In my last week in my job as ICT advisor, I had some time free and so offered to do anything in classes that teachers wanted. Stu put his hand up and asked if I could spend a session with his class while he worked with podcasters as part of his action research project. I was quite keen to get into a classroom again and, of course, I couldn’t help but try an ICT tool that I have been mucking around with for awhile – VoiceThread. It turned out that the session time was during maths and I could get the laptop pod so I decided to put together a problem solving VoiceThread and give it a go. Generally, it went really well but there were some issues as well so I would adjust the activity if doing it again. Here is a summary of my thinking after the session:
What went well
The problems were aimed at the right level and I think it was definitely worth the effort of popping them into Comic Life to ‘jazz them up’ before exporting them as images and uploading to VoiceThread.
I had previously set up 10 identities called ‘Group One’ etc on my account and this meant I could have the children working in groups of three using one of the identities.
I was able to be logged on to 10 different laptops on my one account and we could even all add to the same VoiceThread slide at the same time using the different identities (I was trying to stretch VoiceThread to the max and it coped well).
I had embedded the same VoiceThread on 10 different pages of a wiki so that everyone could work off their own copy in their groups. This worked extremely well.
The children were extremely motivated to use VoiceThread and many even asked if they would be able to set up their own accounts at home.
Some children persevered with working out problems for almost a full half hour and showed higher level thinking skills.
What could be improved
The children were told they needed to work out the answers to problems before being able to record but many were so keen to get onto VoiceThread they rushed the problem solving just so they could record. This meant that many of the answers were not well thought out. Next time, I think I would have a paper version of the problems and the children would have to show me they had worked to figure out an answer before being able to get a laptop to record their strategies.
Some children recorded silly comments just to listen to them back and have a laugh. Even though they deleted them, this wasted time. By having the paper version as I said above, I think this would go some way to resolving this issue. I would also lay down some ground rules at the start and point out that anyone not following these rules would be working all the problems out on paper and not using the laptops at all.
There was too much background noise in the recordings. I might try to control the noise levels more or have the recording area somewhere a little quieter.
I didn’t know how to make the doodle tool stay solid so it kept fading out making it hard for the kids to show all their working in time. I know now that you click on the big white circle in the middle of the Doodle tool circles so this would make things much easier next time!
I couldn’t seem to upload any images for identities or otherwise when I was at the school. I think this is something to do with the school firewall so it is a good thing I got it all set up the night before. I did try bringing a picture across from my Flickr account and this worked fine so I would advise teachers to have all their images banked there for the kids to use as a workaround.
I did really enjoy working with the kids and still think it was a very worthwhile activity. Anyone can use this VoiceThread and add their own working out strategies so feel free to do so! Many of the problems still have not been solved correctly. Stu has also blogged about the session in his class blog which you can also go and read.
There has been a real surge of interest in Second Life through Twitter recently. I have had an account for about a year now but only occasionally go in. I can see that there is a real potential in Second Life for education but I have not really found enough of interest to keep me going back in that regularly. Still, the other day I decided to hop on and ended up teleporting to an island on Second Life that is a Spanish speaking area. As I am learning Spanish, I thought I would head in there and see if I could try and talk to people in Spanish. I bumped into a nice guy called Angel (in real life – I can’t quite remember his SL name) who was based in Spain. We chatted for a while and he was very patient with my exceptionally broken Spanish! It wasn’t until the end of the conversation that we realised that we were both ICT advisors and were able to share ideas around that topic. I took a snap shot of us having a talk. For anyone trying to learn another language, I think Second Life has HUGE potential. I certainly found it very motivating
I just wanted to give a big ‘ups’ to the teachers that I have worked with over this year who have now started to do their own blogs. Today I worked with the staff of one school (in groups of three) to get new edublogs up and running for their classes. Everyone was so enthusiastic and really enjoyed the tools at their finger tips when making their blogs. I must say that I am getting more and more impressed with Edublogs – particularly the Pages function which basically means that you have the benefits of a wiki and blog combined. I do find a couple of things mildly frustrating such as that when I send an image up to the editor when posting and try to resize by dragging the corners, it does not stay resized when I publish. I know that I can go and change the dimensions in the insert/ edit image area but it would be handy to resize without using this. The other very small thing that I think could be improved is having a widget named Html rather than having to know that you use a Text widget. It might also be handy to have something written in the template thumbnails to let you know which you can customise the image of and which ones you can’t.
However, these are very minor things and they don’t interfere with me being able to use the blog. The page feature more than makes up for any small irritations and I plan to add some to this blog in the very near future.
It would be great if some of you out there could go and leave comments for my fledgling teacher bloggers. Nothing is more motivating than knowing that someone is out there and values what you do. Below is the link to a page in our cluster wiki with all the blogs linked to:
I have also spent time working on Teacher Portal to make it easier to navigate and to simplify the interface. I am quite happy with it now. While some of the content is specific to our cluster, I think this could be a useful resource for other people as well and it would be great if anyone wants to add some of their own content into it.
Let me know if you think it could be improved and what you’d like to see added
I put this presentation on strategic planning together for an inter-cluster meeting. I loaded it up to Slideshare for a meeting I had today and thought other people might find it useful.
This is nothing new – just a post to say that I have also added my ICT Roundup presentation to SlideShare as it has not messed up some of the slides the way that SlideBoom did in places (they are upgrading their site today so maybe they are improving it).
This is just a quick post to say that I have put together a couple of instructional pages on how to use the Track Changes and Comment features in Pages (Mac) when doing collaborative writing work in class. At the end of the instructions, there is an editing and proofreading checklist for children to use as part of this process.
I would try to embed the code but I think it won’t work so well due to the size of the window, so here is the link to where I have uploaded this to Scribd. Feel free to use this in any way you like if it is useful to you.
I have spent the last few days putting together this presentation on ICT in education. Basically there are around 60 slides with two examples of ICT use linked to from each slide so that’s a lot of content! Let me know what you think.
In my last week in my job as ICT advisor, I had some time free and so offered to do anything in classes that teachers wanted. Stu put his hand up and asked if I could spend a session with his class while he worked with podcasters as part of his action research project. I was quite keen to get into a classroom again and, of course, I couldn’t help but try an ICT tool that I have been mucking around with for awhile – VoiceThread. It turned out that the session time was during maths and I could get the laptop pod so I decided to put together a problem solving VoiceThread and give it a go. Generally, it went really well but there were some issues as well so I would adjust the activity if doing it again. Here is a summary of my thinking after the session:
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