Archive for the Category ◊ ICT Co-ordinator Stuff ◊

Digital Leaders (mk2)
Monday, April 25th, 2011 | Author:

I wrote before (here in fact) about my digital leader project. I originally chose 12 children and then gave them jobs etc, some stuck to their jobs and blogged loads and some got bored and wanted to go out and play football. So I am starting again. It is such a great way of engaging children but I was new to it and I didn’t focus enough. I need to make sure that they also benefit in gaining new ideas and trialling new things as well rather than just being asked to do the same thing over and over!

I have created a new form and listed the main jobs on there. The children can tick the ones they are interested in and we can start there.

Why will it be better this time?

The form will get emailed to all children – No ‘but I can’t access the form’ issues we had last time. I had bit.ly’ed the link and some couldn’t access it because they tried googling it rather than typing in the address bar.

I know the jobs I want them to do – last time I had an idea, but now I know. I also have plans for them to attend at least one teachmeet and present virtually at 3 others (including kidsmeet). They will be busy!

I have tried and not succeeded before so I am better prepared this time (note, I haven’t failed, just not succeeded as much as I wanted to)

 

It is well worth trying in your school if you’re not already!

Category: ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags:  | 2 Comments
An ICT Policy
Friday, April 15th, 2011 | Author:

I wrote way back in July last year about my need to create an ICT policy for my school. I felt that it would make sense to have one policy to encompass ICT, e-safety, social media and anything that I thought I would need. So I tweeted and emailed people that I thought would be able to help and share and many replied sending their policy or the one created by their local authority. I then spend time brainstorming the features of my policy and using bits from different policies that existed or writing it myself if I couldn’t find it.

This has taken a while. It is only now that I am in a position to share it with you all. I have also made lots of changes as we have learnt more about blogging, Google apps and other systems throughout the school.

Now, I have never written a policy before so I am a little nervous about sharing it, but I am hoping that if one school finds it useful, it will have been worth sharing. But a few things…

  • Children have helped to write the KS1 and KS2 acceptable use policies
  • Relevant parts will be shared with parents, staff and governors in the coming weeks
  • I have written this with the ICT Mark and 360Safe guidelines in mind, we may not go for these awards but felt it useful to try and reach the standards that they set

So here it is, the link is below and I have embedded it if you would like to read it. Huge thank you to the very generous people who helped me along with the process.

Direct link here.

PS: It says May 2011 because that’s when it is due to be shared with governors.

Category: ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags: , , , , , , , ,  | 3 Comments
Primary to Secondary
Monday, February 28th, 2011 | Author:

Just a quick post today, on Thursday I am planning on meeting with some ICT guys from our local secondary school. This came about because a friend of mine mentioned on Twitter he’d been to see a guy at a local school and it turned out to be mine. Now don’t get me wrong, I was planning on contacting them at some point anyway, but this sped it up a bit.

So what do I want to talk to them about?

What is the point of meeing with them?

Will meeting them actually make any difference?

What should we even be talking about? Moderating ICT levels? Sharing ideas? Collaboration? Accessing their VLE? Sharing their equipment? What would you be asking them? Or if you are from a secondary school, what would you want to be telling me as a primary school?

One definite thing I am going to ask for their support with is a local gifted and talented day for Year 6 children. We will do one with Y2 as well, but I don’t think they’ll want to get involved with that one.Another is that we will probably get some access to their Moodle and the children in Year 6 will be able to have a bit of a play beforehand. This is fine, but we have mixed year5-6 so it might make it tricky. But we shall see.

Any tips and ideas would be welcome as I haven’t had a secondary school interested in sharing before, but the potential is enormous. I think.

Category: ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags: , ,  | 7 Comments
Greenscreening – The conclusion
Saturday, February 19th, 2011 | Author:

Greenscreening…that’s a fun idea isn’t it? I thought so…but let me tell you, it can be a massive headache. Here is a review of my 6 week greenscreen experience/hell/journey.Previous posts are here and here. I will repeat bits of it, but this post will be more of an overall experience so I hope you don’t mind.

Firstly some context. I am a PPA teacher, this means I teach in a class for a morning or an afternoon a week and I do some ICT across the school, usually in 1 hour slots. So this is my experience of getting it done in an hour a week. I know others have their own class, so that helps (A LOT) logistically.

So…the idea was to try this with year 5 and 6, there are 3 mixed classes. Two I would be teaching and 1 that would have their own teacher doing it. First I needed some green screen. Turns out blue works just as well. I got that from ebay for £3 a square metre. I had no idea how much I’d need so bought 9m for about £30. The cameras we were going to be using would be Flip Ultra and the software was Wax 2.0. This is free and available here.

It turns out you can do greenscreening with Movie Maker, which would’ve been easier, but it prefers blue and the Windows 7 version of movie maker is different, so we stuck with Wax.I had spent HOURS looking online for free software that would do this for us and even Twitter let me down when the best anyone could come up with was…buy a mac. Not helpful.

The plan was to spend about 6 sesssions working on this. The first two would involve finding random backgrounds and having a photo of the child in front of a photo background. I messed around with this the children had great fun putting themselves in Harry Potter or at the North Pole. These can be seen here and here. Then the children were going to have a movie of themselves in front of a picture background. The movie would be in a documentary or news-style report where they would talk about climate change, deforestation or the like to go along with the topic.I had planned on using some other video editing tools to produce credits and title sequences but time didn’t allow in the end.

So, we set up two greenscreens in the end. One in the corridor under some small spotlights and the other on a board that we could move to wherever we had space. This was the corridor, music room, hall, anywhere! Logisitics again dictated that the music room was busy when I was doing ICT or whatever. Also, there is the issue of man-power (that should be LSA-power) as I can’t really just let 5 children go into the music room unattended to take some pics. I could, but it meant me manning the classroom, corridor (green screen 1) and music room (green screen 2). The children were great with the pictures, they had fun and we made some good photos. The key thing that let us down? Lighting. The software removes one shade of green, the lighting meant we had millions of shades and shadows and it wasn’t very good. If the children moved the tolerance bar a bit too far, they disappeared or became a floating head. Bit tricky.

It was great to see the children working together though, only a few could take pictures at once so the rest had to spend their time writing a script for their video, researching or finding pictures. Most did this well, thankfully!

Another problem with Wax was that it couldn’t save the picture. So we used the snipping tool in Windows 7 to snip the picture out, and save that as a picture. We could have printscreened too of course.

Then on to the videos…

The two classes I worked with were making videos as a group. This again was due to time as I thought it might be easier to get through ten groups rather than 30 children. I guess with hindsight, it’s about the same as the children had more chance of fluffing their lines if they have their friends with them too!

I used the amazing Cue Prompter to show their script, this meant they could start and stop it at will. They did put it up to (warp) speed 9 at times, but when recording, it was set on a manageable 2/3. They all recorded their videos and we were done. Luckily I had some amazing help from the teachers who managed to squeeze in extra recordings in quiet times to make sure all videos were ready in time for the final session.

A week or so before the final session, I thought I should be good and test the software. Wax doesn’t like the video format that the Flips records in. That would mean converting them. Around 90 videos needed doing. Oh dear. I would usually use something like Zamzar or Camtasia but this is one at a time. I Tweeted and got lots of ideas including Format Factory but when putting this into Wax, it ruined the audio. Grr. I went through the (quite good) Wax forums to ask for support and through there found Super Video Convertor. The settings on here allowed the Flip videos to be converted to the exact format that Wax wanted. Fiddly and took about 8 hours of converting for all of the videos, but I did it. Result :-)

I produced guides for the children and they worked through these to get their videos rendered. We managed to render on the netbooks, but the computers in the suite were much faster so I’d use those in future.

Then in the past few days we imported the videos, combined them with the background and completed the task. It was hard work, but well worth it. So would I do it again? Yes. It was a LOT of work, but they loved it. I was honest with the children and told them I’d never done it, it could go wrong and we’d all learn from it, this seemed to make them even more determined to make the pictures and videos work! The other teachers have been proud of the results even if I am only 75% happy with them.Maybe it’s because I’m a perfectionist and I want them to be better, but I have achieved a lot with the children so I should be happy. Please don’t let this experience put anyone off, just test it first. You could get £10 worth of green fabric, just try it with the video cameras you have and see if it works. I would definitely do it with photos in future as this would be very easy to do.

Next time though:

  • Invest in some better lighting – it is crucial – Maybe a few small desk lamps would be enough. Most of ours was filmed in the corrider with all sorts of windows and things providing different levels of light
  • Book a room or get the teachers/LSAs to record throughout the week rather than rushing it through in a day
  • Get the children to remove their GREEN jumpers! Most did, but some didnt.
  • Test it thoroughly before launching it with the children
  • Get them to make up a name – we can’t blog their videos as they all say their name to introduce themselves!

Greenscreening is a fantastic tool for inspiring children to think and work creatively and definitely something you should look into. I spoke to a tech from the secondary school and she looked worried that we were greenscreening in primary. We also have a trainee teacher who said “I can’t believe they are greenscreening at age 10, I was 19 before I first greenscreened”. Ridiculous. I was 28 and it was about 6 weeks ago!! We’re moving quickly and it’s very exciting indeed!

My Wax Guides can be found on my school page here. Also on this page is a guide from Ian Tobin on using Paint.net and his blog post is here.

Category: ICT Co-ordinator Stuff, ICT Planning  | Tags: ,  | 4 Comments
The Cloud – My Vision
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 | Author:

I’m at the stage I need to make a decision. Admittedly, it’s not just my decision and will be shared with the rest of the staff and yes, children will have a say too, but primarily it is my decision.

The decision is where to go with our online learning. Currently we have a range of online tools (also known as a VLE in Becta language) and these include Purple Mash, J2E and Brainpop amongst others. I wrote about the decision to choose between Google and Live@edu here and I still haven’t started either. I have installed Google but just for the calendar. I have spent a term-and-a-half swaying between Google and Live. On one side I have many people on Twitter using Google and loving it, on the other I have Hampshire about to start their Live solution. It was due in October but there have been a few delays in getting it right but full credit to Hampshire for delaying it until it’s ready.

Then there’s also the VLE that I spent two years sharing with teachers, Studywiz, that we could use as well. So I have options. Lots of options. For those unsure about VLEs, I wrote about whether to VLE or Not to VLE here

As I wrote earlier, a VLE is a collection of online tools. I have that. But what I don’t have, is somewhere to put them all under one umbrella. I want to make it simple to access them all. So I thought I’d jot down what I want to achieve and then see where I end up…after this waffling about where we are so far.

So what would my VLE have in it? (I’m calling it VLE, you could call it online space, cloud, magical land of stuff, whatever)

Control

I want control over logins. I want it simple e.g. firstname.lastname. I want full control over what can and can’t be published. For example, children shouldn’t publish live unless I let them have that access right. When I say ‘I want power’ I mean the school has the control of course. I would like control over the tools available, so year 6 see more than year 1 for example.

Also, I want one login. They login once and it’s there. All of it. Just simple and easy. If they have to login again to access a certain tool, fine, but it needs to have the same structure as the other logins. Typing firstname.lastname twice is possible, I can live with that.

Email/Messaging/Discussions

I want to have emails for all staff and children. I’d want to be able to control who sends what, meaning that youger children, say up to year 3 can only send internal messages but older children can use this as an external system too. I’d also want the ability to archive messages and to keep them after children had gone. For example, if a child wanted to, they could still use parts of it in Year 7/8 whatever. Maybe. But I want that potential. I obviously want all messages to be stored and to be able to search and check them.

Discussion forums should be included too, this is a key thing in Studywiz and I would love to have discussion forums in certain areas of the cloud thing.

Blogs/Sites

I want children to be able to make websites and/or blogs. The blog could be used as a learning journal as they progress through the school and the sites could be used for personal use as well as for certain projects. We have a project in year 3/4 where children will be looking at the local area and the teacher talked about videos and a travel documentary. It’d be great to have a website containing embedded video, photo galleries, hyperlinks and good old writing too.Yes, we have blogs in our school, but the children don’t really use them yet and I think teachers would prefer it if children had their own separate ones.

Pictures

I would love an area like Picasa or Flickr where the children can upload pictures and share them with their friends. This could be photos of them out and about, playing football or scanned in pics of work. Then they could make an e-portfolio type thingy too.This should also include some kind of embedding (maybe on the sites mentioned above) that allows children to use animoto/photopeach/vimeo etc to embed their content.

Writing tools/docs

They should have access to Google docs/Office online as well as J2e-type tools that let them type, publish, make presentations, spreadsheets and all of those sorts of tools they’ll find useful to complete homework and to share their learning.

These would also be used for staff to share documents, reports, policies etc to make it easier for us to work collaboratively. You all know how amazing Google docs are, I want that functionality. Simple and easy sharing from an address book. I want to click a couple of times and the whole of Year 3 have the document or all staff etc.

Animation/video

I’d love a video sharing area. J2E has a great new animation tool that would be part of the package, so I wonder if they could create their video (or upload one) and save it into a video area online. A self-contained, personal (safe) youtube. They could send links to their friends and share their work.

Creation

This includes picture creation using some of the amazing Purple Mash tools and music creation using something like Aviary. These should be available to the children when they log in too. These tools should make it simple to create a piece of magic and then share it with others either by uploading it to a gallery or by sending a link to others.

Sharing/Giving work

Teachers should be able to create a page and share work/homework very easily. This could be a link to a document or a video or a discussion forum. They should be able to easily include hyperlinks and embed web2.0 tech as well. Similar to the blog, but private to just the children in their class/year group.

Cost

Apart from the extra bits like Brainpop or Mash, I’d like this to be as free as possible.

What have I missed? I look at the list above and it is a little biased towards things that I know are possible. I know that I can pretty much design that myself using Google tools and some clever people at 2Simple and J2e to help me make this work. But I’d love to know what else was possible.My current time scale is to get something in place by Easter, then spend the Summer playing with it and sharing it with some staff before launching it in September.

So please share your ideas, I really would love to hear them…

**Edit** It has been pointed out that this will just be a serious of tools under one umbrella, and that’s true, but what tools should be included?

Category: General Thoughts, ICT Co-ordinator Stuff, Learning Platforms  | Tags: , , , , ,  | 3 Comments
KS1 Planning – The Local Area
Saturday, January 01st, 2011 | Author:

I’ve been planning some KS1 ICT today. I’m not a KS1 expert at all, I teach 1 morning a week of KS1, but a few things have made my life a lot easier and I thought I’d share them with you to see if it might help when you plan next time. There are others out there that are much more advanced and experienced than I am, but hey. Here’s what I’ve started doing.

Firstly, the topic. The children will be looking at their local area and comparing it to Katie Morag’s Island of Coll. They will be visiting the local village and conducting a traffic survey and will hopefully then look at ways in which to calm the traffic through the village. So that’s my brief. Where can ICT fit in?

At the moment, each class has 1 ICT lesson a week and this can be in the suite or with netbooks in the class. I want to try and integrate ICT across the whole curriculum to give children a varied ICT experience.

I am also the PPA teacher, I provide ICT plans for the 3 KS1 classes but I only teach ICT in one of them. We have discussed it and I think the best thing to do is to provide the teachers with a variety of objectives and activities, they can then pick and choose which they do.

So the objectives include:

  • To use text and images to develop their ideas
  • To share and present information in a variety of forms
  • To present their completed work effectively

I then sat with the plan from two-years ago (it’s a 2yr cycle) and looked at each subject area to see the general gist of where the topic was going. I then loaded some of my favourite tools and here we go…

The children will be conducting a traffic survey so they will need to know about data handling and the furbles would be a great place to start.From there, we can then move on to 2Count and 2Graph so that we can begin making our own graphs. These are both part of Purple Mash.Hopefully the children will realise that the traffic goes through the village too quickly so they will discuss how to slow it down, using activities like Zigzag or Traffic Issues on Mash to help them.There are some more great data handling tools on the free iboard site too.

As we are looking at cars in the village, why not use 2Design and Make to make our own one? We could then graph those too?

When it comes to researching our local town and a Scottish island, then I turn to Simon’s excellent Infant Encyclopedia to help the children with their research. This has a range of short activities, videos and games for the children.

They will also need to look at their village and a Scottish one so why not use Google Maps and Streetview? That will make a great comparison tool. It would be even better if we could link to a school on an island too and I have already put those plans in place as well.There is a bear that travels a lot too, so we will have a quick look at Barnaby and his travels from the BBC.

So with that range of activities, the children will be learning to find information and to research using the internet, to present and analyse graphs and also to combine text and graphics using a simple tool such as Purple Mash. They of course will be reinforcing the skills of loading websites, logging on and using the netbooks safely and saving work too.

How do I present this to our children? These links will all be put on our school website (like I talked about here) so that the children can click and load the site or at most, login to Mash and then complete the activity.

I’m not sure if this is the best way of planning, but it seems to work and means there is variety. Will all three classes do the same activities? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. I want them to be able to transfer skills from one tool to the other and this should give them the chance to do that. With the exception of the paid-for elements of Mash, this is all free too. I just wonder if it would work with KS2 or do they need longer project-type ICT sessions?

With thanks to Simon Haughton for these data handling ideas.

Category: ICT Co-ordinator Stuff, ICT Planning  | Tags: , ,  | One Comment
Primary Digital Leaders
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 | Author:

Have you ever noticed that as ICT coordinator you are responsible for a million things around school? The VLE, blogs, website, microphones, cameras, laptops, photocopier(?) and oh yeah, the ICT curriculum. Regular readers will know I’m trying to improve ICT across the whole school and I want to remove some of these minor roles from my day-to-day life. So I’m going to give them to the children.

Kristian Still has a very successful Digital Leaders programme at Hamble College and after a brief chat with him last month (and Dawn Hallybone) we thought about how this would look in primary. So after Christmas I will be inviting children to apply for the role within school. The children will need to fill out a short online form asking why they should be considered and then I will choose and briefly interview them until I have my team. I envisage starting with about 6 children. I will obviously have overall responsibility for them, but I think that some children have shown huge potential and I want to tap into that. So, below I have listed the responsibilites they will have. Most of these will be infrequent or maybe weekly. Most they can do at home or in their lunchtime if they wish. The role is not compulsory and I might not get any applicants, but it will be interesting to see the response.

So what do you do in your school? Do you have a list of ‘silly’ jobs that the children could take over? Or better yet, new jobs that they could take responsibility for?

Digital Leaders will have the following responsibilities:

Website/Blogs/Online

  • Uploading new photographs into each year group area of the website
  • Editing/adding to some areas of the website
  • Converting documents into Flash and embedding them within the website
  • Write blog posts for your class and comment on other blogs across the school
  • Reset/change password for children that have lost or forgotten theirs (Blogs, Purple Mash etc)
  • Helping staff to upload pictures/videos to their blog

ICT Clubs

  • Plan and lead ICT club at lunchtimes for 3/4 and 5/6 (1 day each)
  • Possibly lead an after-school ICT club

Other

  • Change photographs on the TV screen in the reception
  • Turn on, and choose, a webcam to play in the hall during lunchtimes
  • At times, and with your class teacher’s permission, support teachers across the school when they teach ICT and use new hardware or software
  • Organise competitions e.g. a drawing competition in Purple Mash
  • Possibly attend events and other schools to share ICT learning
  • Attend after-school training for staff and parents – with your parents’ permission of course!
  • Trialling new software as required

Mr Addison will:

  • Make sure you have enough training and accounts with a suitable level of responsibility to manage the tasks above
  • Provide you with software to trial so that you can use it as part of the ICT club
Category: ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags:  | 18 Comments
A new(er) ICT Curriculum
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 | Author:

I wrote in the Summer about my plans for ICT. Now I have been in the school for half a term I have a better knowledge of what is happening and where I would like to go. Currently we have 1 ICT slot a week per class and this is ‘when ICT happens’. This might be using the netbooks or it might be in the suite, but generally ICT is supposed to be in those time slots. But…lots of teachers have been happy to get netbooks as and when to do a bit extra. This might be creating a story in 2Create a Super Story or researching online, so the shift is happening towards a more cross-curricular approach.I know most people did this a while ago, but that’s where we are.

So my job is now to guide the staff and to plan appropriately for the ICT across the school. They seem keen, they just need ideas and support to get going. So how do I start?

I envisage planning a range of generic lesson plans that meet NC objectives and marry up with the level descriptors so that teachers can pick and choose the ICT that they want to do that half term. These eventually would be linked to our ICT assessment (not yet written) so it would be easy to assess where the children are. If they fancy doing 4 weeks of presentations, that’s fine, but better yet, they could do 4 sessions of presentations in the same week. I say generic plans because I think that most areas of ICT can be achieved in whatever topic. If I plan 4 sessions of using presentation software (not just PPT) then they should be able to pick this up and use it in Tudors, Victorians, Plants or Space. There are some things that will fit better with certain subjects – Google maps when studying the local area – but these can be used as and when.These add-ons could also be listed so teachers can pick and choose as they wish.

Generic also helps when a fancy new piece of software or web2 tech comes along later. If I write a plan for ‘making an e-book’ then the teachers could have a go at using MyEBook.com, 2CASS or Zooburst.com. It would all depend on their focus. They could use our help guides and adapt.

I would then link all of these plans on our website so that the teachers could click on a topic (e.g. presentations or databases) or a NC objective and the plans would come up.

Does this seem like a good way to go?

Things I want to avoid:

*Everything being taught in 6 week blocks – some things take 2 sessions and others need a couple here and a couple later

*Being software dependant – yes I will teach powerpoint, but more importantly I will plan how to ‘make a good presentation’

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this. It is a huge task, but one that also has huge potential.

Category: General Thoughts, ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | 4 Comments
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