Pretty Workspaces

I have been practicing using Hapara Workspaces with my intermediate students. I wrote a blog post about it here.
This week, I have been sat with Lenva getting a bit of PD as I hadn't done anything with the work that the students had submitted till I saw her. I was nervous of doing something daft and loosing the work. Lenva took me through the marking, the spreadsheet that is generated with all the marks on it and how you can send the work back in two ways - one to keep working on it and resubmit and one as the final return. I had been worried that I would loose the connection to the work once I sent it back as this was the main reason I was FINALLY getting my head round workspaces in the first place. Lenva put my mind at rest over that.

While I was with her, she showed me how you can search for other people's public workspaces. Very handy! She then showed me one that she had found that had been made very visually attractive by the use of headers and colour.
This reminded me of a PD Lenva did with us a while back and she gave us a presentation that she had put together of all the card colours put onto proportionally correct pages that can be downloaded as images and used as headers for your workspace cards.

Here is the blank presentation with the colours -

Here is my copy which is quite messy as it has the slides on it that I have copied and used to create header images for my workspace cards. So far I have been making the first workspace I will be needing with my seniors pretty. This is the jumpstart one which I will need in a couple of weeks time. Here is the link to the workspace. I think it makes it much more visually appealing and not just plain boxes with writing in them. Thanks Lenva. Here are the other workspaces I am fiddling with at the moment (as of writing, unfinished, just saying) Level 1 Chair Design Level 2 Lighting Design

More Maths in Graphics

A while ago all the CoL teachers were asked to reflect on where Maths happened in their classrooms.
My blog post on this is here.
Over the last week, my intermediate classes have been looking at networks. Making 3D shapes out of flat sheets. Link to information on my new class site.
They were given some nice easy grid paper and we made a start making cubes, cuboids and pyramids.

We used grid paper so they could concentrate on the shape and form we were making rather than doing too many skills at once. I have tried doing this activity with plain paper, rulers and pencil before and it was a total disaster as the measuring and drawing of the squares was too hard. With a grid paper, they can count the squares on the grid and use the lines there.

We had a conversation about where the spots on a dice are placed and they found out that the opposite sides of a dice add up to 7.

As they were doing this on Wednesday, their class teacher happened to be in the room and mentioned that they were doing probability in maths in class. PERFECT!

When they completed their dice we had a quick session throwing them and making a note of what number we got.

We then talked about why their results were not an equal 1 in 6 for each of the numbers. They came up with - 30 throws was not enough. The dice is not very heavy or accurate so it wasn't throwing or rolling like a dice normally does.

Not too bad for a graphics lesson! Maths in action!

Using the Priority Workspace collections in Google Drive

The Priority collection on Google Drive is really useful. Here is a quick how to....

One day in the holidays..

It is Thursday of the first week of the holidays. Last week the students asked me if I was coming in to do classes in the holidays. To be honest, I laughed in their faces. 90% of them are not the most focussed bunnies during the normal lesson time and I live much further away from school than I used to, so the answer was quite a firm no.
I had a slight change of heart though, as I was planning on coming in to school on both Thursdays to do the Community coding course that has been running for the last 12 weeks. I told the students I would do classes on both Thursdays if they wanted. I'm too soft.

2 things came up as topics of conversation today. NZQA and penis drawings.

NZQA came up as a topic of conversation while I was helping the students put their work onto their portfolio websites.
I have been getting my students to put their project portfolios together using Google Sites for quite a while now. I have put a sheet on the front of their sketchbooks with a link to the student's site, so the drawings were still in the sketchbooks which are sent away in November and all they had to do was type in the link to the student websites to see all their notes and research.
Last year was the first year that I had made a bitly.com account so I could personalise the shortened url links to the websites.
This is when I realised that there was a problem. With an account on bit.ly, you can see how many clicks you get on the URLs that you make.

As you can see from this screenshot, there were no clicks on the links to last year's project portfolios.



This makes me REALLY MAD...... NZQA are all for "going digital" for the exams but can't get markers to click on links that are sent to them as evidence of project work?
Surely they have a computer in front of them to input marks as they are doing them so why can't they type in a VERY SIMPLE url to look at student's online work?
I went and had a chat with our SLT member who is the principals nominee. We decided that we would do a two pronged attack this year. The site and I am currently busy printing out the research that the students have done online to stick into their sketch books. I thought I was over doing this nonsense!
Here are the girls who were in today cutting out stuff to put in their sketch books that is quite happily sitting on a Google Site that no one at NZQA will see. Ridiculous.



What with this and the moderation debacle over the last couple of years, NZQA is becoming a swear word in my head.

The second topic of conversation came up as the students asked me if the examiners looked at all the blank pages in the sketchbooks. I confirmed this as they regularly come back with the "nzqa assessed" stamp on all the blank pages too. This is to make sure that they don't miss any work hiding in the middle of the book.
I have this conversation with the class at the start of the year when I give the sketch books out. I ask THE BOYS not to draw anything (like penises) on any of the blank pages, as it will give the examiner a bit of a shock! I say the boys, as I have taught in two countries now and it is always the boys who feel the uncontrollable urge to draw penises everywhere they go! I tell them I have scrap paper at the front of the room of they are feeling the need to draw them. It gives them a laugh at the start of the course.
The girls offered to go through the books to check them (to save me doing it this year). So armed with a roll of white sticky labels, they checked through all the pages in all the sketch books.
They only found a couple which is not too bad. They have been covered over with white labels.
 Teenage Boys!!