PLTS Wall Posters Draft Version 1

Have spent this morning compiling these draft A3 versions of student speak generic PLTS posters.  Wondering if anyone has any thoughts.

Thanks in advance :0)

An Animated Short: From Wrapping Paper to a Digital Greeting

I know, I know, its only the end of November, but as we all know preparing quality work takes time. For the last 3 weeks I have been working with my students in the school's ICT suite to develop graphics for use in their own personalised and Desk Top Published Christmas cards.

The process took the students through

• Wireframing a draft Christmas Motif
• Editing this to create a final coloured design
• Copying and pasting this motif to create repeating patterns (wrapping paper style)
• And finally experimenting with how different background colours and colour sequences in their designs effected the seasonal appeal of their image.

My favourite file name has got to be "complicated," expressing the students view of his work, as he included 2 colours in his background pattern and developed a similar process in recolouring sequentially the Christmas trees on his paper. Mathematically the task provided opportunities to use flip and rotate tools in MS Paint, enabling exploration of ideas around translation, rotation as well as line symmetry. Linking patterning to these ideas also provided challenges around rule making, and requiring visual prediction skills, and editing to ensure all spaces within the design followed the rules we had decided upon for our patterns.

This week most of the students have chosen their "favourite" wrapping paper design and used design wizards in MS Publisher to create their card, including this design on the front, and some including the smaller design motif elsewhere, personalising the greeting. They are very attractive as outcomes and even the simpest of designs, when repeated have produced some really intricate outcomes.

One of my students, building on our units of work last year, has developed a real interest in using Pivot Stick Animator to tell short visual stories. It's been a bit chilly this week and during lunchtimes he has been working away on this.



Very imaginative and creative yet somehow "Pythonesque" or "game like," he extended his use of the wrapping paper design to form a background and structure for his story including characters, who navigate a maze of santa's sleighs, falling between gaps, or limboing under others, transforming as they move shapes from one sleigh to another. This has inspired some thought about how easily we could extend this project to use images we have already developed to create digital online christmas cards.

To make this movie

• The pivot animation file was saved as a .gif file
• The gif was imported to MS MovieMaker along with a suitable sound track.
• The gif was dragged to the timeline and sound track added
• After some editing in MovieMaker to get the look and feel right, the completed movie was then exported as a video file in .wmv format.

I have posted previously about this and you can read about it by following this link. The completed movie can now be played standalone in a Media Player, or could even be uploaded to somewhere like Google Video for hosting and inclusion in a blog or school website like I have done with J's permission here. So J and I will begin the festivities here early and with no apologies by wishing you all a very Merry Digital Christmas.

Amazing Grace: It'll Be Alright on the Night

We have been preparing material for our celebration assembly for parents. This has included compiling from our collection of photographs; a series of video montages. The tool of chioice for this has been Microsoft Photostory a flexible and easy to use tool, that I have used many times with students to compile for web display, graphic work carried out in class based ICT sessions.

Today a suggestion was made by the students that we use some of the images form our story telling sessions about Grace Darling to form a backdrop to part of the show. I instead asked a group of students to help me script a voice over, and had a student volunteer to record it in Podcast Voice with a partner. The following is their outcome.



The students who finally recorded and presented the story, did a cracking job as you can see and hear, but today, as with their other written forms, were encouraged to save some of their errors and bloopers. Clips from the cutting room floor are often used in shows such as "It'll be alright on the night" and "bloopers" are also often selected from movies in the making for inclusion on DVDs. They humorously show how even the most professional of us can sometimes get things wrong.

Today was a real treat when the students shared not only their "finished" product, but also their "blooper Clips." It seems that our narrator had a particular problem with one of the worms... words, eventually giving up on it to use another she felt was less of a tongue twister. It takes an amazing amount of self confidence to share these kind of mistakes, and is a sign of the maturity and self assurance that this group is developing through the use of Multimodal tools such as this. They are definitely moving beyond the self concious and developing a greater audience awareness. The safety they felt as "broadcasters" today was also evident in their willingness to share discuss and laugh along with their friends at the difficulties they had encountered and demonstrating how they had revised and edited, rerecorded tracks to produce the outcome they were seeking. A huge well done, thanks and tumultuous applause to both R and T for a job well done.

In sharing this story with you, we would like to acknowledge and thank the developers of the RNLI's "shorething" website, The Grace Darling Museum and the makers of the "Grace Darling" Flash Story, from where the images we used were downloaded and screen captured. We hope you enjoy our Story.

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.

Making a Molehill Out Of A Mountain: Ramblings and Reflections

Explaining how I plan or visualise the learning routes I design for my students has often been a headache for me, since I haven't found a visual model to help me explain. The IKEA man image I presented in a previous post, although describing my behaviour during the planning process, somehow didn't really explain how I see this process in my head. In order not to make a mountain out of a molehill, I have made a molehill out of a mountain instead, and in this post wanted to share a visual model I am currently working on with my students to help break the processes we engage with into steps while supporting us in working towards the outcomes I want to achieve. I would like to thank Di Pardoe for the idea behind this image, and for the inspirational work she did with us around assessment for learning practices, in recent years.

I mentioned in my IKEA Man post how concerned I was becoming that when we look at planning frameworks, particularly like those presented in the QCA schemes of work, we tend not to look at the end product first, or the outcome we want to achieve. A learning focus often taking a back seat to the need to deliver. This may seem strange to some of us, plans are essentially linear after all, we move from point a to point b and then we can do c. Our plans might be, but classroom learning as a long conversation, provides many first hand experiences of how when engaging with students, the assumptions we make during planning, can quickly become unravelled, leading to more complex situations and requirements than we intended or expected. Recent events have required my reflection on this and to find a way of formalising visually, the processes I want to engage with in supporting student learning and to guide classroom visitors and myself toward seeing where we are now and how this has been achieved, modelling how the small tasks and activities in our learning process are leading towards desired and intended outcomes. I still feel it is important that we and the students see the big picture, to ensure understanding of how the steps or processes that evolve link to the way we are approaching these goals, and using the Maths Mountain above is enabling me to begin fulfilling many of these needs. It enables students to participate in the journey we have taken so far and to see where we are to go next as we traverse our topic. On the top of the mountain goes the big objective, or target outcome for the week, and at stages or stopping off points up the mountain the smaller objectives to be achieved are displayed. We have a character who climbs the mountain with us as the week progresses, and during our plenaries we review the sessions and make decisions using traffic lights about whether we can move on up the path. In our final sessions we engage with a problem or a puzzle involving the steps we have developed to review where we are. This simple visual device is helping me to improve the transparency of the processes we engage in, and currently flexible enough to allow small diversions, while focusing my attention and guiding my conversation toward the intended outcomes of each session, allowing at a glance for feedforward and feedback around the steps in our journey and the possibility of insight for students and visitors to where we will be going next.

After attending the Year 3 numeracy sessions held in Bristol today I have been considering how this tool might also support another issue, that of evidence of learning. The practical nature of the teaching and learning processes shared and outlined today by our colleagues, and the emphasis on talk as a process I have over time come to recognise as "thinking together" is in stark contrast with school based requirements to have children record all outcomes. I was interested to hear the question "Why are we doing this? raised, is it for the students, for their parents, for the inspector or maths coordinator? One suggestion made to free us from this concern was that we list the things students had done in a word processor and to copy and paste these to create cut outs that could be stuck into student's books at the end of the week, or to perhaps capture photographs of students engaged in practical work and discussion to be added. This essentially might turn the student's maths book into a learning log, where some pages have student recording, while others outlined learning outcomes or showed images of learning in the first instance generated by the teacher. This fascinates me since it parallels much of the work I have been doing for my Degree on "Narratives of Learning." As a result this evening I am toying with the idea of producing in a smaller format the maths mountain for students to use with our existing green for go and pink for think colour coding system, so they can use the I can statements included in our class mountain, to share with each other their personal progress towards the class targets set, perhaps helping to take ownership of the learning we engage in. Perhaps at significant stages in the process, during plenaries or as part of a morning task the students might be encouraged to highlight or later annotate these with sentences about their work, putting the vocabulary they are engaging with into practice, or illustrating the mountain with examples of what we have been learning. Perhaps the addition of a problem or puzzle to be worked together, could also be used to provide additional evidence of their ability to use and apply the skills and experiences gained during their practical work. I was really drawn to the power of the idea of encouraging children to express themselves, what they have gained from a set of practical activities, rather than forcing an activity merely to model it for an often remote audience. As professionals, the idea of our plans as records of learning, even though as an assessment support teacher I used to advocate this, somehow right now doesn't seem to cut the mustard in some circles, and so this for me right now is certainly worth further consideration. I would be grateful for any comments that might support this idea.

(Having just reread this I have amended the title, it is a bit of a ramble, perhaps I should have called it High on a Hill stood a ... it seemed to make sense at the time Ed.)