Mixing it up!

So today I worked with the fantastic sustainability leaders at Findon Primary School. The 6 students from grade 5 & 6 have all demonstrated great leadership strengths. Today's session highlighted that, without any huge effort on my part, the team is focused on working collaborative to achieve their goals. The main goal at this stage is ensuring that the Rubbish Free Friday data is collected. This involves:

• Going to all classes during recess eating time and recording who came to school rubbish free. 
• Bringing that data back to our lunchtime meeting to be collated
• Determining the two winners for this week (raffle) 
• Writing the speech for the assembly presentation at 2.30pm. 

I have been really impressed with this years leaders ability to get all this done in a collaborative, timely manner, so that we can spend our meeting time discussing our action projects for the term/year. 

This weeks action was the creation of a Mix. 

For those that don't know, Mix is an add-on for Microsoft Powerpoint, which can be downloaded and added to the ribbon (tool bar) in power point. When you click on the Mix button, you can add video, audio and other effects into your power point and you can also export your Mix as a video. 

So this is a brilliant tool for engaging students in a technology rich lesson, extending the concept of a powerpoint into something they can add to a blog, Youtube or school website. 

This mix, produced by the leaders is about a rubbish free lunch box - the students are going to use it to promote Rubbish Free Friday. 

We're off to the Museum...

Diprotodon - Victoria's Megafauna

Today I had the privileged of joining Learning Team 3 from Findon Primary School on a visit to the Melbourne Museum. Whilst I had attended an excursion a couple of times in the past, this was the first one that involved visiting a specific venue.

The Museum had things down pat - they had things figure out and their systems and processes enabled a fairly stress free day for the teachers (apart from trying to supervise 5 classes of grade three students:)). The visit gave me some great ideas for how to improve some of the processes we have in place at the Wildlife Sanctuary.

Students on the Forest Walk

The students had a great time exploring all the exhibits from the Melbourne Gallery, were students explore Mellbourne's history, including an old shack and Phar Lap, to the Forest Gallery, where live exhibits engaged students in understanding frogs, lizards and forest plants, to the Science and Life Gallery where evolution, dinosaurs and wildlife were on display.

Something I noticed was the way in which students engaged with the technology in various exhibits. Whilst interpretation experts would tout their educational benefit, I noticed in so

Students exploring the Dinosaur exhibit

me exhibits that this was a very surface level of education and in fact bordered on students being more engaged with the interactivity than the information presented. One particular instance was when students were fighting over looking at a virtual display of animals. pressing screen images that would provide information about the animals - at no point did students pay any attention to the content, even when it directly linked to questions in their worksheets (they had to have the exact section of information pointed out to them). At this time I asked the students what they were looking at - they explained - 'just random animals'. They were amazed and excited, when I pointed out the animals on display (above the screen) and were then actively engaged in looking at what was around them - rather than the screen. I feel if the screen wasn't there, they'd have had a more interactive learning experience.

Findon Primary School

I'm pretty lucky to be able to work with the students at Findon Primary School. Over the last few years I've been able to do some of my teaching placements and work with great teachers and students on sustainability projects. Mr Fromm, who is a great teacher and mentor, has provided me with great opportunities to work with his students and the sustainability leaders since 2012.

Paula, Linda, Daniel and the whole team at Findon have welcomed and supported me through a journey that has had many challenges and not only have they encouraged me to explore and refine my teaching skills, they have also made me feel like I belong as part of the team.

The students at Findon are also fantastic! I can see they are excited when I visit and keen to run up and talk. Having been involved for some time it is really great to see their growth.

In 2016, I've become kind of a scientist in residence at the school. This involves developing lessons around the various learning teams inquiry units and then working with classes to deliver these lessons. This has been another great opportunity to practice my teaching skills and also develop some really interesting lessons that tie in with the Masters research project.

Working with Findon on this project has really provided insight into my teaching practice, where my strengths lie, where I can improve and it has reinforced my thoughts around what interests me with regard to student learning.

What I am discovering is that I have a real passion for engaging students in inquiry based lessons, that enable them to take control of their own learning pathway. I am still much more of a 'sage' style teacher, but with intent to change this through my teaching practice into more of a facilitator of learning.