Archive for ◊ 2012 ◊

Fancy a coffee?
Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | Author:

Got 10minutes to spare? Fancy playing a game? I guarantee you’ll spend 30minutes or so on it though…

I came across this game about four years ago when we were running a business project in my last school and I have played it a few times since. Today I showed it to a bunch of Year 5/6 children who had a session of free time on the computers (pre-Sats treat) and many chose to play this and try and beat my score.

The premise is simple. You have 14 days worth of business. Each day you buy cups, coffee, milk and sugar. You mix your ingredients, set a price and start the day. If people like your coffee then your sales will go up and if they don’t, then your reputation goes down.

All simple enough right? Well, no. Each day, the milk goes off, sometimes sugar and/or coffee is ransacked or attacked by ants and the weather changes too. On hot days, people don’t want as much coffee do they? Also, the price you charge depends on the quality of the coffee. Oh and you need to think about your reputation too. So there are lots of variables coming into play.

I remember my top score from a few years ago being around the $200-mark yet I played recently and got $291 which I was very proud of. I set this as a challenge today and the children had a go. After all, I’m old, what do I know about games? A couple came close, and one even reached $320! I had another go, in front of them and racked up $630. So that is the current record in my school. Although one child has emailed me to say he has got over $500 at home this evening, so the competition is on!

The thing is, the children were playing a game but they were also thinking. If it was more of a lesson (and less of free time), I would discuss how much each cup actually cost them before they went to sell them. If you buy more coffee, then the unit price comes down but the potential for coffee going stale rises. I’d also look at the percentage markup, profit and loss and other factors and make it an in-depth maths investigation.

It’s like being on the Apprentice. But with less idiots.

So, have a go, show it to your children and see what happens.

The Coffee Game.

Category: Useful Sites/Software  | Tags: , , , ,  | Leave a Comment
Google Drive…a few thoughts
Tuesday, May 01st, 2012 | Author:

So Google Drive launched last week, you get 5GB of free online storage, yada yada yada….

I tweeted that it didn’t interest me in the slightest and the reason for that is that I use Dropbox. I have blogged about it in the past and got referral links taking me up to 11GB of free online storage. I also got a deal with my HTC one X to add 25GB for two years so I technically have 36GB of online space for free, why would I bother with Drive?  Well what about for school.

I thought, what if everyone installed Drive and then had access to their Google Docs? They could manage them in a Windows-style environment instead of online. Many of our staff are not fans of Google Docs and a lot of this is down to the home screen and ‘losing’ documents, so having them in a Windows-style window would help. They haven’t lost them of course, they are organised somewhere instead. But there’s a problem. The majority of planning in school, well, mainly the folders in which the planning sits, are owner by me. I created the folder structure with my account and when you load Drive on the computer, it shows the documents that you own and to visit documents shared with you, you need to click a link that just opens the Docs website. Pointless. We can open a link ourselves.

But what if all planning was owned by one account and we shared that log-in for Drive? Then we can all access the same documents on our desktops. Ok, so we’d lose control over who edited what and when, but we’re all grown-ups so we can manage. Then the teachers can use their named accounts for checking mail and that. It’s easy enough to use the admin console to transfer ownership of all documents to an account e.g. teachers@ourdomainname.com. They’d never need to know that actually everything they were using was online, it just looks like it’s in a folder. Clicking on it opens ActivInspire, Google docs or whatever.

We’d also lose the ability to edit a document with multiple users, but we hardly ever use that anyway. I think staff might just prefer having their files accessible wherever they are. Maybe I’m wrong but I’ll be asking them once I’ve had a bit of a play. I can’t see a way of automatically converting uploaded docs to Google docs format from the Drive application, but maybe I’m missing a button somewhere.

Is it going to work? Not sure. But having all documents and not just planning online will be a huge bonus. This will include our flipcharts too. We’ll be playing with this over the coming weeks and seeing if it is the way forward or not.

Have you started using Drive? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , ,  | 4 Comments
Having a Play(book)
Tuesday, May 01st, 2012 | Author:

We went to the Kidsmeet event last week and I know I haven’t blogged about that yet, but I was asked many questions throughout the afternoon. Some were about Google Apps, so many in fact that I held an impromptu discussion with 10-15 people about it, but another conversation that came up 3 or 4 times was the use of ipads in the classroom. Now, as many people know, I prefer Android. For no real reason except that I tried iTunes once and it annoyed me, I haven’t gone back.

So these schools were asking me about my opinions on different devices, this could have been because I brought some netbooks to Kidsmeet and they intrigued the teachers. Why hadn’t we gone with iPads? Would we be buying some? In short, no. So why?

I think that many schools are doing amazing things with iPads but for me, I haven’t heard of many schools approaching it in the way that I would, and have. So maybe I’m wrong, maybe I just haven’t seen the blog posts about the choices made, maybe there haven’t been blog posts about why they have used them and not other devices. Lots of schools seem to get iPads because everyone else is doing it. I’ve tried discussing WHY people have gone iPads instead of other devices but no-one seems to be able to answer and very few have tried alternative devices at all.

For me, when we started thinking about devices in school, we thought not about what was out there and what was available, but what we wanted to achieve as a school. There are many decisions made in school that baffle me, the decisions by many to sign-up to a VLE for example, but for me it has always started with…why? Why are we doing this? Why will it make a difference to our teaching and/or learning? And that is exactly where we started with the device conversation.

We have two trollies of netbooks and an ICT suite of 21. The suite is 4/5 years old and aging, it will last another 1-3 years but it is rarely used as you can’t fit a whole class in there, it is upstairs so children can’t used unsupervised and people rarely use it as some computers aren’t working. I fix them, but give it a few weeks and they restart randomly again. Not worth buying new bits for them really. So we talked about replacing them. But with what? Even if we had 21 nice, shiny devices up there, would anyone use it if they could only fit 21 children in there? The space is far too small for 32 children. Maybe we let them die and get more netbooks? These have gone down very well so far, but would more be useful? Another trolley is expensive, probably £12k or so. The discussion moved to portable devices such as tablets. This gave me two choices – iPads or Android tablets. Then the wonderful Pete Richardson (@primarypete_) discussed the Playbook on his blog here: http://primarypete.net/tablet-time.

I tried, in vain, to get a range of devices to play with in school. My thinking was that if a company was willing to sell me devices, they would let me have some to play with. Totally wrong there. I did arrange a time and date for one company to bring some tablets in but they didn’t even show up. This lead to a class of disappointed children!! Maybe one day we will look at Apple or Android devices but until I can get some to play with and test, it just won’t happen. I could go and find a school that are using them to have a look, but I really want my children and my staff to play with them too.

So in the end we have bought a Playbook. Now when I tweeted that we had one of these, many people mocked me saying that the apps were rubbish, email support was awful and the device was a joke having sold about 17 compared to Ipad’s 65bajillion. But my thinking is that you need to buy a device that will work for your school. Also, as it didn’t sell very well, it is now very cheap compared to the price when it came out! So why Playbook?

With an iPad, yes the apps are amazing and there are some truly great tools that can be used (epic citadel for example) but these involve the teachers re-planning certain areas thinking about how to use these apps within their curriculum. Not this is probably the best way to do it, but for my school, right now, this is not going to happen. We need something that will fit in with what we are already doing. For us, the Playbook offers a few simple tools that enhance what we are already doing. Let me explain…

Firstly, it is cheap. £170 (inc vat) compared with the iPads mean that we can get more devices than if we went the iPad route. These are about the same price as iPods but are bigger and easier to use.

Secondly, yes the apps are limited, but you know what? We don’t want that many of them. I’ve installed one so far, WordPress. This has been setup with our blog login details and now whenever the children take a picture on the Playbook (or a video) then we upload it via the app. If they have a range of photos then they simple login to Animoto and use that instead. Similarly for video, they chuck it onto YouTube and then embed into the blog. In one day, the class using it (http://www.stjohnsblogs.co.uk/class8) have blogged more than in the last few weeks. My vision is that children can blog while the teacher is sharing a plenary session. They could do this on a netbook too, but often the whole trolley of netbooks is being used, maybe we could buy a c ouple of spare per class? There’s no space in class for fixed PCs.

Also, yes, Animoto works. As does Purple Mash, Busy Things, and most of the other sites we use in school because it has Flash support. Love it or hate it, at the moment, Flash is used a lot within school. So having a device that works with Flash is a massive bonus.

It’s still early days, the Playbook has only been in class for a day-and-a-half, but so far 4 children are ‘trained’ to blog pictures and the teacher is planning what her next blog posts are going to be already. I’m now looking into how we could move forward and buy a few more. Maybe we could have two per class? Who knows.

I just wanted to share my thinking so far, we may change our minds, it may not work, but I’m interested to see how it will develop over the coming weeks and months…

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: ,  | 4 Comments
It’s a Puzzle
Sunday, April 29th, 2012 | Author:

I tweeted about a little project that I was involved in and now I have some time to write a bit more about it…so here goes.

I couple of weeks ago, I saw a few tweets from @7puzzle aka Paul Godding. These were number challenges that were being shared each day through Twitter. Now I don’t know how many people were using them, had tried them with their class or had even seen them, but I suggested to Paul about making a blog. Through various emails and tweets I offered to create one for him and set-up a simple WordPress blog. This was done this weekend and the blog is now live. The benefit of having these on a blog is that they will be searchable and available to all as Twitter is blocked in some schools.

The aim is that each day there will be an easy (aimed at about year 5-8yr olds), medium (aimed about 8-10yr olds) and hard (10+) questions. An example is: Using the numbers 2 4 6 8 just once each, and with all four operations + – x ÷ available, show how you can reach the target number of 24.

I see this as being a fantastic activity for either the start of a maths lesson or to share on the whiteboard at the start of the day while doing the register. We often have thinking challenges and this will be another tool to add to the arsenal. It accompanies 100 Word Challenge brilliantly I think as another tool that we can use within the classroom.

If you can solve a problem, simply leave the solution in the comment box and Paul will check it.

So, to try out the challenges, simply visit: http://7puzzleblog.com/

If you have any feedback, please let me/Paul know

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
Screencasts
Saturday, April 21st, 2012 | Author:

I use screencasts all of the time, mainly on Under Ten Minutes (www.undertenminutes.com) to record how-to videos for a variety of different tools. I usually use Camtasia as I have used it for a number of years and I also have a full license. I love Camtasia and the TechSmith team…but I was researching free alternatives for a thing I’m doing and that led me to a discovery.

Screencast-o-matic (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com) sounds like a made-up product that shouldn’t work. But it does. Brilliantly.

You simply accept the Java plugins, set your mic level and then adjust the box to the size of recording you need. Press go, start talking and then stop the recording when you’re finished. You are then presented with the option of downloading the resulting video or uploading it directly to YouTube. I did that and the result is below.

Screencasts for free, without any installation at all. Genius.

 

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags:  | 3 Comments
Useful Websites
Saturday, April 14th, 2012 | Author:

I am writing a guide for Primary Teachers and I am including a short section to showcase some websites that they might find useful. This does not include blogs as there is a separate section for teacher blogs. These could be sites that help with lesson planning, ideas, discussion, anything really. I am open to ideas!

So what sites would you include? and Why?

Thank you!

Category: General Thoughts  | Leave a Comment
ReThinking ICT #ICT500
Sunday, April 01st, 2012 | Author:

This post is a response to Chris Leach’s invitation to write 500 words about Rethinking the ICT curriculum. Others including Miles Berry and @grumbledook have also blogged their thoughts.

Chris is also hosting an event where we can come together to share ideas and thoughts. Details can be found here. My comments below relate only to the primary curriculum as that is what I do! (it’s also over 500 words, but hey…)

Writing about my thoughts for changing ICT is a difficult process. On one hand I think that there isn’t much to change, after all we can teach ‘anything we like’ at the moment. I’ve taught children to make greenscreen videos, we’ve discussed and used Twitter in the classroom, we’ve Skype-d with Santa and we make our own games and we haven’t been chastised for this. We weren’t really following the National Curriculum, but all of those things we’ve done can be linked if you try hard enough. On the other hand, we need to do something about the schools who ‘do Office’.

I’ve written before about changing my ICT curriculum and to be honest, all of it can be covered under the current National Curriculum and all of it can still be used under whatever new curriculum comes out. I just looked at what I would want my learners to have. I want them to know that there are a range of tools out there that do the same job, or different jobs or a bit of a mixture. I try to include ‘new’ stuff like blogging as well as traditional stuff like ‘being able to do a presentation’. But when we present we work on how to present and not just how to add animation and effects. It’s all very subtle changes but that’s what will work. My planning is slowly moving on to www.ictplanning.co.uk - I don’t think it’s groundbreaking, but it might help someone.

I don’t buy into this current craze of wanting a huge emphasis on coding and programming in the curriculum. Yes it should be included, but it shouldn’t be the main driver. Children today want instant results and the thought of spending hours writing lines of code before seeing an end product would bore many of them, and their teachers. We use 2Do It Yourself which is a fabulous way of including game design with a bit of coding as it gives the children a graphical view of their game instantly. They can design it, try it our and refine it as they need to. For us, this is the building block before they move on to Scratch and Kodu.

Another problem is the staff. Teachers are worried that they need to know how everything works before the children can use it. How many teachers in a normal school would want to learn programming to then pass it on to the children? Now in an ideal world the teachers would be happy not knowing how something worked and giving the children the chance to explore and learn for themselves, but we all know that this doesn’t happen. One day maybe, but we’re not there yet.

Also, people often say “my 3year old can use my ipad, but at school he won’t be near a computer til he’s 6″ or whatever are missing the point. Yes your children can use a device, but in school we often just have PCs. Until schools have a range of devices to allow children a chance to explore different things, we will be ‘stuck’ with using PCs. And why don’t we have a range of devices? Often it is money. However I know a school that has bought a whole set of ipod touches but isn’t letting the staff or children use them yet until the staff are trained. Again it comes back to staff confidence which the more I think about it, the more I think that it could be the biggest issue.

How do we get our staff confident and comfortable trying new things?

How do we get them willing to let the children potentially fail first, and then succeed later?

How do we keep them informed of new developments and new websites to help them? Many of them won’t go on Twitter (I’m the only one in my school on it)

In this time of change and uncertainty, I don’t worry about schools with people like me, leading the ICT and finding out about new ideas. I worry about schools like the one I visited last week. They had very recently had an ICT inspection from Ofsted who has graded them good with outstanding features for ICT yet when I spoke to the children about ICT they said we ‘do Word, PowerPoint, Excel and sometimes if we’re good, drawing’. Those are the schools that we need to support and focus on. They need to be shown the light and shown the way forward.

How do we do that?

I don’t know. Answers on a postcard…oh wait, stamps have gone up in price, just comment below. It’ll be free.

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: ,  | 4 Comments
Child Blogs
Monday, March 26th, 2012 | Author:

Today seems to be a day for thinking towards the future…

We’ve been blogging now for 18months and some children have asked about setting their own blogs up. Now we have class blogs and some children have access to write on these. We also have the children’s blog which everyone has access to, but the main problem with this is that after 10 posts, the previous ones are on page 2 and lost into the ether. After-all, no-one clicks on page 2 do they?

I could give them all access to their class blog and then when they blog they put their name in the tag to differentiate it, but each yeah I’d be moving them al around as they move class. I don’t fancy that!

So I want to use WordPress to setup the blogs instead. Now I don’t want to force a blog on every child as the thought of writing more than they need to would scare some children. So I want to do it as a sign-up system. So my initial thought was a google form where the children fill in some options, I look at the answers and then manually setup a blog for them. They could agree to a set of rules before they get the blog turned on and we could decide them with the children of course.

There is probably a plug-in or something that I could use, but here are some things to think about…

  • Do I set the children up as contributors so that they can write on the blog – and then I’d have potentially hundreds of blog posts and comments to approve…or do I set them up as a higher level so that they post and manage it themselves – with possible e-safety issues when comments come in
  • Is there an automatic way for new blogs to be listed somewhere? There’s no point making new blogs if no-one can find them. I could have a page called ‘Blogs by children’ but would I have to manually make a list of the blogs or could it be done automatically?
  • What happens if a child adds photos of themselves to the blog? If the blog was called ‘Amy’s blog’ then photos would have to be banned
  • Should the children be allowed to choose their own themes and widgets?
  • Should the children’s blogs auto-tweet as well?

Of course I might be thinking of all of this and then it turns out that only two children want their own blog, but still, if two children want it then I should be providing some way for it to happen. I wouldn’t want to be the person forcing them to use non-school systems or worse still, blocking it entirely.

So, if you are a WordPress expert, tips are welcome! If you are a teacher, what do you think? Should children have their own blogs or am I just giving myself more work?

Category: Blogging  | Tags:  | 8 Comments
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