ICT in my Classroom

Today was Day 1 in terms of our laptop use in the classroom and we hit the ground running, so to speak – just how I like it. I am sure you have had days like today, when it is a bit of a whirlwind from 8am right through to 4pm – where does the time go? Today the sands just seemed to slip through my fingers! Not to say it was one of the best days for a long time.

We now have 8 Toshiba laptops running happily in both of our Year 5 classes and today we kicked off with a simple word level activity in literacy. One group worked on Race to Ramses! a game about combining prefixes and suffixes to create new words. I have taught with laptops in the past but the new technology (laptops and WAPs) is just so much more reliable. And it is great seeing children completely engaged with one to one technology supporting their learning, I am so pleased to see it in the hands of the pupils – which is the whole point. You might think “web game, one group…not really setting the world alight” – but I suppose it is a culmination of a lot of work and to finally get things in front of children, reliable and solid feels like a big achievement.

Needless to say in the afternoon we swam into deeper waters and I’d like to think we pushed the envelope a bit…

The morning was successful and the children enjoyed working on their own machine and many children asked for the web address for the game – so we will have to get our del.icio.us account sorted or get them into their Google accounts soon!

In the afternoon we were looking at some science work we have begun regarding healthy living and exercise. Today we explored pulse rates and we used an online spreadsheet to share our results, hence the title of the post. (This work is similar to some online spreadsheet action we had last year with my Year 6 class) I decided to use a Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Docs application for a while (in fact I have a few grumbles about that – more soon) but you could have easily used EditGrid as an alternative – I set the sheet up so that all of the children’s names from both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other columns were labelled, “Resting Pulse1, Resting Pulse 2…” It was in these cells that the kids added their resting pulse after counting for 30 seconds and doubling.

I then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login on all 8 laptops per class that I put around the room – so in effect I logged in 16 times (plus my PC and SMARTBoard, so 17) to the same document from different locations. We talked a little about how to find our pulse and then asked the children to record 10 instances of their resting rate into the spreadsheet. It was great! With the live update feature we were able to see individual results popping up all over the place and even from next door in Rick’s class who were doing the same. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent – even with 17 simultaneous users on a single login. The children really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a great overview of not only the class year group working together, but also to the sorts of data people were adding. Children from the other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning the validity of results from kids in my class.

The children had a tendency to sit with the laptop in front of them, in small groups rather than freely moving around the classroom and accessing any machine. But I suppose that is due to the nature of task.

Within the space of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected approximately 600 individual results all in one place. No doubt they will be quicker next time. This method of data collection also allows us the ability to then manipulate the results afterwards, working out averages of the whole year group etc. I would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable kit in your classroom, we have already said that it will be an excellent data entry method for our maths lessons on data handling.

It is now 12 hours since I started the day at school and I am just about coming up for air, no don’t worry I am not at school still! – but it is great to reflect here on these sorts of days. One to remember and I hope you might take some of these ideas and use it yourself.

In my class assembly on Thursday I am going to talk to my children about the missing adventurer Steve Fossett and how with the use of technology I have managed to help look for him. Even though I am some 5000 miles away from where his plane is meant to have been flying, with the use of technology I, we can help.

I sat down and following a post in my Google Reader I went to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and after registering, searched for Steve’s plane or the wreckage of it using Google Earth. Anyone can register and help look – you are given a HIT, a Human Intelligence Task – in this instance to review a small satellite image for any clues to his whereabouts. You are also given a precise set of coordinates, I put these into the “Fly-To” in Google Earth and took a look at the exact location. Brand new, up to date satellite imagery needs to be opened via a KML file and then it is a matter of scouring the small area as part of your task.

Once you have taken a look go back to the Amazon site and complete the HIT by checking the appropriate choice. It took me about 15 minutes to look at about 10 distinct areas almost 1 square kilometer of searching.

This is a human story that has a history – as Jim Gray, when lost at sea, was also searched for unfortunately without the right outcome. I hope that something good comes from this deployment of human and technological effort. There is obviously hundreds of square kilometers to search, but if everyone does a little bit perhaps there still may be a positive outcome.

Image: ‘Spirit Freedom‘
www.flickr.com/photos/15572047@N00/324409978

First day back with the children today which is always good, finally getting them in to the classroom to see whether your furniture arranging was totally futile or not! I was pleased to see with my new Year 5 class that I have more space than I first thought I would. Perhaps I was imagining my Year 6 lot from last year!

So we got straight into talking about the class blog and as I did last year we posted our agreed set of class rules on our blog for you all to read. Those who have been following this space for a while will know that I used to have the Priestsic6 blog – that has now been passed onto Sarah Stamp the teacher taking over my Year 6 role. I have in turn inherited the Priestsic 5 blog which was begun by Mr O’Brien last year.

As ever we would love to hear your comments about our class rules and any connections you would like to make with our class of 9-10 year old kids. Our class laptops arrive tomorrow so I hope to increase the amount of blogging work we do in Year 5 with this technology at our fingertips – perhaps we can get reading your class blogs very soon.

Following on from my post regarding the use of Flickr I was kindly sent a link to FlickrCC, a search engine drawing solely from Flickr’s Creative Commons licensed images. After a quick look it is easy to use – your results are presented in a wall of thumbnail images which is really clear, gives you a range of sizes to download and an attribution link as well – making it all very easy to find great quality imagery. Many thanks to Joseph Williams at Sunrise Elementary School, Glendale Arizona for the link.

I hope you all had a good back to school day/s – and don’t forget to leave an encouraging comment for my young bloggers – we will be checking tomorrow!

Well the summer holidays are over and here in the UK we are back to school this week for a new academic year.

This is a brief post to say how helpful I have just found the Flickr resource. We are doing some short work on settings, as do most year groups, and I found myself some belting pictures courtesy of the Flickr community. Some of us may not be able to use Flickr in schools but we can still take advantage of the excellent photographic resource that it is.

So I searched for things like “moonlight” and “road” as we are focusing on The Highwayman and there are some great images. A few tips to help you get started with your search:

1. My number one tip has to be to filter your search to only include Creative Commons licensed images where you have permission to download and use the images from the owner. Next to the search button click on “Advanced Search” and scroll down to the Creative Commons options at the bottom of the page, checking what you need.
2. Once you have a set of results, filter them according to “Most Interesting” to give you a set of popular well constructed, interesting images.
3. Use the “Thumbnails” view to allow you to see lots of images to help you find what you want quicker.
4. If you find an interesting image take a look at the owners photostream, their set of images. You may discover other pictures of similar quality or versions of the one you liked.
5. Also search the “Groups” as these often collate images under one topic so a quick look for moonlight in groups comes up with a list of groups dedicated to the art of photographing the moon etc!! And this group which has some nice images in it.

This is one of my favourite images I found and we will be using this tomorrow for the kids to explore and add some sensory description to.

What do you think of it?