Christina

Hi everyone,

What a day! Lots of information going in. I think I need time to reflect on what I am going to do to embed within my class - music and thinking with technology. Resources may be a problem. I wonder if I can buy a projector that will plug into my laptop and speaqkers in the classroom so that I can use this work asap? Use it quickly or lose it? Anyway it is great and I am really excited about using it in my classroom. Getting the kids to think about Music further will be an interesting challenge in the thinking context.

Another full day. lots of thinking and my thoughts are now gathering in a direction that takes me to higher plains! Well that is where I want to take the chn really. To higher plains of thinking. The tools that help gather thought really work and I enjoyed sorting out my thoughts using them. I feel the colour coding helped me get round the essential, unit and content questions. I look forward to trying these questions out to get the chn to think about what they are doing and improving what they do.
 * DAY 2**

Another full day with lots to take in. I found the reading the night before helped (although I probably did too much!). The most practical activity was setting up the teacher account and actually doing the first project of the visual ranking tool. To set them up does take a lot of thinking although I think the manual probably goes into a lot of depth.
 * DAY 3**

Our planning is (I think) done too fast and not enough attention is put on the thinking and learning tasks to achieve an overall education. We are to be encouraged to think and thinking takes time! It can be done quickly however sharing with colleagues to improve all plans has to be better for learning. Planning using Lane Clark's idea of planning with the end in mind is perhaps a good place to start. Perhaps we need to start from scratch and develop it properly. I know I find that planning 4 levels in one day (ha ha!) takes a lot of time and I inevitably have to do some things quickly just so that I get them done in time to teach them. Sometimes we are concentrating on subject areas whereas we should probably be looking at the overall skills to help children learn. If we teach the children the skills and thinking required to learn then they will learn whatever they need to learn in the future. They will be adaptable and change whenever necessary and not be afraid to change and learn new things. This is the challenge. However children still learn best by doing active things where they are totally engrossed in the activity and learning without realising it.

I always need time to think and mull it over. To improve it and make changes. Actually I think it would be good to see and share with each other just to see if I am on the right track. This is difficult for me because of the music application. As usual I want to do it perfectly with no mistakes!