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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve set a few freebies up to see if I can make any use of them. Some of them claim to be ad free but you have to prove you are a school before they take the adverts off (fair enough!) Wikis are something I am not too familiar with. I know what they are and I use them often enough but I have never written one or been part of one. It will be interesting to see if we can find a reason to use them at school.

The places I have looked so far have been Wikispaces, PBWiki and Wetpaint. Wikispaces is probably better than wetpaint - it’s cleaner and easier to use (so far!) but the ads are really obvious and I don’t know if there is a free way of getting rid of them. Wetpaint is ok though - a bit messy on the layout front but that’s probably to do with the style I have chosen and the fact I haven’t turned the ads off yet. I’ve not played with PBWiki enough yet but it looks ok - clear layout and no ads but you have to pay for most features.

Have I missed any obvious ones I should try?