My school blog platform, Creative Blogs, has launched a new free blogging project that you might like to get involved with.
Called Blogthenews, the new project is attempt to bring the school or class newspaper into the 21st Century. It acts as a news site that collects stories automatically from school bloggers all over the country. Best of all, you can write your news story on your own school or class blog and providing you indicate that you want your story to be syndicated, it will automagically appear on Blogthenews saving loads of time and effort. We would prefer it if you had editorial control of your content, and you and your class decide what’s newsworthy. Whether that is a brilliant piece of writing; some fantastic poetry; a summary of a topic that your class has been doing; or a genuine news story that is happening in your school, all we ask is that you edit the story and provide some context so that readers get an idea of who the author is and where they are from prior to syndicating it.
To set up a link from your blog to Blogthenews is very simple. All you have to do is sign up here, and we’ll do the rest.
We hope you can support this exciting and innovative project and help make Blogthenews a real community success story.
Creative Blogs teacher wins Naace Impact Award
We were absolutely delighted to hear that David Mitchell of Heathfield Primary School in Bolton recently won a Naace Impact Award for his work with blogs. To read about David’s reaction (under the most trying of circumstances) click here. Needless to say, we are immensely proud to host Heathfield’s blog and are delighted that it is now regarded as a benchmark for excellence when it comes to educational blogging.
New Bloggers
Creative Blogs has been growing from strength to strength, and several new schools have set up projects. Please visit their sites and provide encouragement!
And what about the renowned author, Pie Corbett, whose blog we have just set up! http://piecorbett.net
More are on the way, including our very first international school!
Quadblogging
If you have a class that isn’t getting many visitors to their blog, then consider signing up for a quadblogging project. Quadblogging is an idea of David Mitchell’s from Heathfield. Simply, each school signing up is partnered with 3 others, making a quad. Each week one school becomes the focus for visits and comments from the other members of the quad. So far it has been very successful with many schools from all over the world signing up for quads. To read more and to sign up, click here.
Today, Heathfield Community Primary School received an international ICT award from Toshiba for their teaching and learning through blogs. I'm particularly delighted for them as David Mitchell, the deputy head has put in an immense amount of work with teachers and children on their blogsite. On visiting the site it's hard to believe that it was only set up last December!
I am very proud to host Heathfield's blogsite and will blog more about the award and their site when David has filled me in on the details.
I am very pleased to read the first of a series of posts about blogging on BrainPop's blog. Pleased, because the first post in the series was written by Peter Rafferty. I met Peter over 5 years ago at a conference, I think, and his school became the first to order a blogsite from my then brand new Creative Blogs service. In those 5 years Green park's bloggers have gone from strength to strength while watching blogging in primary schools grow from a minority cult to a widely accepted and powerful medium for communicating children's learning. It's clear from the story how deeply embedded is the culture of blogging in the school's community, and long may it continue.
I look forward to reading further posts in the series from other top Creative Bloggers, David Mitchell and Jack Sloan.
This blog has been quiet lately, for two reasons: firstly, I have moved house and BT in their wisdom are taking rather a long time to get me connected to broadband; secondly, I have been running a rather exciting project called Blogtheworldcup. It's a collection of 32 blogs representing the 32 countries that took part, each blog being maintained by a class of children with their teacher.
To date the site has had over half a million hits (and it was only live 1 week before the Cup started) and has about 650 members blogging, commenting and interacting. What's different about this site is that although it is based on Wordpress, like all my school sites, it has the Buddypress plugin installed. This turns the site into something more akin to Facebook with users having the ability to update their own profile; "like" the posts of others; use the Twitter @ convention to send public messages; make forum posts and much more, all withinthe context of a techer moderated platform.
Here's what some of those involved in the project thought:
It has been a privilege to have been involved in this project from its inception and watching what the teachers and children did with their blogs. Here's to the success of Blogtheolympics.net, it's going to be quite a ride.
As someone who spends a lot of time showing teachers how to use blogs it's probably unsurprising that I get hooked up in the technicalities of blogging: how to add slideshows, how to create surveys etc. It's nice when I get a gentle reminder every once in a while that blogging is only a tool and it takes the creative spark of a teacher to make something worthwhile happen.
I had just such a reminder yesterday at the Manchester Head Teacher's Conference. I had been asked to run a seminar with Jack Sloan, a year 2 teacher from Chorlton Park where I have done quite a bit of teaching over the years. It was listening to Jack talking about the wonderful and creative work that goes on in his class that caused me to reflect that yes, his class blog is one of the best Keystage 1 blogs you could ever hope to visit (in my opinion, the best, and I'm proud to host it), but actually it wasn't the blog itself that was so impressive, rather the extent to which Jack has used this very simple technology to create a truly empowering learning environment for his children.
A particular highlight was the traditional tales unit he did using Jack and the Beanstalk as the basis, and you can follow the development of the project from first ideas, design work and peer critique all the way through to the finished movie.
For the last 2 years I've written an annual blogpost listing my favourite websites and web apps to support blogging in school. The last one was in Feb 09 so a revision is slightly overdue (the original is here).
The number of tools that you can create stuff with, then embed the results in your blog is now truly immense and choosing a top ten is nigh on impossible - some apps are brilliant, but are niche in their use. So this list really reflects my current classroom favourites - at the risk of suffering from bloat, I found it was impossible to pick ten, so the list has grown, and that still doesn't leave space for excellent tools such as the timeline tools, Dipity and Timeglider; wordcloud generators Wordle and Tagxedo; live blogging tool, Coveritlive and many others. I'm also deliberately mixing up the list from past years, so do have a look at previous posts to see what is on those lists too. Finally, I'm going to categorise them, too, being aware that any categorisation is pretty arbitrary as many of the tools mentioned could easily fit in other categories.
Where possible, I've given alternatives in case personal preferences or local authority filtering etc. gets in the way. And if I've missed an indispensable tool or website, please feel free to add it as a comment.
Personal Productivity and Sharing
Many of the tools listed under productivity are indispensable to me in my everyday interactions with the internet and my personal learning network and I don't always use them in the context of blogging. However, I also find them incredibly useful tools to add interactivity to my blog for example through using Google Forms to add a survey (see below).
Google DocsImpossible to describe in one paragraph. You get spreadsheets, documents, slideshows and forms. The latter is particularly useful for bloggers as it allows you to generate a survey which you can simply embed into your blog and it auto collates the results into a spreadsheet for you. Here's my blogpost on using Google Forms for datahandling.
DeliciousOne of the first social bookmarking tools was Delicious. Others such as Diigo and Digg have come along with extra features, but the great thing about Delicious is its simplicity. I use it for myself to collect useful resources (my Delicious page is here), but I also use it with children as a research tool and too put links on blogs (Here's Chorlton Park's Y6 Delicious page.)
TwitterThere is lots of lazy and ill-informed criticism of Twitter (celebs tweeting what they had for breakfast etc.) I would simply say that developing a worldwide network of educators through Twitter has opened my eyes up to more ideas, opportunities and resources than any piece of CPD I have ever attended. Follow me on Twitter here.
SlideshareSimply a way of putting the PowerPoints that you and your class make online. It doesn't support all the fancy transitions and sound that you can put into a PowerPoint which is a good thaing as the class have to concentrate on content. Here's an example of an embedded Slideshare that I made with PowerPoint:
CompfightTeaching children (and teachers) to respect intellectual property is always a challenge and I always try to do this by being scrupulous in my modelling on my own blogs. As an image search engine my first port of call is Compfight. And if that doesn't come up with the goods, then I'll try the Creative Commons search engine which also includes video and music. For more royalty free resources try my Delicious tag here.
PicasaDeciding to move your own image collection online is a big step, but one that is well worth it. Other services include the ever popular Flickr and the more commercial Photobucket. My current favourite is Picasa as it automatically syncs My Pictures on my PC with the web. It also has some great photo editing tools including a cool collage builder. You can also download the Picasa software to your PC for faster editing and easier management of your albums. Incidentally, if you would like to make online collages from photos stored on your PC (or from the results of a Google image search) then Shapecollage is simply fab.
Creativity
AnimotoThis is a brilliant tool that takes images and video and mixes them into a very slick movie incorporating sound, titles and your own audio track (or just choose from the free music on the site). As a teacher you can apply for a free educator account, too (click here). Criticised by some as being anti-creative as it does all the mixing for you, in the right hands it is brilliant for children to select their own images to send powerful persuasive messages through making adverts or persuasive movies etc. I've blogged about it here.
Glogstergenerates superb interactive posters that can incorporate audio and video (from Youtube) as well as slick animated graphics. Fantastic for topic work, election posters, displaying poems etc. It also has a social element, and for that reason you need to sign up for the educator version (link in title) which effectively gives you your own Glogster site for your class.
Vokiis the ever popular talking animated heads generator. Children will love playing with the characters and using them to demonstrate their language skills, poetry reading, foreign language acquisition etc. You can record audio directly into Voki, use audio recorded elsewhere or simply use the text-to-speech capability of the site.
Photopeachis the simplest slideshow generator I have come across. It's a great first web tool to explore if you are new to the business of blogging. As well as simple slideshows it will also allow you to generate questionnaires. Here's my most recent post on how to create a Photopeach slideshow and put it on your blog.
Collaboration
Voicethread Imagine putting up an image and then capturing all the comments that people make about it verbally. That's the premise of Voicethread. Put up an image, or series of images and get collaborators to add their comments via a USB mic, a keyboard, or even a webcam. This brilliant tool can be used in all kinds of educational contexts. Here is one from the children of Chorlton Park telling us about their dreams for the world.
You can try the service for free, but it's well worth upgrading to an education account.
Wallwisheris a brilliant tool for capturing ideas. Think opening sentences for stories, arguments for and against, plenaries capturing what we have learned. Signing up for an account gives you control over your wall and enables you to control your wall, keep an eye out for updates and delete anything off topic. Setting up a wall is so quick and easy that it's possible to do it on the fly and to get the class adding to the wall, simply share the URL.
Primary Pad Primary Pad is an amazing collaborative word processor. Multiple people can edit the same document in real time with each person's contributions showing up with a different colour. Think of several groups around the classroom on netbooks working on their own writing tasks together with the teacher "dropping in" on their group via their own pc and making suggestions, editing mistakes and marking etc in a non-intrusive way. Or use it as a research tool where children are all independently researching and contributing to a project document - a bit like a wike, but much simpler and everyone can see everyone else's edits in real time. Based on the code from the now defunct Etherpad, Primary Pad is not free, but well worth subscribing to.
On Thursday I have kindly been invited to talk to a group of teachers from across South Manchester about spicing up their ICT curriculum. Dave Watson, head of Chorlton Park Primary School has set the day up and I'll be teaching with Twitter, search engines and Umapper in the morning (If you are following me on Twitter I'll be asking you to let us know where your favourite place in the Lake District is - it could be a mountain, a hotel, a town, a restaurant or cafe, a building, anything really, just as long as we can find it using a search engine). In the afternoon I'll be doing a brief talk about some of the work the staff have done at Chorlton Park with blogs and other collaborative tools. Obviously, I couldn't use PowerPoint so I though I'd give Prezi a whirl.
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?
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.
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:
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)
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).
