Category Archives: wwwd

Mostly stuff to do with the classroom & Teaching and learning. Posts that fit with the site’s description: “Teaching, ict, and suchlike”

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ReadingbusThe Reading Bus http://www.readingbus.co.ukA couple of minutes late, children presenting.
Hannover PS Aberdeen; High social depravation mixed backgrounds and abilities.

School has lots of parent links.
Raising attainment in Reading, fun and fostering lifelong reading.
The bus started from school, but includes other partners.
CFE – Enterprise, affected parents as well as children.
Learning bus, Aberdeen Bus company for education staff, buses are fun and unthreatening for parents, halfway house.
Involved more than one school, schools were to raise money for bus and conversion. Flat funding, lots of other charities contributed.

Bus launched 31 Aug 2006.
Partnerships with libraries, heath, school nurses, community health.
Emphasis on non-threatening place for teachers, learners and parents to contribute together. Children very involved in all aspects and implementation.
Bobby: 10 primaries involved, children from all schools worked together. Enterprise approach. Eg. Design of bus competition, great ideas. Bobby obviously benefitted great confident presentation.
Samantha: great list of events she had been involved in.
The slides in the background are going too fast to blog.

Morag Russell Aberdeen University
Learning conversations designed to find out what children think (and let the children know).
Wicked witch idea: What might happen if you cannot read?
Great use of conversation.
Wher do you want to read, not in classroom
Parents recall of school, lack of choice, again asking parents why reading was important?
Eg: misreading of pregnancy test.
Parents think they are not good readers, didn’t read novels.
Community Radio project, children lead, interviewed based on wicked witch.

Slide, children learned: adults think they are smart but they don’t know what children thing
Question to children, why can people read but puppies can’t? Great answers from children.(need time to think)

There is far to much in this, to blog as it goes on. keywords, conversation, enterprise, (revisit children’s conversations with them, lets them know that their contributions are valued).
Children link reading to real life rather than education.

Bus as neutral space, teacher shares custody of learning, teacher welcomes. Children given a safe, secure dialogic space. given a voice.
Live broadcast radio show.

notes: £120,000 to buy and convert bus

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An early start, I sneaked in.How primary teachers create a community of learners.
BeBo: blogs not used, children don’t want to write?
Connections and discussions.
Ewan’s BeBo deconstruction, blog least important, comments, bands, photos, friends, Attention
Ewan:

  • Blogs and Comments
  • Heh, Sandaig otters, thank goodness we blogged yesterday. On to the teddies and out of school communication.
  • Musselburgh trip to France, 4698 visits, advertised on posters in local shops.
  • Clustermaps, opportunity to shoutout to the audience.
  • The Dream Dragon, example

David: Photos

  • How to bore your friends and family or A useful tool
  • Photos with notes Viking Invasion Project on Flickr
  • Highlight, link and learn, open photos to others to add knowledge.
  • Telling Tales: teddies, bubbleshare: audience.

Ewan: How do you make friends:

  • Link Out, East Lothian blogs for all children with custom sidebar .
  • Online link shareing.
  • scotedublogs

Some of the five top tips:Shoutoup sig, business card, letterheads, school boards.Read, write comment, join a wiki.
Discussion, problems and blocks from HTs and authorities.

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Last night I was reading an interesting post And, don’t forget to breathe! on GD’s Random Jottings a blog by a teacher in Argyll (one of Andrew Brown’s 118 I’d guess). It was an interesting post from the chackface, I was especially interested in

But I’m beginning to wonder how many others have stalled ICT projects, their progress barred not by large rocks but by small, irritating pebbles of problems.

There are plenty of rocks in the way of progress, but the small technical details are often a show stopper, things that work at home or on an inservice or training day just don’t work in the class where the pressure is on, frustration will lead to the stall. And there are so many pebbles.

At lunch time I was planning this post, it was going to be about the use of wee cheap devices, namely the iRiver and cameras and just getting things done quickly and generating excitement in the class.

This morning I was doing a bit of talking in one of our primary six classes, the one that is ‘not ‘mine’ (or half mine, I am sharing one of the p6s this session), we were looking with a projector at some posts and comments the children had made, following links in comments, and talking what makes a good comment. 15 minutes before the bell we decided to blog about the French lesson from the previous day, the children’s second one. The children wanted to blog about it, but couldn’t think of much to say so I pulled out my iRiver and recorded a short song about the alphabet, we uploaded that onto the blog and the children were delighted (I am not sure how delighted their teacher was with their accent). I was pretty pleased with myself, and thinking about the afternoon.

BulbThe day before my class had been working on electric circuits and a group made a tiny movie with a digital camera, they has written a good report and were going to blog it, with me giving a hand to get the quicktime movie in the post.
I’ve installed the stuff from embedthevideo.com to make it simple to generate code to popup movies.

We uploaded, blogged and tested. The video was blank and QT said it needed a component. Eek, I then spent any free seconds for the rest of the afternoon trying to get a move exported from QT pro that was a small size and played on our school PCs, needless to say I didn’t get it to work until after the end of the school day. The problem was I had encoded the movie in H.264 format, doing it again in H.263 format worked fine (and the movie was smaller). I uploaded the replacement file and the post is now working well.

Anyway, this post was, in my imagination, going to be about the ease of using small devices to make quick, simple and exciting posts with children.
It turned out not to be so simple. I’ll know the next time.
The idea of making really short, small video and audio clips and blogging them easily was really attractive, getting away from the larger scale podcasts and dv projects to something more spontaneous, this technology should be transparent but it is full of grit and pebbles.

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teachMeet06logoAnother awful glow pun, sorry. I got the news yesterday that I had been accepted as a glow mentor, and therefore would be going to SETT. I had not asked my HT before as I’ve gone the last few years and thought that it might be pushing it. She said something like ‘I expected that you would be going and wondered why you had not asked.’Of course I was going to pop along for TeachMeet06. I am not sure what to do about the teachmeet vs glow dinner clash?
I also don’t really know what is on the program and have not chosen which presentations to go to, I know I want to see the Interactive Chatting Teddies as I would like to get my photo taken with Spencer and Campbell, and I presume Ewan will be doing a turn, so I will probably heckle;-).Any suggestions as to other good presentations gratefully received. What I am really looking forward to is meeting with everyone who has supported the Sandaig Blogs, by commenting and linking, over the last couple of years.The other thing I’ve got to do is work out exactly what i am going to talk about for 7 minutes at TeachMeet, seems harder than talking for an hour, I am going to be talking about RSS and APIs but have not really worked out a conclusion yet.

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My class are working on a bit of their Scotland topic researching cities. I had planned that they would use Wikipedia for research and was even thinking of using a wiki for presenting there results. Unfortunately we still have only one pc as the suite is still in progress. Anyway we had a look at Wikipedia with the projector and white board, compared it to our old classroom encyclopedia, hmm nothing on PSPs or IPods in the old book. We talked about who put Wikipedia together and how quickly it could change. We talked about accuracy and reliability of information. We had a quick look at the Tyrannosaurus page, and then the page about Glasgow. We had a quick chat about licensing and the fact that we could use the dinosaur photo if we liked. Covered a lot of points which will need further discussion and clarification.

Then I gave groups of children printouts of the Wikipedia pages about Scottish cities and highlighter pens, they went through the entries highlighting bits of text which will become note and then their own texts. Steam-powered Web2.0. good fun was had by all and the children ended up with some useful starters for their research. There should be a child’s eye view on the Sandaig Otters blog tomorrow.

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I will be talking to folk from the schools in our Learning community tonight these links are for me to talk about.

Sandaig Blogs:

ScotEduBlogs Wiki Links to the Scots Edu Blog world.

A couple of tutorials on using wordpress (interface might be a bit different)

A list of a few other school/class blogs

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My class are beginning to get the hang of blogging, this week we appointed two class scribes each day to blog each day, they are given the digital camera, and snap away then blog whatever they choose over on Sandaig Otters.

This week the children, who are pretty much new to blogging, need a bit of support with the technology as well as the writing but I think this is going to be a regular feature of the class this session.

I am also going to try to expand it to other classes. I kidnapped a few children from Primary seven to do a wee bit of blogging yesterday. If this expansion happens I’ll need to get busy figuring out how to present the posts as they will be dropping off the bottom as fast as they appear.

Again this week I have has sterling support from a pile of off site teachers and friends who have been commenting on the work. Apologies to those who have not had a follow up comment from the bloggers, we have still only one pc in the class as the suite is not ready yet. I’ll be delighted to return the favour and also link to other primary blogs if you let me know.

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I think this blog is unique in the ScotsEduBlog world in that it runs off Pivot.

The reason is that 1. I was familiar with pivot when we started blogging at Sandaig as I had blogged for a few years at Bad Poet my non-edu mainly SuperCard blog.

and 2.Pivot is one of the few blogs that did not need a database on the server, and we did not have a database with our hosting package at the time.

Pivot has in my opinion, proved to be great, very flexible with a pretty good toolset.

It has enabled us to run 18 weblogs for a variety of purposes. The theme settings are not as slick as say wordpress, but it is easier to customise using basic html and css, the blogs here may not be the prettiest but they are distinct from each other and some are cunningly disguised as parts of the main site (example: HT News or Sandaig News).

The main thing that has held me back from wholeheartedly recommending pivot to other teachers is its lack of pre-moderation of comments, so I was delighted to read about the new 1.40 beta on pivotlog.net, which has Comment Moderation and Greatly improved Metaweblog API support.

I think I’ve already been testing the metaWeblog stuff here as I uploaded some cutting-edge files from the pivot forum recently, but with moderation I can now recommend Pivot to any teacher with a smattering of html and css that would like to run a blog from a web host rather than use a blogging service. wOOt as the young folk say.