What Planet Are You From?

We used Voicethread today for some work about planets in our solar system as part of our Superheroes work. Generally we have used it to support speaking and listening prior to a fiction writing task, but it is equally effective in gathering and sharing research and factual information.

Voicethread Planets

The children worked in pairs on a laptop – opened up the Voicethread we had created and used Planet 10 from the Planet Science website as the main source of information. Not only is this a great interactive model of the solar system but it has information about each planet presented in different ways.

Children also gathered information from other information websites tagged with “planets” on our Delicious account. They then added that information in written or voice form to the Voicethread. A simple way to create a pooled information resource which is presented and created in different forms. As I said in my Teachmeet Takeover talk at BETT last Friday, Voicethread allows children to work together in an open way. They can see everyone’s comments and contributions updating in real time – they can tap into the information others find as well as share their own.

Our next step will be to personify the different planets as Superheroes and link the physical features we learn about with some superhero powers or special abilities.

I like to use Google Earth when talking about the rotation of the Earth and the sunlight layer, shown in the image below helps to model this even further. “What happens in between the dark part and the light part?” a question from one of the children was a good discussion starter.

GE sunlight

Another feature of Google Earth, that is often unexplored, is the different things you can view apart from the Earth. These are Sky, Mars and The Moon. Looking closely at The Moon there is an abundant set of information about the various lunar missions, landings and physical features.

Moon in GE

We discussed the size and scale of the craters we could see (we found one that was 115km across!) and also tracked the route the Appollo 15 Rover took on the surface.

Lunar15

High resolution panoramic imagery is also available dotted around these landing sites and is a fascinating glimpse into the lunar landscape.

Rover

It made me think about combining some of the digital storytelling ideas that we have done using Google Earth and use Google Moon or Mars as a science fiction bachdrop. The incredible imagery would certainly be a great starting point for descriptive writing about a setting.

LearningTech Newsletter Issue#3

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Introducing Issue Number 3.

In this edition: I report back from my trip to the World Innovation Summit for Education in Qatar; Rick, my Year 5 colleague, explains about how we use Voicethread; you can become a 1930’s newsreader; I share an online tool for making GIANT posters and be sure to check out the debate about whether technology is in fact making children better writers, not worse.

LearningTech Newsletter Issue#3

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As always I would be grateful for any feedback, suggestions or thoughts about the content of the newsletter. Hope you find it useful.

Developing Leaders NCSL Conference: Classroom Without Walls

Last Thursday the National College for School Leadership held the third of their national Developing Leaders events and I was invited to run a workshop titled Classroom Without Walls.

I approached the workshop with the idea of connections, how we as teachers can connect using Twitter and how we can connect children’s learning. You can see the presentation I used below and in the first few slides I shared my use of Tutpup and Voicethread – simple but hugely effective tools for the classroom, both of which connect children to each other’s learning.

Classroom Without Walls” suggest looking at or beyond the horizon, however I raised the idea with the participants that we sometimes overlook the walls between our own pupils. I explained that using tools such as Voicethread we can perhaps first address how we can connect children within our own class. When was the last time your children looked at each other’s work? Peer assessment is important but often difficult to find time to do. When working with Voicethread, peer assessment is just part of the process not just an additional session you need to timetable.

I helped demonstrate the idea of a networked teacher by asking the participants to find teachers who had tweeted a clue about their location to me via Twitter. As usual my network provided some great responses and the workshop participants used Google Earth to try and find the schools and colleges that were shared. It was really engaging and rooted in a lesson that I taught last year to my year five class.

It was interesting to see that out of the two workshops around 90% of delegates had a Facebook account and only about 15% had a Twitter account. Some had both. But these young teachers, although very aware of social networking between friends, have not yet engaged with the idea to create a professional network. I hope I gave them a nudge in the right direction.

If you get a chance then also take a look at this Mastercard advert “Milton Avenue”– it resonated with me as I was thinking about how important a network is to me for information and advice. I don’t have all the answers but perhaps someone in my network does. This was underlined on Friday when a teacher at school asked my advice about domain names on behalf of the school she is a governor at. My experience of purchasing domain names is limited but a quick question on Twitter allowed me to provide her with great recommendations and advice.

It was agreat day at the NCSL and I was thrilled to get some time to catch up with Dan Sutch from Futurelab who opened the day with a thought provoking keynote on the future of schooling and leadership. John Davitt was there to wrap the day up in his unique and entertaining style, the first time I have seen him talk beyond the TeachMeet 7 minutes.

Teachers TV – Online Collaborative Tools

C2984002I have been fortunate enough to be part of a Teachers TV programme recently aired entitled “ICT for the Non-Specialist – Blogs/Wikis”.

However the part that we were filmed about did not include anything to do with a wiki – what we did showcase was TutPup, Voicethread and Google Docs. We are in the second half of the film.

The programme synopsis is included here 

The use of blogs and online collaboration in education is explored as teachers discover how and why they should make good use of them.

Head of geography at Bury Church Secondary, Sally Sumner, uses blogs as a resource in the classroom and as a revision tool, having overcome her initial doubts about her ICT skills.

MFL teacher Janet McCann finds blogging invaluable for motivating the boys in her class, and discusses why the pupils find this technology so engaging.

At Priestsic Primary School, Nottinghamshire, ICT co-ordinator Tom Barrett uses online collaboration tools for peer assessment, developing the pupil’s literacy skills.

Collaborative online educational games are also shown, providing a safe environment on the web for pupils to improve their numeracy skills.

A rare chance to see me in the wild! I hope that you find some of what I articulate about the tools useful and please ensure you take a look at the context document that I wrote to accompany the film which is available in the “Resources” link.

It is lovely to see my old class talking about how they use technology and how it helps them. Some permission issues prevented me and the film itself from saying TutPup or Voicethread – it had to be all very generalised. But those three tools that I have mentioned and that appear in the film are stalwarts of my classroom practice – just today I sent out this Tweet

“My class is suddenly alive with the buzz of 30 Y5s playing+challenging each other on http://tutpup.com so much good game talk going on 🙂 “

The other films in the series are:

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 4: Improve the Story

In today’s literacy lesson, the third in our Google Earth storytelling unit, we made the leap from audio or spoken parts of the story to some written work. 

The use of the mapping in this story has provided us with a structure through the escape route we chose and also it has provided us with a rich visual stimulus for story content. The bushes James has to break through in his bid for freedom have caused scratches and bruises and ripped his clothing. The building site we have seen has caused James to be covered in dust and mud. In our story he hides between two large lorries and we stretched out with our senses (Jedi style!) and saw workmen chatting on a tea break, heard drills banging into the ground and the smell of diesel fumes from machinery. All of this has been generated from studying the satellite imagery in our story location.

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Over the last few days we have been working on generating a bank of good vocabulary for the escape, which we have on our WOW WORD display. Through discussion and thesaurus work we have gathered lots of verbs and adjectives that have already proven valuable for the children to use in their stories. We have also tried to generate lots of different alternative sentence openers – many of the recorded audio sentences began with “I”. We used the verbs we had generated and coupled them with adverbs to generate powerful sentence openers. Again these are displayed on the wall for the children to see and use in their work, and in fact many of the improvements made today included many of the examples you can see.

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Today the children used this language work to improve the sentences they had begun in their Vocaroo audio. Underneath the code for the Vocaroo player they added <p> for a paragraph and then wrote an improved version of their audio. We encourage them to make small changes to the original sentence, so just add a WOW word or begin the sentence in a more interesting way.

Here is an example of what one of the placemarks looked like and a second image of what the same item had included in the placemark properties. You can listen to the audio for this example here. The children coped well with writing in this way and had no problems with the coding as it is so simple.

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The combination of audio and written text has allowed the children to really improve their writing. I have always been very encouraged when the children have used Voicethread and I think that a technology based audio element can be a powerful way to scaffold the writing process.

I believe that in this unit there have been a few ingredients that have contributed to improved storytelling:

  • Google Earth’s imagery provided the class with ample inspiration for what to be creating in their story – they could see and explore it in front of them. They were not looking at a piece of paper and trying to drum up something.
  • The confidence and comfort that they have with the main character and the background to the story.
  • A clear and purposeful backbone to the tale – James is escaping.
  • An agreed escape route. The whole class can then discuss the various moments in the escape. The sharing and peer support is vital.
  • Easy audio recording has provided the children with a quick avenue into generating story content. There is no password/login/signup/complex method/knowledge/skill barrier to using Vocaroo. The children were recording their ideas immediately.
  • Audio and text situated on the image at where it happens in the story brings, often disparate, storytelling elements together.