Thunder

About a month ago I was chatting to Tim in the bar at the Welti - the gym I am a member of, and we will leave it at that.

We were chatting about blogging in Shropshire and he showed me a couple of blogs from pupils at Shrewsbury High School, I was really impressed by the content and comments made.  Knowing that I was going to be talking about the use of blogs in education at the Derbyshire ICT conference I asked Tim if he could interview a couple of his students to discuss their blogging.

Unfortunately Tim didn’t manage to interview the girls prior to the conference, but he has done now, you can read his post that contains the interview here.  The blogs referred to are: http://archl1.wordpress.com & http://scuth1.wordpress.com

I posted a link to FlashEarth on my del.icio.us account a couple of days ago, thinking I would write a post about it when I got some spare time.  Ewan has already posted about it, so just check out what he has to say.

At the last Shropshire Advisory Service day I did a short demonstration of my blog and to show my readership I clicked on the clustrmap and then struggled to name some of the countries my readers come from.

Last week I was reading a post on the TecnoTeach blog entitled ‘Where did you say you were from?‘ the teacher appears to share my lack of geographical knowledge.

…. asking the children to start naming new locations as they appear on the map. Making this a game with the possibility of winning school house points has opened up a new curricular area in our blog that was not intentional. The children are now looking at the map, with interest, and locating marked areas as they have a desire to find out who their world wide audience are.

If you have a school blog, go and create a clustrmap now to develop your pupils’, and possibly your own, mapping skills.

This is a great idea and I wholesomely agree, put a clustrmap on your blog - not to record the number of hits your blog gets but where people are coming through.  You could produce a huge world map on your classroom wall and insert pins in it when you get a visit from a new geographical region.

The findings from the ‘Summit on Educational Games, Harnessing the power of video games for learning’ organised by the Federation of American Scientists can now be viewed online. The summit was convened to discuss ways to accelerate the development, commercialization, and deployment of new generation games for learning.

The Summit focused on four issues: video game features useful for learning and aspects of learning that could be supported by video games, research needed to support the effective use of games for education and training, market barriers, and changes in schools that might be needed to take advantage of educational games.

Gareth Pimley has just started a blog for Primary D&T teachers, Gareth is an exceptional practitioner so his blog should be very informative.

Via Lifehacker I came across a post on the Chief Happiness Officers blog that looks at 10 seriously cool workplaces, at the beginning of his post he states:

Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one.

Isn’t this equally true of schools, here are a couple of typical ICT classrooms:

 

These rooms are hardly creative environments, I hope when the BSF programme comes to Shropshire we will be able to take account of the creative workplaces mentioned in the previous article and would be keen to see any schools who have produced creative, colourful, organic and playful environments for their pupils.

How cool would it be to have a wall like this, one that you can write on:

All the photos from his post can be found on flickr.

I have just spent the last 30mins playing on some maths games produced by 2Simple software.

A suite of six fast paced games designed to make learning mathematics fun, effective and meaningful. In traditional arcade style, these games are set to engage children from their first click whilst the high pace of learning will keep them striving to improve.

• Factoroids - break down the factors into equal parts.
• Dividers - target each number with the correct divider.
• FracWall - arrange the fractions to create a whole.
• BondBubbles - join the bubbles to recall number facts.
• SeqSnake - work out the sequence to grow the snake.
• FunkyPlatform - use the calculation platforms to reach the target number.

The software is aimed at Key Stage 2, but I could have used it with KS3 classes. The software tracks your progress so you don’t have to start from scratch each time.  I found the games enjoyable, so why not give it a go yourselves, you can download a 30 day trial from their website.

Via the ICT Research Network I was pointed to the Frank Wise School blog that contained a section on their reflections on podcasting with children with severe learning difficulties.  By all accounts it appears to have been a huge success.

Today I took my podcasting roadshow to Sir John Talbot’s school in Whitchurch Shropshire, this is my local secondary school.

It was the year 6 induction day and the headteacher had asked me to get a group of 20 mixed year group students to record the events of the day. Prior to the day, just like at OWS, I emailed the students with a link to their blog and asked them to comment on the first six posts. Unfortunately not many of the students participated in this activity, this lead to me having to spend time going through the questions with them to assess what they knew already. The applications I had asked them to look at where all new to them - so today was going to be a big, but enjoyable, learning curve for them.

So after getting their brief and planning the questions they wanted to ask the year 6 students off they went with ibooks, mobile phones, mp3 recorders and digital cameras in hand to record their discussions.

The students were given a brief introduction to Garageband, iPhoto and iTunes to enable them to produce their enhanced podcasts. All photos taken throughout the day were uploaded to the schools Flickr account, they even caught me doing some work - I think I should frame it!

The students were really motivated and engaged with using the ibooks and ICT being more than spreadsheets and databases. All the teachers that popped their head in during the day were impressed with the work ethic and the buzz that was going around the room. It was amazing to see how much they produced. You can read their evaluations of the day here, at present there is only a couple but they have all agreed to add theirs comments tomorrow.
Please check out their blog and leave them some comments.

It was great to see the students so engaged in their work, there really is great potential in developing this kind of experience for our students. I will have to put some time aside during this Summer break to produce a unit of work for KS3 ICT lessons based around these collaborative and social technologies.

I have been subscribing to Bill MacKenty’s blog for a while now, initially for his writings about the use of Games in Education. Today he had a post stating:

Part of my new job at Hunter College High School is to create and run staff technology professional development. Because I like to share stuff, here’s a link with all the materials I’ve created. Lots of movies, PDF guides and the like.

Take a look and take the files you are interested in. It would be nice if we could put all of our ‘HowTo’ guides in a central place for all to benefit from, maybe this is a Summer job for me. If anyone has any guides/movies that they would like to share either send me a link to them or email them over.