Teaching with Technology

Today provided me with one of those – ‘blimey things are going to be different from now on’ moments.   After a staff meeting about guided writing with children last night, I put two and two together and realised that a tool called Etherpad could be a match made in heaven.

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!

This week I tried to use wordle as an assessment tool in literacy. Children were shown a stimulus image of a man looking over the edge of a well and were then asked to write 100 words of character description. We then took everyone’s writing and put it into wordle.

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.

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.

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 was very 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.

blogpost from mrkp on 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! 

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!

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/

Came across this great site on another blog www.animoto.com