Tag: classroom

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Usually at this time of year I am busy ‘tidying’ things into cupboards. The summer holidays are approaching. This year I am having to clean the out – nine years of accumulated stuff.

There are worksheets galore, laminated instructions and guides, old Tate gallery calendars. Books, tapes, things I’ve made to help with a task, things I thought might be useful, kids work I couldn’t throw out, old bits of technology, a tower of dvd disks I was keeping for bird scarers.

The electric trunking round my room has a collection of interesting wee things the kids have found, spider skeletons, squirrel and mouse gnawed nuts, broken egg shells feather and the like.

As someone who doesn’t have a great memory, this brings back lots. It has also makes me think of a few slightly connected things.

Reinventing the wheel

Primary teachers create a lot of resources. Or buy them from twinkl or similar. I thought that the flowering of edutech might have delivered shared resources in a more distributed, open way than it has. I do resent the money spent, as I think with some leadership we could have had something great.

I am organising, as best I can, anything I think might be useful and leaving them for the next person to occupy my classroom. But I also found resources left by the previous incumbent that I’ve never touched.

memories

Some of the memories I’ve got are stored in our class blog. As they get older I doubt there of much interest or anyone other than me. I will be a wee bit sad as they are lost or replace in the future.

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The Advent calendar in Glow Blogs has now 15 wee activities for mid-upper primary. 5 minutes of Christmas fun or a brain break for each day. New ones appear at 1 minute past midnight.

I have learnt a bit about the Site Editor when making the Calendar page. I used the new, to Glow, Grid Block. Each grid contains a group with a display post shortcode. The Display posts plugin allows me to show a thumbnail for the post published on a particular day. If there are no posts it just shows text of my choice. In this case ‘wait for the date’. The posts are queued up by scheduling.

There is an Advent Calendar in H5P itself, but I like the display post approach.

Each post has a simple H5P activity. Matching games, quizzes and the like.The Site Editor in Glow blogs is a really powerful tool for creating different looks. I’ve enjoyed testing the cover block a bit this weekend.

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Grass in the foreground 2 blurred people behind

My last day of term plan yesterday was a scavenger hunt, Capture the Flag and tidy our MakerSpace.

The scavenger hunt was made in Keynote, a slide for each challenge.

I’ve recently read Digital Scavenger Hunts – DigiLearnFalk which shows how to make really attractive one-slide digital hunts in keynote. Using place holders. They have even some nice templates to use.

My own approach is much less attractive. I wanted quite a long list of ‘things’ to find and wanted to add audio to the video/photo mix. The result is much uglier, but only takes a couple of minutes to make.

I write (or copy from a list or lists found online ) & edit the list in a text editor. Then copy it.

  1. Open Keynote & make a new Presentation.
  2. Create a title slide.
  3. Make a new slide and set the from a to section heading
  4. Change the view to outline and paste in my list. This makes a slide for each line.
  5. Select all the new slides and choose Reapply Layout to Slide from the Format menu.
  6. Edit the Slide Layout and move the section heading to the top.
Keynote Scavenger Hunt – No Audio

I use Keynote every day in my class. Perhaps unfortunately for my class, I spend very little time designing slides. I mainly choose the default black on white theme. I try to follow the advice of Robert Macmillan and keep my slides simple.

The class didn’t have time on Wednesday to do more than make the slides and then we reviewed them together. Given more time, it could have been a fun task for the pupils to make the slides look good.

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Bookmarked 20 outdoor bird games and activities (creativestarlearning.co.uk)
When learning about nature and wildlife, experiential outdoor sessions need to happen. We need children to play and to practice key skills so that observing and understanding birds is a key focus of our time.
Over the decades , a number of outdoor educators such as Joseph Cornell, Steve Van Matre, T...

This and Creating Bird Friendly Schools and Nurseries | Creative STAR Learning | I’m a teacher, get me OUTSIDE here!