Thunder

I have just read an article in TES online entitled ‘Look what’s happened to mobiles phones and broadband‘ by George Cole, in the article he says:

A shame then, that most schools still see mobile phones as a threat rather than as an opportunity for extending the use of ICT. I know there are management and security issues, as well as questions about who pays for using many of the features. But it’s sad that a personal computer which many students have in their pockets is being banned rather than used as a useful ICT tool in the classroom.

We need to keep opening headteachers eyes to the power of the mobile phone, it has been great over the last few weeks to be working in two schools in Shropshire (Oldbury Wells and Sir John Talbot’s) where the headteachers have supported my use of mobile phones in the lessons I have been teaching. It would be great if organisations like Becta could note the power of the mobile phone and publicise case studies showing their positive impact on learning, we also need unions like NASUWT to stop stating that we should ban them (see my earlier posting).

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.

Today I ran a workshop as part of an RE conference at Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth. I had 4 sixth form students and 2 year 9 students, that had worked with me a couple of weeks ago.

Our role was to blog and podcast (using Garageband, iphoto and itunes) the events in the morning and to record and publish the question time event in the afternoon.

The blog can be found here - it isn’t complete as I am waiting for the information that the ethics group completed so I can upload it. Photos taken during the morning, mainly of the food group for some bizarre reason can be viewed on their flickr page, unfortunatley we ran out of space on the free account so I will need to upload the outstanding photos in August (I hope I remember). The websites that formed the basis of the ethics research can be found on their del.icio.us page tagged by ethics.

The question time mp3 is 58Mb at present so I will try and splice it up over the next few days and then upload it to the blog.

The year 9 students were stars, and commented that they wished their ICT lessons were more like this and not just using Office applications!

Tomorrow I am off to SJT to set up a blog and do some podcasting with a mixed age group of pupils.