A week or so ago I posted about a site called Lulu which allowed you to publish children’s work. I recieved the results yesterday and I have to say that I wasvery impressed with the results.
The whole process from ordering to the books arriving took just over a week and the quality of the printing and binding was excellent. The children were absolutely extatic when they saw the results. As mentioned in the previous post I think that this is now a real alternative to buying a traditional book for the children to record work in.
In September I’m going to try and do all my children’s History in this way and see where we get to. I’ll be giving the children different aspects of the Victorian period to research to bring together in this way.
The question is will the quality of the work match the quality of the end product – I’m sure it will.
AIM: To give the children an open ended task without constraint and see what they produced.
To record the skill that I observed and that were being developed.
To have some fun!
WHY: After yesterday’s post about the massive change I believe needs to take place in education, I decided that I needed to put my money where my mouth is and actually give the children the freedom to explore ideas and create something. I decided to use a site I’d come across called Comiqs.
The task that I set the children was as open ended as it could be. Simply I showed them the site and told them that their task was to create a comic of their own. The subject was entirely up to them and there would be no time limit. I told them that they could use anywhere in school to take photographs and that I would allow them to use any props that they could find. I provided them with paper to sketch out a very rough storyboard and ‘trained’ some ‘comic engineers’ on how to use the digital cameras and the Comiqs site. Other than that I sat back, facilitated and watched events unfold.
For the benefit of this post I’ll put the skills that I saw chronologically in bold capitals.
The first thing that was interesting was the discussion that went on. Some of the ideas that the children came up with were incredible, if a little zany and at times gory. CREATIVE THOUGHT.
They were all different and really creative. What quickly became clear to the children was that they were going to struggle to take photographs of these particular tales, so the discussion moved onto how ‘crazy’ a story they could tell within the limits of the school environment. ANALYSING INFORMATION AND REASONED DECISION MAKING.
The groups then spent a long time discussing / arguing about the finer points of the story lines and trying to storyboard their ideas. This was I think the hardest part of the process for the children, but the most constructive. Most children found the transition from an idea in their head to an idea on paper very difficult. The fact that they had to ‘think visually’ was very new to them. They are after all used to writing stories in a traditional way. However, once they realised that the pictures could be set up to show detail and add to the story development the really took off. STORY PLANNING, CONCEPTALISATION AND DISCUSSION.
At this point I was really shocked at just how much thinking needed to go into the planning of the stories in terms of deciding exactly how a picture would / wouldn’t help the story. Discussion moved onto close-ups, long shots etc. MEDIA LITERACY
When children finally started to take the photographs to insert into the site it was hilarious! Everyone was laughing and the atmosphere in the classroom was brilliant. It was a definate ‘moment’ in teaching kids.
The Comiqs site is really intuitive to use. The children picked it up really quickly once they had been shown the basics.
The comics have not yet been finished, it has taken us all day, but all the children have been totally engrossed, engaged and on task. When you think about the skills that they are developing I think you have to say that its been a very successful day. We’ve not even started the ’proper’ writing on the comics yet! When the children have finished I’ll post some examples and put my final lessons learnt.
I have to say I’ve not looked forward to a Monday morning like this for a very very long time!
AIM: To write a Year book for the leavers of Year Six.
WHY:
To give the children a nice momento of their time at our school.
To create a sense of occasion as the children leave.
When I was on a course on Friday Stephen Drury showed me a great publishing site called Lulu. Immediately all thoughts of a small red headed Scottish singer were abandoned as it became clear just how powerful the site coud be. (Ignore the German on the thumbnail, the site is in English)
The great thing about the site is that you can upload Word / PDF files to create different types of book that can be published, but crucially from a school perspective you don’t have to put in bulk orders. This ment that the Yearbook once created could be purchased by parents and delivered to their own homes. No more hassle for the school collecting orders etc.
The other amazing thing was the price. Each book cost only £3.80 to produce and because the site is in America £6.00 to post. Under a tenner for a 80 page properly bound book! I think as these things go that is great value.
It was really easy to sort out the yearbook itself.
Download a template from Lulu for the size of book that you want. This is well worth doing as there are funny margin settings to do with printing and this just makes life easier.
Set up a template for the kids to put their pictures/thoughts in.
Set up file for the teachers/head/significant others to record their thoughts in
Bring them all together when complete into a single file.
5. Next upload the file to Lulu and follow the on screen instructions to publish. This is when you can set the price etc. The only thing that was slightly tricky was getting the cover art sorted out, but there is a template that you can download to help you.
Once you’ve completed the upload you can share the web address with those children who want to but the book. I decided to go for this approach rather than opening it up to the web as there were pictures of the children with their names on. This way I felt was an acceptable compromise.
The wonderful thing is that now the whole ordering / delivery side of things is taken out of my hands. Parents can go online with the children and order the book to bring in before the end of term to get it signed etc. Just a word of warning though, the site is American based so there is quite a long lead time on the order, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that everything will arrive on time!
However I think that the most important and exciting prospect for this type of development is the impact it could have on the way children produce work using ICT. In all the time that I’ve been involved in ICT in primary schools the main criticism from those unwilling to change their practice has bee the argument that children will ‘have nothing to show’ for their work.
Surely this is the solution!
Imagine the scenario where at the end of the year a child is able to produce a professional looking book that contains their work over the entire year! This would surely give that sense of audience and end product that raises attainment. There is no limit to the things that could be shown blogs, experiments, photos in fact anythingthat can put into a word document.
You could also produce a book per topic for the class eg when the children have researched a topic all their work could be put into a single book for display. The possibilities are endless. School could also use it as a fund raising exercise if they wanted to. I think it could have the power to change my practice fundamentally.
LESSONS LEARNT:
The incentive for children to produce a professional looking end product will motivate and engage children.
This is a great site that is easy to use for anyone with a basic level of digital literacy.
The speed of the process is one of it’s strengths, it took us two days to produce the book from start to finish.
This type of printing could do away with the argument of children not having ‘anything to show’ for their ICT work.
The cost is reasonable and in no way prohibitive.
The site takes the hassle out of the organisational side of things for school as everything is delivered to the child’s home.
Here’s a word cloud that I made using all the comments left by children on our school website. I think it makes interesting reading.
It also occurred to me that this could be a really useful tool for looking at the quality of vocabulary that children were using in their writing, for example if your lesson was on character description and using powerful adjectives etc you could get the children to paste their initial descriptions into a shared doc, then generate a word cloud. Then at the end of the lessons do the same activity and compare the differences between the two word clouds. Hopefully there would be some interesting discussion generated and some clear development!
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.
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.
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!
Just wanted to put down a note about how were using Senteo in the classroom. Simplest way to describe it is think who wants to be a millionaire ask the audience. Each child has a key pad that they can use to answer questions in Smartboard software. It gives you really clear assessment of areas of weakness for the chgildren and I’ve found it really useful whilst revision for the SATs.
Each child has their own logon so you get really specific information as well as a class overview. The software also lets you ask ‘instant’ opinion questions which can be useful.
We’ve used it for :
Assessement of specific Numeracy skills eg multiplication methods
Science revision
Listening assessments in Spanish
Really we’ve just touched the tip of the iceburg and next year things should really take off.
Came across this site on another blog. Feedjournal is a way of printing off rss feeds into a newspaper format. I thought that this could be a really cool way of creating a newspaper from a shared class blog. All the students write on the blog and then just set up the feed. I think it looks really cool and pretty simple to use. Saves as a pdf and then use issuu to publish like the one below.
Just a quick post. We’ve been experimenting in school with the use of the smartnotebook recorder. It’s really quick and easy to use and if you connect a microphone then it’s the simplest way that I know of creating and avi. If you then want it as flash etc then use Flash video MX (free) to convert it.
This seems to have worked pretty well for us – but if anyone knows a simpler way….
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