Published June 2011
At Tahunanui School, Nelson, blogging is seen as a pathway to the development of the key competencies.
The aim for 2011 is to promote and support their wider school community to communicate and share students' learning experiences within an online environment.
While only at the beginning of their journey, already 58% of Tahunanui School teachers have been blogging at least once a week during term one. In term two the focus has been on sharing their learning through blogging, and explicitly linking their teaching and learning experiences to the key competencies.
Year 3 teacher Emma Watts has approached the development of the key competencies with her class by using a range of tools to support her students' understanding. She and other teachers in the school share these examples of learning with the wider school community through their class blogs.
The fish philosophy example emerged in 1998 from the film of the same name, FISH! Room 9 practices this to promote the key competency 'relating to others'. Emma finds it helps the students to develop a sense of community and inspires them to have fun, choose a positive attitude, and respect themselves and others.
The class have also been developing their understanding of group roles to support teamwork and reinforce the school value of ‘Getting along’. The group roles have been adapted from the Skills For Growing programme. This blog post shares their understanding about the role of the reporter.
Solo Taxonomy has been used to provide students with a rubric and visual images to self-assess their own level of thinking. Using Solo, teachers and students are supported to create their own rubrics and identify their next steps. This blog post shows how Emma has used Solo to help her students within the context of their learning.
'Key competencies are good habits or life skills,' says Emma. She believes that looking for evidence of applying and practicing them in everyday learning helps to reinforce them as ‘living’ habits. Art Costa’s Habits of Mind fit well here and her class are just beginning to explore them.
Emma has used Voicethread to share the class learning and thinking about their inquiry topic Against all odds, and their science understandings about keeping warm. Emma’s buddy class teacher, Dave Pearson from Room 11, also used the same experiment with his students, and recorded it on the class blog.
