Hackasaurus is one of those tools for many people. I have shown it at a couple of recent Teachmeets and also at a conference I was at last week, but I hadn’t used it with a whole class until this week. So I thought I would share what we did with it and how it worked.

In case you don’t know, Hackasaurus lets you take a webpage and then edit the text and images that are on there. This looks like the site has been hacked, but in fact it’s just a (very clever) copy. This works best for news sites I think.

I first used it in class to create a stimulus for discussion. I took a Sky News page, hacked it a bit to add a photo of a hotel and then wrote 5/6 paragraphs about the new hotel that was being built in the Indian village we were looking at. The text gave different opinions from different sides such as the hotel company, local businesses and unemployed villagers.  I could have just said to the children “today we’re discussing a hotel development” but by having it as a news page that I have “found”, it made it more real.

So, on to the whole-class test. In the morning, we went down to the pond and took part in some pond-dipping. We took photos of the things we found and then later on, I wanted the children to write about what they had found.  Now, this wasn’t the main focus, it wasn’t literacy, these aren’t the best examples of writing at all, but they are examples of children exploring a new tool that later on will help them to improve their writing. Over lunchtime I uploaded the photos to a Picasa gallery meaning that the children could easily access them. I put the link to this gallery on the schools website (www.3x3links.com/stjohn) and also added a link to a Newsround site too. I find that working with Newsround is much better as it has less inappropriate news stories on the sides and is more suitable for children. I also added a link to a Google Doc (that was open for anyone to edit without signing in) and added this to the school site too.

For the lesson, I demonstrated how to add the X-Ray Goggles to the bookmark bar and then we looked at how to edit text. I realised that Picasa brought another bonus, as the images were stored online, they already had an image URL meaning that the children could copy the URL of the image and paste it into Hackasaurus and change the photo in seconds.

As I said, these aren’t the best examples of writing, but for 45-60 minutes with a new tool, they worked really well. I hope you like them and can see a way of using them in your class too.

The hacked pages that my class made are available here (for best results, right-click and open in new tab/window): http://stjohnsblogs.co.uk/class8/hacking-cbbc/

Word of warning, once your children know how to use Hackasaurus, they won’t believe any webpage you ever show them again. But maybe that’s a good thing? My children now question the information they see online a lot more than they did a few weeks ago!

A how-to guide for Hackasaurus is here: http://www.undertenminutes.com/?p=383

The course is split into four modules:

• ICT and Literacy
• Images and Animated Videos
• Finding and Presenting Information
• Blogging in the Curriculum

Each module contains some links to free software or websites as well as suggestions of how they can be used in the class. Alongside the activities there are often help videos showing how a tool works.

I hope that this course is useful to teachers and will give them some ideas for using ICT with their children.

The course can be found here: http://essentialcpd.co.uk

This post was started because many schools in Hampshire are looking for ways in which they can remove their VLE and use an alternative. So I thought I would put together a post based on the common tools within a VLE, particularly the one used in Hampshire, and then give some ideas of alternatives. Many of these alternatives will be Google Apps-based or blog-based, but there are also others too.

The main thing to remember is that choosing a variety of tools is going to take more work than buying a VLE with all of the tools built-in. However, the obvious benefit to using other tools will be cost. Many of the tools used will be free but there is the obvious cost of time in setting up some of these tools and configuring them to meet your needs. Over the coming weeks, these pages will get updated to include how-to guides and videos.

The plan is that this post will develop into something I can share with schools if they decide to drop their VLE and are looking for alternatives.

For help with blogging or Google Apps, feel free to contact me for further advice. To setup Google Apps yourself, use the guide here or just get an overview here.

Some common tasks and VLE tools:

• Creating a topic or class webpage
• Providing links to websites related to the topic
• Uploading photos to share learning with a wider audience
• Uploading photos for children to access and use within their work
• Emailing and Messaging
• Discussion Forums
• Storage of work and documents – for ongoing storage, providing files for lessons and setting/receiving homework

If you have any tools that could be added to these pages, please let me know so that I can add them on.

I’ve streamed things before but it can be a bit hit and miss depending on internet connection, software issues and other factors (such as pressing record to get a copy afterwards!) but today I thought about using Google+. Now I know that Kevin McLaughlin (@kvnmcl) is a huge fan of this and I gave it a go. I had to use an account that wasn’t part of our Google Apps domain, which is fine, I used a generic school account e.g. somethingsomething@gmail.com and loaded it up. I tried it first on a Chromebook but that was having WiFi issues and then switched to a netbook instead, using an external webcam instead of the built-in one. This worked fine. I simply started a Hangout, ticked the enable hangout on air option and started to stream it live. What I really liked was the ability to not only give a link out to everyone watching – the few people who had seen my tweets earlier this morning – but the ability to embed it directly into a blog. So I copied the code, pasted it into a new post and tweeted the link to our blog. This would make it much easier in future as I would know the URL of the stream before it was set up and I could give this to parents ages in advance if needed.

I set the stream up around 45minutes before the concert and muted the mic. There was a lot of silliness, showing off and playing up to the camera before we started, but hey, they’re children and it was a new thing that we hadn’t done before! The concert went well, parents loved it and the children were fab. Afterwards we looked and the children liked that it had put the video onto YouTube for us automatically. We discussed what to do with the 45minutes of ‘rubbish stuff’ at the beginning and we found the trim button in YouTube. We simply used this, removed the excess and saved it. An hour later (maybe less) the video was trimmed and of course, it was already embedded on our blog.

It must be noted that we also had a video camera in use too because we were checking it worked ahead of the Easter production this afternoon! All in all, it was very easy and we might look at doing it for future events.

The copy of the stream is available here and the version from the video camera is available here on our blog.

Creating Organizations and Uploading Users - This includes how to create the CSV/Excel file to upload users in bulk.

Adding Users 1 at a time

Creating Groups – Useful if you want to email a whole class or all staff at once

Choosing which services to enable – Google Apps provides access to lots of services, you might not want them all enabled.

Settings – Choosing which settings are enabled/configured for the different Google Apps tools.

Google Apps Marketplace – Adding Apps from the Marketplace

Advanced Tools and Reports - Not really used by most people, but useful to see what is there.

Part 3 will follow soon, this will look at what to do now that you have Google Apps all setup and running.

My brief was to present for 5 minutes on the new curriculum and to see if it was fit for purpose. My question is, what was the purpose? If the purpose is to get more computing into schools, then yes it will do that.

My talk started with an introduction and an explanation that I am a primary school teacher and although I need to know about computing, I also need to be able to teach dance, music, science and a load of other things too. It is hard to train teachers in one aspect of the curriculum when there are so many things to look at.

I talked about my background. I didn’t have any PCs at school and didn’t really see a PC until I was 16 at college. I didn’t program at home on Spectrums etc either. I still went and did a BTEC in ICT and my Primary Education Degree specialised in ICT too. If people want to learn ICT and learn about computers, they will find a way. Even if they haven’t been taught computing.

I then showed the new curriculum and discussed the interpretation. I think this is a big concern. If read in one way, then 3/5 statements from KS1 and 4/6 from KS2 curriculum are focussed on programming and just 1 in each looks at the other bits. So what would happen to all of the ICT we do now? We had already heard from Phil Bannister at the Department of Education saying that it is expected that ICT should be taught across the curriculum and even though this wasn’t mentioned, teachers should do it anyway. My worry is that  many schools will look at the curriculum and just interpret is as reducing the need for all of the fun creative ICT that we have been doing already.

I showed some pictures of a few projects from school using Sketchup, Pivotman, Voki, Google Maps, Audacity and many others and asked if these would be applicable in the new curriculum. There are some statements that might help…

Those statements are:

To view my PowerPoint, download it here. It isn’t very exciting, but then I guess you had to be there

Overall I was very pleased with how it went, there were laughs and a round of applause half-way through (thanks to Bob Harrison for starting that). Afterwards there were many great comments from people, so that was nice

Here are the responses. I have removed names from the survey.

Click here to open the results.

When starting a blog, there are a few choices.

1) Blogger - This is free. This is very simple to use and takes seconds to setup. It’s easy to post to, manage and share your posts. An example from @shelibb is here. Simply sign-in with your Google login.

You can enable Blogger through Google Apps, but I wouldn’t suggest it because then your children can post without any input or control from the teachers. The first time a teacher would see the post or any comments, is when they are live to the world. Not great. Guy Shearer has written about a way around this. His article is here.

Now I know many people will want simplicity, but there are reasons for spending the extra time and going with WordPress.

Miles Berry (@mberry) suggested remixing videos using Popcorn Maker (https://popcorn.webmaker.org/) which is a free site to use. We had a bit of problem signing the children up but I think this was probably down to our email settings rather than the Popcorn site, so the children all logged in using my log-in. We worked in pairs and had 16 pairs using the same log-in with no difficulty.

The basic concept of the site is to find a YouTube (or Vimeo/HTML 5) video, add it to the timeline and then while it plays, add pop-ups, text, images and multimedia content.

This is an example from two Year 3 girls (note, they haven’t done a huge amount but it gives a small flavour):

We were basing this on our India topic and we were looking at the River Ganges. For this, we all used the same two videos to make it a bit easier, technically. Then, the pairs had to research facts and information about the river and add it to their video. Now, some have spelling mistakes, some are slightly inaccurate (the river is 2,500km and not 2,500m long!) but in an hour, we have produced some great work.

This was all fairly simple to do and within minutes the children were happily adding maps of Varanasi and pop-ups to their video. Once done, they simply saved it and it gives them an embed code and a URL to share them on a blog or website.

Francesca and Issy then went and added the videos to their own blogs too!

The next step is to finish the videos and publish them onto the class blog. The children have already started to suggest other ways to remix videos in other lessons. I think maths methods might be the next one…

Today saw the launch of the draft National Curriculum. ICT is gone and in its place, Computing. To read through the document, click here.

Now, my thoughts on the changes can wait a few days until another blog post, but I REALLY need your help with something. I am on a panel at the Westminster Forum reviewing the new curriculum and giving my thoughts. The full line-up is available here but includes some amazing people such as Miles Berry and the Director of Education for Microsoft and the person who co-founded CodeClub and someone who does Computing and Software Development and me.

I’m the only primary school teacher on this panel. I don’t want that to sound big-headed, I’m not sure why they chose me and not Chris Leach or Kevin McLaughlin or the 100s of other amazing people on Twitter either….but I need to present for 5 minutes on my views of the new curriculum. That’s where you come in. My plan is to share your thoughts and fears and feelings about it too. Maybe I can be your voice on the panel. Maybe you love the thought of teaching algorithms to 6 year-olds.

So if you have any thoughts, please share them below. Will it change anything? Who knows. Will it make a difference? I doubt it. But it’s a chance, right?

For the official chance to consult on the changes, visit here