ICT in my Classroom

I thought that I would reflect on what I have managed to do so far this half term with my class – it seems that we hit the ground running headlong into this web 2.0 thingy.

I have really enjoyed working with the children on the class blog – as one child said to me it gives them a voice. The sort of resources we have used are exciting and have minimal learning curves – they have been applying their ICT skills in real contexts. This is what it is all about (well to me anyway )

But I have also challenged the kids with stuff like embedding code into our wikispace – they have coped amazingly well.

So what have we done in the last 7 weeks:

Quikmaps - used this throughout our local history work, we basically geotagged old photos of the town. We added code to placemarks in Quikmaps, we then embedded the maps in our class wikispace. (Wow that sounds hard, but my Year 6’s did it)
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Bubblr - in our Literacy we took Matilda photos from our Flickr account and made a simple comic strip of them and added simple speech and thought bubbles. We embedded these in our wikispace too.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Blogging - we started our class blog and the children have really enjoyed it. At least once a week I do a lunchtime blogging club so kids can get online and write / comment and visit other school’s blogs.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Wikispace - we have used this space to share our literacy writing and the work we have done in other subjects. I published the backing music for a song they were learning in music for example.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Local Live – we used a shared collection to add points of interest around our town. This worked extremely well with one login too!
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Google Earth – This has been a regular feature of the half term and I am sure will continue to be. We have explored where news stories are from, visited Rome, Paris, London and Athens. We like to look at our Geovisitors and locate them on Google Earth. I have used Google Earth in my maths lessons.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Mayomi - a lovely simple Flash based tool for mind mapping that we used to support our maths and literacy, easy to navigate and well presented. Cannot directly link to the map though when finished.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Flickr - I have added photos, images and screen shots to our account and found it invaluable for the kids to make the most of some web 2.0 apps (like Bubblr) I have found the notes a simple success. ( I have also explored it as a photo resource for upcoming curriculum areas and it is amazing)
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT

Editgrid - we have set up an online space to share investigation results. Hopefully it will help the children better appreciate fair tests and reliability of results.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
…that’s not to mention using digital cameras to record our science and our SMARTBoard work.

So what is next – more of the same…?

I think I shall set myself some simple targets and you can hold me to these before Christmas (as long as Santa still comes )

• Continue to apply the successful applications across the curriculum I have already used, so they are not just one offs.
• Setup a session when the children moblog. (could be interesting!)
• Explore parental permissions so children can take more photos and blog with these.
• Setup a more structured daily blogging routine, children blogging in writing partners.
• Answer: does having a world wide audience / platform really make a difference to the standard of the children’s writing?
• Spread the word: get at least one other class in school blogging.
• Get the children writing with TiddlyWiki.
• Develop more international links via blogging etc.
• Do a simultaneous science experiment with another class somewhere in the world.
• Use Flickr notes more.
• Look into purchasing a cameraphone for blogging purposes. (Will I need to change blog hosts?)

So there we are some simple targets…well i will reiiew these again at Christmas.

Just added three new items. Still no contributions though…

Planet Earth DV – Habitats – Caves

Shackelton’s Voyage: Diary and letter writing

Continents

[rockyou 42372319]

I am quite impressed with how this looks. Has anybody used Rock You with their children / class? Might be some issues with easily accessing other content…

Just uploaded some more resources to the wikispace:

Geography QCA Unit 15: The mountain environment

Please visit and add your school’s location to the list and any other resources you have!

Many thanks for all of your responses and comments for this idea. I have created the spreadsheet that I hope to use for the sharing of results over at EditGrid (I find that this is much easier to use and currently has more features than Google Spreadsheets)

Please go to http://www.editgrid.com/user/tbarrett/Science_Online and take a look – I have even added a sheet for comments J

Currently there is an investigation, that started this thought process going, on “The effects of temperature change on the rate of dissolving” but there is no reason why this resource cannot expand as the year progresses and as more and more science is completed in classrooms.

There are no results currently present as I am on half term – but I have grand plans (that is if anyone will join me and my class) in completing the science investigation again but at the same time so we see real time changes as children enter results.

This is work in progress and I would appreciate any suggestions or ways to improve the resource, anything about design or layout too. I already have some ideas about using Flickr and perhaps Google Documents or blogs to collaborate on the scientific method as well as the results.

Please visit and contribute so we can all benefit from the science we do but never share

Following a comment from Sally on the “My Quikmaps Lesson” post I thought I would quickly explain how to add images, video even Bubblr strips to a placemark.

1. So you have made a new map and you have added a placemark > What next?
2. Find an image stored somewhere online. For the images I used in my local history lesson I used our class Flickr account.
3. Copy the location or url of the image – in Firefox you can just right click and “Copy Image Location”.
4. Now navigate back to the placemark on your map. Make you have clicked on it to open up the balloon – and that the cursor is blinking at you in the space.
5. If you just paste the address it will not display the image because you have not told the map to retrieve anything. So you need to add in a little code.
6. All you need to do is ensure the URL is encoded with the highlighted parts in the example below.

   
   (No spaces between the = and the url)

7. Now close the balloon and click SAVE IT (bottom right hand corner) When viewing the saved map if you click on the placemark it should open up with an image inside.
8. When embedding video or other media – just look for the “Blog This” option, Gand paste the generated code straight into the placemark balloon. Google video can be added pretty easily in this way.

Hope this helps. Let me know how you get on.

Today we had a planned session in using Bubblr. It was GREAT !! And I would recommend the use of this little site with a whole class to any teachers out there. It was simple and worked a treat… (Take a look at my previous post explaining what Bubblr is)
If you will permit me I will explain what all the fuss is about.

We have been looking at Roald Dahl’s Matilda this week and I thought a simple activity for Bubblr would be to choose some pictures and let the children add them to the Bubblr strip and then simply add text, speech and thought bubbles. Nothing complex or anything to do with order – just to play with the interface and get used to it.
But the beauty is in the simple way the images are accessed by the children. All I did was upload them to our class Flickr account. The children search in Bubblr for our user name “priestsic6″ and there we have it – all of the images in our account with the most recently uploaded heading up the scrollable list for the children to work with.

The Bubblr strips were published and then if you click on the “BLOG THIS” button you can copy the code for embedding it. I asked the children to go to our class wikispace and embed the Bubblr strips into our literacy page. With their prior knowledge from doing the Quikmaps lesson they coped really easily with it. I was suitably impressed with how adaptable the children are. As I was walking around the suite there was that great buzz when everyone is on task and they are really enjoying such a simple but great activity.

Please let me know if anyone wants any more details about the activity or how to set it up yourself.
This one’s a keeper…

We have SMARTBoards at school and one of the new features of Notebook 9.5 is the lasso screen capture feature. Just click on the camera icon on the toolbar.

In our newspaper work we have been looking at the differences between direct and reported speech. A simple activity that involved the screen capture tool was that we went to the Newsround website and scanned news stories for examples of the different speech. A child then chose the lasso capture tool and lassoed (!) the part of the text, this is then captured into the notebook software and we sorted it into a table.
I have also used this tool in the past when exploring shapes in a photograph (like of railings) the children can draw around the shapes they see – these are then captured to Notebook. It is then possible to sort the shapes into different groups, triangles, quadrilaterals etc because the clipping retains the properties from the photo. In the past you could only do a square around the shape so it was more difficult to organise them after they are captured via their properties.

Here is a movie (WMV) from the Steljes site of the tool in action.

Just thought I would add this as I have been on about teaching newspapers in class. Newseum is a fantastic site giving access to over 500 international newspaper front pages. Click on “Today’s Front Pages” and you can view them all either as a list or as a map which I have done with my class.

Great for exploring the features of journalistic style and newspaper language features. As a class we even looked at a Russian front page and identified the same language features (Headline, strapline, caption etc) as an English version. This helped (I think…) the kids to understand the universality of the features of a newspaper.

The site though also has some excellent resources for social studies and I will be using the D-Day news feature (pictured above is the front page of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph) to help provide a source of historical information when we study WW2 in our history. The front pages can be zoomed into in the flash feature and explored really easily.

I discovered this neat little network link Google Earth file via Frank on the Google Earth Blog. I think it will be a useful teaching aid for Science.

It shows the leaf colour of major forests in and around the UK, the information is gathered from the Forestry Commission sites and transposed into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.

In class we are soon to be looking at life processes in Science so I will be keeping an eye on this one. I thought I might take a snapshot of Google Earth with this network link on, like the image above and watch it in a Flickr slideshow with the fade on or in Picasa with similar fading settings to illustrate to the kids the changing colours of this time of year.

Download the Google Earth file here >> Leaf Colour in the UK