Digital Technology advances communication and learning

Over the last week the children have reflected on the classroom layout. Given that we all want a classroom that enables better communication and learning and, given that our current unit of Inquiry, involves a lot of collaborative work using Web 2.0 tools, the children realised that the computers in the class were too close together and were preventing them from collaborating. After looking at the 'ideal classroom' they wrote their ideas down about how our classroom could become nearer to the ideal. http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/2243666/2244404/2269304/EducHiveFinalistClassrmBIG.gif
They used google docs to devise a Survey and used raw data to help them with their ideas. They used gliffy.com or google sketch up to draw a plan of the ideal classroom. After sharing their ideas together yesterday the children set about making the classroom a better learning environment. As they tried to put the ideas into practice they began to need the following skills to help them:

• negotiation
• compromise
• listening
• estimation of size and measurement
• spatial awareness
• communication
• thinking
• reasoning
• analysing
• justifying
• trial and error

to name just a few. By the end of the afternoon the classroom was finished!

On Monday the children drew bar graphs and pie charts by hand, using data collected last week. On Tuesday they read information from bar graphs, pie charts and a line graph, answering questions about what the data meant. Yesterday they collected Data to help with the classroom layout and today they have used a web tool to help them construct further graphs (http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/) They have learned about the importance of a title for each graph, about x and y axes and about the importance of labelling the axes. We will move on now to look at range, mean, median and mode.

More information about our week will follow tomorrow!