Stop Motion at its Finest (Guest Teacher Post)

One of the best parts of being a teacher is the collaboration that happens between students, teacher and even schools.  Today I am lucky enough to have a guest teacher (the first of many I hope) publish a post about the use of technology in her classroom.

Tamzin is a teacher of a prep classroom that has 28 students that are 5 and 6 years old.  One of Tamzin's goals for the second half of the year was to assist her students to use technology as a tool that facilitates learning rather than distracting/ detracting from their learning that takes place in her classroom.  So without further ado, this is Tamzin's story.

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I teach 28 amazing students.  One of the best things about teaching for me is the collaboration of students’ minds.  I love teaching the younger students because they are capable of almost anything.  They all have this perfect view of the world that is really special to be a part of.  As a teacher I believe technology is amazing and can facilitate rich learning experiences.  However as the year has gone on, my classroom has fallen victim to what I like to call "technology overload."  

I teach at a technology privileged school.  We have a 1:1 laptop program from years 4 to 7 and in my class alone I have the following devices:

• An interactive whiteboard with dual pens.

• A WiiA Sound field System.

• 2 pc computers.

• 3 iMac computers.

• 2 MacBook Laptops.

• 8 iPads.2 digital cameras.

• 2 video cameras with tripods. 

• A Tape/CD player.

These devices are great and always fun to play with.  However, my first job is to ensure that I immerse the students in my care in rich learning experiences and if this means that all of this technology sometimes needs to take a back seat then so be it.

This year I took on board the idea of Technology Fridays.  The idea of a collaboration day/time made by children for children really interested me.  Often in my class the best learning comes from the dialogue that happens between students; Technology Fridays seemed like the perfect opportunity to facilitate such dialogue.

After talking with Lachlan he helped me set small goals to improve the effectiveness of the learning that technology facilitates in my classroom.  I decided that having students realise that technology can help them collaborate, learn and share ideas would benefit them past the doors of my classroom.  I talked with my students and their ideas of the use of an iPad really shocked me.  For a 5/6 year of child, an iPad is a fun thing you can play games on.

I spent a great deal of time re-evaluating how iPads were used in my classroom.  Having 8 iPads was a privilege and not only that a way to show students that these devices can facilitate learning and fun at the same time.

Over the coming weeks I worked with my students to brainstorm our favourite iPad apps.  We looked at why we liked them, what characteristics we liked and what we didn't like.  We discussed why some students like some iPad apps and why some didn't.  The students even began to bring in screenshots of the work they were doing on their iPads at home.  Before we knew it, we had a wall in the classroom plastered with evidence of iPads in our life.  The best part? Parents even started asking to come to technology Fridays because of the discussions that were happening about how iPads can help us learn at school.

One of the tasks we were required to complete was a student retell of the creation story.  Before I had a chance, a group of students decided that it would be great if they could use iPads to retell the story.  Another amazing thing about teaching is seeing the fire of learning blazing in your students.  During the next Technology Friday we developed what we call "Stop Motion at its Finest."

The students had the idea that they would create a movie about the creation story.  We brainstormed how we could do this.  Some students wanted to animate their movie, others wanted to act.  Then one day one of the quietest girls in my class stood up and placed her picture on our iPad wall.  It was a screen capture of a stop motion movie her and her dad had made using an app called stop motion studio about her princess teddy bear.  The class fell silent as they looked at her picture.  This girl stood in front of the class and talked about how you take lots of photos using the iPad's camera and put them all together and they play as a movie.  She talked about how you can use anything at all and then you slowly move it.  The class listened in silence and when this girl was done they all turned to me and said "We're doing that!"

I immediately investigated the app and distributed to our class iPads.  I then used the rest of Technology Friday to explore the app.  I found that it is important for the students to be able to play with their technology before redefining their learning goals.  We came together as a class and discussed how to use the app and made a small video of the students in our class.  We came up with rules and cheats and discussed what we liked and didn't like about the app.  In the space of 1 and 1/2 hours we were experts on how to make a stop motion video on the iPad.

Stop Motion Studio for iPad
Easy to use, even a 5 year old could do it!

Before we began on our creation story, I immersed the students in a range of print and digital texts.  We explored age appropriate stop motion movies and picked out our favourite parts of each.  Immediately I began to see a definite style among the students.  They were making the learning their own and slowly the technology they were using was becoming invisible and the learning was driving their investigations.

I assisted students to break into groups and we began to storyboard our movies.  The students decided it would be best to work on a part of the movie and put it all together at the end.  Each group talked with each other and the class came up with 4 steps that would help them all complete their movies.

1. Work in small groups to storyboard their part of the movie.
2. Discuss what materials they would need to make their objects needed for the stop motion movie.
3. Work together to create their objects.
4. Collaborate with other groups to see if any objects could be used in other groups' movies to save time.

Students working together to create their storyboards
The learning was the students, they created it; they owned it!

Students then worked out the roles of their team members to assist them in filming their movie. E.g. director, speaker, the mover and the creator.  When they had created their objects, I allowed then to complete their movies with as little teacher instruction as possible.  I facilitated early discussions and encouraged them to work out their problems amongst their peers.  All in all, students loved the idea of being directors and were capable of solving any problems they were confronted with.  I believe the clear expectations we outlined in Technology Fridays prior to students creating their movies students to focus on their learning rather than the device and app.

Students were always given time to reflect with the entire class.  This allowed for the building of common understandings and the sharing of problems.  Students helped each other rather than running to the teacher for the teacher to solve their problems for them.  They discussed how to solve problems such as bad lighting, shadows on their work and blurry pictures.  Some of my boys even made a stand for the iPad so it would move when filming out of blocks.

Very quickly it became the students’ project, not mine.  They owned their learning and it was purposeful for them.  The focus was on them and not me. After they were finished we glued their posters together and hung them in the classroom.  I have added their work and the final movie below.

The finished student created posters
The students glued all the objects they made together to make posters of the creation story.

Do you believe it is important for students to own their learning?

How do you facilitate learning through technology in your classroom?

Feel free to leave me a comment, I would gladly answer any questions, you can even ask my students questions.  Sharing and collaborative learning is one of the best parts of being an educator and the learning should definitely not stop here.

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ClassDojo: A School Approach

I have just started my second year of teaching at a small but very energetic school in South Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.  I was lucky enough to complete my graduate internship here in 2010 and this year will be my second year as a full time qualified teacher.  Last year I taught Prep, which is similar to kindergarten and in 2012 I will teach a multi-age class grade 5/6.

Throughout my years at university I was always interested in behaviour management strategies and their impact on students inside and outside of the classroom environment.  A big focus for me as a teacher is assisting students in developing understandings of how their behaviour impacts on others.  Last year I decided to work with my students on understanding and owning their own behaviour.  I have the belief that every behaviour a student displays has a function.  You can’t change behaviour, but you can assist students in developing skills to manage their own.

Like many teachers, ClassDojo has assisted me in providing students with a personalised behaviour management system that provides students with real time feedback on their decisions. In 2011 I implemented ClassDojo half way through the year and saw immediate changes in my students. (Read my story here http://bit.ly/w5QQwZ). 

This year I have the privilege of being the ICLT Coordinator for my school.   I have worked with the staff at my school to implement ClassDojo right throughout the school.  We discussed as a staff how the program can assist the behaviour management systems we already use in our classroom and have worked hard to tailor the program to suit each individual classroom.  So far the feedback has been very positive. 

Here are some of the steps we took when implementing ClassDojo across the school and in my own classroom.

1. Add the students into the system and negotiate their Avatars.                                                            

This was a great way to talk to students about what they wanted with their Avatars.  We found younger students loved when their own headshots popped up onto the screen when they got a point.  This was very personal to them and assists them to build ownership of their behaviours.  The older kids seemed to like the monsters.  In some classes they even drew their own Avatars, scanned them into the computer and the teacher uploaded their creations to ClassDojo.  Very personalised.

2. Negotiate the Positive and Negative Behaviours.                                                                                      

From the get go we believed as a staff it was important to negotiate what the positive and negative points were in each classroom.  We found that what was important in one classroom wasn’t as important in another.  We also found that students have a different perception of behaviours and how we word them.  When we all sat down and discussed with students what they wanted as positive and negative behaviours in their classroom. We found that they were very engaged in the process of building their ClassDojo system.  Children owning their own behaviour is a very powerful process to see.

Our Building Behaviours
Negotiating Behaviours is integral if you want students to own their behaviour.

3. We started with Positive points only.                                                                                                                              

During the first week we introduced and built the systems in each classroom with our students.  As teachers we decided that we would ease students into the process of real time feedback of their behaviour.  We started awarding positive rewards only.  Once students were comfortable with the systems place and function in the classroom we talked with students and began to award negative points as well as positive points.  We found this process assisted students in beginning to manage their behaviour.  This can be a tough process for children to grasp, but ClassDojo assists us daily with assisting students in developing the skills to do this.

4. Reflection and Review are the keys to success.                                                                                           

We are now in week four of Term 1.  Most teachers have continually talked with their students and reviewed the positive and negative behaviours.  Some have added more and some have taken some away.  We believe the key to promoting student ownership of their behaviours is involving them in adapting the system to suit the needs of their classrooms.

5. Have fun and reward students for their hard work.                                                                                   

A lot of teachers including myself have negotiated with students rewards for their hard work.  We believe that for students it is a massive task to own their own behaviour as well as completing every other task we throw at them throughout the school day.  We have negotiated with them a “cash in” system.  In my class we cash in points for time on the Xbox Kinect on a Friday afternoon.  In Prep they cash in points for free time in the school playground.


Even though our school year has just begun, ClassDojo is a major part of our schools classrooms.  Daily you can hear the sounds of positive points ringing through the hallways.  Our biggest success is assisting students in developing the skills to own their behaviours.  Watching it happen is a powerful experience, one that I’m very proud to be a part of.

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Class Dojo: Building Positive Classrooms in Realtime

Everything we do is behaviour.  I sometimes struggle to understand my own behaviour and I have had years of practice at monitoring, assessing and managing it.  One thing I have noticed as a teacher is that once you put a class of children together, everything is multiplied.

I have questioned myself many times on the fairness of pushing 26 or so students into a classroom context and expecting them to manage and negotiate their own behaviours.  Teachers do the best they can to outline expected behaviours and social standards of classrooms, schools and the greater societal contexts.  However, even the best teacher can't read the minds of each and every student in their class (if you can, call me, because we need to talk).  It can be hard to manage the behaviour of all students at all times, especially if their not sure of what is expected of them.

I have always believed that technology should be invisible in the classroom.  It should be something that just happens, not something that has to happen.  I also believe that when implementing things into the classroom, an excellent teacher negotiates his/her expectations with their class and behaviour expectations are no different.

I found Class Dojo by sheer luck and implemented it's flexible program into my classroom with the guidance of 26 five year old children.  For a while I had been looking for a pieces of technology that would allow me to monitor student behaviour as well as providing students with instant feedback.  Class Dojo does both of these things and more.

The interface is easy to use, there is a step by step tutorial on how to use the program on your internet browser and the best feature of all is that it is free!  Once you have signed up, the website asks you to add a class and input your students names.  From there you can assign them a cute looking monster or arrange to add a picture of them to make it more personal.  My favourite feature is being able to use my smartphone as a remote to award positive or negative behaviours.

Once your class is added, the program asks you to create positive behaviours (these are green) and negative behaviours (these are red).  There are simple icons that are tied to each behaviour you make.  I have found that there are enough of them to assign to nearly any behaviour you can think of.

For me , this is one of the coolest tools I have come across, and after testing it now for over 2 months, it is the coolest thing my students have encountered.  Class Dojo rewrote our classroom behaviour system.  It allowed us to sit down as a class and negotiate what we wanted rewarded as positive behaviours and what we wanted rewarded as negative behaviours.  All 26 students were participants in this process and it allowed for each student to have a voice and develop an understanding of how to behave in the classroom context.

We spent hours on negotiating what a "good/positive" choice was and what a "bad/negative" choice was.  My class negotiated the language we would use when creating behaviours and committed themselves to creating an environment that was safe and where each member knew what was expected of them.  I was blown away by the deep discussion 5 year olds were having over what constituted a positive behaviour to them. I developed deep respect for them as learners and community members.  They now owned their behaviour, they owned the positive and negative consequences; its rewards, and most of all they respected each other because of it.

Our classroom behaviours are simple yet effective.  They are student decided and worded.  The technology didn't rule their decisions, it guided them and assisted them in becoming everyday expectations rather than punishments.

Our Class Behaviours
100% Student Negotiated, 100% Student Owned.

Another feature of Class Dojo is its ability to provide instant behaviour feedback to students. Other than the sounds played when a behaviour is made, or its visual pop ups, the program provides interactive behaviour graphs that show audiences the behaviours recorded for a given period. I was astounded when my class asked to see their graphed data.

When we first started the graph was approximately 50/50 in regards to positive and negative behaviours made.  My class were distraught and accused the program of recording their data wrong.  It was unbelievable to 26, 5 year old students that they had made so many negative decisions.  Since then we have had many discussion about how to improve our behaviour making, with the goal to make our graph 100% positive behaviours. I am pleased to say that since the beginning of this month we are at 90% positive behaviours.

Class Report for October
It's amazing to watch students negotiate how they can make more positive behaviours with informed knowledge of what they need to change.

In my eyes that is all I could wish for. No one is perfect; especially when you're 5 years old and you're still exploring your behaviours and their consequences.  I have promised an ice block to each child when we get 100% positive behaviours and I'm sure the day will come when this happens. When it does, I will congratulate my students for their efforts.  Until then, I am just happy with them owning their own behaviour.

My hat goes off to the creators of Class Dojo.  The most effective technology in classrooms is that which is unseen until it is needed to be used.  Class Dojo is one of those technologies.  It isn't 100% perfect, but the influence it has on students and their ability to negotiate and own their behaviour is priceless.  Myself and 26 students want to thank you, we look forward to using this program in our classroom for sometime to come.

If you would like to use Class Dojo in your classroom, click on this link > CLASS DOJO.  You won't regret it!  Share it with your friends and peers as well.  Technology such as this needs to be shared.

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