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.
A while back Rachel Boyd wrote about a video she has posted on teachertube. It’s called ‘Why Let Our Students Blog?’ and it addresses exactly what the title suggests. Now it doesn’t give lots of lengthy evidence into the benefits of blogging - it’s more an introduction probably designed to inspire and enthuse people about them - but it’s worth a watch and it has certainly given me some useful words to use as I think about why I want to get the children at my school blogging.
Download Video: Posted by rachelboyd at TeacherTube.com.
The video also, for me, brings up a whole load of questions about the use of teachertube! I suppose it will stick around But it makes me cringe slightly. In the same way that godtube made me cringe. If I ever get round to making any videos I’ll stick to youtube.
The time has arrived. I have my commoncraft video ready to display, I have my links all lined up and ready to use, I have the convincing examples of the publishing of work and the assessment of work that blogging allows and I am ready to tell the others at school all about it.
I am delivering an ICT based staff meeting tomorrow and I am going to use some of the time to talk about blogging. The main idea is that we, as a school, start to celebrate the work that our school does. Blogging will, I hope, enable us to regularly publish work - be it art, recounts, stories, poetry, audio etc - to an audience. Even if that audience is just my mum to start with.
At the staff meeting we’re also going to have a go at using Audacity. So I may not even get on to the blog thing! Audacity is, as most people are now aware, great. You can use it for recording and editing sounds. In my degree days I played quite a bit with audio editing software (such as Cool Edit - now Adobe Audition, cubase and the like) but I never used Audacity. Probably because it was free and it’s not really as good as the others. But it is great! It’s free (did I mention that?!) and it’s easy to use.
I’ll show you what can be done with it after the staff meeting tomorrow! I may even show you how my school starts blogging too. But that all depends on how much fun we have with Audacity.
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