Category: Literacy

Back to school…

LiteracyPublished on2 Comments on Back to school…

Well the summer holidays are over and here in the UK we are back to school this week for a new academic year.

This is a brief post to say how helpful I have just found the Flickr resource. We are doing some short work on settings, as do most year groups, and I found myself some belting pictures courtesy of the Flickr community. Some of us may not be able to use Flickr in schools but we can still take advantage of the excellent photographic resource that it is.

So I searched for things like “moonlight” and “road” as we are focusing on The Highwayman and there are some great images. A few tips to help you get started with your search:

  1. My number one tip has to be to filter your search to only include Creative Commons licensed images where you have permission to download and use the images from the owner. Next to the search button click on “Advanced Search” and scroll down to the Creative Commons options at the bottom of the page, checking what you need.
  2. Once you have a set of results, filter them according to “Most Interesting” to give you a set of popular well constructed, interesting images.
  3. Use the “Thumbnails” view to allow you to see lots of images to help you find what you want quicker.
  4. If you find an interesting image take a look at the owners photostream, their set of images. You may discover other pictures of similar quality or versions of the one you liked.
  5. Also search the “Groups” as these often collate images under one topic so a quick look for moonlight in groups comes up with a list of groups dedicated to the art of photographing the moon etc!! And this group which has some nice images in it.

This is one of my favourite images I found and we will be using this tomorrow for the kids to explore and add some sensory description to.

settings-3.jpg

What do you think of it?

The Highwayman Animation

LiteracyPublished on4 Comments on The Highwayman Animation

1023174tFurther to my use of the animated short “The Piano” last year I discovered this excellent version of “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes as I researched the literacy work we are doing at the beginning of the new term. It is produced by Britannica Dream Productions via some pretty imaginative hacking of the game Sims 2.

Both Rick, my new teaching bud, and I commented on the fact that the poem is pretty heavy, so I am pleased to find this version to allow the children better access to the text. I suspect that I will be using this to help the children investigate and understand the text in the early stages of our work. This would be a good link to add to the Primary Framework for Literacy resources list for this unit.

Woohoo just found the same video on YouTube so embedding it here!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/gVdDa2Ms0WQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]Just spotted Ross has written about this resource ages ago + told us all about a good text version online.

"The Piano" by Aidan Gibbons

LiteracyPublished on11 Comments on "The Piano" by Aidan Gibbons

Next week in our literacy lessons we are going to utilising a piece of content referenced in the new UK Primary Strategy. It is a short film called The Piano by animator Aidan Gibbons, take a look.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Sr64NI33qUo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
It is intended to be used by Year 5 children but our Year 6 kids will not have the opportunity to use this great little bit of film so I have adapted the original planning for older kids as we continue our poetry work.

By the end of the week I hope that the children will have a narrative poem that illustrates what occurs in the film. Further work could be done with the children working in Movie Maker and adding their narrated poem on top of the film.

Please let me know if anyone would find the planning useful.

Exploring the 21st Century Classroom

Blogging, Google Earth, Literacy, Mapping, Maths, My classPublished on1 Comment on Exploring the 21st Century Classroom

Last Thursday night I presented to Ivanhoe Grammar School about the uses of ICT in my classroom. But this was no ordinary professional development event, Ivanhoe is in Melbourne, Australia.

We conducted the net cast using a free trial on some desktop conferencing software and used Skype for the voice call. It was quite a challenge for me as you don’t have the ability to see the faces of your audience so you don’t know when to go back over things or just shut-up fo a minute! Joseph Papaleo helped organise the event for his school and from his responses it seemed to be a success.

During the presentation I covered a range of topics, giving practical examples of their use in my classroom –

>>Blogs
> Writing for a real audience and purpose
> Visitors and comments

>>Google Earth
> Starting the day with a “Wow!”
> Going beyond geography
> Being an information tourist

>>Using Wikihow for instructional writing

>>Turning Point audience voting system

>>MS Photostory – an alternative presentation tool

I would just like to thank Joseph and the staff at Ivanhoe for inviting me to present and I hope that although the line was a bit poor you all were able to take something that could make an impact in your classroom.