Seeing Ripples

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 first is from Peter Richardson a primary school teacher in Preston who took my idea for using Voicethread for peer assessment of writing and used it for work in their Egyptian work. Here is the Voicethread he shared.

Kevin McLaughlin is a Year 4 teacher in Leicester and after reading my blog post about using Twitter and Google Forms for a data handling lesson, has applied the same ideas himself. His class compared music tastes from Kevin’s Twitter network (via a Google Form) with their own. I am pleased it worked well for his Year 4 class too, as Kevin explains,

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.

View Berlin in a larger map

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.

Using Voicethread for Writing Ideas and for Peer Marking

In the past week or so our literacy work has focused on a short sequence from the comic Spiderman #1. Our Superheroes topic is going well and in this post I explain how we have used Voicethread as a creation tool, a writing scaffold and as a way to do peer marking.

We began with the sequence in the comic where Peter is attending a science fair at a local school and is bitten by spider that has been zapped by one of the radiation machines on show. I wanted the short 5 panel sequence to be the focus of an extended narrative. I liked the tight focus on a few moments and the action and comic imagery would really help us to write some interesting narrative.

To begin with we made some notes about the short sequence as a whole class, mainly key words, things that just jumped out from the images and from the facial expressions of Peter.

Notes about Peter Parker being bitten

The next step was to import the five panels from the comic you can see in the above image into Voicethread. I just used a screen capture tool and created some separate image files for each. The Voicethread was to be a collection of first ideas. At this early stage of the writing process I think Voicethread plays it’s hand superbly.

The children have the opportunity to say their ideas aloud. To articulate, listen back, correct and re-articulate very easily. All of the children in the year group worked on writing and recording ideas for the Bitten! sequence and as you know they are privy to all of the comments from their peers in real time. We used the vocabulary above as a stimulus throughout this early task.

Voicethread Ideas 2

After sharing literally hundreds of narrative ideas for the sequence, the children were put with a writing partner. Often we focus on writing in solitude but I think the support and insight children can get from working together is hugely rewarding. They get to see how someone else might approach the same piece of writing.

I modelled the up-levelling or improvement of some simple starter sentences for each of the panels. We worked together as a class to extend and improve on them using the language already collected. The children used Google Docs for their work and I encouraged children to also have open the Voicethread of ideas that we had created. The 5 panels acted as 5 simple paragraph changes. In this step the children are using Voicethread as a source of ideas and as a writing scaffold. They listened and read back the comments others had left and I think found these really useful in kick-starting their work.

Up levelling

As we were working in Google Docs I dipped into their work as they were busy writing. I have written before about how this is less obtrusive than looking over their shoulder or taking their books off of them. I added a header to the Google Doc and then used CTRL+M to add a named and dated comment. I would back this up by a quick chat with the pair if needed to ensure they would act on my advice and feedback.

Marking Bitten

The children had of course shared their Document with me and their writing partner. In my Docs home screen I used the star label to show which Docs I had marked and which I hadn’t. You can read some more ideas for marking with Google Docs in this blog post.

As part of the writing process I explained we would be publishing some to the class blog. I wanted the feedback from the blog to be part of the improvement process for the children. I think that if you plan to publish examples of work in this way, and the kids know this before they begin, you are not just bolting it on afterwards. The children know that the blog readership will be their audience.

We were able to publish 80 percent of the work from the class, those that didn’t were just unfinished. The comments that we received were fantastic and greatly encouraging for the children involved. We would revisit these later in the process.

Blog comments

Although the children have a finished piece of work at this point we are only part of the way through the writing process I had planned and this is where we turned back to Voicethread again. (We kept a printed copy of this first draft.) I have often said that the use of PDFs in Voicethread is overlooked. Clearly the use of images and video is very engaging, but adding PDFs is really useful functionality.

I did two things before exporting the children’s work from Google Docs. Firstly I added their names next to the title of the work. I knew from who shared it with me who the owner was, but as a plain PDF it would be missing that. The second thing was to increase the size of the text so that it was clearly visible in Voicethread.

Voicethread allows you to zoom in to text or images, but when you need to use the pen highlighter it zooms out. With a full page PDF the writing can sometimes be too small to see. Ensuring the text size is set as high as possible is really important if you want to take advantage of the pen tool.

Voicethread pen

Once this was done I exported all of the Docs as PDFs (no need to worry about the file names as you added their names to the text already) and imported these into a new Voicethread. I noticed that some of the pages were jumbled, in other words if a piece of work was over 2 pages these pages were split. Naturally you want them next to each in Voicethread – watch out for that, however it is easy to move pages about from the upload screen.

Saying that, it is hard to see from the thumbnails which belong together – maybe that is something for Voicethread to work on. Either a magnify function on the upload page for each thumbnail or better assurance PDFs will stay in the correct order.

Once the Voicethread was ready to go I asked each pair to record an audio comment of one of them reading out their own work. This is a simple step you can take to allow all of the children in the class to access the different pieces of writing. If they struggled reading it, there was an audio version! We talked to the children about adding comments and feedback and I stuck to a simple 2 stars (things they liked) and 1 wish (something to improve) which we have used before. I encouraged them to use the pen tool to highlight words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that they were referring too and this proved very successful.

Improve2

Interestingly the process of reading your own work out aloud and recording it made the children realise where they could improve their own work.

The final step was to revisit their original writing and complete the editing process. It is sometimes hard to find time to review work in light of comments but is essential in helping children improve. Those with blog comments on their work were encouraged to look at what was written. Everyone had numerous comments on their own work as part of the Voicethread – they went back to their Google Doc and made alterations and improvements based upon the feedback from me, their peers and the wider audience on the blog.

I went to every single pair and asked them to talk through some of the alterations they had made and guided them to focus on anything they had overlooked.

In short the sequence looked like this:

  1. Reading the focus sequence
  2. Gathering initial vocabulary and feedback
  3. Voicethread of sequence – children add ideas
  4. Writing begins – using above resources
  5. Writing is published to the class blog and uploaded to Voicethread
  6. Voicethread of work – children add feedback
  7. Edit in light of teacher, blog and peer comments

This was over the course of about a week and half to two weeks. This sort of timescale really allows you the space to establish some quality and immerse you and the class in the piece of work. After all, we were only writing about a very short moment in time.

It may have only been a few fleeting, painful moments for Peter when he was bitten, but we found this extended writing and review process really successful.

SSAT Primary National Conference – Connected Classrooms

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.

SSAT Primary National Conference 2010

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.

Video of my Voicethread Presentation

During BETT 2010 we, the teachers, tookover commercial stands to talk about free tools for the classroom. Here is rare footage of me in the wild (!) presenting about “Why I think every primary classroom should be using Voicethread.”

Here is the Interesting Ways doc for Voicethread. A big thankyou to everyone at BrainPOP UK for letting me takeover their stand and for sharing the video footage.

Making Superheroes to Represent the Planets

TerraFirma

We returned to our information Voicethreads today that we created yesterday about the different planets in our solar system. I wanted the children to consolidate some of the information that they had learned about the planets.

To do this we asked the children to create a superhero that represented a planet and some of it’s characteristics. Clearly this ties in well with the topic we are running, and provided the children some rehearsal for when they create their own original hero. But I think works well whether you are doing this topic or not, as a superhero is ideal for personifying the different physical characteristics of the planets.

We had a look at two different free online superhero creators: from Marvel Kids and HeroMachine from UGO. Both are very good but we decided that the HeroMachine had more choice in terms of customising the hero. This would of course provide better choice for the children when creating their own. (We used HeroMachine version 2.5 rather than the Alpha version 3.0) Both creators give you a massive palette of masks, skins, tails, accessories, wings, auras and insignias (plus much more) these can all be coloured, layered and customised.

The children were working in pairs on laptops in the classroom. I gave each pair a planet to work on and directed them to three things for information:

  • The Voicethread we made that gathered everyone’s information in one place, a good starting point.
  • Websites tagged with “planets” from our Delicious account.
  • Any other web based resources they can find.

Before they set off I opened HeroMachine and demonstrated making a character representing Earth and highlighted the choices I was making and the reasons I made them – like a modelled writing session. For example the colours green and blue and why I used more blue to show the ratio of water to land. I emphasised the need to understand the planet they were representing and asked them to think of colour, size and atmosphere. This kept it simple and achievable as some planetary facts are too complex to represent.

Jupiter

You can see the start of a Jupiter based superhero here in which children have chosen the largest hero body to show it’s size and also a red belt which they explained represents the red spot on Jupiter.

VenusVenus is represented here and is shown with the colours of heat as it is close to the Sun with surface temperatures over 460 degrees Celsius.

One pair spent some time looking at a Wikipedia article on Saturn and decided that they would make a male superhero because Saturn was a God, which is great – they went on to explore ways they could represent the rings with either superhero clothes or objects he would carry.

I am looking forward to finishing these off with the children, it has been a great way to personify the facts about the planets and has really helped to consolidate their understanding of the solar system.