Ok – it’s been a while since I posted on here but I thought it would be fun to mention a couple of things that I am looking into at the moment. Hopefully at some point in the near future I will stop just looking into things and actually start using some of the great web 2.0 stuff that is around. I still struggle to work out how to actually use the resources that are out there. By that I mean I know how to use them in terms of logging in and posting messages and the actual technical side of the stuff but I don’t know how to use them in my classroom.
I guess that’s where the gift is. It’s what I’m striving for. When I’ve found it I will let you know. But until then I will just keep telling you about stuff I find. Neither of the following things are new but I’d like to mention them.
The first is Delicious. Not the food magazine that my wife subscribes to but a social bookmarking site that is really taking off (and has, indeed, been taking off for a while). I have setup an account for my school but not put too many links on there yet. It’s a great way of keeping all your much liked and useful links in one place you can access from anywhere with an interweb connection. It’s free too which makes it even better! There’s a lot more to it – such as tags, bundles and networks but I’m not going in to that.
The second thing I’d like to mention is something I use on my personal blog and have started using a little bit in my classroom but not in a ‘real’ way. It’s Twitter. Twitter is:
a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Basically it’s a status update tool – you get 160 characters (or something like that) to say what you are up to. Like a mini blog. You can send messages to it via email, your blog, your mobile, a downloaded desktop tool or even the website itself. I don’t think you can send messages via post yet though. I like it. I’ve started using it a bit as a plenary tool at school – at the end of each session, after I have done the main plenary I will ask the kids to compose a very brief summary of what we have been learning (basically comes out like our WALT). Through Twitter you can follow people’s updates and see what they are up to. At the moment the kids don’t have anything to do with the Twitter page itself – I add that after the lesson – but it is useful for quick updates of the website and blogs etc and a good review tool for my class. I can see it being used as an instant publishing tool further up the school – so as soon as children find something out they can publish it to twitter or even ask questions of people who ‘follow’ them. Tom Barrett talked at length about Twitter and using it in the classroom over on his edublog.
Well – it’s a new term, a new year and all that. Hope you’ve had a great Christmas and a bit of a rest. Waiting for me in my pigeon hole this morning was a copy of Primary Choice – a seemingly advertising driven magazine full of KS1 & 2 resources for the Primary classroom - it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Anyway – there was a very nice little article in there from a guy called John Sutton. He points to a marvelous site/application called VoiceThread. John said that it is going to be the most common “have you seen this?” education resourcen of the year. So I am simply setting the ball rolling by mentioning it here!
VoiceThread calls itself an online media album. The idea being that you can upload an image, document or a video and then add a commentary (audio or text) to the item you have uploaded. But it doesn’t end there. Other users can register and add their own thoughts and comments too.
It looks fantastic as a simple resource for thoughts aroung pretty much anything! I talked earlier about asking “What’s in a picture?” and this would be a great extension of that activity. Instead of, or, probably better, as well as, discussing the image children could go to our audio area and record what they are thinking. I know there will be many other ways you can use this and I look forward to working it out! Have a look at it and see if you agree with John Sutton about this one.
It’s another oldie but a goodie. At school this last week had our Christmas show. We had the nativity story for the Key Stage 1 performance and a play called Santa’s On Strike for our Key Stage 2 performance. It was great fun. We took quite a few pictures of the night and then the next day I asked some of my class to turn the photos into a slideshow.
We used Photo Story 3 from Microsoft which is very easy to use and creates a quick but decent looking slideshow. It’s free too which is great! While some of the photos were a little out of focus (bad stage lighting!) I think the finished effect of the slideshow is excellent. A very simple process for the children in my Year 2 class and they saw the results posted on the school website.
I’ve been looking into writing the vision for ICT within my school and came across the e-Safety in Schools blog. I’m mentioning it for two reasons. The first is that it has many useful thoughts and ideas for e-Safety and second is that I must say it is also a very simple, clean blog. No fancy graphics. Just a simple, clear, easy to read layout.
Having a look back through the archives I found a link to Think You Know. It’s a site from the CEOP Centre and it offers information and advice about staying safe online. Mainly it’s a site for children – there are different areas for 5 – 7 (coming soon), 8 – 10 and 11 – 16 year olds and then there is a section for anyone who works with or looks after children too. The young people’s areas are good looking, fun based activities that suggest ways to stay safe. You have to register to access the teacher’s section which has resources and lesson plans for e-Safety. It’s well worth registering and the site in general is an excellent resource.
Edit: I’ve just found another similar site called Kidsmart. It’s the same kind of idea – giving information in a fun relevant way about staying safe online. They also provide some nice banners and artwork to use onwebsites to link to their own.
Maybe this is an idea that has been used before. But I tried it for the first time this week and it worked really well. This year we have started using the SEALs material for our PSHE lessons. As with all material it needs a bit of thought and adaptation to work in each class but on the whole it is very good stuff. You can download it from The Standards Site.
This term we have been talking about Getting On and Falling Out. One aspect of this was looking at the reasons people fall out and talking about the fact that there are always (at least) two sides to an argument. One example of this was giving the children the same story but from two different points of view. They were able to see that both people thought the other person was being unreasonable.
To accompany this I asked the children to spend a bit of time in small groups (I used groups of three) thinking about a freeze frame they could show. They then took a photo of this freeze frame and we collected the photos together to display on the interactive whiteboard. Simply using the view as slideshow tool in Windows we looked at each photo in turn. We spent a few moments discussing what the photo could be of. It was interesting to hear the discussions that went on – at first the children who were in the photo thought they could correct anyone who suggested a different idea to theirs but soon began to realise how it worked. One particularly good example was a picture of two children who decided to hold a karate pose. Everyone else thought that the picture looked like one person playing a trombone and the other doing a dance to the music.
I’ve followed it up throughout the week by stopping the children at certain points and asking how else something could be interpreted – reminding children to consider other people’s point of view before they jump to conclusions.
You can see some of the pictures the children took on the Class 2 pages of the school website.
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