My Digital Wish

I was pointed to this widget maker from the Digizen website by one of my students recently.  Its an interesting tool and one I think I'd like to use to indroduce and support discussions around what it might mean to be a global as well as a cyber citizen.  Rather than an outcome though I was wondering how it might function as a starting point for work with students.  As an embeddable device, this widget, by copying the embed code can be inserted quite easily by many students to their personal blog spaces.  This has lead me to wonder how I might use the widget maker with the support of VLE based student blogs and commenting to share and explore our thoughts and values.


This week my Y4 and 5 groups have been using their blog spaces to write about and share their experiences from a school journey. As part of the session plenary students were asked to visit each other's blog spaces and to read what had been said.  They were then asked to leave a simple comment on each of the posts they read
1. about something they liked about the post, perhaps how the text was presented, how they had enjoyed a particular part of the journey mentioned too, or focussing in on the literacy aspect of the presentation and perhaps the way the author had used particular words or phrases and why they liked them.
2. to suggest one thing that they might do if they were the author to improve what they had read.

I was interested to see how unprompted some students had begun to take part in short conversations as they worked.  Replying to comments left.  This notion of commenting as a conversation has left me wondering about the possibility and potential for using short outcome based tasks such as this as a way to promote online discussion, and  using commenting around the text free post itself as the vehicle to drive the central learning outcome for blogging activities.

Previously I have used Think.com discussion widgets to promote this type of activity, collecting student views around particular issues allowing chained and direct comments to be made that are visible to all. I am wondering about how allowing space for students to select from a limited menu of options such as that provided by the digizen widget maker, embedding the completed object to a blog post before initially providing students with particular spaces to visit and comment might be an interesting way to develop learning conversations through commenting.

Following the process the students have begun, perhaps they could find something as digizens they share with the author.  Being limited to choose a particular number of items from the provided list need not mean they they do not share ideas presented in other digizens displayed.  To break the ice and start the conversation they could ask questions about one or some of the choices that the blog author has made seeking responses and to identify what choices made by the author mean to them.

As a starting pont for work combining citizenship, literacy and ICT this could be an interesting stimulus for a longer term piece of Persuasive or Discursive Writing, the notion of an ideal world or a starting point to ground and discuss the many changes that are going on around us right now and how we see them.  I am sure there would be much disagreement about some of the more personalised possibilities, but this would provide opportunities for students not only to express their "wldest ideas" but perhaps more importantly to be asked to explain, explore and express their reasoning behind them opening up space to debate and see more than one side to the argument, while identifying some of the shades of grey.  As a collect and store process the blog comments also could form a useful resource as the presentation of a wide collection of modelled thoughts and opinions to be drawn upon in later writing, reading and speaking and listening activities.  Something to further pondered.

Honeycomb 7: Writing like an Agony Aunt

Today the students didn't actually work in Honeycomb, but rather the "static site" and comments we created during our previous sessions were used as starting points and stimuli for the session.

To begin this morning we read together and shared the comments and advice we had left for William, Greg and Claire in our previous sessions using the Honeycomb Worry Website as a shared text. The children were asked to work in pairs to identify the ideas that they thought the characters might find helpful, and then to work with me as a class to create a model opening for a letter to one of the characters. Prior to the session I had created a Smart Board Notebook, that divided the letter into the three sections I wanted the children to use in framing their response, within this I provided sentence/paragraph openers that they could choose from, to discuss and develop as they wrote.

Using their Asus Web books in pairs the children were asked to open the wordprocessing package "write" to create their own advisory letters to the story character of their choice. They were allowed to "steal" openers if they felt they needed to and encouraged to use, add to expand and improve the ideas modelled by their friends to support the advice they gave. Throughout the session the students were stopped and encouraged to read aloud their letters as they developed. Suggestions were sought as to where they might go next, while this process also offered opportunities for other children to reread, review and edit their works in progress in response to what they had heard.

To end the session students were asked to attach and send their letters by email to me for moderation, review and printing. As web books the Asus Ees do not have a direct connection to our school network or print solution, they are intended to be used to support use of local applications alopngside the online learning tools and storage spaces we are providing such as the VLE. Drop boxes are the main vehicle for doing this in our current environment, however as I have mentioned in previous posts I really want the students to see our VLE as just this a Virtual Learning Environment, and a social tool to boot. The drop box approach seemed somehow not quite right contextually for this activity and the type of work the children have engaged in. The emails and letters are currently sitting in my inbox, awaiting a response. Being concerned not to lose the enthusiasm that this process has evoked, I am thinking after all their hard work that the pairs of students should recieve a reply from the characters they have sought to help. This should not be too difficult or time consuming, drafting a short standard reply from each character, that can be copied, pasted and edited to provide a little personalisation . Keeping the children hooked in this way I hope will be a really cool in and starting point to the next phase of our writing process which will involve the children using the ideas we have developed empathetically to write their own dilema based stories on these characters and evolving around similar themes. It will be interesting to see what response having an email from either Wiliam, Claire or Greg will have on Monday Morning. Hopefully next week we will be able to upload our letters to the class blog and share some of the outcomes. In the mean time here is a taster offered by two of the boys...

Dear Greg

We are sorry to hear that you have been having girl problems. This is something we don't usually have. We both have a sister and know all about the problems that girls can cause.

Why don't you start by talking to her at lunchtime. You can find out about her and see what she is in to. After that you can ask her out then if she says yes, you can take her on a date somewhere she might like to go. Perhaps you could go to the movies or for a walk in the park.

Good Luck

J and B

I wish I'd had friends like them when I was at Primary school.

Previous Posts

• Honeycomb 4: Thinking Through an Online Role Play Project
• Honeycomb 5: Beginning our Role Play Task
• Honeycomb 6: Collecting Ideas For Empathetic Writing
  

Honeycomb 5: Beginning our Role Play Task

Today during our literacy session the students began their work using the version of the "Worry Website" I created in Honeycomb over the weekend. During this session our focus was on writing in role and how we might begin a conversation or response to character's problem. If these students/characters were in our class, how might we encourage them to talk or listen to us and the things we had to say?

The session was slow to start, even though the students are now familiar with the log in process to access our Wireless network and VLE from their Asus Ees, today was the first time we had visited Honeycomb in a while, and the first time we had visited it from the direct hyperlink added to our class page. Hopefully tomorrow the process will be quicker.

We did encounter a problem today however which we struggled to find a work around for, and currently I am not sure whether this is an issue with Honeycomb, something we will have to think about when using the Asus, or perhaps a combination of the two. The comment box in Honeycomb is fixed and does not float, its size in the browser, combined with the inability to scroll within this page element meant that the add comment button appeared in most cases out of view in the browser window. Thinking on my feet I was able to rescue the situation suggesting that for today the children draft their comments to Use on our Worry web pages in "write" to transfer later. This will mean students either going through a slightly extended process of tranferring these files to the network, and so as not to lose the work and impetus from today, adding these comments when we complete the task and engage with our comment reviews tomorrow.

One or two of the machines seemed to give different renderings of the environment, allowing use of the add comment button, and I thought I would share a couple of the outcome comments generated as part of the task today to give a flavour of how this task is beginning to effect the student's thinking process.

What I am really pleased with in these examples is the apparent empathy that the environment has begun to create in the two student comments. They have begun to put themselves in the shoes of Claire, and to draw on their own experiences as they offer advice and support about the problem using

• "the you are not alone perspective," sharing how a similar event has affected them
• "the in my experience approach" offering practical suggestions about the things that have worked for them.

It is still early days for this activity but these comments are useful beginnings to support the discussion I want to generate around language choices when we respond to others.
They also offer models we can develop or use to frame our agony aunt responses during this week's writing outcome.

Previous Posts

• Honeycomb 4: Thinking Through an Online Role Play Project

Getting Persuasive: Creating TV Style Advertisements with Photostory

This term we have been working on a science based theme around materials and their properties. To engage our students with cross curicular persuasive writing we decided to adapt parts of this to focus on the "three Rs." Hmmm Back to basics ay! A real vote winner in the past, but in this case not "readin' 'ritin' and 'rithmetic" (though we have done lots of this too) rather the Three Rs in question have been how we can "reduce, reuse and recycle."

Getting Persuasive

We began our literacy unit by reading and reviewing a range of texts, posters, leaflets and letters, and using these to identify features of the text type that drew our readers in. These included visual and layout features such as

• headings
• emboldening
• the use of logos
• slogans,
• and bulleting,

that would identify these text formats as being part of the non fiction genre. Moving on to identify language features such as

• emotive imagery,
• the use of rhetorical questions
• cause and effect and logical connectives.
• and looking at how these devices were used to support the expression of opinion
  

Literacy sessions have taken on a slightly different perspective here focusing on developing and engaging with the "functional aspects" of the text type, and considering

• What persuasive texts look and sound like?
• Who might write these and why?
• and How they work?

It is difficult to be passionate about something unless you have experience of the ideas behind it. In order to give context and purpose to the outcomes we wanted to develop the students were immersed in "topic based activities" beyond the literacy hour to support their knowledge and understanding of the key ideas they would need to engage with in the process of writing.

Persuasive writing is an interesting and complex sub genre, in that even though classified as Non Fiction, texts are constructed around the feelings of an author. They may appear to find their origin in "fact" but are usually driven by the emotions and opinions of an author based on their interpretation of facts as they see them. They may appear to be objective, but usually present only one side of a potential argument. Helping students to understand this, requires that they attempt to put themselves in the shoes of their audience and begin to develop some empathy with the other side of the case, inorder to choose relevant ideas they can express that appeal to both sides or those without their experience.

To help with this and our exploration of the genre we presented a simple "marking ladder" that we could use to help evaluate the texts we engaged with, and that could be unpicked and developed as we worked to reflect the key features of a persuasive text as we saw them. This included ideas presented above, but also set out to frame generically success criteria for the writing outcomes that students would develop later, and that could be used to frame comparison between their work and the texts we had explored. These texts we decided should

• Open with a strong statement of opinion
• Provide 3 key points to support this supported by facts
• Close with a reassertion of the opening statement using either a slogan, an assertion or a question.

Within the overall process of exploring texts and developing our writing, we made audience the key focus for our work. Moving into phase two of the unit we gave the students an audience and practiced and applied the ideas we had been developing through the guided and shared writing of letter to our caterers. This sought to persuade them how composting of food waste was a great idea, giving our reasons why, and inviting a response. We know that many of the materials we discard in school are recycled or reused, but what about our food waste? Our new grounds are vast, so we decided to look at how composting as a process could be used to enhance our surroundings rather than perhaps ending up in a landfill? To make these more "official looking" the students also wordprocessed them, allowing them to use some of the visual features we had discussed to be included during the publishing process.

Working Towards A Digital Writing Outcome

In building up to our final Writing Outcome, which was to produce a TV advertisement or Video Presentation, we also read these British TV advertisements with voice overs by Eddie Izzard and Jane Horrocks, as well as this interesting stop motion project by simondo89 I discovered on You Tube.

Refering back to our Marking Ladder and success criteria for "writing," we investigated how these videos used similar ideas to persuade. The students identified the use of slogans and Logos as key tools to stating opinion and asserting ideas, but also how the use of visuals such as gesture alongside music were used to persuade us that "recycling was cool." We used comparison charts to review the three videos gradually over several sessions, looking at one initially to identify features that supported our big idea. If the advertisements are telling us that recycling is cool how are they doing this? What makes us think or feel this way?

In The Eddie Izzard Example, the voice over was seen as cheeky and quirky, presenting a casual almost throw away idea. We got to this point via the expression by one of my class that the voice over was "idiotic." This invited discussion around what she meant by this, and lead to time spent unpicking the idea and why the voice might have been prersented in this way. In addition students mentioned the type of music chosen, the bright airy look of the scenes, the shiny newness of objects and the fact that the "new everyday objects" presented were highlighted in the video as the cans they were made from. This added to the "coolness" because no one would have anything like them in their homes. The young fellow who was the focus of the story told also had a slinky, casual way about him strutting about the scene, casually casting his can into the recycling bins, and going about his business as if it was everyday. I was really pleased when a number of students after several readings mentioned how the advert also began with the character throwing away his can and ended in the same way... The advert itself was "kind of recycling." As can be seen in the outcomes later, many of the ideas in this video were borrowed as available designs to use in the works that developed as a result.

Looking at the other 2 advertisements we began with these ideas looking for similarities. The Jane Horrocks Advert from the same series used very similar ideas, Here the character from the previous video was seen playing a computer game, skateboarding and collecting points as he collected bottles to recycle. As a result the "coolness" of recycling glass was expressed in almost identical ways, but also afforded the questions around the idea of audience and who the advert might be aimed at? Using clues such as continuity of the central character, the music and visuals we decided that the video was probably directed at us, and how we could persuade our parents and grandparents to recycle. Though the main idea that it was cool, the use of the game perhaps lead us to see how recycling needn't be such a big thing, or get in the way of how we usually behave.

The final stop motion project, I think really excited the students as they had recently done some stop motion work, and could see how this advertisement had been been put together. A fantastic tool in as it turns out for engaging them crosscurricularly with the oft neglected ICT curriculum strand 4 statements around "Reviewing, modifying and evaluating work as it progresses." In this video using simple visual tools such as the recycling symbol, items from the bin, an image of the world, lettering from an old newspaper, and a piece of carefully selected music, a really simple message was transmitted by reusing material that could have been found in our bin to persuade, no voice over just a litter dance using throwaways, slogans and captions. The message portrayed used a number of familiar processes, and as such enabled them to begin drawing on prior learning to begin discussing how this had been achieved. It also began to open up the task we wanted the students to carry out. Helping identify with them the transferable skills we could use from a variety of ICT based processes such as animation, podcasting, video storymaking to contextualise the writing outcome.

Getting Persuasive with PhotoStory

The final phase of our Literacy Project was to make a short TV style advertisement./video presentation aimed at persuading our parents and other adults that we should recycle. For this we decided to use PhotoStory, the reasons for this I hope will become clear as the process is outlined and you view the completed outcomes .

In making the advertisement the children worked in groups of 4.

• Firstly they planned and then scripted their voice overs using the structure and success criteria above.
• Using the script as a frame we used Flickrstorm and Google Images to locate and save 5 images that we thought would support and help express our ideas.
• These images were imported to Photostory and sequenced.
• The text tool was used to place our slogans or key message on the first frame and to add credits to our final one.
• The children then rehearsed there voice overs, considering how they would express their ideas before..
• Using the inbuilt voice recorder and microphones to record each child's contribution over the appropriate image.

I love the outcomes of which these are only three examples. They are starting points on a journey that I feel reflect the children's emergent and growing understanding of how these text types work.

• Slogans and opening statements include ideas like "Don't Turn Away," "Prepare to be Amazed," "Our World Could Look Like This." Attempts to grab attention!
  
• An appropriate choice of Emotive images or bold and borrowed ideas to open and close their advertisements.
• Use of simple cause and effect sequences such as, how composting feeds worms, who feed the birds and this is Good for them and must be "GOOD FOR YOU!"
• and assertions of ideas such as "It is up to you!"
• The sense of fun in the experience from a student perspective is also eveident as they attempt to include features they experienced in reviewing advertisements eg singing part of a script, and how their reading process is developing with experiences from storytelling and podcasting sneaking in as they find themselves inadvertently inferring and improvising through prediction rather than verbatum use of scripts.

These videos were entirely self produced and I feel indicate an increasing understanding of how advertisements use paritcular features to atttract an audience in order to persuade. Underpinning this is the student voice and their rehearsal of concepts and ideas from beyond the text as they work to organise their ideas as sense making structures. They are I think nice examples of first steps in the use of video as an independent tool to express ideas, and as starting points for evaluation and review as we plan the next steps in our learning.

In supporting the development of this unit, the immersion of the students in a theme,

• involving visitors,
• auditing classroom and staffroom bins,
• asking questions around school about what happens to our "rubbish,"
• discussing and exploring how materials can be reused, the process of recycling materials and the possible consequences of not doing so

have developed a sense of ownership around the work we have developed. The students have begun offering their services to help recycle, if other classes sort their rubbish, delivering it to appropriate places around school during break and lunchtimes.

As a result of a "bin audit" from the staffroom this week, students have suggested the need to create posters that offer advice to staff and other students about how they can improve their 3 Rs. Our completed advertisements have been placed on the VLE to share with our parents at home, though not being able to wait it seems one student arrived yesterday, knowing we were about to make our advertisements with a flash drive, so she could take her group's home to share after school. Another student out ill yesterday, but knowing we were going to be making our advertisements yesterday, used photostory on his home PC and sent the result to me by email. The students have clearly been excited and highly motivated by the projects with the images throughout this post reflecting the level of engagement and fun associated with developing the outcomes. Next week following the excitement of this process we hope to launch our campaign a little wider with a first public airing during assembly.

These videos also present themselves not as an end product but rather potential starting points for future work as reference tools for others as well as ourselves. I was privileged last week to experience some of our secondary students working on OCR Nationals coursework, and in addition to use within the Pimary Phase, have begun wondering how as an all through school, these could be used to promote and support continuity and progression, acting as evaluation tools and starting points for older students to evaluate and develop video based projects of their own. The idea of beginning with the work of other students regardless of age, in order to illustrate processes and identify steps for self improvement and development in the quality of outcome would be fantastic. In an all through environment such as ours it would be a really exciting to involve older students taking on and helping to move forward the work of their younger peers, extending work such as this and developing it for their own benefit, while perhaps sharing and presenting new resources that can further enhance the learning and experiences not only of themselves but other students and the colleagues who are learning alongside them. Perhaps in closing my thoughts truly are running away with themselves... However in recycling these videos the Possibilities do seem truly endless.

Google For Schools

Received an envelope full of glossy goodies from Google this morning, introducing Google For UK Schools. The space includes some interesting project ideas starting points and support materials for using Google Earth and Google Maps involving geotagging as well as search tutorials for students, and presenting some gadgets that may be of particular interest to teachers. I like the idea of the "Fair Trade and Chocolate" project, which seems to me to have some interesting possibilities for using geotagging to help students understand the origins of the foods they eat.

Next term we will be engaging with a geography based topic where we will be trying to integrate work on food and eating. This has set me thinking about how it might be interesting to adapt this to think about the journey of a meal. Perhaps beginning with food labels researching the origins of the ingredients, or even making a visit to the local supermarket, to photograph and note where the fruits and vegetables in our local five a day come from. The countries of origin could be geotagged by students using my quikmaps account, or following table top tasks as part of a shared session, for inclusion in our class blog or year group community pages. Maybe we could add these to our growing interactive school atlas, and be embedded in Tizz's Travels. Well some "food" for thought anyway. There are some interesting possibilities for this idea, and I am sure this would make an interesting starting point, not only for supporting understanding of our "place in space," but could be extended with older students around issues of global responsibility, sustainability and fair trade.

Think.com: Starting Up Your Community Part 1

Think.com is an online collablorative learning tool I have been using with Key Stage 2 Students this year. Sponsored by Oracle, the service is free. Reassuringly and in the interests of safety and security, the service has a lengthy registration process and acceptable use agreement, so the early stages of set up can take some time. This however is far outweighed by the eventual benefits for students.

Registering for the service requires a visit to the website in the first instance, and the submission of school specific details. Once initial processing has taken place the school will be emailed, and your headteacher will be required to confirm agreement with terms and conditions of use in order for the registration process to be completed.

Initial set up of users can be long winded, as there is no bulk processing facility, so student and teacher users must be entered by hand. This is not unusual in setting up new systems, and perhaps this could be handled by administrative staff within the school. Once users are entered as either teachers or students, logins are generated for you by the system. These can then be printed out. I found it useful to copy and paste these from the page and to make seperate files for them, as these cannot be saved or reaccessed inside think. I also created an excel file where the details could be stored and held centrally for reference.

Before giving out logins and allowing student's access it is part of the agreement with oracle that parents, staff and students have read and agreed to the acceptable use statement. It is also part of your agreement with oracle that signed agreements or contracts be maintined on file in school. This is good esaftey practice, and will support the establishment of a catologue of acceptable use statements and digital permissions inline with BECTA guidance. We are seeking to integrate this agreement within our school's acceptable ICT use agreement, and eventually hoping that acceptable use agreements will become part of the enrollment process when new students arrive in school. This will enable a central register to be maintained and updated, perhaps through SIMS, when teachers recieve new class lists each year they will also be able to have a list which shows at a glance, students for whom we have permissions to use cameras and access to the think.com community or our chosen VLE.

I found that the conditions of use statement, was extremely wordy, and not easily accessible by our learning community, so the first term of our school year last year was spent working with students from Y6 to unpick, practically what this document meant. The result was our school's Internet 3 Bees, Internet Safety Charter. This fits snuggly and builds on our school's behaviour policy, The 3 Bees, "Be Responsible, Be Respectful, Be Safe.

At the beginning of each year, in school we revisit our school behaviour guidelines with students, through classroom based activities developed to unpick what good classroom behaviour means and looks like in practice, and from these we create our individualised classroom contracts. Online learning communities require not disimilar practices to be carried out. E safety practices are largely common sense and not that remote from what we expect in physical spaces, we have elements associated with

• Stranger Danger.. eg Protecting our personal information,
• Looking after people's property and things... eg Data Protection, digital permissions.. Respect for Hardware.. Not downloading without permission, Intellectual Property rights
• Showing respect for others.. eg netiquette, good manners, think before you click and so on.

As with the classroom many of these issues overlap, as can be seen by the repetition of certain agreement statements in our acceptable use contract. As with all behaviour contracts their must be sanctions as well as rewards. Within our think community, it was made very clear, that without parental permissions, and student agreement with our contract, they would not be allowed access. As a school we need this year to begin pulling these elements together, and embedding them within our school's good behaviour policy, child protection and anti bullying statements. In order to get us started, I have decided that since we are working on class contracts and community building activities in the first term, and establishing classroom routines, all students in Key Stage 2 should in parallel do the same thing with their think communities. In this way we are starting to establish the links between how we learn and think together in the classroom with the processes of how we learn and think together online.

Think.com as a resource as well as a learning environment, has a collection of ready made lessons and resources to help with the establishment of and understanding of why we need community rules. But communities don't just establish themselves, they are diverse social structures, and so we need to engage with them and nurture them. As a teacher in Think, your role is like that in the classroom, to support the community, help them work together, monitor their activity, and to set up tasks and challenges you would like them to engage in.

I have described building a Think.com page with students as being like using LEGO, each element we want to include is like a brick. If we want to include text we add a text brick, if we want to add a picture gallery we are using media so we need to use a media/image brick, and so on. For basic guidance on using Think a starter comic strip guide is available from our website, or can be directly downloaded by right clicking and saving target as here.

Here are a couple of activities and strategies you might like to start off with.

On your home page:

Set up a welcome message to the students, and establish this as a starting off point on visits to their think spaces.

Underneath your welcome provide simple tasks/activities to do, which change once a week.

• Based on something you are planning to develop over the week in class or in the Online Classroom eg a spelling challenge to find words with the xx sound picture in them, or to set up a page in preparation for the development of a report, Collecting images or maps around a topic they have located on the internet for a particular purpose.
• Based on something you would like them to pursue in preparation for class, This could be a discussion board you set up where students submit story starts, or if you are doing persuasive writing perhaps a debate, where you make a statement, and the students have to respond, giving reasons why they think this, ready for a Big Write. Perhaps include a vote on an aspect of classroom activity from the previous week.
• Something you might like them to do in their think spaces with each other. Perhaps they develop a poem in a writing frame, using a web based resource such as Instant Poetry Frames, which can then be copied and pasted for upload. Students are then required to add a discussion board for others to read and comment, or leave stickies in response.

Perhaps, as has been the case with some of my students, when they get used to this process and way of working, they will begin to suggest things that could be done as community activities in think. I haven't always used think as part of formal curriculum activities, so additional creative little side tasks can be included that encourage students to follow up points of interest.

Community Check In:

I have found it useful to have a community check in, a discussion board on my home page. In class we might do check in as a circle time activity, where we all greet each other, and let each other know how we are feeling, or share something exciting with our friends . In Think I have established a check in board, where students when they log in are encouraged to visit my page and leave a message. This performs a couple of functions.

1. I know who has been on line recently and can visit their pages to see what they have been doing by following the link left behind
2. I can monitor use, eg who is and who is not using the space, and begin to follow up on reasons why, perhaps offering opportunities in class if access to the internet is a problem.
3. I can leave encouraging mesages or offer support and sudggestions about how work might be improved, or on my home page, keep a list of student pages where something exciting has happened and encourage students to visit, for a bit of creative copying.

A Few Starting Points For Students:

Log in and name your home page, choose an avatar or icon to represent you, from the list.

Home Page activities.

Introduce the environment, and how it works a step at a time, using the building brick analogy through focussed practical tasks. here is one example. I used with Y3 and 4

A few of my favourite things,

encourage students to search safely the internet for images of the things which interest them, or represent something special about them. favourite sports, hobbies, colours, foods etc. Save these to the computer,

Model how these are uploaded and labelled in think as a picture gallery.

Write about your favourite things,

Choose one and write an acrostic about how you feel when you touch, see, hear, smell, taste this thing or are doing an activity.

Make a list of your favourite things and rank them in order of preference.

Put up a vote showing your favourite things, and invite people from your class community to choose the things they like from your list.

Be an Expert Hotseat. Put up a question board and invite other students to come and ask questions about your favourite things or interests.

Leave a sticky which says something complementary about a friends page, (this could be progressively developed to encourage students to become involved in a nod and a wish. as they develop self assessment and review)

The possibilities for transferring classroom type collaborative tasks to Think are enormous and I think incredibly exciting. Some of the activities above may seem formal to some and not that disimilar to what we would do in the classroom, and this is intentionally so, as all communities have to start somewhere. many of our classrooms are more formal in September than they are in July, and this is because we work with our students to establish boundaries, expectations and routines. Working on line is no different, what we need to make a classroom community work is the same as we need to make an online community work. The only limiting factors in using think are our imaginations and creativity. Oh and persuading others that it does not need to mean extra work of course. I hope above that I have helped to allay some of these fears and concerns, by hopefully showing how the above activities have a less = more type of feel. I would very likely be doing something similar in class, but within these tasks I will seek to emphasise the e safety aspects, no where will we be using our names or personal details, only references to preferences, we will be asserting the positive initially, consolidating ownership and a sense of belonging, all of which will be familiar to colleagues from the early days of any classroom year.

As a school working together in Think for the first term, this I could be beneficial on a number of levels.

• Firstly all students and all staff in Key Stage 2 will be working on similar things, which will ease access to provide support and guidance.
• It gives me a chance to begin promoting the use of Think spaces as vehicles to embed classroom learning activities as integral to our curriculum, while acting as a whole school opportunity to begin thinking together and sharing ideas we have about how technologies like this might be used to begin changing views on ICT as learning tools.
• It will also hopefully act as a catalyst to thinking about what we want from a VLE, and how we will integrate these into school life.

On a whole school level, we will be introducing revised esafety and acceptable use policies and agreements not only with students and carers, but also with staff. This will therefore mean the natural use of an assembly around esafety as part of a wider school community focus on why we have rules and routines.

Possible Futures, Plausible Pasts

What Is That? I don't look like that! I like the way you look your Liverpool kit. I'm going to be a superhero when I grow up, and fly around rescuing people. Year 2 had a cracking time today playing with the digi blues. We set them the challenge of thinking about what they would like to be when they grow up, and then miming or posing in action positions from their future jobs. The poses were then framed and captured by their friends, and after docking with the docking station were exported as jpeg files to personal folders on their home drive spaces.

Once we had saved the photos, the children were shown how to open them in photofiltre, and then the fun began. We discussed the tools we had been exploring over the last few weeks and which we might choose and use to help dress up our fantasy posed portraits, in the uniforms, costumes or work clothes we would be wearing in the jobs we had chosen to do in the future. Using the spray can tool and altering the nozzle size, the students were able to use the image of themselves to trace and place items of clothing, on their own body shapes. They were also able to think about how they would like to wear things like their hair, whether they thought they would have moustaches or beards and so on. Using cascade saving there is also the possibility of thinking about what they might look like with or without these features and so on. As you can probably imagine to a seven year old adding a moustache raised a few giggles. But one of things that really wowed them, was in posing for the shot, they were able to add things like paint brushes and easels to artists, Insert footballs under their arms or at their feet if they were footballers, or even add a cat to be treated in their arms if a vet.

Having dressed themselves up, they needed to touch up the backgrounds. My favourites today were one student who, having dressed himself as a footballer, painted in the grass, crowd, and a goal, framing himself in the structure, while a second, who said he would like to be a fighter pilot, painted in the cockpit of an aircraft around the lower part of his body, before adding his helmet and flight suit. Then there was our superhero, who having laid out on the ground arms outstretched in the classic flying position, for digital capture, spent a considerable time dressing himself in a suitable attire. It was not so much the image outcomes as the discussion that this task inspired, that I found exciting to be part of, and the thought process that went with imaginatively engaging with their possible futures, and what the tools provided allowed in enabling this process.

Having seen how the students engaged with this activity, I am also now quite excited about how they might react to future use of this process. Some of the students I worked with this morning will be in my class next year, and I am thinking about using a similar process to help them empathise with life in the past. Our first topic in the Autumn Term is on Life in Tudor Times. It might be interesting to use this as an outcome activity having explored some of the royal portraits, and try to recreate the images or scenes, placing themselves posed and central to photographs which can then be edited to include, contemporary dress and cosmetic touches, or having looked at and discussed tudor pastimes and other aspects of tudor life, having the chldren create pastiche type images, where they frame themselves acting out tudor activities, recreating background scenes around them, and using themselves as manikins to dress in traditional clothes. These images could then be used in digital learning stories, or uploaded to support blog entries photostories or podcasts, drawing on tasks developed in the literacy hour.

Thinking Together

I have been asked a number of times recently about Think.com by local colleagues and visitors to these pages, usually questions revolve around how easily students engage with the environment and whether or not they really use the spaces to work with others.

In answering the first question the students do find the environment relatively easy to work with. When modelling how to use the space I have tended to describe it to them as a modular system rather like a construction set. Lets say we want to build a car from LEGO, then we get together a set of bricks with axles, and add wheels, we use transparent bricks to install windows, and other pieces we collect together, we arrange on a base to develop the vehicle, adding modules or bricks as we go rearranging them to gain the effect or shapes that we want to achieve. With think.com we initially have a base, or blank space, and as we want to develop the space we insert modules or widgets to do or hold particular things. If I want to add text, I insert a writing brick, if I want to insert a picture or two I add a picture brick and so on. If I want to rearrange them I use up and down arrows to move them about the page, and likewise if I want to reorganise my pages I can do the same, using up and down arrows to change the order.

I visited our community this afternoon, as I had asked a group of students I am working with on a DT project to set up a new page to record and log the progress of our project to share ideas with each other, and to seek help in collecting materials we might need in order to develop our project when we return from the half term break. I had proposed that the pages could also act as a space to collect together group thoughts about how we might present our project to the judges at the final exhibition day in June. In this example, the student had visited our school website and blog, in order to download images he could use to support his presentation. He has also inserted a hyperlinked list to direct other community members to our project blog, and added a brainstorm/discussion board to his page inviting other students in the community to contribute ideas to his project. Other members of the team have followed suit, and within the discussion boards the group are beginning to share their thoughts. He has also contacted me through think, using email, to ask questions consolidating his thoughts about the project, and offering suggestions about how I could alter and edit the web pages we have uploaded. As an active member of the community, he also takes on additional responsibilities offering support to other students who want to know how to do things when an adult is not online, and acting as a "think buddy," highlighting and pointing out transgressions from our online agreement when visiting other pages. What was touching is how as a year six student he has also kept a Blog, during SATs week that made very interesting reading. Within our community he is not alone in this.

Although we have some students who use their spaces as display boards for favourite footballers, pop stars, wrestlers and the like, this weekend has been a bit of a special time for Bristolians, with the confirmation of a double promotion in the football league, and this has been a stimulus for a change in the upload process, with male students particularly and as young as year 3 suddenly uploading images of the Gas and the Robins with supporting text, and photos from the local newspapers. This is I feel more than justification for providing spaces like this for students, particularly as we have many reluctant recorders, and in order to engage with this environment and the community as a whole, the students must engage textually. Writing about city or rovers, is a start and something which interests them, this space has enabled and facilitated a sharing of interests. Writing for a purpose, identified by them, and for an audience of peers.

As an environment Think has many possibilities, and everytime I visit it I encounter student innovation and creativity. Three of my favourite favourite spaces are a gaming space developed by a year 6 student, an e zine style space constructed by one of our year 6 girls and the agony aunt style spaces built by our school councillors, who regularly update in order to seek opinions through the use of votes and discussion boards. During our end of term review, the year 3 and 4 students who were introduced to the environment for the first time this term, suggested a host of things they would like to develop with their class teachers, such as utilising the space to collect ideas and thoughts for their VCOP work, and the big writes they engage in in class. They suggested publishing research and topic based pages to their think spaces, and unlike many of their older peers who have tended to use Think rather like MSN and My Space, these students were keen to write and publish material about what they were doing in class, have written short poems and uploaded images relating to topic work, before going off to engage with their peers, through interactivities published around the material they had uploaded. This bodes well for future developments and use of the space as an embedded tool for cross curricular ICT development. What needs to happen now however, is full involvement by colleagues to build on the enthusiasm and excitement that the space has generated in their students, to structure the space for their use as a collaborative learning environment. It would be great to see think used regularly within literacy hours, as a starting point for or as final outcome for the presentation of classsroom activities. Watch this space.

Mr Mills I can play the Rosiephone!: Surfing With Year 1

This week's Hot Site from year 1 emerged from a mini theme on Pets. The Canine Gang's learning with pet's fun page. Learning to play the RosiePhone, as Pup Idols, raised whoops and cheers, and lead one child in the Plenary to say "Mr Mills I can play the Rosiephone, its good because you can make it bark and stuff too." In addition this flash based page also allows children to record, though unfortunately not save their compositions. Another favourite was Muffin's Mix Up, where the children could swap body parts to design a puppy, which before printing they had to give a name to.

This site really is fantastic as a resource, and has been very well thought out. All of the activities are obviously embedded in developing understanding of the needs of a dog as a pet, but also have very strong cross curricular links, particularly in the ICT curriculum, not only as an internet resource, but also within strands such as control, using mazes to take your dog for a walk. Input and output through activities such as Pup Idol mentioned above. For older students or as a shared class task another fantastic resource is the doggy database, where inputting information about the type of dog you might like, or engaging with provided scenarios, help support and identify questions we may need to ask when identifying a suitable pet dog for different people. Check it out. Dig deep and stay a while.