Tag-Archive for ◊ blogs ◊

Anti(cyber)-bullying week
Monday, November 14th, 2011 | Author:

During a discussion with Year 3/4 teachers last week, we were talking about anti-bullying week which happens every year. Now we are lucky enough not to have a bullying problem in our school and whether this is down to our children, our staff or our policies, I don’t know, but it doesn’t really happen. So how could we cover anti-bullying week with a new slant?

I thought about our blogs. these are our portal to the world and we discussed cyber bullying. We came up with a plan.

Using a fake name and email address, I clicked on a blog post from each of the year 3/4 classes and left a comment. The comments were either about their line-dancing lesson or the ‘Dress up and Battle as a Roman’ morning. The comments were rude but not too offensive.

For example I said: ” I think you look silly in your shields and hats, I think the Celts would have beaten you”. I wanted it to be enough to get them angry and to question it, but not enough that they would cry or be too upset!!

Now this won’t get picked up by spam filters as I used a real-enough looking email address and name so that it would appear in the moderation queue.

I hadn’t thought of this as being risky until I shared the idea on Twitter so I wonder. What are the risks?

Children could get VERY upset – Hopefully not, we’ll only be displaying the message for a short time before we delete it or spam it as a class.

Parents could get involved – Again, I hope not! But if they do, we will discuss why we are doing it. I believe it is a serious message and the children are old enough and mature enough to deal with it. We are not asking parents permission before we do this and we will not even discuss it with them afterwards.

The messages will never go live and will only be seen by 30 children per class.

How do you cover cyber-bullying or online safety?  Is this a good idea? Or a risky one?

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , , , , , ,  | One Comment
Which Blog Plugins?
Friday, September 02nd, 2011 | Author:

Just a short post today. I am often asked which plugins we have on our school blog to help it run and to manage it so I have made a list. Now I know there are people out there who have more knowledge and expertise than I do and I’d love them to correct me or provide new plugins too, but here is our list: http://stjohnsblogs.co.uk/which-plugins/

Hopefully you can find them useful too.

Bear in mind you will probably need a self-hosted blog for these to work rather than one from wordpress.com

Category: Blogging  | Tags: , , ,  | Leave a Comment
Blogging with children
Monday, February 07th, 2011 | Author:

I originally wrote this article to appear in the Spring edition of User Friendly, Hampshire’s ICT magazine. As the magazine has now appeared in schools, I thought it would be a good idea to copy it below for you all to see. I wrote this in October 2010.

Do your children blog? No? Why not? Blogging is a fantastic way of sharing and celebrating the learning that is going on within your school. I know that you already do this with your learning platform, but blogging takes it to another level and allows your children’s learning to be seen from anywhere in the world. I am writing this in October half-term and our school’s blogs have been viewed 9,500 times in 7 weeks. (Edit 7/2/11 this is now 69,000 visits) We have had people visit from USA, Canada, South Africa and the Far East. This creates a huge buzz of excitement and we have had people comment that we have inspired them which makes us (and the children) feel very proud indeed. There is the blog feature within Wizkid and while this is great, it would limit the children to writing within the school and not for a wider audience. I am not sure about blog features in other VLEs, but I am sure they offer similar tools.

Before you start:

Check your photo permissions. You will have done this for your website and for your VLE already and this is just another thing on the list of tools that require photographs. You can of course blog without photos and just include the backs of children’s heads or just their work, it is up to you.

Three ways to setup a blog in school:

Pros Cons
WordPress.com Simple to setup

Free

 Limited names available if you want class6 etc

You’d have to find and install plugins and themes
Primaryblogger.co.uk Simple to setup (you can have a blog in 60 seconds)

Free

Plugins provided

Themes provided

Spam filter provided

 Not as much control as a self-hosted blog (but still great)
Self-hosted WordPress Full control over the name e.g. www.stjohnsblogs.co.uk

Full control over all themes, plugins and options

 Small technical knowledge needed to setup a domain

Hosting £5-20 a year

Please note: There are other ways such as Blogger, Typepad etc but at the time of writing Blogger is blocked so I have focused on WordPress. I would suggest looking at primaryblogger.co.uk as it would help the majority of people get blogging in minutes.

Settings:

You MUST make sure that you check the box that says ‘requires admin approval before comments go live’, this can be found under the Settings>Discussion menu. This means that any comments from the outside world get vetted by you before going public. Just in case you get some dodgy visitors and comments.

Setup a map or globe from www.clustrmaps.com or http://www.revolvermaps.com/ so that you can see who has visited your blog.

Now what?

Now you can start blogging. Blog when you feel like it. Blog when you want to show things off. Blogging makes a great plenary tool at the end of a lesson to show what you have done or what you have learnt. You can also use blogging to ask questions for the readers and visitors. Use it to show off the ‘silly little things’ that happen in your school on a daily basis, parents will love this. This half-term we have had photos of aliens we have sewn together, leaves made out of numbers, instruction writing and games made in 2DIY.

One key thing is to get the children involved. We often login for them as the teacher and then let them write the text. This way they are becoming a part of the process, then you can check it and press ‘Publish’ before it goes live.

More advanced:

Why not combine it with a tool such as Animoto or Photopeach and make your photos a bit more exciting? You can embed most things into a blog so you could have a Google map or a Voki or a PrimaryPad.

Some examples:

http://www.stjohnsblogs.co.uk – St John the Baptist Primary, Hampshire (My school)

http://blackfield6ao.wordpress.com/ – Blackfield Primary, Hampshire

http://fordingbridgejunior.blogspot.com/ – Fordingbridge Junior, Hampshire

http://tobythepuppy.wordpress.com/ – Fordingbridge Junior, Hampshire

http://hmsastute.wordpress.com/ – Titchfield Primary, Hampshire

http://heathfieldcps.net/ – Heathfield School, Bolton

E-Safety to consider:

  • Make sure you have permissions to include the children’s names/photographs on your blog
  • Ensure that an adult is in control of what gets posted and when – both when writing blog posts and commenting on a blog
  • Talk to the children about the blog, what it is used for and ways of using it appropriately

One last top tip – Once you setup a blog, send my classes a comment and we’ll visit your blog and say hello. It’s always useful to share the experience with other schools.

For a more in-depth guide to setting up a blog including which plugins to use, please visit my blog: www.ianaddison.net and search for wordpress.

Ian Addison

ICT Coordinator,

St John the Baptist Primary School

Category: Blogging, General Thoughts  | Tags: , ,  | 7 Comments
Bears that travel…
Monday, January 03rd, 2011 | Author:

Just a quick post to share an idea that I’ve stolen magpied from a fellow teacher. I have asked and she is fine for me to do so and I am not claiming this to be my own idea at all. I am just taking it and developing it.I will link back to her work when this idea comes to fruition.

It all started yesterday morning when I saw a tweet from a teacher in New Zealand asking if anyone had a home for her class pet, Trevor. He travels the world spending a few weeks in different schools. While there, his hosts (the children) write about his journey, their area and country and they post pictures. You can see Trevor’s adventures here: http://trevjunior.edublogs.org/

Now I thought this was great and set about planning which teacher at school I would ask. I have lots of contacts on Twitter so the bear would have plenty of holiday homes around the UK to visit. But then I thought, what if others want to do the same? So I started thinking about planning a website to host it al so that anyone can get a bear and send it to another school.

With @mattlovegrove’s help, we will have one main site that explains how it all works and links to the blogs and then teachers can signup to blogs for their class pet. People can also offer their class as a possible holiday destination too. This could be done through a simple google form for example. The pets (and their children) can then decide where to send him to next.The site will be based on WordPress and full of guides to show how to blog, upload pictures, videos etc.

While he is away on holiday, there can be lots of communication between the two classes, building community cohesion/global awareness/whatever box you want to tick but mainly getting the children enthused about the world around them. We could also build up a google map for each bear’s travels so far. Then when the holiday is over, he may go back to his home class or he may go on to another holiday.(Maybe they could have a passport?)

We’ll start slowly, we’ve only just finished the initial conversation but I think we should have something to show in a little while.

So do you think your class pet needs a holiday? Could you get an additional pet just for travelling?

Now what do we call this? classpetholidays.com? bearsthattravel.com? Any ideas?

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , ,  | 6 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
Class Accounts
Sunday, October 03rd, 2010 | Author:

As more and more of what we do is moving online, there comes the problem of logging in and remembering email addresses. I don’t know about you but I probably have 50+ logins to various sites, banks, email accounts or whatever. How can we manage this in the classroom? I know many  people see this as obvious, but people have been asking how we’ve managed our logins so far.

Well, this term we have already used our blogs, Animoto, Prezi and Viddler as a whole class, so how do we log in? I’ve created a class email account for each class (and also for the sports team, school council etc) and signed up using those.The benefits of this are that when we made Prezis, we could all see the work that everyone else had done. Of course this could lead to problems if someone wanted to maliciously delete someone else’s work, but I doubt that’ll happen. It also gives you more space, for example with Viddler, we now have 2gb per class rather than for the whole school.

To make it easier, I also have a whole school email account and all of the class mail forwards automatically to the main school one meaning I only check one account and not 15. Saves a lot of time!

Even if you are but 1 teacher trying this with your class, think bigger. I have set up the whole school (or at least chose a naming convention the whole school can follow) just in case they all want to start prezi-ing or animoto-ing in the future. Having a whole-school plan in place will help in the long run.

PS If you want to make more email addresses quickly, check Oliver Quinlan’s post on it.

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , , , ,  | 4 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
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
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