Learning, Teaching and ICT

 Thanks to Mr W for the photograph. I spotted it on his flickr link. I’ve cropped the original a bit to show Shirley and myself deep in conversation at Teacheet. Shirley decided to come along at the last minute and I’m glad she did ….. more great CPD

……And she’s hoping to come along in January to meet up with Kim. Isn’t it amazing that we’ve all become virtual friends as a result of having class blogs!

This was my third visit to the Learning Festival, but my first time viewing the events in my new role. I’m not sure why I was able to attend the festival as a class teacher for two years in a row (I think I must have said I wanted to hear one of the speakers who was talking about a topic that might have helped my Chartered Teacher studies). Normally it was only members of the management team who went …. I’m pretty sure that, in my 12 years of being at the school, no other classroom teachers had the opportunity to attend – maybe they never asked .

During recent visits other schools, however, I’ve become aware of the extent that some school management teams have gone to this year to make sure that as many class teachers as possible were able to attend the festival. On my own first visit in 2006 l stumbled upon (only because I had some time to ‘kill’) the one seminar that led to a total change in my classroom practice, the basis for my CT dissertation … and my eventual secondment opportunity!

Wednesday was a very long day. I attended some great seminars. On Thursday, I even met Sharon Toner when I attended her 12 minute session on the use of mobile phones in the classroom (I seriously need to upgrade my phone!)

But back to Wednesday ….. before Teacheet, there was Teachmeet - it was great. I really regret not taking notes. I remember thinking … gosh, that’s a great idea! …. several times during the evening. When I returned to work on Friday my colleagues asked me what the highlights were and I talked about quite a few, but I knew I’d missed some. That’s why it’s great that some of the presenters are blogging about their ‘slot’. Jonesieboy was one of these bloggers. His pupils made a great GoAnimate animation – unfinished

I’m also glad that he mentioned that it would work just as well with Comic Life – we’ve just installed it in all our computers, and as we only have intermittent access to GoAnimate (something to do with bandwidth?), it’s great to know we can have similar projects in our own classrooms.

The first bit of news is that I finally got round to signing up for this year’s TeachMeet and I’m looking forward to ‘lurking and listening’.

I see that on the list of ‘lurkers’, there’s an Ian Cameron – I wonder if it’s the same Ian? 

The second bit of news is that I received an email to say that the Voices of the World project is all set to resume soon.

Cassie only mentioned last week that she’d love to be part of this with Primary 5L/W via the Carronshore Blog ….. great!!!

The last post showed an example of how Ian Cameron used Comic Life in his classroom. I referred to how he used it on the Falkirk VTC website …. but because Schools Online has got a really annoying habit of timing out after a very short time, I can’t link to the entry so I’ll include the text here.

“Ian Cameron, a Staff Tutor with Dundee City Council, kindly allowed us to use this video. The children used a very simply made cut out figure as a stimulus for making this comic. They brainstormed what ‘mischief’ the character could get up to. They then wrote a draft script before going off to record the action on camera. The comic was constructed using photographs and text before being exported as a video.”

I’ve quoted him from memory …. hope I got it right

Ian was also interested in some of the freely available online tools we’ve used in class blogs. Some of them are listed (with examples of how they were used) on the Staff area of the VTC. The example below shows how we used Voicethread to showcase how groups of children were responsible for researching a particular Aboriginal Dreamtime Story as part of our ‘Australia’ topic.

I’ve since found this wonderful wiki that gives links to loads more …. and they’re really well organised, too! I’ts at cooltoolsforschools

http://www.schooltube.com/
I recently found this site and I’m testing it out. It certainly seems secure …. I’ve spent ages trying to sign up and then upload this very short video

The support I received has been great, though. All email enquiries were very promptly dealt with.

Here’s the same short video that appeared in the last post.