Matua Haami chooses his first mobile phone

Trying to send a picture...

Room5ians take on care of school grounds and love it!

You have been invited to share a moment. Click here to view this Telecom Photo/Video message.

Weedy weed whackers at work

Fieldtrip Fantasmagora!

WOW! What a great field trip. We did so much. You Room5ians were excellent!!! The best group I've ever taken on a field trip in 8 yrs.
Please state here what you did, where you went, why you did it all, who you met, what you are going to do next and all the cool ideas you have for enhancing parts of Hamiltron, City of the Future.
Yeeehah! What great learning!

Mohamed spreads the word

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Mohamad Tajeran visits the class to tell us why we need to plant trees.

Mobile Technology and our Fieldtrip

This Wednesday we will be walking into town to further investigate our city and how we can be positive contributors to it. Our goal of course is to create digital stories that showcase HamiltON's strengths and maybe investigate some of the less desirable aspects with a view to making some meaningful suggestions for the HCC to consider.

We will hopefully be meeting the Museum director to discuss how we can have input into the development of wonderful museum exhibitions and programmes involving kids.

We will also go to the library to meet someone important to discuss the exciting new possibilities relating to the library of the future... This is good timing because our own library is being redeveloped soon and you could share your ideas for that too.

The river banks will call us also so we can capture our wonderful Waikato River as Mlearning agents. Perhaps we will discover fascinating historical sites along the way.

For this trip we need to be able to gather information as we travel. Mobile phones are one means of capturing information on the run. We even know how to post it to our blog now. But what else can we use? How do we arrange it? And what if there isn't enough cool ICT to share around? Not everyone has a phone. How else can we gather our information? Can you think of innovative solutions to solve the problem? We need everyone involved at all times to avoid boredom, so how can we creatively get everyone involved?

Please post your ideas.

Sarah's real dog, Molly

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Sarah's real dog, MOLLY. She likes chasing rabbits.

a whopping great success!

Well, our expo day at the Meteor with the Hamilton City Council went really well. The Room5ians who took part were top shelf ambassadors for Peachgrove and HamiltON. Our agents were in the field doing mobile blogging to send evidence of our cool city in live as they found it. The head agent coordinator [Rosiegal] put in the hard yards to take our message to the people of HamiltON and to explain to the City Council folk how we innovatively use technology to make learning active, interactive, adventurous, intriguing, fun, and purposeful.
Sadly we thought we weren't able to include everyone, but as it turned out, we could have ! oh well, next time we'll know better.
The good news is that as a result of our time spent there from 9:30 until 3:30 we met the CEO of the HCC, Michael Redman, we might be visited by our Mayor, we might get in the newspaper, we are having a poster competition with prizes, we will be visited by people from the police and council to hear our views on the city, we will try to get the Team Kiwi Racing people in to visit us, we are going to win prizes, the director of the City Museum wants to hear from us, the PiL researchers have filmed us interviewing the head of communications for the council. Phew - that was a long sentence. Sarah, the communication director from HCC wants us to teach her how to mobile blog and use communications technology and in return she will cover the VIP tent at the V8s for us with her mobile phone and post directly to our blog.
Essentially, by getting involved, we created loads of new opportunities for ourselves to bring our studies alive - learning outside the classroom and with ICT rocks!
Viva the Room5ians!
SO, next we will have visitors in the classroom. We also need to get out more with everyone involved. I say we go on a walking tour to meet the museum director and experience the Waikato museum ...a picnic might be nice too.
We should also arrange to go to Kakepuku to read our finished stories that we have written about going there...Let's go Wednesday in the last week of term...confirmation pending feedback.

You have a PXT from an inquiry agent

This is the indian garden

Angelic Agents at the expo

Room5 art sent to the blog from MrWoody's phone

You have been invited to share a moment. Click here to view this Photo/Video message.

Room5 art - this is an experimental mobile blog attempt

HamiltON - why we're cool

Saturday we will have Room5ians roaming the city looking for evidence of the positive aspects of our city. They will take digital photos on their cell phones and email them directly to the blog using a secret code. The images and your text explanation will show up on the blog for people to read at the HCC Creative and Innovative Strategic Expo at the Meteor in town.

Easter

Hello Room5ians - since I'm not a religious person, Easter for me has been about spending time with family and friends. The highlight has been visiting my beloved grandparents, Gwen and Claude Tucker, who are 87 and 91 respectively. Sasha and I filmed them with a handycam so we could make a digital story about the visit. They both told us stories and made us laugh with their amusing banter. Silly me - I forgot to take digital pictures because I was filming. D'oh!

I hope you have lovely grandparents to enjoy too.

Right now I am trying to work out how to post to blogger from my mobile phone. So don't be surprised if some odd seeming posts appear. See you on Wednesday!

:-)

Who wants to be the teacher!?!?!

Not all things can be learnt from one person.
Who would like to teach the class specific skills?
The first task would be to teach Room 5 how to set up a blogger account in our ICT time.
The "teacher" would need to have the skills to do it, explain it, state learning intentions and the steps to follow.

Task two would be to explain and teach how to email photos, video footage or text directly to our personal blogs from a mobile phone or computer.
This skill would enable us to gather and send data whilst on a fieldtrip, while it's still fresh in our minds. There are other benefits I can imagine. Can anyone think of any to share?

Other teaching tasks will be posted in future. Let's see who the best teachers are!

emailing images to blogs

can you work out how to email images directly to the blog?
can you take that even further using mobile technology?
how could you use that for a field trip?
would that help you to learn more effectively? if so, how?
do you have tools at home we could use on such a fieldtrip?
can you devise a competition based around a fieldtrip between rooms 5 and 9? for example, a mini-documentary showcasing your learning from the "Mfieldtrip", using phones, cameras, video cameras, email, blogger, etc.

digital story telling

as a means of self expression, summarising, presenting outcomes, evaluation, reflection, etc, digital story telling* is a potentially powerful tool for learning and one that teaches technical and thinking skills, covers many key competencies and engages 21st century learners...

"Children see things in very unique ways. Capture that special view by allowing them to tell the story. Give them the chance to use photographs, videos, and audio recordings to create projects that will combine art and history, as well as reinforce reading, language arts, and research and technology skills."
- Christine Paradise, a 3rd grade teacher at Steed Elementary school

[found in...]
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/


* digital story telling uses digital cameras, still images, sound recording, narration, basic editing to make a concise anecdotal summary of an experience.