Thunder

After having a rest and watching the first half of Brazil v Croatia I have managed to spark up the laptop to post about the fabulous experience I had today.

About three weeks ago I was asked by Lisa Thomas at Oldbury Wells school if I could organise and deliver an ICT day for their able and talented pupils, I nearly bit her arm off So, today the day arrived and I was so nervous - it has been a long time since I spent a whole day teaching

The end of last week I had emailed all the students to gain their thoughts about blogs - the post can be found here. This gave me the starting point for the lesson, I discussed the various student responses and then cracked on by asking them to look at the following websites and we discussed if/how we could use them today:

• http://www.flickr.com
• http://del.icio.us
• http://wikispaces.com
• http://writely.com
• http://owspupils.ethink.org.uk

Flickr came out as a firm favourite for them to store images taken throughout the day, I set up a flickr account for the students - www.flickr.com/photos/owspupils

The students also saw some value in using del.icio.us, again I set up an account - del.icio.us/owspupils - unfortunately we didn’t use this today, time was against us Maybe the school will use this in subsequent days/weeks/months….

I had set up a wikispaces account to start to get students to produce help files etc, this can be found at shropshireict.wikispaces.com. I had planned to get students to create pages on using garageband and flickr etc, but as with del.icio.us we ran out of time.

The students were given their objective for the day - ‘To produce materials to support year 6 students coming to OWS next year’. The students then split themselves into groups and decided on their focus for the rest of the day.

After a brief interruption from Ewan via a Skype conversation where I ended up leaving one of the students I was working with to chat with primary school teachers that Ewan was working with, we continued with our day. Ewan challenged our group of students to produce and publish a podcast before he did. You can find our podcast here and their podcast here, ours was produced a good 5 minutes before theirs.

The fun now began, students were given mp3 recorders, ibooks and digital cameras they also were able to use their mobile phones and some even used mine (I hope they didn’t make any long distance calls). What was interesting was that a couple of teh students brought their own ibooks with them - how cool is that.

I probably gave a couple of the students an introduction to Garageband, how to get photos into iphoto and how to convert the sound files on the mp3 recorders so they can be used in Garageband. For the rest of the day the students provided the technical support for each other. Apart from two of the students none of them had seen let alone used a Mac before. It was great to see these students supporting each other, especially when they were from different year groups (Y7 - Y10).

The rest of the day was frantic, engaging and tiring - you can see the final outcome on their blog at owspupils.ethink.org.uk, why not pop over and leave them some comments I am sure they would appreciate it. Throughout the day a variety of teachers popped in to see what the students were up to, at one point there was about eight members of staff in there, the staff were impressed by the levels of engagement and work that was going on. I hope they continue to update their blog on a regular basis. The students thoughts about the day can be read here.

If there are any Secondary schools in Shropshire who would like to arrange a similar day please get in touch.