ICT in my Classroom

I took these pictures in 5 minutes around my classroom during an afternoon of work last week. It was great to see so many different things going on in our learning environment. There are some great examples of artwork done by the class as well as a wonderful display created by our brilliant teaching assistant [...]

On Thursday I had the opportunity to head down to London to take part in the Amplified’08 event held at NESTA HQ. In addition I was grateful to also be able to attend the MIrandaMod2 unconference at the London Institute for Education. Network of Networks The amplification of voices is the intent for Amplified08. Voices [...]

We have had our Nintendo Wii in our class for about a week now and the children have been busy making their Mii avatars. They have truly engaged with it and seem to appreciate and understand the valuable role it can play in our class to have fun and support learning. One idea I mentioned [...]

In today’s literacy lesson, the third in our Google Earth storytelling unit, we made the leap from audio or spoken parts of the story to some written work.  The use of the mapping in this story has provided us with a structure through the escape route we chose and also it has provided us with [...]

Photo by debaird Attribution-ShareAlike License In our writing sessions today I took both classes, all 60 Year 5 children, over two sessions and we continued and completed our work begun yesterday. The children were completing the task of adding 6 audio recordings to the correct placemarks in Google Earth, please see Part 2 for details [...]

Your talent scouting has hopefully provided you with a great location for your class narrative and perhaps you have even plotted the journey the main protagonists will take during the tale. What’s next? Today we continued our Google Earth storytelling as we added audio to the placemarks.  In my opinion children’s writing, whether digital or [...]

This is a series of posts about the use of Google Earth as a platform for my students to write. It was first inspired by the 21 Steps by Charles Cumming highlighted by Ewan McIntosh in a seminar at the Scottish Learning Festival. For a while I have been keen to take advantage of, and further [...]

Miles Berry has emailed me about a short survey for students about their use of technology. Miles and Terry Freedman are running a seminar at BETT 2009 (as titled above) exploring children’s informal learning outside the classroom and what implications this might have for teachers and schools. For the seminar they will be discussing:  a number [...]

I am delighted to get our Nintendo Wii installed and setup in our classroom. To get the audio working I used a small jack for the connections and ran it from the Wii into the PC’s Line In and then out again to speakers. We have one for each of the Year 5 and 6 [...]

For the first time in 2006 I saw a multi-touch device in action in the labs of Philips in Eindhoven. Just recently the wave of multi-touch devices has grown and this is especially clear in the use of mobile phones (also my iPod looks different). I suffered from iPhone envy when I was in Glasgow for the SLF [...]