Planning

If you have made some group specific activities in [|Kidspiration, Inspiration,] PowerPoint, Keynote, Word or Pages, then you need to make them easily accessible. =Create folders for your reading groups.=

=Each week save the files into those folders that students will use=

that I have introduced to many teachers is to make your group folders i.e. for Reading, they might be named titles of books and leave them on the desktop. Copy the files/activities for the week into the folder. Teach students how to find their folder and the activities. || ==== For Reading I will add the activities for the week in one folder. ====
 * [[image:ictprofessionaldevelopment:reading_activities.png]] || [[image:ictprofessionaldevelopment:reading_folders.png]] ||
 * One method that used to work well for me and

A lot of the activities I create will come from a template, with Google Docs you can save the template for students to access.
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Worksheets in Word, Pages, PowerPoint or Keynote with hyperlinks to the activities in that folder or to websites. The following example has been created in Word. This is an interactive Reading worksheet with links to Inspiration activities and space to record their answers. ||
 * [[image:http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fAJ1_x5EGq8/SayPeC5kVVI/AAAAAAAABJw/vdHiVznFnzw/s400/Word_doc.png link="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fAJ1_x5EGq8/SayPeC5kVVI/AAAAAAAABJw/vdHiVznFnzw/s1600-h/Word_doc.png"]] || You can also include Interactive


 * [[image:http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fAJ1_x5EGq8/SayQDfFvqlI/AAAAAAAABJ4/7gzsUgBEq-c/s400/PEA.png width="500" height="350" link="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fAJ1_x5EGq8/SayQDfFvqlI/AAAAAAAABJ4/7gzsUgBEq-c/s1600-h/PEA.png"]] ||
 * And this is one of the examples of the Inspiration worksheets the above Word document links to.

If all of the related files are kept together in the same folder then you will not have any trouble accessing all of the files. But do remember one thing! When creating activities for students, save them as templates! If students have to save their work for it to be marked, teach them how to save to their own folder. Interactive PowerPoints that hyperlink to games do not need to be saved by students. The only things that need to be saved is when changes have been made. || Planning, Linking websites and Interactive Whiteboards With Interactive Whiteboards comes a huge amount of activities already created for you. Plus there are all the other activities that are teacher made in Kidspiration, Inspiration, Word, PowerPoint etc. And then I see that teachers have found all these wonderful websites but are not fully utilising them to their full potential. How can we manage all these websites and activities we may have stored on our computers? Answer: Incorporate it into your planning. Hyperlink the activities, websites, or teaching resources into your planning and launch the sites from there. This is a perfect way of managing all of these links and it is all in one place plus you are able to see what resources you are mainly using. In this example I have colour coded the activities, red for Flip charts, orange for PowerPoint, green for Inspiration, blue for websites and black for book work.

Following on from my previous post about management systems, I had management boards for my reading and maths. These boards weren't managed by me but were managed by the children. Several teachers I work with are successfully using this system. The reading board looks like this. There are a variety of activities for children to do and they all know what they are doing at this time of the day. The 'Reading Study' here stands for their Computerised activity. Before I send children off to do this activity I always demonstrate it first preferably by projector on a whiteboard.

Depending on how many computers there are is how I will organise the reading group. Two can share a computer, working on a activity together. Or if there is less computers available I might use my label management technique. This works very successfully in dividing up reading or math groups. This is an example of the maths board. There are 3 math groups, half of the math group goes on the computer and they have allocated labels, M for mouse,K for keyboarding, D for director ( they tell everybody what to do), O for observer (they stand quietly). The other half will do related activities in their books, or complete reading games.



Before I send children off to complete activities, I always go over the activity I expect them to complete. Don't assume that they know how to do the activity i.e how to click on a hyperlink. Talk them through how they are going to do it and especially if they need to save a copy to their own folders.

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