Learning, Teaching and ICT

Last week was the busiest ever for CPD. Some sessions went without a hitch, others were more troublesome! In fact, there were so many disasters at the start of the week that, by the time Thursday’s Go!Animate course came around, I was prepared for every eventuality!

The two pictures above give a flavour of the more successful Go!Animate session.

 The decision to bring along some of the Primary 5 pupils who had been trialling the success of using Go!Animate to improve literacy skills was made after reflecting on the success I experienced when I gave my first CPD course as a class teacher.

I had been asked to do this to introduce other class teachers to the idea of setting up a class blog. I posted my thoughts about the decision to bring along some of my own pupils to give their perspective on things and I’ve revisited those posts, one of which can be found here.

At the time, Maryam reflected in her own blog how weird it felt for her to experience a reversion of roles

 “Yesterday Me,Anna,Sophie,Darcie,Rebecca and Ainsley had went to this place in Camelon to teach teachers who to use blogs.It was really fun! Though it was a little weird teaching teachers.But anyway it was still fun.

First we had went to the little café place.We had a scone,some biscuits and tea.The scones rocked!We got to put jam on them or butter.The tea was REALLY hot and my tongue went firey red.Aghhh!

Then we had went back upstairs and we waited for all the teachers to come.Then when they had all came we started our presantations.Anna and Sophie went first.Then me and Darcie but we had sort of made a muck up of it!Then after we had went around helping the teachers.

THAT WAS THE WEIRD BIT!

I’ve never helped a teacher and it was a bit emmbarrasing going up to them and saying, ”Do you need any help?”I had helped a few people but the computers there are a bit slow and they keep canceling things so it was a bit hard.Then after the teachers had went back and we got everything back in Mrs Vass’s Car.Mrs Brown had took some people and dropped them off at there homes.Mrs Vass took me,Anna,Rebecca and Darcie.It was really funny!

I can’t wait till next week if we are going back!”

One of the CPD sessions this week was also designed to introduce teachers to Blogging ….. but It did not go well! The internet was VERY slow during the session and everyone soon became discouraged. As well as that, I was torn in all directions, trying to help the 15 or so participants. How I regretted not having brought along some extra Primary School age experts to offer some professional advice

Other CPD courses during the week had various little glitches, and by the time it came to delivering the Go!Animate one, I had put plans in place to cover all unforseen events! If the internet was to go down, then I had made arrangements for offline viewing of the benefits of using the freely available resource. My invited guests ‘experts’ provided first hand evidence of how it impacted positively on their ability to use direct speech in their writing  (I can’t find the link they used now – typical!). The group who came along produced this animation.

I’m also indebted to Cassie for helping me to make sure that the CPD session went smoothly. She offered to introduce her Primary 5 class to Go!Animate and evaluate its effect.

 If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew that it actually did have a positive impact on children’s motivation to learn, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable ‘selling’ the idea to colleagues

Here’s a flavour of the successful CPD session!

Today and yesterday were our in-service days. For class teachers that usually means two days of some sort of CPD. In my present post, however, it consisted of both attending CPD courses delivered by others – and delivering CPD courses to others.

A CPD course delivered by others – Monday:

The first course I attended was some CPD about CPD  :-)

It was delivered by Con Morris and Katie Barrowman – two people I’ve only known virtually until yesterday. It was a very thought-provoking course, presented in an active and fun way. The chocolate orange was not won by anyone and a member of the Falkirk audience reminded Con that he’d promised to share it with everyone if no-one managed to get 2 correct answers to his question. (I was second last in the semi-circle, and was very pleased that there was a couple of slices left by the time Katie had made her way around the grateful recipients! )

We had all been asked to write down two forms of CPD that we knew of …. the ‘usual’ face to face type of twighlight session was not allowed to be one of them. Con spun the ‘random generator thing’ (I’ve seen Ewan use it in Teachmeet sessions – didn’t know it was from the classtools site), and if you had written that down then that was counted as you being half way to winning the chocolate orange all to yourself.

Although lots of people had managed to get one CPD option correct, no-one managed to get two. The whole exercise just brought it home to people the wide variety of activities that come under the umbrella of CPD.

……. Now for my embarrassing confession – I didn’t write down any of the generated answers!! In my defence, however, I took the ‘face-to-face’ type of CPD ban literally and tried to think of non ‘face-to-face’ activities only. What did I write down? ‘Reading educational blogs’ and ‘more recently, twittering’.

When the ‘generator thing’ came up with ‘other’, and Con asked if anyone had written something under that category, I almost admitted to my choice but was beaten to the post by someone at the other side of the room who admitted to writing down ‘going to the theatre’. Con’s reply was great (can’t remember his words exactly – but in summary it was something like ‘it’s ok to take time out to refresh’).

It was also a great surprise to everyone that Katie (I think she might have been the one who did this?) had taken the time to set us all up with a temporary Glow account and we all got to have a contemplative look at it – although I’m sure that there are more advantages available when you’re a fully paid up member

A CPD course delivered to others – Tuesday

Today it was my turn to deliver a course.

In the morning, I helped some staff in a school become familiar with their new Schools-Online website.
The afternoon session, however, was the highlight of my day! I was working with some teachers whose job it is to teach French to Primary 6 and 7 stage children. I introduced them to the effect that an audience can have on a class. We visited some schools that are using blogs to motivate children, and we looked at the use of freely available online tools to enrich learning and teaching.

The feedback forms they filled in made it very apparent that they were staggered by the number (and quality) of these tools. It was obvious that one of the main high spots of their CPD course was the delicious link given to me by Shirley via a recent comment on this blog – thank you for sharing, Shirley! You’ve made some teachers in Falkirk very, very happy

I love the educational potential that GoAnimate offers. It’s not possible (at this time), however, to include animations in edublogs.

Access at work is also very erratic at the moment (hopefully bandwidth issues will be resolved in the future) and this has been quite disturbing as I’ve signed up to present a course on it – next Thursday. No matter where I host it online, the same problems will present themselves as it’s a ‘hit and miss’ situation.

But here’s where Smart Notebook comes in handy. I used the ’recorder’ tool to capture the animation I made for Neil’s birthday surprise    (I know it’ll look a bit strange to ‘outsiders’ but all the scene backgrounds and the animations had my sons cracking up with laughter – and I had a genuine reason for sitting at the computer for ages getting used to the programme!)

The animation is now safely stored on my desktop and can be viewed offline (thanks to my colleague, Malcolm, for the tip).

Once I had recorded it, it was easy (and very quick) to upload it to a host site. I used this opportunity to compare 2 favourite host sites – photobucket and schooltube. The first video below is hosted on photobucket – the second one on schooltube.

As anyone using an edublogs blog knows, I’ll not be able to preview these videos until I’ve pressed the publish button – here goes

Or ……

This is just a short post to say what I’ve been up to recently.

I’ve decided that if this is really going to be a CPD blog, then I need to post more frequently in order to reflect on what I’ve been doing. I really want to keep this blog going – but I’m starting to struggle.

This morning, however, I had one of those ‘lightbulb’ moments when checking my weekly calendar.

I realised that since starting my secondment, I tend to put my energy in to planning for the week ahead rather than reflecting on the week that’s just passed.

… So from now on, I’m going to use this blog to try to truly reflect – (and try to learn from my experiences). I’ll include the highlights from each week (don’t think for one minute that I’m not working like a dog for the rest of the week – ‘cause I am!)

Last Week’s Highlights:

• Monday – I had planned to visit a school to help staff to become familiar with the new Think Quest website. I’ve used Think.com in the past with pupils but after stumbling upon the new web 2.0 tools, this resource lost most of its appeal for me …. and for the pupils in my class. As it’s part of my remit, however, I felt obliged to ‘sell it’ as best I could. Prior to my visit, it transpired that there was a problem with the school’s new account with Think Quest, so I thought it best to have something else up my sleeve . I amended the presentation to include the benefits of introducing children to Blogs, wikis and all the new cooltoolsforschools stuff. The staff were blown away by what I had to share, and by the end of the session, everyone of them had set up a new class blog – I’ll keep you posted about the eventual outcome of this (will they keep them going?)

• Thursday – On Thursday I went back to visit Carronshore Primary School. Class teacher, Cassie, had agreed to work with the children on the GoAnimate program after I told her that I was giving an in-service delivery on its benefits. I love this website and the potential it holds for improving literacy skills. I’d played about with it prior to visiting Carronshore and I completed this effort on Saturday …. andthis one earlier this evening ?. The children in Cassie’s class know (like me) that it makes work feel like fun! I helped them make the first scene. They chose friendship groups to work in (2, 3 – 4 children at most in each group). Each group was supplied with an A3 piece of paper divided into 6 sections. After some think/discussion time, they illustrated each scene. I then showed them how to bring their scene one to life using the GoAnimate program. They loved it – I can’t wait to see if they manage to complete scenes 2 to 6 the same way – I’ll let you know! The plan is that they then create a piece of writing based on their group effort – time will tell

More Lightbulb moments to follow