Next week in our literacy lessons we are going to utilising a piece of content referenced in the new UK Primary Strategy. It is a short film called The Piano by animator Aidan Gibbons, take a look.
It is intended to be used by Year 5 children but our Year 6 kids will not have the opportunity to use this great little bit of film so I have adapted the original planning for older kids as we continue our poetry work.
By the end of the week I hope that the children will have a narrative poem that illustrates what occurs in the film. Further work could be done with the children working in Movie Maker and adding their narrated poem on top of the film.
Please let me know if anyone would find the planning useful.
I was pleased to see the final instalment of my contribution to the SMARTBoard Lesson Podcasts published the Sunday before last. Ben and I discuss the future of the IWB and a couple of lesson ideas I contributed.
It seems that it will be an interesting year regarding the release and development of interactive surface technologies. Now it seems there is a mixture of large players in the market all of which could concievably affect the look of our classrooms in the not too distant future.
As you may have read I have been tracking these products for more than a year now – four major stories seem to be most dominant.
I suppose the question is no longer about whether or not we will see this type of technology in education but, what form will it take and who will be able to back it?
Last Thursday night I presented to Ivanhoe Grammar School about the uses of ICT in my classroom. But this was no ordinary professional development event, Ivanhoe is in Melbourne, Australia.
We conducted the net cast using a free trial on some desktop conferencing software and used Skype for the voice call. It was quite a challenge for me as you don’t have the ability to see the faces of your audience so you don’t know when to go back over things or just shut-up fo a minute! Joseph Papaleo helped organise the event for his school and from his responses it seemed to be a success.
During the presentation I covered a range of topics, giving practical examples of their use in my classroom -
>>Blogs
> Writing for a real audience and purpose
> Visitors and comments
>>Google Earth
> Starting the day with a “Wow!”
> Going beyond geography
> Being an information tourist
>>MS Photostory – an alternative presentation tool
I would just like to thank Joseph and the staff at Ivanhoe for inviting me to present and I hope that although the line was a bit poor you all were able to take something that could make an impact in your classroom.
All you have to do is choose three spheres that add up to 10 before they scroll off the bottom of the screen, if you get a total that is greater than 10 you lose part of the life at the bottom. You can make other numbers by combining smaller integers. It would be a great little starter for a maths lesson to get the kids brains working – works really well on the IWB.
Following a link to my blog from Stephen Hall at Tech Waves I unearthed a rather strong opinion against the idea of 1 to 1 laptop projects in the US. His post “Laptops are a costly Mistake for Schools” gave a me a good dose of reality just as I am on the brink of finalising our first step in this direction. I was curious to read articles here and here, that clearly illustrated the potential ills of such projects on such a wide scale.
Nevertheless I am determined that our approach is different, as I commented, we do not have deep pockets nor are we going to only measure standards after a year and say it was a failure or a success. We know from our own experiences that such projects are much more complex and often have unplanned impacts.
It was good to read a reply by Dennis Harter to these views and I truly value the variety of opinions that are so easy to access via our blogs. It helps so much as a subject leader to hear these comments and debate such real issues borne of real experiences.
Some of the main differences between many of the US models and our own is:
Age of the children – I work in a primary school, so problems evolving from a growing technical expertise within the student body will be limited.
Scale - we will be beginning this project with only 40 odd machines, no doubt this will stretch some of our resources, however it is not in the realms of 1000’s of machines to manage. Lessons we learn from this will help to shape the future of the project.
Focus - For a long time my headteacher and I have been saying that we want more choice for the children when it comes to technology. So that they eventually will be able to choose the most appropriate tech for their own learning. I believe our measure of success may be different to many of the US schools cited in those articles.
Access - in many of the articles there were huge ramifications from allowing machines to go home. For us the laptops will remain in the classroom for those children’s use. No sharing, no trolleys the responsibility for them will be the teacher’s and the children’s. As they will not be leaving the site we will hopefully reduce accidental damage and other related incidents.
With 3 quotations currently in my possession the next step for me will be to meet with my headteacher and discuss the details and what follows.
Back in December I posted about my thoughts on investing in a pool of laptops for classes at school. Well it has been nearly 5 months since those initial thoughts and since then I have managed to pin down the make and series of machine we want and I have a much clearer understanding for the sort of resource we want.
The most important thing for me is the variables that may affect their performance in the classroom and I want to pre-empt these so that the classteachers and children can confidently turn to the technology when they want. The 16 SMARTBoards we have were installed after many weeks of intense research and price hunting. It has been much harder to find the right hardware with this laptop project, for a start. There are so many machines to choose from.
The problems that I envisage (from experience and advice):
Battery life – can they be used successfully throughout the working school day? Do we need spare batteries?
Wireless strength – we have an old building that is not particularly conducive to wi-fi.
Ongoing maintenance – how will problems be dealt with when we only have a part time technician?
Our SMARTBoard project had far fewer variables than this one and so far there has not been a single problem with the SMARTBoards, in what will be 4 years of use this coming December. I want that sort of reliability from the laptops. Inevitably there will be problems, and I am not daft enough to think it will be all plain sailing – I just want to solve them, or at least anticipate them before they happen. Hopefully my considered choices now will help smooth the user experience when and if we finally purchase some.
I say “if” because I was brought back into reality after reading Stephen Hall’s post ‘Laptops are a Costly Mistake for Schools’. It was such a contrasting view on laptop projects and I am curious as to the reasons that such schemes have been considered a failure. I believe that at my school our approach is slightly different in the sense that the children will have limited access within school hours, they will not be taking the machines home. We are looking into this technology as it is part of our ICT vision not to directly address standards – as I have stated previously:
We would like our children to have a uninhibitied personal choice when to use technology; whether that be a calculator or sharing an online spreadsheet on a laptop.
I just sometimes think looking at standards or levels or grades or percentages is the wrong thing when deciding whether the project has had an impact. They did it here in the UK with interactive whiteboards. The impact is so much wider.
Not many tests are taken on laptops are they?
A few months back I was lucky enough to stumble upon Ben and Joan’s Podcast. Predominantly about the use of the SMARTBoard in classrooms, but often branching off into the wider world of Web2.0 etc I really enjoyed listening to the show.
Ben asked me after an initial contact to share my experiences through a series of interviews and so far they have casted 2 out of three, take a listen and let me know what you think. (Show notes from SMARTBoard Lesson Podcast site)
Tom Barrett, Assistant Headmaster at Priestsic Primary and Nursery School, shares his lesson about using the SMARTBoard to create interactive board games. He also talks about the process of implementing SMARTBoards in his school.
It has been a whole month and more since I last posted to my blog. You may be wondering why? Well it has been a busy few weeks since the Easter break, so much going on. My son, George, is on the very brink of walking for himself and he seems so small and vulnerable when he stands there on his own. He of course had his 1st birthday at the end of April which was great fun, and most of my time out of school has been taken up marvelling at his daily progress.
As for school – well it is busy as ever. We are nearing the crunch week of SATs exams with my Year 6 children and needless to say we are busy revising and getting ready. So what role does ICT have when it comes to this time of the year?
Well we have continued to use ICT and specific websites to support the children in their revision of the key subjects, especially maths and science. As you may have already seen from a previous post, we are using Turning Point voting keypads to work on our fast mental recall of times tables and on Friday we completed a 50 question (5000 point!) mega test on our 6, 7, 8 and 9 times tables. The children get so motivated, it is great fun.
Next academic year I am going to look into the procurement of another set of voting keypads. Turning Point is a simple, effective technology using Powerpoint that I like. However Smart Technologies, the manufacturer of Smart Boards, have developed their own voting system called Senteo. When I last visited the BETT show in London SMART were wielding the Turning Point system on their stand and I remember asking the question if SMART were going to develop their own so that it integrates with SMART Notebook. They clearly have.
So do we go for Senteo or Turning Point?
It looks like the Senteo devices will be more expensive to buy than the TP keypads. I have also seen some decent offers for buying a class set of TP keypads and getting the second half price. This purchase can also be done through the E Learning Credits budget which is useful.
I suppose the question is whether or not the new SMART devices will bring new features (they have an LCD screen allowing greater feedback and flexibility) that provide value for money.
I would be most interested in any initial thoughts from colleagues who have had the opportunity to use both systems and may be able to shed some light on the advantages and disadvantages of both.
