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.

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!

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.

The results were great! What became very clear was that the children were using phrases like “he looked like…” and hadn’t really used powerful descriptive words.

The great thing was that we could actually see the frequency of the words used by the size of the words in wordle.

Next week we’ll do some guided writing and repeat the process which should hopefully show a real difference.

I really liked this as an assessment method and would recommend that people tried this in their own classes.

This worked incredibly well and led to a really interesting discussion with the children about chatting in general.

After the inital “Hi wassssaaaaapppp!” comments the children quickly started posting only relevant information. In fact they came and told me that they were getting annoyed with people who were still posting like that because it got in the way if the flow of information that they wanted to work on.

It struck me what a massive jump in real learning this was for these children, which completely quashed any fears that this was going to be a free for all chat a la msn.

All of this within five minutes!

I then got children working in smaller groups of six or seven to complete the task. They loved it and you could hear a pin drop in the classroom.

I asked the children what they liked about it and was amazed with the responses. Essentially they liked the fact that the chat was actually about something that they were learning about and that writing on the chat stopped “stupid conversations” starting and distracting them!

This from a class that loves to natter!

It was a great session that had some briliant learning outcomes for the children and me. Can’t wait to get back in on Monday and experiment further!

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.

Today I stumbled across this tool called Stripgenerator whilst looking through my Google reader.   There seem to be a lot of flash based comic book creators out there at the moment and I’ve already blogged about Comiqs.   I decided that I’d follow the same sort of format and allow the children a complete carte blanche to see what they came up with.

I was really pleased with the results, within minutes the children had started to come up with all sorts of wild and wacky stories that were really creative.   I thought that this could be a really useful stimulus for the start of a creative writing lesson.   The children would have three pannels that effectively have the beginning middle and end of a story.

This year I decided that it would be different…

As normal I sent out the letters asking the parents to state the time that they wanted for the parents evening.  (I suppose that next year I could do this via a GDocs form, but hey ho hindsight is a wonderful thing!)   When the responses came back I set up a GDoc with a simple table in it showing the times that had been booked in the first wave.

I then sent out an email to all the children which included the document so that they could show their parents which times they had been allocated.   One point to note.   I made sure that the parents could only read the document and not contribute to it directly as I could foresee a scenario of people changing appointments etc.  

I asked them to email me if there were any problems with the times and I was quite suprised at how well this system worked as you can see below.

It turned out to be a really efficient method of communication with the parents that saved an awful lot of stress.   The parents really seemed to appreciate the simplicity too.