Can I be your friend? ENO Video Trailer

Recently we ran some e safety workshops for students in Key Stages 1 and 2.  This was followed by a MAL for colleagues raising awareness about the wider issues surrounding online lifestyles and Social networking,

One very telling thing was how many of us may think we are immune to the apparent naivety and youthful playfulness if our cares...  The following video a trailer for "Two Boys" by the English National Opera, entitled "Will you be my friend?" raised a few eyebrows when shown.  It is incredibly thought provoking, especially in terms of the normalisation of how we  behave online, the language of social networking and how this is translated if transferred to the real world.  Just pondering how this might translate into a series of activities to use in school, with our older students.

I have no doubt the actions of the character would be greeted as beyond weird and creepy by many of them, though as an exercise in facing the reality of online behaviours it would be interesting to see reactions if the abstracted and remote world of networking socially could be allowed to seep into the real world for a short burst of time.

A creative and cringeworthy moment of ICT Inspiration and 3 minutes well spent...      

E Safety: How to choose a strong password

Great video from Sophos Labs and a very Enthusiastic sounding fella Graham Clulely. How to choose a strong Password. Thinking this might be a nice tool to support discussion during our introductory Phase Three sessions.

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.

Preparing to Work Online With Honeycomb

This term I have been working with my students to revise and review how we use some of the communications tools we have previously engaged with while waiting for the return of all their e safety agreements to begin work with a new, and very cool tool Honeycomb.

I first saw and played with this environment during the pilot stages following preview release at BETT in January 08, and was excited by the potential it seemed to afford for online collaborative and home school learning activity. This week most esafety agreements returned I was finally able to get most of my class logged in for the first time.

In the build up to this session we have spent time working on the web, practicing the skills we need to find, collect and store materials for use while working in Honeycomb. This has been done by working in local applications to consolidate skills that would be useful when agreements were returned.

To begin we spent some time exploring and working together on the Simpson's Movie website. Here the students designed and saved "avatars" that they could use as online representations of themselves. We also resized and cropped these to make smaller "icons" that we could use alongside our work on the class blog or perhaps to represent our work later in wiki pages developed within the Honeycomb environment. This has been part of an ongoing process of introducing the importance of keeping our online identity safe. We have considered and discussed how, if we can use images like this to represent ourselves can we be absolutely sure of who we are talking to online. Introducing the concept of how "stranger danger" in the online world might be dealt with as we do in the "real world," through seeking advice and help from an adult we trust, has been a key teaching and learning point for these activities. It was interesting to see how many students tried to create avatars, that were charicatures of themselves but a really great device to further consolidate the main e saftey teaching point of this process was when some student avatars outrageously moved away from the physical person they really were.

In addition to this, we also began modelling the process of collecting visual material to support topics and themes we were working on in class. This included beginning to make with the students local network image banks or share folders from photographs the students had captured on visits or downloaded from the web. We initially used these in local applications through the file insert process. This was intended to prepare the children for the collect and store process needed in learning how to upload images to publish to their Honeycomb pages. To practice and familiarise them with the browse to find, and browse to upload process, we used local applications with which they were familiar such as 2 create and 2create a story, developing multimedia texts around for example our visit to the SS Great Britain. In order to develop these the students were required to download images from cameras and the web first and then to use the browse and insert process to include their images in their documents.

What I am already loving about Honeycomb is that despite its ease of use, it does not wash down the process of getting material onto the web. In order to get an image into a page it must first of all be imported or uploaded to the webspace. As with most current online spaces images cannot simply be copied and pasted, as with local tools, and this is something I feel is really important for students to understand. To get an image from a web page to Honeycomb it must first be downloaded and then uploaded. This provides a very physical opportunity to introduce students to a key esafety aspect, that of intellectual property rights. It is all too easy when using local tools to simply copy and then paste images from the web. I hope the process of using Honeycomb will provide an opportunity to discuss and help students understand the importance of saying thank you, acknowledging the person/people or place that has provided any materials we use. This is still to come, in the course of our work but is key reason I hope the environment's developers, softease, do not seek a route that would make image inclusion possible simply by copy and paste. The principle of "collect, store, prepare and share," on which the above is based, is also key to the elearning projects to be developed using Asus Ees as generic tools and web books over the coming year.

This weeks session was intended to be simply introducing how to log in, log out and to set up our first page. Our preparatory work carried out using local applications and previous work on blogging has proven incredibly useful in enabling the students to work with the tool. Here is one example created by a student who currently has no internet access at home. This was her first attempt at using an online authoring environment beyond the class blog where importing images had been largely supported.


During this first paired 45 minute session J managed to log in, create a new page, customise the background, upload and insert her avatar, give her home page a title, spending some time playing with font style, size and format as well as browsing the available image bank to include a few images a short piece of body text asking her friends what they think about her avatar? The students have begun to make suggestions about how they would like to use the tool beyond school to support home learning tasks, something I hoped would begin to emerge later as they worked with the environment but that is extremely encouraging in terms of supporting development of future home/school e learning projects.

I began today visiting pages and leaving comments on student pages only to discover that I been pipped to the post, discovering on my page a nugget that had been left already. Thanks J:o) I'm quite fond of my avatar too!


There are one or two things that I personally still need to sort out and explore. Think.com allowed access to review work published by students in one page, and when blogging we can use RSS feeds to pull together material for review to one space, to monitor engagement or to remove/flag for follow up. A message today from a colleague reminded me that this was something to be further investigated and a potential management issue within Honeycomb. Maybe we have missed a tool that will enable this to happen, but nonetheless is something to explore further if I intend to use the tool with students beyond the school day. Currently I have set the environment so that children can only publish and comment within their year group, which hopefully will make this manageable, but also begun to extend previous online experiences by asking that students leave a comment on my pages when they have published, so I and other children can see, share and check out what they have been working on.

The students were certainly fired up by the tool and I hope we can maintain this level of motivation. This is potentially the start of an exciting experience, one that I hope will allow me to develop further the online pedagogies I began using in Think.com, I also hope that the students will begin to use the tool to extend their classroom learning experiences as it is perhaps linked to activities set for home learning within our upcoming elearning project and as we move towards the opening of our new school in the spring term. I look forward to any comments. :o)

Blogger Navbar and Esafety

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Blogger Templates: Remove the NavBar

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One of the biggest concerns I have had and read about in using blogger with students is the what "might" be returned when/if they press the next blog button on the blogger nav bar. I was prompted to think about this again today through a message from Doug Dickinson.

We have no control over what blogs or blog content is returned from pressing the next blog button. So I wondered today if their was a way to remove this from the page as it is diplayed, and found this blog post from "Blogger Templates." Following their guidelines I managed to insert the code given at the location suggested in the blog template and hey what do you know, no nav bar...

I have inserted this code in the podcast challenge blog I have been setting up, however, it is important that in using a blogger blog to drive this space we acknowledge this. Hopefully in prominently displaying a blogger Logo and backlink at the head of the blog's widget column this will be achieved satisfactoraly. Perhaps I should also state the reasons I have chosen to remove the nav bar. Any thoughts?

Video, Hyperlinking and Quikmaps!

Having spent a good part of last week playing with Quikmaps, and getting really excited by the possibilities that attaching photographs to place marks provided, I have been pondering on a comment left by Tom, around tagging other media to place marks, and how this might be used with my class. As he suggested, If we can use html tags to embed images from the web to place marks, can we use similar methods to embed other media types, and have them play inside the place mark too? This left me however with additional questions, what if this were not possible, how could we then provide a link to these resources, so they could be used, either as part of a presentation or as part of a data logging or "collect store and share," process. I am concerned that tools such as this do not get used simply because we can, but that the tools we choose to use should match the context of their use and support the generation and development of meaningful and purposeful outcomes. As I began to think my way round this I was also reminded of the E Safety issues we must consider when preparing and developing material for a project such as this. Because of the use of geolocation technologies, we need to ensure that we evaluate material with students to minimise personal reference and risks to identification. These are however considerations that we should all bear in mind as good practice when developing digital content with and for students, as central to their E Safety Education. In preparing digital media work, and reviewing material for publication, we need to bear in mind our school's e safety and digital permissions guidelines.

So this was my starting point. How could and why should I use video with quikmaps? What tools might I use to develop the video in the first place? What purpose might developing this resource or asset have? The notion of asset or resource development is I think a key one in how we view this tool and its role in the teaching and learning process. So where to go!

Contextualising this Asset

Our School is undergoing enormous changes at the moment with the development and construction of a new through campus, of which we will become part. In less than a year the school we now attend will be gone, and the landscape which the students are so familiar changed completely. A great context then for using video assets with students linked to Quikmaps might be to create a living History Archive.

Tools for the job!

I have used MS PhotoStory and Movie Maker a number of times with students at school to present and edit digital work, and with my class early in the year as part of a vodcast experiment. I have been really impressed with how quickly they are able compile and create projects from scratch with this tool, adding sound as a musical background or through direct recording of voiceovers for individual images. In contextualising this idea I am revisiting an idea from an earlier post regarding little patches of ground. As I said above the footprint our school currently leaves in its landscape is about to become a memory or shadow with the development of the new school campus, and its demolition, but this is a place has been a large part of our student's and community's lives for the past 50 years, so how do we preserve the legacy, while moving on?

Using PhotoStory to create a video

Using digital cameras the students might be asked to identify a place or memory from within the school grounds or locality that is special to them, that they would like to preserve or to change, and to capture 2 or 3 images which sum up the essence of their connection to that place, or sum up their reasons for choosing it. Returning to class they would import their images to Photostory, and begin drafting and or rehearsing their script, recording voiceovers to support their "voicethread." On completion the photostory would be exported to video, for upload to a web host.

Uploading Video to the Web

At the moment Quikmaps does not support independently hosted video, and my LA like most does not allow "YouTube" files through the firewall, for the time being anyway, they do seem to allow "Google Video" so for the sake of this project, I will upload my student video clips to "google video" marking them as unlisted educational files.

Once the videos are uploaded to Google, clicking on the file hyperlink takes me to a page where I can view the video file in its new google video format.

• To the right of this screen is a link button to "email-embed html,"
  
• Pressing this button offers the chance to get the "embed code" for the video file.
  
• Click the "embed html" hyperlink to retrieve the code
  
• Highlight and copy it.

Adding The Video Clip to a Quikmap Place Marker

I need to create my map as outlined in Imaging our Learning Journey and add our place markers. Once this has been done:

• I Click on the pin I wish to associate my video clip with
  
• Add a heading text or annotation for the clip.
  
• Copy my "embed code" from Google Video
  
• Return to my quikmaps window or tab
• Right click in the place mark bubble and paste the embed code
  
• Repeat this for each pin, and then save the map.
  

Viewing my Map with Video

Returning to the My Maps page, I can press the view larger image hyperlink, perhaps expanding the view to full screen.

Clicking on the placemarker pins, now not only opens a bubble, but one which contains a "Google Video" player, where I can watch the clip, attached to the context where it was shot, or with which it has an affiliation. (See the image at the beginning of this post)

This "Mashup" can now also be embedded itself into a blog, a website, or maybe even a wiki, by copying and pasting the code given in the "this map in my website" link.

Adding Hyperlinks

In addition to video from Google, embedding images from the web as described here, hyperlinks can also be added to place markers using html. So even if the resource or asset cannot be embedded in the place marker directly, then readers can be redirected to it. Inserting the following piece of code to a place marker where

• Red = the tags embed the hyperlink
  
• Blue text should be substituted with the web address/url/location of the resource on the web
  
• Black text should be substituted to create the text in the placemark that describes the place being linked to.

Appologies for the blurriness and pixcelation in this image, will try to fix it later... The tag in place should look something like this.

Linking in this way makes reference to a place on the web, where content you cannot associate directly with the place marker can be found, eg a podcast, a website, or a wiki age/project. If associated with a media file, this would also enable direct download perhaps to the browser, to be saved to the user's computer, or with permission from the user, enable it to be opened in an appropriate application, eg a sound or video file in Media Player. If you wanted to use a file saved to an independent host site then this would be a possible solution to achieving this without using Google.

Born to Ponder

I wonder how many similar contexts for this asset could be conjured up. Some that stand out at the moment are

Recording, logging and tagging a field trip,

Logging experiences on a school journey. A Geoblog!?*

Thinking of Joe Dale and the use of digital media to support MFL, I was wondering whether there might be opportunities to use this tool to support development of MFL assets. Maybe drawing on the student's locality and experiences, to log familiar locations with images and adding/developing commentary in languages as well as English, to develop virtual tour guides, and tools for younger students.

Playing with my Voki: EULAs and E Safety

I am busily preparing an esafety assembly, a reminder about our Internet 3 Bees for tomorrow. As I was downloading images to share, as starting points around some of the sites I know my students use regularly I suddenly thought how useful it would be to show a EULA or part of one anyway, one of those documents that appear online when we register for a service that highlight our responsibilities as users. If you are like me I frequently flick through, these clicking the accept button, but since exploring web 2.0 spaces and how they might be used, and in the light of e safety concerns, I have been increasingly drawn to read through some of these, focussing as a primary teacher on the "age limitations" presented by those offering the service.

Tomorrow in revisiting our Internet 3 bees, I now feel that I need to draw these documents to the attention of colleagues and students alike, inorder model the need to involve parents when they want to engage in online activities and before entering into any online agreements. This is particualrly important for us in light of the fact that we use Think.com which has a rather lengthy EULA, that constitutes a contract between school and Oracle. It is easy to bypass these, in the midst of excitement about the potential of online tools but when visiting the Voki site this evening, I was reminded that the age limit placed in their site EULA is 13. This is also the case for sites such as MSN, Google and social networking sites but the wordy legalise of EULAs means they are not easily accessible and students and parents may not be aware of the responsibilities they have, or choose not to engage with them. Even though it would be a shame for such potentially powerful tools not to be used, in the primary sector it is really important that we are aware of these, and that because of this any use of such tools, be developed with and through parental partnership, or class based accounts, inorder that we comply with the EULAs presented.

Anyway having been the Mr Grumpy, I agreed to the EULA at Voki, (being just a little older than 13) and have had a play this evening adding part of one of our class podcasts as a backing track. I think it would be great to have a class designed character, who would be able to appear on our blog to share what we have been doing, or to celebrate in a different student's voice a particularly fine piece of work, or in a piece of news. Using Podium the track can be recorded very easily, and exported as an MP3, I am thinking it would be great to upload this file together as a class alongside their blog entry, and share with their parents.



Get a Voki now!

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.

Structuring Web Use With Students

Our year 1 students are currently working with me in our Online Classroom to explore the internet. I may appear a bit of a party pooper in saying this, but there are key skills and concepts to learn even for these younger students, and a host of potential e safety issues surrounding suitability of websites, and how we manage access to those sites we want them to work with. My experience tells me how children click off a site when they are bored and wander off. In my early days within my current role, students would ask if they were going to play on the internet today. When given access to the web during freetime at the end of a unit of work, they would gravitate towards a handful of very limited sites, such as cbeebies, paperdolls or in the case of the older students they would try to access or search for gaming sites, frequently blocked by the LA firewall. There are some questions around the wisdom of generically blocking websites, but for the time being , perhaps this is an essential prerequisite step, in the protection of all, though as anyone with any web surfing experience can tell you you cannot bolt down the system completely, and often the most unlikely keywords within search requests can return some dodgy (a very technical word) search outcomes, some of these which may not be readily evident on the surface or until pages are reviewed, or regardless of the relevance to the subject you set out to find.

With very young children it can be difficult to limit and provide "Safe Opportunities" to explore, and at times a chore to set up the Network room or Computer so that they all have the same web sites in front of them as starting points for the session. We do however need to emphasise the role of the internet as a learning resource, as well as a place to have fun and play. And I particularly want to emphasise the role of the teacher, as with all ICT based activities, in planning and preparing these experiences.

It was interesting in my student interviews recently when asked about the ICT experiences they enjoy, how students openly said they had enjoyed using the internet with me, but were disappointed that they didn't "play" their anymore. I took this as a backhanded compliment, when they went on to say that the sites they had visited with me were fun, and had helped them to learn about what they could use the internet for, and helped them find out things. The older students loved for example using think.com, because they had made their own web pages, it was a bit like MSN because they could sticky their friends and send email and the other social webspaces they had used at home, because they had used stuff they had found out or collected on their pages. They also mentioned how they had enjoyed making PowerPoints that were like the CDs they had played with. The Three Bees had helped them to think about what they were doing. So even though not free play or free searching, structured learning and fun were not exclusive, just different to prior experiences. It is possible by selecting the sites we wish our students to use carefully we can enable a balance between what is considered play and what is the purpose of the internet in school to support cross curricular "work"and the specific teaching of ICT skills. How do we manage this process however requires time and careful consideration of the resources we select and use. My strategy for this has been to use web technology itself to support me.

There are a number of possible strategies, some more difficult to manage than others, and dependent on the age and experience of the students, but all involve careful preparation for the sessions by teachers or other adults and the collection of bookmarks. For this post I offer 2 ways of doing this one, an individual teacher solution through the making of simple web pages to provide direct links to the pages you want the students to use, and the second a whole school approach through the inclusion of bookmark collections to your school web site.

Making a Simple Web Page Book Mark Collection with MS Word

For many years I have used Microsoft Word as a platform, to set up simple computer based web pages to support web based work with students. This is not dependent on the abiltity to code pages, and requires only a change in the way you save your pages, the rest draws on your ability to wordprocess an type. It is not as difficult as you may think.... HONESTLY!

You may have noticed how when you type a web site address into a Word document, the software automatically inserts a hyperlink. Some of my colleagues find this an annoyance, but I have learned to see this as a benefit, as this also happens if you copy hyperlinks from the web browser's address box and paste them into Word inputting a space or return afterwatds. You can then insert a picture next to the link or a text description to remind yourself or point older children to what is available on the site when they follow the link, or what you expect them to do when they get there.

Copying further useful links and repeating the process builds up a bookmark collection, around the theme you are working on or as in the case of the year 1 students I am currently working with it would provide links to a range of sites I had chosen for them to explore around the objectives and outcomes I have identified.

Once the list is complete you can use all your wordprocessing skills to bullet the lists if in plain text, add and resize images as reminders, organise and group your links into categorised lists by copy and paste or drag and drop, add headings to the catgories, change the font etc. If you feel adventurous you might even explore using a table on your page to act as a place holding device.

When finished your list you should save the file not as a word document (.doc) but as a web page ('htm, or .html), and in Word this is quite straight forward. You click save as, locate the place you want to save the file, give your file a name, and then in the file type box, where it usually says word document, select web page from the drop down menu, before pressing the save button. You can come back to the file and edit, make additions or remove links by opening it in word later too, and then resave to update the file.

To use the file you have made, find it on your computer, it will have a web page icon, with blue e, if you saved it as a Web Page, it will open in Internet Explorer or your default browser, and clicking links should take you to the pages or sites on the web you have linked to.

Managing use of this file is possible by copying and pasting it to the computer desktop, I have tended in the past to keep a copy of the original safe, and to copy and paste this for students to use, on the desktop of classroom computers. On the network, I place one copy of the file in a shared folder, and then show the students or support staff where to find it, and how to open it.

Using The School WebSite or Learning Platform

On our school website, each year group has a "learning Community Area," and within these community pages a collection of web links which we are building to support theme based work. Our school website has been set as the home page for all browsers within school, so when we log onto the internet, the first page we see is our school home page. My aim is that all students and staff see this as a starting point for school based internet work, and something they can contribute to. As we educate our students about the internet as a virtual place, I hope we can enable a progressively more open approach to the web as a learning tool. Our site does not prevent web searching, and indeed in the lower corner of the page a Google search tool is embedded, however this has been set to safe search, and as I know this may not always return "suitable sites," we have recently installed Hector The Protector, and I have actively encouraged students to either hide or turn off monitors and then point out pages they are uncertain about. I have also set up an account for staff with del.icio.us the social bookmarking site, and intend this as a central place where teachers can add web sites they find useful and reviewed, or want to use with their students. From here as the webmaster for our school site, I will eventually be able to use these bookmarks to make additions to the school's resource bank and year group community pages, on a regular basis.

Returning To Year 1

Our Internet work with year 1 has been linked to classroom based activities, but centred around the principles of what the internet is, what we can see there, how we get around and the things we can do. We have also focussed on the multimodality of web pages and observation of what happens to the mouse pointer or cursor when we move it around the page, how do we know when we can do things on a web page? How to make our windows bigger, and how we move pages up or down. Where can we find windows that seem to have vanished? The interactive and dynamic elements of pages have been central to the activities we have presented on line, focussing in and using pages which exhibit sound, movement and pictures to have fun with the ideas we are learning about, mixed with the serious stuff of navigating, interacting with and getting things to happen or done. This has also been linked to exploring CD Roms, laying foundations for understanding that information can be stored, saved and used in different formats.

Using the school website as a teaching resource (maybe even a learning platform), to support this learning has been a key feature of the sessions. Children have been taught how to find the places we want them to go, by learning how to find their way around this place. They open up Internet Explorer, and our home page appears. Where is their community Section? Where Is our class Blog? What have we been doing in class? Where can we find the weblinks section? Using these as places to explore the web concepts we wish to develop, in a guided yet exploratory way. I am not just saying this but the children have had a lot of fun exploring the sites we have provided for them, and this evidenced by them beginning to visit sites from their community pages in independent classroom work.

Notes To Self

One of the things I have learned form this experience is that perhaps the early years communities I have set up do need some editing and review, and we may need to include some pictorial/iconic buttons to support emergent web and oral text literacy. I will however not remove the text based links, as the expectation to use these has challenged the student's use of phonic cues to find them, or to seek help from adults to enable this, and this in turn is a valuable experience for them in their desire to engage with the material and understanding that words carry meanings. Perhaps the use of picture buttons, in the early years alongside Text based hyperlinks, might support pace in the use of the community pages when locating specific areas we want them to use, nonetheless once there they will still need to locate resources. Perhaps the use of Theme based images would help support identifying what each section of the links page was about, and make narrowing down the search zone easier for them. Will have to look into this with the children during the assess and review week for this unit.

Think.com a practical place to engage with E Safety

Began that E Mail Unit with Year 3, but have decided to take a slightly different tack. I have opted to adopt the Think.com Environment as a place to work as an online community and a place to practice e safe procedures. My decision has been supported through Surveys carried out with Students using tools within the environment itself and data collected in recent interviews with students, which in part regarded their online activities outside of school, and their uses of mobile technologies.

Of 103 students surveyed, 80% across Key Stage 2, from year 3 to 6 have their own Mobile Phones, and more than 70%, have access to the internet most via Broadband from home. From conversations I have had, many of those using the internet regularly, also have MSN or Social Web Space accounts, and several of the Boys in upper KS2 are regular players as members of Multiplayer Gaming Commmunities. Surprising to me however, were the students in Upper Key Stage One, who said they had Mobile Phones, some of which they had received for Christmas, and one of whom mentioned using MSN (hopefully under supervision!). I also had a conversation last week with one of our parents, who felt able to discuss with me some of the issues they had already needed to address with their eldest child, and who expressed how pleased they were that we were seeking to engage with the issues surrounding online safety and behaviour, so actively with our younger cares.

Our School Contract and Code is known as the Three Bees. And within this contract children are encouraged to

Be Responsible
Be Respectful
Be Safe

Within this framework, classroom based contracts are negotiated at the beginning of every year as classroom communities are established Through PSHE or SEAL sessions, what these mean to us as members of the community, ideas about what they look like in practice are also developed and consolidated through practical activities as we seek to establish commonly understood guidelines and codes of behaviour. It is my desire that within this framework we ultimately develop and embed our e safty work.

Within ICT sessions earlier in the year I engaged older students in helping me to write an Internet 3 Bees Student Charter building on the familiar and established framework we already had for classroom communities. It is important that our students recognise and are able to transfer skills and approaches from their everyday experiences to their online or technologically mediated activities, and I feel that this requires experience, and engagement in supported online activities.

To support this process I have opted to use the Think.com environment within taught ICT sessions, focussing on email and other aspects of online communication, from Year 3 to Year 6. Within our Scheme of Work, I hope to tie use of this environment to our PSHE and SEAL curriculum, as a place to practically engage with our E saftey guidelines, but the environment offers so much more, as a cross curricular tool to encourage collaborative work and thinking together. As we move towards the introduction of VLEs, we need to be careful that we do not see these solely as homework repositories, but that we see them as vehicles to support and diversify our views of learning with ICT and not just delivery systems or storage spaces. Hopefully when we do adopt a VLE formally the skills students and teachers develop within think will be transferable to the more formal environment.

Think.com enables students to develop up to 10 pages, where up to 6 page elements, text, multimedia or dynamic can be added on each, using widgets to do this. It also provides each student with an individual student.yourschool @think.com email account. I have just been visiting some of my Year 3 and Year 4 student pages, who after 2 sessions in the suite, as with the older students, are finding little difficulty in using the tools available to them to engage with others, and to add interactivity to their pages. Indeed they are offering support and help to their friends, by sending stickies, inviting them to visit their pages and helping to include things they have done. Using the widget structure their is the potential to engage children in collecting and sharing ideas, collecting data, and uploading and publishing work which can be seen by and commented on by a real audience. To enable this environment to be used for practice, and for school based e safety purposes I have set access options to limit their access to the wider world community, creating a "walled garden" type environment, where they can work, and through monitoring, we can promote the e safety practices which the space is intended from our point of view to promote. This could be altered later, as student experience develops but for the time being we are concerned to use this space for school based online tasks.

Currently I am working on a new E Safety Policy for school, drawing on templates borrowed from the LgFL, (thanks Anthony for this link). Within this the priority for us must be to recognise and acknowledge the diversity of experience our students and colleagues bring with them, and the naivity as well as expertise we have within our communities. A cybecafe mentality is not an appropriate perspective on the use of the Internet. Many of our colleagues may be unaware of the online behaviours of their students, or the potential dangers they face. We need to find ways of making these considerations as transparent as road safety and stranger danger are when we take students on a school visit. E Safety considerations are not a matter for scaremongering, but about using common sense. We have not stopped taking children on school visits, because of the need to carry out risk assessment, but have become more vigilant and considerate of the potential hazards. A common sense approach to developing and supporting children's learning in and around the use of technology is what is required of us, and this in turn requires us to become familiar with these ourselves, and to ensure that our school philosophies and policies reflect the action required to bring this about.