Diwali Resources from iBoard

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i-board Divali resource link update

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The resources created and presented by iBoard are always a treat and delight to use with students. This month's free feature has been no exception. I have had a number blog visitors and colleagues in and around school looking for resources and materials to use in supporting work on Diwali and advised them to check these out. Have fun.

Catapult Chicken And Talking For Reasoning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Cross Curricular Control, BeeBot Games, Home Mades.i Board and Y1

There are a large number of ready made BeeBot Resources available from TTS, these include floormats, sequencing cards and a host of other accesories. We have purchased a number of these to support topic and theme based activity in class, and they go down really well with the students. The Focus on BeeBot Software is something I also recommend strongly, it not only enables on screen work to be developed from floor work with the students, but also has proven really useful, in beginning to enable colleagues to see the value of turtle work as a cross curricular tool. A 30 day trial download of the software can be made from the site above. Included in the package are a number of the floor mats as onscreen mazes, which we have used with the IWB during Numeracy and Literacy Sessions, to promote discussion about the properties of common shapes and to develop phonological awareness. What is also interesting is how the students react to being able to switch views to see the board as the BeeBot sees it. I have recently bought a site licence for this and am looking forward through coaching activities to further developing the use of this tool in Foundation and KS 1 classes.

In addition to the commercially available materials however I have also begun to introduce the idea of using resources we have available already to support BeeBot work in class. Did you know for example that BeeBots like to count. Creating Bus Stop type journeys (as in the Suffolk Empty Number Line Project) for the BeeBot, has enabled group activities to be developed around the use of number lines, and to begin seeing the forward movement of the turtle as addition and the backward movement as subtraction. The BeeBot and Number line have also been used to develop problem solving within the difference model and through for example, our Beebot is thinking of/ is on or at a number, if he counts on, adds, count's back, subtracts X he stops on Y, what number is he thinking of, or where is he? As seen in earlier posts it is also possible to make sequencing and theme based games quite easily, not only as a staff, but also with the students themselves taking an active role in the process.

Estimating, predicting and measuring using non standard units is also a useful mathematical role for the BeeBot, and with our year 1 students I used again the BeeBot Boogie mats we had developed for Y2, but this time to encourage turn taking, social play, prediction and testing within Ma 1. Ma 1 (Using and Applying Mathematics) is central to the New Primary Framework for Mathematics, and the ability to develop concrete visualisation and problem solving strategies, particularly in the context of shape space and measures can be supported through engagement of the students in practical activities supported by this versatile tool. Ideas such as right and left, linear measure, simple fractions, compass direction can all be introduced, or become inherent concepts within activities supported by beebot activity.

At the beginning of this term I used iBoard Purple activities to introduce our overall control unit in Y1, and to conclude we revisited and spent time working with the age specific tools in the iBoard red set, which require a focus on navigating mazes with greater accuracy, and introduce eighths of a turn. It was fascinating to see the students applying floor based work to their onscreen activity, and using taught strategies to think about and identify right and left turns. In other posts I have mentioned the use of gesture, as an indicator, and during these sessions I was really aware of this as evidence of learning, transferring physical whole and part body movements to thoughts about the inputs required to move the mouse, spaceship, bee, and frog about the screen. My Learning Support Assistant and had a great deal of fun engaging with the students with their games, and listening to the cheers, whoops and celebrations, (which attracted some attention from neighbouring classrooms too, OOPS!) Collecting fuel tanks, feeding the hungry frog before his food flew away, and the disappointment when he fell off the lily pads and into the pond were more than visibly evident around the room. If you have no idea what I am talking about, then I strongly recommend you check out the "Which Way, and "Control It" resources in the online trials of the software, which can be found following this link.

iBoard and Control

If anyone is looking for a fantastic resource set, for introducing on screen control to younger students, yr 1 and Reception, checkout the iboard resources from Electronic Blackboard. I used three games today with my year one group, from the iboard purple "control it" set, called Cheese sniffer, pollen hunter and fly catcher. As young and relatively inexperienced computer users, many of this group are still learning mouse control, and developing screen to hand coordination. These games enabled a multi pronged approach. They involved

• Mouse control practice
• Coordinating actions on screen with mouse movements
• Decision making about which directions to send the game characters in,
• Visual problem solving
• Turn Taking

Cheese sniffer is a two person game, involving input, to control either a grey or pink onscreen and furry mouse. The aim, for your mouse to gobble as many pieces of cheese as possible before your partner's does. It uses an onscreen arrow pad, featuring right, left, up and down to input movements. Children take it in turns to input up to 5 moves before their pad fades indicating the next players turn. Whoops, cheers and much giggling was a key feature of the children's engagement and enjoyment of the tasks. As an IWB resource, as we modelled the activity, it was soon highjacked by the children, giving instructions to their friends from the carpet space. Great fun.

Pollen Hunter, expands on cheese sniffer, with again only four directions, but this time is a maze type game for one player at a time. The aim is to control the flight of your bumble bee as it tries to collect pollen from on screen flowers, before he is caught by a hungry bird. What appealed to me about this was the speeds you could choose for the birds flight, described as "gentle," "slow," and "fast."

Fly Catcher is another one person maze type game, but this time with an 8 direction arrow pad. Here we pretend to be a spider sitting in his web. The aim to control the spider and to try to catch and eat as many flies as possible before they fly away.

For spatial language development, these are fantastic resources, for using to consolidate through paired, group or class discussion, terms such as forward, backwards, up, down, right and left, the foundation of any work we want to do using floor turtles for example, but also particularly useful in the early mathematics curriculum. They are also great for encouraging and consolidating the kinds of cooperative and turn taking activities we expect and want to develop when children work in pairs on the computer, such as the use of gesture and talk, rather than taking over the mouse. Great fun as both standalone tools on individual computers and on the electronic whiteboard. As an advocate of a tool box approach to ICT use in teaching and learning, these are just three of an amazing array of cross curricular materials available in the iboard toolkits, but which will definitely be embedded in our scheme of work as it is reviewed.