ICT in my Classroom

This idea was one that popped into my head at about 3am. After George, my 2 year old son, woke us and I had settled him again, I began thinking about Google forms (as you do at 3am - what better time to be thinking about that subject!!) and the current work we are doing on film narrative and The Piano by Aidan Gibbons. Take a look at the film for yourselves.

An emotion graph is a simple line graph comparing a range of happiness to sadness against different points (time) in a story or film. This technique of graphing the emotional ups and down within a story really helps children to visualise the whole story in a different way. Once the graphs are complete they can be discussed in reference to the different peaks and troughs of emotion. “Why is the main protagonist so upset at this point on the graph, what has happened?”, “In which part of the story is he the happiest?”

The graph can reflect the events in any type of linear narrative, whether that be a book or film - it could even reflect the varying emotions within an event such as a football match. As you can see the whole plot in one graph it is useful to engage the children in conversations about the structure of the plot and the way that the emotions are tied into generic story elements such as problems, conflicts and resolutions.

The children in my class really enjoyed watching The Piano today as we began our film narrative unit. One of the children said that the main character was playing his emotions on the piano, they were the notes of his life. Such a lovely turn of phrase. The Piano is an excellent text to explore in terms of an emotional graph as each of his memories linger, bringing joy and sadness into his life again.

Once you have opened up your Google form (and I have explained in more detail how to do this on this post) I have simply added a new question for each of the different events that I would like the children to gauge the emotions for. Because the film is only two and half minutes long I have chosen about ten or eleven events. I have then chosen “Choose from a list” question type and added the numbers 0 - 10. For each question I added a reminder about the emotional scale from sad (0) to joyous (10) as some additional text. I found it really easy to generate one question and then just duplicate it using the link, and just edit what the event is.

Your form is complete and now you just need to add the line graph itself to the linked spreadsheet. You will see in your spreadsheet that the header (top) row is filled in with the different events from left to right. Under each column heading add the average =AVERAGE(Range) formula for the cells below, say down to 100 cells below. This will average out the different responses from your form and return a single figure. Don’t worry the survey results should always be added below your average row. I like to add the “Rounded” formatting to these cells as well. Select these average figures and click the “Chart” tool and create a line graph from this data. (These average cells could also be hidden, select the row from the left and click hide row) Find some more detailed steps to making a chart here.

Place the chart to the right of your data or embed within a blog post somewhere, and enlarge it so that it is clearly visible. I will be emailing the emotion graphing form to all of our Year 5s and getting them to complete the form (from within the email) alongside watching the film again. We will then be reviewing, as I have mentioned above, the responses and how the emotions vary throughtout the text. I will be encouraging them to justify their responses and decisions with supporting evidence from the film.

Now it is your turn to complete the emotion graphing survey that I have referred to - watch the film again, if you haven’t already, and answer the survey that I have embedded below. The code for embedding a form is available when you click “Edit/Resend Form” and then it is under the “Preview and Send” link.You will also see that I have published the graph which can be done from within the graph drop down menu.

Let me know what you make of this idea and whether it was worth a sleepless early morning!

• How can you use this idea in your own narrative or literacy unit?
• Have you used emotion graphs? (I know there is an option with Turning Point voting systems to do something similar which I have used in the past)
• How have you used them?
• How else have you used Google forms in the classroom?

I cannot believe that we have already had three weeks of work with Google Apps in our year group. This week has been extremely eventful, and I have loved and hated technology in equal measure (well there is always a bit more love) - with major network issues it has brought into focus issues of reliability that every school and teacher need to engage with when investing their time and effort in Google Apps.

Monday - 12/5/08

• Took some time with the children to explore the various different views and issues surrounding finding and managing Docs home page.
• I emphasised the importance of the search function at the top of the page and how Google have been known to be quite good at searching
• I demonstrated a few different searches and how quickly you could find content - as you type in the search field it immediately gives feedback on that term, even looking in the people who you have shared the docs with. You can then click the results that popup to go straight to that doc. Very powerful and much quicker than navigating through folders or views.
• As a class we worked together to edit the 1st draft verse we wrote last week. I used the strikethrough tool and colour formatting as we worked on ADDING words OMITTING words and CHANGING words in the poem.
• The alterations the children suggested were excellent and as we finished up I thought that we could use the REVISIONS tool to compare our new version with the original. When two versions are selected and compared changes and deletions are clearly highlighted. If different users were to make the changes than these users are colour coded too with their edits.
• In a less sophisticated way than Track Changes this could be used on a longer piece of work when reviewing 1st and 2nd drafts.
• The children had time together to complete their 1st drafts of the poem and organise their poetry journals (Google Presentations).
• There were a few pairs that had work missing, their poetry journal presentations were missing slides. I pointed them towards the revisions tool and told them to find a version that was complete and to REVERT TO THIS VERSION.
• Although a minor incident this is an example of one of the huge benefits of Google Docs. It auto saves so many times (I keep seeing the “Saving…” message popup at the top on this doc) that unless you were to delete the actual file, a child could retrace every step in the life of the piece of writing, even over a number of days or weeks - not possible in more traditional office applications.

Tuesday and Wednesday - 13/5/08 and 14/5/08

• Oh dear.
• Powercut killed the school server during the night and the APS or alternative power supply did not seem to do its job.
• As a result of this the DHCP database has been corrupted and so the server could not administer new IP addresses to laptops and even the access points. Bad news all round.
• Keith our technician rebuilt the database today (Wed) and tells me it is working again.
• With no wireless network we were unable to access our online docs and so were in a fix - seeing the main concern I have with this approach materialising.
• We were able to continue with our poetry work with some nostalgic pencil and paper writing for a few days! It has brought into sharp focus the main drawback of this method and so I have looked further into the new Google Docs development of using Offline syncing.
• If you download Google Gears, a browser extension, you can sync your online docs with your desktop.
• It seems that this service will be made available to Google Apps Education Edition too, which is good news. But there remains many questions: will children need to work on the same laptop to see their desktop synced work? Could the whole domain be synced to a network? How will this individual use be translated into domain use?
• I hope that when teachers say to me, “But what happens to your access to the children’s docs when the internet connection is down?” I will be able to answer that we will just work on our desktop synced versions which will sync up when we are back online again.
• I would hope that there are no further restrictions to doc access because of the offline nature - for example having to work on a specific machine because docs are only synced there.
• I am hopeful for this situation but expect there may be some compromises - it will be interesting to see how docs could be used offline for a domain.
• On reflection I still have complete faith and trust the infrastructure in place. This event is the first of its kind at school, but we did not lose the internet connection (which, for what it is worth, has been amazingly reliable over the last 5 years or so) it was the wireless network that suffered. If we were to be working on a Local Authority learning platform or other such product we would not have been able to access it either. I will be chalking it down to an unlucky event - and still have full faith in my network structure and reliability.
• Do I have all of my eggs in one basket when using Google Docs? Not really - the writing and poetry language was the focus and that was still focused upon in the days we had no connection. Should you have a backup plan in the back of your mind? Perhaps, there is no harm in it - I usually have something up my sleeve for most things even if it is normal class work and not technology related. Using Google Docs to support your work is no different in my mind.

Thursday - 15/5/08

• Wahey the wireless network is back on its feet - looks like it was a corrupt DHCP database which issues and controls IP addresses. So the old IPs were not being refreshed and nothing new was being issued. Suffice to say it took a 3 hour database rebuild from Keith our technician who drafted in some extra help too.
• Anyway the whole problem has highlighted the need for some sort of backup in the event that it occurs again and, as I mention above, I hope that the Offline - Google Gears development allows us constant access and a possible solution.
• The children were straight back into their writing and we had another great session today with children completing their first verses and editing what they have written.
• Their senses poetry has a simple and effective structure and they have been using Docs tools to help support their work - it seems to have been a successful unit of work. One of the highlights is the poetry journals that the children have created we hope to continue to add to these as we continue our poetry work.
• Google Docs does seem a little glitchy - over the course of the last few weeks I have noticed things that serve to remind me that it is still in BETA. Here are a few:
• The thumbnail view in Presentations is a little odd, more often than not the text appears over sized in the thumbnail.
• Presentations seem to take a long time to load.
• Sometime text behaves strangely in Docs - rigidly holding onto formatting even if you change it, can be frustrating.
• Objects and texts do go missing there has been perhaps a dozen occasions, not just today, when we have had to retrieve an older revision because of missing text.
• As a result of this missing text phenomena I showed the children how to use the Revision aspect of Docs again, reminding them that they can revert to any version right back to the beginning of the Doc.
• As an extension I stopped the children with 20 mins to go and showed them how easy it is to add images to a Doc.
• We used the FlickrCC search tool http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net and I modelled how to drag an image from one window to another and drop it into Docs. We then looked at how to alter the image and move it about.
• We talked briefly about the Creative Commons license and what it meant (need to do more on this)
• Discussed the importance of dealing with inappropriate content (images) and what we should do - I think it is important to keep this sort of learning high on the agenda, so the children understand what is expected of them and how to deal with issues if they arise. It seems to me that this message of appropriate and sensible action should be reinforced throughout the year, not just in a bundle of e-safety lessons.
• For some reason IE shut down or crashed on a child and they were a little perplexed as to what had happened. (Note to self - must install FF so kids have a choice) A huge benefit of Google Docs is that it auto saves so regularly, as explained above. As a result the child was able to log straight back in again and pick up without any data loss. Working on a desktop WP like MS Word (auto saves could be configured - true) there is a higher chance of data loss due to unexplained crashes or application misbehaviour. You can encourage a healthy “save regularly ” culture in the use of desktop apps but nothing comes close to Google Docs saving your work every 70-80 seconds for you. It won’t forget.

Friday - 16/5/08

• During today’s literacy session we worked for approximately 20 more minutes, just fine tuning our poetry journal presentations.
• Children were still finding missing text and a few things different but were independently accessing their doc revisions and switching back to older versions that were complete. Good to see this going on as it is an important feature when editing and writing.
• Yesterday children had dragged images into Google Docs and today they wanted the same images in their presentations. This is where we faced problems but the kids worked brilliantly to work around the issue and solve it.
• Initially I had told them to copy and paste the images across from docs, but this did not work - it allowed you to paste but no image.
• Secondly I suggested finding the image again in the Flickr CC search and dragging it into Google Presentations. Even though they suggest this works, it doesn’t. Or it at least hasn’t for us. The presentation would say it is working - the message at the top of the page would be saying importing image or something similar, but nothing would appear.
• Children suggested we save the image and insert it. So they saved the image to their network folder and inserted and browsed for that saved picture. Not as simple as dragging and dropping but same result and kids happy. Children coped really well with switching from one method to another. Good to see.
• Seems to me that Google Presentations is much more glitchy than others. Behaved quite slowly today and image issue is a little frustrating.
• The choosing of images to illustrate their verses was a good extension activity. The quality of their choices were well justified and added another element to their writing.
• I was delighted to see children who had successfully inserted images splitting off and supporting their peers who had not. That sense that we are learning and exploring together was strong today.
• I demonstrated how to preview the presentation and we talked about the IM feature/backchannel that appears to the right. We talked about ways we could collate feedback about what we can see in this space.
• I began a presentation of our class poetry journal and told the children to go to their GMail and open up their inbox. With the presentation in full screen and the IM window open I copied the URL to share the presentation and pasted it into an email. I asked the children who were signed in (remember the children are working in pairs on docs that are shared between them) to raise their hands and I added their addresses into the email. This was as easy as typing the first letter of their name and finding them in the list. I fired off the email and the children opened it and the enclosed link.
• Note to Google - it would be useful to have an email link next to the presentation URL that auto generates an email to send to contacts.
• I could see from the IM window who had opened it up and joined the presentation - ripples of excitement from the kids to see their names and those of others in the window, they love IM. I took control of the presentation and showed them how I could move the slides on and it will change automatically on their screens.
• Upon moving the presentation on a slide I looked up and saw that all of the 16 wireless machines were responding in almost real time. Very impressive.
• I said a few “hellos” the usual IM stuff and let the kids throw a few messages around. I then drew the discussion back to how we could use the IM chat. The only problem that is apparent is that the resulting chat cannot be archived, saved or copied from the window. It is a flash IM and so you cannot copy text out. Although this IM within the presentation window is really neat, if the chat cannot be saved it is less useful. The alternative would be to create a group chat in Google Talk - I would have preferred to share the URL for the presentation in IM form but we have not installed the GTalk clients yet on each machine and the children have not all started up the GTalk IM in GMail.
• Ideally we could (1) All be part of a Google Talk group chat using Talk client from desktop (2) I would open the presentation (3) Copy and share the URL in the chat (4) Children open to follow, but close the IM frame (5) Feedback and answers to questions I pose could be added to GTalk chat (6) Chat is saved and archived, access it from GMail “Chats” link.
• Note to Google - let us copy or save the chat from Presentations - or merge GTalk into presentations.
• After our, on the fly experimentation with presentations and IM we listened to pairs and individuals present and read their poetry from their journals.
• I found it useful in order to jump straight to the presentation to access the shared Docs from my account and right click the Presentation name- then choose “View Presentation” from the bottom of the list. This bypassed the edit screens.

Overall reflections on Week 3

The biggest consideration for me this week is what do you do if the kids cannot access the internet. Of course we/I/you have been successful working without Google Docs - so we continued on with our poetry in more traditional ways. I am pleased to have thought a little more about the development of Google Gears and Offline Docs for Ed Apps, that could be a very important change in the reliability of this tool. If there are days when the web is flaky - it happens - then children could continue unhindered by this. Is the “All my eggs in one Google basket” an issue that you consider to be an important one to resolve with teachers adopting these tools?

On Friday we explored the IM feature of presentations and I am keen to explore how we could harness the children’s natural understanding of this communication tool in future learning activities. Could GTalk be used to get the children responding to questions at the same time, like we did with the spreadsheets example a while ago? They were so excited by that one activity - if we can just pivot that enthusiasm in the direction of learning. It is a shame the IM in presentations isn’t linked with Google Talk in some way, so that what is added there can be saved and returned to later. I will need to download the GTalk client to the laptops and continue to explore ways that IM can be used. Although I am reflecting on the use of IM within Google Apps, with the GTalk client the IM could stand alone from G Apps and so be embedded within any learning activities taking place on the laptop.

Google Presentations seems to be behaving as the one application that is most in BETA - lots of glitches and missing work issues to try and resolve this week. It can’t even handle images as it should. It feels sluggish when working with it - I hope it improves.

Today it was clear that we are all learning together and I was so pleased to see the children being creative and trying to solve problems with real initiative. They worked well on their own or in pairs and helped each other out, sharing what they have learned or a method just discovered to reach an outcome we are all aiming for. We are learning and exploring together. It has been very apparent that there are maybe 3 or 4 children who are extremely adept at using Google Docs, they offer help to others very willingly. But all the children have progressed so far since not seeing Docs 3 weeks ago - long may our learning continue.

This academic year has been different for me due to the (ongoing) development of a permanent laptop resource in my classroom. We currently have 8 machines available to us and when we double up from both Year 5 classes we have a possible 16 machines that we can use. On the not too distant horizon these numbers will be doubled by the procurement of a second batch of laptops for school. With this second step towards a 1:1 model in the upper junior classrooms I am thinking more and more about the pedagogical impact of a greater technology choice.

An activity that has become one of the mainstays of our literacy work has been to respond to an image resource. In our current unit we are reading Street Child by Berlie Doherty, set in Victorian London it tells the story of a boy called Jim who, after a series of misfortunes, spends time in the workhouse as a child labourer and lives on the streets. The exemplar planning for this unit explains an opportunity to respond to an image:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

This is a commonly used strategy to engage the children and elicit a response from a visual resource - such an activity occurs fairly regularly in primary literacy work and I daresay other subjects and age ranges. It takes a failsafe, traditional form - of paper and pen. In this post I explore ways that this simple activity can be transformed with the use of technology. And transformative learning is what I am looking for, because replication offers no benefit to a teacher - all it produces is ostensibly a better presented piece of work and more of a headache to setup. The technology has to offer a whole new level of interaction with the image that cannot be gained from the traditional method explained above.

The learning activity has to be transformed into something that provides a greater depth of learning and interaction. There has to be a pedagogical shift.

Down to the practical stuff. This activity is something that I will be doing very regularly, so finding the easiest to use option for the kids and something that offers a new type of interaction are both key criteria. Other important questions included:

• Why is it better than using paper and pen?
• Do you need an account to use it?
• How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?
• Easy to navigate?
• Can we share our responses?
• Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

For some time now I have explored this notion of visual annotation and due to its ubiquitous nature in the primary classroom I have taken a long look at a few options. They include: using the notes tool in Flickr to annotate certain parts of the image; TwitPic - an application that combines the brevity of Twitter and image captioning/commenting and even such conferencing tools as Twiddla that offer a quick way in to sharing annotations. However none of them are like Voicethread.

As a primary teacher Voicethread is exactly the tool I need for this purpose. (Watch out switching to analogy mode) You may well be able to eat your cornflakes with a knife, although messily, but why not use the spoon that is in the draw. Voicethread is that perfect match - it functions as a media commenting tool. As they describe it on the site:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish.

Now many colleagues have been using Voicethread in all manner of ways in the classroom and I know that I am not revealing some great secret. But what I would hope to reveal is a how such a tool can transform learning, and especially in the climate of a primary classroom. For it is just such an activity that peppers the new literacy framework, but how would this learning task look in a shifted school, a learning environment that offers a 1:1 choice for all that belong there? Can every activity of this sort be transformed? It only needs the right cutlery in the draw…

Needless to say I used Voicethread to transform our work on responding to an image for our Street Child work (as described above).

Do you need an account to use it?

Yes. Voicethread requires you to have an account. So there is some setup time here but well worth it - a specific benefit for a teacher is that you can setup members of your class as sort of sub-users. So one sign in, but everyone in the class has a working identity they can switch to which tags their work. Really useful and easy to setup. Voicethread has an dedicated education community now as well.

How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?

I just showed 2 children from my class how to load the site, login to our class account and fire up our Street Child resource. With me helping it took us just over five minutes to setup. The site was responsive and loaded quickly.

Easy to navigate?

With the very briefest of introduction my Year 5 class had no problems with navigating around Voicethread. One aspect to note is that when you load a Voicethread it will begin playing the various images straight away and it took a few minutes for the children to take control. My children found the overview screen - giving thumbnails of all of the screens really useful.

Can we share our responses?

This is where the true transformation of learning emerges very strongly in my opinion. The last short sentence of the Literacy strategy document is:

Share these as a class.

This is clearly meant to be some form of plenary activity or summary to the session. With Voicethread the children can see everyone else’s comments being added in real time. As soon as they have been saved they can be viewed by everyone in the class. My class were not just sharing their ideas for 5-10 minutes at the end of the session but were interacting, exploring, reflecting upon and sharing the work of their peers for the whole of the session. It is very difficult to be specific but from my observations this shared experience helped to support, encourage and inspire children to contribute further thoughts.

Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

A completed Voicethread can be effectively presented in situ, but it has some impressive options to embed in other online locations - the simplest is perhaps a class blog warranting further comments and reflections on the activity. You then have a great opportunity to take sharing beyond the classroom.

Why is it better than using paper and pen?

In my experience using Voicethread to annotate images online is the ideal tool. It offers such a broad range of ways to transform the learning activity - children can record a spoken comment bringing in other literacy strands, a video response takes that on that extra step. A major benefit for mobile learning is that Voicethread is a flash based site and so seems to pressurise the wireless access point less, it performed really well for us and so reliability=big tick.

Not only does the final product look that much better but the options to then seamlessly share that product, not just with our Year 5 class, but with a wider global community of educators is the clincher. And in my opinion the sharing that occurs during a whole class task is the most important transformation that goes on. Children picking up on and reading others work not just writing their own ideas down.

How would I rewrite the activity from the Primary Strategy for Literacy? How should such an activity be explained to a classroom that has taken that pedagogical leap, a school that is shifting to a 1:1 choice?

Here is their version again:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

Here is my version:

Organise the children into their laptop buddies (pairs) and ask each pair to take a look at the Voicethread showing scenes of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their pairs about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to add a text, video or audio comment to the appropriate image - remembering to take advantage of the onscreen doodling to help clarify what they refer to. Encourage children to take a few moments to read and explore the work of their peers as it appears. Do they have similar thoughts? Are they thinking anything different to you? Embed the completed Voicethread on the class blog.

Does it sound transformed? I don’t know…

This for me is the nuts and bolts of what we do in the classroom and it is in this very act of transforming one small activity that I think I will uncover what this pedagogical shift will be like in my school. Perhaps the quilted tapestry of these smaller shifted learning activities will reveal a bigger picture. What do you think? I think Voicethread is a good example of how learning can be transformed with the correct tool, but what else is there that needs to be explored? What other daily activities in the primary classroom can be transformed? I know that not everything can be 2.0ed but what will form part of that shifted tapestry?

(Unfortunately for us the audio and video options for commenting are blocked due to our proxy settings, it is a bit of a pain as I want to be making the most of this resource - Voicethread did promise a little while back “We’ll be developing a more comprehensive networking guide.” but nothing yet. Any help for fixing this would be most useful? I have run the http tests and most of them don’t work!)

I am pleased to say that we are going to be contributing to this great little writing project from George Mayo. The @ManyVoices project is a collaborative, creative writing project using Twitter.

Each child writes part of the story sticking to the 140 character limit, once they are done another pupil picks up the authorial baton and continues the tale.

One of the best aspects of using Twitter for children to author creative writing is the character limit - those reluctant writers do not feel over-awed by a large blank page. The short paragraph they have to contribute is manageable and offers greater accessibility.

We are going to access the @manyvoices Twitter account and I will ask the children to work on a single laptop throughout the day next few days

The updates are copied onto a supportive wiki whereabouts you can read the whole story so far and follow along. George also explains:

The story concludes at the 140th entry. At that point, we collectively edit and revise our little Twitter story before publishing it as a small book through Lulu.com

I look forward to contributing over the next few days and I will post about how it goes. If you want to be involved I know that George is still looking for contributors - why not get in touch with him and get your kids to play their part.

My favourite web based tool I am using in my classroom at the moment is Visuwords. It is a dictionary/thesaurus/etymology visualisation tool which uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. It works wonderfully with a SMARTBoard as you can move the nodes about and shift things around to help clarify a connection. There are many many applications for this in the classroom and here are just a few I have been pondering.

Define key vocabulary from learning objectives.
So you have shared with the children the learning objectives for the session and now you want to clarify any vocabulary they should/need to know. You could even have a link directly from that word to the site. For example you could explore the meaning of “significant” from the Y5 Literacy Framework objective:

• Read and compare stories by significant children’s authors.

Search for the word and ask your children to explore what they can see, can we find any synonyms that will help us define it. Roll the mouse over a connected node to see a pop up definition. Relate it back to your objective - this would work well in a plenary session too.

Explore new vocabulary that you find.
I love exploring new vocabulary with my children. They see my enthusiasm and it becomes infectious, we have a Wow words board where they can put up interesting words they find in their reading books and elsewhere, this changes all the time. This week we were doing some work on an extract from A Christmas Carol and as we read it we noted some words we wanted to find out about. Ruddy, intimation, mourner. I ran the searches in Visuwords as a plenary.

Explore word derivation.
Visuwords does a great job of showing the children how interconnected words are and one part to explore is the derivation of vocabulary. The link you are looking for is the dashed line (you will see from this explained in the key) which shows the roots of the word you are exploring. Not quite as good as a full blown etymological dictionary but you can see the connections.

Play a word journey game.
This is a favourite in my classroom at the moment and is similar to a word association game. The children are given a starter word and they take it on a journey, thinking of a connected word and recording each step. You ask for where they ended up - “So you started with GIANT and ended up with FACTORY.” This sits nicely with Visuwords as you can expand the visual network by double clicking on a node. Run the search for “Fairytale” and see if you can get to “Fake” - lots of possibilities to explain and discuss these connections.

Experience the links between words.
There is a clear difference between the various links that are displayed and the graphical key below the map area explains these connections. There are 19 different types of links that may be displayed and I certainly wouldn’t expect to use them all or to ask my children to understand them. But the key links I would be interested in are: “is a word for”, “is similar to”, “derivation” and “opposes”. Try running a search for “style” for a broad map straight off the bat.

Show the depth and complexity of meaning.
Sticking with the results for “style” - you can very easily display how some words in the English language have a broad range of meanings and possible uses. So in these results you could highlight to the children how many different shades of meaning there are for this simple word. Another good example of this is the word “say” - very simple on the outset but if you run the search you will see it is complex in it’s meaning and usage.

Explore different word types.
Visuwords uses 4 colours to display the 4 main word groups. Green - verbs, Blue - Nouns, Orange - adjectives and Red - adverbs. This proves to be a very effective visual aid to writing as children can quickly generate adjectives from a search. So if you punch in “happy” there is displayed a wondrous tangle of synonyms the children could use in there writing. Of course they can roll over these and see the meaning of the new words if they wish. The combination of data and the way it is presented makes this a very powerful tool to support writing.

Discover more information than you expect to.
Do a search for “banana” and now double click “edible fruit” - Wow, all of sudden you and the children are exploring topic related information. From the original node you have the definition, the plant group it belongs to, other banana plant types. Following the other links you have this great web of edible fruit of which our initial search obviously belongs to. I just learned of breadfruit and jackfruit and pitahaya! Cool! I just did a quick search for “puma” and followed the “wildcat” node and you get a similar result. This could prove to be an interesting research tool if used in the correct manner.

Just enjoy it!
Dictionaries are never this much fun! There is something strangely hypnotic about the way the word nodes splurge outwards and the network stretches and skews. As connections are made, new pathways and relevance is shown. Drag the background screen around to move around the word map. Don’t forget the scalable version that can fill the browser window or to use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out as you work. The latter point is good to focus the children’s attention on one specific part of the map. See if the children can find a word with the most nodes, the most links!

It has been great exploring some of these ideas in more depth as I have been writing this post and consider this as an excellent addition to my online classroom toolkit.

What successful experiences of this tool have you or your colleagues had? How have you used it in your classroom? 

As part of the new Primary Literacy Framework, we are covering narrative over the next four weeks and I must say it has been much clearer what we are doing in literacy due to the changes. I find them most welcome, gone are the days of chopping and changing all term.

Anyway one of the 12 strands is to “Engage with and respond to text.” Well today we used Diigo in a fantastic way that got the children doing exactly that!

Unfortunately I cannot link to the work we did as it had photos of the children and some text from published texts. So you get your visualisation juices going…bear with me…

Imagine a web page, I used a published Google Doc, with a table at the top of the page with the children’s photos and names in. Under the table is an opening to a story by a significant author and suitably chosen for the ability of the children in the group. Tomorrow a different group are doing this activity so a different story. As we are only looking at the opening hooks it is just a few paragraphs worth. Above the table of children’s names are some simple instructions such as:

Take your time to read the opening to the story below. Your job is to respond in two ways.
1 - Add a sticky note, using the Diigo toolbar, under your picture or name and  explain how you feel about this opening.
2 - Highlight some text and comment on part of the opening you enjoyed or want to talk about. Add you initials to your comments.

In my planning I had put down to work with this group as they completed the activity on individual laptops at their desks and it was a real success. The children clicked on Sticky Note in the Diigo toolbar and added a typed comment, they then went a step further and (after clicking refresh in IE to see their friends comments - a good tip!) added further comments to their friends Diigo stickies. They rolled over the sticky bubble icon and then rolled over the Actions menu at the top right. Then it is just a case of going to “Add Comment” and the children are engaging with not only the text but each others’ responses.

The other Year 5 class completed the same activity after playtime. Whereas the group in my class began with a webpage with no comments on, the other class were able to view (and comment on) ours and get started quite quickly. The children were, as before, motivated and really engaged with the task. Diigo as a tool is becoming very, very useful!

Here are some of the children comments on the text we looked at today using Diigo.

“Its a sad story when the girl and hugo dies at the end.(and i think that hugo should die because he didn’t let the girl have freedom so he disereves it.”

“on the part were hugo found out that the young girl escaped your body goes really cold for second with fear that something terrible is going to happen”

“It is a sad story because some body dies and the girl trys to get her freedom.”

Any guesses what the story is?

On Reflection 

• This activity was easy to set up - it is basically a page of text, the key thing is to have the Diigo toolbar (and class account) ready to roll.
• It can be done with a whole class using a computer suite for a literacy lesson, different children looking at different texts.
• The texts could also be in the public domain and they do not need to be narrative even. If you are looking at persuasive text why not look at the Alton Towers site and get the children to add Sticky Notes with their comments about how persuasive the site is.
• It could also be extended beyond popular fiction to include peer reviewing of children’s work they have published. (Lots to explore here I think)
• We worked between classes separated by a corridor but there is no reason why schools from anywhere could collaborate in response to a story or text.
• Given the right preparation and equipment I think this is a most manageable activity within a literacy independent session.
• My children had looked at Sticky Notes before but never added them independently - they catch on very fast and coped without any problems.
• Diigo with its “Highlight and Comment” tool can easily become a very useful online text annotation / response tool and I think I will keep using it.

I am pleased to welcome Diigo into my toolkit on a permanent contract all these ideas have been simmering for a while now and it is excellent to have the opportunity to see the children engaging and responding to text in this unique way.

Videojug and the pursuit for folding glory!

Who is doing instructional writing? We have been covering this text type for a few weeks now and two weeks ago we used this site as part of reading and evaluating instructional text. I decided I wanted the children to compare 3 sets of instructions for the same thing and to rate the instructions I chose to look at a renowned video titled “How to fold a T-Shirt in 2 Seconds”. However I did not reveal the video until the class had tried to follow two different text instructions (no pictures). And yes I did take in a load of T-Shirts for the kids to use! Don’t worry by the end of the lesson you will have all of the neatly folded!

The two sets of written instructions were taken from the Videojug site - a written set accompanies most videos. The first set the kids used was one edited down to one paragraph, no numbers or bullets. They struggled, but the point is they are meant to. (T-shirts become messy at this point) Suddenly the children are talking about how difficult it is and saying that this feature or that feature is missing.

We then looked at the second set of instructions which are just the exact written set from the Videojug site - as you see it online. The children still struggled, even though there are far more reader friendly features. There was some mild folding success, but not much. We discussed as a class why this was and rated the instructions as before.

I then told the children to open the laptops they had on their tables and look at the video. I showed it on the SMARTBoard too. I suggested to pause the video as it played so the children could keep up. It’s good as it has a “You will need” section and clear numbered steps on the video. I would recommend getting the site preloaded if you are getting lots of machines to access it - also if you are working on a wireless network.

There were lots of serendipitous moments and suddenly children were expertly folding the T-Shirts as if they had been working in a clothing boutique for the past 10 years! We then had a Fold Off, children folding as fast and accurately as they could. I even challenged the other year 5 teacher, Rick to a contest. Entering his class with his kids backing him, I struggled and lost my 2nd pinch as he made a beautiful fold to the rapture of his children’s voices, I skulked off and called for the return tie!

Create a Graph

A classic maths tool, Create a Graph is saved by about 850 other people on del.icio.us and is a wonderfully useful tool for your data handling work. It can of course be used as an excellent way to demonstrate the creation of graphs with a whole class but This week we used it as part of an independent activity in a maths lesson. The children had pulse rate monitors fitted and a laptop to access the site. They needed to record their pulse after 2 mins of resting and then again after 2 minutes of walking around the room. This was repeated for 10 minutes - we tried to predict the shape of the line graph and the children managed very well with the tool. An important aspect of the tool is the ability to add a minimum and maximum value to the graph, so that you can create a more balanced graph with greater detail. We also discussed why 0-30 would not be useful on a pulse rate axis!

Once the line graphs were created we exported them as PDF files and talked about them in the plenary of the session using the SMARTBoard. You also have the option to export/download the graph in other formats: SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) PNG (Portable Network Graphics) JPG (JPEG, Joint Photographic Experts Group) EMF (Enhanced Metafile Format) Can be imported into programs such as MS Word or MS PowerPoint, EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) Can be opened with graphics programs such as Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress. A good range of options to keep everyone happy!

I like the way that you can continually preview the graph as you enter data which allowed the children to spot errors as they built the graph. All in all a good apple!

Good Ol’ MS Word 

Now even though I have dabbled in blogs, wikis and online documents I still think there is great value in just some basic word processing skills. We are using the new MS Word on the class laptops and we have charged the children to write a set of instructions, a help document for the excellent Sploder game creator site. It has been great seeing the children bring to their work basic skills they have learned along the way and to develop some new ones. It has also brought us excellent opportunities to recap saving routines and simple image manipulation.

I know, and have experienced, the value of working on writing with other collaborators, with other children, other schools using new age writing tools. But in this instance I wanted to write without publishing along the way, I wanted the children to hone and master a single piece of work for a chosen audience without the outside world looking in. That’s not so bad is it? We have had some fantastic results, which you will no doubt see glimpses of here soon, and the children have been extremely motivated by the whole writing task.

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.

Well the summer holidays are over and here in the UK we are back to school this week for a new academic year.

This is a brief post to say how helpful I have just found the Flickr resource. We are doing some short work on settings, as do most year groups, and I found myself some belting pictures courtesy of the Flickr community. Some of us may not be able to use Flickr in schools but we can still take advantage of the excellent photographic resource that it is.

So I searched for things like “moonlight” and “road” as we are focusing on The Highwayman and there are some great images. A few tips to help you get started with your search:

1. My number one tip has to be to filter your search to only include Creative Commons licensed images where you have permission to download and use the images from the owner. Next to the search button click on “Advanced Search” and scroll down to the Creative Commons options at the bottom of the page, checking what you need.
2. Once you have a set of results, filter them according to “Most Interesting” to give you a set of popular well constructed, interesting images.
3. Use the “Thumbnails” view to allow you to see lots of images to help you find what you want quicker.
4. If you find an interesting image take a look at the owners photostream, their set of images. You may discover other pictures of similar quality or versions of the one you liked.
5. Also search the “Groups” as these often collate images under one topic so a quick look for moonlight in groups comes up with a list of groups dedicated to the art of photographing the moon etc!! And this group which has some nice images in it.

This is one of my favourite images I found and we will be using this tomorrow for the kids to explore and add some sensory description to.

What do you think of it?

Further to my use of the animated short “The Piano” last year I discovered this excellent version of “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes as I researched the literacy work we are doing at the beginning of the new term. It is produced by Britannica Dream Productions via some pretty imaginative hacking of the game Sims 2.

Both Rick, my new teaching bud, and I commented on the fact that the poem is pretty heavy, so I am pleased to find this version to allow the children better access to the text. I suspect that I will be using this to help the children investigate and understand the text in the early stages of our work. This would be a good link to add to the Primary Framework for Literacy resources list for this unit.

Woohoo just found the same video on YouTube so embedding it here!

Just spotted Ross has written about this resource ages ago + told us all about a good text version online.