We are pleased to announce that the Learning Hub will be open for check-out, and to support Summer School, during the summer holidays.
The opening hours are:
Monday - Friday 7:00 - 13:00
Please note that the Technology Zone will be undergoing some renovations during the summer and will be closed from July 4 - 14. During this time, the Learning Hub may be quite noisy and you may find restricted or reduced access to other areas as well.
We hope you enjoy this time to catch up on some fantastic books!
This morning we hosted our final Parent Coffee Morning of the year. We shared a brief overview of the 21st century tools that we’ve been using here in the ES all year, along with an introduction to some of these exciting tools.
The first tool we discussed is blogging:
We love blogging as a tool to extend classroom conversations beyond school time, to engage students in authentic writing for a real audience, to develop communication skills, and to document reading and writing development. There are quite a large number of class, student and administrator blogs here in the ES - check out all the links on the sidebar at right to read them!
Next we talked about wikis:
We love wikis for collaborative knowledge building and working together on a focused task with partners around the world. We talked about the benefits of being able to view the entire history (every edit of every wiki page) of all wikis to track student growth, the ease of using the discussion feature to communicate with others beyond our classroom about our learning, and the many different ways to track changes on a wiki through e-mail updates or RSS.
Then we covered RSS:
We love RSS for bringing all the information we want directly to us! We talked about using RSS to track any work your children do with web 2.0 tools at school by setting up a Google Reader account, you can actually follow along with any blog posts, wiki pages, or podcasts that your children create, as soon as they create them. This is a great way to change the typical after school conversation starter from “What did you do at school today?” to “I saw that you added a new blog post at school today, why did you choose to post about that topic?” The possibilities for staying connected with their learning are endless!
Finally, we discussed podcasting:
We love podcasting for the ability to build oral language skills, increase depth of understanding about oral communication, and the ease with which you can take podcasts with you wherever you go. Podcasting has made a huge impact on the language development of our ESL learners here at ISB and is an easy way to have students reflect on their learning in a format that is exciting, engaging and comfortable to them.
As you can see, there’s a lot going on at the ES! You can keep track of all these exciting learning experiences here on the Connect 2.0 blog.
Get ready for more Parent Coffee Mornings on the first Wednesday of (almost) every month next school year! These events will be formally noted in the official school calendar to make it easier for you to plan ahead. We hope you come back from your summer holidays rested, refreshed and ready to learn even more about 21st century literacy here at ISB!
As with every year, we are ending this school year in the Learning Hub with a full inventory of all materials.
Our inventory process will begin on May 26th, which means that all items borrowed from the Hub (books, audio books, everything) must be returned no later than May 16th.
In addition, we will stop checking out books on May 16th. This means that there will be no check-out from May 16th until June 9th (at the latest).
Please ensure that you return all Learning Hub materials by this important deadline.
The LH Team thanks you in advance for your support!
After another successful Parent Coffee Morning (a recap of last week’s session due to popular demand), we are ready for our final Coffee Morning of the year!
Our final discussion will take place on Wednesday, May 21st at 7:30 am in the Learning Hub Project Zone. Thanks to the creative participants in our session this week, we have decided our theme for the final session will be “a year in review.” We will cover some of the most important topics of the year, share some of the most important tools that are being used in our ES classrooms, and highlight some fantastic student work that utilizes these tools.
Even if you haven’t come to a Coffee Morning yet this year (or if you’ve been at every one!) you definitely don’t want to miss this session! Please join us on Wednesday, May 21st at 7:30 am in the Learning Hub Project Zone!
Have you ever heard of TED Talks? If not, here’s a brief introduction from their website:
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
Our mission: Spreading ideas.
We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you’re an important part of it. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.
The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.
Sir Ken Robinson’s talk is so engaging and entertaining, and so clear in the need for revising our understanding of school and education. After watching the video we talked about the need for both teachers and parents to embrace and encourage children’s creativity, to provide outlets for exploring new avenues for learning, and to develop a more open-minded outlook about education.
In fact, the video is so good, we were encouraged to run it again next week!
So, on Wednesday, April 30th at 7:30 am in the Learning Hub Project Zone, we will show this talk again! Please come by for this excellent video and some stimulating conversation about the future of education!
Just in case you can’t make it, or you’re curious about the other fantastic presentations available for free by TED, you can easily subscribe to these talks using the TED website, or the iTunes store (for Mac and PC).
Our final Parent Coffee Morning will be on Wednesday, May 21st at 7:30 am in the Learning Hub Project Zone. Please join us!
Two of our fantastic elementary classes have recently participated in two different, but equally exciting, writing projects. Both projects involve students from around the world and both projects result in the publishing of a book authored by our students!
Grade 5
Mrs. R’s class used the group instant messaging tool, Twitter, to write a globally collaborative story as part of the @manyvoices project. Twelve upper elementary and lower middle school classes all worked together to create a fantastical fiction story 140 characters at a time, following the protocols of Twitter. Mrs. R’s class wrote chapter 10 (of 12) using their best descriptive language, in just one afternoon. As each student wrote their sentence in the story, they were able to build off the work of the previous author. What a great way to build excitement and enthusiasm about reading and writing! And what makes it even better, is that the finished story is now published as an actual book you can either buy or download!
Grade 4
Mrs. M’s class used a wiki to participate in the globally collaborative writing project, 1001 Flat World Tales, elementary group. Our students used this simple web 2.0 tool to become peer-editors for students in Australia and the United States, while developing their persuasive writing skills. We enjoyed the project so much, that we collaborated just a little bit more to create an interconnected frame story that links all of the individual student stories together.
This ongoing writing workshop involves students and classes from grade 2 all the way up to grade 12 and will continue until the end of the school year (each school division participating on a separate wiki). Once all of the participating schools are finished writing, the top stories will be selected by the students for final publishing in a book! After reading the fantastic stories from our grade 4 students, I’m sure at least one will be chosen for the final publication!
These projects are a fantastic way to engage students in their writing and to promote a lifelong love of writing, reading and learning!
The last week and a half has seen an amazing increase in excitement and enthusiasm about reading - especially in the Learning Hub. We have students eagerly reading during every break and recess and the Hub has been packed with students taking advantage of the special collections highlighted for this celebration of reading.
Along with reading books, our ES students have been spending some of their free time exploring the interactive projects that some classes have completed online. All of the links to these enticing projects are posted on the Read On Readers wiki. Check it out to see some of the new tools our ES students have been using to enhance and support our reading curriculum!
Over the course of the week a number of teachers participated in the “virtual readers” campaign where by they picked their favorite book and were filmed reading it. These clips where then put onto ISB’s very own IPTV network and were streamed into classrooms across the ES. This was a new and interesting way to broadcast the love for reading and books across the school.
As our readers enjoyed the casual Starbooks Café’s around campus, many were “caught reading” on tape by Mr. O’Neil. These fun, short clips have also been posted to the IPTV network to continue to promote a love of reading in the ES.
The week was a great success thanks to all the hard work from the staff and students. It was great to hear from the kids how much fun it was to get “caught reading.”
Last week we had another successful Parent Coffee Morning - this time we covered some of the basics of web 2.0: blogging, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking and social networking.
We started out by watching and discussing some great, quick videos, by Common Craft:
Blogs in Plain English
We have quite a few student and teacher blogs here at school. We use our blogs to connect with a wider, authentic audience. The power of having a wider audience for our writing is both exciting and motivating for students and teachers! You can find all of the ES blogs linked on the sidebar to the right. Please feel free to check them out and leave some comments!
Wikis in Plain English
We are using wikis in several classes here at school. You might want to visit a few to get an idea of how they are used. One of the most recent projects has been the 1001 FlatWorld Tales project completed by Mrs. M’s fourth grade class. Check out their persuasive stories here!
Social Networking in Plain English
We are using social networking in grade 5, grade 4 and grade 2 to connect our students with others around the world to discuss our learning. Our grade 5 Ning is focused on engaging highly able readers through discussion about books, themes and characters. Our grade 4 Ning is focused on delving deeper into our science curriculum by presenting, sharing and discussing big issues about water. Our grade 2 Ning connects our class with a partner grade 2 class in the US to learn more about intercultural understanding. All of our Nings are password protected and private - meaning only students, teachers and parents involved in the project can see the work the students are doing.
As an extra bonus, we watched two more videos that cover some other web 2.0 tools that our students are not using yet (but they will be soon!):
RSS in Plain English
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Now that we’ve covered the basics of web 2.0, the homework assignment for this session is to leave a comment here, on this blog post! You can leave a comment about something interesting you learned during the session, or a further question, or an idea for the topic of our next session, or anything else you’re interested in! We look forward to continuing our discussion here!
Our next session will be: Wednesday, April 23rd at 7:30 in the Project Zone of the Learning Hub. Please join us!
Then this is the session for you! Due to popular demand, we will cover the basics of web 2.0 in this one hour session. The perfect introduction for web 2.0 beginners!
Please join us at our next Parent Coffee Morning on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 from 7:30 - 8:30 in the Learning Hub Project Zone!
Time for the fabulous, the exciting, the thrilling, Starbooks@YourLibrary!
Thursday, March 13 from 6:30 - 7:30 pm, the Learning Hub will host the second Starbooks evening. The theme for this time around is “Bedtime Stories” so come prepared: wear your PJs, bring a teddy bear and cuddle with your favorite blanket or sleeping bag - slippers optional!
This special evening will kick off ISB’s week-long Celebration of Reading! So, make sure to mark your calendars so you can experience:
Mystery readers sharing the best bedtime stories
Our new Reading Cafe
Autograph signing from ISB’s very own Grant Simen’s, 7th grade author of Spirit of St. Valentine: An Expat’s Tale of Love!
All to be enjoyed sipping a tasty mug of hot chocolate! We hope to see you there!
Mrs. M’s class used a 
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