ICT in my Classroom

This week has been a real learning experience for all as we engage with Google Docs within a literacy unit. It feels like our pedagogues, so often taken for granted, have been truly challenged by new processes, ideas and methods of work. I am pleased to welcome Rick, my teaching colleague, who has kindly contributed his thoughts in his own words (see Wednesday) he puts up with my hair brained schemes and it is great to have his perspective on it all.

Monday - Bank Holiday - 5/5/08

• Work this week will be primarily supporting the literacy unit Sensational from the Primary Framework, as I want to take advantage of embedding Google Docs within something very structured and curriculum driven as soon as possible.
• Thinking about ways to give each child a document so that they can work on it individually. I initially thought about emailing it as an attachment from the Sharing options. Instead of this the document could be shared as usual with the whole class, the child then opens the doc and chooses File>Save as new copy. They will then be asked is they would like to copy the collaborators too, click cancel and they have their own copy to work on. No collaborators and with Copy prefix on doc title.
• It will be important to establish some folder structures at this early stage - we will have a Literacy folder as well as a Poetry one within it.
• I will explain how to move docs between folders and talk them through folder creation although it is pretty easy.
• We will also take advantage of the colour coding to keep track of subject docs. I will keep the colours the same as their literacy books in the classroom, blue. Yellow for numeracy.
• Just edited Session 1 of Sensational unit in light of the use of Google Docs to support activities.

Tuesday - 6/5/08

• 2 docs needed to be shared so I used the Share button from the Docs home page. Added all year group (60 odd contacts) from group made in contacts. Clicked send and it crashed a bit! Wasn’t keen to share with so many in this method. Closed window and tried again.
• Opened each doc individually and added collaborators that way - no issues this time around. Use this method in the future.
• Decided with teaching colleague that the children were going to work with a partner on a shared poetry journal, but they would share that presentation with their partner and me.
• Modelled creating presentation and altering the title and adding theme - I would be using this presentation as a class poetry journal.
• Children created their own poetry journal presentation and altered theme.
• The children shared the doc with their partner and with me.
• We now returned to the Docs home page and I modelled creating a folder, naming it and colour coding it. We used (as I mention above) blue as our literacy books in class are blue. We then created a nested folder called Poetry.
• I then showed the children how to select a number of docs, including those I have already shared with them for today’s lesson, and Move To a folder using the button. The docs could also be moved by dragging them to the correct folder on the left. The Move To option is easier and less likely to result in docs being added to the wrong folder.
• The children had no problems creating folders and the children who were not logged in will need to make the same folders in their own account.
• It would be useful to be able to share a whole folder with another collaborator. A teacher could share a number of docs they need children to engage with in a lesson. Would be a useful option.
• After reading the poem that we are working on I asked the children to talk with their partner about their first impressions and to try to explain an image that appeared in their heads as they heard the poem. I added some feedback to the class poetry journal and then asked the children to add their own thoughts to theirs.
• I took a wander around each pair and talked with them about progress and what they thought of the poem, I was also able to check on any issues or problems. It appeared that the initial period when we immersed them in using Docs has given them familiarity leading to confidence.
• 2 or 3 pairs had presentations with tiny images visible. I think this occurs when the initial window the doc is opened in is small. When it is resized the presentation image is not - hence the problem. We resolved this by refreshing the page - save and closing and then reopening would also work.
• All of the children were working confidently with their presentation and we had no major tech problems at all. Able to focus on the literacy/poetry response. Pleased with the reliability of it so far. I reread the poem to focus them on the task. The children’s familiarity with the app is deceptive as not had formal training / teaching on it. But they inherit skills from Docs and Spreadsheets and also from Powerpoint - they bring these to the party and it gives them confidence. Common layout, generic structure, simple to use - one of the most important aspects of the tools.
• As soon as the children had completed their first impressions on the poem I checked that the children had shared their doc with me. Some had not so I asked them to check by looking at the Collaborator list in the share options. Revised adding me and partner in.
• Second task was to add to a single document examples of alternative titles for the poem The Magic of the Brain. We discussed the topics of the poem and explored some ideas together and I asked the children to open the doc and add to a table I had created. We talked about being aware of other users adding to the doc at the same time and to watch out for over-typing.
• I had the doc open on the SMARTBoard and I could see who had opened the doc to edit from the pop-up “Also editing…” message. The children began adding their alternative titles and then a few pairs told me they could not alter the text. I took a quick look and they did not have the toolbars and it was clear they were just viewing the doc and not editing even though they were valid collaborators. It seems that any one document has a limit on the number of concurrent editors. I exited the doc on the IWB and then asked someone to refresh and see if they could now edit and they could.
• I asked pairs to work with pairs (groups of 4) so they could continue to add their alternative titles. Talking to some of the children we tried to figure out how many users could work with a document at the same time. I think it is 10. This has implications on sharing work in the future, for example when every child is using a laptop and logged into their own account and then working on a shared doc. We will only be able to work with 10 at a time. Perhaps using different docs, differentiated for different groups, and so you have 3 or 4 docs shared with children and smaller groups working together on a similar activity.
• Another option here would be to use Google Talk as a way to collate ideas - for example instead of editing the alternative titles doc ask children to join a group chat and then to encourage them to write and submit alternative titles as instant messages. These could then be copied out of Chat and into a doc for future reference. The use of the instant messenger in this way would be an important motivator.
• Added new user for a child who had left and then returned to year group.
• Edited user who had incorrect surname - the name could be changed but not the username, I need to investigate whether I need to delete and re-add the user, or if I can alter the

Wednesday - 7/5/08

• Ensured all children had created appropriate folders. Children logged into account who had not on the previous day to ensure same folder structure.
• Some children still need to to completely appreciate the different views that are available in Docs home. They may think they have not got a Doc but it is the view they need to change. New way of managing Docs - views. We need to ensure that we include a teaching point about the management of docs home - encourage them to use Search and options down the left to sort their view, such as “Items by Type” and various folder levels.
• In first part of the literacy session the children opened up a Doc of the poem we were working on. It was still a shared copy, we reread the poem and the children talked with their partner briefly about the patterns that they could see.
• I asked for some examples and for one child to then highlight on the document a pattern they could identify in the first verse. I thought I might need to remind them of the highlight tool but they were able to do this without any problems. This highlighted section was then, of course visible on everyone else’s screens (including the IWB) as we were looking at a shared doc.
• I wanted the children to then work on their own copy and they, as planned, clicked on File > Save as New Copy - an alert box pops up asking if they would like to inherit all of the collaborators for the doc, they need to click CANCEL for a clean (no collaborators) document to work. Unfortunately I did not tell my teaching colleague, Rick, this small but very important detail. Rick has kindly contributed his thoughts in his own words below (italicised).
• Having modelled making the folders with the children we then discussed the need to have their own version of the poem as it would not be beneficial for all the children to contribute on the same document. Although I wasn’t aware of the issues involved in creating a copy of the poem with the class we worked through it. We encountered the message box as described above and I explained to the children that we did not want to copy the collaborators and therefore the children needed to click cancel. Once the children entered their google docs, hand after hand reached for the ceiling. I was faced with children wanting to inform me of the fact that they already had a number of copies in their folder! It appeared that a number of children from Tom’s class had clicked OK and copied the collaborators. As my children attempted to make a copy of the document it became apparent that they were also copying the collaborators.
  
• At this point I stopped the children to inform them of what was happening and why a number of copies were appearing. I again informed the children of the need to click cancel. Unfortunately a number of children still clicked OK and the whole vicious circle started again. As a class we deleted all copies and I decided to move on from that activity, opting to look at the task of identifying patterns within the poem together on the IWB. In my opinion the problem occurs because the children tend not to read the pop up messages through habit even though Tom has discussed this issue on a number of occasions with them.
• After the lesson, I spoke to Tom regarding the problems we both encountered. I began by reiterating my commitment to the project to Tom. However, my personal view was that individual photocopies of the poem with highlighter pens may have been a better, more efficient way of completing the activity. I also went on to explain how well I felt the presentation worked as a tool for sharing and planning ideas for poetry writing. We talked about the issues of handing out documents and established it needs to be just as easy and accessible as traditional methods. We both felt that this problem could be easily resolved as the children become more familiar and confident.
  
• Even though the technology presented problems with this particular activity, I feel that with work this can be an invaluable tool. Without experimenting and experiencing the possibilities it is impossible to assess the benefits these new tools offer the children and the teaching and learning taking place in our classroom. I feel this leap into the unknown is an exciting time for myself and the children.

• As Rick points out the process of giving children a piece of text to work on is a very important process. In this digital approach we, as a year group need to be completely comfortable with saving a shared document as a personal copy. It is a crucial process and the children need practice and familiarisation. We are, after all talking about the first time we have done this - going from a shared doc to an individual copy. Needless to say the process needs to be as easy as saying to the class,”OK please get your self a copy of the document named ???” The process needs to be fast and problem free.
• My class did manage to save a copy of their own, although some were still working on the shared copy. I pointed out that they needed to check that the doc title was preceded with COPY.
• I showed them how to insert a comment, from the INSERT Menu, from the Right click menu or by using the keyboard shortcut Control+M. Children highlighted and commented on the patterns that they could find.



• We then ensured that the text marked doc was shared with me and their partners. I suppose this is another very important process - handing in your work.
• After looking at the patterns in poem we moved on to creating a spider diagram plan in our poetry journal presentations. The diagram consisted of some simple shapes and it proved a good activity for the children to practice using the shape tool.
• I modelled the use of the tool and allowed the children to work with me at creating the diagram. We then added text over the top and I told the children to not worry about the location until they had finished entering the text. Their understanding of SMART Notebook as an object based app will prove useful when using Google Presentations



• This simple diagram will form the support to drafting a verse based on the structure of “The Magic of the Brain”.
• I thought initially that the children could write their first verses in their journal presentations. But there is no spell check nor the benefits of a clear writing tool. So I will highlight the importance of using the correct tool for the correct job. Perhaps asking the children to think more closely about this choice in the future and highlight the change of choice I made as a model of this behaviour.

Thursday - 8/5/08

• We began the session by clearing up some Docs that had been shared with children by mistake, as Rick pointed out above. I stressed the importance of the children getting to grips with managing their own space.
• Today’s task was to continue with the planning of our poetry inspired by The Magic of the Brain and then to begin drafting verses.
• I simply said to my class they need to get into Docs and load up their journals. They got stuck in straight away and had no problems. The only issue that is worth mentioning is how some children were still confused about the view of the docs they had. They were saying they couldn’t find something when in fact they needed to adjust the filtered view.
• I opened our class poetry journal and went through the different parts of the poem plan we had created yesterday.
• I opened a new Doc and we discussed the importance of using the correct tool for the task - and so explained the benefits of using Docs for writing and explained we will add our verses/poem to presentation later.
• It felt like less Google interface teaching and accustomisation today and more engagement with the poetry, the tools began to take a back seat- I know we have to experience a period of familiarisation but I was encouraged to involve the children in a more extended independent session with their Docs tool.
• Each pair would plan the next verse together by duplicating the spider diagram from yesterday and altering the text. I showed them how to right click the slide thumbnail on the left and Duplicate Slide.
• Once the plan for the next verse was prepared the children split up - one drafting the verse in a new Doc and the other working on a whiteboard. They then got back together and checked through their versions making alterations and amendments.
• A pair of children had some issues with their journal presentation and I used the revision history function to revert to a copy that was correct. Revision history is really important and as the children are editing their poem drafts I must included this as an important writing tool. If they don’t like something they have done or the changes they made they can revert to an older version. They can also compare versions to see which is best, this crumb-trail of the whole writing process is a powerful aspect of working in GDocs - not possible to see this when working with paper and pencil.
• I have been thinking about linking pairs up to share their poetry drafts so that peers can add suggestions and edit for improvement. This could be done by either adding comments (Ctrl+M) or by making changes and then engaging the children with the revision history and getting them to compare versions to see what they like.
• Rick explained that some of the children had opened a presentation thinking it was theirs when in fact it was the class poetry journal - the mistake came about for two reasons: due to similarly named Docs and because the children have not got to grips with filtering the view. Owned by Me would have directed them to the correct Doc in this instance.
• Rick also pointed out that all of the actions in GDocs home seem to be driven by single clicks and not double - which the children use out of habit.

Friday - 9/5/08

• Unfortunately I have got a bout of tonsillitis so I have not been in school today.
• I checked in later in the day to see what the kids had managed to get done in my absence.
• They continued to create planning (in presentations) and drafts of the different verses for their senses poem (in Docs)
• I reviewed everyone’s poetry journal from my Docs home page and added some comments and marking where appropriate by simply adding text or by highlighting parts to look at. Very easy to have this sort of access from any computer that is online.
• It would be ideal to have the option of inserting audio into Presentations, (likely) and Docs, (less likely) - as this could be a simple way of providing feedback.
• It looks like the next step is to complete drafts and edits of the poems, perhaps pairing the pairs up to review.
• I have noticed that the work they have done in their journal presentations needs a spell check, a noticeable absentee from the toolbar. I hope to see that soon.

Overall reflections on Week 2

It has been an exciting week for all of us in Year 5 as we learn how to embed Google Docs in a unit of work. No time for theorising about its implementation and possibilities anymore this was the real deal, 60 kids working with Docs as part of their literacy. The practicalities and processes have been the main focus.

• How do children hand in their work when it is complete?
• How do we organise our docs?
• How do we give each child a copy of a text?
• How do two children best work on one document?

We have, as you may have read above, managed to answer these questions and in the process uncovered possible problems you may come across. Such as how children must not inherit collaborators when saving a doc as their own. Or how the children need to understand how their view of the docs home page can be filtered in so many different ways: Name, Date, Sharing, Folders, All items, Owned by me, Opened by me, Starred, Hidden, Bin, All folders, specific folders, Saved Searches, Shared with, Documents, Presentations, Spreadsheets. That is 17 different filtered views and unless the children appreciate how to manage their docs using these they may, as we have seen this week, think they have lost some. Of course this is not to mention the ability to search for a document, which is very powerful as you would expect. And the advanced search options really mean that nothing is ever lost! I hope to engage the children more fully in this management tool next week.

I feel that I have come a long way in understanding the possibilities of these tools in a very short space of time. When you are engaging 60 children with Docs everyday you see what is missing and the limitations. For example it would be useful to be able to share a whole folder rather than a single doc, so we could give out work for the whole week in one go.

As Rick has said it is an exciting time and I hope you can learn from the lessons and problems we face in our journey into using Google Apps as part and parcel of our classrooms, our teaching and the learning that is taking place.

It is great to finally get some of the Google Apps tools in the hands of the children in my year group. I have been thinking about their deployment to support my teaching and learning for a very long time. In this post I reflect on our first full week of use and explore some of the issues that were raised.

We are using the Google Apps Education Edition installed on a domain that I picked up during the sign up process. I have decided to focus the children’s efforts on the tools that I consider to be the most important, so we introduced them to Google Docs and GMail. The other Google Apps tools, such as Calendar, iGoogle and Sites will have their place and will come in time, but for now Docs are king.

Below I have recorded my thoughts and Google Apps related actions that occurred throughout the week.

Monday - 28/4/08

• Created a CSV file in Excel of both classes username, firstname, surname, password.
• Generated accounts for domain using “create multiple users” tool.
• Shared my excitement with all 60 year 5s!
• 20 minute introduction to Google Docs and Gmail for all Year 5s.
• Brief look at Docs homepage and looked at each individual tool - looked at similarities with MS Office.
• Explored Sharing facility in Docs.
• Talked about when we should share and when we shouldn’t.
• Discussed the importance of security and appropriate use.
• Talked about measures if there were any inappropriate behaviour.
• Explained that we would work together to form some rules/advice to make the most of G Apps.
• Emphasised the importance of Gmail as a way to communicate the sharing of docs.
• Children had no problems with Gmail - the rhetoric of email is very familiar to them.
• Explored what spam is and how we have to deal with it if we use email.
• Set challenge of sending an email and creating and sharing of a doc.
• Explained that we will have a Google Break Tuesday lunchtime 12.30pm to 1.00pm to give children who cannot access internet at home chance to use the laptops in class.
• Shared teacher email addresses and pupil usernames and passwords.
• Children made a note of these on info sheets to take home.

Tuesday - 29/4/08

• Responded to children who had already -approx 8- logged in and shared a document with me / or emailed.
• Provided children with 30 mins in the morning to login and offered appropriate support.
• Congratulated those who had independently accessed G Apps at home.
• Had a Google Break at the children’s lunchtime when the children from both Year 5 classes could choose to work on a laptop and access their G Apps account. A very successful session with more than 16 children accessing their G Apps acc.
• Observed how children are very good at discovering new features not yet explained. Within the 30 minutes children were accessing Google Chat and nattering away to each other. When they are working together as a group, on an individual laptop, and they make a new discovery they are quick to explain to their peers what to do and how to get to the same discovery.
• There was lots of excitement about using Docs and the majority of the children were keen to tell me that they had either worked on it the previous night or were planning on doing so very soon.
• During a Geography session about the location of India the children were given a choice about how to present a piece of work and it was great to see the range tools that they turned to: SMART Notebook, MS PPT, MS Word, MS Excel, Google Docs. Many of the children chose to use Google Earth as a way to support their learning. They are making better and better tech choices.

Thursday - 1/5/08

• Had a conversation with teaching colleague in Year 5 about his concerns and thoughts about using G Apps.
• Discussed the issue of managing 30 docs that are shared with him. I talked about RSS feeds for doc changes but it seems that Apps Edu Edition does not currently support it. Boo. We talked about making folders in Docs home and I talked him through the process. We made a First Attempts folder to collate initial docs shared with us in this early stage.
• Marking and assessment of work is an important issue and we discussed the realistic merit of typing a document, pros and cons. We felt that if the children could record an idea for a sentence in audio form and have that embedded within a document adjacent to their typed effort there would be great benefit for review, support and editing. Unfortunately GDocs does not allow embedded media at present. Perhaps Presentations will soon as it allows video.
• We explored how we could assess the children’s writing if they have used GDocs. We discussed the grammar and spell check indicators in MS Word and I explained that these were not present in the GDocs so the children’s mistakes would not be flagged up to them as they work. This is a good thing when doing an assessed piece. They could use the spell checker but we could ask them to bypass this so the work is a true reflection of their writing ability.
• Time is a key issue when thinking about how children work when typing. They cannot produce as much as if they were handwriting the piece due to their slow typing speeds - I explained that perhaps we need to just give the children more time.
• I explored our next literacy unit from the Primary Framework based on the compilation of poetry “Sensational“. Throughout the unit the children add to a poetry journal. I discussed with my teaching partner the possibility of everyone creating a GDoc for this instead of a paper copy. I want the children to engage with GDocs in a structured way ASAP within the frame of a subject or topic. This is a good opportunity to do so. Taking it from exploration and an immersed approach with free reigns to a structured application of the technology to support the curriculum.
• I produced 2 documents that form part of activities within the first week of poetry unit. One of them needs to be a shared doc so that everyone can contribute to the same space - looking at alternative titles for a poem. The other needs to be a doc that each child can have a copy of and work on individually or in a pair. The solution for the first doc is easy as I can share with everyone in the year group. I think to distribute a copy for everyone for the second doc can be done by emailing it as an attachment. The children would then see the email attachment and open it as a GDoc. I need to check this.
• The ability to share a doc with a peer is also a useful way to share ownership of work. So even though when the children are working in a pair - if you only have access to 1:2 laptops, or the activity was to work with a partner, then the final step of the work would be to share it with the child who did not start the doc.
• I discussed with my colleague the use of email contacts to create sharing groups. This can be done in two ways. The first is in GMail contacts and then creating a group by adding email addresses, but you cannot see a list of who you have in your contacts so you have to go down a class list and make sure you have added everyone. The other way is when you share a Doc with someone you get the option to choose from your contacts. You tick them off and then there is an option to create a group from that bunch.
• We have created different email groups for whole year group, whole class, differentiated literacy and numeracy groups. This way we have lots of flexibility to share different documents with appropriate groups.

Friday - 2/5/08

• Checked against class list those who had not completed the challenge of sending an email and creating and sharing of a doc.
• Directed those who needed time to get online to use the 30 mins in the morning.
• Asked those more confident in G Apps (often those who had logged in at home independently) to offer support for those who needed it.
• Explained to these children that when you provide support not to take over but to carefully direct. Could we have some children to be Google Experts?
• Discussed guidelines with whole year group for sharing docs and created a simple set of positive statements to help children know when it is best to share a doc with the teacher.
• Created and shared a doc about sharing guidelines with all children and encouraged them to add to it if they thought of any new statements.
• Explored with the year group avatars and online identities and why it is sensible and safe to use something other than a photograph.
• We used the Simpsons Movie website to create an avatar and save the icon to their network folder. Some children in my class had already made theirs and emailed it to me after a brief chat with them the previous day. One child had preferred to use a Star Wars avatar - some of them had already worked ot how to upload the avatar image to their GMail profile
• We uploaded avatars to their GMail account profiles, the children worked really well together to help each other with this. Learning together.

Overall reflections on Week 1

The children’s attitude towards the introduction to Google Apps has been the most positive aspect this week. I was excited to see them engaged with these tools and their enthusiasm throughout the week has been great to be caught up in. It is clear that the procedures for distributing documents and work in a primary classroom needs refining and exploring, I am sure there is much to learn about what is best. We have spent 5 days in an immersed state, the children have been sharing their docs with me without any boundaries. On Friday we discussed guidelines for when it is best to share docs with us. I wanted the children to have freedom and space to practice the process of sharing docs without restriction. Now they are familiar I want them to think more carefully about what is shared.

It has been very interesting looking at the units of literacy we are yet to teach and planning for the implementation of Google Docs in a structured way to support our work. Many of the Tweets I received this week about GApps use in school has centred on the question of email and whether the children have it or not. From my own experience the sharing and notification of documents is driven by the power of GMail and so it is important for the children to also understand this. I look forward to having a better appreciation for the practicalities of working in GDocs from our work next week.

This academic year has been different for me due to the (ongoing) development of a permanent laptop resource in my classroom. We currently have 8 machines available to us and when we double up from both Year 5 classes we have a possible 16 machines that we can use. On the not too distant horizon these numbers will be doubled by the procurement of a second batch of laptops for school. With this second step towards a 1:1 model in the upper junior classrooms I am thinking more and more about the pedagogical impact of a greater technology choice.

An activity that has become one of the mainstays of our literacy work has been to respond to an image resource. In our current unit we are reading Street Child by Berlie Doherty, set in Victorian London it tells the story of a boy called Jim who, after a series of misfortunes, spends time in the workhouse as a child labourer and lives on the streets. The exemplar planning for this unit explains an opportunity to respond to an image:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

This is a commonly used strategy to engage the children and elicit a response from a visual resource - such an activity occurs fairly regularly in primary literacy work and I daresay other subjects and age ranges. It takes a failsafe, traditional form - of paper and pen. In this post I explore ways that this simple activity can be transformed with the use of technology. And transformative learning is what I am looking for, because replication offers no benefit to a teacher - all it produces is ostensibly a better presented piece of work and more of a headache to setup. The technology has to offer a whole new level of interaction with the image that cannot be gained from the traditional method explained above.

The learning activity has to be transformed into something that provides a greater depth of learning and interaction. There has to be a pedagogical shift.

Down to the practical stuff. This activity is something that I will be doing very regularly, so finding the easiest to use option for the kids and something that offers a new type of interaction are both key criteria. Other important questions included:

• Why is it better than using paper and pen?
• Do you need an account to use it?
• How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?
• Easy to navigate?
• Can we share our responses?
• Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

For some time now I have explored this notion of visual annotation and due to its ubiquitous nature in the primary classroom I have taken a long look at a few options. They include: using the notes tool in Flickr to annotate certain parts of the image; TwitPic - an application that combines the brevity of Twitter and image captioning/commenting and even such conferencing tools as Twiddla that offer a quick way in to sharing annotations. However none of them are like Voicethread.

As a primary teacher Voicethread is exactly the tool I need for this purpose. (Watch out switching to analogy mode) You may well be able to eat your cornflakes with a knife, although messily, but why not use the spoon that is in the draw. Voicethread is that perfect match - it functions as a media commenting tool. As they describe it on the site:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish.

Now many colleagues have been using Voicethread in all manner of ways in the classroom and I know that I am not revealing some great secret. But what I would hope to reveal is a how such a tool can transform learning, and especially in the climate of a primary classroom. For it is just such an activity that peppers the new literacy framework, but how would this learning task look in a shifted school, a learning environment that offers a 1:1 choice for all that belong there? Can every activity of this sort be transformed? It only needs the right cutlery in the draw…

Needless to say I used Voicethread to transform our work on responding to an image for our Street Child work (as described above).

Do you need an account to use it?

Yes. Voicethread requires you to have an account. So there is some setup time here but well worth it - a specific benefit for a teacher is that you can setup members of your class as sort of sub-users. So one sign in, but everyone in the class has a working identity they can switch to which tags their work. Really useful and easy to setup. Voicethread has an dedicated education community now as well.

How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?

I just showed 2 children from my class how to load the site, login to our class account and fire up our Street Child resource. With me helping it took us just over five minutes to setup. The site was responsive and loaded quickly.

Easy to navigate?

With the very briefest of introduction my Year 5 class had no problems with navigating around Voicethread. One aspect to note is that when you load a Voicethread it will begin playing the various images straight away and it took a few minutes for the children to take control. My children found the overview screen - giving thumbnails of all of the screens really useful.

Can we share our responses?

This is where the true transformation of learning emerges very strongly in my opinion. The last short sentence of the Literacy strategy document is:

Share these as a class.

This is clearly meant to be some form of plenary activity or summary to the session. With Voicethread the children can see everyone else’s comments being added in real time. As soon as they have been saved they can be viewed by everyone in the class. My class were not just sharing their ideas for 5-10 minutes at the end of the session but were interacting, exploring, reflecting upon and sharing the work of their peers for the whole of the session. It is very difficult to be specific but from my observations this shared experience helped to support, encourage and inspire children to contribute further thoughts.

Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

A completed Voicethread can be effectively presented in situ, but it has some impressive options to embed in other online locations - the simplest is perhaps a class blog warranting further comments and reflections on the activity. You then have a great opportunity to take sharing beyond the classroom.

Why is it better than using paper and pen?

In my experience using Voicethread to annotate images online is the ideal tool. It offers such a broad range of ways to transform the learning activity - children can record a spoken comment bringing in other literacy strands, a video response takes that on that extra step. A major benefit for mobile learning is that Voicethread is a flash based site and so seems to pressurise the wireless access point less, it performed really well for us and so reliability=big tick.

Not only does the final product look that much better but the options to then seamlessly share that product, not just with our Year 5 class, but with a wider global community of educators is the clincher. And in my opinion the sharing that occurs during a whole class task is the most important transformation that goes on. Children picking up on and reading others work not just writing their own ideas down.

How would I rewrite the activity from the Primary Strategy for Literacy? How should such an activity be explained to a classroom that has taken that pedagogical leap, a school that is shifting to a 1:1 choice?

Here is their version again:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

Here is my version:

Organise the children into their laptop buddies (pairs) and ask each pair to take a look at the Voicethread showing scenes of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their pairs about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to add a text, video or audio comment to the appropriate image - remembering to take advantage of the onscreen doodling to help clarify what they refer to. Encourage children to take a few moments to read and explore the work of their peers as it appears. Do they have similar thoughts? Are they thinking anything different to you? Embed the completed Voicethread on the class blog.

Does it sound transformed? I don’t know…

This for me is the nuts and bolts of what we do in the classroom and it is in this very act of transforming one small activity that I think I will uncover what this pedagogical shift will be like in my school. Perhaps the quilted tapestry of these smaller shifted learning activities will reveal a bigger picture. What do you think? I think Voicethread is a good example of how learning can be transformed with the correct tool, but what else is there that needs to be explored? What other daily activities in the primary classroom can be transformed? I know that not everything can be 2.0ed but what will form part of that shifted tapestry?

(Unfortunately for us the audio and video options for commenting are blocked due to our proxy settings, it is a bit of a pain as I want to be making the most of this resource - Voicethread did promise a little while back “We’ll be developing a more comprehensive networking guide.” but nothing yet. Any help for fixing this would be most useful? I have run the http tests and most of them don’t work!)

I think I have found the perfect place to reflect on the way a network, and specifically how Twitter, can impact on what goes on in the classroom. No mains gas, no telephones, no mobile signal, no internet connection, no possible way to interact with my personal learning network (PLN). Tucked away in the Cornish countryside the location of the cottage we are staying in provokes vocabulary such as: isolated, severed, detached and remote. But similar rhetoric could also be applied to the lack of connection I have with my network. I am removed from the network I want to reflect upon and away from the classroom that it can impact. This perspective is welcome as it offers me clarity of thought, as I write, that I have not had for a long time. In this post I hope to unpick what my Twitter network means to me in terms of my classroom practise and explore the best ways that you can utilise it in your own classroom.

Twitter: a communication tool

In my experience, and in the short time that I have used it, Twitter has grown quickly to play a major part in the way that I interact with fellow colleagues and professionals from around the world. In my classroom and with the children I teach it has been an exciting tool to utilise and support learning. However it is one of many tools that we have at our disposal. I do not see it replacing any of the others we use nor do I see the positive impact upon learning being exclusive to Twitter.

This diagram is a simplistic representation of my network in terms of numbers. It does not reflect that many individuals in your network will be linking up with you using different tools. For example, someone may be your contact on Skype, Twitter and perhaps subscribes to your blog. This would not be uncommon as each tool plays a different role for you and your network. However what we can conclude from the numbers is that I have been able to connect with a large number of people using Twitter. It forms a large part of my current PLN, but has been the tool I have come to last of all. This should be encouraging for most teachers looking to use Twitter, as with careful consideration and some small effort your Twitter network can expand quickly.

Unique communication

Twitter is primarily a communication tool and has often been described as filling the gap between email and instant messaging (IM). It is interesting that it occupies this middle ground. I believe it is important to understand how this communication functions in order to make the most of it in your classroom. IM is all about synchronous communication, relying upon people being online at the same moment. Asynchronous communication characterised by email (and blog commenting) is slightly more time consuming but does not rely upon people being online at the same time.

Twitter communication can be in both of these two different camps. It is a platform that can fluidly handle both synchronous and asynchronous messaging. However each exchange or interaction you have with your network can be more or less synchronous; no two will be the same. This is important because it allows a teacher the best of both forms of communication and the ability to utilise the power of them using just one application. So you could request information the night/day/week before and then return to those responses after some time. On the other hand you could activate your network to help on the spot, in that moment or current time frame when you need it. When you are planning to use Twitter as part of a lesson or to support learning the asynchronous facet of Twitter communication is perhaps the most useful. You can gather responses to a tweet over a short period of time and return to explore them with your class when you are ready. However you still have the opportunity to foster responses from your network in real time that can have an impact on learning. Here is a simple, theoretical timeline of a planned Twitter activity that can be easily adapted to suit your needs, and one that I know from experience works well.

The timeframe that A-D occurs in is flexible enough for it to work within hours or just minutes between. The repeat request (B) is optional depending on the sorts of responses you get from your initial interaction. If you are to take advantage of live feedback then it is a good idea to repeat your request (C) just prior to working with the children on the activity (D).

The information torrent/stream/river/brook/flood

My favourite metaphor for how we use Twitter is the idea that it is a river that is constantly flowing. And that when we open up the Twitter site in our browser or start up Twhirl we are at the banks looking on. Some of us stay on the banks, roll out our picnic rug or unfold that favourite chair and settle in to watch the information stream pass by. Others quietly observe from the banks for a short time but have their trunks on underneath their clothes, and were always going to jump in and contribute. However we choose to interact with this ever moving and changing flow of information, whenever we move away from the current we no longer see the flow - it passes us by, it carries on downstream. We can still hear the ripples and froths of the information eddying and ebbing along (or is that Twhirl alerts) but we no longer see it or interact with it directly. Understanding this distinct current is vital to make the most of Twitter in the classroom. I could ask for some contribution to a lesson, but those people momentarily away from the riverbanks could easily miss this request. My network may well return but the request will already be bobbing downstream out of sight.

I hope that you do not mind me indulging so deeply in such a metaphor - it helps me to appreciate the nuances of the tool.

Depending on how many people you follow will depend on how quickly the information flows. If you have only a small network of people that you follow then the brook will flow more slowly, those people are more likely to pick up upon your information request. Those following a large group of people will experience a much faster flow of Twitter updates and so when you throw your own into the torrent it can very quickly be washed downstream and out of sight. Armed with this knowledge I have begun retweeting requests so as to give people the opportunity to respond if they can. From the timeline diagram above you can see I have included just such a repeated request. This is particularly important if you are looking for a good number of responses to work with or if you send out a Tweet days before the event.

Manageable networks

Every user of Twitter has a different take on what sort of size your network should be to be manageable. In my opinion I do not think much of it matters. I currently follow over 500 people, I receive their updates, and I hear what is going on in their world. However they do not all tell me at the same time! I do not see this number being particularly difficult to manage, what is there to manage? I visit the information flow when I want and take what I wish from it. I know that when I am not engaged with it the river continues to flow. That does not bother me, I know that my PLN is wider than Twitter and anything important I need to know about will reach me through another tributary. I also appreciate some factors that will allow my network’s information to remain valuable even when it is greater than 500.

1. How many people actually update every 5 minutes? According to my Twitter Karma only 236 contacts have updated in the last 24 hours. That is less than 50 percent.
2. The global aspect means there will always be people asleep and inactive when I am engaged with Twitter.
3. I know the times when my network updates the most.
4. I also appreciate who updates most frequently.
5. In my opinion the greater number of people I follow the richer the tapestry.

A global network

As any network grows it soon begins to encompass professionals from different parts of the world and this can dictate the levels of asynchronous and synchronous communication that goes on. When you plan to use Twitter in the classroom it is important to be aware of the time differences for different parts of your network. For example when I asked for some responses for a maths lesson at 9.30am GMT, Australian responses dominated the replies. I knew this was going to occur so I repeated the request later in the morning and at 1.00pm to take into account those waking up to the west. With this planned repeat of the request, members of my network in the US, Canada and South America were able to respond and contribute their small part to our lesson.

Who is in your network?

Although the numbers in the PLN diagram above are clearly dominated by those in my Twitter network I am more than aware that it is more to do with the “who” than the “how many”. In a previous post I explored a metaphor for interacting with your Twitter network. I wrote that asking if there was a doctor on board a plane would be much better if doing so on a large passenger jet, you surely have a greater chance of getting a response. When I wrote that, I was reminded of a story of a gentleman who, suffering from a severe heart attack aboard a small domestic flight, was saved by a whole team of cardiac surgeons, doctors and registrars who were all travelling to a conference on the same flight! I could not verify whether this was true or not and clearly there is a healthy slice of luck involved - but it does extend the metaphor in an important direction. A carefully constructed network of valued colleagues, all with a an ethos of sharing at the heart of what they do, may well be more valuable to you then a random mixture of hundreds of people. From my experience the vast majority of education professionals using Twitter have a fairly tight control over who they follow, I am no different. It is often when I receive an email notification of someone adding me to their network that I will think about these simple steps.

1) Explore their Twitter profile, scan who they follow.

2) Look for the language of education in the profile - teacher, tech coordinator, K12 etc

3) Explore their online work, blog, wiki or school website link.

4) Skim read recent Twitter updates.

5) If they are clearly involved in education I will follow back.

The very fact that someone has chosen to add me to their network is strong incentive for me to “follow” them back. I firmly believe in that approach to using this tool. I consider it to be a compliment every time someone clicks the “follow” button for similar reasons as I would. I try to thank people for adding me to their network with a direct message and I am always hopeful that in this new exchange there is a new possibility for learning for both parties.

Talking and listening

You have no control over the choices other people make in terms of adding you to their network. Just because you have added them does not mean it will be reciprocated. It is important to appreciate that Twitter in fact has two networks working alongside each other. To help better understand this below I have republished some graphics that I have used in the past to help explain this dichotomy.

Building your network

I do not profess to have all of the answers in terms of building a network using Twitter but below I have included some simple steps that I hope will support you in building your own. I have deliberately chosen to use the word “building” as I believe that you have to take some specific steps in order to lay the foundations for a successfully and appropriately populated Twitter network.

1. Make it your own: the P in PLN is for personal, so take steps to follow people that interest you both professionally and personally if you so wish. There is no right way to do it. Consider how you want to use Twitter. In the classroom?
2. Hit the ground running: if you are new to Twitter then explore other people’s networks and follow a bunch of people you would like to listen to, it will get the ball rolling.
3. Go global: use Twitter mashups to explore possible colleagues in other countries - you will soon begin to appreciate a better sense of network geography.
4. Friend of a friend of a friend: again use network visualising tools, like Twitter Blocks, to help you explore who is following members of your network. Take a couple of further steps and you may see many more possible connections.
5. Your own rules: it is a good idea to establish what you will do when someone follows you, how will you check them out? Do they have to be a teacher? On what grounds will you decide not to follow someone?
6. Reciprocate: try to follow back fellow education professionals when they add you. Your network widens and so does theirs.
7. Balanced or unbalanced, does it really matter?: It is your choice how many people you follow and there is no Twitter police frowning upon us. If you want to follow 1000 teachers then go ahead!
8. Participate: when it is right for you jump into the stream and get involved, there is no better way to characterise your profile then making contributions. When you want responses from your network, for your own lessons, your own participation may help to yield a reciprocated involvement.
9. Respond: When other professionals ask for help/information or interaction via Twitter (and it is relevant to you) respond. Simple acts of 140 characters or less maintain a sharing ethos amongst your network. Others are ostensibly more likely to respond to your own requests later on.
10. Search: Use Tweetscan to find out about discussions on Twitter. Search for keywords that are relevant to you - so a SMARTBoard or IWB scan may uncover a new network contact.
11. Momentum: The behaviour of my network has changed since I began using Twitter. Momentum has been built in the numbers of followers I have and I would say that at around 400-450 followers I began to receive followers daily. That is network momentum.

Different types of questions to ask your Twitter network

When you plan to involve your network in teaching and learning in your classroom it is basically inviting individuals to offer their voice to what you do. Twitter is all about communication, so when thinking of what you will get from Twitter for your lessons - conversation is the currency. Below I have outlined some general categories for types of questions or requests you can make to your network, plus some examples for each. Anytime I would ask my Twitter PLN to be involved with the class with their responses I would always precede my response with, “I am working with my class…” or something similar indicating to all that it is directly for teaching and/or learning. I think that this helps persuade fellow professionals to contribute.

Creative

Involve your network in the creation of something new - perhaps in decisions during shared writing with a class, or a piece of music.

• We have written this so far…what word would you use to describe the event/character/scene/action?
• Can you help us to think of synonyms for “help”?
• Here is what we have written so far (insert URL) Should the character in our story be A or B - and tell us why you made that decision.

Data

A Twitter PLN provides a large group of teachers available to contribute all manner of data to a historical or mathematical investigation. Twitter would allow you to collect data easily but only superficially, but if you were to direct readers to an online form or poll then the data could be more in depth.

• What is the temperature where you are today?
• How far do you have to travel to work?
• How old is your school? What year was it built?

Opinion

This type of question could be incorporated into many different types of curriculum areas. What you are looking for here is the addition of another facet to the class debate and Twitter gives you that very easily, you can extend your discussions via feedback and insight from others. I would always recommend an age stamp clearly on these sorts of posts to signal what level of discussion, feedback or opinion would be most appropriate. (Twitpic is an excellent resource to share and discuss images using Twitter)

• Here is an image of Queen Elizabeth I what does it tell you about her?
• Here is what we have written so far (insert URL) Which of these sentences continues the report in the most persuasive manner?
• We have written some class rules what do you think of them so far?

Information

Instead of gathering data from all of your contacts, with these types of questions particular information could be teased from your network. These could ideally be used to help provide a global perspective about school life for children. Further steps in the conversation could be taken to find out more about a particular school etc.

• What is it like to work in an international school?
• Does the weather effect you at school? What do the children/staff do to tackle the high temperatures during the day?
• Most of the children in our class walk to school because so many live nearby, what is the most popular form of transport in your class and why?

Location

This is pretty simple - a request to find out where people are. I have used this to inspire a Google Earth introduction. Lots of potential for finding out about different locations and having a teacher there to guide you a little. Imagine having a teacher for your class to talk to in every city in the world?!

• We are exploring world time differences, it is nearly lunchtime for us what are you doing and what time is it?
• What is the weather like where you are?
• We are looking at the differences between the UK and Australia, is there anyone who can help us?

Challenge

Ask your network to pose challenges and questions for your class. Again this type of response could be planned for and incorporated into many different lessons.

• Challenge my class to find you using Google Earth, please provide us with just a small amount of information where you are?
• My class is revising the human body. Please give us a challenging question to answer. Grade 5.
• Challenge us to find a landmark or building that has a distinct shape?

There are many, many types of questions and requests you could make to your network but I think it is important that for every one you make there is a clear thankyou to those who have taken the time to contribute. After the lesson make a point of sitting down and tweeting to all of the individuals who helped. Another little tip that became very clear from the comments to a recent post is about the follow up. Where possible a blog post explaining how Twitter was used helps those who contributed get the bigger picture. Their 140 character contribution may have been a small piece of a larger tapestry - and it is useful to help other teachers realise that.

Reliable response

One of the most important questions when planning for a Twitter activity is: will I be able to get a response from my network? This is valid. You have to feel completely comfortable with the network you have built and the reliability of response you will receive. This reliability is very important if you are to plan for using Twitter as a teaching and learning tool, after all you do not want 0 responses. How can you get guaranteed responses? I think that this is impossible as you have no influence over the people that follow your updates. However there are two aspects that, in my opinion, can increase the reliability of response. Firstly it is important to build a network as described above. If you have network members that are more willing to share and contribute then a response may be more favourable. Secondly the sheer number of followers will statistically increase your chances of getting a response from the network.

The latter point is worth considering as you plan to incorporate Twitter in your lessons. If you have only just started out with the tool, then waiting for the number of followers to grow to reach a sort of “tipping point” is crucial. I explore the idea of a “tipping point” in this post. Only you can decide when this is, for me it was around 80-100 people and was proven in light of a particular interaction that went well.

Summary

In my opinion there is great potential in the use of Twitter to support teaching and learning. It is unique in this role because it is all about conversation on a larger scale. Not just instant messaging with one or two contacts or including a Skype call in your lesson, but speaking to a wider network of fellow professionals. Currently most users consider Twitter to be just a networking tool, this opinion was confirmed when I recently asked if it could be a teaching and learning tool. To make the transition into the classroom and having a direct influence on learning will take more people planning to use it and a growing weight of examples and successes to explore.

I look forward to seeing the different ways that I can use Twitter as a teaching and learning tool in the future with my class and I hope you will do to. Unfortunately the peace of the Cornish countryside is miles away as I finish this post. I have returned to the ever-connected world we work in and I can’t help but feel a mixture of reactions about that. Anyway I had better get Twhirl fired up and visit that river…

We have been using spreadsheets from Google quite considerably this year. The main strength over Excel is the ability to share the data that is generated and benefit from a pooling of efforts and results. One of the most recent uses in my Year 5/Grade 4 class was during a History lesson, in which we were exploring why the River Nile is so important to Egypt. I posed the question quite openly and asked the children to explore some climate data about different world cities in order to refer it against some of the major sities in Egypt. I have embedded the spreadsheet below.

Each child was given a few different cities to explore and using our class laptop resource they independently investigated average rainfall, temperature etc. They added the results into the correct sheet and as we all worked we were able to see the other results popping up.

At the end of the session I posed the main enquiry once again, “Why was/is the River Nile so important to Egypt?” I asked the children to use the “Discuss” tab (top right, next to “Share” and “Publish”) and to write their answers in the instant messaging tool. Once they had added their response I asked them to join me in front of the SMARTBoard to finish the session.

The “Discuss” tool allowed me to quickly collate all of the children’s thoughts into one place and display them on the IWB to discuss. It proved to be a good focused activity to finish the independent session and it generated some interesting points to discuss in the plenary. Here is the unedited transcript of what they responded with.

year5tb: because it dosen’t rain much.

me: the river nile

year5tb: so they can drink beacuse they can drink and stay healthy. So they can drink from in it. ? Hi J.C!

Because they don’t realy have much precipitation to live on.

They hardly have any precipitatoin and the River Nile is the only water they have

year5tb: because theres no fresh water to help there land stay moist. Becues it is the most hotist and driay and that is the only warter. Because it’s the only river in eygit. That the only river. We think that the river Nile is important because the weather is so dry and hot. It is the only wet river they have.

Why is the river niel inportent becuase the river is dray and it is not so wet. So they can keep fresh.

me: Because they hardly have eny rain fall

year5tb: Because its hot and dose’nt rain much.

So egypt can have water from the river and then take it back to there village.

As you can see in the text there is plenty to discuss with the children and we referred back to the spreadsheet as we talked and justified some of the ideas. It brought all of their thoughts into one place and became a clear focal point for closing the lesson. I think that the idea of a simple message board service / tool would be really useful for a laptop session whether in GDocs or not - perhaps something to explore, it would have to be something light, with no login so children can just get in and add their response.

(If I were to ask the children do something similar in the future I will ask them to add an initial to the post so that it becomes more useful for assessment purposes.)

I was pleased to discover that Edublogs now has the functionality to embed iframe, javacript and most object code into blog posts and sidebars. Below I have embedded the two different Google presentations on sharing good practice in Google Earth and using the IWB.

If you would like to contribute to the ongoing development of these two presentations just let me know you have a tip to share.

In order to embed a Google presentation into a post, like I have done above, just follow the screenshots.

If you have any other ways you have used javascript, iframes code etc in your Edublogs let James and the rest of the community know.

Buckleys mate

That was the first reply from @deangroom to my Twitter request in support of a maths lesson earlier this week. I had asked my network to explain to my class of Year 5s / 4th graders what the probability of snow was for the following day. In my planning I had included this activity as a plenary to my maths lesson on probability. The children were exploring a range of statements and deciding what the likelihood was. The conclusion of the session was planned as follows:

Explore with the children the language that they have used in the session. Ask: Is the same vocabulary used in other countries? Ask Twitter network to respond to: “What is the probability that it will snow where you are?” Explore the responses and discuss the reasons for any differences.

“Buckleys mate” threw me a little though, I shared it with the children and after a little searching we discovered that it is an Australian slang term meaning “No chance” - so we figured out what @deangroom meant!

Time Aware

One of the most important things that I have learned from successfully using Twitter to impact on my lessons, teaching and ultimately the children’s learning is that you have to be time aware. I sent out this tweet, as you can see, at just after 9.15 GMT.

I did not need the responses for a further hour but allowing your network time to respond is very important. By the time that I was sitting with the class to finish the session we had approximately 20 responses to explore, and more was rolling into twhirl as we were working. I simply displayed the “Replies” view so the children could see specific responses to us.

I was also very aware that America was still tucked up in bed and only those very early risers, insomniacs and those burning the midnight oil would be responding at the time from the US. The morning session worked out that we continued our maths on until lunch so I retweeted 2 hours later and then again around 1.00pm. This may seem like you are pestering your network but single tweets can get lost in the torrent for many of your network - some may not respond because they simply may not have seen the request. I knew that the 1pm tweet would nudge those in the US and many added their responses to the stack of examples we had to discuss with the kids.

Shaping the learning experience

As you can see from my planning and the request I sent out the focus was on the language that other people would naturally use to describe an event’s probability. And the coincidental geographic information that justified such a likelihood helped our discussion. We were able to establish from the early responses that they were mainly from Australia and the children were amazed to read the responses:

This naturally lead to a discussion about why residents of this country would give this sort of response, we discussed their climate and the ostensibly long history of no snow days and how this leads people to believe more fully that it is highly unlikely. Then came a response from closer to home.

I swooped upon the language that @jonesieboy had used in his tweet and saw it as a good teaching point. I focused the children’s attention upon his use of “1 in 4 chance” and we explored how this could be rephrased as a a quarter and that led us naturally to the equivalent percentage - 25%.

The children had been using 5 words to describe their own statements in the main part of the lesson. Certain, probable, possible, unlikely, impossible. After reminding them about this I asked them to position “1 in 4″ or 25% on their own scale and to give a word that best describes the chances of snow in East Lothian. It is amazing what a single tweet can do to a lesson.

Creating a learning experience

In a similar way to how our Geotweets lesson proved successful the quality and quantity of responses from my network offered me an opportunity to create a new learning activity. The initial plenary was really successful, we discussed the tweets we had received at that point and the language differences it presented. I decided to continue with the maths lesson for the rest of the morning and spent 10 minutes, whilst the children were outside for breaktime, creating two additional SMART Notebook pages that incorporated the Twitter responses.

The main focus was of course the language individuals used and although we concluded many people, when asked about probability, responded with a figure/percentage, I challenged the children to juxtapose the responses onto our original scale.

The second notebook page was an additional bonus, but the geographical information is very important to explore with the children when reviewing any responses in Twitter. In the case of this maths lesson the probability could be justified by geotagging the tweet. I used a rudimentary map and we discussed the location of the respondees and how this affected their responses. I could have looked at a map+Twitter mashup but this would not challenge the children’s geography knowledge, rather it would just display the locations.

To create these pages in SMART Notebook I simply used the screen capture tool to snip the individual tweets from Twhirl. You have to ensure that the inactive opacity is set to 100 as Twhirl becomes inactive when you switch to the SMART screen capture tool. You can download the notebook file with these two pages in here.

I was delighted to use this networking technology in this way and it was great to finally execute what I had long conceived to be possible in my head. The lesson was so much richer for the carefully planned introduction of Twitter responses. The two SMART Notebook pages supplemented the original nbk resource and the discussion in the plenary. The parallel Y5 class was able to benefit from the depth and quality of responses as they also located the tweets and scaled the responses using the notebook. In terms of my own teacher assessment of the lesson I think that the children had a truly global picture of what this question meant to real people and a far greater understanding of the variety of vocabulary used to describe probability. For some people who responded the possibility of snow was almost far fetched and for others it seemed they were having to literally defrost the very keyboard they were frostily typing on! When I look back at the short paragraph of planning I had written it’s brevity does not reflect the depth of opportunity it actually produced. I move on from this lesson knowing that when you invite responses from your network to expect much more and to be flexible enough to make the most of the learning opportunities it readily presents.

With a careful, planned approach I think I have proven (in this instance) that Twitter can be used to impact on the children’s learning. That may be a very narrow impact in terms of a wider curriculum but it is an impact nonetheless.

Make it work in your classroom

• Think carefully about what topic to support - the simplest questions are the best.
• Phrase your 140 characters with great care. Get as much in as you can. I must have taken a good 5 minutes redrafting the original tweet.
• Be time aware. Think carefully about who will see your tweet when you send it out. Send your request for information prior to the time you actually need it, to allow the network time to respond.
• Don’t be afraid of retweeting a request so that people who have just logged in can pick it up.
• Request a location from your network as this can form some excellent points for discussion.
• Display the responses using the Replies view in a Twitter client like Twhirl or Snitter, this way you will not be distracted by the other conversations passing by.
• Share with the children the language of Twitter and what it all means, one of my children heard the alert sound of a reply and said “That means someone has tweeted us!”
• Be flexible and prepared for the direction that the tweets can take you.
• Save an image of your replies for future reference - you can see all of the replies we received for this lesson here.

Many thanks to all of you who responded to our question - thankyou for contributing to our maths work this week.

A little while back the EdTechRoundup team had the wonderful opportunity of interviewing the Google Applications Edu Team in the UK. We asked our networks, via the blog, wiki and Twitter, to contribute their questions.

Over at the EdTechRoundup blog the serialised answers are being published, as the title suggests, one per day. Please take some time to head on over and read the three responses so far and if you had submitted a question perhaps yours will be up next.

We would particularly appreciate any comments left there that continue the debate, as I know the Google team are watching!

This afternoon we embarked upon the most challenging technology related work we have done to date in Year 5. The children are 4th graders, 9 or 10 years old.
Recently we all went to Perlethorpe Activity Centre to support our work on rivers - we measured the velocity and profile of the River Meden, as well as enjoying a lovely sunny walk around the grounds of Thoresby Hall. As we walked round I snapped away some pictures and this afternoon we had the opportunity to geotag them in Google Earth(GE).

The children have used GE many times already this year, so I decided to take advantage of this knowledge as opposed to using Google Maps or Quikmaps as I have done in the past. The geotagging work ties nicely into their ongoing map skills development and is a good conclusion to the visit.

This video clip is one of the children completing the process of embedding an image from Flickr into a GE placemark, using the correct written code. (<img src=”">)It certainly was a challenge for the children but once they had written the code a number of times, and often corrected their mistakes, they were flying.

Here is what you have seen Kyle do in a step by step guide.

1. Find an image stored somewhere online, study it carefully and try to pick up on any clues as to where it is. Remember when you geotag an image it should really be located where the photographer was standing when it was taken, not the subject of the image.
2. Copy the location or url of the image - in Firefox you can just right click and “Copy Image Location”. IE take the URL from “Properties”
3. Now navigate back to your new placemark in GE. Make sure you are looking at the properties window - you will add the code in the “description” part.
4. If you just paste the address it will not display the image because you have not told the map to retrieve anything, it will just return a link. You need to add in a little code.
5. All you need to do is ensure the image URL is encoded with the highlighted parts in the example below.
6. <img src=”alovelypicture.online.234.jpg“>
7. Now click OK. If you click on the placemark it should open up with the image inside.
8. When embedding video or other media - just look for the “Blog This” option, and paste the generated code straight into the placemark balloon. Google video can be added pretty easily in this way.

The visual / spatial skills needed to correctly place an image on a map is an interesting one to explore. The children were looking very closely at what clues the image revealed as to the exact whereabouts of it.

I told the children that they would have had a successful afternoon if they could embed just one image in a placemark at the correct location. But, just as they often do, the children ran with it and tagged many pictures correctly on the map. A challenging but ultimately successful afternoon of GE mapping work.

(I will add a link to some example KMZ work as well as a Google Map of our work from today when I can.)

The lessons that I have enjoyed the most this year have been when we have adapted to the children’s enthusiasm for certain activities. Before our half term break we had one of those sessions.

In our literacy lessons we have been learning about the punctuation pyramid since September. It is a simple graphic that shows the various punctuation marks and their corresponding National Curriculum (UK) level for writing. Learning what is included in the pyramid and using it as a tool to assess their own writing is something that we consider to be very valuable. We have 3D pyramids on the children’s tables and a large copy of the punctuation pyramid on the wall as a display.

We recently purchased some software that had a pyramid builder game included and the morning session I am referring to saw both Year 5 classes working on practicing to build the pyramid from scratch.

I soon mentioned to my colleague, across the corridor, about a little competition to see who could build the pyramid the quickest. We were soon having a inter classroom battle to build the pyramid the fastest. Everyone engaged and working really hard. And this is where we began to sense their enthusiasm for the the activity. We decided to adapt the session to harness this fervent engagement with the task. After some time working with the pyramid builder and ensuring each child had had plenty of practice independently we announced a tournament.

We shuffled tables around to form a long row and brought all of the laptops together in my classroom. We had two rows of 8 laptops facing each other. The arena was ready! And the pyramid gladiators soon picked up the invitation to be involved. The task was simple: build a complete pyramid as quick as they could without any omissions or errors. Once they thought it was complete they needed to stand up. The simple knockout tournament began.

The children responded so well to the change of furniture and the change of style of session. We sometimes shy away from some light hearted competition in primary for fear of labelling people “winners” and “losers” but conducted in the right spirit it engages and motivates.

After 3 rounds we had a final battle with two laptops facing each other in the centre of the arena. Needless to say we had lots of fun and the children enjoyed every minute.

If you want to have a go at a Punctuation Pyramid competition with your class then you can try this Befuddlr puzzle for the image above, once it is complete it will display a time in seconds. Let me know how you get on and perhaps we can have an inter school leaderboard!