Tag-Archive for ◊ digital leaders ◊

Digital Leader Badges
Monday, January 23rd, 2012 | Author:

As you may have noticed, lots of schools have started getting children involved in the training of staff and in the day-to-day workings of ICT throughout the school. We have a group of children called Digital Leaders and I know many other schools do too. We have debated for a while how to identify them within school, the school council have lanyards with their names on it, but our Digital Leaders preferred the idea of having badges. So I thought about people I knew who made and used badges and thought of the guys at BrainPOP UK. They designed a badge for us and now I have a small collection available for other schools too.

So, if you would like 10-20 badges for your school simply visit my sponsorship page and make a donation. I did think about transferring money directly to our school but it seems like a lot of hassle for small amounts of money so why not use this as a way of donating to charity instead? I only have around 140 badges to give away so it will be on a first-come first-served basis. Once you have donated, please email me your details and I will send the badges to your school.

If you would like badges in larger quantities (50+) then email info@brainpop.co.uk and talk to the team there. You don’t have to be a BrainPOP subscriber to make the request but they will need to see demand before they print more as they have to be done in bulk.

 

Edit – Thanks to everyone who has donated, we’ve raised £80 for charity! All of my badges are now gone, so if you want some you will have to contact BrainPOP. Sorry!!

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , , ,  | 2 Comments
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
My Inset Morning
Monday, March 28th, 2011 | Author:

Today we had a teacher training day and the morning was given up to ICT. My plan was to show staff our ICT vision, how to use Google Apps and then give them time to play. My worry is that teachers never get play time and that they are expected to use new equipment, software and initiatives with little training.

Oh….7 children came in to help me too.

So we talked about Google Apps and the email and calendar environment. The calender is a little confusing as you need to add the ones you want rather than me deploying them all from the admin console. However children were on hand to help out with little problems. We also had a few issue slogging in to Google in the first place due to the ‘squashed letters’ captcha. As one of the children said, why don’t they just ask you what 2+2 is? That would do the ‘are you human?’ check easily enough!

After the playing with email and receiving invites to birthday parties, we moved on to the workshops and the children were fantastic. Unfortunately not many staff attended the child-led workshops but the children seemed to do well if they did have any customers. A lot of teachers stayed in the hall for my blogging talk and a few people went and loaded the whiteboards to play with ActivInspire on their own.

The children ran three workshops. One on Brainpop, another on Photopeach and one on flip cameras and visualisers. They seemed to do well and a few members of staff commented on how well the children had done.

All in all I am fairly pleased with the day. If I was going to change it, I wouldn’t have ran anything in the second workshop, it was a bit much, I should have given even more play time to teachers to let them blog and/or check Google Apps. But we shall see how it goes.

Two things that went well? Teachers enjoyed exploring. One was very happy with ActivInspire and another said she loved seeing Brainpop and having chance to fiddle. The other thing was the children. They worked well and I hope it is something I can do more of in the future. I think a couple of them could definitely come with me on training sessions elsewhere!

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , ,  | 2 Comments
Digital Leaders – 2weeks in
Thursday, January 27th, 2011 | Author:

I wrote about my plans for my Digital Leaders a few weeks back and I know some people would like an update as they are trying a similar project, so here goes…

A digital leader is a child in my school. They are not just Year 6, we have a couple of Year 3 children too. They have all completed a Google form that asked their name, class and reasons they wanted to be involved. From this list of 50+(!!!) children, I picked the ones that I thought would work with the jobs I had in mind. Most jobs are weekly, some are occasional. For example, I am writing the draft of this post in the Year 3/4 ICT Club which is being run by Lottie and Olivia from Year 3/4. I am simply here because an adult must be present.

So what jobs are there?

  • Running 3/4 or 5/6 ICT Club
  • Blogging for our outdoor curriculum
  • Updating pictures on the website
  • Updating pictures on the TV screen in the reception
  • Setting up a webcam at lunchtime for us to watch animals in Africa

So I assigned children to jobs, they then decided when the clubs would run or whatever and began advertising. 3/4 decided to have ICT Club as freetime but 5/6 decided they wanted to try Scratch (we haven’t even used that in class yet). These are some of the things that they are doing, this is exciting and fab, but some of my more experienced leaders have more responsibilities.

As you may have read, we are doing a lot of blogging. Teachers are slowly coming on board and love the idea of uploading videos or photos but struggle with it, despite the guides to help. So what they do now is to transfer the video from the camera to a folder on the computer, complete aa digital leader Google form and answer some questions. This includes which class and where the video or pictures are saved. The digital leaders will come along, convert the video, create the animoto or resize the photos. They then save this as a draft blog post and the teacher then writes the blog post with her class. An example is here. They then complete a small form and put this in the teacher’s pigeon hole to say the job is done.

Also, one child has the job of downloading the .doc version of our weekly newsletter and converting it using Embedit.in and embedding it into our school website like this.

What next? Well I want to get my one or two experienced bloggers to share their learning with others. My top blogger will need to pass on information to the younger children too. I also hope to include them in trialling new software and testing my new cloud/online portal thingy too.We will also be getting a visit from some secondary Digital Leaders in the near future too.

They also have a blog and will start writing about their thoughts on here if they want to. I’m not sure if they will, but we shall see…

Here are some (very basic) files that you might want to borrow

Job List

Initial Letter – including application form

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags:  | 4 Comments
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
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