Remixing Videos
Monday, February 11th, 2013 | Author:

After our success last week with videos for news reports, we have looked to other ways of editing and playing with video online. Offline we were fairly limited to an old version of Windows Movie Maker, but on the web, we suddenly have loads of (free!!) tools to pick from.

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…

Category: Curriculum, Useful Sites/Software  | Tags: , ,  | One Comment
Computing in KS1/2 – Have Your Say!
Thursday, February 07th, 2013 | Author:

This is your chance to have your say on the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 National Curriculum for Computing (the subject formerly known as ICT)

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

Category: Curriculum  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
Online Video Editing
Wednesday, February 06th, 2013 | Author:

Just a quick post but I found this tool (via the ICT Magic Wiki) that I had to share. The tool is WeVideo (www.wevideo.com) and it is an online video editing program. The first reason for loving it is that it uses Google Apps logins to sign in. This means that the children won’t need to register for new sites, they just click a button and they’re in.

Another reason for loving the site is the ease of use. Apart from having a very detailed guide holding your hand, the site is so intuitive, it all just works as you’d expect. You make a new project, choose a theme, upload your videos and then drag them onto the storyboard/timeline. You can then add audio backing tracks or trim the videos as required. Our Year 5/6 team were looking for a way to piece together videos for a news report. When I told my Y3/4 class, they asked if we could have a go and so we quickly made ours too. Ours isn’t as well rehearsed or scripted as the 5/6 versions will be, but for 20minutes work with a Flip camera, I’m pretty happy!

I simply asked the class what we had been doing this week and then asked who wanted to be on camera discussing it. Volunteers were quickly chosen, they went and filmed (including an outside broadcast) and then as a class, I showed them how to put it all together. I had nothing to do with the filming, I just put it all together for them. One thing I couldn’t get working very well was the direct upload-to-YouTube option, so we published the video to the WeVideo site, downloaded and then uploaded to YouTube manually. This might just be because I was doing  it under the pressure of having 5 minutes before hometime! With more time, we would cut back to the “studio” after each snippet and we would also include some interviews. But for our first attempt, I’m over-the-moon.

The class were so keen to make it, they have asked if we can do it again tomorrow as a “special report” as part of our Outdoors Day.

Have a look at the video, if you have any comments, head over to my class’ blog to leave them for the children.

Category: Useful Sites/Software  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
Train Fares
Saturday, January 19th, 2013 | Author:

Slightly left-field post only applicable to very few of you but hey….

For those travelling to BETT on the train, it is well worth looking into Group Save tickets (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/promotions/pr354fdc0a0400020101fea1769fbf60/details.html) Basically you need 1 adult and then three other people (adults or children) and then you just pay for two full price adult tickets. So four adults would travel for the price of two.

Then with this group, four additional children will travel for just £1 each.

Take our trip to BETT.

Group 1: Me and my wife, two children, plus four additional children at £1 each. That would normally be £185.50 but with Groupsave it comes down to £78. Bargain.

It’s well worth looking into if you are taking children anywhere and don’t have enough to claim big group discounts.

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment
BETT2013 Plans
Saturday, January 19th, 2013 | Author:

Borrowing (porcupining) the idea from Chris Mayoh, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of my plans for the BETT exhibition. I have a number of presentations and these tend to be for companies I have worked with in the past few years. So I thought I would share my plans so far. I do need to look at the seminars and theatres and plan some of those in somehow too!

 

Wednesday

11:30am – 12:00 (Google)

Francesca, Issy and Emma will be presenting on the Google stand looking at how they have used Google Sites in the classroom. We will be sharing a few ideas of how to get started and showing just how easy it is to create a website in minutes. Google Sites is a great tool for sharing information that the children have learnt on a particular topic and they are extremely easy to use.

1:30 – 2:00pm (Stone Computers)

Emma, Emily and Lottie will be on the Stone Computers stand (info here) sharing their thoughts on what it is like to be a Digital Leader and they will also be talking about our school blogs. This includes examples of children who have now got their own blogs for sharing their own ideas too. Our school blogs have had 600,000 views in two years and I’ll be giving a bit of an insight into what we use the blogs for and how they have helped our school. For info: This talk will be followed by Chris Mayoh discussing his Digital Leaders, which will be well worth sticking around for.

2:30 – 3:00pm (2Simple)

Henry and I will be looking at how we have been using 2Do It Yourself to create platform games. This will include designing our own characters, planning the game and then editing the code to change the game dynamics. The children learn and use a whole range of skills when creating these simple games and we will give a demonstration of that.

When not presenting, we’ll be wandering around and enjoying ourselves!

Thursday – Not attending, back in school for the day!

 

Friday

10:00am – 12:00 BrainPOP

Along with my wife we will be on and around the BrainPOP stand showing just how amazing BrainPOP is and how it can help with a range of topic areas in your classroom. We’ll be the ones in the black t-shirts :-)

1:30 – 2:00pm (Stone Computers)

Similar to the presentation for Rising Stars later on today, this will be another quickfire look at free web tools to get teachers using the web in their classrooms. This will include tools to help with animation, research and art.

2:30 – 3:30pm (2Simple)

I will start with a presentation looking at the impact Purple Mash can have in your classroom. I will then be around to answers questions and to help share some of the great ways in which we have used 2Simple’s tools in our school.

15:30 – 16:00pm (Rising Stars)

This will be a presentation sharing a range of free online tools to help with ICT in the classroom. This will include tools to help with presentations, ebook design and photography. These are quick and easy tools that can be learnt in seconds and then applied into your curriculum with ease.  There will also be a chance to purchase copies of my book, Essentials: ICT and get it signed too.

6:30 – 9:30pm

I’ll be heading to the Teachmeet to see what wonderful stories and ideas people are sharing this year.

When not presenting, I’ll probably be on the BrainPOP  stand :-)

Saturday

11:30am – 12:00 (Rising Stars)

This will be a presentation sharing a range of free online tools to help with ICT in the classroom.  These are quick and easy tools that can be learnt in seconds and then applied into your curriculum with ease.  There will also be a chance to purchase copies of my book, Essentials: ICT and get it signed too.

2:00 – 3:00pm (2Simple)

Another talk and demonstration of Purple Mash talking about how we have used this in our school. There will be time for questions too.

Category: Conferences / BETT  | Tags: , , ,  | Leave a Comment
Twitter Lists
Tuesday, January 15th, 2013 | Author:

I have been using Twitter for ages now (a good few years) and I have never got around to sorting out my lists until recently because of time. I would imagine that many others are in a similar boat, only because when I tweeted about lists, a few others asked for more clarification, so here it is.

Lists are a feature where you can group certain users together. I could have lots of lists but I tend to just have a few. I have one for people in Hampshire so that I can see what local teachers are tweeting about and I have another for people I talk to or follow regularly. These are the tweets that I now look at in more detail. Before I found that I was spending ages looking at Twitter but it didn’t feel productive. Now my time has been reduced but I feel that I am getting a bit more out of it. I know that there is the chance I’ll miss something from someone, but as @dughall says, it’ll get retweeted if it’s useful. I do scroll through the main timeline now and again, but not as regularly as I used to.

I would definitely recommend spending a few hours going through the people you follow and organising them into lists. I found the best way to set this up was through the Twitter.com website. I simply scrolled through the people I was following and I added some to lists. It only loads 10-20 at a time so there is a lot of scrolling, but you’ll get there in the end.

It may seem like a big time spend at the start, but it will make you feel much better afterwards.

Category: Social Media, Twitter  | Tags: ,  | 2 Comments
Presentations at BETT
Saturday, January 12th, 2013 | Author:

The first of our presentation times have now been released and my Digital Leaders will be presenting for Tony Parkin on the Stone Computers stand on Wednesday at 1:30pm. They’ll be talking about their role as Digital Leaders and the way in which we use blogging across the school. Then on the Friday I will aim to give loads of free ways to include ICT in the classroom using a range of web 2 tools.

Have a look on the website for the full schedule from Stone Computers.

Merlin John talks about the plans on his website here.

Category: Conferences / BETT  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment
The Ideas Porcupine
Saturday, January 05th, 2013 | Author:

Teachers are often familiar with the term magpie-ing ideas. Borrowing from someone else because it is a great, shiny idea and then adapting it and using it. We use the term ‘magpie’ mostly in Literacy lessons where a child has found a great word and then we can share it with others. Before anyone comments, I do remind them to thank the person they got the idea from. I often do things in class and say that I have found it on this website or borrowed from this teacher on Twitter. It’s good practice after-all.

Anyway, in one lesson, a year 3 child named Ben heard a good word and shouted “We should porcupine it!”. Cut to baffled faces as he replied saying he knew it was an animal but couldn’t remember which animal stole ideas.

When we discussed it further, my class suggested that a magpie can only carry one idea at a time in his beak but a porcupine could hold loads on his spikes, hence the birth of the porcupine. My teaching assistant then drew me a porcupine and he now lives on the wall.

We’re not sure how he’ll be used yet, but the plan is to stick great examples of work, exciting vocabulary and any other idea on and around him to inspire others.

Oh, if you want this idea for your classroom, feel free to porcupine it. Ben would be very happy.

porcupine

(edit – after a bit of discussion, it was decided that an angry magpie in the corner of this display might be a bit of fun. So @e_gran drew one here)

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , , ,  | One Comment
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