ICT in my Classroom

With the half term break upon us here I wanted to introduce some new members of the “Interesting Ways to Use…” family. In addition to the usual types of tech topics I have decided to start some resources that are not technology specific in a hope to widen the relevance.

One is to Support Writing which is fairly obvious and the other is to Make your Classroom a Sparkly Place to Learn which will be a place to share ideas for creating an enriching and vibrant classroom environment – types of displays, resources, organisation etc. We all want our rooms to sparkle so let’s share our ideas and help each other.

They all start at zero remember and they need you to contribute your ideas. All of your ideas are welcome, grand or small, they can be things you have been doing for years or just solid ideas you think could have an impact.

Remember One Idea, One Slide, One Image.

If you would like to help just email me or send me a Direct Message on Twitter with your own email address, and I will add you as an editor to the presentations.

Last Thursday the National College for School Leadership held the third of their national Developing Leaders events and I was invited to run a workshop titled Classroom Without Walls.

I approached the workshop with the idea of connections, how we as teachers can connect using Twitter and how we can connect children’s learning. You can see the presentation I used below and in the first few slides I shared my use of Tutpup and Voicethread – simple but hugely effective tools for the classroom, both of which connect children to each other’s learning.

“Classroom Without Walls” suggest looking at or beyond the horizon, however I raised the idea with the participants that we sometimes overlook the walls between our own pupils. I explained that using tools such as Voicethread we can perhaps first address how we can connect children within our own class. When was the last time your children looked at each other’s work? Peer assessment is important but often difficult to find time to do. When working with Voicethread, peer assessment is just part of the process not just an additional session you need to timetable.

I helped demonstrate the idea of a networked teacher by asking the participants to find teachers who had tweeted a clue about their location to me via Twitter. As usual my network provided some great responses and the workshop participants used Google Earth to try and find the schools and colleges that were shared. It was really engaging and rooted in a lesson that I taught last year to my year five class.

It was interesting to see that out of the two workshops around 90% of delegates had a Facebook account and only about 15% had a Twitter account. Some had both. But these young teachers, although very aware of social networking between friends, have not yet engaged with the idea to create a professional network. I hope I gave them a nudge in the right direction.

If you get a chance then also take a look at this Mastercard advert “Milton Avenue”- it resonated with me as I was thinking about how important a network is to me for information and advice. I don’t have all the answers but perhaps someone in my network does. This was underlined on Friday when a teacher at school asked my advice about domain names on behalf of the school she is a governor at. My experience of purchasing domain names is limited but a quick question on Twitter allowed me to provide her with great recommendations and advice.

It was agreat day at the NCSL and I was thrilled to get some time to catch up with Dan Sutch from Futurelab who opened the day with a thought provoking keynote on the future of schooling and leadership. John Davitt was there to wrap the day up in his unique and entertaining style, the first time I have seen him talk beyond the TeachMeet 7 minutes.

Miles Berry has emailed me about a short survey for students about their use of technology. Miles and Terry Freedman are running a seminar at BETT 2009 (as titled above) exploring children’s informal learning outside the classroom and what implications this might have for teachers and schools. For the seminar they will be discussing:

 a number of areas in which young people are using web-based and hand held tools for creativity and social networking across text, graphic, music, game and video media. 

As well as a literature review and some case studies, they have also put together a Google form that will allow them to collect some quantitative data of their own. I would encourage you to help Terry and Miles with their seminar by finding a little bit of time to allow your classes to contribute their thoughts.

I was pleased to discover that Edublogs now has the functionality to embed iframe, javacript and most object code into blog posts and sidebars. Below I have embedded the two different Google presentations on sharing good practice in Google Earth and using the IWB.

If you would like to contribute to the ongoing development of these two presentations just let me know you have a tip to share.

In order to embed a Google presentation into a post, like I have done above, just follow the screenshots.

If you have any other ways you have used javascript, iframes code etc in your Edublogs let James and the rest of the community know.

I hope that some of you have enjoyed reading the 33 Interesting Ways (and tips) to use your Interactive Whiteboard. The Google presentation continues to grow as people contribute, the last three tips are titled:

• #31 – Snap it! (using the SMART capture tool)
• #32 – Check by order (self checking method using the layering of SMART Nbk objects)
• #33 – Befuddle It (using Befuddle to create a picture puzzle from your Nbk pages)

Well there is a new kid on the block looking for help!

I have begun a new Google presentation (currently) titled: “Four Eighteen interesting ways (and tips) to use Google Earth in the classroom.” It follows the same model as the IWB presentation, in that it is an open resource that needs your contributions in order to grow. Please feel free to share with your colleagues if you find it useful, spread the word or even embed in your blog.

Contribute one idea or contribute ten! I have made a start – the process is easy.

1. Go to the presentation and take a look at was has been contributed. If you would like to be added as a collaborator send me an email (thomasgeorgebarrett [at] googlemail [dot] com – or use the contact tab at the top of this page – or even send me a direct message via Twitter I am tombarrett) I will invite you in as a collaborator.
2. Add your one slide, one idea and one image.
3. Change the presentation title slide and file name to match the number of ideas.

It will have a humble beginning as before, but I know with your help it will soon grow into something that offers a uniquely authored resource, sharing good Google Earth practice from around the world.

I spotted Animoto via the NextGen Ning network and Justin’s post about it, further to that John and Doug have given it a mention. As you will quickly realise, and John rightly points out, Animoto is very simple. There is no real creative control over what you produce, you just throw some photos at it, choose a music track and out pops an MTV style video.

There is not much there for the children to really get their creative teeth into however it is a great little tool for producing quick and slick videos. Last year we used our class digital camera for recording our work in a science investigation for example, we then gave the children a sheet of thumbnails of these pics for their books. An extension of this simple idea would be to produce a quick movie of their science lesson or PE session. Not as a ICT, presentation task but as a simple, yet imaginatively presented, record of the work they have done.

(Image taken from Mashable Social Networking News )

Animoto makes a buck or two from the choice of longer more extended video lengths but for the work done in class the free 30 second videos is adequate. Taking a look today it seems since I have last used it Animoto has added the functionality of retrieving images from locations online. Currently these are Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, PhotoBucket and Facebook. It worked fine for my Flickr account – offering me the choice of my different photo sets.

I just uploaded a few images from our DT work this year just to illustrate the idea. This is what I came up with. Unfortunately can’t see a way of embedding Animoto footage here. The final video is rendered and then you get an email telling you it is ready to view. Following the link that is included provides some publication options, I particularly liked the iGoogle page embed option which pops your vid onto your iGoogle start page in a new gadget frame.

All in all a useful tool to make quick video footage perhaps for record keeping purposes, but not much more than that. I will take a look at Fliptrack as an alternative soon.