ICT in my Classroom

After being passed on some information about the new LG Shine mobile phone blog from Doug Belshaw, I dropped them an email as they were looking for bloggers to use and review this new phone. Well low and behold they decided to send me one!

Earlier this week I took delivery of the LG Shine – and to put it plainly it is quite simply the most exquisitely beautiful phone I have ever had the pleasure of using. Brushed and polished metal are superb bed fellows in this sleek slimline piece of technology.

I am looking forward to using it much more and perhaps organising a sort of tech review with some of my children in my class who know more about mobile phone technology than you can shake a proverbial stick at.

My contract with Vodaphone was soon running out so I have recently organised a new contract with T-Mobile and took delivery yesterday of the Sony Ericsson K800i, the new Bond phone seen in Casino Royale, has a 3.2 megapixel camera to boot – I was particularly interested in the direct links to Blogger, so perhaps I will setup a moblog for myself.

Today was another opportunity for us to welcome headteachers from around the UK to our school and to talk strategically about our use and implementation of ICT, via the NCSL SLICT programme. We had five colleagues from Birmingham, North and South Leicestershire, Milton Keynes and London.

It was exciting to be able to talk about blogging and the use of wikis which was brought up in the previous day’s workshops. I was pleased to be able to realistically demonstrate how these new read/write tools may impact on the classroom. (By the way “wiki” is taken from the Hawaiian word “wikiwiki” meaning quick, hence you can quickly add your own contribution to this sort of web 2.o media)

It was another successful day and both Dave and I would like to thank our visitors for the positive feedback that they gave us before they left. We hope we can support and help in the future with your own school’s ICT challenges.

Sorry that I have only just got round to writing the last of the three great conversations I had with colleagues last week. Unfortunately I have been very unwell over last weekend and very busy at school.

Nonetheless the conversation holds its resonance and comes under the “Exchanging and sharing information” strand of the National Curriculum which Claire and Rick have been exploring for there year 3 class. We ended up speaking about linking up with other schools using Skype, (a simple freely downloadable piece of software that allows you to make voice calls over an internet connection) to communicate verbally and then to use a class blog to provide written feedback and an exchange of ideas.

We worked together and came up with the central idea of poetry which would remain the refrain throughout a variety of work in geography, history and literacy. The ICT part will be contextualised and be an application of many new skills.

Rick and Claire have already begun and taken the first steps by talking to their children about communication and how that currently manifests itself – but also they have setup their class blogs.

If there are any schools out there who are willing and able to link up using Skype, to produce perhaps some writing that would great. Please let us know.

So I am on to explaining about the second of three great conversations I had last week with colleagues at school.

Since starting my blog I wanted to draw more of my colleagues into the experience and I set my own targets for this, well I am a little late on it but I have still managed it.

I had planned to support Claire and Rick, who work in Year 3, set up their blogs, but I decided to open out the session to other staff members and I had lots of takers! It was a chance to follow on the session I held before Christmas which was a great success and to tell them about setting up and getting on with the writing. After all that ’s what it is, an opportunity to write.

So we had Year 1, 2, 3, 4 and Year 6 teachers there – I had a meeting with Pete and Cathy about blogging the day before as they couldn’t make it, so that accounts for Year 5. So from a voluntary session I covered all of the Ks1-2 classes, to me that is very promising and I must say a big thankyou to those who attended and supported the session.

I introduced learnerblogs.org and explained the other platforms that are available to blog, the importance of getting running and just to write, I broke it into 3 simple sequential stages of usage that seemed pretty useful.

1. Write together as a class using admin login on class blog.
2. Assign children unique logins to write individually on the class blog.
3. Children have their own blog to publish to and manage.

For many early years teachers it seemed that they would remain at 1 as their usage would be primarily writing together.

I am really pleased to see colleagues at school embracing the technology and many thanks to those who have already commented on the priestsic3 blog, I will keep you all posted of any more newborns in the ward.

Last week was a fantastic week at school for conversations about new online (web 2) technologies. Nothing massively ground-breaking just a good step in the right direction.

On Monday I met with Pete and Cathy who work in year 5 and we talked about a recent Literacy subject audit that we carried out, in line with the ICT self-review framework here in the UK, that showed we needed to give staff better access to online resources. We have many floating staff, who cover classes in other year groups and also absences. The ability to access all of your bookmarks from any computer is a clear advantage.

So I introduced del.icio.us to them and we are going to populate our school account with the bookmarks we have before we introduce it to the rest of the staff – having two colleagues already in the know is helpful to me, so that I can draw on their experiences and it is not just me preaching my insane ideas.

We have got a clear tagging system that we will introduce:

• Key Stage: Foundation, KS1 etc
• Year Group: Y1, Y2, Y3 etc
• Subject: Maths, literacy etc
• Topics: multiplication, division etc
• Star rating: ***** = 5 star rating ie excellent resource.
• And anything else that is a relevant tag.

I am looking forward to getting the school account up and running, introducing it to staff and populating it with lots of good resources.

Perhaps if other primary schools get their own del.icio.us accounts running then we can begin adding different schools to our network and sharing the online resources we use.

Using del.icio.us in Education – Take a look at this guide to del.icio.us from John Pederson that I have helped contribute to.

So after a few great days of interesting staff meetings with colleagues at school, two new Year 3 blogs have been created. (And many more on their way soon)

I am sure you are all aware of how important these times are and I would really appreciate any readers just popping along and leaving an encouraging word or two.

http://priestsic3.learnerblogs.org
http://priestsic33.learnerblogs.org

So as I currently write this I am installing the new SMARTBoard software and I have just reviewed the current state of the product that was displayed at BETT. The Interactive whiteboard has hardly changed since I dusted off a boxed one in a corridor way back when I was training.

I do remember setting that board up in the Year 3 class I was working in and thinking that it was truly the most impressive resource I had used – I have since been in 2 different schools and been charged with the implementation of many IWBs. So I bought into the idea. There are many schools in the UK and I am sure across the world that have not had IWBs installed. It seems to me to be a slow process of integrating a decent technology.

So what’s next? I think that sometimes schools wait too long to have technology delivered to them – to wait for the next bandwagon to come along. I don’t think that the IWB can be taken much further than it already has. Software has changed, yes. What devices we can attach has changed, yes. But what about the interactive technology we use. That is pretty static. No doubt that over time things have been manufactured to a greater standard, with more reliability etc. But when you watch Jeff Han demonstrate at TED Talks a new interactivity, perhaps we should be investing our efforts there.

Recently I wrote about my experiences with Philips here and then here, but it was early days with my blog and I assumed that it slipped under the radar of many of my readers. I hope that you might take the time to read it and comment.

So from my experiences with Philips and watching Jeff Han I believe that perhaps we are looking at the wrong model of car. Indulge me in this analogy for a moment.

So the IWB is an old 2002 model car, and every year there has been a growth in sales – way back then the model had all of the latest features and was “cutting edge”; now the same model has had a paint job, a few bolt on extras like a new exhaust and ways to plug in your mp3 player – but the car itself has not changed.
They are still selling but they haven’t really changed. As drivers our gaze has been fixed by these glorious new additions and the fact that so many other drivers were buying them. Governments even waded in to buy the cars in bulk and then distribute them to new drivers. Of course there are excellent drivers out there – no question, but has the actual car we are driving changed in 5 years? So whilst all this is going on in a factory in Holland or in the US somebody has questioned the design and created the next evolutionary step…

I suppose the question is: how long will it take us to wrench our gaze away from one technology and open our eyes to the possibilities that are emerging elsewhere?

With great fanfare and celebration (and even a small finger buffet) I hereby open our WIKI ARCADE.

After coming across SPLODER I thought it would be good for my kids to design some games, which we will be doing in the near future. And what better place to play them than in our WIKISPACE ARCADE.

So gone are pinball and grabber machines and we welcome a new era of flash games at the PRIESTSIC 6 ARCADE.

I have written some instructions to add your own game too, so why not give it a go!

Ever since I decided to run some workshops in school about some new web 2.0 tools, I have been thinking about what set of resources (physical and digital) would best make up a sort of blogging toolkit. A starter pack for teachers to make the most of the technology.

So what would you need in an ideal situation in your classroom to get the most from a blog. I would be really interested in creating an ideal situation, something that perhaps teachers new to the technology can look at in a practical sense.

So lets make a start on the digital or online resources:

> A blogging account – we have been using a free Learnerblog

> Bookmarking storage – a place to store and share your Favourites, del.icio.us is popular

> Image storage – we use a free class Flickr account so we can link to photos we use – these pop up nicely in Learnerblogs as a Flickr bar underneath where you type your post.

> We also use a wikispace for ongoing work that is less appropriate for blogging. We have been using some for poetry and other stuff. They are also very good at embedding all sorts of media, scroll to the bottom of the literacy page for some work on Bubblr and look at our history page for work in Quikmaps

What about the physical resources:

> A digital camera in the class is really useful – currently we have a Sony Mavica

> Laptops with a strong wireless connection available in the classroom full time would also be ideal. This would help facilitate and make regular the process of writing. Hopefully we are to have some soon, so I will see how they go.

> An mp3 recorder would also be great for working with and creating podcasts etc.

I would really like to hear what views you have about what you would include in this “starter toolkit”.

Image Citations:
Neil T, “Toolkit” Neil T’s Photostream. December 25th 2004 <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/2/2517652_156aaa68b4.jpg>

So many people are in a reflective mood – lots of “reviews of the year” and “best bits” going on. I don’t understand where everyone gets the time! I still have 12 draft posts that I started thinking about since September I have not written!

I suppose the title of this post suggests a mini review and one thing I will get back to later is the targets I set a while back for our progress.

But this is about real change. Real difference. John and Will have been thinking about whether or not blogging is making a real difference. I think there is a long way to go. As I commented on John’s post:

I would have to say that if we are just talking about writing, given that there are many more other aspects involved with blogging, it relies upon “audience” and “purpose”. My Google Reader is full of people who are dedicated to this great world of web 2.0, the read/write web – but it is much harder to actually attribute specific educational achievements and progress to blogging. This is generally because some time in May my class and thousands of other children will sit in a hall with a booklet and a pencil and will be tested.

This year I would like to make the most of the blogging global community to give the children more PURPOSE to their writing, to take advantage of the huge AUDIENCE they have when they blog. How/Will/If this actually happens, well I am unsure…

I am positive about having a class blog, let me explain some of the great things that have happened since having a blog in September.

• Children realise much more readily that when they blog their work may be scrutinised. They are very, very keen to get the spelling and punctuation spot on – that can only be a good thing. More please.
• Through the simple use of GeoVisitors the children know that they not only have commentators but readers from across the globe.
• One of my children said that they really enjoy blogging and told me it gives her a voice. Enough said.
• We have been able to link up with schools and children from around the world really easily.
• Reluctant readers and writers enjoy exploring other schools blogs and commenting; writing posts on our own space.

But what more is there…John says he is starting his 4th year of blogging and still only scratching the surface, not sure then where we are after only 4 months. But I am determined to exploit the power of this and other tools more readily in our work, we need more communications between schools asking for (again focusing on the writing) specific tasks to be done by others – giving us a REAL LIFE PURPOSE to the words we write. And we need the REAL AUDIENCE to be part of the writing process.

One of these great moments happened this year when we saw a post about Flic-Flacs by the 5/6P Allstars in Sydney. We read it with great interest as a class but struggled with the instructions – so we commented and that’s what we asked for, better, clearer instructions. Well they really set to it and the resulting piece of writing was just great and proves my point about REAL PURPOSE and a REAL AUDIENCE. Take a look. We then made our own and closed the loop by commenting further on these improved instructions. Take a look at some of the comments we wrote back to them.

I think this is precisely what we should be using our classroom blogs for, making it real.

Image Citations:
Zesmerelda, “Massive Change” Zesmerelda’s Photostream. October 21 2006 <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/80/275391899_50e20a57b6.jpg>

Flic Flac image from the 5/6P Allstars Blog