Purposeful engagement

After speaking with a colleague tonight about purposeful learning it got me thinking about my class and my teaching. As teachers we drum into ourselves that our teaching is purposeful to the students needs and that we have full engagement in learning but when you put the two together what does this mean.

I recently had a reliever do a well planned writing lesson with my students. I wanted them to be encouraged to use descriptive language and make the writing more interesting for the reader. I feel this is something I seem to be drumming into them all the time, yet the outcome is never that successful. Having a reliever is always nerve wrecking and again that word reared its head "purposeful". I wanted to make sure that what they were doing had a point and wasn't just something that was done to fill in time.

So where did I turn... uncle google! Now i'm not a teacher that is ashamed to say some of my best teaching power points come off google, What's that old saying... Work smarter not harder! So after carefully whittling down the best possible ones that fit the purpose of my learning intention I had my remaining few. Anyone would have been good enough to use for my class and anyone would have gotten a half decent piece of writing out of the majority of them. But this is where I stopped... teaching shouldn't just be about the purpose it should be about making the students WANT to do that purpose and to me this engagement is different to the purpose being meaningful. I mean I have students in my class that are into hunting and I can make the topic meaningful to them by making it about hunting but that in no way guarantees engagement.

That was when one particular power point caught my eye. It was based around taking a picture of an old bridge with a  river underneath and writing a description about it. What I loved about it was that it showed two types of writing for the same picture, a basic simple non descriptive piece and then a wonderful paragraph that hooked the reader in and was full of juicy similes, adjectives and adverbs. It had its purpose to show the students how something could be so much better by simply changing a few words or a sentences. So once it had worked through how to do this I wanted to keep the students engaged even more by giving them a variety of interesting pictures that had all sorts of possible descriptions that could go with it.... and their it was possibilities! It wasn't about giving the students free range to keep them engaged but giving them different directions in which they could choose to take their own writing, but that the choices weren't limitless. It thought maybe a lot of editing on behalf of my reliever had happened but when I read the students work I was surprised to find only minimal spelling and punctuation mistakes which showed me they had wanted to and tried hard to produce fantastic description.  Man did I get some of the best pieces of writing. I have shared below one of my not so confident/able writers piece of work. Proud Teacher here......

Enriching learners through technology

My one constant pondering (among the many I seem to have as a teacher) is "how can I enrich my students learning when they are working independently?" When I'm with them during group time I know exactly what they are doing and whether or not that task is to hard or to simple, but its that time when they are away that i'm left wondering whether the tasks they are doing are really beneficial to their learning.

I have always been an advocate for incorporating technology into my students learning tasks. I based my Accelerated Literacy Learning around this exact idea as I wanted to see if these kinds of learning based tasks really do help to enhance the learning they are doing with me. Whilst I know that a computer program is never a substitute for 1:1 teaching time, I am also well aware that as a teacher it can be difficult to get that time during the week to give those students that extra learning time they need with you to help give them that task. Some studies to say that classroom based computer programs do not help to enhance students learning. In ways I can agree and disagree with both sides of that view, however evidence has told us that technology has been helping to enrich learners for years. Marshall cites that "viewing of Sesame Street was positively associate with subsequent performance in reading, mathematics, vocabulary, and school readiness.(Wright, Huston and Kotler, 2001)"(i)
 In fact the entire paper "Learning with Technology, evidence that technology can, and does, support learning" is a very interesting read.

So my question is..with so many computer based programs out there, which ones are acutally beneficial to enriching learning in the classroom?

Study Ladder has always been a tried and true one for me. I like the fact that as a teacher I can choose what it is my students are learning and I can also track how they are actually going. The extra added bonus is that it is free, which as a teacher is always a positive. I like the idea of being able to track my students and set the tasks as I believe this the best way for me to make sure the work they are doing is actually enriching and giving them the link and support they need to what they have been learning with me. There really is no point getting them to do tasks using technology if it has absolutely no benefit for the student.  There are others that I have used which have been fantastic but its the cost that always then prevents me from being able to use it. So then comes the whole wondering of how do I as a teacher get around that?

So my final question to you as the reader of this (hopefully not too confusing first) post... What ethnology / computer based learning are you using within your own class and how are you using it to enrich your students learning?