Teaching with Technology

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.

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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!