Thepipbuzz

Koka Ngaire posted this so that we could use it as a teaching/learning tool to: - look at what our Prove It evidence should look like and sound like - use our steps to success for writing a quality blog comment Hi, I have been working on a  Prove It for Maths from my Level 3 workshop. The WALT was: learning to solve multiplication questions in parts

This article shows you how to put the options and controls in the Google search results page into the language that you actually speak, rather than the official language of the country you (or your Internet Service Provider) are in. Tonight I noticed that Google's search-results are still in English, but the option links and controls (eg Next-page, Images, Videos) are all showing in the Irish language (known as Galeic to some people) presumably because I'm in Ireland, and it was (until a couple of hours ago) St Patrick's day. This is nice of Google. But unfortunately many people here - yes, even thought who learned Irish at school for 14 years - don't actually speak Irish. And personally I didn't even go to school here, so I can't even say "Please may I go to the toilet" (the first Irish-language phrase learned by many an Irish child). So putting these words back into English is pretty important to me: I can guess where Images / Videos / Next ...

We thought that some of our parents may not have seen our Collaborative Art pieces from the start of the year that are displayed in our two spaces.  As a whole class, we are so proud of our art work. Koka Ngaire posted our end results in the NZ Primary Teachers Facebook group and as you can see from the photo - we got over 800 likes from teachers from all around NZ !  Their comments were beyond what we hoped for - many teachers have taken the idea and used our work to show their classes so that they could do the same kind of activity. We found this awesome artist Wahyu Romdhoni who creates these amazing animal portraits. So, we printed the pictures out A4 and then divided the picture into a grid to match the number of students (these were both roughly 5x6 squares). We cut the picture up so that we had 30 sm all squares for each pic. Each learner got a little square and a square piece of cartridge (A4 size but squared off). Then we just went through skills for enlargement, then...

Wow - our first week of using our new digital timetable in our Collaborative Space! We have been leading up to this for the first 4 weeks of Term 1.  We have had to learn lots and acknowledge that we are all in charge of our learning. We sign up for workshops with Koka Ngaire & Matua Fergus according to our goals and current gaps in our learning.   We are so proud of our first couple of days of working this way - a big change for a lot of our learners! We get to choose what we want to do and when to do it.  That makes us feel in charge of our learning.  We are getting more learning done because we don't have to always check in with the teacher as a class for everything.  Our timetables make it easier for us to remember what we should be doing and blogs make it easier for us to share our learning. Our trickiest learning has been around signing up for workshops and remembering to fill  in our timetables correctly. We enjoy using our devices, but we a...

We are into our second week of using our timetables.  Some of us are able to sign up to workshops and fill in the timetables without help and some of us are still in the Learning Pit when it comes to making sure we get the whole week filled in! We have had great discussions this week in our Maths, Writing and Reading workshops - lots of talking, asking questions, giving examples and thinking!  We have also had fun PE sessions and practices for the Nui Duathlon happening next week. Matua Fergus has started to teach us Te Reo - our first workshop was on colours.   With Koka Ngaire we are learning more about using Screencastify so we will be able to explain and show our learning on our blogs. In writing we have been learning what makes a good blog post so that we can get started on our very own posts to share our learning! We can't forget our weekly creations for our Chapter Chat Twitter session on Friday - we all love getting creative in a variety of ways.  We als...

This article explains how to remove the semi-transparent image that is shown at the back of the Travel theme (template) provided by Blogger. I like Blogger's Travel template (now called a theme) - it's clean, and lets me control lots of things.  But I don't like the semi-transparent image that you can see underneath parts of blog-header, navigation bar and perhaps the post header and body. By itself, this image looks like this (I suspect it's supposed to be represented a scrunched-up piece of travel diary paper of similar): Underneath one of my blog's header it's like this - see the lightly shaded area to the left of the red arrow: Do you see the grey shading? You can possibly ignore it - until you do something like show an ad-unit with a genuine white background in that really shows up the difference. Then it just looks scruffy. I'm sure that with some major template changes, it could be eliminated altogether - but luckily there's an easier way w...