Good news! The popular book raps are returning in Term 2. Schools in the Diocese of Parramatta are beginning with the Owl Babies book rap for Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 during weeks 4-8.

The rap will run through CENet, with training and help sheets provided.

Jeanette has already decided to give the rap a go, and will also integrate it into her factual text type work for Term 2 by using owls as the topic for her class’ Information Report writing.

More information is available now on Staffnet. Give it a go.

As we announced this week to staff, our grant funding has been approved, and thus our plan to install 8 Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) into classrooms can go ahead. This is just the beginning of our plan to introduce IWBs into classrooms across the school.

So now my classroom desk is littered with papers as I sort through all the purchasing that’s required. We know we want Activboards, and we know who can install them for us. So at present, our focus is on the most “unknown” element at present - the projector that will shine on the actual IWB.

Sounds easy, right? Find a good projector at a good price? Perhaps, but it gets more challenging the more you think about it. The projector is a crucial piece in the puzzle. Get it wrong, and it can impact on the whole setup, which at several thousand dollars a room, is something we want to avoid. So what are we looking for when choosing a data projector to work with our IWBs?

Lumens. It’s got to be bright, hasn’t it? We’re looking to find a projector with a standard minimum of about 2000 ANSI lumens.

Resolution. Higher resolution means sharper images that can be seen more easily from the back of a classroom. Considering what you can get for your money nowadays, XGA resolution has to be on the list.

Noise. Thanks to Daryl (our maintenance man) for this advice. No teacher wants to have to yell over the top of the equipment. We’re checking the specifications of each projector for their fan noise output in decibels. Only a couple in our price range so far have fallen under 30dB.

Replacement Lamp Price. This is an essential criteria. Lamp prices vary greatly from brand to brand and from supplier to supplier. What’s more, at several hundred dollars each, they’re an expensive ongoing cost. Some reasonably priced brands have very expensive lamps.

Projector Price. Of course, the projector finally has to be good value for money. There are lots of suppliers out there, and the Internet gives a guide to what prices should be like. However, when ordering 9 projectors at once like we are, there’s a little more room to negotiate and score ourselves a cheaper price. Let’s just hope all the suppliers I’ve emailed in the last couple of days come to the party.

Anyway, that’s where we’re up to at present with our IWB rollout - negotiating a projector deal. We’ll keep blogging to keep you informed with our progress.

By the way, our picture for this article was sourced from morguefile.com, a free image archive. It could be useful in teaching and learning, especially as we want to encourage children to respect an author’s copyright and discourage plagiarism.

I’ve heard this catch-cry for many years now. Since we’ve put computers into classrooms we’ve often considered it our most important task as teachers to show children how to use them. It’s been up to us to show the children how to save, how to print, how to use the “Word Art” in our word processing program, etc.

Or has it? Yes, I must admit that even in my own class I get frustrated when a child in Term 1 asks me if they can print work, only to have my affirmative response followed by another question: “How do I do that?” But we’ve known for a long time at St. Michael’s that the focus with our classroom computers is integration into classroom learning, not about how to use a computer. That comes with the classroom learning that has the technology well-integrated into it.

So we have our computer skills. But the Web 2.0 world we live in demands more. Rather, it doesn’t demand more, but it does demand a re-prioritisation. Many children now come to school familiar with their computers. What they don’t know will come with further use and their own desire to do more with the tools they have (given of course an encouraging environment to use them).

For the 21st Century learner, the most important computer skill is not about operating the hardware, but about managing the information that hardware opens up the gates to.

Take, for example, these statistics that I’m taking off the net as I type:

• Searching Google for st. michael’s primary school blacktown south brings up 43 200 results
• YouTube serves 100 million videos per day
• Last year Reuters released more than 2.5 million news items, which would have all been posted on its websites.

To manage this ever-growing world of information, our children need to be critical users of the Internet and have the information skills necessary to utilise the information they want and need effectively.

I suggest that teaching our children Information Skills and about Critical and Visual Literacies is more important than teaching them how to apply a template to a slide in PowerPoint, or finding where the eraser tool is in KidPix.

Hopefully Judy and I (and perhaps some others on our team) can share a bit more this year about how crucial it is for our students to be information literate as the first and foremost “technology skill”.

This Monday we’ll continue our journey into the blogging world and show you a few more of the features to help get you started.

Multimedia Monday is on at 3:00 p.m. in the library.

When I walked into the staff room this week only to hear Cherie say “I want my Bee-bots back…”, I knew we were in for some fun.  Not only that, but Cherie’s kindergarten students have really taken to them quickly.  Her account of their achievements is nothing short of extraordinary, especially given the relatively short amount of exposure they’ve had to the “little critters”.

Cherie has posted pictures and a written account of the great things happening in KB at the Bee-Bots Downunder Blog.

Thanks to those who came to this week’s Multimedia Monday sessions and started with signing up to blogs.

One thing that came up was blog privacy, and excluding your class blog from search engines and the like.

When using edublogs, there is a process in the admin controls that you may want to enable.

1. Click on the “Options” tab
2. Click on the “Privacy” sub-tab
3. Tick the box next to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”
4. Click on the “Update options” button

This process means it’s far more likely that people can’t find your blog simply by googling it, but would need to know the address (or follow a link to it from another site, such as perhaps our school website or Intranet).

We’ve included a screen shot with the steps marked out to help you with this simple process.

A reminder that Multimedia Monday this week will be devoted to getting you started with blogging - such as signing up, and familiarising yourself with the admin pages.

If you have your own laptop, please bring it with you.