Creative ICT News

Blogging is for little ones, too

The art of blogging seems to be getting a little more recognition in schools, and I was pleased to see that a teacher from Redbridge got an award for his blogging with reception children (Guardian article on the award here). Of course, the Creative Blogs community are no strangers to the benefits of blogging with younger children. Jack Sloans's year two blog at Chorlton Park gets an incredible amount of traffic and he has taken a lot of time and effort to get the children actually writing on the blogs themselves independently - I know I've watched them do it. Another great year two blog is that from Claire Jones at Southwark Primary in Nottingham, one of the newest schools to join Creative Blogs. In the early years the best example is probably Angela Newham's blog at Green Park (Peter Rafferty's Year 1 blog at this school was legendary - but he's now moved up to year 4). So, congratulations to Dan at Gearies primary for his award - I know that Anthony Evans, the ICT advisor from Redbridge, who is a friend, will be very proud. Maybe a Creative Blogger could get an award one year?

Stuff I've been doing elsewhere

I have been posting some content in one or two other places that folk who read this blog may find useful, so I'll post some links to it here.

Pupil Tracking Spreadsheets

As part of the work I do with Incerts, I have published a number of Excel based pupil tracking spreadsheets. These sheets are designed to be automatically populated with data from the Incerts teacher assessment system (thus saving you bucketloads of time). However, it struck me that many people who don't use Incerts could still find these spreadsheets useful by filling them in manually or using copy and paste etc.

Sample maths tracking and Y6 on target spreadsheets

Sample Early Years summary spreadsheet

Incerts will be publishing more spreadsheets soon, and when they do I will make notes on them over on my Incerts blog. I also hope to publish a date for an Incerts seminar shortly. Drop me a line if you are interested.

Creative Blogs

Recent posts on my Worpress for schools platform, Creative Blogs, include:

A review of Animoto, the fantastic slideshow creation tool;

Instructions on using the import/export function in Wordpress to set up new blogs,

How to create a Google Custom Search for your school (and why you might want to do this).

I've jumped on the Iphone band wagon

The new iphone 3Gs arrived a few weeks ago. It was prompted by the dropping and smashing of my Windows Mobile based XDA Orbit. In truth, it was a phone that I never loved. This was the second time I smashed it, and I was always frustrated by the clunky nature of Windows Mobile and the lack of applications to install on it. So, when serendipitously, a letter arrived on my mat inviting me to upgrade the day after the XDA bit the dust it didn't take me long to decide.

The process was helped by my friend Dave who had spent an entire Italian meal showing off his new iphone (note to self, don't join the legion of "incredibly pleased with myself" Iphone users who insist on demonstrating its capabilities whenever and wherever - I have only been partially successful at this). He was inordinately pleased with his London Underground planner app which, not only planned his route for him, but told him which was the optimum carriage to get on to minimise distance through crowds to exits etc. He was unimpressed when I pointed out the logical flaw in this app: namely, if all iphone users on the Tube downloaded it then you would see empty carriages on trains except for the "optimum" carriage" which would be crammed with geeks peering at their iphones and using Google Latitude to see which of their Twitter friends were also wedged in with them. This image had me giggling, and I'm sure that there is a cartoon in there somewhere.

It wasn't enough to stop me putting my order in and I've now spent a few days playing with my new phone. It's a brilliant piece of software design - incredibly easy to use, but it does have its limitations:

It currently doesn't support Flash. This means that loads of the interactive content uploaded to Learning Platforms and available generally on the web won't work on it. To be fair, this is no different to other smartphones, although the HTC Hero does claim to support Flash now, although I'm told it's a bit clunky.

The phone won't run 3rd party apps in the background. That sounds fairly geeky, but it's an important point. As an example, I have downloaded the MapmyRide app which uses the GPS feature of the phone to trace any runs or bike rides I undertake onto a map. Unfortunately, if I receive a phone call during the training session I have to resume the MapmyRide tracking after the call. It would be so much better if it just ran in the background. Again, Android phones allow this.

Maybe I should have looked seriously at the HTC Hero,but I've been seduced by my iphone and in practice have found it to be a wonderfully intuitive and simple device to use. Synchronising contacts, calendar and email with Outlook was the work of moments and browsing the App Store has given me some great applications that will make my life a lot simpler. Doing stuff like taking a photo/video/voice memo/note is so intuitive that Apple don't put a manual in the box.

Here ar a few of the apps that I'm using regularly:

Wordpress

The Wordpress app is an absolute gem. I can set up access to as many Wordpress blogs as I want and write new posts, edit existing stuff, upload photos straight from the phone's camera  and so on. It makes mobile blogging a piece of cake.

Typepad

This is a Typepad blog, but the iphone app from Typepad is nowhere nearly as good as its Wordpress counterpart. Its biggest limitation is the inability to edit existing posts as it treats any edit you make as a brand new post. I use it if I really need to, but any edits or additions I leave until I get home.

Evernote

Evernote is a new application for me that brings together the camera, notes, web bookmarks and voice memos into a single application. It uploads all notes that you create to your Evernote web page (creating an instant backup) and syncs with the Evernote desktop application that you can install on your home pc. I know some schools use Evernote on pupil handheld devices as their preferred jotter and I'm looking forward to exploring its potential.

Other apps I've installed:

BeeTagg:     QR code recognition software (see post on QR codes)

Tweetdeck:    Impressive Twitter app

MapmyRide:    GPS tracking for exercise (there are lots of other GPS tracking apps)

Facebook: Nuff said

National Rail Enquiries:    Although this cost £5 it is absolutely brilliant. If you use our rail network at all it's far easier to use this app to find out about trains/delays etc than using the web on your computer. Particularly keen on the "next train home" feature which, because it uses GPS will tell when your next train home from your nearest station is in a single click.

I'm looking forward to exploring the new phone's potential (did I mention it makes phone calls too), and I would be very happy to receive suggestions for apps that I might have missed (there are so many thousands of apps in the Apple Store that finding what you want is actually a bit of a trial and error experience).

  

My Top Ten Free Web Tools to Support Blogging In School

Almost exactly one year ago I wrote a post detailing my top ten apps to add value to your blog site (original here). A year on it's time to reappraise and update. Most of the sites listed are absolutely free and I have used all of them in class. 

Compfight

Top of the list is a Creative Commons image search engine. Compfight uses Flickr as its image bank to search over 4 billion images. By setting the search to Creative Commons only, you get images that are free to download and use on your blog. I teach the children in my classes that this is the only image search engine that they should use, and if they are older (years 5 and 6) I teach them to copy the image URL as an image credit. 

Flickr 

It's logical that since Compfight uses Flickr, than that should be on the list, too. In last year's list I opted for Photobucket, but unless you have a pro account (definitely worth paying for if you are a Photobucket regular) it has too many ads on it to remain in favour. Flickr is a much cleaner design and since tools like Compfight use it, the it should be on the list, too. For other excellent tools that use Flickr click here. 

Dipity

Dipity is one of several free online timeline tools. I particularly like this one because it works really well with lots of children logged in using a single account adding to the same timeline concurrently. Display the timeline on your whiteboard and refresh the screen to see what your class are adding. Here's one some of my year fives did on the Victorians:

5MW Group 1 Victorian Timeline on Dipity.

A previous post purely about Dipity can be linked to here.

Quikmaps

Quikmaps is a Google Maps mashup that allows you to draw over the top of a Google Map. I use this in preference to Google Maps itself in most instances because it doesn't display all the community content that Google Maps does. Once you've added a location tag, you can add a photo or evn a Google video to that location: fantastic for local area studies or field trips etc. Picture Trails Since we upgraded Creative Blogs, previous restrictions on which slideshow creators could be used have now been removed, and practically every slideshow creator will embed into a Wordpress blog. Picture Trails is just one of many possibles. I wrote an article showcasing some of these here.

ClustrMaps

Clustrmaps I regard as an indispensible widget. It shows a map with little red dots for the rough locations of each of the visitors to your blog. Since blogging is all about gaining authentic audience for your writers, then it follows that you need to be able to demonstrate this. For many children, clicking on the ClustrMap to see who is reading their blog is a powerful and motivational experience. For instructions on embedding a ClustrMap widget, click here. 

Slideshare 

Still on from last year's list is Slideshare, the presentation hosting service. Simply upload a PowerPoint to Slideshare and embed it into your blog. A powerful way of getting all those class PowerPoints that you have produced online. One neat little upgrade that they have added is the ability to group Powrepoints, so you don't need to paste 30 different lots of embed codes to display all your class' work.

| Get your Presentation Pack

Here's a post on how to do this. 

Voki 

Also carried forward is the talking avatar creator, Voki. Children love creating Vokis and you can use them in all manner of ways. Record poetry reading, news broadcasts, MFL work etc and add the sound to your avatar. Fortunately, embedding the code is much simpler than it used to be - ignore the Slideshare I have done on Voki, it needs updating. Simply copy and paste the embed code that Voki generates. 

Voicethread 

Voicethread is one of my favourite tools for capturing student responses to an issue. Create a presentation on Voicethread using slides, images or video, and then allow your audience to add comments by voice, typed, or even filmed. A basic account allows you to try Voicethread out, but if you want to start using it properly, then you can purchase an educational account at very reasonable cost.  

Solidcasts 

There are a number of different podcasting services on the web, some of which are very expensive for schools. There is no reason why this should be so and Solidcasts allows you up to 100mb of podcast hosting free of charge. Thereafter it's cheap to add space as you use it. I find it easy to create and manage your own podcasts. 

So, there you have my top ten tools that I've been using in my classroom. Some of the ones that have dropped off the list include Teachertube and Bubbl.us which are still very valuable tools, it's just that I haven't used them so much this year. Others such as Photobucket and Rockyou have been replaced by alternative tools. 

What are your favourite tools to support blogging in your school?

The chill winds of economic reality

One of the best/worst aspects of the internet in recent years has been being able to use all kinds of really fantastic tools for nothing. The credit crunch seems to have really started to bite and some of these tools have started to drop by the wayside Others have started to put ads into their product as a means of paying the rent.

This "something for nothing" business model really affects me as I sell a Wordpress MU based blog platform into schools. This costs a very reasonable (I think) £350 per annum and takes away all the headache of having to run a web server yourself and doing installations, upgrades, support etc. I'm not going to get rich doing this, but it's enjoyable and I've got about 20 schools running on my server with space for lots more. Persuading a school to part with the cash when they can get single user Wordpress accounts or Edublogs accounts for nothing is the tricky part, but once persuaded they seem to really appreciate having their own domain and oversight of all blogs from an admin login.

I'm hoping, that as more and more companies are putting advertising into their free products, folk might see the benefit of investing in their own domain for their school blog site. Twitter seems to be full of people bemoaning the fact that their lovely Edublogs page or Pageflakes site is now displaying advertising. Frankly, I don't see the point in getting hacked off with a free service when they start putting ads in it - they're businesses not educational charities, and it may be that they have no alternative - lots of free Web 2.0 services have already shutdown, and it seems that the brilliant Tutpup might be the latest.

If you want to find out more, check out: http://creativeblogs.net

One last point, if you are an edublogger and you want to just run a single-user account for your personal blog, I'l be happy to accommodate you on Creative Blogs (no ads guaranteed ;-). Just get in touch.

     Update: In fact it has emerged that Tutpup was in fact acquired by Mind Candy, owners of Moshi Monsters. read their blog post here: http://mindcandy.com/2009/02/tutpup-now-part-of-mind-candy/

Two lessons

One of the disadvantages for me as a self-employed consultant is that I am occasionally prone to bouts of introspection and self-doubt: "No-one reads my blog; it would be much easier to go back to teaching," etc. One such attack was brought on last week when I was working quietly in the corner of an ICT suite. The children in the class were all writing New Year's resolutions and what I saw profoundly depressed me. They were using Microsoft Word, and when one child asked if he could put a picture on he was told that he could use Word Art for the title and clip art for the picture. The children didn't print their work out for display and I doubted very much if they would ever look at them again. It was a classic "filler" for the first week back and probably epitomises what Ofsted would term "dull teaching". 

I don't hold myself up to be some kind of inspirational teacher, but I don't think you need to be to make such a lesson interesting and worthwhile. I decided to repeat the exercise with my Year 5s at Chorlton Park, only this time, they would blog their thoughts. When I pulled up the Year 5 blog on the whiteboard, the first thing I drew their attention to was the Clustr Map. Who was reading their blog? They could identify visitors from India, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, USA among many others. Straight away they were impressed, they had no idea that so many people were reading their stuff. Next they logged in and wrote about their New Year resolutions before using Compfight to find a striking image (with a license that they were allowed to use) for their posts. Those that finished quickly began to comment supportively on each other's resolutions and they made sure that they tagged their posts with a unique catgory so that they could pull up their resolutions and review progress later in the year.

I don't consider this lesson to be, in any way, remarkable; it required very little thought or planning. Any teacher could have delivered it, but it does so much more than the first. The children were aware that people from all over the planet could read their work, and that imediately impacted upon the quality of their writing; they started to review each other's work (without any prompting from me) and supported each other via positive comments; they knew that by clicking on the New Year Resoultion category that they could go back to their work and read comments and review progress (If you have a moment, please visit and add a couple more comments - will be much appreciated). They remained engaged from start to finish and many stayed on into break to make sure that theirs was published.

It is this ability of blogging to be able to demonstrate to children that people read their efforts that makes it such a powerful tool for learning. It also reaffirmed to me that we need to keep making teachers aware of tools such as blogging that have the capability of making a seemingly mundane task into something exciting, interactive, worthwhile and fun.

Embedable Bitesize

Thanks to Miss Merrie's class at Sudley Junior School in Liverpool I note that the BBC are providing blog embed codes for BBC Bitesize at KS2 (unfortunately not at KS1). This is fantastic news as it means I can easily embed educational games and activities into my class blog. Cool.

Anyone care to comment?

Manchester Social Media Cafe

I'm at the Northern, a trendy backstreet bar in Manchester's Northern Quarter for the inaugural meeting of the Manchester Social Media Café, a group formed to discuss social media issues of the day. Unsurprisingly, for the first meeting, the topic is, "Is blogging dead?" There is a good crowd - at least fifty and a panel of four taking questions. Hopefully there will be something of interest to educators. Updates throughout.

Discussing LiveJournal at the moment, not a social network I'm familiar with. Do LiveJournal blogs appear in Google searches? Not sure that I've found or read one. Apparently it's very popular in Russia.

What will the effect of the credit crunch be on the blogging genre?

Is blogging a human need? I blog therefore I am. Blogging is a 21st century cave painting. Note: read the Groundswell blog on ratios between bloggers and readers of blogs. (I'm blogging live and will add the links in later).

Has anybody read the Samsung mobile phone project blog? Link please.

Reflections the next morning

The event was an undoubted success - I counted well over fifty people. However, because the discussion was mainly around the genre of blogging and how to compete with professional journalists it was of limited interest to educators. The panel format worked well, but I think a keynote speaker would definitely add to the attraction of the occasion, and with that kind of turnout, I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to atract one. 

I spoke to several people but didn't find another educator there (@mrkp, @mrstucke, where were you in my hour of need?). The one interesting point to come out of it for me was the shock that corporate people registered when I told them that I worked with children blogging in schools. "You mean children can write blogs?!"

Roll on the next one. If you are in the northwest and you fancy getting together with social media types from all walks of life, it's definitely worth a visit.

Manchester Social Media Cafe on Google Groups

Blogging from my mobile phone

I've just installed the Typepad app for Windows mobile from http://get.typepad.com . On running the application I log into my blog and write this post. Rather neatly I can also access the phone's camera from within the app. This allows me to take a photo on the go and automatically embed it in the post. Ok, so a shot of my pc monitor isn't exactly inspiring, but hey, it's a test! I need to find a similar app for Wordpress now.

What's Changed?

I picked up from Twitter that fellow edublogger and teacher, Joe Dale, from Nodehill School on the Isle of Wight has decided to become a part time teacher and spend a couple of days a week working for himself. This is how I started nearly four years ago and it got me thinking about how my outlook has changed over that period. At the time, I was ICT co-ordinator at Crumpsall Lane Primary School and I thought we were pretty cool when it came to ICT. We had a fantastic website which included teacher interviews written and recorded by children (nowadays we'd call this podcasting, but we hadn't heard of feeds in 2003); had a fantastic 100th birthday website with recollections from ex parents, photos, scans of school logbooks from the war etc; and we were avid users of Think.com. I'd like to point you at this wonderful site, but it was all lost when the school subsequently switched to a template driven site :-(

I had very set ideas about what life would be like as a freelance consultant: schools would hire me as a peripatetic ICT co-ordinator and I would come in and sort out development plans, staff audits, staff training etc. How wrong I was.

The first step to changing my outlook was discovering blogs. My first post dates back to November 11th 2005, almost exactly 3 years ago, and some 6 months after I struck out on my own. What was significant about this post was the fact that it was a report of a conversation (a phone conversation, as it happens), but one which had a profound effect on me. It introduced me to RSS. Suddenly, I became aware that content was no longer king. I had spent ages developing a Web 1.0 website which I rather naively thought would be an excellent advert for me and my services and my intention was to make it a destination site by putting up loads of resources and links for ICT teachers. The site is still available (and still used - only this week I received an email from someone who had downloaded my sample Acceptable Use Policy), but my discovery of blogging and RSS rendered the site obsolete overnight.

Suddenly, through my blog, I had the means to collect and disseminate resources, reflect on stuff that I was doing/attending/thinking about, and to get feedback from my reader (sic). While I've never been a prolific blogger, and am much more rooted in the practical sharing of resources and ideas rather than the more academic and thoughtful tone of some other edubloggers whose blogs I read (and readership I envy), I'm still quite proud of my blog. 

As my journey through blogging continued I developed a resource site on del.icio.us (which I think is rather good), a Slideshare site, a social network for Wordpress MU in education, various wikis, online document stores,  and I linked to more and more blogs written by the aforementioned Joe Dale, Tom Barrett and Simon Mills to name but three of the most useful.

What all this taught me was that although I thought I knew what made ICT tick in a primary school, in fact I was a long way from the cutting edge. I had a lot to learn. 

For an excellent review of the last 20 yers or so watch Professor Stephen Heppell's keynote for the K12 Online Conference. Follow this link for the video, voicethread and more. It's a 40 minutes well spent. Above all it showed me that although I was on the right tracks with what I and the ICT Team at Crumpsall were trying to achieve, we hadn't appreciated how significant some of that stuff was and how we could have made it even better if only I'd grasped the importance of blogging, sharing and what Professor Heppell calls "usness" sooner.

Best of luck to Joe in his new venture, and if you want to support him then why not attend his popular Isle of Wight ICT conference next weekend? I'm told the island is very nice this time of year, and the list of speakers is impressive.