Tag-Archive for ◊ blogging ◊

Blogging without me
Monday, November 01st, 2010 | Author:

We’ve been blogging at our school, you may have noticed as I’ve waffled on about it a fair bit, but I saw something today that made me smile and realise how far we’ve come in half a term (plus a day).

We have blogs for each class and these are sorted by the teacher but there are other blogs that are shared a bit. For example the sport blog or the whole school blog. We also have a blog for Learning Outdoors as part of our outdoor curriculum. Now, the teacher who runs this said she loved the idea of blogging, but didn’t have time to do it as she was outiside. Fair point. So a Year 6 volunteered. We gave him some login details and away he went armed with my blogging guide. The result is here. All blogged by Adam and pretty much on his own but overseen by me.

Then just before half term, and I mean just, it was lunchtime on the last day, I was asked if we could have a choir blog and Adam duly offered to blog for them too as his class teacher runs the choir. I explained time was tight on the last day and it’d get done over half term.This then merged to become a clubs blog to cover all of the clubs we have.

Now today I wasn’t at school as I was training elsewhere so Adam couldn’t come to see me. His teacher didn’t know whether I’d had chance to set up the blog or not either. Then at lunchtime today an auto-tweet appeared from school with a link to http://stjohnsblogs.co.uk/clubs. Turns out Adam had investigated to see if I had setup the blog or not, then logged in and written a post and had it approved too. There’s even an MP3 uploaded which I imagine he did too.

This might not be a big thing to some schools out there, but we have some keen bloggers at our school and the children are helping to push this along. I feel very proud of this and long may it continue.

If you have 2 minutes, please do go and listen to their song and leave us a comment.

Category: Blogging  | Tags:  | 2 Comments
Blogging with the whole school
Saturday, October 30th, 2010 | Author:

This post has been a long time coming. I am writing it because some people asked how we started blogging in our school. Now, I am not an expert in this field at all, for that I would hand you over to @mattlovegrove, @johnmclear (from Primary Blogger) or @hgjohn and they have all helped and supported me through the trickier parts of setting up our blogs. No, I am someone that can fiddle and play and eventually get there. It might not be the best way and I am sure there are shortcuts I missed but hey, it seems to work.

So here’s a recount of what we have done, what’s worked, what’s annoyed me and as with anything I do, I hope it is useful to someone else in the future.

The plan:

I wanted 1 blog per class that was capable of video, sound, flash files (for 2DIY/2CASS). It needed to be teacher-proof. It needed to link all of the blogs together and have a common-ish look and feel. I didn’t mind different themes, but all must have links to school website and e-safety resources for example. It needed to link to Twitter and our school website. It needed to be simple to set-up.

Often in a school, you will have 1 keen teacher. They might want a blog so they’ll go and make mraddison.wordpress.com or whatever. Then Mrs Smith says that it is a great idea so she tries to make one too but Mrssmith.wordpress.com is taken and she ends up with Mrssmithyear4.wordpress.com You will end up with the issue where each teacher and class has a different naming structure. Not a massive problem, but wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way of managing them all? A bit of research led me to WordPress MU (multi-user).

WordPress MU was a bit more complicated than a usual wordpress install and that makes sense really, I was setting up at least 12 blogs rather than 1. I set up a domain and installed wordpress. With my school being called St John the Baptist, we were limited to domains as many were taken, I settled with www.stjohnsblogs.co.uk

Set-up:

To setup blogs coming from the main one, I needed an email address per class. This wasn’t a huge hassle as I was intending to set this up anyway. These could then be used to sign up for accounts on Prezi, Wallwisher etc as well. These were all done through Google and they all automatically re-direct to one main account to make it easier for me to check!

Linking them all together:

I couldn’t find an easy way to do this. I started with writing some HTML code that I copied and pasted into a text widget on each blog. This meant I could quite easily replicate the links on each blog so class 1 had links to 2, 3, 4 etc and blog 2 had the same set of links. I wanted to control liks at the top and to have all of the others inherit these links. I can’t find a way to do this, so if anyone knows, please enlighten me.  I ended up using the link widget and adding new blogs as we created them. This does mean logging in 15 times or so when we set-up a new blog (as we did with our after-school club) but it seems to work, it’s a shame I can’t manage these from the top-level.

Plugins:

Akismet is a key plugin to use as it will track and colelct spam that is sent to your blog. It wasn’t made clear if I could install this at the top-level or if I needed to do it per blog, so I set it up per blog. This required an email address per blog too.

I was torn between Clustrmaps and Revolvermaps to track visitor locations and in the end we have a bit of a mixture, but that’s fine. They can’t all be the same. Firestats is used to track the actual visitors per blog, but it seems to sometimes count per blog and sometimes for the whole domain. Either way, it’s fine and does a good enough job for us. I can then tell people in assembly,”we’re heading for 9,000 views” or whatever.It also shows which blog has had the most views so Class 5 are constantly asking me if they’re still top. Friendly competition is always good.

Unfiltered MU is another important plugin. Before installing it, only I as admin, was able to use HTML code from sites such as Animoto, Voki or Photopeach. I wanted everyone to do this and that is what this plugin allows you to do.

Themes:

I found themes to be a bit of a pain to be honest. I need to install them at the top level before anyone can select them for their own class blog. This means I would need ot find enough decent themes to cover all classes when I would rather they did this themselves. We currently all have pretty much the same theme, this half-term I will sit with the teachers and show them my theme search and let them choose their own. I might do this as a class, but we shall see if time allows.

E-Safety:

The key thing is to ensure that comments are approved by an admin (either myself or a teacher) before going live. This can be done through the discussion settings page.We have also had to double-check our photo permission letters to ensure we have the appropriate photo permissions.

Other bits:

There is a great WordPress app on Andorid which means I can approve comments on blogs from my phone. Very useful and quicker than logging in to do it.

Feeding to Twitter and our website was a breeze thanks to Twitterfeed and I discussed that here

I have made guies for my teachers so that they can always find them on our website. These cover sites such as animoto, photopeach and blogging in general. These are here.

The future:

I would like to see teachers including the blogs in their plans a bit more so that they think of ways to use them in advance rather than just as an ad-hoc thing later. I would also like to see us looking at other school blogs so we can start to explore the potential that is available.

So…

This hasn’t been easy, but then it hasn’t been mega-difficult either. The hardest bit was deciding what I wanted and what the software could do. Once I changed my view a little, I was able to make it work for me and it now works brilliantly. There are a couple of issues, such as the links not inheriting from the main site, but apart from that, I am happy.

If you want to setup blogs across your whole school, I would suggest talking to @HGJohn as he does it for a living. I will help where I can too but I can only go through what we did.

Please do go and visit our blogs if you have 5 minutes. They can be found at www.stjohnsblogs.co.uk and most classes have now got started. Class 1/2 are reception and will start this half-term, as will class 4.

Category: Blogging  | Tags: , ,  | 12 Comments
My first month
Thursday, September 30th, 2010 | Author:

It’s been a busy month. 4 weeks of term have gone and I feel like I haven’t stopped for a second. I know I wrote about my first week, but we have achieved so much more since then.

Hardware:

There are still a few minor niggles and not all of the software has been installed, but we are definitely getting there. The netbook trolley is now booked out most lessons and some have been ‘borrowed’ by KS1 so they can do small mini-ICT with their children too. The flip cameras have gone down a storm ad have been used to add to our blogs (below) and to just showcase PE lessons and drama.

We also bought a visualiser which was very quickly nabbed by a Y5-6 teacher and has been used to show marking on the board, children’s writing and the best bit? Showing children how to sew. £85 well spent and I think we’ll be getting more very soon!

Software:

We had a LOT of software in school. This included CDROMs that I’d never heard of and were not used. So we have tidied up a lot of it, thrown some, installed some and invested in others. I will be making guides and help notes for all software in school so teachers are aware of what we have and what it does. But in just 4 weeks we have had teachers using 2paint, 2diy and next week starting on 2Create a Super Story too. This includes a quick go at Purple Mash, J2E and iboard too. I’ll blog about those later!

Blogging:

The original plan consisted of two classes starting a blog this half term with the others having a go later on once it was up and running. That went out of the window right away. Class 6 loved the idea and then they started. So the plan became ‘let’s have 3 classes trialling it’ and then another started and another and the plan was torn up (electronically) and we let teachers have a play. I now have the situation where a teacher feels bad as she is the only one in Year 3-4 not blogging so wants to do it and try something whizzy! At the time of writing our blogs have been viewed 5,100 times in 4 weeks. That is just mental. I’m amazed how quickly staff have taken to it.

We are now at the stage where I have stopped approving comments on blogs and I have passed this on to the teachers. Also, 3 of the blogs contain videos, 1 of children making pizza, 1 of children reading out their literacy and another of our emphatic cup win. We have used video so much already I am considering setting up class accounts on Viddler. We had set-up one account but I soon realised that it would work better with 1 per class. It gives a 2gb limit and isn’t blocked like youtube or vimeo.

Website:

Both the blogs and the website went down very well with staff, governors and the PTA and it has now been launched to parents. Reactions seem positive from the few I have spoken to and hopefully it will develop into a huge resource for parents, children and staff.I intend to make guides for how to use various resources and include them all on the website in appropriate language for different audiences. This includes our Facebook guide and will include guides for the websites and tools we use in school.

The Governors and PTA now have logins so that they can add useful dates, minutes and other documents too.

We have also added a CEOP button so that any e-safety problems can be reported to either us or CEOP.

One issue with using the website and blogs is the use of photos. We have around 35 children who cant have their image online and through some careful negotiations and explanations with parents I am slowly reducing that number. I want to ensure the blogs and website showcase our school and I want to include the children in that journey too.To do this I need to have the support of the parents and I think they are happy to join us for this ride!

Planning:

Someone asked me how I plan ICT. Currently it is ‘let’s see what is cool and shiny and let’s go for it’. It is sort of linked to the topic and it’s going very well but it isn;t linked to the national curriculum or QCA. I am probably meeting a lot of the objectives, but that isn’t my main aim at this stage, that will come later. I have planned up to half-term for everyone and will spend the next couple of weeks doing the next half-term. I now have copies of all curriculum planning for the rest of the year so I can begin to plan ICT in a more strategic way to ensure it matches to the rest of the curriculum and enhances it rather than being a random stand-alone subject. Luckily there are a few other teachers I know via Twitter who are helping me to plan all of this!

Mondays:

My Mondays are for working with teachers and showing them how to use something or supporting them if they need it. What with start of term and inset we’ve only had 2 Mondays so far but on both I have worked with teachers and it has gone well. This coming Monday I will be team-teaching with a teacher to use 2Create a Super Story. I can’t wait as I’ve never used it with children either!

Other stuff:

I’m not all about ICT and in fact only teach it for about 5 lessons a week, but it is my main focus in school. I have learnt lots already in just 4 weeks and I have to be hugely adaptable as I will be teaching an able 5-6 maths set one day and learning number bonds to ten the next. It’s great fun in one class as Milton the monkey joins in with our numeracy work :-) (yes it’s the year 1-2 class!)

I was talking to a couple of teachers today about how much we achieved in just 4 weeks. It’s been incredible. In the next 2 months we will be ensuring we have a solid ICT action plan in place, putting AUPs and policies together for staff and putting a more structured ICT curriculum together. As well as trialling various software, running e-safety events, introducing a VLE and cloud solution and trying to keep up the momentum we’ve started! Oh and my girls’ football team will be having their first matches too!

PS…And yes, 4 weeks have gone already. I’m not in school tomorrow and September is over so I make that 4 weeks! :-)

Category: General Thoughts, ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags: , , ,  | 4 Comments
Pets that blog? Whatever next!
Sunday, September 05th, 2010 | Author:

Weirdly, it will take me longer to write this blog post than it did to actually start, plan and finish my latest project! Oh well…

@charliedeane has a class bear. Last year he had some adventures with Charlie’s class and the children and parents wrote about what he was doing. Same as many, many other schools I’m sure. This year, it’s moving to a blog www.buttonsthebear.co.uk and he also has a Twitter account @buttonstails. A few other teachers have started blogging with their class pets too and during a chat on Twitter, I joked that we should start a blogging zoo or pet shop.

So I did.

I could’ve spent ages creating a site. I could’ve spent 15minutes creating a domain and a blog. Instead I spent 1 minute using weblist.me (I blogged about it here) and created a weblist page instead.

If you have a class pet that has started blogging or tweeting, get in touch with me and I’ll add it to the zoo.

The zoo is available here: http://weblist.me/blogging-zoo

Category: Blogging  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
Write once – post many
Sunday, September 05th, 2010 | Author:

Ok, so you’ve got a Twitter account. You’ve got Facebook. Your class have a blog. Your school has a website. Oh and don’t forget the VLE as well. That’s potentially a lot of places to be writing information. But let’s not forget the traditional format of the paper newsletter to parents and the other ways such as texting parents. Which website or format do you point them to? All of them? I know I’d get confused with that! What you need to think about is a way of writing once and getting that to feed to other sources to reduce your workload and make it all a bit more familiar for visitors.

(Just read this paragraph back and it sounds like a bad American TV ad. I think it’s because we had American TV on holiday and I watched too much of it on a rainy day. Are you fed up with small cupcakes? Do your muffins never come out correctly? You need Bigtop Cupcake!) Anyway, I digress…

There are so many different ways of getting these formats and sites to crossover and talk to each other, but I’ll just talk about some of them and the ways I will be doing it at my new school.

We will be blogging with our school and with this there are two main choices. Well, there’s the choice of which system to use (mainly Posterous, Blogger or WordPress) but then the choice is between quick, easy and free (wordpress.com) or a self-hosted blog which costs about £10 a year for hosting but gives you more control. I went for the latter. We have set-up a site that will contain each class blog. The teachers will have logins and then they can blog and it will appear here. But I want it to go further. I could use a plugin on the blogs to tweet automatically, but purely for the reason I;ve been using it a while, I’ve gone for Twitterfeed. It’s quick, easy and free.

To use Twitterfeed, you will need a Google account (it accepts others too, but you’ve probably already got a Google one) Once logged in you simply click new feed, give it a name and paste in the RSS feed. What’s an RSS feed? Well it’s the system that sends out updates from sites such as blogs, news sites or sport sites. The kind of site that updates regularly anyway. You then use an RSS reader such as Google Reader, Feedly, or your VLE to read them and turn this into text/links. If you can’t find your blog’s RSS feed, in the address bar at the top of your blog, there will be an RSS icon like this one (unless you’re using an old browser like Internet Explorer 6. Shame on you if you are) or the star will be yellow in Firefox.

Click that and you should be asked to subscribe, you’ll also see a link for the RSS. The RSS for this blog is http://ianaddison.net/?feed=rss2 Unhelpfully, not all RSS feeds follow the same format. I showed teachers how to use RSS feeds when training on the VLE and every one seems different, some end .xml, some have rss in the address and so on. Trial and error sometimes comes into play. Luckily, Twitterfeed has a check facility so you can see if you’ve found the right bit!

Under the advanced Twitterfeed settings I changed my time to every 30minutes and for it to just post the title rather than title and description. I only did this because it made the tweet a bit shorter and a bit easier to retweet should anyone want to. You can also choose a prefix and suffix. I went with a prefix of ‘New blog post:’ Not very exciting, but sometimes you need simple and obvious!

On page two, you can then choose a twitter account to tweet with e.g. my school blogs will tweet through the school account and my personal blog will go through my own twitter account. You can set it up to post as your status on Facebook too. I did for about 4 blog posts but then turned it off as most of my friends thought I was a geek/loser (delete as applicable) So that’s blogs and Twitter linked…

Our VLE, Studywiz has a built-in RSS reader too so when we have our VLE set-up properly, the blog posts will also feed into this.

Our website is setup using a system called Joomla. This is a content management system which means that you don’t need to know much about websites and the code behind them to get it to work. I can also include little plugins to show things like maps, video or in this case, tweets. On the left-hand side, it will show the 6 latest tweets from my school Twitter account – @stjohnswaltham – The tweets will mainly be about our latest blog posts, but I will be investigating setting up our Google Calendar to tweet key events too. At the bottom of our twitter plugin is a link to follow us too.

As one last thing I have also put the links to our blogs on our school website on their own tab so people can find them that way.

So what will I be telling visitors and parents? Go to our website. From there you can see our website (obviously) our tweets and our blogs. We might also share our Twitter name but I’m not currently planning to share the blog addresses with everyone, I’d rather they found them through our website.

It does take a bit of time (maybe 2mins per twitterfeed) to set this all up, but once it’s done you’re away. Please do have a look at what we’ve started to do on our school site: http://stjohnthebaptistprimary.co.uk/ but bear in mind term hasn;t started yet so the blogs are empty!

Category: Useful Sites/Software  | Tags: , ,  | 4 Comments
Holidays are coming…
Friday, July 23rd, 2010 | Author:

So, the holidays are here, time for us teachers to sit around on our backsides for 6 weeks. Fantastic. Or maybe not, do you know any teachers that relax for the whole 6 weeks? Me neither!

This holiday will be a strange one and busy one. I’m moving back into school, into a role that is still being defined and it’s also the first summer holiday as a home owner so there’s bound to be house-y things to do as well. Add in seeing friends, going on holiday and the small matter of GTAUK next week and it will fill up quite quickly! But what else will I be up to?

*School Website. This is one of my first priorities. My new school has a website, it’s ok, but it seems quite complicated to add things to it and usually this is just in the form of newsletters. I will be moving to a much simpler system which means that we can get a few people, and some children, adding content to the site.I also want to make it sustainable so will be making videos of how to use the website so staff can keep it up.

*Setting up blogs for every class. I think this will be done using WordPress MU. I’m tempted to setup a new domain and then create class blogs from there so everyone follows the same naming convention. Going to a school with a name as popular as St Johns means a lot of domain names are already taken! I’m not sure yet how I will start using the blogs and how I will convince staff they are useful, but we shall see. I am working in 7 out of 11 classes so I think I’ll start it when I’m in their class. Once it is popular with children, I’ll bring staff onboard.

*Policies and stuff. As mentioned before I will be writing policies and AUPs and action plans this holiday too. I know I should probably wait until September, but I want to get the majority of it ready while I have time.

*VLE. We will be launching our VLE slowly next term, again with the classes I teach and then gradually throughout the school, hoping to have it in place by Spring. I want to make sure I get this right after spending two years telling teachers how to do it! Every school is different though so I need to think about my staff and make sure that I do things in a way that makes sense.

*Reading Blogs. I am awful at reading other people’s blogs. I read posts when they appear on Twitter if the title catches my eye, but generally, I’m awful at it. I have setup Google Reader, but never really used it properly. I have 500+ posts to read and it’s just silly. So one job this Summer is to find a way of keeping up with it and managaing the information that comes through. It might be Google Reader, in which case, I’ll make sure I;m better at reading them each week!

*Twitter Favourites/Delicious. I use Twitter a lot (you may have noticed). Often I use it on my phone and some links don’t work properly or I haven’t got time to read something so I favourite the tweet instead or send the link to my Delicious account. This means I have 100′s of tweets that I need to work through and I probably should tidy up my delicious account a bit too. I want to start September productively and continue it on too.

*Hampshire Delicious. We set up a county-wide Delicious a little while ago and I have added some links to it, but it stands at around 240. I want to make this much bigger and maybe look at linking with people who already have decent accounts set up to see if I can improve ours. I also need to begin publicising it to schools.

*VLE Shared area. I talked about this just 2/3 weeks ago, but now I have shown it to around 70 teachers. They love it. I have been overwhelmed with the response to it so far and I am very pleased. Currently we have around 30 areas/topics that people have been busy adding content to. I have setup RSS feeds from Delicious and I have also been linking activities from Brain Pop and Purple Mash. I need to finish this off and then start adding from other sites such as iboard and BBC Class Clips. Two other things I want to do are adding games and CPD. The games folder will be a collection of online games that students (and teachers) can play that encourage thinking activities. I will share some of these later, but Physics Games is a good place to start. I also want to put a staff development area as well which will contain RSS feeds/embedded pages of blogs from a wide-range of subjects relevant to the primary phase as well as videos from TED Talks and others that might be useful. Our VLE would be a great place for CPD and I want to push this side of it a bit more.

*Articles for Naace. I was discussing Naace with a few people, including the always excellent Miles Berry, and I was suggesting that there seemed to be a distinct lack of content and voice from the primry teachers. There are lots of secondary and consultants that are willing to share and be heard, but where are the primaries. Following some interesting discussions with Miles and others, I am now writing two articles for Naace. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learnt in there somewhere??

*Clearing out my old email. As I leave the consultancy role, I need to make sure I have saved everything useful, cleared it all out and moved properly to my new email instead.

*Top Secret Project. This is really exciting, but I can’t share anything until next week. Sorry!!

It sounds like a lot, but some of those jobs will take half a day, so it isn’t that bad really. I think sharing my to-do list will be useful because I can reflect on this when I return in September and see how much of this I achieved and how many other things got added to the list throughout the holidays!

Enjoy your break everyone, you’ve worked hard and you deserve it.

Category: General Thoughts, ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags: , , , ,  | 4 Comments
Blogging: A quick guide
Saturday, June 19th, 2010 | Author:

I have been talking to schools about blogging recently. We have a blog in our VLE and this is good, but this is all hidden away within the VLE. There are huge benefits to this, it is much more secure and safer, but writing for an audience demands an audience.

Recently I have been showing examples of blogs to people that are out in the wider world and visible by anyone. So how do you do it? Where do you start? Why do you bother?

I use WordPress and it is very simple to use. I know a few schools have started to blog and write a few posts, but how do you get it going? Some schools have asked if I had a ‘how-to’ guide to get them going, so here it is.

http://bit.ly/wordpressguide - This URL seems to be broken and I can’t find the original file :-(

Here is a video instead: http://www.undertenminutes.com/?p=56

 

 

I hope it’s useful, feel free to share it with as many people as you like and send comments through if you think I need to add or change anything.

Category: Blogging, Useful Sites/Software  | Tags: , ,  | 2 Comments
TeachMeet Hampshire…the aftermath pt2
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 | Author:

After discussing the event as a whole here, I thought I should talk about the high quality of the presentations from all involved. They were truly amazing. Sometimes at TeachMeets, there can be talks that are a bit weaker than others and some that might not be relevant to primary or to secondary, but at TMHants, we didn’t have this at all.

As mentioned, none of our presenters had presented at a Teachmeet before and the old adage of ‘Attend a Teachmeet, present at your second’ was true for some presenters such as Charlie Deane, Jo Rhys-Jones and Jon Audain.

The evening kicked off with a presentation from Hannah Knight from Horndean Infant School, Hannah avoided the fruit machine as she had to rush off early. Hannah uses a different VLE to most of Hampshire, yet this is irrelevant, the pedagogy is the important thing (as Emma Goto always tells me to say!) It is true though, there is very little difference between most VLEs and some of Hannah’s examples were amazing. I love the idea of filming ‘Guy Fawkes’ introducing a topic or Father Christmas having a VLE login so the children can interact with him. I wish Hannah could have carried on talking to really win over the VLE doubters! Horndean won a Becta Excellence Award in 2009, so please do take 5 minutes to watch the video. If you have any questions for Hannah, email me and I’ll pass them on.

Ok, so Hannah was done and the fruit machine could now come in to play…I don’t remember the exact order people came on, but will do my best.

Charlie Deane (@charliedeane) talked about her class blog and the power that it has had in her Y3 class. She started a blog with a bit of nagging from me and a lot of encouragement and inspiration from @oliverquinlan and his TMBett talk. Oliver’s blogs are here. Charlie talked about sharing children’s learning, improving enthusiasm and the fact that Pie Corbett himself has commented on a blog post! Not bad for a blog that is only three months old.

Jon Audain (@jonaudain) was covering for Phil Bagge (@baggiepr) as Phil was unable to attend. Jon began the first of his two presentations talking about the excellent e-book site MyEBook. I first saw this a few months ago after seeing a link from @colport, his books are here. MyEbook lets you add text, pictures and sound or simply convert a pdf and it makes a whizzy little e-book for your children or parents to look at. Why not upload children’s writing or create a school prospectus? Check out Jon’s examples or Phil’s examples. As Jon said, his children’s writing has been seen by 8000 people, truly powerful stuff!

Then came one of my highlights, no sooner had Jon got back to his table, the random fruit machine called him up again!

Jon then went on to talk about art packages and about the simplicity of Sumo Paint. He showed how he used Sumo as part of his Superhero topic, he then wowed us with his artistic ability and created a house which he quickly changed perspective on to make a tiled effect and this could quite easily have been from another planet. Sumo is a great package, why buy anything else when this one is free?? He also talked about the ‘create a Martian’ app he’s been playing with on his ipod touch and how the children used this to give their superhero an enemy. Jon’s presentation is available here.

Emma Goto (@emmagoto) talked about the power of using Bird Boxes to enhance her KS1 classroom. Full details of the Bird Box project can be found here. Emma discussed the impact that the birds had on the children’s writing and showed a 4 year old’s writing which had sentences, lots of words spelt correctly and full stops. Very good indeed! But nothing can top the excitement of your birdbox getting some visitors and being able to watch them online. This is something well worth looking in to and I will definitely be doing this in my school next year.

As mentioned in my previous post, I was starting to worry as a few presenters pulled out for various reasons. So I called on Twitter and asked the excellent Pete Richardson (@primarypete_) if he had time to knock together a video for us. On the night, we didn’t ‘need’ his video as time was running along nicely, but I couldn’t ask for something and then ignore it, so we showed it. And Malcolm became a star.

Please do take 2 minutes to watch this video. Malcolm the mole came on the screen to discuss Pete’s project, MOLE. The idea is that there is a map of the UK and it highlights different trips, residentials and places to visit. There are so many places you can go on a trip with your class, but schools tend to stick to what they know, Malcolm showed us that maybe we could explore instead. Great idea and I thank Pete for his hard work in making the video for us, Malcolm was definitely the star of the night. Please do go and add a pin to Pete’s map to help build up this collection of places to visit. Pete’s other presentation on the power of Prezi is here

During my presentation I talked about the use of social bookmarking. I was shown this by Kristian Still a couple of years ago and then did nothing with it until last year. Why save your bookmarks on different PCs? Why write down your favourite websites on a notepad? Why not share them? Delicious lets you share websites. We have started an account that I hope will become a Hampshire-wide account, but who knows. For now, there are about 250 websites that might be useful. Check it out here and my previous blog post about it here.

Kristian still (@kstill) showed how Xtranormal can be used within the classroom. His class were talking about the use of multimedia (we were told “that’s when there are multiple different media used in one go”) and explained this using movies created in Xtranormal. This could be used for a wide-range of different curriculum areas and you could see people excited by the potential. This is the great thing about TeachMeet, I’d heard of it before, but never really seen it. Now I want to go and play!

Paul Emecz (@emecz) discussed using Studywiz galleries for assessment, discussion and as a general collaborative tool. I understand that this may have alienated some of the attendees, but most of them use Studywiz and some of the principles could be transferred to just using pictures. Some of the pictures showed difficult images and allowing the children to discuss these can be very powerful. As we have mentioned many times on studywiz training, the gallery is by far the best tool. So many uses and so easy to set up!

Philip Griffin (@pilgram) joined us from Reading to discuss using handheld mobile devices in the classroom. The children were using Nokia tablets to aid their writing. Unfortunately the devices they were using are no longer available, but the principle is the same with others and I know some schools are using ipod touches and similar. The quality of their writing was very good and they obviously enjoyed using them!

Helen Caldwell (@helencvital) from our sponsors Vital, talked about the power of green-screening in primary. I have to admit that I was too busy looking at the amazing effects to take note of the software used. I have sent Helen a message and will update this when I find out. The green-screening allowed you to take pictures of children and then change the background from a green screen to another world or a dinosaur or whatever your imagination will allow! This seemed good and people were happy, but then Helen showed the video and jaws dropped. How about changing the background for a whole sequence of animation? We watched as a child swam under the sea. Truly amazing and I wish I paid more attention of how to do it rather than just staring at the screen.

Voicethread is mentioned a lot and I must admit rather sheepishly, I have never played with it. Jo Rhys-Jones (@jowinchester) showed how to use it and I loved it. Voicethread allows you to upload a stimulus such as a piece of writing or artwork and then to add a commentary around it. Jo’s example is here and she has her children discussing a piece of art. She also showed using different languages to commentate on the screen. I must find some time to go and play with it! For more examples, check out Pete’s blog here or David Mitchell’s (@deputymitchell) blog here.

Another tool I’ve seen but am still yet to play with, is Scratch. this lets you create games, move characters around and really bring some excitement to your Control lessons. I know a lot of primary schools use Flowol, but why not throw in some Scratch? Fred Crowson (@fcbsd) showed some possibilities of its use, including animating a basketball move to show in PE when discussing tactics! Fantastic idea! One idea that came from the video stream was using Scratch to create a ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ game in KS1.

Some Scratch helpsheets and guides:

Like I said, these were all truly amazing presentations by some wonderful, inspiring teachers. I would like to thank them all again and hope that they will present next time…or better yet, some of the non-presenters from tmhants will get up instead!

Category: Conferences / BETT  | Tags: , , , , , , ,  | 8 Comments
« Previous Entries
Next Entries »
307393 pages viewed, 495 today
122765 visits, 220 today
FireStats icon Powered by FireStats