Learning, Teaching and ICT

Today I went (back) along to Carronshore because Primary 5L/W were interviewing some visitors from a local Asda store that’s due to open soon nearby. I suggested to Miss Law that it might be a good idea to use the new Animoto for Education website to produce a video of the event. Unfortunately, we discovered that we couldn’t upload the mp3 file of the interview because we worked out that Animoto needs a music file so that the cool effects can happen to the uploaded images.

Eventually we used Photostory 3 to produce a video podcast of the event. A few minutes were spent uploading this to photobucket. The results can now be seen on the Primary 5L/W blog.

It was frustrating not being able to upload the children’s voices to the Animoto ‘show’- having randomly chosen music accompanying the pictures wouldn’t have had the same effect.

Later this evening, however, I thought about a lovely moment last session when we ‘recorded’ the children in Primary 7V reading their own storybooks to the Primary 2 children in the school. I’ve included it here. The photographs were uploaded to One True Media and a soundrack was added. There’s obvious pride in the older children’s faces as they read their stories ….. and the younger children appear to be a captive audience

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I’m constantly updating my diary with school visits, twighlight courses, meetings … even a trip to BETT (should I choose to!).

Cool tools like myPlick      Photobucket       Slideshare    and     Animoto    are all on the agenda.

What’s important, though, is that learning is at the heart of all the fun.

 Sharon’s  great project  Voices of the World  is a perfect example of this. At Carronshore last session we had heaps of fun being part of it all, and we hardly noticed that we were learning along the way

Talking of fun while learning

 …. all of the Primary 7′s interviewed their parents last session so that they could write about their early years (as part of an autobiography). They each took home an mp3 recorder so that they could find someone at home who could answer the questions they had devised about their earlier years.

Bethany made use of her experience of using vokis in class to produce this wonderful interview with her mum – enjoy

It was a busy week last week, but I think that things are set to become even more busy in the near future. The first ICT Support Team meeting of the session takes place tomorrow at 9 am. We’ll be joined at 11 am by the ICT Support Engineers. The agenda has been emailed to all concerned. I have some general ideas about the Falkirk VTC site. I’ll bring these up at the meeting tomorrow – more on that later.

Later in the day, I’ll be paying a visit to Cassie at Carronshore Primary … it’ll be nice to catch up with all the staff there, too:) I’ve arranged the visit because Cassie has been asked if her class will interview representatives from a new Asda store due to open up nearby soon. The interview is set for Thursday. Primary 7V interviewed a variety of visitors and the technique of asking good questions was stressed(brainstorming open-ended questions, role-play in small groups, feedback of findings, etc.)

When it comes to the actual interview, there’s decisions to make about what format it should take. It may be a simple podcast using Audacity to convert to an mp3 file, a video can be created using a digital video camera … or it may be that some children take photographs of the event while others conduct the interview using an mp3 recording device. (i’ve just received an email from the people at Animoto to say that I’ve been successful in my Animoto For Education application – this might be the ideal choice!)

I suppose the strangest thing about my new post is not having a class to test out all the new cool web 2.0 tools that keep popping up. Go Animate has been discussed a few times in the scodedublogs feed. Malcolm (one of my new colleagues) and I looked at it on Friday and were both suitably impressed. It was agreed that later on in the session a ‘special events’ evening should be arranged to showcase the potential some of these tools have for improving learning and teaching ……  but what we needed was a teacher with a class to try one out. I contacted Cassie when I returned home from work and she is more than happy to try out Go Animate with her class and has agreed to share her experience of using it by coming along to the special events evening to reveal any improvements made to literacy as a result.

I really didn’t mean to leave it so long before writing this 2nd ‘new job’ post – hopefully, I’ll get more organised soon  

 picture by Brian Vass – Tofino sunset

Well … I survived my first day. In fact it was quite pleasant

 My diary is filling up and my new phone with the much needed ‘sat-nav’ facillity is very much appreciated – and needed :

(my lack of sense of direction has been the topic of many a Carronshore staffroom ‘chuckle’).

Good luck tomorrow to the new primary 5L/W, and to the new Ist and 2nd year Larbert High pupils!!

More soon  …..