Classroom blogging

So we have really started our bloggin’ great adventure as we have had posts and had them commented on by people who don’t know us! Exciting! The children have also added comments – well just one so far and I haven’t even sent out the address yet! We added some photos yesterday which is very easy – but the quality of them is very poor. So I have created a class Flickr account so that we can access better quality pictures.

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We did some work in science today using the digital microscope and so I am going to post about what we did and ask the children to comment. Updated Wiki with this too. There are also photographs of some of the children’s box of achievement items that have been brought in for RE.

A new class – a new technology

It is strange talking to children about something that they have no previous concept of. We are so used to saying “you will remember when” or “you should know this”, so telliing my class about blogging and our class blog was something completely new. Many of the children surprisingly had their own website and used MSN a great deal but nobody had heard of a blog.

Anyway it was our first day back and after a bit of “getting to know you” we spent some time exploring John’s class blog at Sandaig and looking at the empty space that is ours! (well I had popped something on to get us started) The children seemed really interested and keen to start.

So as a first activity they worked on what they think would be some good class rules and then we shared our ideas in SMART Notebook and decided upon the most positive and important to us. Then I just quickly showed them how to blog this as an entry, really quick and simple. They enjoyed seeing their rules published on the blog and John has already commented on it, which I know they will enjoy reading tomorrow – lets hope many more people will comment as I think many are not totally convinced there are millions of possible readers – well maybe!

I think that for the rest of the week we will post work together and explore some safety guidelines – I think we will create some BLOG rules too. I spotted MHetherington’s blog for some ideas for this.

Testing embedding vid from SMARTBoard

As with BLOGGER I thought I would just see if I can embed YouTube video footage in a post. But after I pasted the code to the post frame it just sort of vanished. Not sure if WordPress likes embedding things. I will try to upload the file as an alternative. The upload feature is for images only, which I will test anyway.

Weymouth Harbour

Well it is clear from the quality of the image below that uploading files through WordPress is like passing it through a crude filter as this was a pretty detailed photo. I think it will be best for me to sign up for a Flickr account for the class and link to them

Google Earth use in classrooms

This app won me over straight away. Over a year ago when I started to use GE I could see massive potential in just being able to see the world in an instant. So I set about making some resources and clearly the first things that came to mind are the geographical uses of the programme. I decided to start posting them on the GE Forum under UK Primary Curriculum and people started to look at it.
I produced some Google Earth resources for “Village life in India” which is a Geography QCA unit. Staff at my school used it with great success in Year 5 and it was a simple resource including locations of the school, county, country, continents and the village itself. I also added in an overlay of a more detailed map showing Chembakoli. Simple stuff but it had a great impact on the children and was a great teaching tool.

BBC DV Planet Earth snapshot

The resources I produced just stemmed from there really, my only problem… not enough time to produce and develop the ideas I had. But someone was looking – there have been over 12,000 views on my forum since I began.
I think that the most successful resource I have made, has been the BBC Planet Earth work. The TV series was quite amazing and when I found that much of the video content had been made available online via the BBC website I used it to illustrate the whereabouts of the different aspects of nature in GE.

The only disappointing thing is that although there have been many people viewing there has not been any contributions of content from UK teachers.