Teaching with Technology

Just found a moment to finally reflect on the Voicethread that I set up with our Year Four Children.   The idea was to write cinquains based on pictures.  The other children from around the world would upload their cinquains based upon the same pictures.   This would allow lots of discussion about the poetry etc and provide some interesting stimuli.

The project worked out better  than expected thanks to Keamac in New Zealand.   The children all really seem to have enjoyed the project and I’m really impressed with the quality of the work.

Lessons Learnt

• Voicethread is an excellent tool for teaching and publishing poetry
• Revisiting the thread to listen to others contributions embeds the teaching points far more effectively than any other method I’ve come across.
• It might be a good idea to make a slide that outlined the structure of the poetry and gave an example so that it could be used at the start of a lesson.
• Well worth doing – simple with maximum results.

http://voicethread.com/share/137938/

Our year 4 children have been working on adverts for different subjects at school.   They’ve used Animoto’s free 30sec option.   Here’s the music result.

Here is some work I did yesterday with some Year 4’s on writing cinqains.   Really simple to get them recorded onto Voicethread at the end of the lesson.

I’m going to try online and see if any other children from around the world want to write their own and then upload them to the same time.

To have a look follow the link, comments appreciated.

http://voicethread.com/share/137938/

We had a really successful few lessons recently using shared documents.   The children collaborated on a shared document to find out information about the life of John Lennon.  There was some fantastic stuff going on in the classroom and everyone was totally engaged.   There were of course still frustrating issues with bandwidth / speed but they can be overcome eventually (I hope.)

The biggest drawback – if you can call it that – was that children naturally wanted to get up and see what their partners were doing.   This was great in terms of the speaking and listening that they were engaged in, but not so good in terms of using the application’s features.

Nevertheless this aspect of the project has gone really well overall and the children will only get quicker and more efficient.

Lessons learnt

• Get the children to take responsibility for different sections of the document – this makes things much easier as changes aren’t instant.
• Get the children to choose a colour to write in as this makes it easier for you to see exactly what they have contributed.
• Might work best if children from different classes / schools contributed at different times – this would mean that they had to really use the emails properly and also they would have to read what had been written previously.
• Links between schools studying the same curriculum could be the way forward.

The next part of the project was to try and transfer this information onto a shared time-line.   I got the link to www.dipity.com from Susan T on Twitter.   It’s a fantastic time-line tool that allows you to collaboratively draw a time line.   The thing that I really liked about it was the fact that you could add pictures, map links, video etc to the points on the time-line.

In practical terms for this project when a child found out that ‘Imagine’ was released in 1971 they could then embed the video to show it.   Another example is showing the exact palce on a map where Lennon was born.

Brilliant fun!

Lessons Learnt

• Dipity is a fantastic resource that is really easy to use.
• Really thorough investigation skills are used to find more than just a date.
• Deep Learning experience
• Again better to collaborate with a person who is not online at the same time, or in a different physical space.

Hello the Future!

Inspired by Tom Barrett and his comprehensive blog on using Google docs I decided to have a go at my own project with my year 6 children.

Aim

To use Google docs to create a shared word document relating to our History topic which was post war history through the eyes of John Lennon.

What Happened

First of all I tried to get the children to set up their own Google mail account.   This proved slightly problematic as the children were using 35 wireless laptops routed through the same server.  

After about 13 or so setups the Google server decided that we were some sort of spammers and refused to create anymore accounts until the next day.   This was slightly annoying, but not insurmountable.   Tom got around this problem by buying a domain from Google, but I’m just a cheapskate!

Once the accounts were set up I got all the children to email my account.   By replying to these emails their details were automatically set into my Google contacts.   I then set up a shared spreadsheet with columns for our email addresses and names and invited all the children using the ‘invite contact’ option.   Now the children entered their own emails and names into the shared resource.

I appointed some group leaders who were then asked to set up a document that they would them invite their friends to.

The documents themselves had individual headings in them such as ‘Early life’ ‘The Beatles’ so that the children could work on the same document but in different areas.

I then let them loose! 

Lessons Learned so Far

• Buying or owning a domain would make life a lot easier setting up emails
• Sharing documents wirelessly slows things up hardwire preferable
• In a shared ‘word’ doc you can’t use a chat window, but if you agree one font colour for chat it seems to work well.
• You can leave marking / suggestions in the same way. (I use pink at the top of the doc)
• Takes time to set up, very exciting once it’s going!

I’ll give further updates as I go along!

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Thanks for the idea John

Really great idea form a colleague – she put a wigit on her desktop showing the weather in the two town that we’re working with in France and Spain.

Simple, effecitive quality.

Got this idea from Mark Warner works really well as a quick project.   I’m going to use audacity to get the children to record their own poems over the top of a track and then publish it using that.

Tip: take the photos at low res to speed upload.

Really excited by Google Sketchup looks like it could be absolutely fantastic in the classroom!   I’ve just had a five minute mess around on it and already I’ve managed to create my first building.   I’m looking forward to using it for a QCA Design and Technology unit that we do in Year Six on shelters.  

I think that we’ll try to build our own city by creating our own buildings and then putting them together into our own fully fledged creation.   I’ll post again when we’ve had a go!