Images from the Past:Thinking Aloud

I wanted to flag this site, which I found when visiting del.icio.us this morning. Old Pictures has on display a collection of photographs taken over the last 150 years, and although being American in origin also has some interesting photographs from Britain, including its colonial past, and Europe. They have also displayed painted photos, which I think are great, as we tend to see the old days as being black and white, an interesting talking point for an ICT session, and perhaps an ICT lesson where we could use Photofiltre, 2 Paint a Picture or MS Paint to "touch up" some old pictures, suggesting how they might look today.

In their introduction the authors say "It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Even with a thousand words, how do you describe the look in a Mother's eye...," and it is this statement which set me off today, thinking about visual literacy and how I might use these images in the classroom. Not all of the images on this site might be considered appropriate for use with younger children, but many are evocative, and interesting starting points for discussion with older students. As a teacher resource or as a source of material for developing clsss based materials I feel this site has much to offer.

I think I would start by downloading one or two images, which I could use to make rub and reveal activities, in my Smart Notebook. With the image above for example, slowly rubbing out sections of an applied ink layer I would focus on parts of the image, encouraging inferencial activity to build up a class view of the context and what the woman is thinking or feeling, as information is gradually made available to the students. Views will change within the group as the picture is slowly revealed, ideas and vocabulary could be collected which we would build on from the stimulus towards perhaps a big write, or a guided and shared writing activity.

Perhaps using the searchlight tool to highlight specific areas of an image, and prompt question such as:
Who are these people?
What are they doing?
What do you think this object is?
What is it made of?
What do you think it was used for?
Does it remind you of anything?
Where or when do you think this photograph was taken?
I would seek responses from students and groups about the evidence they can find in the image to support their thoughts. We could change the direction of the discussion to form a starting point for historical enquiry, around visual evidence. I have also used this technique with paintings and photographs of archeological evidence, from the distant past.

In between questions I would use "talking twos" or "pair and share," to enable the students space to develop their own ideas, collect vocabulary, or "rehearse and write," around the image as a stimulus.

Having engaged together as a class with the image I might use prepared tasks, for students to work collaboratively, using prepared DTP or word processed files to carry out onscreen text development focusing on the images. Perhaps we could work in pairs to write a diary entry from the view point of the woman or the photographer, develop a newspaper report where the photograph informs the headline, and based on an imaginary interview with the subject, we might write an empathetic letter, or use the image to develop textual openers. As a paired activity in class based ICT areas I might provide simple texts developed through shared writing to encourage students to expand and develop, revise and review these to include WOW Words. We could also provide comparison charts for "then and now," where perhaps having explored an image of the "Wright Brother's plane," and made observations from the image, children could look for simailarities and differences between the aircraft and a modern counterpart.

My experiences of working with video tell me that a picture may paint a thousand words, but in all likelihood it will paint a thousand different words for every reader. So one of the purposes of written text in evoking shared understanding comes into play through such activities. In addition in photographs as with other images, we only see what the camera sees, or what the photographer wants us to see, images are framed and biassed by the choices orignially made by the artist. We don't see what happened out of shot. Using a portrait, it might be interesting to try to recreate the image through mime. Children could work in groups to set up their version of the shot, with friends replacing the real participants. Can they recreate the scene, including the expressions of the people featured? Using digital cameras their scenes could be used for comparison with the original and further discussion evolve around how the visual text is similar or could be altered to improve its accuracy. They might also try to create an imaginary view of what happened before the image was captured, and what might have happened next? Maybe they could use the original image, placed in the centre of a piece of paper, and try to expand the scene to show what might have been beyond the picture frame.

I also enjoy using the spotlight tool with students to focus on what we can see when sketching from images. By inserting a photograph to a notebook, or viewing it as a slideshow image, we can use the spotlight tool to highlight a starting point for a sketch. The children sketch what they can see, and then the spotlight is either moved to another area of the image to focus on, or is gradually resized to include more of the image which must be added to the previous section sketched. Using the idea of line, and mark making in observational drawing sessions such as this the students are frequently surprised by the quality of outcome created in their final sketches. I personally enjoy listening in on the discussion and langage use which evolves when children try to help each other or notice a feature and try to describe it to their friends. Ultimately though all of these activities contribute to the children's understanding of images as textual artefacts and how they evoke meaning and emotional response, and support the use of oral language in support of cross curricular and multimodal text development. I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have on this site or post, or any other ideas you may have about the use of digital images in the classroom.

MS Powertoys for Windows XP, and Year Group Blogs

I downloaded 2 PowerToys yesterday which I think will be really useful in preparing materials for upload to our school website. Gaining ownership of our website has been a real challenge, since it is not an out of the box solution, but has been developed internally using MS Frontpage. The links provided by Anthony Evans in his post the other day, led me to the PowerToys page, and reminded me of a conversation with Scott one of our LA technicians who recommended Image Resizer.

Image Resizer adds a tool to right click menus which, after selection of images in Windows Explorer, enables batch conversion of images to predetermined sizes. The handheld option shown here we think is about the right size for upload to photo galleries to fit screen size 240 x 320.

Another potentially exciting tool from this space was the HTML Slide Show Wizard which runs from the programs menu as an application. Opening the wizard and importing your resized images, this "toy" creates a slideshow, by generating the page code to a local folder. From here the pages generated can be imported into an existing website, where with the addition of hyperlinks this becomes part of the site. Captions cannot be added to the images, but from an e safety point of view this is a potential benefit, and the slick windows XP feel to the show generated, with its familiar Windows navigation buttons makes the outcome, easy to use and look great too. Prior to discovering this I have used other web slideshow generators, but this is relatively simple, and in combination with the image resize tool above, should help enable less familiar members of staff and students, bearing in mind our esafety guidelines, to begin preparing materials for inclusion in our website.

We have also begun to develop the idea of year group blogs, as learning stories, to help with the regular update of site content. Hopefully over this term we will begin to see regularly published posts from students and staff about the work they have engaged in, in class. From humble beginnings I hope these will expand to wider possibilities as students and staff become more familiar with the affordances of these tools.

Big Kid! New Toys!

Have spent quite a bit of time playing with Comic Life over the holiday and had a blast, but also discovered at the same time a new role for MS Publisher, an old favourite of mine. I have used this with children from Year 3 to Year 6, for everything from drag and drop sequencing tasks to building web pages and combining graphics and text to develop picture books, advertisements and poetry, see previous post"We've been doin' bold today", but never considered using it until this week for making comic strips.

Many of the how to handouts I have made to support staff in the past, have probably ended up as supports for wobbly desks, rather than guides to software and how they might be used. These have often been overly wordy with the inclusion of screenshots to help. I hope though that My new Wilbur Helps Out guides might be a bit different. Wilbur as a character emerged a couple of years ago to act as a guide for a web design initiative I had to develop within my Masters Course. Over the holidays though Wilbur the Book Worm, has aquired a new role, as a guide to new software, appearing in his very own comic strip for student and staff how tos. I have been impressed by the way this format strips away the often longwinded explanations, and how a carefully selected image or series of images, combined with captions and speech bubbles can clarify the most seemingly complex of tasks. I will be trying these out with colleagues and students first, before uploading them to my webspace and our school website for sharing.

During the week I also made a surprising discovery... This is probably really familiar to everyone else, so I'm going to look really silly.... Do I care! Not a jot, as it came as a complete surprise to me and was really exciting too... I was familiar with being able to drag images from Windows Explorer into open documents and files, but while playing with the Mac on the web last weekend discovered how you could drag images off a web page in the Safari Browser, directly onto the desktop. What I didn't realise however is that you can now also do this with Internet Explorer on the PC. Never again will I spend hours saving images to file from right click. I can now simply open or create a new folder and drag the image from the page directly to it. Since then I have also discovered that images can be dragged from the web page directly into open documents in some applications, or image editors. So in making for example smart notebooks, opening the notebook software, tiling it onscreen alongside Internet Explorer, the image can be dragged from the web page straight into the notebook. This process also works with text, by highltighting the text you want in the browser, then dragging and dropping it directly onto the page, as a text object.

On Video Data, Comic Strips and Learning Stories

Finally got back to my Masters Dissertation this week, and began by reading a thought provoking paper, by Lydia Plowman and Christine Stephen, of the Interplay project based at The University of Sterling. I had the priviledge of meeting Lydia a few years ago, at the CAL'05 Conference. Some colleagues and myself, had also presented our emerging work from a Research Project based at The Graduate School of Education in Bristol, as a symposium. Our methodology then as mine does now involved the analysis of video data collected in my classroom, and since this medium was also used by Interplay I was very interested to hear what Professor Plowman had to say. In the case of my current project, the data was collected by colleagues during the InterActive Project. It involved video capture during 8, Year 4 numeracy hours, where the students used Excel in guided investigations, to support exploration of the functions of graphs and charts. As my Tutor can verify, and I have to say she has been incredibly patient with my perfectionist attitude, I have spent a considerable time stumbling around the methodological process, not the analysis per se, but the sheer volume of data collected, and how I am actually going to write it up. There is also, an at times, alarming character based facet to this, in that everytime I come back to it I find something new, and with this a new set of questions emerge. This is an unfortunate by product of a rambling mind and not a lack of focus in my questions.

We have used the idea of "iterative cycles of review" as a way of facilitating "ways of seeing." Video at first hand seems to offer a cornucopia, but it is easy to make assumptions that what we see is what we get, and to assume that everyone will read the data and see the same things that we do. This however is frequently not the case. Lets take the example of a visit to the cinema with friends. On leaving we may have all watched the same movie, yet from the discussions which emerge you could be mistaken for believing differently, as the group identify different parts of the film to talk about. Taken out of context, by an outsider listening in, these apparently disperate episodes would seem disjointed, even alien and have little meaning. There may be common high impact moments, but more often than not we highlight very specific individual moments of interest, parts that stood out and had personal impact and meaning for us, and which are very different to those of our friends. Even the same episode, might be described from a different perspective, the visual effects, the protagonists reaction and so on. As the discussion evolves we might eventually come to focus on specific moments, as the outing was a social event and we seek to create a common experience from the whole we have shared. Our approach to "Iterative cycles of review," involved a similar idea, a number of "viewers" worked together collaboratively to identify common themes within data collected, and using our shared experience over time set out to negotiate common meanings through discussions mediated by the data we had engaged with, attempting to tell a shared story based on the common experiences presented in the evidence we had evaluated. Within the analytical process for the symposium above we also used the Studio Code software environment, to tag episodes from the video which corresponded to instances of events and actions within categories we had agreed upon and identified in the data. This introduced some interesting questions for me around perceptions of what happens when children are learning in teacher designed ICT mediated situations, the role of the teacher, and what learning looks like during ICT supported tasks, and so my return to the original InterActive Project data I am using for this project.

In the Plowman and Stephen paper, the authors have used Plasq's Comic Life, to present screen captured video data alongside captions and examples of dialogue between adults and students in the preschool/foundation stage playroom to exemplify particular forms of what they call "guided interaction." They use comparisons between ICT and non ICT based activities as frames to support "ways of seeing," and presenting how interactions observed within more traditional activities, might be developed, evolve and compare with interactions mediated by ICTs as learning tools. The use of the comic strip format sets out to share what has been learnt from their research and as well as forming part of the frame used in data analysis, is intended to support the dissemination process of findings to pre school staff, helping them to identify examples of guided interaction within their use of technology.

I am very much an amateur Mac user, and "emergent researcher." My Mac has largely been employed for multimedia work, video editing and the like, but I was so inspired by what I read, I felt I ought to try out the software, which I feel may help me present the data I want to discuss in my project submission. It also has the potential to extend my current assessment for learning practices and evidence collection activities as I prepare my porfolio for NAACE Mark assessment. In previous assignments for my degree I have presented data from video as "snippets from Learning Conversations." or as "Narratives of Learning." using text supported by images captured from video, or linear presentations using PowerPoint to support observations, analysis and presentation of visual evidence. These digital PowerPoint learning stories (Narratives of Learning), have proven to be useful tools in presenting classroom learning as it unfolds through linked events emerging from the class as a community of practice. I have however become increasingly aware through engagement with video captured of my students at work of the dangers of focussing solely on "the moment," and using dialogue and conversation as evidence when observing students using ICTs. I have also begun to think about what I have come to see as "meaningful inactivity," times when students seem not to be involved physically or verbally with a task at the computer, but when asked about this are able to discuss what they and their partner have been doing or what they have learned from the experience. This type of action has drawn into focus, some practical everyday issues, like those annoying moments when a student who has apparently not engaged with a class task, is then able to relay what has been happening around them. There are also occasions when single word utterances between students seem enough to change the direction of a computer ( or non computer) based task, however when these utterances are viewed within the original context of the video, gestures and visual feedback from the screen become part of a more complex picture than this apparently simplified student discourse would tend to suggest. Language may be a key support in the movement of a task, but the other tools used also seem to mediate and facilitate changes in direction through feedback, with the gesture and motion of the participants communicating what they would like to happen. The richness of the visual and verbal context presented in the video from the activity system which evolves around in this case the computer presents a much broader context to the activity from which so much can be lost, as elements are removed during analysis. And here in lies my conundrum, how to present this richness. I have used a range of methods, including transcription and an emerging framework for multimodal analysis of the data so far, but this is heavily dependent on detailed description, and reliant on the written word to provide context for the activities and actions of those involved. Maybe a multimodal approach to presenting data, will help support the refining of the analytical and presentation process. It will be interesting to see whether using the comic strip format will enable me to engage with the data and tell this particular set of learning stories, while enabling me to visualise and formulate more clearly what the evidence seems to be telling me about what learning looks like as action in ICT mediated situations.

Cross Curricular Control, BeeBot Games, Home Mades.i Board and Y1

There are a large number of ready made BeeBot Resources available from TTS, these include floormats, sequencing cards and a host of other accesories. We have purchased a number of these to support topic and theme based activity in class, and they go down really well with the students. The Focus on BeeBot Software is something I also recommend strongly, it not only enables on screen work to be developed from floor work with the students, but also has proven really useful, in beginning to enable colleagues to see the value of turtle work as a cross curricular tool. A 30 day trial download of the software can be made from the site above. Included in the package are a number of the floor mats as onscreen mazes, which we have used with the IWB during Numeracy and Literacy Sessions, to promote discussion about the properties of common shapes and to develop phonological awareness. What is also interesting is how the students react to being able to switch views to see the board as the BeeBot sees it. I have recently bought a site licence for this and am looking forward through coaching activities to further developing the use of this tool in Foundation and KS 1 classes.

In addition to the commercially available materials however I have also begun to introduce the idea of using resources we have available already to support BeeBot work in class. Did you know for example that BeeBots like to count. Creating Bus Stop type journeys (as in the Suffolk Empty Number Line Project) for the BeeBot, has enabled group activities to be developed around the use of number lines, and to begin seeing the forward movement of the turtle as addition and the backward movement as subtraction. The BeeBot and Number line have also been used to develop problem solving within the difference model and through for example, our Beebot is thinking of/ is on or at a number, if he counts on, adds, count's back, subtracts X he stops on Y, what number is he thinking of, or where is he? As seen in earlier posts it is also possible to make sequencing and theme based games quite easily, not only as a staff, but also with the students themselves taking an active role in the process.

Estimating, predicting and measuring using non standard units is also a useful mathematical role for the BeeBot, and with our year 1 students I used again the BeeBot Boogie mats we had developed for Y2, but this time to encourage turn taking, social play, prediction and testing within Ma 1. Ma 1 (Using and Applying Mathematics) is central to the New Primary Framework for Mathematics, and the ability to develop concrete visualisation and problem solving strategies, particularly in the context of shape space and measures can be supported through engagement of the students in practical activities supported by this versatile tool. Ideas such as right and left, linear measure, simple fractions, compass direction can all be introduced, or become inherent concepts within activities supported by beebot activity.

At the beginning of this term I used iBoard Purple activities to introduce our overall control unit in Y1, and to conclude we revisited and spent time working with the age specific tools in the iBoard red set, which require a focus on navigating mazes with greater accuracy, and introduce eighths of a turn. It was fascinating to see the students applying floor based work to their onscreen activity, and using taught strategies to think about and identify right and left turns. In other posts I have mentioned the use of gesture, as an indicator, and during these sessions I was really aware of this as evidence of learning, transferring physical whole and part body movements to thoughts about the inputs required to move the mouse, spaceship, bee, and frog about the screen. My Learning Support Assistant and had a great deal of fun engaging with the students with their games, and listening to the cheers, whoops and celebrations, (which attracted some attention from neighbouring classrooms too, OOPS!) Collecting fuel tanks, feeding the hungry frog before his food flew away, and the disappointment when he fell off the lily pads and into the pond were more than visibly evident around the room. If you have no idea what I am talking about, then I strongly recommend you check out the "Which Way, and "Control It" resources in the online trials of the software, which can be found following this link.

Puppets and Animation II: Completing Our Movies

This week I wanted to build on the storyboardng activity from last week, and for each group to develop their own short movies based on the Ramayana. Time was an enormous issue, and concerned that we would not finish on time, I reorganised the activity.

I decided to set the scenario of the class being a film company, where each group would focus on a particular section of the story instead of working to make five individual films. We delegated scenes from the storyboards we had made, dividing the plot into sections, each group filming self styled stories, based around their particular episode.

Using the puppets made in previous weeks, and the digi blues, the students made short animated clips, which on completion were exported to a shared folder.

Coming together as a class we used Microsoft Movie Maker, to import, organise and sequence the clips. Using the Interactive Whiteboard as an editing space, we were able to organise and discuss the sequences of events, as a shared class experience. Drawing parallels between Movie Maker's timeline and the storyboard structure we had used to plan the scenes, we were able quickly to sequence the clips we had developed together, and to add a title frame, and rolling credits.

All that was missing at the end of the session, and I have to blame myself for this, was the popcorn. However with all mobile phones switched off, media player set to full screen, and the lights dimmed much discussion arose from the final outcomes we had created. These have been recorded on thought bubbles, for display with photographs taken, puppets made and storyboards developed over the course of the unit of work.

What has excited me most during the development of this sequence of activities, is how much was gained from the process of engaging with the media as a storytelling device. The students were immersed in the text as they created it, and the story that evolved went through a constant process of revision and review, as they discussed, negotiated and considered how the characters might physically respond to events, or how the actions of the characters could be used to support the narrative they were trying to present. This approach to deconstructing traditional texts is definitely something I will revisit again.

The Journey of a Banana

It was food week, Year 2 were exploring how they navigate internet pages, and comparing life in their current location with that on St Lucia. It can be very easy for students to begin seeing the internet as a play space and not an information source, so from the very beginning of this unit, simple web quests had been built in to our sessions together. The sites we were to use had also been preselected, and linked to our school community pages. Initially they involved students in locating pictures or key words in simplified online texts such as those to be found at schooltrain, but later involved labelling maps from online and CD based atlases, which share many of the features with a web page.

Learning how to navigate and locate information on the web is fine but the next stage is actually learning that we can do stuff with it. In this case we began with the Oxfam Cool Planet Website,

and their Bonkers about Bananas pages. Using these as a starting point, we discussed the origins of Bananas and the processes involved in harvesting them and transporting them from the Windward Islands to the Supermarket and how all this had to happen before the tasty yellow fruit ends up in our lunchbox. The photographs on the site are excellent, and break the process down, as well as providing a map which locates the islands and texts which support discussions about Fair Trade and the lives of banana farmers.

In this session we opened 2 create a Story, and using the teacher options I enabled the full toolset view. With the children at the Interactive whiteboard, we set up a writing frame, by copying the images of the process from the approriate web pages, and pasting them to the image box at the top of each page in the writing frame we were creating. On completion of the process we watched the slideshow, and discussed what text we might add to support our readers in understanding the journey of a banana. We saved the file to the shared space on the network and the children were asked to work in pairs to find, open and begin writing their story of the journey of the banana.

As mentioned in a previous post I introduced pictorial folders to our network in September, and these 6 and 7 year olds have learned through regular practice, how to log on, and how to find their work independently. One or two students still find this a bit of a problem, but most can not only open files they have saved, but are beginning to cascade save their work, adding numbers to redrafts and edits. This has obvious benefits for assessment for learning practices, and in enabling them to go back to previous work, if they make mistakes. The outcomes of the activity was developed over two sessions, the pictorial support structure within the texts enabling them to develop continuity in their work from one session to the next, and in some cases to go back and reread, check and make simple revisions to the texts they had input previously. In the final stages before publication the students were encouraged to recolour their slides, and fonts to make them readable, and to input animation and slide transition effects from the menu. Discussing this first, and the effects we might choose, the students were very choosy about which would bring about the effects they wanted. For example, swinging bananas in trees were given a rocking animation, bananas from the supermarket, were sent spinning or exploding into the shpopping basket, and processes were often faded in or faded out of the frame. Review during the plenary session of the purposes of the animation effects chosen, yielded good reasons for the effects the pairs had chosen. These documents were so exciting, that over the next couple of weeks, I will be including them in Flash format in a gallery on the school website. In the mean time the students have moved a long way from September when they required everything they produced to be printed out, and instead were really excited at the possibility of sharing their work with their class teachers in class on the IWB or through the website, realising the animation effects they had chosen would be missing from any paper based work. This has very exciting possibilities for the view of publishing that these students are beginning to develop. It will be interesting, with the introduction of class Blogs, developments of the school website and the introduction of a VLE, to see just how much of the "textual" work these students develop in the future will be promoted and displayed by them in digital format.

Thinking About Email

Our LA are about to begin a VLE Pilot, and some time over the next two terms some of my younger students will be required to engage with that QCA or LA unit on E mail, as part of our schools' scheme of work. I have often thought about why we teach this unit where we do, and why E mail, a device with such powerful potential seems to be used so little as a learning tool in the classroom.

We use e mail with students in schools largely it seems as an ICT only resource, a device where skills based teaching takes priority over context, meaning and purpose. Yet without purpose and context there is no meaning to learning about or with E mail. In literacy sessions we work with our students to develop their letter writing skills, hopefully in situations where they have a particular audience and purpose for the final outcomes. Within an email environment then we should be expecting the same thing. For sure there are skills specific to emailing which need to be taught and learned, but why are we sending an attachment, what is it's purpose, who am I writing to and why.

I do not feel, that students should only encounter e mail as a subject in the context of ICT. Students and teachers alike would find E mail as a tool more exciting, if units were regularly planned, to include email as part of simulation activities within theme based and topic work. For this to happen we need to see email as more than a unit we teach at year 3, but as a supporting structure for wider curricular activity, which could start through the use of email simulation software in Key Stage one, and develop through shared class work as a starting point or stimulus for ongoing classroom activities with the real thing. I have published a bright ideas page to my website today, what a fantastic christmas present this was, to share some of my thoughts. How about an online interview with Henry VIII at yourschool.org.uk, or keeping in touch with that roving reporter Barnaby as he trots around the globe? What if we could talk to Katie Morag, as a pen pal? Recieve a mysterious time warped message from a Saxon Villager or Roman Soldier stationed at Hadrian's Wall or Caerleon?

A favourite session we ran with Key Stage 2 students a number of years ago, involved a simulated hot air balloon flight. Set up by colleagues from a local secondary school, the students used simulated data, collected by a local ballooner to track his mystery journey from Bristol, until he landed. Within the simulation they were required to keep in contact with him, imaginary flight controllers, the local police and to write and submit press releases for a newspaper we published later to a set deadline in school for parents and other students. It was great fun.

All of these things obviously take time to set up, but as with most ICT resources, once collected, made and saved, sample texts and materials are there to be developed, changed and extended for later reuse. With a view to developing creative curricular and the new longer unit formats for the Primary Literacy Framework, perhaps their is a place for email as a learning tool within these areas, acting as stimuli as well as the ICT tool it is often considered solely to be.

From Floor To Screen: Imaginary Journeys and LOGO

In a previous post I talked about using BeeBots with year 3s to develop floor compasses and promote discussion around the cardinal compass points. Since then we have used Roamers, borrowed from the Local CLC to explore and develop these compasses, introducing numerical values for the measurement of turn, and helping to establish and consolidate the language associated with rotation. We have introduced the idea of right angles, quarter, half, three quarter and full turns as multiples of these right angles, applied 90 degrees as a value of turn in a right angle, and introduced the idea that we can turn easterly and westerly, clockwise and anticlockwise as well as good old right and left. We have also introduced and consolidated the eight points of the compass and derived through our knowledge of halving and doubling, that the turns in between must be 45 degrees more or less than the compass directions we, or our turtle are currently facing. The hardware used for these floor based activities may be quite expensive to buy, but there is no doubt that the concrete and physical experiences they have provided, have made acces to the on screen turtle in LOGO smoother and less painful. They have also informed my intention to buy a class set of floor turtles. Currently my first choice for this is likely to be the Probot, from TTS.

Extending these experiences from floor to screen, the LOGO environment I have chosen to use in school is an open source tool called MSW LOGO . It has none of the bells and whistles of some of the commercially available packages, but with an uncluttered interface, it does exactly what it says on the tin, for this reason I think it is easy to use, with fewer distractions, and is more accesible than many of its counterparts. The turtle is a simple triangle, the apex it's head and the base it's tail. Transferring experiences from the BeeBot (as I didn't use or have access to Probots this time), forward is always towards the head end, back towards the tail. East and clockwise equate with right, and west and anticlockwise the left. A common problem children seem to find with the onscreen turtle is wanting to input up and down for forward and back, encouraging the children to visualise the BeeBot in it's place, helped them to understand what inputs needed to be given, and that head directional movements would be forward, while tail inputs would be back.

Why develop this unit? Well I felt we needed a unit of work for Year 3 which would bridge concrete floor work in key stage one, with the onscreen environment, and that this should incorporate an element of play and familiarisation. The suggested use of LOGO in Year four is quite heavy going, and a steep learning curve for the uninitiated. A nice feature, of MSW LOGO is the ability to import and use background images. Building on previous floor work where we had made treasure trails for the Roamer to follow, and written mystery tours, I decided to extend this on screen. I could have used Roamer World or a host of other similar tools, but was interested in the skills progression and familiarity students could build on later. Besides, with this software, making backgrounds for the turtle to move in is quite straightforward, and good fun too.

Opening MSW LOGO, you can export the workspace as a bitmap, or graphics file. I began by inputting a procedure to draw a very small square at the home position of the turtle, eg repeat 4 [fd 5 rt 90], then saved this as a background. This was then opened in Microsoft Paint, and the background created. The image at the top of the post is what I eventually produced. The icons and compass rose, were made from clipart, which was copied, pasted and resized before placing around the map. This was all done before the land and sea were floodfilled.

Using MSW Logo, the students used the bitmap menu to find and Load the map, and following the main teaching session were left to explore the island, inputting commands to travel to different locations. It was a fascinating to watch the interchanges as children made decisions about whether to turn right and left, by how much, and as they estimated and refined decisions about the distances the turtle would need to travel, adjusting inputs in response to on screen feedback. The physical gesturing and body movement of the students also reflected their thought processes, turning hands, and whole body movements seemed help with their predictive processes. For the remainder of these sessions we will be continuing to build on the outcomes of this session, by writing mystery tours for our friends, consolidating the ideas of the eight points of the compass, before in the the final session using storyboards to record the views on the island, we would see at various stopping off points planned for us by our friends.

Playing With Our Website

I guess as with many of us I have been flooded recently with a plethora of flyers and adverts from people offering to set up Learning Platforms and School Websites, indeed one company recently contacted me to tell me about the fantastic website they had built for a local school, and it was, but I have to admit to being more than a little upset that they had done so without even looking at the one we already had, one which I had spent many hours lovingly tending to. It would have been nice for them to say, how they could offer their services in managing and maintaining our site, rather than assuming we did not have one or offering the editable template structure approach.

As a school we have had a website since 1998, and in that time it has not lead a static existence, but has gone through several incarnations, from my early experiments with visual development tools, through a class based project with my students that was later adapted to become an LA scheme of work unit, having stopped off on its way to form the basis of a local school's network project. Our site's current incarnation began in June last year when I began to reorganise and restructure it with an eye to supporting school based and extended learning within the wider local and educational communities. I recently discovered an article about Learning Platforms which expressed sentiments, I feel that any school website designed for learning should share. Unfortunately since then I have lost this article, but the description was inspirational. Learning platforms were likened to "Railway Stations," places where learners came with a view to travelling to "new destinations," embarking from here to widen their learning horizons. As a community school, with a long commitment to extending and supporting the learning not only of our students, but all stakeholders, this metaphor and vision of a learning platform shares much with my own views on the role school websites.

A website is little more than a navigable filing system, and can be much more than a shop window. It too can act as a portal, somewhere that not only potential clients, but existing stakeholders want to visit, to celebrate and share all that is good about us as a learning community, and a place to share tools and resources that we, our students and wider community can draw on to engage in and extend our learning opportunities.

This weekend I have uploaded the latest version of our website, it has a new look, but still contains all of the previously developed content, reorganised and filed as it had become a little tatty (behind the scenes). It builds on the work that has gone before by including links to new content too, some of which exist outside of the site, with the Teyfant Site acting as a portal, platform or starting point where all of this is pulled together. Some of the new content represents trials and experiments currently going on in school, with emerging technologies. I am pleased to include this time some experimental class blogs, which will grow out of class community pages and community ICT projects and which hopefully will enable delegation of some of the sites maintenance and upkeep tasks. Can't wait to see how these develop. I was intent at the beginning of the year that any learning platform we did adopt should meet our needs and not be bought into solely to meet someone else's agenda. After Easter we will be participating in a pilot scheme, for a commercial VLE, but I would like this to become part of our school's wider web strategy, and meet with our learning agenda. Using the school web site to frame our thoughts about what a learning platform is, and the potential affordances they bring to a school such as ours has already been a beneficial process, but will help us further when we consider what we truly want from the VLE. I feel that our school website has the potential to form the basis of our "learning platform," and that tools such as a VLE, should plug into this, in order to expand it's functionality. Lets just see how things pan out.. What do others think?

Puppets and Animation

Last week as part of their introduction to stop motion animation, my year 4 students worked with potato heads, this week in class they had been sharing the Ramayana as part of their topic work on India. They had made some beautiful articulated stick puppets in class, with jointed limbs, and I felt these would lend themselves beautifully to the work they were developing in the suite.

It was interesting this week with puppets and a familiar story, how the focus of the group's work changed, from ICT skill development, to story telling, and how much better the students became at working together, as they retold the story to each other, and began negotiating next steps, for their work. Previous points of group disagreement found their resolutions in the decisions which had to be made if the story, however short they were trying to tell, was to be achieved. The tasks which evolved were also much more student lead, and the outcomes demonstrated the benefits of structured play activities in previous weeks. At the beginning of this week's session we reviewed some of our previous work as a starting point highlighting some of the diffficulties we had had, including staying out of shot, our excitement to shoot frames before we were ready, and the problems some of us has had in taking turns and working together. Looking at the visual evidence through the films we had made in previous shoots the effects of these were inherent and evident, as moved cameras, or shadows, or hands in shot. Discussing these we decided that the animation, direction and camera activity might work better as a "carousel activity," where everyone had to take turns and would have the chance to take on every group role during this "shoot."

The favourite scene was a battle scene between Rama and Ravana, as you might imagine, with Martial Arts type moves being devised during the short 150 to 200 frame films that were made, rather than the flight of Rama's golden arrow. Some groups also devised a dance scene with Rama and Sita, while one group thinking about how they might tell the whole story in 10 seconds, introduced ideas drawn from experiences of Silent movies and cartoon strips, and added written captions, and speech bubbles.

In our plenary this week we shared the shorts we had created, and it was interesting to see how far the groups had developed in such a short time, and what they had learned about the film making process and use of the camera. The children had used boxes to raise their cameras so that they could shoot down onto the desktop stages we had created. Some characters began their action out of shot and moved into the frame as the action developed, the students had clearly used the onscreen viewfinder to frame shots, as their was little evidence this session of student body parts or shadows in shot, and the quality of movement of characters was smoother. To compile evidence of learning for this unit, as a result of this session I am considering using Movie Maker to pull together the progression of files into one place.

Our next session will be classroom based, building on the work from this session, and developed through a literacy session. The students will work in their groups to plan a retelling of the story, using a storyboard. In the sessions to follow, the group will be encouraged to use the six planned scenes from the story, to shoot six short animated scenes using the puppets they have created, with additional scenery props if needed, made during this time. Building on community ideas developed this week I will also suggest that they might like to consider and create additional support prompts for their story such as captions and speech bubbles. During the final session I am intending that the students be introduced to Movie Maker to compile the clips they have created, and add a title frame and credits.

A common concern I find expressed regarding the introduction of techniques such as this within the classroom is the time element involved, or understanding of the wider curricular potential and relevance such activities can offer. My experiences tell me that often much of the learning which takes place in ICT mediated learning situations, is not readilly evidenced within the outcomes created, though can often be inferred from what has been developed in the process. I am beginning to think that perhaps some of our problems relate to trying to fit too much in, and as a result of this repeating similar things in different formats. What maybe we could consider is how we might be able to do less in order to achieve more. The longer unit format of the New Literacy Framework may help with this. A unit of work on for example playscripts, might see not a traditional written outcome as evidence, but performance of the script through the development of a podcast, video news programme or an animation. Focussed written and practical tasks in the class leading to the eventual perfromance and publishing of this text, for further evaluation of the final outcome, by a wider and real audience. Animation could be linked to a host of traditional text genre, including visual documentary style approaches to the explanation of processes (a sequence describing digestion or the factors necessary for plant growth), journeys (using real or imaginary maps and icons to document an imaginary journey to a remote location), recounts and recording of visual or oral tellings of familiar tales through for example puppets. The final multimodal outcome seen as integral to and emerging from a wider planned engagement with similar text types in other formats, could challenge ours and student perceptions of what texts are, what they are for and how we portray meanings for remote audiences? Literacy activities would also be set in the context of wider subject learning taking place around the unit as it develops, and make use of such tools as the digi blue, more relevant. This is certainly an area I will be reflecting on more widely as I extend my views of what multimodality may mean for ICT and the wider curriculum through the new literacy framework.

2Create a Story: Making Flash Files

Having read Keith's Post about 2 create a Story (2cs), I was reminded of some minor issues I encountered when I first tried to export to flash from the software. I love 2cs as a tool , and am not sure if my issue was a bug within the software at the time or whether it was a by-product of the way it had been installed on our system.

What would happen is when I exported as .swf, the software would create a .2cs file instead. This file could not subsequently be opened in 2 create a story or in flash player, I tried renaming it's file extension to .swf, and this then solved the problem enabling the file to be played in flash player, and to be inserted in my web pages. If you encounter this problem, and feel comfortable with trying out this process, then the Fix I used goes like this.

1. Follow the save process from 2cs as usual, in the file types box selecting export as flash.
2. Close 2cs and open windows explorer. Browse for the location where you saved the file.
3. In the tools menu select folder options and then the view tab.
4. Scroll down and ensure the hide extensions for known file types box is unticked. Press the apply button, and then ok. All files should appear with their name followed by their extension (eg .htm or .2cs)
5. Select the file you have just saved, and then right click to rename.
6. replace the .2cs extension with .swf.
7. Double click to open the file in flash player.

If this doesn't work, then rename the file with the .2cs extension, and seek advice from 2 simple.

In more recent versions of the software this problem doesn't seem to happen, 2simple I have found are a very approachable company, and having visited their website the other day before writing this, you might rather prefer to call them if you encounter this difficulty, to seek a version upgrade. In the meantime I hope this might be a helpful stop gap.

Thank You

Wanted to say thank you to the ICT Subject Leaders at The I this afternoon, for the opportunity to share some of the things we have been doing in school. I really enjoyed the session, and hope you gained as much as I did from the experience.

Even Potatoes Have Feelings: Introducing Stop Motion Animation Using Digi Blues

A couple of years ago we invested in a set of Digi Blues. This term I have begun to adapt one of our LA units of work for Y4 an introduction to animation. This week being a whole school food week I really wanted to link our session to the work students were doing in class. I had considered, making simple stop motion films using pulses and stuff, but couldn't quite map out what I wanted the students to achieve. Then I remembered Toy Story and the scene where Mr Potato Head having rearranged the parts of his face announces "Hey look! I'm Picasso."

Introducing the session to the students, we explored a colection of characatures I had collected from the web that showed how the shapes of our facial features change, to express our moods. Using a Manga style outline, we began to explore how the character's face might appear according to their moods or feelings.

The children had been previously organised into groups, and roles had been decided on, one child would control the camera, a second would direct and monitor scenes, calling the shots as it were when the scene was clear, while the other's would act as animators, making the small movements neccesary in between each shot.

Each group was given a potato, and a few cocktail sticks. The facial features for our potato head were to be formed from plasticene. The cocktail sticks would act as anchors on the potato while the students manipulated the plasticene shapes to gradually change mood of the forlorn vegetable.

As an introduction to the principles of short film making and stop motion animation the activity was good fun, and the students gained a great deal from the experience. The biggest challenge for them was understanding that the movements of material had to be very small in order that the movements of the character would appear smooth. They also soon discovered on playback that being in shot, meant appearing in the monitor image on screen and not just stepping back, which challenged the director and cameraman.

One problem with the digi blue is the file format that the video is saved in. I have struggled for a while with how we get the files made on these cameras to play on PCs that done't have the softwarw package that comes with them installed, and the solution had been starring me in the face for some time. Importing the .avi files into copies of Microsoft Movie Maker on the same machines, allows them to be exported as Window's Media Video Files, which then can be played in Media Player. It seems that not only the children gained from this experience.

New School Project

This week we began a project with our students, supported by colleagues and friends from Calling the Shots and Creative Partnerships. Our current school will eventually become part of a new school, developed within the DfES "Building Schools for the Future" programme. This will result in the development of a through school campus due to open in 2008-9, the disappearence of our current school buildings and a complete reshaping of the landscape around us.

This Cross Curricular, Living History Project seeks to embed the use of digital technologies in logging and documenting the processes of change and transition during the building of the new school complex. It will provide students with the opportunity to develop their skills in using and editing digital photographs, film making and sound recording while they develop a new area of our school website dedicated to the documentary making process. Within this project we are also taking our first, embryonic steps into blogging, and will as the project develops, begin exploring podcasting as a communications medium.

iBoard and Control

If anyone is looking for a fantastic resource set, for introducing on screen control to younger students, yr 1 and Reception, checkout the iboard resources from Electronic Blackboard. I used three games today with my year one group, from the iboard purple "control it" set, called Cheese sniffer, pollen hunter and fly catcher. As young and relatively inexperienced computer users, many of this group are still learning mouse control, and developing screen to hand coordination. These games enabled a multi pronged approach. They involved

• Mouse control practice
• Coordinating actions on screen with mouse movements
• Decision making about which directions to send the game characters in,
• Visual problem solving
• Turn Taking

Cheese sniffer is a two person game, involving input, to control either a grey or pink onscreen and furry mouse. The aim, for your mouse to gobble as many pieces of cheese as possible before your partner's does. It uses an onscreen arrow pad, featuring right, left, up and down to input movements. Children take it in turns to input up to 5 moves before their pad fades indicating the next players turn. Whoops, cheers and much giggling was a key feature of the children's engagement and enjoyment of the tasks. As an IWB resource, as we modelled the activity, it was soon highjacked by the children, giving instructions to their friends from the carpet space. Great fun.

Pollen Hunter, expands on cheese sniffer, with again only four directions, but this time is a maze type game for one player at a time. The aim is to control the flight of your bumble bee as it tries to collect pollen from on screen flowers, before he is caught by a hungry bird. What appealed to me about this was the speeds you could choose for the birds flight, described as "gentle," "slow," and "fast."

Fly Catcher is another one person maze type game, but this time with an 8 direction arrow pad. Here we pretend to be a spider sitting in his web. The aim to control the spider and to try to catch and eat as many flies as possible before they fly away.

For spatial language development, these are fantastic resources, for using to consolidate through paired, group or class discussion, terms such as forward, backwards, up, down, right and left, the foundation of any work we want to do using floor turtles for example, but also particularly useful in the early mathematics curriculum. They are also great for encouraging and consolidating the kinds of cooperative and turn taking activities we expect and want to develop when children work in pairs on the computer, such as the use of gesture and talk, rather than taking over the mouse. Great fun as both standalone tools on individual computers and on the electronic whiteboard. As an advocate of a tool box approach to ICT use in teaching and learning, these are just three of an amazing array of cross curricular materials available in the iboard toolkits, but which will definitely be embedded in our scheme of work as it is reviewed.

Getting our Bearings

Last term I really caught Beebot fever with my year 2 group, but this term I have moved on to using Roamers to develop control with a year 3 group. We will be developing a unit of work, which is largely geographical but which will make a considerable mathematical leap, from the use of preprogrammed right angle and quarter turns with a BeeBot. In order to control the Roamer, the children will need to input numerical values for the size of turns and later I want to develop this work to introduce an onscreen turtle.

I decided to take a non digital approach to over come the problem, and made "floor compasses" with the chidlren. During yesterday's session we began with Beebots, but used them to help us begin making and exploring these tools. First of all we made cardboard circles, and folded these into quarters. Using a ruler and pencil we lined in the folds, and added the four cardinal directions. With the beebots sitting in the centre of the compass, we carried out a series of activities to predict what direction the beebot would face, when we inputted different numbers of turns, either to the right/left, to the east/west, or in a clockwise/anticlockwise direction. This was developed as a small group activity, where children took up positions as the points of the compass and used their cardboard compasses to give each other instructions based on predictions, about how many inputs would be needed to rotate the bot to face members of the group. They could only use east, west, or clockwise anticlockwise, and the number of turns they predicted to give these instructions. At the end of the session, we reviewed how our ability to predict had changed, had we got better? What had they noticed about the number of inputs needed to make the turns in one direction when compared with the other? For example 1 turn anticlockwise or west, would require 3 turns clockwise or east if the beebot were to end up facing the same direction. We ended the session by recording the numerical values for North, South, East and West found on a Magnetic compass to our floor compasses, before further folding them and lining in the additional points which next week will become NE, SE, SW and NW. We will be using these compasses next week when I introduce the class set of roamers I have borrowed from our Local CLC, and hopefully these strange and mysterious numbers will begin to mean something to them, as we get our bearings with the more complex floor turtles. Modelled on the floor, through planning routes and journeys for the roamer I hope these cardboard tools, will become helpful when we move to mapwork adventures, using an onscreen turtle in MSW LOGO, later. Perhaps as intrepid adventurers we should also decorate our compass roses, as they become valuable tools on our onscreen expeditions.

Hunting For Geography Resources

While searching for Geography resources to support a Unit on Using the Internet with our Year 2 students today, I ended up wandering, and in the process came across some real nuggets, some of which address areas I had looked for previously but failed to find and some which I think are real treasures and I don't want to lose. Most of these I have added to each year group's community useful links pages on our school website, but there were three that I particularly wanted to share.

The Staffordshire Learning Net's Visual Geography Micro Site is part of their wider Geographical Association Gold Award winning site.
Find Out About St Lucia from School Train, which I think will be an amazing tool to use with these young students, uncluttered and easily accessible through picture links and reduced text content. Will enable a focus on the browser navigation skill I want to address while at the same time enabling access to information the students will be able to use back in class. Check out the other resources on this site too, as the site is not limited to geography.
Weather Underground.com, this link takes you to the weather right now in St Lucia, but last term I was looking for a site just like this for colleagues to use with Students in Year 6 which could be used to collect online data for weather tracking and modelling activities, using a spreadsheet.

Collecting on screen assessment evidence from Flowol

I was just reminded through an email conversation of how useful the Smartboard recorder tool turned out to be at the end of term. Having played to experiment with making software demonstrations for colleagues, I wondered how useful it might be to capture evidence of outcomes from the Flowol activities and challenges, my year 6 students had engaged in. Running their Flowol files through their associated mimics, I was able to use the Smart Recorder tool, to captured the onscreen action that their programs produced to a video file.

New Literacies and Multimodality

In a previous post I began to explore aspects of what Multimodality meant to me in the context of onscreen work with 2 Create a Story.

I recently read an amazing book Edited by Janet Evans called "Literacy Moves On:" which I would strongly recommend to anyone teaching literacy in the primary school. Published in 2004 by David Fulton, it is a very readable and accessible text, that deals practically and theoretically with ways in which multiliteracies and popular culture can be exploited in the classroom, and explores how the multimodal world may impact on children's text creation and their views as authors. There are also 2 excellent online publications on multimodality and multiliteracies in the classroom available from the QCA and UKLA entitled More than Words and More Than Words 2. Inspiring stuff.

I was stimulated after reading this book, to reconsider some of my preconceptions about why my students seemingly meandered into unconnected dialogue at the end of their stories. Was it because they couldn't organise their work? Or were they in fact drawing on a wider text world, and playing their story like an episode of Eastenders on some cranial screen, where dialogue unlinked by stage directions and narration, carried their created plot through the physical actions of characters only they could see? Could they see their story unfold as they wrote it? Presumably they must, since the dialogue was frequently linked even if not as expected in the written forms they were presenting. Might part of the solution to mine and their "problem" be to value and draw on this text type as narrative, and engage them more critically with it, to help understand the difference between the oral text genre's I wanted them to write, whilst drawing on the largely visual text of a TV programme as a stimulus or starting point. I enjoyed as an outcome of these reflections, using several animated stories without dialogue last year, in supporting a group of reluctant writers in narrative writing activities. Their favourite was "Bert." Having the visual narrative, to work from really seemed to help them organise events, and understand how to develop the story sequentially. There being no dialogue, they had to really think about how they would describe the actions of characters, and the events in the story as it unfolded. They also wrote reams, and were happy to revisit, revise and develop the stories they had written in onscreen form, using images captured from the film within a PowerPoint writing frame. What was really good to see was them later sharing the stories they had written so proudly with younger students, printed out in the form of picture books.

I would also like to recommend a really good teachers TV programe I came across recently about reading multimodal texts such as this in the classroom. Check it out.

Reading Film: The Lesson
Reading Film: The Monk and The Fish

IWBs: Reflections on Visibility and Readability

This week I have been giving a great deal of thought to some upcoming staff meetings I will be leading about use of the Interactive Whiteboard and designing for learning. While watching Joe Dale's video, I was reminded of some of the issues around readability while using the Interactive Whiteboard with students. His use of Yellow backgrounds with Large Blue Fonts, reminded me of the suggested importance of high contrast, colour combinations and font choice when creating digital resources for use in the classrooom. as opposed to paper based tools. As we move from paper to screen it is easy to think that the process will be a direct transition, but designing for readability within digital environments can present new challenges.

Many my colleagues use Comic Sans as a preferred font, probably because it looks fun and child friendly, but their are other more practical reasons and benefits for using this and other sans serif fonts, eg arial and verdana, when creating digital material. Sans Serif fonts tend to be more rounded, widely spaced and lack the little flicks that Serif fonts such as Times New Roman have. Some usability studies and reference sources have suggested that in digital environments, these latter font types (serif fonts) can cause difficulties for some readers as they can can lead the eye while scanning. Since discovering this, I have made a concious decision in presentation tools such as websites, powerpoints and IWB Notebooks of my own design, to use sans serif fonts.

Colour choice between fonts and backgrounds, are also an important issue to consider when creating your own digital content. Red on green or green on red as an example wreaks havoc with my eyes, described as busy by colleagues I worked with on my degree course, text presented in this way was described as "dancing," "jumping" and "dizzying" by them as we tried to focus on the apparently moving text, if uncomfortable for us consider also what effect this would have on for example a student who exhibited red green colourblindness.

Several articles I have encountered about dyslexia, also suggest that the choice of font size and colour, background colour and column width may effect student ability to engage with the texts we present, not only on screen but also while publishing for paper based activities. On Screen high contrast texts are useful in overcoming some of these barriers, but it is suggested that black on white may not be the best medium, and that a slightly off white background, would be preferable to support onscreen work. For more information on this latter area visit the British Dyslexia Association's website, who offer a useful style guide, not only for on screen text development but also print materials. The site itself is also great for demonstrating some of the ICT based tools available for supporting dyslexic students, including text readers, and includes tools in its design for customising page views which are style sheet enabled. Yellow on Blue or blue on yellow are are often suggested for use in developing IWB resources, I have to say that I don't always use these, but in putting together files and resources I do think about how these texts might be received by my students, consider the fonts I am using and the colour combinations and how these might effect readability. I also try to establish with my students before we begin whether or not they can see clearly, and if neccesary (which is often an issue related to how whiteboards and projectors have been sited in a room) adjust light conditions on the screen through closing blinds, or turning off lights accordingly.

Fonts and backgrounds may not be the only factors to consider when creating resources for use with students. Consistency in style of presentation may also contribute to accessibility and readability issues. This is an important issue to consider for those of us who work with children as emergent readers, this will apply when reviewing and planning which websites we will use, how we will lay out a support sheet, and when it comes to presenting material for shared reading, I have become increasingly aware in planning and making resources of the need to maintain a consistency in style throughout particular documents, and not to mix fonts, colours etc too widely, unless the style change is neccesary for a particular purpose. Eg in making hide and reveals, or highlighting a particular learning outcome. What we need to be careful of however is limiting font use to a single standard house style, for everything we make and use, but being aware of the issues and how they might effect our presentation or reader engagement. It is not I feel useful or indeed desirable to limit the fonts we use, as we do not want children to believe that all written texts, use letters or sound pictures of the same size and shape, which is likely to introduce readability issues all of its own later.

In the smartboard toolbox, there is also a very useful tool for all students, called the magnifier. This tool acts like a magnifying glass and when opened, can be dragged over sections of a page, revealing in another window on screen a digitally enlarged version of what is inside the "lens." I have found this particularly useful in highlighting sections of text on internet pages, and enabling the students to see for example web site addresses, without the need to copy them to a notebook and enlarge them.

These are only a few of the issues, and relate to ideas I will be considering as a with colleagues as a starting point when considering notebook design for students. If you would like to explore usability and readability more widely then a few useful starting points might be.
The British Dyslexia Association
Jakob Nielsen's useit.com: usable information technology
and the US Department of Health and Human Services Usability Web Sites

I was also interested to read an article By Anthony Evans on Web Page Reading a few weeks ago, where he had begun to explore how readers engage with web based texts.

Making Drop Downs with MS Word update

Thanks to Joe Dale for his comment and pointing me to his very useful blog and video tutorial about making writing frames which include drop downs. The video is a great walkthrough for newbies, with handy hints, including how to change "dropdown" background colours, font size, style and adding online help for students and other users. Special thanks from me for the tip about inserting spaces before and after the menu entries. There are host of other fantastic support tools, links and resources in this rich space, focussed on Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom. Since these are language focussed, many of them are readily adaptable for use in the primary literacy hour. Check out Joe's Blog at http://joedale.typepad.com/, Joe also presented at BETT this year, and his blog spot about this, with direct links to the video above and more can be found by following this link.

Drop Downs: MS Word as an Interactive Resource

In this entry I want to share the use of the "drop down menu" creation tool, which has enabled the often static texts I have created using MS Word to become more participative. Using this tool created and shared texts become firstly cloze and multiple choice based activities, but combined with the IWB and our imagination they can also take on dynamic properties.

Digging up a Hidden Treasure

Hidden to many of us within MS Word, the "drop down" tool is part of the "form tools" set. Going to view/toolbars and moving down the available list, and clicking forms opens a floating toolbar we can begin to use to add some degree of interactivity to the shared texts we create with and for our students.

Inserting a Drop Down Menu

Working with a prepared text, a "drop down menu" can be inserted from the toolbar where the cursor is placed in the document. Once inserted, double clicking on the form element opens a dialogue box. In the drop down item box type a word or phrase and press the add button, repeat this to create your list of choices. To the right of the dialogue box, the list of words or terms in your dropdown list will be appear. If you make a mistake, simply click on the error and click the remove button, to remove it from the list permanently, or correct it and press add to put it back. Closing the dialogue box returns you to the word document you are working in. At the moment you cannot use the drop down list as you are in the design view. On the Forms tool bar is a padlock, clicking this button, protects the sheet, but also reveals the drop down arrow. Clicking the arrow opens the list you created, and so access to the choices. Unlocking the sheet again means further drop downs can be added, or double clicking on existing objects, new words and phrases can be added to an existing list.

How Have I used Dropdowns?

• To create files using shared story ideas and text level elements developed during shared and guided writes.
• To provide shared activity files, that allow children to select from ideas, lists of words and phrases, developed over the period of a class shared write, to create their own versions of a class created story.
• To Facilitate class and paired discussion about word choice, sometimes innovating on files developed and published within the National Literacy Project. (eg Grammar for Wirting Tasks).
• To focus children on common spelling errors and structures, by giving lists of the different ways familiar words have been spelt within class activities, and requiring the children to identify the correct spelling from the list.
• To explore the correct use of homophones, providing sentences which require the children to discuss and choose from different forms of the word eg their/there/they're, or one of our particular problems is deciding when to use our and are.
• To play with sound pictures as a class during phonics sessions. eg using several dropdowns and large fonts to generate words as a class on the interactive whiteboard and playing games such as inviting children to change one letter or sound picture to change a rod into a place where peas grow, or a fish etc, this extended the common sound button activity to engage with the meanings of the words we were generating.

Like so many of these tools though, playing with them in the classroom context opens up many more doors and possibilities, as we engage with them imaginatively. Thanks goes to the Secondary MFL Team during the Interactive Project, based at the University of Bristol, who first introduced this technique to me. Would love to hear from anyone else who uses or finds this technique useful.

Treasures to Recycle

During recent work using Branching Databases; to help my students understand how to develop null questions, I made a Smart Notebook that included simple two branch trees, and collections of similar themed objects to be sorted. In between each tree page I added 2 others and from the clip art gallery inserted a treasure chest and a recycle bin, which became background images for each of these. The file can be downloaded by clicking this link.

We began by dragging objects from our theme sets to the top of the branch and practiced asking and testing questions which we thought would split the pairs. As the session progressed questions which were found to work were dragged from the tree page to the treasure chest, and those which didn't were dragged to the recycle bin. We went on to use the questions in the recycle bin, as discussion points to help identify, the features which made good null questions. The challenge for the group was how we might change these recycled questions to join the treasures, that we already had available for use in our sorting trees.

This strategy has since been used in guided and shared writing sessions. Working with partners to create "Super Sentences" and "Story Openers, students were encouraged to discuss, rehearse aloud and then draft texts on small whiteboards. These were then shared and recorded on a blank notebook page. Drawing on a recent INSET session, where we were encouraged to "steal" super sentences, for display as models for later, I used the treasure boxes and recycle bin instead as tools to collect and sort both the super and the not so super sentences. Rather than rejecting them, the not so supers, became a focus for task extension and discussion. What might be done to them, so that they might be promoted to become treasures? The children suggested improvements, involving reordering words, adding WOW words etc, and revised sentences were promoted to the treasure chest.

Models of quality work are great, but heavily dependent on our student's ability to see and understand what made them great in the first place. Working and reworking texts and text elements on screen together, I feel really helps to support emergent understanding, of what makes a good text. Through shared evaluation we can begin to understand what the song sheet we are being asked to sing from really means. It also illustrates in action the potential benefits of using ICTs within the writing process. In contrast to using ICT solely as a publishing tool, text input is not seen as an end in itself, something to get finished before we move onto the next thing, but rather as part of an ongoing process. A starting point to be revisited, edited, revised and improved as part of an ongoing series of activities, and where the relationship between reading and writing becomes an explicit element of the activities and discussions which evolve. Engaging children in the review and revision process encourages ownership of class texts, as shared works as children see their "bits" transformed with the support of others. Combining this type of activity with the wordprocessor, through for example the use of drop downs, values the shared resources present within the class as a community of writers.

Using Dropdowns, which I have written about in another entry, enable children to use individual and paired activity to engage further with these shared resources, considering personal or group preferences for word and phrase choice. Despite all working from the same text elements, being able to mix and match phrases, actively engages students in reading and rereading, and creates a diverse range of outcomes. Students are frequently surprised at how different, individually published texts are, even though they began from the same starting point. But what is the high point for me of such activities, is how even the most reluctant recorder is able to develop a text of which they can be proud, and are keen to celebrate their success through the sharing of their outcomes with others.

Drag and Drop versus Raspberries and Giggles

A common problem I encounter in using the Smart Board are the sounds made and the repeated dropping of objects brought about by pushing or dragging against the surface with the skin of our fingers. Continual contact with the surface of the board is neccesary inorder for objects to move when we drag them, but friction between skin and the board, either makes those "rude" noises that the children giggle about, or cause our fingers to move unevenly and bounce across the surface, leading to us dropping the object we are moving, and returning it to the home space we collected it from.

Try teaching students and yourself to invert your hand, so that it is the back of your finger nail that makes contact with the board. This makes it easier to apply continual pressure to the object being dragged. Because the finger nail bends under the slight pressure needed, and because it is relatively smooth it will also move over the surface of the board without emmitting the dreaded raspberry and is more likely to remain in contact with the board. If moving from the Promethean or Hitachi board environments to the Smartboard for what ever reason, or just looking for another method of engaging with the board, then pen here can also be used as pointing tool. By pressing the pointing tool icon on the Smartboard's floating tool tray, then your pens can be enabled to act as pointers, and used to drag and drop objects about the board.