Susan+-+Petone+Central

Kia Ora, Talofa, I'm Susan and I teach a Year 6 & 7 roopu at Petone Central School. The following are some of my personal and school-wide ICT goals for the year:
 * 1) Use voice thread in our up and coming Social Studies unit on the Petone Foreshore.
 * 2) Use IMovies in my writing programme
 * 3) Setting up a Blog for my class in term 2
 * 4) Use Kidpix with video link term 3
 * 5) Use Photo Story term 4
 * 6) Make time to explore, play with a range of ICT programmes, tools etc

The learning and using of voicethread was easy enough to pick up for both myself and the children. The children used it to present their findings for our study topic on the Petone Foreshore. They also used it to assess their explanation writing. They provided each other with feedback and feedforward, using our co-constructed success criteria. [|voicethread] Jeannie and I both presented the use of voicethread at the ICT Expo...I think it went off well.
 * Voicethread...**

The second term has mainly been taken up with setting up our class blog. Now that it is up and running, the children and I are now working on trying to keep it updated on a regular basis. Overall we are very proud of our class blog and get alot of enjoyment in logging in and reading about ourselves. However setting up a system so that the children can take the responsibility for keeping it regularly updated is a work in progress. [|Te Roopu Tawa Blog]
 * Blogging...**

Overall achieving the goals that was set out at the beginning of the year has been a bit of a mission. Slowly but surely I am making progress. Although I definitely see the benefits of using the various ICT tools for enhancing children's learning and see the high engagement for our children. It always seems so time consuming and frustrating to implement and follow through. Why is that?