Delicious Twittering

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.

Photo Story

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.

Why let our students blog?

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.

Photography club

I’ve mentioned the photography club before haven’t I?  Well - I help run the photography club at school.  I call it a photography club because we go around taking photos.  Which is fun.  But I don’t manage to teach the children much about taking good pictures.  We tend to just cover the basics.

Anyway.  I overheard one of the members of the club chatting away to his group while they were transferring the pictures from the camera to the PC.  The boy was using his own camera and he said “Oh - I forgot about that picture.  I took it with my phone and then transferred it to my camera so I could bring it in.”  Just a passing comment.  He thought nothing of it.

How many teaching staff would have been able to say that?  It kind of goes a bit of the way to demonstrate how different things are now.  Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying all the staff at a school should be able to do that.  I’m not suggesting we run loads of staff meetings on bluetooth and the latest mobile handset.  But it is important that we think about these things.  I need a better idea of what the children in my class are capable of and what they actually enjoy doing.