Tom Barrett - Page 118 of 145 - Create the space for dialogue

Back to school…

TomLiteracySeptember 3, 20072 Comments

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:

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.
Once you have a set of results, filter them according to “Most Interesting” to give you a set of popular well constructed, interesting images.
Use the “Thumbnails” view to allow you to see lots of images to help you find what you want quicker.
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.
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.

What do you think of it?

Animoto: "quick and slick"

TomTechnologyAugust 28, 2007April 22, 20196 Comments

I spotted Animoto via the NextGen Ning network and Justin’s post about it, further to that John and Doug have given it a mention. As you will quickly realise, and John rightly points out, Animoto is very simple. There is no real creative control over what you produce, you just throw some photos at it, choose a music track and out pops an MTV style video.

There is not much there for the children to really get their creative teeth into however it is a great little tool for producing quick and slick videos. Last year we used our class digital camera for recording our work in a science investigation for example, we then gave the children a sheet of thumbnails of these pics for their books. An extension of this simple idea would be to produce a quick movie of their science lesson or PE session. Not as a ICT, presentation task but as a simple, yet imaginatively presented, record of the work they have done.

animoto s

(Image taken from Mashable Social Networking News )

Animoto makes a buck or two from the choice of longer more extended video lengths but for the work done in class the free 30 second videos is adequate. Taking a look today it seems since I have last used it Animoto has added the functionality of retrieving images from locations online. Currently these are Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, PhotoBucket and Facebook. It worked fine for my Flickr account – offering me the choice of my different photo sets.

I just uploaded a few images from our DT work this year just to illustrate the idea. This is what I came up with. Unfortunately can’t see a way of embedding Animoto footage here. The final video is rendered and then you get an email telling you it is ready to view. Following the link that is included provides some publication options, I particularly liked the iGoogle page embed option which pops your vid onto your iGoogle start page in a new gadget frame.

All in all a useful tool to make quick video footage perhaps for record keeping purposes, but not much more than that. I will take a look at Fliptrack as an alternative soon.

Using Diigo and Google Notebook

TomTechnologyAugust 24, 2007April 22, 20197 Comments

Further to my initial thoughts of linking up the use of Diigo annotations with Google Notebook use I have developed a visual workflow of how a student might interact in this way. The context could be anything from a simple reading comprehension task in a literacy session to ongoing research within history or any other such subject.

Pedagogically Diigo is being used here as a tool to scaffold and support the child’s interaction with a website. When thoughtfully used I think that it might provide a new level of interactivity to those static, non-interactive, information heavy websites. Of course Google Notebook’s part in this process is as a written record, a place to respond for the child without having to navigate from the browser.

Please click on the image for a larger clearer version.

I am pleased with the simplicity of this idea and how it could be aligned to most subjects – the next step seems to be to finalise how the notebooks are organised. I have added some simple Diigo notes to this poem by Charles Causley as an example, but it is not difficult to see how this can be used. One further development in terms of how you as the teacher organises the Diigo annotations is to use the tags to categorise the work you are doing, for example “comprehension”, “poetry”, “inference” – this would be a useful way to help signpost the work completed too.

Please contribute any further ideas as to how Diigo may be used in such a way or perhaps combined with another tool.

The Highwayman Animation

TomLiteracyAugust 23, 20074 Comments

1023174t Further 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.

Missing tools

TomGoogleAugust 22, 20076 Comments

There seems to be no other way of actually managing a large number of Google accounts then working through a domain. So today I registered through Google priestsic.net for our school and began exploring the apps that are now available.

To my surprise Google Notebook is missing from the list which is a great shame as I consider it to be perhaps the tool with the most potential to school users. However there is still the ability to personalise the start page (iGoogle page) for a user. So as a teacher I can add locked content (widgetty thingies) and the others can be personalised – this is ideal.

My advice then currently to anyone planning on exploring the setup of Google accounts is to stump up the £4.91 or whatever it was for the domain name and go through the process of having a central place you can manage the accounts. I think that although there may be some bits and pieces missing in this single sign in, namely Google Notebook and Reader, the time saved due to management outweighs it.

So I am going to create a separate class Google account to share work in other apps such as Google Reader and Notebook. This afternoon I explored how Notebook worked when two people were working in the same login, it seemed to hold out OK, both views of the same notebook updating as the other worked on it. Not ideal, but would allow a class of children to work on research together and get the most from this excellent tool, sidestepping the issue of the app missing as mentioned above.

Further to my ideas related to Notebook, a single sign-in poses a new problem as there is no direct indication of who is adding what. So titles of notebooks could name specific tasks or children, to allow them to add the content in the correct place and for us to properly monitor and respond to what is happening. Imagine then a series of guided reading sessions during a week of literacy work, where children add the answers to Diigo set questions on a specific text – each child opens the notebook via the FF extension and navigates to the correct notebook (either by name or by task) adding their responses which are now labelled due to there location. Complete Notebooks could be archived into Google Docs so the list does not get too crowded over time.

In addition I have also signed up for a class Diigo account so that we can share annotations and signpost online text to children.