ICT in my Classroom

Over the next few weeks at school, once we return from half term, we will be learning about writing effective instructional texts. (Year 6 – 10/11 year olds) I want to begin to make the most of the links that emerge so readily from blogging so I have planned to work with Jamie Wahab in Sydney, Australia.

The children from his school will be part of our audience for some shared writing we will be doing on “How To Write a Blog Comment”. We will also be producing the writing for some novice bloggers in my school.

I think that we cannot make the most of these international links and the whole essence of the flat earth unless we put into place some simple curriculum planning to embrace it. So I have planned a week of literacy lessons where the first part of the lesson – shared writing / reading – will be about constructing effective instructions for the title explained above.

• Literacy Planning Document (Google Docs)
  

It will include a range of web 2.0 based skills – including, Gliffy, Flickr and of course our class blogs. I have begun by adding a flash file to our class blog that I will use on Monday as an introduction. Perhaps the most important aspect is establishing with the children in my class that there will be a real audience for this work, who and where they are. That will be key.

Although this is a small scale project I just want to clarify the details here:

Our Aims:

• For the children who are involved to become more effective writers of instructions.
• For the children to have a greater awareness of AUDIENCE and PURPOSE.
• For the children to select appropriate style and form to suit a specific audience and purpose. (NLS T22)

Why do this using class blogs?

• Not only have we been able to establish worldwide links from our blogs but as soon as we have published our work it has a similar varied audience.
• Writing on the blog allows other children to interact with the writing process, to leave constructive criticism and to work collaboratively towards a successful piece of writing.
• The audience becomes part of the editing process.

What dialogue will occur?

• We will publish our work throughout the week including the notes we make using Gliffy or other applications. The set of instructions will also be published for others to follow on our class blog.
• The intended audience can leave feedback on the success or otherwise of the instructions we write as a class – there will be time on the Friday for us to explore some of these and to edit the writing if necessary.
• The act of commenting constructively will be a important skill for the children visiting and reading to develop.

This is not just an exclusive project, so I would very much welcome anyone to help us make it an effective unit of work – feel free to leave a comment here indicating who and where you are and if you would like to be involved. Or just explore some of the work published over at Priestsic6 from Monday onwards and leave a comment over the next few weeks.

Since the staff at my school have begun blogging the questions surrounding the pedagogical practises in the classroom that incorporate blogging have been spiralling amongst us. For many, including the teachers of early years classes, it seemed a very solitary activity with the children sitting and the teacher typing.

It is clearly an important stage in the development of our school blogs. I have read a small number of articles that sound out the fact that there really is no hard evidence of the widespread use of blogging to improve standards etc. I suspect, in my humble opinion, that there has not been enough of us to ask the questions. Not enough classes actually engaging with the technology to make it part of the daily fabric of the classroom. There will always be a form of playing and dabbling with the tech but as one of my colleagues asks:

“How does blogging actually improve what I am already doing well?”

So after half term I will be working with my school to take our blogs offline. As in what can we do as teachers to incorporate the use of our class blogs into the rich learning environments we have already created.

John has already taken a small step towards this with a page on my Classroom Blogging Wiki (newly reorganised) called Classroom Organisation. as he puts it:

Recently on my blog I was wondering ‘How long does it take your kids to post?‘ and had a few replies. I though it might be a good idea to collects the various ways of organising blogging in the primary classroom.

This however is specific to working online – I want to collect ideas about creating opportunities for all the children in the class to interact with the blog even if they are not online. So back to simple things like a writing table, that many early years classes in the UK have,  leaving a piece of writing from another class blog there for them to look at and write a comment on some paper. I suppose it is also an effort to embed the vocabulary into the class as well. A post-it note wall so the kids can write ideas for the class blog on.

In the UK we have something called guided reading during our literacy hour – perhaps children could be working with an adult to read another class blog and at the end of the 15 mins leave a comment written together.

I understand that this last example is online work but it is blogging where we might not consider it. I think that we need to look at not only our curriculum but the learning environment itself – so the children can see their blog (and others) around them, not just if they sit in front of a computer.

We need to bridge the gap between writing online and writing with a pen, between seeing their blog online and seeing it offline, and perhaps we can begin this by creating a rich learning environment that encapsulates the diverse learning opportunities that blogging brings.

Over the last week my class have been voting for their new wordpress theme on our class blog. We decided upon 5 themes including the current one and I set up a poll on our wikispace so that the class could vote for their favourite. I used PollDaddy to create the poll and embedded it into our wiki cover page, with some little thumbnails of the themes to help the kids remember. It was a great way for the children to personalise their blog and to make a contribution.

I have been astounded by the response – I deliberately left the voting open to multiple votes just to give a it a bit more scope. I expected the kids to enjoy doing it but the response was so far beyond my expectations!

There were 2567 total votes!!  Take a look.

It seemed a small campaign sprung to life during my lunchtime bloggers clubs on Thursday and Friday! Children were calling for supporters and the two themes that emerged as potential winners battled it out, staunch defenders of one theme soon caved in to the massive pressure and swapped sides cancelling out their previous votes.

China Red emerged the winner with 62% of the vote and 1589 individual votes. So we have a new look.
I know the kids were just voting and voting again, but it was a lot of fun and there was so much buzz about with my kids. I know everyone voted and consequently I now know I could use the polls in other ways.

One boy turned to me, as he repeatedly voted China Red into an insurmountable lead, and said how it would be great if we used these to help decide what we can do in class. So we came up with one idea of having a free hour session late on in the week and setting up a poll with a few options like extra PE or art. Let the children decide what they would like to do. Their own democratic timetable!

So I will be exploring two things and would appreciate any help,

• Can you embed a similar poll directly into a Learnerblog post – as opposed to doing it on the wiki? (however successful it was)
• What other curriculum based applications are there for the open use of a poll such as this?

Two boys from Year 4 just about burst into my classroom this afternoon proclaiming that they had been left a comment from a teacher in Australia! They were the very picture of excitement and I was too, we loaded up their class blog and read the comment. I said that they needed to go and find where Geelong was on an map, they replied, in a very matter of fact way…

“We have already looked it up on Google Earth.”

Wow, missed that one. This is one very happy ICT Coordinator. Thanks John

Some new ones, why not drop them an encouraging comment to help them get started.

Year 2 Class Blogs.

http://priestsic22.learnerblogs.org/

http://priestsic2.learnerblogs.org

Year 4 Class Blog

http://priestsic4.learnerblogs.org

I know the children would be excited to hear from you.

Tonight I delivered a staff meeting that introduced the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. It was really well received by all and I began by explaining that the need for such a tool had been highlighted in responses to subject audits which coordinators had carried our for the SEF (Self Evaluation) and wider school improvement planning.

Del.ici.ous was an obvious solution to the need to have a more structured approach to online resources. I also believe that we will benefit from other school’s similar commitment to the use of social bookmarking. So not only do we get a better system for our own online resources that we know and love, but get to see other school’s take on it too.

So far I have got a handful of schools that have begun using del.icio.us as a whole school resource, and I would really appreciate anymore that you know of so that we can benefit from a greater network of resources.

We are priestsic on del.icio.us

For the session I produced some simple cards that I laminated and trimmed down so that staff can stick them up close to their school computer. One explained the login details and the other was a simple summary of how you can easily add a new bookmark.

The resources are on a computer at school in MS Word format but I will publish them tomorrow so that you can use them in your own staff meetings etc.

I must just thank David Muir for his excellent Simply del.icio.us guide that I directed my staff towards at the end of the session.

Today we were writing a simple flow diagram for an explanatory text about drive belts. So I planned to use Gliffy, the online diagram tool, to do the job. I was really pleased with how things worked and the user friendly nature of it all.

It is a free to register site and has all the functionality you would expect. I was happy with it but I did ask myself whether I could have got similar results using SMART Notebook? What was I doing that is different?

Well the transformation of the activity lies in it’s potential. Today I scratched the surface and we just used it to create a diagram, but when you plan to collaborate on a diagram with others – then it becomes a different game entirely. Two classes could collaborate on the same diagram, maybe two classes in the same year group (same school) and then from the wider community too.

There is also the inherent “Share” feature as with many web 2.0 tools nowadays – the ability to embed into websites or blogs using, in this case, java or linking quickly to an image file of various sizes. I found this very useful.

I did find the resizing of text to be a little fiddly it could do with being able to resize along with the shape it lies in.

The images you can see in my example were straight from the Image Search tool in the left panel – which is a nice touch, being able to search right there. (You can also upload your own images to the left panel to insert)

All in all a good tool to have in the locker when exploring this sort of diagram authoring.

Before Christmas I contributed to a publication from the ICT professional body called NAACE. The magazine is all about “Sharing Success” and I was pleased to explain some of the work I have done with Bubblr+Flickr during a literacy lesson for the second issue.

However for some reason it’s publication passed under the radar, anyway they have produced 3 issues so far and are well worth dipping into.

Take a look over at the NAACE site for more details.

(You may need to be using Internet Explorer to download the pdf files, they don’t seem to like the Fox!)

Another show is ready to listen to and it couldn’t be easier to get it! All you have to do is go to the GCast player in the left sidebar and click on POSTS – now choose the top show for the latest.

This week we spoke with Clay Burell, a teacher at the Korean International School. Find out more about Clay by visiting his Professional Blog or his Classroom Blog.

The conversation centred on his work with wikis in the classroom and some projects he is working on. I hope you enjoy it – let me know what you think.