Classroom Cornerstones

Tomorrow sees us begin our Autumn term here in Nottinghamshire, England – most of the English primary schools will be back by next week at least. I just wanted to explain the road ahead for me in terms of the ways I will be using technology in the classroom this year, my classroom cornerstones. These tools/ideas will be sticking around for the course of the year, either because they have become part of the fabric of how we support learning in the case of the first two, or they are areas I want to explore the potential in more depth, the latter two.

Group media collaboration tool: Voicethread – this has become such a great tool to use in supporting children with speaking and listening. Beyond the basic group collaboration, last year I saw children grow in confidence due to the protracted use of refined talk and voice recording in Voicethread. Children who would usually not utter a thing when in a whole class situation were more willing to contribute and speak in front of the class. There is a lot going on when a child decides to record a comment in a Voicethread, most importantly for me is the fact that they willingly and independently vet and refine what they say. We will be looking to consolidate the use of Voicethread in the classroom this year, especially in the use of peer feedback in the writing process.

Office 2.0: Google Apps/Docs – I carefully documented the steps we took last term to use Docs in the classroom and I have even had the opportunity to contribute to the Official Google Docs blog in a post about introducing online collaboration. We will continue to use Docs as a cornerstone technology in our classrooms this coming year. The classes we were with last year have moved onto Year 6 and I look forward to seeing their work with the tool continue and the teachers alongside them develop their knowledge and understanding of the technology. Last year we did not have the opportunity in the Autumn and Spring term to use Docs so we will have a whole bunch of new opportunities to utilise the tool to support learning in the best way. I am looking to use Google Forms more and to reach beyond the school in bigger international collaborative projects – please let me know if you have a similar age class using Docs.

Timeline tool: Mnemograph – Last year I stumbled upon this great timeline tool just as we were finishing our Ancient Egyptian unit. We will repeat this unit, beginning before Christmas and I am pleased to be working with Will and Michael from Mnemograph in some development of new features which will perhaps make it easier for a whole class to work with the tool. If you have not had an opportunity to see it in action I would strongly suggest you take a look – it is very useful for Ancient history as it is one of the few online timeline tools that allows you to go back that far. I am looking forward to unleashing my class on Mnemograph and putting it through it’s paces this year.

Class blog: ???? – I have yet to decide about the tool that we will use this year for our class blog. I know that it doesn’t matter a great deal and it is more about the content. 2 years ago we ran a class blog for the Year 6 class I was with and found we had problems remembering usernames and passwords and the whole process took too long. I have been exploring the use of Posterous – a blogging tool that just needs an email sending to a simple address and that is it. It deals really well with all of the media a classroom could possibly throw at it. Of course a Blogger account has a similar email address to send updates too – still undecided about the best way to go yet.

I think there is enough there to keep me out of trouble for the year to come (there is of course about 10 other things I didn’t mention) – what are you focusing on this year in your classroom? What will be new for you? What are you going to consolidate and explore in greater depth?