Classroom Environment

The school year is fast approaching and I thought I'd better have a look at how I'm going to set up my classroom to further develop the vision of elearning with my new class. I've been doing a bit of reading about "educational spaces" and wanted to see what I could do to promote these ideas in my own classroom environment. Below is a great blog about these "ideas" The video about Ordrup school is well worth a look, I found it to be quite inspiring ...

http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2010/11/ordrup-seven-spaces-of-technology-school-environments-embodied.html

It's really neat to see schools who are embracing this type of vision for learning ....

Anyway ... back to my class. I have a prefab with 32 students this year. My first idea was to try and get the computers off the walls - easier said than done. All the power points are located on the walls. I tried running long extension leads over the beams and dropping them down onto table groups - not a good look, as a colleague remarked ..."I'm sure that contravenes a number of health and safety laws" She was right of course .. it looked like a dog's breakfast.

As it turns out, I'd have nowhere for the students to sit anyway if I continued down this road. The desktop computers will remain against the walls ... for now anyway :-( I haven't got very far creating any secret spaces etc either ... need to really think hard about this one, I can certainly see the value in them. It's quite an art just to cram 32 students plus desks into a prefab space.

I'm still keeping a small mat space for me to work with small groups of kids ... I know, I know old habits die hard - anyway what I have managed to do is ... remove my desk from the equation. The teacher now has no desk in the classroom environment. This is quite revolutionary for me, I don't know how I'll cope, or where I'll put those coffee cups and packets of panadol !