Student portal

The board has added a few new resources to support french language acquisition in the classroom but also at home. TV5 Monde, Ici Radio-Canada and TFO édcuation are full of games, websites, articles and videos for learning at home. Students access these resources using the Student portal on the St-Gemma website. For TFO, students need a group identifier and password which they wrote in their agendas yesterday. Happy learning! 

L'électricité

Started our electricity science unit a few weeks ago. We started with what we think we know and what we want to know. We have begun to talk about reducing our consumption as well as safety and security measures around electricity. In tandem to learning about electricity, we have been learning about coding and programming. Many if not most jobs of the future will require some form of coding knowledge. On Friday, we had a Google hangout with a class at St-Gabriel's school in Kanata with a lot of coding experience so they could give us their tips and tricks.

Below are the big ideas from the curriculum as well as some resources for students looking to deepen their learning at home

Big ideas: (1) Electrical energy can be transformed into other forms of energy. (2) Other forms of energy can be transformed into electrical energy. (3) Electrical energy plays a significant role in society and its production as an impact on the environment. (4) Society must find ways to minimize the impact of energy production on the environment.

Ressources

https://hydroottawa.com/fr

http://www.hydroone.com/OurCommitment/Safety/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/anton-malafeev/le-monde-sans-electricite_b_5992770.html

http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/10/07/comment-reduire-sa-consommation_1250570_3244.html

Les dangers de l'électricité

Peut-on faire de l'électricité avec des oranges?

Student survey

Already two months come and gone! When we come back on Monday it will already be November! Students are going to get new seating, we will have new learning goals and, of course, we will be diving into a new science unit. With two months already under our belt I thought it was time for the teacher to get some feedback...that's right the teacher. Teachers are often busy giving feedback to students, but we don't always take the time to let our students give US feedback. Today, students answered anonymous surveys so that I could get some feedback on the physical set up off the class, how and what we are learning, homework or anything else they wanted to let me know. 

Here's what I learned :

- Mme parle à la bonne vitesse (this surprised me as I have been told I speak very fast)

- Nous lisons et écrivons juste assez 

- Nous parlons trop (which is interesting because you would think grade 6 students would love to talk)

- la classe est bien organisé et comfortable 

- ils veulent apprendre les verbes, les études sociales, les arts et la physique

- ils aiment la technologie 

- plus de jeux! 

In a few weeks, I will be sending a parent survey through the student's gmail accounts for some parent feedback as well. Stay tuned! 

Leveraging digital

In every C (créativité, collaboration, communication, caractère, citoyenneté et pensée critique (see previous post)) there is a leveraging digital component. Students need to be able to explain what tools they are using as how it is facilitating their learning. During our biodiversity inquiry,  here are the tools we used and what students said the tools allowed them to do.

Google Slides
- speaker notes
- animation, transitions, effects
- visuals
- templates - themes
- liens

Google Sites and Wordpress
- to share information
- to reach a bigger audience

Powtoon
- very visual!
- video
- voice and music

Prezi
- well organised
- easy to use
- very visual!
- sharable
- multimedia uses (video, links)

Read and Write for Google 

- word prediction

- dictation

- read the text aloud and highlights

Google Doc/Drive

- more than one person can be looking/writing the same doc at the same time

- Easier to read

- more visual appeal  - images
- copy/paste
- collaboration
- easier to share with other people - different publishing options
- Mme has access to everyone's work - she can give feedback, correct and comment much faster
- Revision history
- saves automatically (no more my dog ate my homework or I lost it)
- liens  

Twitter
- to tweet
- connect with others
- share
- many ideas and opinions
- limited amount of writing possible

Padlet
- shareable - different publishing options
- many boxes
- visuel
- multimedia
- collaboration - people can work on it at the same time

- Google Translate

- Google Search 

- Dictionnary.com

- Youtube

- Chromebook 

- Voicethread

Looking for small appliances

Before having a maker fair, I'd like to try an unmaker fair. I am looking for small appliances or electrical toys that no longer work or you don't use. If you have an old toaster, phone, fan, vcr, computer etc. Let us take it apart and see how it works!

New pedagogies and critical thinking

New Pedagogies  are a new way of thinking about teaching and learning for the 21st century in a highly complex and ever-changing world. 

In this model, the role of the teacher is "that of activator of learning who designs learning experiences that build on learner strengths and needs, creates new knowledge using real-life problem solving and help all students identify their talents, purpose and passion." . 

Six competencies guide the learning (les 6 Cs) ; creativity - créativité, critical thinking - pensée critique, communication, citizenship - citoyenneté, character - caractère and collaboration. With every C comes a learning progression or a way of evaluating where the students and educator are in their learning journey. My goal this year is to unpack some of the learning progressions with the students. I am translating the progression into French then as a class we are discussing what they mean in order simplify the progression to student friendly language. Students should be able to evaluate where they are on the progression, set goals and find ways to improve. 

As most parents will have noticed we have been working ridiculously hard on our biodiversité inquiry. In looking at what students were doing I thought this was the perfect time to look at the critical thinking progression. We simplified the language as much as we could, we evaluated where we thought most the class was and we used part of the progression in our rubrique for our final task. You can find our version here.The progressions are quite lofty in their goals so don't be shocked if we are on the "low" end. The students are after all only in grade 6 AND doing all this in a second language. 

L'orchestre du CNA

On the 29th, we are very lucky to be going as a class to the NAC to hear the orchestra. To prepare for our visit, we will be learning about various instruments and some of the basics of classical music. Here are two great sites to explore to learn more about classical music.

Arts Vivants - CNA

San Francisco Symphony