My Class Podcast Station Challenge:Starting Point

This weekend I decided to take up the challenge of setting up a customisable class Podcast station for my students.

Over the past year we have been using Podomatic, a fantastic free host that has proven really useful, alongside my preferred classroom Podcast Authoring tool, podium, in helping me understand how the technical side of process works (ish!).

As a learner however I have decided it is time to try something new, to move beyond the adoption phase and take a few risks, as I move into the adapt and innovate phase of using this technology. So in this series of posts I want to share the first steps I am taking in "mashing" together some free online tools, with some not so free or readily available ones to set up this new and customisable podcast space .

Podomatic As a Starting Point

Podomatic is an online Podcast "publishing" solution. It offers for the absolute beginner three key ingredients required to set up and run a podcast station, and all in one place. They offer two solutions

• Basic (a free service)
• and Pro (their fee paying service).

Both solutions provide

• Easy upload and storage space for your audio or video files
• A home page to host and display details around your podcast and it's episodes
  
• An RSS feed to allow regular listeners or viewers to subscribe to, be updated about and download your show to a podcatcher (eg iTunes) without the need to continually visit your podcast site.

Additionally the service enables online file conversion, this has proven particularly useful on the odd occasion we have wanted to upload video podcasts. Submitting files from Movie Maker for example, the site converts these to pod friendly video formats behind the scenes with the minimum of user experience and no input beyond hitting the publish button required. The site also has a basic online recording tool, allowing audio podcasts to be recorded through the site. Once you have set up your account, using the Podomatic Site to publish a Podcast or Podcast Episode is really straight forward.

• Log in to your account,
• navigate to your My Podcast Space
• Upload your audio or video file
• Create a post and show notes
• Attach the audio file from your uploaded media or PC to this page
• and press the publish button.

The process of publishing a Podcast to Podomatic is very similar to creating a blog post, and if you are looking for a starting point to explore the possibilities of Podcasting in class this is certainly a great place to begin.

Publishing the file to your would be audience is however the final step in the process, and even though sites such as this offer online recording tools, if you want to be a bit professional and add music or refine and edit recordings before publishing you will need local tools on your computer to help prepare and edit your audio files before publication. As I have mentioned in a number of posts and above Podium by Softease is my prefered classroom tool for this, though a number of other tools such as the open source platform Audacity, and Garageband on the Mac have been written about by other colleagues as tools they use to enable this.

Moving On The Context For The challenge

I originally set up a Basic Podomatic Account. This provides 500mb of online storage space for your audio and video files but also a bandwidth limitation for downloads. This has been more than sufficient for the work we have done this year, but I want the students to begin using video and audio podcasts more regularly as part of their classroom work this session, and enable them to help customise the page that hosts links to their content and feed, this either meant finding or developing a local solution or looking at a subscription serviece or combining tools available to support this and so the crux of this personal challenge, and the subject of the upcoming series of posts.

Using the solution I have decided upon, I have already set up the space, and as a taster it can be found here. Over the next couple of posts I want to share with you the tools I have used to do this, and the process involved. Hopefully you will revisit and follow my quest.

Stelarium: Open Source Planetarium

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Stellarium

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Found this in my feeds this week from Portable Apps, I have downloaded it for a play later, and was really intrigued by the visuals on the home site. Available as a portableapp this open source application, may hold some intriguing possibilities for home school learning, and anyone running windows xp on portable platforms. I am avidly watching the space labelled Linux at portable apps to see firstly what applications become available, and then whether or not they can be run on the Asus ee, from flash drive through the Linux distribution installed. Still a newbie to this.

Seven Wonders Of The Whiteboard Challenge Via Kwout

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whiteboardchallenge » home

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From 11th August for seven weeks, the Seven Wonders of the Whiteboard Challenge is set to begin. The aim of the project

"To improve the use of interactive whiteboards in the classroom and to stimulate more discussion about how they can best be used."

I am looking forward to a little focussed blogging and a revisit to how I am using my classroom Smartboard. However it will be interesting to see what folk are doing with the range of board types and if users of mobile solutions such as Mimio and e beam share in the process. I will also be interested to see how or if the role of peripheral devices such as voting sytems, tablet PCs, and input slates are explored in blog posts, used alongside these. Could be an exciting seven weeks.

Sojourn Via Kwout

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Dictionary.com/Word of the Day Archive/sojourn

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Am loving using Kwout to bookmark and post site links and other interesting things I come across to my tumblr tumble blog. Hopefully this "Kwout" from dictionary.com and the Guardian won't sum up the entire use I put this tool to. It may be a "sojourn" at the moment, but I am beginning to appreciate the neat Archive tool in Tumblr, that lets you flick between views and track your content. I can imagine this becoming a really useful tool for logging online research references later. Kwout also allows direct posting to blogger as can be seen above, and a number of other spaces including Flickr.

"Robot Voices" And Reading For Expression

Voice Synthesisers and text readers are much more lifelike these days, but still lack a certain something. Something I admit to finding difficult to listen to and often "cringeworthy", is that a word? Today in my feeds however I spotted a space, that set me up for a brief playtime, and thinking about how I might reconsider their place in my classroom.

We have used word processors with text reader plugins for a long time, and my colleagues and I have been regularly entertained by the mispronunciations, the effects that misplaced punctuation has on the way the text is read, and extended periods of phoneme play as we have tried to get the reader to say what we meant. My all time favourite has to be the metallic "youglee," read by an MS Word plug we had once, that no matter how hard we tried we could not get the synthesiser to pronounce as "Ugly."

The space that inspired this post today was "Read the Words," posted by colleague Angela Maiers. "Read the Words" hosts and converts text from a range of sources to audio. The files it produces can then be linked to, embedded in blogs or websites, used to podcast with or be downloaded as MP3 files to use locally for playback. They also offer advice about how to have files read more realistically, by spelling phonetically or including punctuation to effect cadance and expression, even slowing down the pace of the reader. Text can also be uploaded in Spanish and French, though not being a linguist, I don't feel able to comment on this. The space also offers a choice of avatars to read the files for you, and it was playing with these this morning that has lead to this post today.

While playing, I discovered choosing two different avatars to read the same text, gave not only two different voices to listen to, but also two completely different renderings of the text. Here are two examples of a section of the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood," read by "Michael" and "Lauren" The text was copied and pasted from an online PDF file, at Logo.com.

Lauren |Example


Michael Example



Example read by Your Truly



Listening to these clips got me thinking about how I could use this tool in tandem with student podcasting to help help evaluate and think about our use of expression when reading, and the importance of enunciation when we perform texts reading or speaking aloud.

As well as embedding these files in web pages, they could be prepared and downloaded for use within Powerpoint shows or IWB notebooks as shared texts. Comparison files could be recorded by the students, other colleagues or the class teacher, using tools such as Podium or Audacity, to support discussion around the effects on the audience of different aproaches to reading the text. Perhaps sharing a prepared text in this way, with groups of students could form the starting point for a challenge during guided sessions. Can they listen to and improve the presentation together? This could result in them recording their performance for sharing with the class and comparison with what they originally heard. Using voice synthesized files, prepared pre session might be an interesting starting point and way in to supporting critical review of performance, and using the files alongside or embedded in enlarged texts on the IWB, a means for promoting discussion around the role of punctuation, while mispronunciations could be a vehicle for thinking about how words sound in context and modelling the strategies we might use to ensure sense from the text we are engaged with. I would be really interested in any thoughts you might have around this post, and look forward to hearing from you.

Screen Shot Captured from Read the Words via Kwout

Stick Figure Animator: Extending the Possibilities with MovieMaker

My students have asked a few times how to get the animations they make with Pivot to stop looping, and whether they can add sound...

The simple answer to this is Yes!
Yey!
But not using Pivot itself!
Oh! So how?
By using Microsoft MovieMaker.

First of all

• Create action sequences as clips in Pivot.
• Export or save animations as .gif files (animated images)
• Open Microsoft MovieMaker and...
  
• Import your .gif files to media clips.

Once you have imported your .gif files to a media clip gallery or collection they can be dragged to the video timeline, moved around and if neccesary resequenced, as if they were photographs or video clips.
Once on the video timeline

• Scene transitions can also be added between clips, and opening and closing credits added.
• Sound files can be imported to the clip gallery too, and then added to the audio timeline to support the action, and here they can be edited, split or cropped to match the length of the movie.
• If you would rather, the narration tool can be used to record your own sound or add a voiceover using a microphone.
  

This model movie using a few clips created by yours truly, a couple by my students and a borrowed sound file from the web, was made using this process and uploaded to google video for sharing. The video file could also have been saved to somewhere like podomatic to become part of a video podcast sequence.

I guess this process would work with images from other tools with the ability to export images as animated gifs too.

Wordling With My Research Project

Exploring Ways of Searching Flickr

Over the past year or so colleague blogs, tweats and feeds have highlighted and recommended a number of interesting ways to search the online image sharing space Flickr. In my day to day classroom work I use images a great deal to support and stimulate the talking for writing process, and as visual starting points for reading activities and inferential tasks. Flickr is a fabulous source for this so I thought I'd pull together one or two of my favourite colleague pickups and tools here, while taking a break from other things.

Recently Angela Maiers pointed out the Idee Multicolr Search Lab that uses colour recognition to sort and group search returns, and retrievr that uses doodles and sketches or uploaded images to search, retrievr does return some interesting finds and interpretations, though perhaps isn't as appealing as the outcomes from Idee.

Spell with Flickr is one of my personal favourites, here you enter a word, and after a short wait, if available image tiles are returned, from Flickr that match your search, along with the embed code enabling the images to be used in other web spaces.

Joe Dale has also published a number of posts around flickr and FlickrStorm. FlickrStorm uses words or phrases and I really like this tool, it seeems no mater how abstract you think your keyword is, someone somewhere has tagged or partially tagged an image to match, really useful for mood images, atmospherics and metaphor, though great when you simply want to find a quality image of something particular, and the Google Image search simply doesn't cut it.

John Johnston has developed a tool he calls the Simple Flickr CC Search Toy, that cleverly searches fickr, and returns images with their creative common's attribution information. Clicking on the thumbnail of the image of choice, provides an embed code for the image, including a backlink to it's source, and the terms of the CC License. This is a really cool tool.

Within the flickr community itself, people have also organised themselves into groups to share images around a common theme. Last Autumn I discovered the Nine Group, who share images that are all related to the number nine. At the time my thoughts flew to the opportunities this opened as a starting point for investigational work in Mathematics.

How would you use your

Returns?

Comiqs: For your Online Comic Life

Thanks to John at Creative ICT for directing me to this really nice online comic strip creator. Called Comiqs, the environment is much more flexible than others I have visited, and mentioned so far, and in many ways is Comic Life Like, in how it is presented and works.


Within Comiqs, you can search for flickr images or upload your own photos and doodles to use, add additional pages and choose from a variety of page layouts and templates. Using the tools and uploaded images in your comic strip is a matter of dragging them from the palette space to the left of the screen, onto the work space where they can be resized and moved around. The Graphic tab, is where the page layouts can be found along with a collection of call outs and the caption box. Dragging these to the workspace and double clicking allows text to be added. To make my playtime easier and shorter I copied text from a file of Homerisms I already had, and pasted these to the bubbles. Not greatly creative on my part, but I did do a little something more with this one.

Completed comics can be saved to your personal space and then embedded in the slide show format below to your blog or webspace using provided embed code.


playing with Comiqs from twowhizzy on Comiqs

I am a big fan of comic strips, their potential as multimodal learning and literacy tools. Comic Life mentioned above and in several other posts, is a local application available for both PC and Mac. It has helped I and my students to write classroom learning stories, and played a key role as a data analysis and presentation tool, helping make sense of interactions in classroom based Video Data collected for my research project. This environment I think is amazing in that it utilises similar affordances and tools, as a web based environment, allowing direct sharing of content to the web, via other web2.0 services. I will certainly be considering how I can use this space with my students to support our blogging adventures, but without losing touch with Comic Life for other things. Having just visited the plasq site, I was interested to find the latest incarnation of Comic Life, Magiq, and to see versions of the tool now available for the iPhone and iTouch. Unfortunately Comic Life magiq is only available for the Mac, but I've embedded the video here for those who might be interested.

Pivot Stick Animator:thoughts and reflections on a new writing tool

I have published a number of posts about the freeware tool, Pivot Stick Animator and shared a number of independent student outcomes, but the excitement generated by my class over the last couple of weeks of term lead to this post, that sets out to introduce a few basic moves and a few thoughts about its place in the writing process.

Pivot Stick Animator was first shown to me by our technician. We downloaded it from snapfiles and installed it on the network where it lay unloved and unexplored, until during a unit on control and modelling a student found the shortcut, and asked what it was. I first used it with Y3 (7-8 yr old) students last summer, but when the outcomes created were discovered on the school website, older students began downloading the software for themselves to play with at home and developing short animated sequences to share with me through think.com. I really became excited by this when I began to see what the tool revealed about their understanding of story structure and visual narrative. Over the last 2 weeks or so this is what has really grabbed my interest observing how the "talk for writing process" we have engaged in over the past 12 months supported and informed the iterative storytelling process involved in creating their visual outcomes.

Beginning with a free play and exploration session proved really beneficial allowing the students to see for themselves how the environment worked. Essentially the tool works like an onscreen flip book. A single image is first of all created by placing the stick figure character in a starting position and then pressing the next frame button. From here simple motion can be created by pressing and holding the mouse over a "pivot Point" and dragging that element to a new position, before pressing the next frame button again.

Creating movement and motion is achieved by dragging and moving elements of the figure and then capturing each frame when finished. This wave action for example was created by repeatedly moving the upper portion of the characters arm, and pressing the next frame button in between each movement .

Waving



Changing the colour of the character to red, and moving the whole image upward slightly each time the arm moves, and then down as in the next image makes him a little angry, hopping mad so to speak. Or perhaps left as he started he could be calling for help! Whole character movement is achieved by clicking on the orange pivot pont, dragging the image and pressing the next frame button in between each movement as with the wave.

Working with the students, we chose a story context, by searching the web and downloading a background image. This supported discussion about who the stick character might be, what they might do, how they might do it and so on. Perhaps what was most interesting and powerful for me, as I observed the process as a whole however was the iterative nature of the narratives that unfolded throughout the task and between and across sessions. As the children began to play and review their "drafts" watching their current story unfold, new narrative possibilities began to emerge and would be introduced into discussion, students drawing on the story so far to project and plan possible next steps in the action. Working in pairs they made decisions about what path the story would take by agreement. "it would be really fun if..." Shall we make him dance here..? "I think he should.... next." Central to this activity is a view of authorship beyond penmanship and one that sees story creation as an ongoing process of design and redesign, something that can be difficult to model in the more traditional writing session. The power to support visualisation and engagment with muliple narrative through talk, while evaluating "potential" outcomes, predicting plausible or possible next steps in the action, is an important part of the process that writers go through in bringing their imaginings to the minds eye and ear of their audience . And is something that as a person plus,this tool seems to offer in abundance. To close my ramblings for today, I leave you with an animated short of my own. with the olympics around the corner, I introduce you to the weightlifter.


Got a few minutes to spare, why not download a copy yourself for a play from snapfiles.

Saltford Lock: 1st Play with Disgo Camcorder

It has been a beautiful evening and visiting a friend we decided to have a drink at one of our favourite watering holes. The Jolly Sailor, is on the bank of the River Avon, next to Saltford Lock, between Bristol and Bath. The activity around the lock and weir became the focus for this very short movie and first try out of the Disgo Camcorder I bought the other day.

This very short movie was compiled from 5 x 10 second video clips I shot, and then put together using Microsoft Movie Maker. The sound is actual footage, recorded by the camera. The clips were imported directly to Movie maker from the camera's SD card using a USB card reader. Some of the clips were trimmed, before adding clip transitions, a title and short credits. As an experiment, to explore the ease of use, quality of video and sound this has proven a really useful activity. I am really impressed with the outcome considering the relatively cheap cost of the camera. Fancy a class set of these to supplement other digital capture devices, really got the creative juices flowing. What to do next? Are you ready for your closeup ...?

Disgo Video

At £24.99 the disgo Video camcorder, I found in PC World this afternoon seemed too big a bargain to miss. A pocket sized camcorder with built in Microphone the unit is powered by two AA bateries and comes with a 1 GB SD Card, that holds approximately 1 hour's video stored in avi format. The card is upgradable to a maximum of 2GB. A 2.0 inch tft screen acts as a viewfinder and playback space, and an internal speaker allows for audio playback and review.

I am pondering just how useful this tool might be as part of a "collect, store, prepare and share" toolkit. Granted it does not take stills, but these can be captured from video using the provided editing software and also through MovieMaker. I wonder also how useful the tool might be as an audio capture device. There seems to be quite a lot of space to play, and explore. A little something else to delve into over the break.

To Type or Not to Type 5: So Many Fish, So Little Time!

The Open Source Tool "Tux Typing" comes preinstalled with the Asus Ee's Linux Distribution, and I and the students have had lots of fun zapping fish and the like while practicing our keyboarding skills over the last couple of weeks, heaven knows I need it. On my web wanders today I noticed that this software is also available for download and use with the Mac and Windows. You can download Tux Typing here from sourceforge.net.

Lookybook take a look see.

This Morning I Have Been Mostly Playing With Joomla 1

Joomla looks like being the tool of choice to manage our Web Site and its Content as we become part of the Bridge Learning Campus. I downloaded a copy a few months ago to play with, having read an article in a magazine, but I haven't done much with it other than exploring online live demos until this morning. Watching Video demos it seemed pretty straightforward, but as with many best laid plans, this morning my inexperience would come back to haunt me.

Following online tutorials I got off to a flyer
Step 1, download xampp from Apache Friends
Step 2, download The Most Recent version of Joomla
Step 3, Set up a localhost Server on old laptop, by installing xampp
Step 4, unzip and copy Joomla Files to new folder called Joomla in xampp/htdocs

But then my inexperience hit in with
Step 5. open localhost/joomla and install

When inputting http://localhost/ didn't find the xampp server space on my c:\ drive. Referring to the xampp read me I found an alternative ip address and used this instead allowing me to move on.

Now I could install the instance of Joomla before
Step 6. deleting temporary installation files and
Step 7 running localhost(or ip address)/joomla and login

If I am honest I am now feeling really pleased with myself as I now have a space where I can practice the skills and processes I need to learn in thinking about how to transfer useful content from our existing website to form the beginnings of the Primary Pages in The BLCs Web Site.

Summertime Has Come

Well the summer break is here, we had our introductory workshop and the new year 6 students have scurried home excitedly with our new 1:1 machines, to play and explore. I have set a diary project, and pages have been uploaded to think.com to support this, with accompanying bulletin boards, for suggested ideas and to share communaly and direct each other to the things we have uploaded. I guess all I can do now is sit back and wait or watch with baited breath to see how the projects themselves emerge and develop.

On a personal front. I have to complete and submit my dissertation, but amid this I have a couple of additional missions. I want to make space to play with greenfoot, and also explore mobile web access that students can tap into in the wider city, linking this to the project I have set for them, while I explore a spot of moblogging, something I got excited about while at HHL07. This hopefully will be easy enough to fit in among other things. I am pondering a change broadband provider and considering whether to supplement this with a mobile broadband account, or whether choosing a provider that offers wireless time might be a better option. I would value any thoughts on this. In the mean time a spot of lunch and a potter in the garden seems appealing right now.

Greenfoot: A Summer Project

Came across Greenfoot, while I was floating around the web the other day, thinking about a control environment or microworld creation tool that we could perhaps make available on our Asus Toolkit for students. I was really looking for a version of LOGO or pondering Scratch, but what interested me about this environment was its use of Java as a development framework, with its ability to compile executable programmes to control elements introduced into the space. Even if we can't use the environment with the Asus platforms, the possibility of involving students in building interactive object oriented games, seems really appealing right now, though whether it will later or not I'm unsure. As an absolute novice programmer this tool looks really interesting as a personal in, so have downloaded to play over the holiday, and explore the possibilities. The video tutorials look really useful. If all works out perhaps this could be another tool to add to our simulation and control tool box for older students, its certainly a recommend and look see for secondary colleagues.

Joining the Asus Club

I have spent the last couple of weeks playing with my own Asus Ee, and preparing for this evening. I have just arrived home enthused from the launch event with parents of our current Y5 Students, where we introduced our new e learning scheme, based on the platform as a "collect, store, prepare and share" device.

I am now looking forward to introducing the devices formally to the students themselves later this week, sharing guidelines for their use and maybe setting some short summer playtime projects for them. We use think.com as a collaborative learning space, and am wondering if perhaps they could use this as a temporary blog type space, though I am also tempted by using the web cam to keep a short video diary or the use of the sound recorder to capture audio soundbites that could form the basis of a podcast on return to school, perhaps around places they have visited or things they have done supported by web images.

The project overall is an exciting development. Perhaps what I am most excited about is the prospect of putting into the hands our students a standardised toolbox and the prospect through 1:1 access of opening opportunities for all students to access the online tools and resources we began to use last year. It will also be interesting to work with my year 6 colleagues, to see how having access to 1:1 tools impacts on subject design initiatives and student engagement. Hopefully there will be much to share as the project develops and emerges over the coming year.

Year 3 Have Fun With Pivot Stick Figure Animator

Last week I began exploring Pivot Stick Figure Animator with my class, they spent their first session playing with and exploring the environment, sharing with each other how various tools worked and what they did. Today we discussed how we might use background images downloaded from the web to help us tell simple stories. I am so pleased with the outcomes and how hard they worked I thought I would share a couple of todays outcomes here.




Our Swimming Movie By T and P (2008)

Our Mad Movie By W and T (2008)

Catapult Chicken And Talking For Reasoning

I was playing on the iboard site tonight and came across this brilliant activity in the maths trial Pack. First of all the name appealed, but then came the visuals. Picture three chickens, a stack of weights and a catapult! What to do? What to do? A serious Homer Moment arose, but with an inevitable outcome. As I expect any self respecting student would do, I put as many weights as possible on the trap door, loosed these on the catapult and then sat back as each chicken was thrust skyward beyond their roosts before, slowly drifting back to mother earth assisted by a parachute.

Putting aside for a moment the humour and obvious fun I had, my initial free and semi structured play engaged me in a series of trial and refinement processes, as I visually evaluated the effect that the simulated masses had on the catapult and its aility to raise the chickens to their roosts. Further play and I found myself estimating what masses would be needed to lift each of the three different chickens to various levels on the tree and this in itself became a bit of an art.

Devised as a tool to support problem solving in context with year 1 students (5-6yrs), "Catapult Chicken" is part of iBoard's developing tool kit to support the Primary Mathematics Framework in Foundation and Key Satge One. As with other tools developed by the team, beyond its surface entertainment value is a well thought out in, to solving problems with inbuilt space for teacher and student creativity, and oppportunities to extend the face value tasks through "talk for reasoning" and estimation.

• How could we arange the chickens largest to smallest, in the branches?
• How could we do this from top to bottom, or bottom to top?
• How many weights might we need to boost the largest chilcken up to the middle branch?
• What would need to happen if...? we wanted to get the large chicken to the top branch?
• Can we order the chickens largest to smallest, bottom to top?

I like the possibilities presented by the game to differentiate activities iteratively through variation in the complexity of language use, while allowing visual modelling and discussion to take place around a shared text as we think and begin reasoning together.

The activity besides being really good fun, would work realy well with students working in pairs or individually during "give and go" main sessions interspersed with mini plenaries that followed on from free play. Here the children could also discuss and devise problems and challenges for the class to work on, with students sharing solutions on the IWB and explaining processes or giving reasons for their choices. I can also imagine some of the students in my current maths group enjoying the use of this tool to support modelled reasoning and estimation tasks in plenary sessions or as an introductory thinking activity and starting point for a puzzles and problems sessions. The environment I would suggest is one that in developing inclusion strategies, and thinking about what the learner needs is as applicable to the stage of development as it is to age. Perhaps I am only 7 at heart rather than a multiple of... but I loved it!

Planning My Classroom Learning Wall: Learning and Thinking Together

Previously I have posted about our School contract and online charter, which use the principle of 3 Bees, "be responsible, be respectful, be safe" to support students understanding of why we have these guidelines. In class we unpick what each principle means to us, and work together to form our classroom learning contracts from these, discussing what they might look like in action, sometimes using digital images and captions to model these processes and routines in action, providing students with visual frames of reference and models of what we think desirable classroom behaviours and actions look like.

As a staff we recently began discussing how we could develop these using the bees as characters to help students link learning behaviours to targets for curricular learning, support self and peer assessment and help develop autonomy and ownership over personal and group learning paths. I thought I'd post today this draft centrepiece for my classroom learning wall, and current thoughts around how I'd like this to work in my classroom. Its a bit tatty at the moment as it is lying on my study floor. Each child is represented in the display as a "bee." The honeycomb in the centre is where we will be displaying our learning to learn and speaking and listening targets for class and group work. These will be unpicked with the class to help identify the smaller steps that describe the learning path we need to follow towards them. Personal targets I am thinking could also be displayed here as "keys to learning," "honeypots," or individual student "flowers." This still needs some thought and discussion with the students though to enble ownership and so the display does not become too contrived.

Anyway expanding the metaphor, and building on colleague sugesstions, since bees tend to work cooperatively within a hive, each hive here represents a student home team or group. I would like the students to extend work we have already begun to develop greater ownership and responsibility for reviewing and evaluating their progress together towards and within these targets, and am currently pondering how we might extend use of tools like comic life, digital imaging, audio recording and our class blog to enable and encourage this.

I was struck the other day by Wordle, and how the visual representations of text had helped me see ideas differently, am considering thispart of the mix to promote talk around learning. I am pondering how the creation of weekly or monthly text files to gather thoughts and ideas during review, might be useful in encouraging and supporting learning about learning. Asking students to use one word to sum up their groups feelings about how they worked together, their learning tasks and outcomes, or to record student descriptions of what they have learned or now understand from a particular activity could be really powerful for later discussion and as evidence of progression in the use of process skills. Student repetition would be really valuable in this case highlighting through the "cloud" commonalities in their ideas and thinking. Perhaps these could also help to support development and use of the vocabulary we need to describe features of learning and thinking together in tasks. They might also be great to display on our learning wall, visually representing aspects of our learning journey, forming starting points for discussion as we develop our grow our common language of learning. They could also be an interesting way to post to our class blog as a starting point to mediate discussions with parents and other stakeholders in our learning community about what has been going on in school.

I also want to link the use of this classroom tool with how we further develop and embed learning within and beyond school through the use of online community tools. A nice tool to use with this would be Honeycomb, for obvious metaphorical reasons, but a new look at home school learning that sees these virtual places as flexible places to extend ongoing classroom projects and activities collaboratively will be an interesting place to start in developing a modelled framework for use of our VLE as we approach the huge changes due to our school in January 2009.

This is only a starting point and a bit of a ramble, but I would value any thoughts or contributions you might have.

Podcasting in the Classroom

Wanted to flag up the new home of colleague James Watson's Podcast Station, "Podcasting in the Classroom."

In James' words the space is

"A podcast about the benefits of using podcasting as a transparent tool for learning and teaching in school classrooms."

Featuring interviews with teachers sharing their use of Podcasting and Recorded audio to support classroom learning, the site promises to be a fantastic resource.

Wordle: Thinking About Time Poems and Calligrams

Over the past fortnight, a number of posts and tweats have circulated about Wordle a "Word Cloud Generator." This morning a backlog of work out the way, and the arrival of rain when I was gardening left some time to explore the tool for myself and ponder on the uses I might have for the tool. Word play seems a great place to begin, perhaps using Wordle to develop poetry tasks, or to collect and present WOW words during class talking for writing sessions, in a different way.

A favourite poem to use with students is "Morning" by Grace Nichols. I first used this with my class supported by a series of activities I found in a book by Ray Barker and Christine Moorcroft called Developing Literacy: Poetry Year 4. The activities presented here, have worked really well as starting points for work with students of differing ages and across the ability range, including my current class. Here is an example Wordle, generated from this poem.



The poem if you are not familiar with it has a repetitive two line structure, and is it evolves rhythmically "Morning comes with a .." series of nouns and onomatopoeic verbs to describe their actions. Innovating on and adapting this poem with students I have enjoyed initially brainstorming and collecting morning objects and the actions they make. The children taking the skeleton of the poem, and changing the noun verb phrases using new words we have collected. It seems to me that interms of wordplay and presentation of the words we collect, a "Wordle" cloud would be a really interesting way to display these for the students to use.

I particularly like the way the tool displays repeated words in larger fonts, and how the more times a word is used determines how large it will appear in the Wordle. I find my class often repeat words, and so entering them as they arise, no matter how often it is repeated could present an interesting starting point for the talk for writing and initial drafting of their works. We could discuss our favourite words, since these will be the largest, but also highlight the less frequently used words, perhaps adding some of our own to the mix.

Returning to the morning poem:

Morning Comes
With a milk float jiggling

The students could be encouraged to use our class wordles to innovate on the format to write their own Morning poem using the word cloud for inspiration. Most of the students could begin selecting suitable words from anywhere on the cloud while others could be challenged to use the less frequently used vocabulary, the smaller words in the cloud. The Cloud helping to support diferentiation and challenge.

The milk float jiggling, might become birds chirruping, sunbeams dancing, toast burning, brothers and sisters squabbling and so on.

What I really like about this poem though are the expansive possibilities, and the temporal nature of the subject. "Morning" might just as easily be night as in the text mentioned above, but could also become hometime, playtime, assembly, Saturday, Summer, Christmas.

Once familiar with the original poems structure, and the Wordle enviroment it might be a fun place for the students to begin collecting, playing with and arranging their ideas using a word cloud on their own or in small groups. Thinking about events and objects that occur at different times?

Wordle clouds are potentially interesting ways to collect Wow Words for display and use not only on the wall or IWB, but in terms of collaborative wordplay they could be useful places to play with and explore multimodally other ways these words might be be presented. Changing font style, colour and orientation, to match the subject of the poem being developed providing further challenges to support talk for writing where in plenary or review students present their Wordles and reasoning for the final presentation style, the outcome of the word cloud itself recieving treatment as a poetic form.

An After Thought

As I have beeen drafting this post an interesting thought about linking these activities to mathematics work and the passage of time has come to mind. A class timeline of our day, our week, the seasons or even the months of the year, using either the poem or wordle to help seems an interesting idea. They would also look great as a new or end of month post/summary on a class blog, a collection of thoughts, memories, feelings to prompt and engage studetns in talk with each other or parents about the learning that has happened during that time. This is a tool that I realy must share with my colleagues, and which would make a cool addition to the year 3 Calligrams and Shape poems unit we developed with students in the Autumn Term last year. Thanks to all who shared..

Update 30/10/08

Since publishing this post I have worked with my students to write innovations on Grace Nicholls' poem morning, example outcomes can be found on the student blog by following these links.

• Friday

• School Days
• Morning Comes
• Week
• Friday Morning

Thanks

Can I thank everyone who attended my session at South West Regional ICT Conference this afternoon, and the organisers for the opportunity to share my experiences with you. I hope that you found the session useful. Much of what I wanted to say this afternoon is presented here, plus a few things I missed, a back list of control related posts from this blog and links to some of the tools I mentioned. Over the next few weeks as the rigours that are the end of term wind down, I will hopefully begin to add some of the other tools and materials I have to this space perhaps including some "unit plans" if there is an interest. Please feel free to leave a comment, I look forward to either hearing from you or meeting you at next years event. :O)

How Has Podcasting Helped Me With My Learning?

Last summer at about this time I published a post, " So what do you think the children get from Podcasting?" Since then I have extended my adventures, using Podium as a tool to support talking for writing and having posted my thoughts for the past 6 months, I thought I should share my students ideas about how the tool has supported their learning. I am currently writing student reports. Part of our reporting process is a series of Teacher/Learner Conferences, where we share and set targets and review our progress. The children are asked about things they feel they have made improvements in, things they still need to develop, and finally the things that they think have helped them to move on with their learning. Last week I began my end of year reviews, and several students mentioned how the podcasting process had helped them. I will not expand on this any more for the time but hand you over to the voice of my class. Here are some quotations lifted directly from conversations with students in my class.

• Podcasting and talking for writing have helped me to, think about if my sentences and the things I am writing make sense, so I can go back and change them
• Podcasting has helped me because I could listen to myself and then go back and correct the things I have written.
• I like podcasting because it is fun, and it has helped me to think about full stops and capital letters in my reading and writing.
• I really want to work on my reading, I want to make better sense of things, and read with expression, because I really like podcasting... We do lots of talking for writing before we write things and this also helps me get my ideas sorted before we work.
• I like it when we get the chance to go over stuff again, so I can see where I went wrong. I have really liked podcasting too because it has helped me think about my punctuation, and what kind to use.

I Look forward to any thoughts you may have.

Storyphones: Language for Learning

With the increased availability of cheaper MP3 players, I have pondered buying a few to use with portable speakers. The main problem is that this would further add to the cacophony that already exists in my talk driven classroom, or require children to take turns with headphones. I could not really see a way of enabling multiple access to the device without a portable speaker or docking option. Then today this was published on Ictopus, about a new device the Storyphone. What a cool idea, essentially a wireless mp3 based listening centre.

I love the effect that podcasting and audio recording has had on my student's perception of reading and its purpose, and have wondered for a while about how we could use this to our advantage, in having students prepare stories for others around school. Either performing from existing texts or preparing their own for sharing through the network. The recording part would be fairly straightforward but individual or group access as said above to the completed texts more of a challenge, requiring either computers to be tied up or access to individual mp3 players. I realy like the idea of the storyphone on soooooooo many levels! Or something similar, and would encourage the company to ask the question "Why stop with selling this idea as a foundation stage tool?" I would love to have something similar available to use more widely with students of all ages across my school, how about you?

Softease Branch, Y3 and the Properties of Shape

As we aproach the end of term and the end of another school year, I am in the process of what might be called mopping up, looking at areas from the Mathematics framework that we have either not yet engaged with, or which the students have found tricky. Alongside this are some ICT curricular elements that I have not fully developed with the students. We have used data handling environments to for example present data from Science Experiments and as teaching aids with the IWB, but the children themselves have had limited independent access to the tools, other than in small groups at classroom based PCs.

This week we have been involved as a class in a Using and Aplying Mathematics unit, to consolidate our use of vocabulary relating to the properties of 2d shape. At the same time I wanted to embed and develop key skills from the ICT curriculum through the use of a Branching data base. The tool I chose to use for this series of tasks comes from Softease Studio, and is called Branch.

The sessions began however, not with Branch, but with a drag and drop sorting tool I had made using Smart Notebook. Other whiteboard users could make something similar, and an image of the tool is presented to the left for reference. The key to making and using Branching Data bases, binary trees or "dichotomous keys" is an ability to generate, ask and use "null" questions to divide a set of objects into two sets initially, gradually refining questions to distill the set until the branches at the end of the tree have only one object. This involves asking questions that have "yes or no" answers. This is process I have found easiest to develop using the observable features and properties of sets or collections of familiar objects. We often use Carrol Diagrams and Venn diagrams to do this, and the whiteboard tool I used as an introductory frame to support student and teacher discussion around this process before engaging with Branch itself, was designed to act as a link between these tools.

Since our task had a mathematical focus, we began with the shapes to the left of the book engaging the children in paired discussions around questions such as

• What can you see?
• What is Special about this shape?
• How is this shape different to or the same as this shape?
  

These were used to focus the students attention around the visible properties of the shapes, and to begin drawing on their prior experiences to describe them, for example

"It has four sides and four corners, all of the corners are right angles."

A great set of reponses describing the properties of a rectangle, however in our set we had two rectangles, a square and an oblong. Developing this we began to use the sorting tree model above dragging the two rectangles to the top of the simple tree, and asking the students to propose questions that focussed how they were different. Is it a rectangle ? Or does it have right angles? don't work since both shapes have right angles and by defintition are both rectangles. Are all the sides the same length? Provides a yes or no answer and allows the two shape to be separated.

We used the notebook to practice this idea together, comparing a number of shapes from our collection and then, testing our questions to see if they worked. The children were then introduced to branch and starting with only two shapes each time initially were were encouraged to make a series of trees practicing and rehearsing their questions together.

During follow up sessions the idea of working with 4 shapes was introduced and the children challenged to devise questions that would begin by dividing their shapes into two equal sets. This sounds easier than it is. Eg I have a square, an oblong a triangle and a pentagon. A good starting question might be does the shape have right angles? Does the shape have 4 sides? And because of our previous activity the children suggested these? From here the next question was also fairly straightforward for them based on the practice sessions of small trees the day before. However what happens if we drag a circle, a triangle, a square and a pentagon into the tree? Is it curved? Does it have three sides? Although having yes or no answers don't work in relation to the challenge question set at the beginning of the session. What is needed is to ask a question such as does the shape have "more" or "less" than x numbber of sides/corners/angles? The students were then encouraged to use Branch to explore these ideas, Before during our final session requiring the children to begin with 8 given shapes to design a game for their friends to play and test out.

The children really enjoyed this series of tasks, which challenged their thinking and enabled them through paired discussion to use and apply vocabulary developed in previous classroom based sessions to a decision making process. The UK Primary Mathematics Framework says students in the course of their work should

• Follow a line of enquiry by deciding what information is important; make and use lists, tables and graphs to organise and interpret the information
• Describe and explain methods, choices and solutions to puzzles and problems, orally and in writing, using pictures and diagrams
• Use Venn diagrams or Carroll diagrams to sort data and objects using more than one criterion
• Relate 2-D shapes and 3-D solids to drawings of them; describe, visualise, classify, draw and make the shapes.

As a guided and collaboratively based series of activities, using Branch in this way really helped support and scaffold this particular group of students engagement and discussion around these processes. It also enabled me to give context to the use of a tool that I have found frequently to be used because it is expected within the ICT scheme of work structure. As with many ICT tools I feel Branching data bases are incredibly useful and powerful tools, if they are used in designed and considered cross curricular learning situations where they can act as a "person plus," or a frame and scaffold to support use, application and transfer of skills and experience from one subject domain to another.

How to write...

in 1000 words or less. Just found and skim read this post from Lifehack, really like what I have read so far something to come back to later.

Pondering on visual storytelling

We have been sharing adventure stories and traditional tales with a twist, during Literacy Sessions for the last couple of weeks, and this week we have particualrly focussed on another of my favourites The Paper Bag Princess, By Robert N. Munsch.

My students seem to really enjoy, my taking a story I love and then trying to retell it in my own words. Perhaps this has come from the podcasting work we have done and their appreciation of how challenging this can be for them at times, or perhaps it simply comes from watching and listening as I try to recount and embellish the tales going through the mental processes I expect of them, visualising, mentally rehearsing and then retelling the tales as they develop. Hopefully though it is also because they recognise the magic of ideas. A story although in existence can still be reshaped, reformed, and refined in the mind of the teller. Even great stories and books such as this are made and altered through performance and enhanced by our interpretations and imaginings. This story telling process however I feel closely models and mirrors the path I currently using in encouraging the talking for writing process. Multimodal views of literacy see written text as "oral text," a symbolic permanent or semi permanant record of what it is we want to say or wish others to hear. Maybe as experienced writers this is something we have lost sight of in the teaching of writing. How many times do we say to ourselves, "hang on that doesn't sound right!" Perhaps we have forgotten over time that the voice we hear, and link to our actions as writers, took years not only to perfect but also to internalise. A forgotten part of our writing repertoire, however this is something which in the primary sector particularly many of our students are either only beginning with or are still in the process of developing. It took an introductory course in Semiotics, communication and representation recently, to actually challenge my perceptions and help me to realise just how complex this process must be. It was great this week then, when the students having eventually read The Paper Bag Princess themselves for the first time, to hear expressions about how they had already read this story, not heard it as I might have expected, and beginning I hope to make the link even if inadvertently between the spoken word and written text they were engaged with.

Over the last couple of days the students have begun to move on from the reading process to begin talking together, planning, mapping out and rehearsing potential plot elements for their own versions of the story. We have discussed and collected new titles for the story to help us innovate on the text, these include such barnstormers as; The Trash Can Princess, The Wheely Binbag Princess and so on, all of which have potential to influence the reactions of other characters in the story, and effect closing dialogue between the princess and the kidnapped prince charming she sets out to rescue. In the process the children have also created some fabulous story maps, and it is these that have prompted this post.

Stimulated by the discussion which began to emerge from the class and the quality of the illustrations the children generated around the story, I have decided to trial something a little bit different in tandem with the story writing process itself. We often use role play and freeze framing as part of our talk for writing process and in a previous post I talked about how interesting it might be to use elements of the Commoncraft approach to animation to support visual storytelling. Having watched the recent release of the Indiana Jones trilogy that featured some really great animated storyboards, I was really fired up to have a go at using this to frame my in to the process. This week we began making scenery and cutout characters, to support the idea of multimedia storyboarding. I am hoping this will inspire the children and help with rehearsing story sequence, something one or two are still finding difficulty with. The idea revolves around using the scenery and character cutouts to frame scenes from the story, capturing these as digital photographs and then using Photostory to sequence the scenes and events. From here I would like the children to add voice overs to tell the story with completed outcomes for publication as simple group movies.

For my more able students I hope this will help extend and expand their vocabulary use and help with the text revision process as they write, while for others, some who are still reluctant to record, or having problems in maintaining logical sequencing as they move from plot element to plot element, that this visual and oral story prompt will help scaffold their progression through the story events they want to tell.

From Probot to LOGO: Some previous posts in action

I have put together this photo montage for the time being to share some of the activities my students have engaged in while using Probots and MSWLOGO this term. Even though presented here in an ICT context, references placed towards the end of this post highlight a number of areas from the Primary Framework for Mathematics with which the children engaged, through the using and applying strand, and which draw into focus the cross curricular potential of work such as this to help children make links between areas of learning.



The file is progressive and begins with the children using the probot to create skeletons around which they made and then decorated their own floor compasses. From here working in groups the students used their floor compasses to learn about compass direction, predicting outcomes from given inputs, eg if I am facing east, and make a 1/4 turn east what direction will I be facing? This required them to know and use the numerical values for rotation sizes, or to calculate these using halving and doubling strategies. Within the problems set we also replaced fractions of a turn with the number of degrees, and the directions of a rotation with clockwise/anticlockwise, and right/left. The children went on from this to make up challenge questions for their friends in other groups.

In the next series of activities the children made mazes using strips of paper. Working initially with right angles, some children chose to extend the activity to include 45 degree turns. The children used their knowledge that a Probot step was 1 cm to help them measure the distances the probot would need to move, and estimation to predict and test the size of turn they would need to make at each point in order to navigate the maze. After step by step planning the children were asked to input procedures, that would take the turtle from one end of the maze to the other without stopping.

The final photographs in the series represent a session in the ICT suite where children used MSW LOGO for the first time. The students were given a prepared treasure map which they loaded into the LOGO workspace, before we discussed as a class and decided the route around the island we would take, or the order in which we would visit particular landmarks. Transferring the floor based experiences of the students to the screen was not difficult, and after only a brief introduction to the commands and how these should be input, they worked very successfully and independently, to resolve many of the issues they encountered. In the plenary to this session the children were asked what they would like to do in the next session, and suggested that they would like to have a blank treasure map, that they could add landmarks to themselves, they could then ask their friends to journey around their island following a route they had prepared.

This series of activities, as well as the obvious ICT and Geographical links, offered opportunities for the students to engage practically with the following strands and related objectives from the Primary Framework for Mathematics

Measuring

• Know the relationships between.., metres and centimetres..., choose and use appropriate units to estimate, measure and record measurements
• Read, to the nearest division and half-division, scales that are numbered or partially numbered; use the information to measure and draw to a suitable degree of accuracy

Understanding Shape

• Read and record the vocabulary of position, direction and movement, using the four compass directions to describe movement about a grid
• Use a set-square to draw right angles and to identify right angles in 2-D shapes; compare angles with a right angle; recognise that a straight line is equivalent to two right angles

Counting and Understanding Number

• Read and write proper fractions, interpreting the denominator as the parts of a whole and the numerator as the number of parts; identify and estimate fractions of shapes;

While using and applying their knowledge and understanding of these areas in the context of problems and puzzles.

Many of the activities here are drawn from or build on previous posts that can be found within the control category to the left of the page.