ICT in my Classroom

I was pleased to see the final instalment of my contribution to the SMARTBoard Lesson Podcasts published the Sunday before last. Ben and I discuss the future of the IWB and a couple of lesson ideas I contributed.

SMARTBoard Lesson Podcast #74: A History and Literacy Lesson from the UK

Let me know what you make of the show - well worth a listen.

Lots going on recently so I thought I would just write a quick roundup…

Parents Evening

Last Thursday we had our first parents evening which was really positive and for the first time I discussed our class blog with some of the children’s parents. The response, from the people I spoke to, was very positive and I was pleased about their reaction to it. We talked about a task that I had set on our History topic using the blog. I posted an image of a mystery object which I wanted the children to investigate and find out what it was. I set a simple reward for correct answers posted to the blog. Kids and parents loved it. I will be definitely doing more in that vein.

Macbeth Timelines

For our literacy work over the last 2 weeks we have   been studying Shakespeare’s Macbeth - the children have accessed the text through drama, character studies and abridged versions. On Monday and Tuesday this week we produced Macbeth timelines. I asked the children to look at 8 key events and pick and choose the appropriate characters and settings for them. I made a simple SMART Notebook file that demonstrated what they would do. It utilised the infinite cloner tool, so I had created a palette of characters and settings that the children had to draw from.

Poppy poems

Today the children were learning about remembrance as it is linked closely with last weekend. They looked at footage from the Pathe Film site and a short cartoon from the War Game film to add the first world war context. They then wrote poppy poems on red templates of the flowers. Next week I am planning on teaching them how to create a multimedia version of their poems using PhotoStory, should be fun.

More Bubblr

In Tuesday’s ICT lesson we used Bubblr as a tool to recount our evacuee drama experience we had with our secondary school. It was a great afternoon as it was an idea I had over a year ago and with the help of some colleagues and students from the secondary school we basically evacuated our Year 6 children for the afternoon! They had no idea where we were going and all of the teachers and students were in role when we got to the local town hall, which was also a great setting for it. Bubblr is proving a really great tool and is ideal as there is no real learning curve it is so easy to use.

Google Earth training next week which I am really looking forward to.

I thought that I would reflect on what I have managed to do so far this half term with my class - it seems that we hit the ground running headlong into this web 2.0 thingy.

I have really enjoyed working with the children on the class blog - as one child said to me it gives them a voice. The sort of resources we have used are exciting and have minimal learning curves - they have been applying their ICT skills in real contexts. This is what it is all about (well to me anyway )

But I have also challenged the kids with stuff like embedding code into our wikispace - they have coped amazingly well.

So what have we done in the last 7 weeks:

Quikmaps - used this throughout our local history work, we basically geotagged old photos of the town. We added code to placemarks in Quikmaps, we then embedded the maps in our class wikispace. (Wow that sounds hard, but my Year 6’s did it)
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Bubblr - in our Literacy we took Matilda photos from our Flickr account and made a simple comic strip of them and added simple speech and thought bubbles. We embedded these in our wikispace too.
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Blogging - we started our class blog and the children have really enjoyed it. At least once a week I do a lunchtime blogging club so kids can get online and write / comment and visit other school’s blogs.
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Wikispace - we have used this space to share our literacy writing and the work we have done in other subjects. I published the backing music for a song they were learning in music for example.
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Local Live - we used a shared collection to add points of interest around our town. This worked extremely well with one login too!
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Google Earth - This has been a regular feature of the half term and I am sure will continue to be. We have explored where news stories are from, visited Rome, Paris, London and Athens. We like to look at our Geovisitors and locate them on Google Earth. I have used Google Earth in my maths lessons.
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Mayomi - a lovely simple Flash based tool for mind mapping that we used to support our maths and literacy, easy to navigate and well presented. Cannot directly link to the map though when finished.
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Flickr - I have added photos, images and screen shots to our account and found it invaluable for the kids to make the most of some web 2.0 apps (like Bubblr) I have found the notes a simple success. ( I have also explored it as a photo resource for upcoming curriculum areas and it is amazing)
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Editgrid - we have set up an online space to share investigation results. Hopefully it will help the children better appreciate fair tests and reliability of results.
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…that’s not to mention using digital cameras to record our science and our SMARTBoard work.

So what is next - more of the same…?

I think I shall set myself some simple targets and you can hold me to these before Christmas (as long as Santa still comes )

• Continue to apply the successful applications across the curriculum I have already used, so they are not just one offs.
• Setup a session when the children moblog. (could be interesting!)
• Explore parental permissions so children can take more photos and blog with these.
• Setup a more structured daily blogging routine, children blogging in writing partners.
• Answer: does having a world wide audience / platform really make a difference to the standard of the children’s writing?
• Spread the word: get at least one other class in school blogging.
• Get the children writing with TiddlyWiki.
• Develop more international links via blogging etc.
• Do a simultaneous science experiment with another class somewhere in the world.
• Use Flickr notes more.
• Look into purchasing a cameraphone for blogging purposes. (Will I need to change blog hosts?)

So there we are some simple targets…well i will reiiew these again at Christmas.