Year: 2007

My Blog; the choir; the flock

BloggingPublished on3 Comments on My Blog; the choir; the flock

I just want to address a few thoughts that are flying around at the moment that we are “preaching to the choir” a bit when we blog. In that the people who read the posts we write are those who are already convinced and understand the potential of the technology. Are the people who do not understand the potential actively reading this information?

I don’t know the answer to that question, I just want to make what I write less about the theory and more about the real impact in the classroom. Ewan calls for more blogging about what is happening in the classrooms, (well I am trying Ewan ol’ chap!) and I have to agree that this alone will encourage other teachers to blog. When they see real examples of classrooms integrating the technology and real successes, that is when they become convinced.

Collaboration

Blogging, My classPublished on1 Comment on Collaboration

I was interested to read Chris Lehmann’s Practical Theory blog this morning about what School 2.0 is being defined as.

It’s about collaboration — it’s about understanding that we are more than the sum of our parts. It’s about understanding that my ideas will be made better if I listen to your ideas. And it recognizes that your ideas could influence me no matter where you live, as long as we both have access to a blog or a wiki.

This very much supports my thoughts and post on how blogging can influence our children’s ability to write.

Editgrid update

My class, SciencePublished on2 Comments on Editgrid update

We got round to looking once more at our Science Online resource over at Editgrid. I had some trouble yesterday with it so I thought I could try dumping the cache in Firefox and that worked really well.

So in the morning I pasted in the data which I added to Excel yesterday and sorted out an average and simple bar graph which you can see I have linked to below, also here.

271344
Then the other year 6 class added their own data – we watched as it updated live, the children loved it and we talked about how the graph and average were also changing.

It would be great to be able to do this with schools in other countries – after all exercise is universal! SO GET INVOLVED – all the instructions are there for you to do the short exercises and then you can add you data into the pool.

Real data we can all share; to help better demonstrate how reliability is imperative in scientific results.

Editgrid and Pulse Rate revision

My class, SciencePublished onLeave a Comment on Editgrid and Pulse Rate revision

Today we were back to school. We had a good day and pretty much hit the ground running.

I decided that during our revision of the human body, and specifically whilst we were looking at pulse rate we would use our Science Online spreadsheet resource to share results between the 2 Year 6 classes.

Although over the last few months we have had nearly 300 individual views and some positive comments on the resource, nobody has yet been in a position to contribute. So I thought I would look closer to home and share pulse rate data between the classes.

Pulse

The important principle still remains underpinning why I want this web2.0 tool to work; that more results means more reliability. These tools have to make a difference after all.

So the children recorded the pulse rate (counted for 30 seconds and doubled) when:

  • Resting
  • After 30 arm circles
  • After 30 star jumps
  • After 30 side to side jumps

Editgrid has a real time update feature but unfortunately we had a bunch of trouble and the spreadsheet just sort of stopped updating. I decided to save our results in Excel and then import them later – you can still see our “Exercise” sheet and everything ready to go.

You are welcome to have a go and add some data – it took us less than 30 mins to gather the info and add all 30 odd sets of entries to Excel.

Let me know of any other simple experiments or investigations you and your class are doing this term that we could pool the results for.

Image Citation:
Imperial Doughnut, “Pulse” Imperial Doughnut’s Photostream. April 25 2006 <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/134998486_c7519227be.jpg>.

Next Gen Teachers Group

TechnologyPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Next Gen Teachers Group

After a brief chat with Doug, and me passing the age test, he has invited me to be involved with this online group. I hope to learn even more from those involved. As Mr Belshaw puts it:

We’re going to be known as NextGen Teachers and the aim is to represent the world and what we’re doing from a more digital native-esque perspective.

I look forward to more in the new year.