Category: Literacy

Finding their Voice

Google, Literacy, My class, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on8 Comments on Finding their Voice

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.)

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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 learning and 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.

How to Create an Emotion Graph using Google Forms

Featured, Google, Google Docs, LiteracyPublished onUpdated on20 Comments on How to Create an Emotion Graph using Google Forms

This idea was one that popped into my head at about 3am. After George, my 2 year old son, woke us and I had settled him again, I began thinking about Google forms (as you do at 3am – what better time to be thinking about that subject!!) and the current work we are doing on film narrative and The Piano by Aidan Gibbons. Take a look at the film for yourselves.

What is an emotion graph?

An emotion graph is a simple line graph comparing a range of happiness to sadness against different points (time) in a story or film. This technique of graphing the emotional ups and down within a story really helps children to visualise the whole story in a different way. Once the graphs are complete they can be discussed in reference to the different peaks and troughs of emotion. “Why is the main protagonist so upset at this point on the graph, what has happened?”, “In which part of the story is he the happiest?”

The graph can reflect the events in any type of linear narrative, whether that be a book or film – it could even reflect the varying emotions within an event such as a football match.

As you can see the whole plot in one graph it is useful to engage the children in conversations about the structure of the plot and the way that the emotions are tied into generic story elements such as problems, conflicts and resolutions.

comparison1

The children in my class really enjoyed watching The Piano today as we began our film narrative unit. One of the children said that the main character was playing his emotions on the piano, they were the notes of his life. Such a lovely turn of phrase. The Piano is an excellent text to explore in terms of an emotional graph as each of his memories linger, bringing joy and sadness into his life again.

Step by Step – make the form

  1. Create a new Google form
  2. Add a new question for each of the different events that you would like to gauge the emotions for. Because the film is only two and half minutes long I have chosen about ten or eleven events.
  3. Select “Choose from a Scale” question type and add the numbers 0 – 10. For each question, I added a reminder about the emotional scale from sad (0) to joyous (10) as some additional text. I found it really easy to generate one question and then just duplicate it using the link, and just edit what the event is.

Step by Step – create the emotion graph

Your form is complete and now you just need to add the line graph itself to the linked spreadsheet. You will see in your spreadsheet that the header (top) row is filled in with the different events from left to right.

  1. Under each column heading add the average =AVERAGE(Range) formula for the cells below, say down to 100 cells below. This will average out the different responses from your form and return a single figure. Don’t worry the survey results should always be added below your average row. I like to add the “Rounded” formatting to these cells as well.
  2. Select these average figures
  3. Click the “Insert Chart” tool and create a line graph from this data. (These average cells could also be hidden, select the row from the left and click hide row) Find some more detailed steps to making a chart here.
  4. Place the chart to the right of your data or embed within a blog post somewhere, and enlarge it so that it is clearly visible.

I will be emailing the emotion graphing form to all of our Year 5s and getting them to complete the form (from within the email) alongside watching the film again. We will then be reviewing the responses and how the emotions vary throughout the text. I will be encouraging them to justify their responses and decisions with supporting evidence from the film.

Now it is your turn to complete the emotion graphing survey that I have referred to – watch the film again, if you haven’t already, and answer the survey. The code for embedding a form is available when you click “Edit/Resend Form” and then it is under the “Preview and Send” link.

Screenshot 16

You will see that I have published the graph which can be done from within the graph drop down menu.

Let me know what you make of this idea and whether it was worth a sleepless early morning!

  • How can you use this idea in your own narrative or literacy unit?
  • Have you used emotion graphs? (I know there is an option with Turning Point voting systems to do something similar which I have used in the past)
  • How have you used them?
  • How else have you used Google forms in the classroom?

Google Apps in School – Week 3

Google, Google Docs, Laptops, LiteracyPublished on1 Comment on Google Apps in School – Week 3

I cannot believe that we have already had three weeks of work with Google Apps in our year group. This week has been extremely eventful, and I have loved and hated technology in equal measure (well there is always a bit more love) – with major network issues it has brought into focus issues of reliability that every school and teacher need to engage with when investing their time and effort in Google Apps.

Monday – 12/5/08

  • Took some time with the children to explore the various different views and issues surrounding finding and managing Docs home page.
  • I emphasised the importance of the search function at the top of the page and how Google have been known to be quite good at searching 🙂
  • I demonstrated a few different searches and how quickly you could find content – as you type in the search field it immediately gives feedback on that term, even looking in the people who you have shared the docs with. You can then click the results that popup to go straight to that doc. Very powerful and much quicker than navigating through folders or views.
  • As a class we worked together to edit the 1st draft verse we wrote last week. I used the strikethrough tool and colour formatting as we worked on ADDING words OMITTING words and CHANGING words in the poem.
  • The alterations the children suggested were excellent and as we finished up I thought that we could use the REVISIONS tool to compare our new version with the original. When two versions are selected and compared changes and deletions are clearly highlighted. If different users were to make the changes than these users are colour coded too with their edits.
  • In a less sophisticated way than Track Changes this could be used on a longer piece of work when reviewing 1st and 2nd drafts.
  • The children had time together to complete their 1st drafts of the poem and organise their poetry journals (Google Presentations).
  • There were a few pairs that had work missing, their poetry journal presentations were missing slides. I pointed them towards the revisions tool and told them to find a version that was complete and to REVERT TO THIS VERSION.
  • Although a minor incident this is an example of one of the huge benefits of Google Docs. It auto saves so many times (I keep seeing the “Saving…” message popup at the top on this doc) that unless you were to delete the actual file, a child could retrace every step in the life of the piece of writing, even over a number of days or weeks – not possible in more traditional office applications.

Tuesday and Wednesday – 13/5/08 and 14/5/08

  • Oh dear.
  • Powercut killed the school server during the night and the APS or alternative power supply did not seem to do its job.
  • As a result of this the DHCP database has been corrupted and so the server could not administer new IP addresses to laptops and even the access points. Bad news all round.
  • Keith our technician rebuilt the database today (Wed) and tells me it is working again.
  • With no wireless network we were unable to access our online docs and so were in a fix – seeing the main concern I have with this approach materialising.
  • We were able to continue with our poetry work with some nostalgic pencil and paper writing for a few days! It has brought into sharp focus the main drawback of this method and so I have looked further into the new Google Docs development of using Offline syncing.
  • If you download Google Gears, a browser extension, you can sync your online docs with your desktop.
  • It seems that this service will be made available to Google Apps Education Edition too, which is good news. But there remains many questions: will children need to work on the same laptop to see their desktop synced work? Could the whole domain be synced to a network? How will this individual use be translated into domain use?
  • I hope that when teachers say to me, “But what happens to your access to the children’s docs when the internet connection is down?” I will be able to answer that we will just work on our desktop synced versions which will sync up when we are back online again.
  • I would hope that there are no further restrictions to doc access because of the offline nature – for example having to work on a specific machine because docs are only synced there.
  • I am hopeful for this situation but expect there may be some compromises – it will be interesting to see how docs could be used offline for a domain.
  • On reflection I still have complete faith and trust the infrastructure in place. This event is the first of its kind at school, but we did not lose the internet connection (which, for what it is worth, has been amazingly reliable over the last 5 years or so) it was the wireless network that suffered. If we were to be working on a Local Authority learning platform or other such product we would not have been able to access it either. I will be chalking it down to an unlucky event – and still have full faith in my network structure and reliability.
  • Do I have all of my eggs in one basket when using Google Docs? Not really – the writing and poetry language was the focus and that was still focused upon in the days we had no connection. Should you have a backup plan in the back of your mind? Perhaps, there is no harm in it – I usually have something up my sleeve for most things even if it is normal class work and not technology related. Using Google Docs to support your work is no different in my mind.

Thursday – 15/5/08

  • Wahey the wireless network is back on its feet – looks like it was a corrupt DHCP database which issues and controls IP addresses. So the old IPs were not being refreshed and nothing new was being issued. Suffice to say it took a 3 hour database rebuild from Keith our technician who drafted in some extra help too.
  • Anyway the whole problem has highlighted the need for some sort of backup in the event that it occurs again and, as I mention above, I hope that the Offline – Google Gears development allows us constant access and a possible solution.
  • The children were straight back into their writing and we had another great session today with children completing their first verses and editing what they have written.
  • Their senses poetry has a simple and effective structure and they have been using Docs tools to help support their work – it seems to have been a successful unit of work. One of the highlights is the poetry journals that the children have created we hope to continue to add to these as we continue our poetry work.
  • Google Docs does seem a little glitchy – over the course of the last few weeks I have noticed things that serve to remind me that it is still in BETA. Here are a few:
  • The thumbnail view in Presentations is a little odd, more often than not the text appears over sized in the thumbnail.
  • Presentations seem to take a long time to load.
  • Sometime text behaves strangely in Docs – rigidly holding onto formatting even if you change it, can be frustrating.
  • Objects and texts do go missing there has been perhaps a dozen occasions, not just today, when we have had to retrieve an older revision because of missing text.
  • As a result of this missing text phenomena I showed the children how to use the Revision aspect of Docs again, reminding them that they can revert to any version right back to the beginning of the Doc.
  • As an extension I stopped the children with 20 mins to go and showed them how easy it is to add images to a Doc.
  • We used the FlickrCC search tool http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net and I modelled how to drag an image from one window to another and drop it into Docs. We then looked at how to alter the image and move it about.
  • We talked briefly about the Creative Commons license and what it meant (need to do more on this)
  • Discussed the importance of dealing with inappropriate content (images) and what we should do – I think it is important to keep this sort of learning high on the agenda, so the children understand what is expected of them and how to deal with issues if they arise. It seems to me that this message of appropriate and sensible action should be reinforced throughout the year, not just in a bundle of e-safety lessons.
  • For some reason IE shut down or crashed on a child and they were a little perplexed as to what had happened. (Note to self – must install FF so kids have a choice) A huge benefit of Google Docs is that it auto saves so regularly, as explained above. As a result the child was able to log straight back in again and pick up without any data loss. Working on a desktop WP like MS Word (auto saves could be configured – true) there is a higher chance of data loss due to unexplained crashes or application misbehaviour. You can encourage a healthy “save regularly ” culture in the use of desktop apps but nothing comes close to Google Docs saving your work every 70-80 seconds for you. It won’t forget.

Friday – 16/5/08

  • During today’s literacy session we worked for approximately 20 more minutes, just fine tuning our poetry journal presentations.
  • Children were still finding missing text and a few things different but were independently accessing their doc revisions and switching back to older versions that were complete. Good to see this going on as it is an important feature when editing and writing.
  • Yesterday children had dragged images into Google Docs and today they wanted the same images in their presentations. This is where we faced problems but the kids worked brilliantly to work around the issue and solve it.
  • Initially I had told them to copy and paste the images across from docs, but this did not work – it allowed you to paste but no image.
  • Secondly I suggested finding the image again in the Flickr CC search and dragging it into Google Presentations. Even though they suggest this works, it doesn’t. Or it at least hasn’t for us. The presentation would say it is working – the message at the top of the page would be saying importing image or something similar, but nothing would appear.
  • Children suggested we save the image and insert it. So they saved the image to their network folder and inserted and browsed for that saved picture. Not as simple as dragging and dropping but same result and kids happy. Children coped really well with switching from one method to another. Good to see.
  • Seems to me that Google Presentations is much more glitchy than others. Behaved quite slowly today and image issue is a little frustrating.
  • The choosing of images to illustrate their verses was a good extension activity. The quality of their choices were well justified and added another element to their writing.
  • I was delighted to see children who had successfully inserted images splitting off and supporting their peers who had not. That sense that we are learning and exploring together was strong today.
  • I demonstrated how to preview the presentation and we talked about the IM feature/backchannel that appears to the right. We talked about ways we could collate feedback about what we can see in this space.
  • I began a presentation of our class poetry journal and told the children to go to their GMail and open up their inbox. With the presentation in full screen and the IM window open I copied the URL to share the presentation and pasted it into an email. I asked the children who were signed in (remember the children are working in pairs on docs that are shared between them) to raise their hands and I added their addresses into the email. This was as easy as typing the first letter of their name and finding them in the list. I fired off the email and the children opened it and the enclosed link.
  • Note to Google – it would be useful to have an email link next to the presentation URL that auto generates an email to send to contacts.
  • I could see from the IM window who had opened it up and joined the presentation – ripples of excitement from the kids to see their names and those of others in the window, they love IM. I took control of the presentation and showed them how I could move the slides on and it will change automatically on their screens.
  • Upon moving the presentation on a slide I looked up and saw that all of the 16 wireless machines were responding in almost real time. Very impressive.
  • I said a few “hellos” the usual IM stuff and let the kids throw a few messages around. I then drew the discussion back to how we could use the IM chat. The only problem that is apparent is that the resulting chat cannot be archived, saved or copied from the window. It is a flash IM and so you cannot copy text out. Although this IM within the presentation window is really neat, if the chat cannot be saved it is less useful. The alternative would be to create a group chat in Google Talk – I would have preferred to share the URL for the presentation in IM form but we have not installed the GTalk clients yet on each machine and the children have not all started up the GTalk IM in GMail.
  • Ideally we could (1) All be part of a Google Talk group chat using Talk client from desktop (2) I would open the presentation (3) Copy and share the URL in the chat (4) Children open to follow, but close the IM frame (5) Feedback and answers to questions I pose could be added to GTalk chat (6) Chat is saved and archived, access it from GMail “Chats” link.
  • Note to Google – let us copy or save the chat from Presentations – or merge GTalk into presentations.
  • After our, on the fly experimentation with presentations and IM we listened to pairs and individuals present and read their poetry from their journals.
  • I found it useful in order to jump straight to the presentation to access the shared Docs from my account and right click the Presentation name- then choose “View Presentation” from the bottom of the list. This bypassed the edit screens.

Overall reflections on Week 3

The biggest consideration for me this week is what do you do if the kids cannot access the internet. Of course we/I/you have been successful working without Google Docs – so we continued on with our poetry in more traditional ways. I am pleased to have thought a little more about the development of Google Gears and Offline Docs for Ed Apps, that could be a very important change in the reliability of this tool. If there are days when the web is flaky – it happens – then children could continue unhindered by this. Is the “All my eggs in one Google basket” an issue that you consider to be an important one to resolve with teachers adopting these tools?

On Friday we explored the IM feature of presentations and I am keen to explore how we could harness the children’s natural understanding of this communication tool in future learning activities. Could GTalk be used to get the children responding to questions at the same time, like we did with the spreadsheets example a while ago? They were so excited by that one activity – if we can just pivot that enthusiasm in the direction of learning. It is a shame the IM in presentations isn’t linked with Google Talk in some way, so that what is added there can be saved and returned to later. I will need to download the GTalk client to the laptops and continue to explore ways that IM can be used. Although I am reflecting on the use of IM within Google Apps, with the GTalk client the IM could stand alone from G Apps and so be embedded within any learning activities taking place on the laptop.

Google Presentations seems to be behaving as the one application that is most in BETA – lots of glitches and missing work issues to try and resolve this week. It can’t even handle images as it should. It feels sluggish when working with it – I hope it improves.

Today it was clear that we are all learning together and I was so pleased to see the children being creative and trying to solve problems with real initiative. They worked well on their own or in pairs and helped each other out, sharing what they have learned or a method just discovered to reach an outcome we are all aiming for. We are learning and exploring together. It has been very apparent that there are maybe 3 or 4 children who are extremely adept at using Google Docs, they offer help to others very willingly. But all the children have progressed so far since not seeing Docs 3 weeks ago – long may our learning continue.

Transforming Learning – Responding to an image

Laptops, Literacy, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on14 Comments on Transforming Learning – Responding to an image

This academic year has been different for me due to the (ongoing) development of a permanent laptop resource in my classroom. We currently have 8 machines available to us and when we double up from both Year 5 classes we have a possible 16 machines that we can use. On the not too distant horizon these numbers will be doubled by the procurement of a second batch of laptops for school. With this second step towards a 1:1 model in the upper junior classrooms I am thinking more and more about the pedagogical impact of a greater technology choice.

An activity that has become one of the mainstays of our literacy work has been to respond to an image resource. In our current unit we are reading Street Child by Berlie Doherty, set in Victorian London it tells the story of a boy called Jim who, after a series of misfortunes, spends time in the workhouse as a child labourer and lives on the streets. The exemplar planning for this unit explains an opportunity to respond to an image:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

This is a commonly used strategy to engage the children and elicit a response from a visual resource – such an activity occurs fairly regularly in primary literacy work and I daresay other subjects and age ranges. It takes a failsafe, traditional form – of paper and pen. In this post I explore ways that this simple activity can be transformed with the use of technology. And transformative learning is what I am looking for, because replication offers no benefit to a teacher – all it produces is ostensibly a better presented piece of work and more of a headache to setup. The technology has to offer a whole new level of interaction with the image that cannot be gained from the traditional method explained above.

The learning activity has to be transformed into something that provides a greater depth of learning and interaction. There has to be a pedagogical shift.

Down to the practical stuff. This activity is something that I will be doing very regularly, so finding the easiest to use option for the kids and something that offers a new type of interaction are both key criteria. Other important questions included:

  • Why is it better than using paper and pen?
  • Do you need an account to use it?
  • How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?
  • Easy to navigate?
  • Can we share our responses?
  • Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

For some time now I have explored this notion of visual annotation and due to its ubiquitous nature in the primary classroom I have taken a long look at a few options. They include: using the notes tool in Flickr to annotate certain parts of the image; TwitPic – an application that combines the brevity of Twitter and image captioning/commenting and even such conferencing tools as Twiddla that offer a quick way in to sharing annotations. However none of them are like Voicethread.

As a primary teacher Voicethread is exactly the tool I need for this purpose. (Watch out switching to analogy mode) You may well be able to eat your cornflakes with a knife, although messily, but why not use the spoon that is in the draw. Voicethread is that perfect match – it functions as a media commenting tool. As they describe it on the site:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish.

Now many colleagues have been using Voicethread in all manner of ways in the classroom and I know that I am not revealing some great secret. But what I would hope to reveal is a how such a tool can transform learning, and especially in the climate of a primary classroom. For it is just such an activity that peppers the new literacy framework, but how would this learning task look in a shifted school, a learning environment that offers a 1:1 choice for all that belong there? Can every activity of this sort be transformed? It only needs the right cutlery in the draw…

Needless to say I used Voicethread to transform our work on responding to an image for our Street Child work (as described above).

Do you need an account to use it?

Yes. Voicethread requires you to have an account. So there is some setup time here but well worth it – a specific benefit for a teacher is that you can setup members of your class as sort of sub-users. So one sign in, but everyone in the class has a working identity they can switch to which tags their work. Really useful and easy to setup. Voicethread has an dedicated education community now as well.

How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?

I just showed 2 children from my class how to load the site, login to our class account and fire up our Street Child resource. With me helping it took us just over five minutes to setup. The site was responsive and loaded quickly.

Easy to navigate?

With the very briefest of introduction my Year 5 class had no problems with navigating around Voicethread. One aspect to note is that when you load a Voicethread it will begin playing the various images straight away and it took a few minutes for the children to take control. My children found the overview screen – giving thumbnails of all of the screens really useful.

vthread

Can we share our responses?

This is where the true transformation of learning emerges very strongly in my opinion. The last short sentence of the Literacy strategy document is:

Share these as a class.

This is clearly meant to be some form of plenary activity or summary to the session. With Voicethread the children can see everyone else’s comments being added in real time. As soon as they have been saved they can be viewed by everyone in the class. My class were not just sharing their ideas for 5-10 minutes at the end of the session but were interacting, exploring, reflecting upon and sharing the work of their peers for the whole of the session. It is very difficult to be specific but from my observations this shared experience helped to support, encourage and inspire children to contribute further thoughts.

Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

A completed Voicethread can be effectively presented in situ, but it has some impressive options to embed in other online locations – the simplest is perhaps a class blog warranting further comments and reflections on the activity. You then have a great opportunity to take sharing beyond the classroom.

vthread1

Why is it better than using paper and pen?

In my experience using Voicethread to annotate images online is the ideal tool. It offers such a broad range of ways to transform the learning activity – children can record a spoken comment bringing in other literacy strands, a video response takes that on that extra step. A major benefit for mobile learning is that Voicethread is a flash based site and so seems to pressurise the wireless access point less, it performed really well for us and so reliability=big tick.

Not only does the final product look that much better but the options to then seamlessly share that product, not just with our Year 5 class, but with a wider global community of educators is the clincher. And in my opinion the sharing that occurs during a whole class task is the most important transformation that goes on. Children picking up on and reading others work not just writing their own ideas down.

How would I rewrite the activity from the Primary Strategy for Literacy? How should such an activity be explained to a classroom that has taken that pedagogical leap, a school that is shifting to a 1:1 choice?

Here is their version again:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

Here is my version:

Organise the children into their laptop buddies (pairs) and ask each pair to take a look at the Voicethread showing scenes of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their pairs about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to add a text, video or audio comment to the appropriate image – remembering to take advantage of the onscreen doodling to help clarify what they refer to. Encourage children to take a few moments to read and explore the work of their peers as it appears. Do they have similar thoughts? Are they thinking anything different to you? Embed the completed Voicethread on the class blog.

Does it sound transformed? I don’t know…

This for me is the nuts and bolts of what we do in the classroom and it is in this very act of transforming one small activity that I think I will uncover what this pedagogical shift will be like in my school. Perhaps the quilted tapestry of these smaller shifted learning activities will reveal a bigger picture. What do you think? I think Voicethread is a good example of how learning can be transformed with the correct tool, but what else is there that needs to be explored? What other daily activities in the primary classroom can be transformed? I know that not everything can be 2.0ed but what will form part of that shifted tapestry?

(Unfortunately for us the audio and video options for commenting are blocked due to our proxy settings, it is a bit of a pain as I want to be making the most of this resource – Voicethread did promise a little while back “We’ll be developing a more comprehensive networking guide.” but nothing yet. Any help for fixing this would be most useful? I have run the http tests and most of them don’t work!)

One of those great lessons…

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The lessons that I have enjoyed the most this year have been when we have adapted to the children’s enthusiasm for certain activities. Before our half term break we had one of those sessions.

2246419748 c8278c3afeIn our literacy lessons we have been learning about the punctuation pyramid since September. It is a simple graphic that shows the various punctuation marks and their corresponding National Curriculum (UK) level for writing. Learning what is included in the pyramid and using it as a tool to assess their own writing is something that we consider to be very valuable. We have 3D pyramids on the children’s tables and a large copy of the punctuation pyramid on the wall as a display.

We recently purchased some software that had a pyramid builder game included and the morning session I am referring to saw both Year 5 classes working on practicing to build the pyramid from scratch.

I soon mentioned to my colleague, across the corridor, about a little competition to see who could build the pyramid the quickest. We were soon having a inter classroom battle to build the pyramid the fastest. Everyone engaged and working really hard. And this is where we began to sense their enthusiasm for the the activity. We decided to adapt the session to harness this fervent engagement with the task. After some time working with the pyramid builder and ensuring each child had had plenty of practice independently we announced a tournament.Pyramid

We shuffled tables around to form a long row and brought all of the laptops together in my classroom. We had two rows of 8 laptops facing each other. The arena was ready! And the pyramid gladiators soon picked up the invitation to be involved. The task was simple: build a complete pyramid as quick as they could without any omissions or errors. Once they thought it was complete they needed to stand up. The simple knockout tournament began.

The children responded so well to the change of furniture and the change of style of session. We sometimes shy away from some light hearted competition in primary for fear of labelling people “winners” and “losers” but conducted in the right spirit it engages and motivates.

After 3 rounds we had a final battle with two laptops facing each other in the centre of the arena. Needless to say we had lots of fun and the children enjoyed every minute.

If you want to have a go at a Punctuation Pyramid competition with your class then you can try this Befuddlr puzzle for the image above, once it is complete it will display a time in seconds. Let me know how you get on and perhaps we can have an inter school leaderboard!