ICT in my Classroom

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.

There seems to be no other way of actually managing a large number of Google accounts then working through a domain. So today I registered through Google priestsic.net for our school and began exploring the apps that are now available.

To my surprise Google Notebook is missing from the list which is a great shame as I consider it to be perhaps the tool with the most potential to school users. However there is still the ability to personalise the start page (iGoogle page) for a user. So as a teacher I can add locked content (widgetty thingies) and the others can be personalised – this is ideal.

My advice then currently to anyone planning on exploring the setup of Google accounts is to stump up the £4.91 or whatever it was for the domain name and go through the process of having a central place you can manage the accounts. I think that although there may be some bits and pieces missing in this single sign in, namely Google Notebook and Reader, the time saved due to management outweighs it.

So I am going to create a separate class Google account to share work in other apps such as Google Reader and Notebook. This afternoon I explored how Notebook worked when two people were working in the same login, it seemed to hold out OK, both views of the same notebook updating as the other worked on it. Not ideal, but would allow a class of children to work on research together and get the most from this excellent tool, sidestepping the issue of the app missing as mentioned above.

Further to my ideas related to Notebook, a single sign-in poses a new problem as there is no direct indication of who is adding what. So titles of notebooks could name specific tasks or children, to allow them to add the content in the correct place and for us to properly monitor and respond to what is happening. Imagine then a series of guided reading sessions during a week of literacy work, where children add the answers to Diigo set questions on a specific text – each child opens the notebook via the FF extension and navigates to the correct notebook (either by name or by task) adding their responses which are now labelled due to there location. Complete Notebooks could be archived into Google Docs so the list does not get too crowded over time.

In addition I have also signed up for a class Diigo account so that we can share annotations and signpost online text to children.

So iGoogle is a start page for Google account users which can aggregate all of the Google apps into simple little widgets, plus many, many more. I have been thinking carefully about how the children in my year group may be able to use this iGoogle page.

The page itself can be highly personalised through themes and the choice of a variety of different widgets, so it would be useful to have a mandatory set of widgets that the class need to add – for example widgets for:

• Google Docs/Spreadsheets
• Class Google Reader account
• Google Mail
• Class Google Calendar
• Google Notebook
• Class del.icio.us links

All of these would be a click away from the home page so easily navigable – there would possibly be a mixture of individual and class use of these tools. I like the way that every child’s page could look different giving them a sense of ownership for this bit of online space – yet maintaining a sense of consistency with the above list of class widgets they need to add. Perhaps this would be the first sort of task the children can undertake when exploring their page and learning about how to add different content.

There is a vast array of widgets available for the iGoogle page, naturally ranging in quality. But within this variety are some real gems. For example Brain Tuner (just search for this on the content page) for primary age children is just what they need – a simple dose of regular mental maths right there on their home page.

I have found two version, the first is a mixture of multiplication and addition; the second being just multiplication. Every time they take the quick challenge records how quickly they have completed it adding a nice little slice of competition to keep them motivated. This may seem a leap straight out of the Nintendo DS book but it is great for keeping primary age kids sharp with their mental maths. I imagine children completing a task may nip and get one of our laptops and just have a quick play on Brain Tuner on their homepage (or even search for maths tagged sites via the del.icio.us widget and get stuck in somewhere else – who knows!)

Then of course there may well be a widget that supports a particular topic of work that you are doing in your class during the year. For example when we are doing work on space we might add the NASA Image of the day widget. During our RE work this year the Photos of Sacred Places widget could develop some discussion.

As I use it more and more I think that it would be a great place for children to start their online session. It just depends now on how the accounts are managed. (Just signed up for Google Apps on a domain) It looks like Notebook is not available via a domain type use of Google Apps, including no iGoogle page – but one that is shared.

Just realised that the iGoogle page (via Google Apps for a domain) is a combination of shared content and personal choices. Good news!

End users of the page still have the ability to incorporate any content from the web, or any Google Gadget, enabling them a degree of customization over the content of the page.