Teaching with Technology

Practical ideas for Web 2.0 in the Primary Classroom

Entries Tagged as 'History'

Using Synchroneyes in the classroom

November 13, 2008 · 1 Comment · History, Tools

Over the last few weeks I’ve been using Smart’s Synchroneyes classroom management software to monitor children as they are working on the individual umpcs on the classroom.

I have to say that I think this could be some software that helps teachers hugely. Basically when children log on they have to connect to the teachers laptop wirelessly. The teacher then has control of what happens on that laptop. No great level of ict skill is required as at it’s simplest level the teacher can see thumbnails of each of the children’s screens and a small icon showing the program that is being used.

This gets around one of the biggest barriers that I have encountered whilst trying to spread good practice – namely teachers ate worried that they can’t see what the children are looking at on the screen. Now they can!

The other rather fantastic piece of practical functionality for the classroom is the lock feature. It does just what it says on the tin, at a click of a button all the laptops display the message “Eyes to the front please.”

This is hilarious when you see the children reactions the first time that you do it! Interestingly this has actually led to some interesting negotiation in my class as they don’t like being locked out and I have found that I’d really has improves the attention from the children when I ask them to stop.

Also you can pull up any examples of good work and send it to all the other screens, again a really practical tool in the classroom.

There are lots of other elements to the program that I haven’t fully explored as yet, such as setting up working groups, letting other children control each others monitors and ‘teach’.

There are some drawbacks. You need to have a pretty full on wireless network and processor for it not to become sticky. Also it doesn’t seem to enJoy the graphic intensive software such as google sketchup. Although that’s not really that suprising!

Overall though I would say it is definately worth looking at as I think it has the power to layer all the good aspects of traditional classroom practice over 21st century technology which is really exciting.

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Collaborative timelimes using Dipity.

June 12, 2008 · 2 Comments · Google Docs, History, Tools, Uncategorized

 

 

This is simply a follow up post to show what my children have managed to produce using Dipity.   I’m really proud of the way that they’ve come such a long way in a short period of time.   The results are developing all the time.

AIM: To produce a shared timeline of John Lennon’s life as part of our study of post war history.

WHY:

  • To encourage children to find, read, analyse and distill information based on a historical event / person of importance.
  • To encourage children to organise themselves in work groups delegating responsibilities and collaborating in a real sense.

I have to say that the more the children have worked together on this project the more convinced I am that this sort of collaborative work creates true ‘deep learning’ experiences.

LESSONS LEARNT:

  • Dipity is an excellent tool for collaboration and really works well in this context.

 

 

hhhh

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Google Docs (part 2.) including Dipity

May 20, 2008 · No Comments · Google Docs, History

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!

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Google Docs in the Classroom

May 15, 2008 · 7 Comments · Google Docs, History

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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