Teaching with Technology

 Whilst looking round a school last year I came across the idea of a ‘learning wall’ where children could write questions and ideas about any topic that they are studying.   The only thing that I didn’t like about it was the fact that it looked rather messy in the classroom - that’s the controling teacher in me!

Whilst ‘listening to Twitter a few weeks ago Doug Belshaw mentioned WallWisher.   I had a look at it and realised that this was in effect an online learning wall!

In class this week I set up a wall all about our next topic - Dinosaurs.   The exercise worked really well and th children came up with loads of questions.

The next step is to get them to create webpages to answer their questions and then link them to the questions on the wall.   I’m looking forward to see if it all works out.

Just a very short post.   Several colleagues and myself are running 10km for charity in a couple of weeks.   Please help us raise £500 for this great cause.

If you think my blog has been any use over the past year then please donate £2 to our appeal at http://www.justgiving.com/charlestownprimary

It’ll be interesting to see what happens - has this blog got the power to change lives?

Today provided me with one of those - ‘blimey things are going to be different from now on’ moments.   After a staff meeting about guided writing with children last night, I put two and two together and realised that a tool called Etherpad could be a match made in heaven.

I came across Etherpad through a tweet from my Twitter network.   It is a collaborative online text authoring tool.   The nice thing about it is that it lets up to eight people author the same work in real time.  This is a significant advantage to Google Docs collaborative element as this does tend to be rather sticky.

Each person has a different colour highlight and it’s really easy to invite others through the url.  

 I tested it with the class today by showing the class this video of Batman the Animated Series (thanks to Dawn Robertson for the idea.)

Then I split them up into groups and assigned them each a few seconds of video to describe as a narrative, trying to focus on powerful words, pace etc.   I shared the url with each group and we all watched each other developing the narrative together.

What was really powerful was that we could see the writing in real time and children were editing ‘live’.   The different colours also gave me as a teacher a really clear visual representation of how I was modelling the writing and in fact which aspects of the writing needed to be focused on next time.

The Results:

I have to say that it was one of the most exciting developments in my classroom over the last year - and there have been quite a few.  I can’t wait to set up another activity for tomorrow and see what come of it!

The message here is short and simple SATs in KS2 are ruining what should be the best days of the children’s lives in Britain!

Year Six (10-11 year olds) should be fostering their love of learning and exploring all sorts of creative adventures that inspire them onto greater things.

Instead the pressure on schools to gain ridiculous levels of attainment (which are constantly changing) force schools to push children down a path of exam technique and points scoring.

I have no doubt that children’s self esteem grows when they suceed in attaining a good level, but this is gained at a loss of seeing learning as an achievement in itself.

It is only when the children enjoy the process of learning and discovery, that the seeds of lifelong leaning are sown.

It may be supposition, but I am forced to wonder if there is a correlation between the perception of the increase in dissafected youth and the implementation of league tables. Did schools in their quest for wishing to be seen as ’sucessful’ actually forget what sucess truely is in terms of developing children?

At which point did children stop going to school to ask questions and go to school to be given answers to remember?

This said tomorrow in my class will be different. SATs are going out the window for the afternoon - we’re going to have tea and biscuits and enjoy each others company!

Rant over.

This morning I took part in a focus group looking at developing leaders throughout the education system. The group had an excellent range of leaders present from executive heads of large colleges to lowly teaching deputies like myself!

The interesting thing that came out from the whole of the morning was the overwhelming feeling that the training at the moment on offer provides excellent opportunities in terms of leadership theory and understanding, but perhaps does not as yet provide practical operational experience / mentoring.

Most people seemed to agree that the best development they recieved was the face to face non judgemental discussions that were as a result of attending such events / training. It also highlighted the importance of having a mentor to challenge and guide you through early leadership.

This confirmed for me the value of blogging and using Twitter (see previous post) as professional development tools. Although these tools do not provide mentoring as such they do allow you to reflect and evaluate your thoughts (blogging) and to ask questions to your peers (Twitter.)

The difficulty at present as I see it is that there is no structure to the network that you can put together on Twitter so work needs to be done to put professionals together or hash tag appropriately.

As such I’m going to see if my network can help me build such a discussion forum. #leadershipexchange

Over the past few months I’ve become more and more convinced by the power of Twitter as a tool for my own professional development.

Twitter is a rather abstract concept to get your head round. Concieved as a way of social networking (think facebook status updates) it has taken on a whole new identity when pit into the hands of education professionals. I and others in my PLN (personal learning network) use it to post ideas about classroom practice, share useful websites, point followers to useful blogposts and perhaps most importantly ask each other questions.

In all honesty it has been one of the most useful and Inspiring things that I have ever done professionally. I see its strengths as follows:
- Brevity, there’s not much chance for waffle in 140 characters!
- Engaging with other educators globally.
- Non-judgemental discussion and opinion.
- Ideas, ideas, ideas!

If you are thinking of getting into Twitter, and I would recomend that you do, then the key is to follow people who have similar interests to you professionally. Linger around ‘listening’ to conversations, check out recent ‘tweets’ and use Twitter tools to see who’s following who to build up your PLN.

Most importantly engage and share tour ideas / views!

If you want to see what it’s all about follow me: @mrkp

Get involved in the conversation.

After much faffing around I’ve moved my school blog to www.charlestownprimary.wordpress.com for those people who are interested!   Please go along and have a look and see what we’ve been upto in our school.

I’ll sort out another roundup post at some point over the holiday, but things have been completely insane for the past few weeks in terms of workload.  I can tell that people have been waiting on the edges of their seats!

I’m really annoyed with edublogs because of the adverts that they’ve started to put on their blogs. I’ve had to move the school blog across to wordpress which has been a bit of a pain in the bum! Not very happy at all!

This is the slideshow from my Bett Presentation on using Synchroneyes.   I did try to sort out some audio to go along with it, but as the presentation was 20min the audion file was massive an kept crashing.   So here it is for what its worth.