ICT in my Classroom

I am excited to let you all know that I have decided to move my blog to a self hosted Wordpress platform. With the amazing help from Doug Belshaw and his constant nudging, I have made the switch, which was effortless really, to give me more flexibility for my work and ideas.

The new blog is called edte.ch

To James, Sue and everyone at Edublogs – I just want to extend my warmest thanks and appreciation for looking after me and my blog for the best part of 3 years. Your help and dedication in supporting teachers and students in blogging is amazing and I owe a great deal to the platform you helped create.

To you the reader, I would be most grateful if you would help get the message to people in any way you can (cross post this message on your blog or Twitter) about changing their subscription details to the new blog. I will post in both places for a short while to give time for people to change but hope to switch completely soon.

This blog will remain but it won’t be updated – it has had nearly 100,000 visits in the last 3 years or so which is amazing and I appreciate that many people have linked to posts here. It won’t suddenly disappear.

This is an exciting time for me and it has been fun to shape my new space, I hope you like it, however I am a little anxious about the move as you can imagine. Please help and encourage other readers along to the new blog. If you pay a visit please let me know what you think.

In last Sunday’s EdTechRoundup meeting I briefly invited my fellow educators to comment about whether I should move this blog to a self hosted one or to stick where I am. In this post I just want to articulate some of my thoughts about this issue for me and hopefully act as a place for further debate.

I have been using Edublogs since the Summer of 2006, when I first got going. There have been ups and down(time)s but overall I have been really happy with the simplicity of the service. Any minor issues I had were dealt with in the forums by James and his colleagues.

My blog, this space has been fantastic for me to explore ideas and to reflect on what is happening in my classroom. I see such a space as being part and parcel of what I do now. I am very, very grateful to those of you who read what I publish and leave comments – the conversation and connections here were the start of my own personal learning network or whatever term you prefer. But…

I was disappointed about how Edublogs introduced the adverts and how intrusive they are on the very words I wrote. In my opinion I also think that some of the blog and forum objections that were posted have been responded to in an aggressive manner. This made me question whether I should roll up my tent.

However Edublogs, a hosted service, has given me the opportunity to focus on writing about learning technology, the successes and failures and not to get caught up in the tinkering behind the scenes. I want that in the future. I don’t want to be lumbered with constant maintenance and endless WP/hosting issues. I just want to go to my blog and write. But then if I move that, I am told could be easily setup.

I also have the question about the momentum that has been built regarding this space. I don’t have thousands of subscribers but it seems lots of my posts have been linked to by a few people. I value all of those connections and realise that some of the material I have written has proven valuable – I don’t want to jeopardise that. But then it is only a little blog and people would find directions to my new home.

You may have noticed that I have paid for the ads to be removed. I needed to buy a nit comb and just get rid of them. I appreciate the service Edublogs provides and whilst I figure out what to do with this space I wanted it to be free from ads for me and for those who read it.

I am still undecided and would appreciate your thoughts.

I know this has been hotly debated and I am not looking for a repeat of the “Ads or Not” debate, just whether I should move or stay put?

Liz Davis and Lisa Thumann have nominated this blog in this year’s Edublog Awards in the Best Teacher Blog category.

I am absolutely thrilled to have even been considered and just the nomination alone gives me great encouragement to continue writing about my experiences with technology in my class.

I have been writing for a while now and, as I was explaining today to my teaching colleague Rick, the process of composing posts continues to help me reflect on my everyday teaching and to draw together idea threads that can all to often become frayed. The ensuing comments and conversations have always meant I continue to learn.

Looking through the list of other nominees and their respective blogs, it feels good to be in the mix with such company. It is particularly exciting to see my blog sharing the list with Ollie Bray and José Picardo whose blogs I enjoy and am inspired by.

The voting is now open and runs until the 21st December 2008 – so please pop along and support your favourite, if you would like to vote for this blog then you know I would be very grateful.

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.

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!

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

>>Using Wikihow for instructional writing

>>Turning Point audience voting system

>>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.

Our ability to connect has obviously greatly improved since the advent of this 2nd evolutionary web. The walls of all our classrooms have begun to tumble and we look further outward, the earth as they say has become flat.

So last week we made the most of our new links with schools in other countries. We completed a piece of writing together about “How to add a comment on a blog”. Our work in my Year 6 class was carefully planned with Jamie Wahab of the Good Shepherd School in Plumpton, Sydney, Australia – kindly assisted by Judy O’Connell. The work we have collaborated on in the past has often been ad hoc – so I was pleased to see how a more planned approach would work.

As we had planned to write on the class blog together and publish not only our notes but the final piece of writing, there was a greater focus on the literacy and writing involved. The blogging became part of the normal lesson and not a lesson in itself. The technology disappeared. For a while anyway Jamie ran into problems with Wordpress and Learnerblogs and an issue with our class blog’s comments emerged from the week (which is yet to be solved)

Nonetheless I suppose there is an important question of whether or not the blogging and links with other schools added value to the week’s work in class?

I think that it undoubtedly did. 100%. As I had planned, we drew attention to the connection we were going to make with teachers and children in Australia (Audience) and how we were writing specifically to help them (Purpose).

I am looking forward to sharing more of our class work with other schools in the future.

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?