Learning, Teaching and ICT

I’ve been given the Key to GLOW

Thanks to Katie for the helpful e-mail attachment …… and to Con for the homework

I’ll do my best!

Thanks also to Jaye and Ollie who promised that I could pay a visit to their schools to see the good work they’re doing - can’t back down now that I’ve made the invitation public

Thank you also to John and to Robert for allowing me to use their good practice in my ‘Active Math’ CPD presentation today …. the teachers who attended were suitably impresssed

John provided ideas for using ComicLife to help P6 stage pupils understand ‘shape properties’ and was very impressed by the motivational aspect of giving them a camera and a new resource.

 Robert used Go!Animate and wrote on his blog:

The pupils are enjoying learning how to make animations. Enjoyment is sometimes a bit thin on the ground in maths for some of these students, despite my efforts to jolly things up, so I’m delighted to see them turning up early to the computer lessons, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

AND!!

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 ……