ICT in my Classroom

So you have scribbled and annotated all over a numberline, in a maths lesson, and now want some children to come and work on the board on another example. How can you quickly get rid of all of those scribbles.

This is a tip to erase all of your annotations quickly. (Not just in maths!)

Download Video: Posted by tbarrett at TeacherTube.com.

I hope it proves a useful tip. Don’t forget to take a look at the shared Google presentation on IWB tips (now up to 10) – if you have one to add just email me and I will include you as a collaborator.

I just wanted to say a big thankyou to you the readers of this blog for helping me reach an  important milestone. Over 10,000 unique visitors to this blog since I added my stat counter about a year ago. I know that may seem a pittance compared to stats for other spaces you have churning away in your RSS reader, but for me it is a real achievement.

This blog has been the single most important professional development choice I have taken. My appreciation for this space has changed since I began writing in the late summer of 2006 (wow that was only last year!) I now consider it to be an integral part of my career and a central point for who I am as a reflective teacher.

It is a personal resource, a classroom history, a technical and pedagogical guide, a sounding board, a conversation, a growing network, a billboard signpost for who I am as a teacher and it still remains a wonderful, reflective space for me to explore my ideas and experiences of ICT in my classroom.

I now begin to understand the power of the personal learning network that has emerged from fellow professionals I have encountered, as a result of this space. I am still keen for this network to grow and hope you can continue supporting my reflections, through your comments and conversations.

One thing that still amazes me is that out of those 10,000 different people I have not met a single one. Skype video does not count. If you can’t see their legs you have not met them! So my challenge in the next year is to meet more of you face to face.

Big thanks to Noel Jenkins and John Johnston for starting me out on this road, those were the first blogs I ever read.

Great to see a few people have already added to the Google presentation about sharing tips and techniques you have found successful with the IWB. Please continue to add to it, we are on #6 today already! I would love to see 50 different tips before Christmas!

Here is a video I have made tonight called “The Double Tap” which supports tip number 6.
Download Video: Posted by tbarrett at TeacherTube.com.
Hope you find it useful, and feel inspired to add your own pearls of wisdom, just let me know your email and I will add you as a collaborator.

Sharing is good. I have started a simple Google presentation to allow IWB users to share a simple idea that has proved successful in the classroom. I would like this presentation to grow and grow as more and more people contribute their ideas. We can then all use this resource to help provide professional development for colleagues in our schools, districts, local authorities…

The premise is simple – you have one slide to explain one idea, in addition you have one image to help illustrate (if you wish). Let your ideas be for any group of teachers or children, from beginners to advanced users of the IWB – don’t be constricted by the IWB type, just as long as it’s a useful idea – I am sure we will all find a way to do it! Write about a simple tip or a longer project – you choose. Contribute one or contribute ten! I have made a start – the process is easy.

1. Go to the presentation and take a look at was has been contributed. If you would like to be added as a collaborator send me an email (thomasgeorgebarrett [at] googlemail [dot] com – or use the contact tab at the top of this page) I will invite you in as a collaborator.
2. Add your one slide, one idea and one image.
3. Change the presentation title slide to match the number of ideas.

It will have a humble beginning – currently the presentation is called:

“One Interesting Way to use your Interactive Whiteboard”

Please help me change the title and create a supportive document that provides valuable, road tested ideas and tips for IWB users, new and old. I am sure we will all learn something.

Image: ‘Sharing‘ www.flickr.com/photos/33128961@N00/142455033

I have just finished talking to Ben and Joan from the SMARTBoard Lesson Podcast as they have been recording a round table discussion for their 100th show. Joining us was Chris Betcher from Sydney, Australia.

We discussed a few questions about SMARTBoards in schools:

1) Is there a SMARTBoard/iwb pedagogy?

2) Does SMARTBoard/iwb uncover or amplify other pedagogies? What does it show and when?

3) What does effective SMARTBoard/iwb usage look like?

4) What is the next step for SMARTBoard/iwb usage for: a beginning user, an intermediate user, an advanced user? (Also what makes a beginning user, an intermediate user, and an advanced user?)

It was excellent to talk with fellow educators regarding the use of IWBs in the classroom and to share our varied experiences.

If you have never listened to the show I would highly recommend it as there is always something to take away. Congraulations Ben and Joan for 100 shows!

My favourite web based tool I am using in my classroom at the moment is Visuwords. It is a dictionary/thesaurus/etymology visualisation tool which uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. It works wonderfully with a SMARTBoard as you can move the nodes about and shift things around to help clarify a connection. There are many many applications for this in the classroom and here are just a few I have been pondering.

Define key vocabulary from learning objectives.
So you have shared with the children the learning objectives for the session and now you want to clarify any vocabulary they should/need to know. You could even have a link directly from that word to the site. For example you could explore the meaning of “significant” from the Y5 Literacy Framework objective:

• Read and compare stories by significant children’s authors.

Search for the word and ask your children to explore what they can see, can we find any synonyms that will help us define it. Roll the mouse over a connected node to see a pop up definition. Relate it back to your objective – this would work well in a plenary session too.

Explore new vocabulary that you find.
I love exploring new vocabulary with my children. They see my enthusiasm and it becomes infectious, we have a Wow words board where they can put up interesting words they find in their reading books and elsewhere, this changes all the time. This week we were doing some work on an extract from A Christmas Carol and as we read it we noted some words we wanted to find out about. Ruddy, intimation, mourner. I ran the searches in Visuwords as a plenary.

Explore word derivation.
Visuwords does a great job of showing the children how interconnected words are and one part to explore is the derivation of vocabulary. The link you are looking for is the dashed line (you will see from this explained in the key) which shows the roots of the word you are exploring. Not quite as good as a full blown etymological dictionary but you can see the connections.

Play a word journey game.
This is a favourite in my classroom at the moment and is similar to a word association game. The children are given a starter word and they take it on a journey, thinking of a connected word and recording each step. You ask for where they ended up – “So you started with GIANT and ended up with FACTORY.” This sits nicely with Visuwords as you can expand the visual network by double clicking on a node. Run the search for “Fairytale” and see if you can get to “Fake” – lots of possibilities to explain and discuss these connections.

Experience the links between words.
There is a clear difference between the various links that are displayed and the graphical key below the map area explains these connections. There are 19 different types of links that may be displayed and I certainly wouldn’t expect to use them all or to ask my children to understand them. But the key links I would be interested in are: “is a word for”, “is similar to”, “derivation” and “opposes”. Try running a search for “style” for a broad map straight off the bat.

Show the depth and complexity of meaning.
Sticking with the results for “style” – you can very easily display how some words in the English language have a broad range of meanings and possible uses. So in these results you could highlight to the children how many different shades of meaning there are for this simple word. Another good example of this is the word “say” – very simple on the outset but if you run the search you will see it is complex in it’s meaning and usage.

Explore different word types.
Visuwords uses 4 colours to display the 4 main word groups. Green – verbs, Blue – Nouns, Orange – adjectives and Red – adverbs. This proves to be a very effective visual aid to writing as children can quickly generate adjectives from a search. So if you punch in “happy” there is displayed a wondrous tangle of synonyms the children could use in there writing. Of course they can roll over these and see the meaning of the new words if they wish. The combination of data and the way it is presented makes this a very powerful tool to support writing.

Discover more information than you expect to.
Do a search for “banana” and now double click “edible fruit” – Wow, all of sudden you and the children are exploring topic related information. From the original node you have the definition, the plant group it belongs to, other banana plant types. Following the other links you have this great web of edible fruit of which our initial search obviously belongs to. I just learned of breadfruit and jackfruit and pitahaya! Cool! I just did a quick search for “puma” and followed the “wildcat” node and you get a similar result. This could prove to be an interesting research tool if used in the correct manner.

Just enjoy it!
Dictionaries are never this much fun! There is something strangely hypnotic about the way the word nodes splurge outwards and the network stretches and skews. As connections are made, new pathways and relevance is shown. Drag the background screen around to move around the word map. Don’t forget the scalable version that can fill the browser window or to use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out as you work. The latter point is good to focus the children’s attention on one specific part of the map. See if the children can find a word with the most nodes, the most links!

It has been great exploring some of these ideas in more depth as I have been writing this post and consider this as an excellent addition to my online classroom toolkit.

What successful experiences of this tool have you or your colleagues had? How have you used it in your classroom? 

At this time of year I like to look at this great resource in Google Earth 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 layered into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.
Open this Placemark

Take a look at my wikispace for classroom uses of Google Earth for further resources. 

A short while back I was buoyed by the use of Google Spreadsheets in our science lessons. The children enjoyed the fact that we were sharing data and it added an edge to their motivation. They questioned the data that popped up as the sheet updated, they enquired about it’s ownership and accuracy. However this week sharing a Google presentation did not run so well!

I assumed we would have a similar experience and the sharing feature would work just as well. Groups were created in each class they were assigned a planet (we are looking at the solar system) and after a short intro, asked to explore our del.icio.us links and create one slide (or more if needed) in a ready made presentation. 3 children were working on a wireless laptop. It just never really got off the ground and I found my self firefighting access, update, deletion and wireless problems. Admittedly the technology got in the way of the learning  and it proved a disappointing afternoon. You really do win some, lose some. There were of course some groups that worked without any issues. So what went wrong – I think that it is important to try and reflect on the successes and failures on this blog so that I learn from it and others do as well.

1. We put a lot of pressure on the wireless network in the session as 16 machines were active and Google docs regularly refreshes so the web connection was very busy.
2. Some kids worked on the class PC and they seemed to work a lot smoother.
3. The children accessed del.icio.us links and these included a NASA image gallery so that could well have chewed up the bandwidth a bit.
4. Google presentations deals with different data than the spreadsheets, whole slides need to be updated sometimes with images etc – not just a number in a spreadsheet.
5. The children had to start from scratch and make new slides for their planet – some mix ups went on here.
6. All of the children were using one Google domain login – not sure if this hindered.

On reflection the idea is still a good one. Children all contributing to one presentation that has a common theme. They all have a piece of the jigsaw. But I think that we just asked too much of the wireless network, it certainly was far more than we have ever done. I am uncertain if the same login made an issue, I may try out some individual account logins with a similar activity.

I think that the most important thing to learn from this is that sharing Google Presentations works smoother when on hard wired PCs because it deals with a larger data set than spreadsheets.

Taking risks is a good thing. If I had never planned such an activity I would not have learned about how differently the application performs in the classroom. Were I to do it again in the future I would feel better prepared. Lesson learned.