A Christmas present From iBoard

I used this set of resources primarily with students in Year 1 last year, though some of our older students also enjoyed playing with this fantastic collection of object based flash tools from the inspirational iBoard Team, at Electronic Blackboard.

Resources include

• Christmas Shape and Space Activities
• Getting ready for Christmas: (label and wrapping paper makers, dress up Santa, and mend or even "supe up"his sleigh, being among the tools available here)
• Christmas Writing: (drag and Drop Writing frames for letters and so on)
• and a collection of Christmas Shopping activities

There are 19 activities in all available to use free here, the students who used them loved the tools, I hope you do too, and that your experiences encourage you to explore further the fantastic Foundation and Key Stage One focussed tools they develop.

Christmas is Coming 2: A Thought For The Day

Using Podium for students to hear their internal voice, might be a powerful use for the tool in guided reading time. I am already beginning to see the benefits of using Podium to help my year 3 students recognise the importance of expression when reading aloud, but a lovely idea I think at this time of year, would be for older students to engage either with bible stories, or familiar and Traditional Christmas tales. Choosing stories that perhaps give a particular message and recording these to share, as either a "thought for the day," type program or series, or that might be used by younger students on the classroom PC as a listening centre. Perhaps by including the PC or teacher laptop as one of the Guided Reading options, students could share a book or text alongside an older students performance, enabling younger or emergent readers to hear a model of how the text can be read.

Hearing Thoughts for the day, short expressions about the things I like or look forward to about Christmas, memories of previous Christmases or even colleagues and community members recording their thoughts and memories about Christmas when they were a child, would make powerful tools for thinking about what this festival means to different people, and how it has changed over time, enabling and supporting discussions about the significance and meaning of the festival. I have to admit to being curious too, about how a public might react to primary school students sharing Christmas messages through this type of public broadcast, in tandem with those we often hear from Politicians, religious figures and celebrities at this time of year.

Christmas Is Coming

Just spent the last couple of hours adding the finishing touches to our school's Christmas Pages and resource share space. Last year we also had a set of Christmas Pages on our website, but it in its format at the time the site was only a couple of months old. By this time last year our visitor count was around 1000, but since then has risen to over 25000 hits. I am hoping that the addition of these pages will draw not only our students to visit with their parents, but a host of other visitors from around the world, as we set out to send our "greetings to the World," and work to develop our image as a "Global School."

Our "greetings to the World," are developing slowly, but some of the students have begun to Use Think.com as a community space, practicing their email, internet and emerging web 2.o skills, to create Christmas pages of their own. The idea being that they will either, download images from the web, or create their own, uploading these to their Think spaces, adding a wish or greeting for the world, before sending a message to me that it is ready for inclusion in the school website. Adding to the website is a matter of download, copy and paste or insert using my choice of Web Development tool Ms FrontPage.

Some students have begun to expand on this remembering the pages we had on display last year, sending Christmas Funnies, or simple poems they have developed, and these too will be added to the space to celebrate their independent achievements.

Within the pages I have included links to some of the Websites I have used to support ICT activity in the classroom, these links are generally cross curricular in nature, but include things such as clipart site, links to pages about Christmas traditions around the world, and favourite site used by me with students from KS 1 last year, the iBoard online activities pages. There are also a number of resources and tools developed, for use with students, and some links to sections of the school website, describing and displaying student ICT outcomes around Christmas themes.

This year I am also interested in how we might begin to use the space to encourage colleagues to have a go at using Podium to develop simple podcasts, though time is short, and space to share this with colleagues limited I am convinced that the simplicity of the tool will enable colleagues to see how quickly they can prepare and develop a performance piece for publication. One idea I have shared is the notion of students performing their sections of the school performance, in class with these being recorded for upload. Another idea which has had mixed reaction is the idea of students creating a thought for the day type program, that could be developed during Guided Reading sessions, based on either reading from an available text or performance of something they have written and prepared. I have also proposed that if colleagues are unsure about the tool, if students rehearse and refine their performances, recording could be done using laptops during student Golden Time, and that I would be happy to work with small groups during this time. I would also be interested to see the quality of output from this tool, if we try to record students singing Christmas Carols and songs in real time, but this is an experiment for later.