Learning, Teaching and ICT

I’d been dreading today for a while! 24 Primary School teachers were coming along to hear me give them advice on how to make the most of their SMARTboards in the classroom when teaching foreign languages to upper primary stage pupils. The reason for my ‘dread’ was twofold:

1. I’ve never had the luxury of an interactive whiteboard in my own classroom practice
2. I’ve never taught a foreign language – and my own ability to use another language is very limited

Maybe it was because of these reasons that I felt duty bound to come up with resources that I thought might be very useful to the teachers attending the course. By the time tonight came around, I was actually quite hopeful! I’d found a number of resources that could be used in a variety of curricular areas - and most of those that were specific to mfl teaching were flexible enough to be used in teaching any of the 3 languages taught in our Primary schools here.

Here’s the ppt notes they took away with them:

When teachers come to courses, they are asked to fill in quite detailed evaluation forms  – I’m not sure I agree with this idea, but I’ve yet to have a very negative response

Happily, tonight everyone was ‘very satisfied’ with the course … maybe they were just a friendly ‘easy to please’ bunch? I also shared my ‘working wikispace’ with them, so that they could easily access the long url addresses to some of the links!

Unfortunately a direct message on my twitter account from Joe Dale arrived too late to be included in the course. You can hear the podcast (hot off the press today!) below. I’m sure I’ll be repeating the course, so I’ll be able to include it then.

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Finally!! ….I hope that the ppt presentation used for my handout notes will be a useful reference for the attendees, but I’d really like to learn better ways of presenting courses. I enjoyed reading Ollie Bray’s post today on that subject and the video he included was great. More to perfect

How to Create a Great PowerPoint – Take 2.0 from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.

….. and now there’s http://prezi.com/

I think I’m going to be busy

In my last post, I wrote about how a few of us in this Authority planned to meet with some teachers to share ideas of how we’ve given children ‘a voice’.  The idea to hold the meeting grew from our involvement in a Pupil Participation event by LTS in Stirling Management Centre

 The evening wasn’t the success we’d hoped for as far as attendance goes – due to a variety of circumstances (the snowy weather didn’t help!)

It was, however, a great success as far as CPD goes. Although numbers totalled less than 20 (or maybe because numbers totalled less than 20?), everyone left knowing that they had been part of a valuable self-evaluation event. It was great to listen to each others’ stories as we explained how we’d built in effective strategies to ensure that pupils’ voices were heard. Cassie’s reflections can be read here :

http://misslaw.edublogs.org/2009/02/10/participation-and-learning/

Prior to the CPD event, I tuned in to Sunday night’s edtechroundup meeting because pupil voice was on the agenda. I joined the conversation just as that topic was coming to an end. I did, however manage to hear Krysia describe how a teacher was experimenting with twitter in the classroom. The pupils were using it to discuss what they were learning as the teacher spoke ….. so if one of them didn’t understand, they were able to use twitter to ask peers to clarify. I think this is what Krysia was describing – but might have picked it up wrongly

Anyway ….  when I was making up a ppt handout for staff in a local school on 21st Century learning tools, I decided to turn to twitter ‘friends’ for advice.

There was so much to focus on that I felt that I had to narrow down the options lest I bamboozled the audience

Thanks to Rich, Turrean (sorry – no link) and David for replying to my ’twitter’  plea for help!  Based on their recommendations, here’s what I came up with. And a big thanks to Tom who’s already collating ideas from teachers about the use of twitter in the classroom!!

It went down a treat – and I plan to make a ‘follow-up’ ppt soon. Why not leave a comment describing your own uses of your favourite tool?

 This week I’ve received a number of emails from teachers asking for advice about how to help the  children feel more involved in a class blog that has been set up.

Windsor Park is a school in our Local Authority. It’s a school for deaf children. I was really impressed by the enthusiasm shown by the staff there. After just a recent short introduction of how they might use a class blog with the children, they’re already ‘up and running’!

Check out their blogs … and leave them a comment if you have the time (I know they’ll appreciate the sense of audience that a simple comment can bring!)

There are only two classes in the school. You can find them here:

Room 1

… and here:

 Room 2

The two blogs are ad-free - a big  thankyou to  Sinclair  who offered to rescue any  Edublogs blogs here in danger of being exposed to inappropriate advertising  :-) 

Other teachers who’ve been in touch have been Mrs W. We spent some time setting up wikispaces for the children in her class. There are links to them on one of her blog pages here :

Carronshore 7wn

… But what about giving children their own blog space? Cassie  has decided to go down this road slowly, by inviting the children to earn their online space. Have a look :

Carronshore 5lw

My own experience of giving children a voice by giving them an online space was the topic of my M.Ed dissertation. There’s a link to it in my old Edublogs blog :

http://mvass.edublogs.org/2008/08/07/some-chartered-teacher-thoughts/

At the time of writing the dissertation, I blogged about some thoughts I had about what I felt was a recipe for success for giving children a ‘safe’ online voice. I wrote:

“It’s very important to me that our community is a safe one. …  but I also want the children to have the freedom to have their own space and not feel that there’s a ‘Big Brother’ culture present.

So here’s what I’ve done to try to create that balance:

• First I created a Class Blog so that I could give the pupils an audience for their work
• Very soon after creating the class blog, I realised that it was important to allow access to the children’s own work so I created a wikispace for the class to post their writing
• This didn’t work well, because if we all logged on and edited the space at the same time, problems occured (a ’someone else is editing this space’ message)
• I wanted the children to have their own blogs, but still have control over how they were used. I discovered that East Lothian could help me set up individual blogs . These children have now moved on to High School.
• I’ve now managed to set up our own individual blogs without the help of East Lothian. ……  I discovered the ‘Gmail+’ trick. For example, If you have a ‘yourname@Gmail’ account, it’s possible to create lots of new blogs using that same e-mail address. You can do this by creating new blogs with a ‘yourname+student1@gmail’ , ‘yourname+student2@gmail’ etc.
• One advantage is that, although the pupils have admin rights, the teacher can also login to the blogs at any time.
• Another advantage is that any comments appear in the teacher’s Gmail account – even although the children can moderate them, the teacher has a record of what has appeared
• It’s quite easy to keep track of what is being posted on the children’s blogs by using ‘google reader’, or something similar
• I’ve since discovered that Wikispaces will set up separate username and passwords for students if you email them the information required.

Of course giving children their own online space with Edublogs is no longer an option due to recent changes in policy :-(

http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=7445

A few of us in this Authority have planned to meet with some teachers tomorrow evening to help to share ideas of how we’ve given children ‘a voice’. The idea to hold the meeting grew from our involvement in a Pupil Participation event by LTS in Stirling Management Centre.

I was also inspired to write this post by the latest edtechroundup agenda because my own input to the pupil participation event will focus on my experience of how technology can help to give pupils …. and parents…. a voice.

If I manage to ‘pop in’ to the flashmeeting and learn from others …. I’ll be sure to blog about it here

I’ve finally come up with some ‘how to’ advice on self-hosting!

These first three tutorials are my story of how I was able to make the quantum leap from edublogs to independence! …… They will probably make anyone ‘in the know’ cringe

I suppose the message is – if I can do it, then anyone can!

Thanks to John and David for their advice …. and a great big thank you to Sinclair for his patience in answering all my twitter and email calls for help

Hopefully, I’ll be able to add to tese tutorials as I learn to become more self-sufficient.