Friday Vox Pop

This week’s question was “If you were Principal for a day what would you do to help improve the way students learn?” I thought this might be a tough question and that I’d need to rephrase it, so it did change slightly when I was actually recording the episode. It became “If you were Principal for a day what would you change to make school a better place to learn?”

The kids had some really good suggestions. Click on the player below to hear what they were!

FVP 9 Principal for a Day

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Ah I’m a bit behind with the old Friday Vox Pop - not to worry, here we are now. Vox Pop 8’s question was ‘What makes a good student?’ The kids had some interesting answers. I think next time I talk to them about this I’ll ask what makes a good learner, as opposed to a student. What do you think the difference between and learner and a student is?

Click on the player and have a listen to what the kids at Hawkesdale think makes a good student:

FVP 8 Good Students

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or subscribe to Friday Vox Pop through iTunes!

If you are interested in being part of Friday Vox Pop, then we’d love to have you on board. All you need to do is:

1. Check the Questions page for what next week’s question is. You can join in next week’s or the weeks after, or the week after that! You can join in how ever many times you like and whenever you like.

2. Make sure you have a voice recorder. If you have a portable one that makes it really easy for getting out and about in the school yard. If not, just choose a time in class when you can get students to come up to a computer that has a microphone attached.

3. Create an mp3 file of student answers that goes for no longer than 3 minutes.

4. Send the file to me and I’ll put it together with my students’ answers. To send the file you can use You Send It or senduit  or you can email it to me if it’s not too big: jess AT technolote DOT com.

Looking forward to it!

The last few episodes didn’t make it into public until today due to ridiculously busy weeks leading up to the end of term. Each episode was actually recorded on each Friday but I didn’t get to the editing and publishing stage until just now! So, that is why there is a major gap in the dates for FVP episodes.

Also, as you can see, I have chosen a new theme for Friday Vox Pop. What do you think of it?

Talk about a tough audience - trying voxpopping students on the last day of term. The last thing they want to think about is what the best classroom activity the did was and why is was good. But, I got some responses…

To listen to this episode you can

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fvp-7-classroom-activities.mp3

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We have a bit of a problem at our school with too much rubbish being left in the yard, so I asked the students whether it was ok to leave their rubbish lying around. Not all of them said no…

To listen to this episode you can:

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fvp-6-rubbish.mp3

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What makes a good teacher? That is the question! This week this kids were actually pretty keen to answer this question. They were confident that they had something to say.

Have a listen to see what the kids think a good teacher is. Now all we have to do is live up to it!

To listen to this episode you can:

Click on this player

FVP 5 Good Teachers

or

Click on this badge to be taken to the Podomatic site

or

Search ‘Friday Vox Pop’ in the iTunes store and subscribe free!

I didn’t get nearly as many kids running away from me this week as I did last week! Maybe my note in the daily bulletin that goes to all classes actually got through.

My impression was that the kids thought these questions were a bit easier to answer this week as I didn’t need to have too much discussion with them to help them answer, so that was good. I might make the next few questions a bit easier so they become much more confident in answering.

The answers to this weeks questions were pretty interesting, and some were predictable. By far the kids see the most important thing as reading and writing. There were lots of different answers about what the least important things were. A couple of Year 8 students even said that history was not important because ‘we don’t need to know that stuff’. It would have been good to have the time to ask the kids for reasons for all of their answers, and I did for some. Some have reasons, others just shrugged their shoulders. I did mention to a few that when they were talking about what they thought was least important, that they shouldn’t just focus on the things they didn’t like. I told them to think of something they had learned that they didn’t think they’d ever use. Most of the kids who said they thought sport wasn’t that important were avid sport fans, and the one student who said she didn’t think music was that important actually really likes music. It’s interesting to see that some kids can see beyond their interests. But I wonder how much relevance they do see between school and the lives they think they will lead. One of my questions in the coming weeks might have to be ‘Do you think school prepares you for life? Why or why not?’ Hmm, I will put that one on my list.

Listen here is today’s episode:

friday-vox-pop-4.mp3

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NEXT WEEK’S QUESTION: What makes a good teacher?

This episode was a bit harder to do this week as again, I had a lot of kids running away from me or just saying ‘no thanks.’ They saw me coming with my little recorder and promptly walked the other way. I’m going to have to get the message to them that nothing they say is ‘wrong’ and they’re not going to get into trouble for saying what they think. One student even asked me this week if I was going to do anything with the answers they were giving us. I said that we can’t change everything at once, but that we don’t know what we should change if they don’t tell us.

I loved the kids answers this week. I gave some of the kids examples of what other kids had said to get them thinking about what they might say, but that was all the prompting I did. They came up with everything themselves really.

One of the strongest answers was that the kids want more sport - both the girls and the boys. In the past I have mostly pretty much ignored this response because they can’t just be outside playing sport all the time, and they can’t, but I still think we need to pay a bit more attention to the fact that they want to. My Chinese classes aren’t all of a sudden going to contain P.E activities, but I could keep it in mind a bit more. More games was something the kids said a lot - and I thought it was interesting how one little one (Gr 2 student) thought that the big kids don’t get to play many games.

Anyway, have a listen and let me know what you think. Click on the badge to be taken to the podomatic site.

NEXT WEEK’S QUESTION: What is the most important thing you learn how to do at school? What is the least important?

I put up a few posters around school last week (this post and episode are a bit late!) so the students had some notice on what the question would be for Friday. I found though, that the way I had phrased it “What do your teachers need to know about how you learn?” seemed to be a bit hard and was stopping kids from answering. Quite a few refused and some even ran away! So, in trying to get the students to answer and to make it easier to understand that I was really just wanting them to tell me about how they learn, the question ended up being “How do you learn best?” I got a lot more relaxed responses and “Oh, I know how to answer that!” replies when I did that.

Have a listen…

NEXT (THIS) WEEK’S QUESTION: What could teachers do to help make school more interesting?