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Over the last few weeks we have been working with the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. We have been discussing and exploring it through lots of talk and drama. On Monday we talked as a class about the drama technique of hot-seating, I asked the children to work with a partner to prepare some questions they might ask the Highwayman if they had the chance. As they were working I wandered out of the class and immediately returned into the room, but this time I tiptoed in and asked one of the children, in a whispery voice, whether it was safe or not. They looked bemused and I crept through the rest of the class shiftily looking from side to side. I had become the Highwayman.
I have always enjoyed drama as a way into text and the children love it when their teacher goes out on a limb a little and pretends. I told the children that I didn’t have much time and that I had gotten their message about meeting them here. We had a series of questions about the plot, the character’s feelings about Bess and what it was like to be a criminal. All the time I was checking through the blinds and looking suspiciously at the kids. When my time was up I acted as if the paranoia had got to me and I accused the children of setting me up – that it was a trap and I with one more furtive glance I dashed off out the door again. When I returned we were all smiling. (The children went on to do hot-seating in smaller groups.)
In the following lesson we used a Voicethread to further explore the characters in the poem. (Each child had their own laptop in this session.) I asked the children to add voice and text (I always give them the choice) comments on the various character images I had uploaded. I prompted them to make these kinds of comments:
Questions that they might like to ask the characters. Consolidating the previous drama work.
Answer a question that they see from someone else. Take on the character’s role and answer a question posed by other people in the class.
General reactions and thoughts on the different characters in the poem.
I have enjoyed using Voicethread in the classroom for a long time now and have always considered it to be a great tool to encourage quality speaking and listening. This was only the second session using the tool and I once again witnessed children recording, listening back and improving what they had done. The open and transparent nature of sharing their work seems to sharpen their attention to detail especially in voice recordings. I sat with a few boys who need considerable support with their literacy and they were just having a great time, big grins, listening and enjoying the comments from others in the class and recording their own. Finding their voice. When you work like this as a class there is a tangible sense of a community of use.
We were coming to the end of the session and with 10 minutes to go I wanted to review the lesson with the children but I decided to change the plan a little and explore a new method to do this. I asked them to log into their newly created Google Mail accounts and send me a short message explaining what they thought of that lesson. With my inbox displayed on the SMARTBoard the reviews of the lesson rolled in. Although the comments were simple in nature it proved a point, it tested the process more than anything. These 9 year olds were independently able to switch applications, sign into their accounts, think about their learningand respond by composing and sending an email in under 10 minutes and for some much less than that. The children each had an opportunity to express their feelings about the lesson, to add their voice to the lesson review. If I had just asked them as a whole class then I would have only been able to garner a handful of comments. Would these comments have been from the same groups of children? Probably – so the use email in this instance helped everyone to express their own indiviual remarks.
I am not sure that email is the ideal tool to respond with lesson comments, although replying to an email that you have sent to the children with key questions about the lesson would be more appropriate I think. Using Google Chat is another tool that would allow for instant messaging in review of a lesson, or I could have added a final image on the Voicethread for the children to add lesson review comments. (Another alternative is to take advantage of a Google Form for lesson review)
Whichever way you approach it I think that it gives every child the opportunity to make their voice heard.
Absolutely. One of the children in my class had waited to the end of the session to ask me if they could access Google Docs at home. This afternoon we introduced all of our Year 5 children (60) to Google Apps and we had lots of fun exploring the tool with our new classes.
We discussed with the children the make-up of their usernames and then the syntax of their email. I use a little information sheet (see above) for them to record their data on, I asked the children to come out to me and I tell them and write down their password. Simple and effective.
Please use this document to support your own introduction to Google Apps in the classroom.
With the laptops already running back at their tables they then go and login. (It is worth noting that they also have to go through some security questions before they access their Docs home.) As we had last year we had the usual problems of not typing things in correctly but otherwise the children all managed it well.
I decided that a simple data entry spreadsheet would be one of the best ways to introduce the idea of sharing a document. I created something that would accommodate the results we have collected during our circuit training in PE, number of repetitions in a minute for steps ups and star jumps, that sort of thing (see the header in the film clip). Once I created the document I shared with all of the children in our year group, this way when they login they will see a document in the home screen.
All the children had to do in this intro activity was to find their name and add their data they had recorded on paper to the shared resource. Just before they began I asked the children to try to imagine what it would be like if I asked every child in the class to record their data on one sheet of paper – their bemused looks helped me to emphasise the power of working in an online document and how we can all access it at the same time.
We began to explore the spreadsheet and as we opened it we could see that the other Year 5 class were well on their way in terms of adding their data. Again I took this opportunity to help illustrate the live update of the document and how the different coloured cell outlines signalled different users (Incidentally if you roll over these coloured cells you will see the username pop up) I asked one of the children in my class to enter their own data and we watched as it updated on the class IWB and all 16 laptops looking on. The children’s excitement was building, similar to the moment when they realise what all the fuss is about in a Voicethread.
This short screencast shows our spreadsheet being updated – a pretty dull video but useful to illustrate how it looks when being worked on by 16 users.
The children were buzzing by now and I felt we could push them on to learning about how you share a document, so once I had shown them how to do it I challenged them to create something and share it with me. I displayed my inbox on the screen and watched as the message alerts came rolling in. I realised the children loved to see this, they got so excited to see their email alert pop into my inbox – before their friend had managed it! I remember this being the case last year. I am going to explore the idea of incidental writing opportunities using email this year.
I showed the children GMail and asked them to send me an email and once again they were very adept at what they were doing, highly accustomed to it all already and were clearly enjoying it. I once again observed, even in this first session, the community of use that appears – children helping each other out, a supportive word, children asking their friends. And of course children empowered to be a mini-expert.
We have gotten off to a flying start and this week I have declared it a sandbox week, in that the children can email me and share any documents they create, a time to play and get used to this great set of tools. At the end of the week we will rein in this activity a little and discuss some simple guidelines for sharing docs.
Last year we only had about 7 weeks of work with Google Docs, today it begun in our classes and I am really looking forward to digging even deeper into what we can do with the tools to support learning in the primary classroom. And we have a got a whole year to dig!
Who knows what we will find?
Some related posts from this blog that you might find useful too.
I am thrilled to be travelling up to Glasgow in a few weeks to take part in the 9th edition of TeachMeet alongside the Scottish Learning Festival. (Depending on a few things I may speak at the TeachMeet too)
There is a huge amount of innovation going on in Scottish schools, I am looking forward to attending an event where I can put a face to some names and meet the people I consider part of my learning network.
I will be at the SLF on Wednesday and Thursday attending a few seminars – I am particularly interested in meeting Ollie Bray and Derek Robertson to talk Nintendo DSs in the classroom. We are on the verge of beginning our own DS adventure in our Year 4 classes so I hope to glean some more ideas.
If you are attending the SLF or TeachMeet please let me know, it will be great to join up the dots and meet you. Anyone up for coffee in Glasgow Wednesday morning as I will be getting in pretty early?
Last year it was in the Summer term that I finally got my act together and began using more cloud based computing and relying less and less on my memory stick. This year has started with barely a shred of paper in sight and I actually do not know where my memory stick is. I have been pleased to see that Google Docs is beginning to deal with imported Word files containing tables much better and so in this post I share a couple that I use.
The links I have provided to the docs should give you access to your own copy – what you see will be yours and not a shared or published version. If you have problems with the link I have added another link where the document is currently published online.
Those of you in the English primary schools will appreciate the fact that we have new literacy and numeracy frameworks to work with and this is an example of a weekly literacy planning document that you could use.
You will of course have to remove the information that doesn’t apply and it is currently filled with a few days of planning from last week just to illustrate how it is used- this is the general style of planning we do for a week.
I like the fact that a digital document that remains as such can take advatage of the links that you can add. Once it is printed those links are dead.
Our timetable changes every week, as well as we accomodate different things going on in school we deal with staff absence, courses etc. Rather than use an online calendar we use a simple weekly timetable that outlines what we are doing – this year we have also added links from the subjects to their respective planning documents too.
Rick my teaching colleague and I are using Google Docs to organise, author and share our planning for this year and it is already proving useful as we make changes during the week to planning. But the person you share it with will of course always have access to the most recent copy.I look forward to the further development of the template resource currently in it’s infancy within Google Docs so that I can make a template from my Docs home screen and generate further copies from that.
I hope you may find some of the Docs useful – let me know if they are and if you have any of your own to share.
I have written about Multiflyer before as it qualifies as one of my top 5 Times Tables resources. We begin the year with a test of the children’s multiplication knowledge to ascertain their strengths and where they need to focus their practice, we also like to be able to see how quick they are. Using Multiflyer we can do this all and have it marked within 15 minutes.
Previously we used to give the children a paper test of 100 multiplication facts, but timing did not come into it. Although it did when we had to manually check 3000 answers from the whole class! Using Multiflyer addresses the work life balance we all battle with.
Here is how we do it.
Access the site and choose Practice from the options.
Select what you want to test the children on – we choose 1-10 from both sides.
Ensure that the children choose to have the Table OFF otherwise they will be able to find the answers using a multiplication grid.
Clicking START will display a practice question – ensure the children know what they need to do.
Remind them that they do not need to move the mouse and that the quickest method is to enter the answers and press enter on the keyboard.
We give the children 15 minutes to answer as many questions as they can. We find that this gives us a really deep picture of their times tables ability.
You might like to ask them to turn their volume down before they begin as the sound effects can be off putting for children trying to concentrate.
When the children have had 15 minutes, or however long you have given them, ask them to click on End MISSION.
This will display a chart displaying how they got on. We ask them to choose PRINTABLE CHART from the top.
They enter their names and the date of the test and print if needed – this could be filed in their folders or with their other maths work.
We use the information provided in the report in a number of ways. The individual tables results reveals to us the level of understanding for each one and so we can tell the children what they need to work on. This week I have told the children their own targets for practice, the weakest of all of the results.
The overall percentage is important but perhaps the most important is the number of questions answered correctly. We enter this into a spreadsheet and divide it into 900 (the number of
seconds in 15 minutes) This calculation provides us a per correct answer time in seconds – we can basically see how fast they can recall their tables. We will complete this every month and involve the children in tracking their own progress.
No marking means we can focus on the diagnostic side of helping the children improve the speed and accuracy of their times tables – I would urge you to take advantage of this resource or others like it to do the same. We completed the task with the children using the class laptops but it could be easily done over two sessions in a computer suite.
Not only will it help you address the balance but also stop you getting bogged down with marking and allow you to focus on helping the children improve.
I am thrilled to be travelling up to Glasgow in a few weeks to take part in the 
