We are coming to the end of another Year at your school. The ICT dept. is gaining strength and is asiPad with Children's Book impermanent as ever: we are to become facilitators instead of discrete ICT teachers (albeit our new guy is 'front loading' skills for me to transfer in cross curricular lessons).
The problem we both face now is that the Reception children are demons on the iPads. They have been utterly sublime all the way to the Easter break. We have tackled some really tricky clusters of skills such as in-app camera work (MadPad and Puppet Pals) and other combinations such as animation using imports of various kinds via DoInk.
Read MoreThe Year 5 Children have been following up on their work we began at the beginning of the year in our Image Manipulation strand. The children loosely follow the lessons set out by the Newham ICT scheme and the art work done by Patrick Caulfield. The images are good and have a clear use in the learning of layering. I suppose you could do this in regular MS Paint, Tux or MS Word but Paint.Net is our Favourite.
Read MoreThis morning I invited the parents along for a talk on the upcoming Internet safety topic we'll be running for the next 4 weeks. The Presentation that is embedded below is in several versions depending on what you prefer.
The links in the final slide aren't there, instead they are here which makes things a little easier.
The next presentation will be all about games in education and how to engage our learners at various points in a topic. It wil also highlight how games are now common place and used to build Literacy, Numeracy and other topics' levels of attainment. This article my help you get an understanding.
Read MoreThe 2012 21CLHK comference has just finished this weekend and now I have several tasks I'm sure other EdTech leaders have to think about. In fact, I now have many.
There were so many great strands going on at the conference that in the end I had to basically double up and dip in and out
of a few towards the end and try to get a flavour of what was going on. The best of what I saw and heard came from Robyn Treyvaud and Sugatra Mitra's keynotes. Many people commented on Punya Mishra and the cross-over of Tachnology in TPACK . But in terms of our needs the former two hit the nail on the head. If you don't know who these people are then follow the links. But rest assured that they are key figures in education and technological usage within education.
Read MoreThis week I was observed teaching. Not usually a happy affair for some but this time I thought I might use the recent additions to ICT (iPads) I have been making to highlight the need for a larger focus put on ICT in our school.
With the recent training and a happier more creative outlook placed on tackling ICT by placing it firmly at the center of our teaching it was time to put the iPad to test in the very grateful hands of the Year 5 children.
Basically, the future plans are that KS2 will inherit a much overdue injection of iPod touches to cater for bespoke cross-curricular lessons. It means that the children will have a video camera and editing software in their hands; something I think is imperative in modern KS2 ICT. So far the iPads have been for the Reception children only with view to KS1 after Christmas and I needed to see what the limitations are when using them with the older children. This is the rationale anyway! Sometimes I really love my job!
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mbedding the final result below.
Simple and easy to share with our recpetion classes and further when we have to cross them off to curricilum areas.
For the inspiration see the Kathy Shrock blog for more info.
Read MoreOn November the 8th we invited over Ewan McIntosh and Tom Barrett two of the leading specialists in ICT in education from the company NoTosh. They were here to work with all staff in Primary and Nursery plus a few from our Bi Lingual section too. They were here for 3 days and were structured so that year groups could work together in their teams and produce new and exciting resources to teach with. They also learned new methods to try and be more experimental with the ICT equipment we have in school.
The days began with our staff learning to use the Google suite of applications that mostly come with a Gmail account. Many people do not realise the potential that these applications have for education. Tom, who specialises in this field was the first teacher in the UK to become a certified Google Educator and leads the way in its use with his ideas called "Interesting Ways". If you should do a Google search for this you will see the variety of uses that have been put together from teachers all over the world.
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witter for Teachers Today is the start of our 3 day long training workshop on Google Tools, Storytelling, social networks and essentially becoming a little more creative in ICT.
Below is the presentation I will be using for teachers to follow on using Twitter. If you want editing rights then please mail to ask!
Enjoy.
Read MoreThis is a snippet of the latest use of the iPad in Reception.
The children have used the app called MadPad that essentially turn the iPad into a musical instrument via video buttons.
This was a two part lesson - the first being to get to know the mad pad app and record percussion.
Then the second to import other children's percussion into new set of buttons.
They had to review what was good sound and what was poor sound. They also had to make sure we could see the instrument being played.
The result was a mixed bag really but the children understood immediately that they could use Johnny's hammer sound as it was the best and he was from another class. Collaborative effects next time where we chose who we want to send our sounds to.
Baby steps as they say as this is only really the end of the first half term.
Next up, drawing and painting with a stylus.
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