ICT in my Classroom

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.

Unfortunately it has been a while since I have been fit to write as I have been off of work, away from school with a nasty bout of tonsilitis. On a course of penicillin tablets for it now which tastes completely rancid by the way! I am feeling back to my normal self at the moment and have had a full week in school which has been busy as ever.

Throughout this week in our Year 5 classes I have planned to utilise our class Diigo account for some simple comprehension work on instructions. Diigo is a tool that allows you to add annotations and sticky notes to any web page – making the most text heavy site partly interactive. As the children roll over these highlights or sticky notes they can read the pop-up message or comment. I have used it to pose some questions about an instructional text on making a healthy smoothie. The text itself is on the excellent WikiHow website and is in fact a piece of shared writing I completed last year with my year 6 class when we did instructional text too.

The children have been working on laptops during the group time in our literacy lessons at this task. The activity has rotated throughout the week so all the children can experience it. Once the children have read a question they can view the text immediately in front of them and they have no need to navigate away to a different window etc. In an ideal world I would have liked the children to answer using something like Google Notebook which is still very much my intention. But I thought that I needed to take things slowly and explore the use of Diigo first. So the children answered the questions in their jotters – a more nostalgic notebook shall we say!

They have enjoyed the task this week and have been engaged and motivated – the problems seem to be the tendency to move the sticky notes around the screen, so the order has been a bit lost. One or two notes have also mysteriously disappeared. I have been signing into the Diigo account so we can see our private annotations, but I suppose that if the notes were public and we didn’t sign in then no alterations could be made. They could be viewed but would be protected. Mmm I will test this out.

del.icio.us has proven to be an invaluable tool with so much constant access to technology with our laptops in lessons. Our Year 6 teachers are getting stuck in too, so our school’s weblink resource will no doubt begin to grow and grow. A great tool for any school that I cannot recommend highly enough!

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.

Tonight I delivered a staff meeting that introduced the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. It was really well received by all and I began by explaining that the need for such a tool had been highlighted in responses to subject audits which coordinators had carried our for the SEF (Self Evaluation) and wider school improvement planning.

Del.ici.ous was an obvious solution to the need to have a more structured approach to online resources. I also believe that we will benefit from other school’s similar commitment to the use of social bookmarking. So not only do we get a better system for our own online resources that we know and love, but get to see other school’s take on it too.

So far I have got a handful of schools that have begun using del.icio.us as a whole school resource, and I would really appreciate anymore that you know of so that we can benefit from a greater network of resources.

We are priestsic on del.icio.us

For the session I produced some simple cards that I laminated and trimmed down so that staff can stick them up close to their school computer. One explained the login details and the other was a simple summary of how you can easily add a new bookmark.

The resources are on a computer at school in MS Word format but I will publish them tomorrow so that you can use them in your own staff meetings etc.

I must just thank David Muir for his excellent Simply del.icio.us guide that I directed my staff towards at the end of the session.

Last week was a fantastic week at school for conversations about new online (web 2) technologies. Nothing massively ground-breaking just a good step in the right direction.

On Monday I met with Pete and Cathy who work in year 5 and we talked about a recent Literacy subject audit that we carried out, in line with the ICT self-review framework here in the UK, that showed we needed to give staff better access to online resources. We have many floating staff, who cover classes in other year groups and also absences. The ability to access all of your bookmarks from any computer is a clear advantage.

So I introduced del.icio.us to them and we are going to populate our school account with the bookmarks we have before we introduce it to the rest of the staff – having two colleagues already in the know is helpful to me, so that I can draw on their experiences and it is not just me preaching my insane ideas.

We have got a clear tagging system that we will introduce:

• Key Stage: Foundation, KS1 etc
• Year Group: Y1, Y2, Y3 etc
• Subject: Maths, literacy etc
• Topics: multiplication, division etc
• Star rating: ***** = 5 star rating ie excellent resource.
• And anything else that is a relevant tag.

I am looking forward to getting the school account up and running, introducing it to staff and populating it with lots of good resources.

Perhaps if other primary schools get their own del.icio.us accounts running then we can begin adding different schools to our network and sharing the online resources we use.

Using del.icio.us in Education – Take a look at this guide to del.icio.us from John Pederson that I have helped contribute to.