Is the sun beginning to set on a cumbersome educational landscape? One that is too rigid to quickly adjust to what leaners need and what they want from the future. A system that looks on as grass roots spread wider and wider beneath it.
I am in revolutionary mood as I return from some inspiring conversations with people at #BectaX.
Can those of us who recognise the need for change, rise above the cynicism? Rise above the barriers and the blocks. Let us be determined and positive, and make change happen in small ways, where we are, where we can.
Perhaps it is wrong of us to ever have believed this change will occur from policy. I am sure you are like me in that you have never waited for policy to define your practice. Each of us has a certain amount of influence, an ability to change 1 or 5, 30 or even 500 students’ experiences of school. If we believe it should be done, we need to make it happen in every small way we can.
I have stood in a room with hundreds of people whispering. It is very loud.
If we all make a small contribution, a small effort of change – if we all whisper, our voices will be heard. Here are some whispers:
Talk to your students, to your classes about technology. Find out how they use it at home and what they enjoy. Plan to do it again soon.
Take what you find out (formally or informally) to someone else in your institute. Better still get your students to explain it.
Show someone how you use Twitter or other online tools to connect with teachers. Do it as often as you can.
Write a blog post about your ideas. (Or even start a blog for your ideas!) Share your experiences, frustrations, successes and hopes for your work.
Share an interesting blog post you have seen with someone who may never see it.
Ask on your blog or on Twitter for other schools to connect with. Share the process with your class and give them an insight into what is happening at schools in other countries.
Help someone on Twitter by retweeting a request for assistance. You never know where that ripple will stop.
Let your children or students teach you how to use something.
Find ways to help parents better understand what you do in school and how their children are using technology.
Find out what your students think of blocking websites. What do they think is “safe” internet use.
Consider managing your own internet filtering. At least have the conversation.
Ask your local authority to unblock useful websites. Keep asking.
Whatever form your whisper takes, raise your voices. We are louder together.
When you share your classroom experiences and ideas, one thing you hope for is that they are transferable to other classrooms. This week I was delighted to see three examples of my ideas being successfully applied elsewhere.
The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities.
The final ripple I caused comes from Jan Webb another Year 4 teacher in Cheshire. Jan took up the challenge of using my Maths Maps idea with her class and developed a series of activities in a Google Map of Berlin for her class to use.
Jan explains on her blog how they enjoyed using the resource in her class.
…a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building! We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.
These ripples are very encouraging as you are able to clearly see the effect sharing your own practice has on other teachers and subsequently other children’s learning.
If you have always thought about starting a blog but never got round to it, why not give it a go. The more pebbles in the pond causing ripples the better.
Today I attended the 4th Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Primary National Conference. I was invited to run some seminars for the delegates. Situated in one of the conference suites of the Emirates stadium, the home of Arsenal football club, the event accommodation was spacious and well equipped.
I ran my hour long session twice during the day, it was titled “Connected Classrooms“. I based my practical ideas on 4 different connections.
Student – Student (same class)
Students – Students (different classes, countries, cultures)
Teacher – Student – Learning (connecting with our curriculum)
Teacher – Teacher (using Twitter for CPD)
I tried to keep my presentation simple and coherent, with a clear message about the ways we can use technology to engage learners.
We used the Nintendo Wii and I spent some time playing Endless Ocean and talking about the ways we have used it in our recent topic. I highlighted classroom blogging as a simple means to establish meaningful connections with other classes around the world.
Drawing upon my experiences of Twitter I spoke about why it is the most important CPD I have had. The most important connection we need to facilitate is between students in our own classes. I went into detail about how Voicethread can do this, the ways we have used it in a recent sequence of writing work and why it is one of my classroom cornerstones.
I think technology has the potential to both perpetuate traditional notions of classwork and to in fact smudge the definitions of what independent work means.
If you were one of those attending the sessions, thankyou for joining me and please feel free to leave me a comment about your reactions. I really value your feedback.
Recently I have written a number of posts about class blogging and have begun using one again in our classroom. One of the things that I wrote about in my previous post is how useful it is to keep tabs on your visitor numbers and locations, and how children get very excited about this.
One big influence on this is a separate network that allows you to promote your class blog and drive traffic to it. I am aware that with a larger Twitter network you can drive a larger amount of clicks. I am going to put mine to good use and post on Twitter a class blog recommendation every single day.
I hope that this helps drives traffic to your class blogs, widens your audience and continues to spark curiosity about different visitor locations. But perhaps more importantly it might help you and your class make some meaningful connections with other classes around the world.
I have started the#classblogs hashtag to keep track of everything to do with … class blogs!
Here are the first 4 recommendations taken from various tweets and recent comments on blog posts.
If you haven’t already please drop by and leave them a comment, remember if they have a visitor map even if you just take a look you will add a little dot. That dot may lead to a question from one of the class…
If you have a class blog and want me to help spread the word about what you are doing I am taking examples from the existing comments on my previous post, otherwise just let me know the details.
When I first began my own blog nearly four years ago I also had set up a class site too. We had a year of great fun and connections. The experience made me realise how easy it is for classrooms to have a global dimension through the power of this technology. No doubt many of you with class blogs experienced this realisation too.
I have had a fantastic week returning to classroom blogging and starting our new class blog >> Priestsic5. Before Christmas I wrote a post asking for teachers to share their experiences with class blogs. To explain what platform they were using and to share some reasons behind it’s use. As you can see from the link I have decided to use Blogger as our platform.
Why Blogger?
The two main reasons are ease of use and sustainability, and I think that the former directly effects the latter. I want the blog to be a well established feature of the classroom and for it to be sustained into the future. Blogger is extremely easy to setup especially if you have some blogging experience of your own – but even if you have not.
One big plus is the associated services and tools that can be utilised alongside your Blogger (Google) account. The most important is perhaps image hosting in the form of Picasa Web Albums. Used alongside the desktop Picasa 3 application it is a good solution. Amongst other things I can blog directly from Picasa, synchronise local image folders to the web automatically and upload photo videos directly to YouTube.
Synchronise
Just to unpick the image folder synchronisation a little further – on our blog I have created an Art Gallery slideshow in the sidebar. I want this to be a collection of all that the class create and so I will be regularly updating the set of images. Currently all I have to do to add another image to this slideshow is add it to a local folder on my class computer – that’s it. I think this is a really useful feature as we are often managing lots of images from a whole class set of work. Using the Art Gallery example here’s how to do it:
Upload you images to your computer, Picasa should automatically pick these up and display them for upload.
Create an Art Gallery folder for the images (usually done during upload process)
In Picasa next to the folder, on the right hand side of the screen, click the Sync to Web button.
Sign in to your Google account.
Your images will be uploaded to a web album.
Click on the newly created online album – click on “Link to this Album” in the right sidebar.
Select “Embed Slideshow” and copy the code.
Paste this code in your blog. For ours I used “Add Gadget” (HTML/Javascript type) from the Layout settings.
Save and refresh your blog to check it is working OK – you can manually change the size in the code.
Now every time you add an image to the original local folder (on your computer) it will automatically update to the web and consequently update your slideshow too.
In the remainder of the post I will be explaining a few additions and changes I have made to our class blog that I consider to be important.
Next Blog Link
One of the features of a blog with Blogger is the top navigation bar that appears. This has a “Next Blog” link button which takes you to a random blog. Naturally this is not ideal for a class blog as you have no control over what you are linking to.
The first thing I did was find out how to remove it. It is a pretty simple case of adding a small piece of CSS code to the Template code. I found this site’s explanation exactly what I needed. Here is a short screencast from the same website illustrating the process:
By simply tracking the number of visitors you are able to illustrate to your class that we have an audience. There are people out their in the world reading what we post. These numbers are important in helping you establish rules for writing posts and comments. Children have a better appreciation that their work is going to be viewed by more than just “us”. A visible visitor counter like StatCounter provides some useful analytics for your blog that you could use in maths further down the line
Dots on a Map
In my experience one of the greatest ways to hook your class into the use of the class blog is to display a map of your visitors. In the past and in the last week I have found this to be a great focal point for the class when they are looking at the blog. I have used ClustrMaps for years on my own blog and with classblogs.
It is simply a case of creating an account and then embedding a short piece of code in a blog sidebar. After 12 hours or so the map will begin to be populated with visitor dots. It is these simple marks on a map that become points of intrigue for the children in your class. After 24 hours of our own blog we had about 400 hits – I displayed the full screen map and just listened to the children pointing at the different countries and chatting about where their visitors were from. There was a buzz of excitement.
There is something so powerful and yet so simple and wonderful in allowing your class to realise that those little dots are people who have just visited your blog and read about work you do in your classroom. They begin to realise the connections we can make and begin to develop an awareness of things beyond their own community.
I know it is only a little map, but it really is a powerful aspect of class blogs and I would strongly recommend you display something too. Can you think of any other way that your class would willingly look at a world map every day and ask questions about where places are? Have your class blog displayed when the children come in first thing and leave room for their geographical curiosity to shine through. What you do with that natural curiosity afterwards is up to you!
Is the sun beginning to set on a cumbersome educational landscape? One that is too rigid to quickly adjust to what leaners need and what they want from the future. A system that looks on as grass roots spread wider and wider beneath it.
Recently I have 