Seeking To Inspire: Draft Enrichment Projects for Phase 3 and 4

This week I have been working on a first set of project outlines for ourPhase3/4  ICT Enrichment sessions. They are intended to run for two terms, at an hour per week, to sit outside of the formal ICT curriculum, but to enable students to develop and extend their skill base through creative cross curricular activity. I would value any thoughts or feedback especially though not exclusively from colleagues working with students in Key Stages 3 and 4.  Thanks in advance:0)

Project 1  Digital Storytelling: Comic Strips  and Basic Animation:  In these sessions we will use a range of software tools to help us tell onscreen stories.  Pivot Stick Animator, graphic tools and movie making software will be used to create simple animated stories, and later Microsoft Publisher, online comic strip makers and video stories will be used to help us learn how comic strips work to tell stories.   Working on these projects will help you learn how

• to use digital tools to plan sequence and tell stories.  
• talk can be useful in rehearsing, drafting and writing stories,
• Appropriately chosen images can add new depths to the things you want to say, 
• to add callouts and captions to engage our readers with the stories we want to tell.

Project 2: Podcasting, Vlogging and Interactive Presentations:  This will be your chance to use multimedia to explore, share and celebrate with others some of the things that interest us.  We will use Audacity, Photoshop, Soundation, Moviemaker  and Mediator to create and share our own multimedia content to celebrate and share individual areas of interest or expertise. The content you create will either be presented through a web page style presentation created in Mediator, or depending on how things go perhaps even through use of class Wiki Spaces that will allow a wider world audience to get a glimpse.  Key messages and areas of learning to be addressed throughout our work will be e safety and decision we should make around the information we choose to share with others and how we can share it safely.

Project 3  Designing and Creating simple computer games.  During these session we will be exploring and thinking about computer games and how they work.  We will create a small group company, who will use a tool called GameMaker to design, program and create maze or paddle type games that we can share with friends and play on our computers.  There will also be opportunities to use graphic tools to create our own game characters, backgrounds and objects.  Because these games will be your own creations,  we can’t be sure exactly what they will be like.  One thing is for sure though we are bound to have fun, playing with our ideas, and hopefully each other’s completed games online.  To complete the project we will develop an advertising campaign for our new Best Seller, this may mean drawing on skills from earlier projects.

Feedback and review: A chance encounter between WALT, WILF and Google?

Recently with my phase 3 groups I have begun thinking about the self and peer review process as an area for development in my classroom practice.  I know this will be a key process if  students are to take ownership of their learning in ICT. I am also accutely aware of the need to monitor and review this, to collate evidence of oucome and to scaffold and support students as we develop this aspect of classroom work. One of our ongoing plenary activities among classroom discussion has involved using a prepared evaluation grid, that requires students with reference to session WALTs and WILFS  to comment on and set next steps based on learning during the session.  In reviewing these however I have frequently found students commenting on things that were not the "focus" of the session, but that were incidental to and emerged or developed out of the tasks as we worked.  These comments often refered to practical key skills, as opposed to the process skills that often surround session tasks.  Unpicking my WALTS and WILFS alongside these reviews I began to see the need to explicitly identify and review these skills, some of which were assumed and incidental  within the WALT for each session.  This is where my use of Google Forms has begun to take shape.

I have begun to explore and use Group Google Spreadsheets relating to units of work we are involved in and which collate response to I can statements around the activities we are developing.  From these I have also generated multiple choice forms, using radio buttons and a red, amber, green system against which students can begin to evaluate their own  performance.  At the top of the form is a text box where the student enters their name, and at the bottom a further 2 text fields allowing the student to free enter comments on what they feel they have enjoyed or learned that has not been included in the "quiz" and a space to enter a target.  To ensure completion before submission each field has also been marked as a "required field."  Once set up a hyperlink to the Google Form is then added to relevant pages in Class Learning Paths on the VLE.  Students are encouraged to complete the form and then submit it. Submision results, including free text  responses, are automatically added to relevant cells in the Google spreadsheet associated with it. In addition a time and date stamp are provided to show when the form was completed.

The Google Spreadsheet attached to each form has also been conditionally formatted, so that as data arrives from the students the spreadsheet shows me at a glance through colour coding what the student responses have been.  Green colours a cell green, Amber colours a cell amber and so on.  At a glance I can also pick out patterns or areas to develop and revisit,  eg red either still needs to be taught explicitly or is poorly understood, and Amber needs to be revisited to secure, hopefully green can be assumed and consolidated.  Students text responses are sent to the relevant cell in the spreadsheet to for review later. The Spreadsheet file can then either be downloaded and saved in an appropriate file format for editing locally, or can be printed directly from Google for inclusion in the class evience file.

This obviously cannot stand alone, however as a possible ARR tool and part of my evolving APP and AfL process this curently seems potentially powerful to me

• Allowing students at the start of a unit to see where we are going and what we need to learn next term and before the unit begins
• Carried out as a survey before a unit of work commencesperhaps it may be useful in establishing a common starting point for skills based work with the students in particular groups, and supporting differentiation/extension and progression
• Carried out at the mid point working in pairs or with learning buddies alongside works in progress and revisiting at the end of a unit may also allow plotting of progression, support review of ongoing learning targets by the students, and the possibility of using these tools to support teacher student learning conversations. 

 I would be really interested to hear any suggestions or thoughts from colleagues, in both Key Stage 2 and 3 around my reflections and thoughts here.  Thanks in anticpation.

Header Images, Wordle, Wikipaedia and Image Search

Having spent most of this week culling the content of the current Primary Phase website, I began pondering a simple way in which students could be involved in supporting the development of the site theme.  Primary Phase classes are named after birds, and within the learning communities section of our website I want first of all to create a gallery section  for each class that will enable outcomes and processes behind longer projects, ICT tasks and digital works to be displayed, as well as providing spaces that students and colleagues can update themselves.  The intention of the latter is that colleagues and students take greater responsibility and ownership of the content we publish, reducing the expectation that one person maintain the entire space, which has been the historical context.  To this end the galleries for the time being at least will remain as standard web pages, locally developed and then updated by FTP, while each class will be provided with a blog space.  I hope to create an aggregated feed for these allowing updates to be fed to the site's home page.  However the subject of today's post is not this but a simple project I began this week to create class header images.

I began the process with my ICT club on Thursday, as we worked through the collect and store phase of the project.

Step 1 of the project was to collect and store from a Google Image search a number of graphics representing class birds.

Step 2 was to open an instance of Wordle in their web browser and to open a second tab where they accessed Google.  Students were encouraged to choose a class bird from the school list and then to search for information about their chosen bird.

Step 3 and the next phase of the creative process was a copy and paste task, transferring text from the web pages that contained relevant factual information about their bird to the create "text box" in their Wordle tab.

Step 4 involved the create button, and time spent manipulating the resulting word clouds until they liked the outcome they had developed and discussing the appearance.  Why were the words presented in different sizes?  What were the key and most common words?  What did they tell us about our bird?  Within the creation process students could change font and layout, with the only real limitation that the word clouds as a group should have a consistent colour scheme.  ( I have to admit to not being overly successful or persuasive in this matter, so we will have to wait and see how this pans out in the longer term, but such is the creative process and who knows!)

Step 5 Students placed their finished Wordle central to the browser window and rather than saving it, we used the print screen key to copy the browser window and then pasted this to Photofiltre, where we cropped our images and saved them for use later.

Our next step will be the prepare and share phase, involving provision of a blank header frame, and the use of either Photofiltre or Microsoft Paint to combine elements, the class bird we have collected with its Wordle.  Yes I know... Microsoft Paint again... but it is quite interesting what can be achieved with this tool.  Using more than one instance, images can be copied from one and pasted to another containing the template or frame and then resized within their selection boxes and moved around the canvas before deselecting and releasing them to the background.  The above sample in fact was created in just this way. Using Photofiltre the images can be opened and then resized or scaled before copying and pasting for placement in a prepared template of a standard size, for placement in the completed web pages.

To finish the project students will be encouraged to export their finished header images as .jpg files and to upload them to a shared space on the VLE.  From here they can be added to the website's image folder and also added to class pages on the VLE.  Once on the web server and included in class gallery pages they will also have a URL enabling them to be included as header images in class blogs.  Though I am still in two minds about which tool I will finally use with the group to compose the final images, I hope that the students will begin to identify with the website through their creative ownership of static page elements such as the headers, and with the inclusion of these objects and ongoing online activity through blogging in the VLE take a proactive role in developing class ownership of the blog spaces to be provided and also including their designs.

This week I have been mostly playing with Joomla!

Not bad I suppose its only taken 8 months to get back to this. The summer holiday was a busy time for me, one where I set out with every good intention of "getting to grips with Joomla" or at least how it works, unfortunately other deadlines kept me busy too and the project was shelved in the interests of completing my dissertation.

Why Joomla? Well essentially because this platform has been chosen to host, manage and develop our new campus web site. Having spent considerable time managing and establishing our exisiting primary school website as a resource, I was keen to engage with and learn the quirks of this new environment, in order to think about how to integrate this existing space with the projected new.

Joomla is an open source content management system. My personal experiences of building pages for the web have developed through using tools such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to build and organise html pages before uploading work developed on my desktop to the host server by FTP. As such I might still be considered on so many levels a beginner. Joomla is a very different onion and experience for me in that it is a server based solution using a data base, among other less than familiar tools to manage and organise content created within it. I blog, code a bit when I need to, but have never really taken the plunge and dabbled too far behind the scenes so to speak. In beginning this project I therefore had some personal reservations about the experiences I was bringing to the process, how useful they would be and considerable trepidation about the gradient in the learning curve I would need to follow. I was however determined to have go. As with the students we work with I needed to start from the things I know, and a establish a frame to hang my new learning on. This post then represents my think around, and how I have tried to visualise and organise my thoughts comparing previous experiences while trying to relate these ideas to what was happening as I worked on and played with my experimental site and Joomla this week.

A Clean Slate

In beginning the project again I decided to start with a clean slate,

• I deleted my previous installation,
  
• Downloaded xampp afresh and the most recent version of Joomla.
  
• And decided to devote a little more time to watching these tutorial videos than I did last time.
  

Working through the process outlined in the videos,

• I set up the server and data base locally on my laptop :o),
  
• Installed Joomla :0)
  
• And followed the wizard like process to get the space ready to host my site:0).

A Different perspective on a familiar Viewpoint

Following the video tutorials in sequence the next part of the process was to set up sections and categories for the site. I wondered what this was all about initially, and it has taken a while for me to get my head round this.

My previous work developing our school site has been visual, each page built by hand, ocassionally using themes but usually by editing and revising templates and using these to frame and include content.

In essence, Frontpage enabled this process for me by combining the affordances of a Windows Explorer type environment with a wordprocessing like tool. A Folder pane allowing my "local server" or "site" to be managed like a hard drive. I could visualise and then create the folder tree where I wanted to store the files for each section of the site in response to the navigation structure I was physically constructing on my home page. The WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor (the wordprocessing element if you like) allowed me to create the hyperlink and navigation structure for the site on the index page side by side and corresponding to the folder structure for the site. Using familiar drag and drop processes I could also copy, paste, open and save files as when editing or in reorganising the space.

In trying to understand how Joomla works I have been trying to reframe my thoughts within my existing model, this is probably really obvious to everyone else, so forgive me as I say I think I've just about cracked it even if an oversimplified view.

Pages in Joomla managed sites do not exist as pages per se, but are compiled through a data base when a visitor arrives at the site and begins their navigation. Administrator defined categories and sections within the data base, allow this to happen. Approaching site set up I decided to try to visualise these categories as if they were folders in my existing tree. First of all setting up categories, broad groups that match the folders and subfolders I previously created for our existing site, but modifying some for clarity. To allocate articles to the correct pages within these categories, I created sections using first of all the category list I created enabling each broad space to have its own page before adding further sections that correspond to other pages I would like within each section of the site.

Why was this so important? I guess this was the question I was asking myself when I began the project? It all seemed a bit back to front in relation to how I was used to working. I needed a way of seeing. The menu system within Joomla drives the page creation or generation process. To compile "pages," through the data base a menu manager is used to create items by linking these to categories and then sections, (in my minds eye corresponding to a folder and a page). Clicking on a hyperlink leads to a request for the data base to behind the scenes pull all these elements together along with style sheets and such to present the content as a page in a visitor's browser.

Where Next For Me?

The next phase for me if my model works is to begin exploring with colleagues the things they would like the site to include and perhaps what they want from it, setting up formally a space based on categories and sections that arise as a result.

Creating user accounts for colleagues and classes will then enable them to log in and use a WYSIWYG editor similar to those they have used in our existing VLE and blog spaces to write, upload files and contribute directly to the content and maintenance of the site, using the sections and categories defined for them eg year4/class name, to post items to the page allocated to it.

Additional modules can be plugged into the space for example breadcrumb trails and RSS feeds to aid navigation or subscription. The addition of common themes through use of shared style sheets will enable a corporate feel for the campus site to be added providing the whole with a consistent look and theme for pages generated across the space.

What has really excited me as I played this week was the ability to add items such as Windows media video directly to a page, and how with the addition of rss feeds, pages within the site could be allocated to support podcasting, while through the use an aggregator content syndicated across the site could be drawn together as a single feed published on the front page through a latest news module.

I still have a lot of playing and exploring to do and apologise wholeheartedly if what I say here is obvious to some or even overly simplistic. I'm not entirely sure what my feelings are right now about the solution as a whole, it does not provide for all of our needs as I see them. I am still wondering how much of what is provided could be achieved through other platforms such as self hosted blogs with the tweaking of design templates. For me the process has been a useful experience, and one I am sure I will be able to draw on further as we work with and develop use of online learning tools for ourselves.

Asus Activities Session 1

Today we began our first project using our Asus Eees, and opened with a basic skills session. The primary aim of the day was to make sure we could log onto the wireless network, log in to the VLE, and to familiarise ourselves with some of the processes and tools we will use during the development of our Challenge.

Our literacy session today was desktop based and involved talking as readers, using printouts from onscreen resources. In our project this week we do not want the children simply copying and pasting material from the web, but want them to engage with the texts to pick out key ideas. The first thing that struck many of them was the technical vocabulary in a text about weather and climate. The children were encouraged to use highlighting to locate unfamiliar words and phrases that we could discuss as a group. These included words such as cyclone, tropical, monsoon, earthquake and drought. Some of these not only raised discussion around their meanings, but also lead to some interesting discussions around decoding. What was useful here was being able to highlight how in reading these we had encountered problems ourselves in understanding and taking meaning away, what would have happened if we had simply copied and pasted it? This lead to discussions around the seasons, what was meant by tropical and why some regions were called the tropics. We needed a globe to see this and a timeline to help us see when winter, summer and the monsoon seasons happened. The children were intrigued by there not seeming to be a spring or autumn, but rather three seasons from the text we had explored. We will be revisiting and building on this work, as the students begin to use the ideas we explore in literacy sessions this week in their presentation challenge.
Moving on in the next session we began developing and reintroducing some of the ICT skills they will need to use in the challenge. Here we worked through the log in process for using the Wireless network, booting the machines up and using the network tool to locate the connection we had made last week and practicing again the connection process.

Once we were online, the students navigated to the VLE and logged in. The next stage of the activity was to reply to an email that I had prepared for today's session and sent to each of them prior to the task. This contained a very simple message welcoming them to the challenge and asking them to reply with a greeting that would let me know that they had managed to get online. On reciept of this email I returned the compliment by forwarding each a link to the build yourself wild website introduced through Twitter by colleague Doug Dickinson a few weeks ago.

The expectation was that each pair of students would take turns to send their email, log out so their partner could then also reply to my email. In the process praciticing the log in and out process for the VLE. When they logged back in their reply would then be waiting for them.

As well as learning about life in India this term we have been working on a science topic on habitats. The children were encouraged while designing their wild self to think about where their beast would live and to select from the features available to them, those that would help them to survive in their chosen habitat. On completing their creature the children were asked to create a desktop wallpaper at the site and to save this to their computer. Both children in the pair carried out the task, and as a finale, were shown how to and required to upload the activity to our shared space.

This process may seem quite mundane. But if we are going to use this space effectively it is an essential prerequisite that skills such as this become second nature, and if the rest of this week's activities are to be successful the key skills worked on in this session will be central to the work the children do.

During the course of the day we learned how to and consolidated a number of skills and processes that included

• Booting up and shutting down our PC
• Navigating a new User Interface and folder structure
• Connecting to the wireless network
• Opening and familiarising ourselves with a new Browser
• Logging into and navigating our VLE
• Opening and replying to an email
• Downloading and saving an image from a web page to a local drive space
• Browsing to find and then uploading an image to a shared web space

Many of these skills and processes had been engaged with before, through blogging activities and through work in Honeycomb earlier in the year. Processes such as this are easily transferable across platforms, but every environment has its own particular quirks and ways of doing things. It is easy to assume that the students will just know how to do this as a result of previous experience. The students seemed to enjoy learning and revisiting these through this particular activity, they were keen to learn how to do the next thing as they built on each activity in stages. The tasks that follow this week will further build on and consolidate these tasks in other practical contexts.

BECTA Filming, Podium and Oral Storytelling.

This week we were visited by a film crew commissioned by BECTA to document our use of Softease's BETT award winning software tool and podcasting platform Podium. The wider publication of which this is part will include other schools and tools who won awards at this year's BETT show.

I have made much previously of my commitment to using Podium as a platform for developing and supporting literacy across the curriculum, because of the effect I feel it has had as a tool on the confidence of my students as writers and readers for purpose and meaning. This has also taken me on a reflective journey exploring the pedagogical value the tool has added as a

• writing tool
• scaffold for writing
• and supporting frame for performance and evaluation of outcomes.

In the multimodal world that we live in I feel the distinction between what we traditionally call reading and writing is becoming increasingly blurred, as I begin to unpick the relationships between modes of representation used and their potential for supporting and developing other more traditionally text types. Providing a challenge to what these processes look like in everyday practice and use, and increasingly providing a context where text development as a process can be seen as design as well as composition. I decided for the session to be filmed this week that I would draw on and try to pull together some of my thoughts, building on and using the ongoing activities of my students using visual storytelling devices to develop the tasks they would engage with.

On Monday we had just begun phase two of a unit of work around stories from other cultures, which is being iteratively designed as part of our wider theme about life in India It is intended to help our students learn about Hinduism as a major world religion contextualised in its country of origin. This week we were beginning to apply experiences from phase one, where we had spent sessions engaged with talking as readers around a number of Hindu stories, including the Ramayana, and for the day of filming I decided to set up a carousel of experiences using mixed tools to engage the children in a variety of visual and oral storytelling activities.

Activity 1 oral Storytelling with Podium

Prior to this session the students had created story maps and begun thinking through structured talk about how, when they write they could link the passage of their stories together. They had added their opening phrase to the story, eg Long ago and far far away... and begun thinking how their story might end. We had also talked about how in the oral tradition of stories, these frequently change over time, so the original tale may be very different to the one that was told when first written down to become a standard. This had been reflected in the different versions of the Rama and Sita story we had heard.

We have begun to use more widely work from recent CPD sessions to encourage oral storytelling as part of our talk for writing process. "Overlearning" of narratives, seems to help us develop a coherent plot for a story, enabling us to engage with the details of what characters might be doing within scenes that surround the events, and knowing the plot so well we have less incidences of "we don't know what to write." The problem within the wider scheme of things is that oral rehearsal of stories is usually transient and lost. “Evidence of outcome” existing only in the pictures we have drawn, and the long gone spaces between us and our friends. I have been worried for sometime about how I can evidence this to satisfy the observer, and so for this session set up Podium as part of a thought experiment to help.

Within the activity, the children worked in pairs first of all to set up podium to create a paired "podcast." Using the chapter tool, the children were encouraged to split the story they were about to tell into a number of sections coinciding with the stages in their story maps. In terms of writing this probably best equates to the planning of paragraphs or “boxing up” the plot. The story maps contained only limited text, the linking notes the students had made, around specific vocabulary choices they would like to include, and was to be told entirely without written text support.

Before beginning their recordings the children were encouraged to rehearse aloud each step in the story as a separate chapter (oral paragraph). In this way the children could edit each chapter after play back, considering use of author voice and how they might build on this in the next section of the tale.

• Were they happy with their use of expression?
• Was it interesting to listen to?
• How could they improve this?
• What additional story language might they need to include to help this?
• How would they connect this part of the story to the next and so on?

The children were challenged by the process and really enjoyed it. The outcomes were lovely not only to listen to but also to see how the students reacted to what each other had "written."

Thinking about the overall process in retrospect, has provided an interesting perspective on the “rereading” process, since in this activity the reader's and teller’s voices became merged to form an audible author's voice. In the coming week we will be beginning to write our own versions of the Rama and Sita story, and as we work I am considering how to use the outcomes created by the students in Podium to help focus on the “writer's tools” that will to allow our readers to hear what we want them to. Using the oral text delivery of one student we could “box up” the story plot as a whole, one which through oral rehearsal the students are now familiar with, before using elements from the "oral" text to support guided and shared writing in the form of paired work. Part of our already established success criteria is how we want the student's characters to have a voice, but that the things that they say should be appropriate to them and their situation. Hearing what they say through the stories presented should be useful in identifying not only what we want them to say, but also in discussing whether the dialogue is apropriate to the situation and in considering the choice of speech verbs to be included, that willallow the reader to hear our intention.

Towards the end of the day I was interviewed and given the opportunity to express some of my thoughts about how the tool has been used in school and the effects I feel podium has had on the learning of my students. I hope that the outcomes of this reflect my feelings, and do some justice to the power of the tool. I know by this point in the day I and the children were exhausted. I would like to thank both BECTA and Softease (Lightbox) for the opportunity to share my thoughts and feelings.

Other activities that went on in class during the day were also linked to the ongoing unit of work and included

Activity 2. Even Potatoes have feelings an introduction to Clay Animator

Here a pair of laptops had been set up using clay animator and webcams to encourage exploration and familiarisation with the software tool to make an animated short entitled even potatoes have feelings. After a brief introduction the children were encouraged in small groups to explore how the tool worked building on prior experiences of using Stick Figure Animator. Using a potato, cocktail sticks and modelling clay,the challenge was to change the smiling features of the character into a face displaying a a change in mood. The reason behind this may seem a long way from the overall theme of the other activities, but hopefully will become clearer when combined with activity 3.

Activity 3 Making Stick Puppets

For this activity the children were provided with stick puppet characters from the Ramayana to decorate and assemble. Each puppet provided consisted of a number of pieces to be decorated, cut out and then assembled to construct the four key characters from the story. Possessing articulated limbs, these characters will later be used against backdrops created by the students in groups, to create short scenes that will be compiled to make a class movie. Using clay animator with these props I want to link their prior experiences with stick figure animator and immersion in the Rama and Sita story to begin exploring the differences and similarities between the flick book and stop motion approaches of the two packages.

The potato head activities, presented in (2) alongside immersion in the story of Rama and Sita will provide examples and talking points will also help us identify issues for later work when we consider planning our class movie,

• establishing and framing scenes,
• working together to develop these
• establishing success criteria for our outcomes

Earlier Posts on Podium and Student response

• How Has Podcasting Helped Me With My Learning?
• Talking for Writing: Using a Picture Book as a Multimodal Text To Develop a Script for Podcasting
• I'll Be The Narrator, And You Can Be Baby Bear...
• So what do you think the children get from Podcasting?
• I Had My Doubts...

Improving Classroom Learning With ICT

Improving Classroom Learning with ICT, written by colleagues Rosamund Sutherland, Susan Robertson and Peter John and published as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme's Improving Learning Series by Routledge, presents the findings of the InterActive Project, based at The University of Bristol's Graduate School Of Education between 2000-2004.

Improving Classroom Learning With ICT, sets out to draw together evidence from this wide ranging research project, drawing on teacher's and learner's experiences of ICT to

• explain why the process of integrating ICT is not straightforward
  
• discuss whether the roll out of hardware and infrastructure alone are sufficient to ensure full integration and exploitation of ICT investment
• emphasise the pivotal role that teachers play in supporting learning with ICT across the curriculum.
• argue that teachers need a greater understanding of how to put ICTs to use in teaching and learning
  
• highlight that out of school use of ICT has an impact on in school learning.
• consider what kinds of professional development are most effective in supporting teachers to use technology creatively and productively.

Throughout the book case studies are used to illustrate key issues identified while also elaborating on how current and emerging theoretical ideas look in the classroom. The classroom based case studies are based in so called Subject Design initiatives, sequences of classoom activities, specifically developed to embed technologies in support of curricular learning outcomes. Many of these include vignettes and writings by the teachers themselves who planned, managed and worked these in the classroom.

I feel privileged to have been part of the project, and to have had some of my work included among many developed by other talented practioners, cross phase and cross curriculum within this text. The book is not a how to, or one that deals with the teaching of ICT, but is concerned with looking at the wider issues surrounding the implementation and develpment of ICTs as learning tools, and is described by the authors themselves as being of interest to all those concerned with maximising the benefits of ICT in the classroom.

Full Reference:
Sutherland, R., Robertson, S. & John, P. (2008) Improving Classroom Learning with ICT , UK, Routledge.

New Term, New Year, New School, New Ideas.

I have neglected my Blog for a while, but I am looking forward over the coming months to sharing with you the fruits that my abscence has spawned.

Several of my previous posts have hinted at the reasons for my absence and on Monday next our new school building will open its doors for the first time to students. Our Reception children and Y6 Students returning to school as part of a phased induction, with the remaining Primary age children starting back on Tuesday.

The new campus will be one of handful of "through schools" in the UK. and has been developed in part within the Building Schools for the Future Programme. The campus will eventually bring together a number of previously existing educational establishments on one campus site. These include a Primary, Secondary and Special school, and extending the range of learning opportunities provided will also include post 16 and vocational education opportunities through onsite partnerships with FE and one of the city's universities. We hope that bringing these diverse areas of expertise together in one place will create new and exciting learning opportunities not only for the community we serve but in seeing everyone on site as a learner enveloping an ethos that promotes and models learning as a life long process.

The last few months have been incredibly exciting the anticipation and build up. Planning and organising the logistics of rationalising and transferring our 90 odd client network from our old building to its new home, reconfiguring our existing website to support colleague access to tools. But I have to take my hat off to our commercial partners who have worked tirelessly and helped in the realisation of these plans as we set out to lay the foundations on which to build our vision.

Leaving work today I found myself feeling an enormous sense of pride in what has been achieved to date, though I am sure our teething problems are far from over. I wanted to share some of my favourite moments from this week captured in the three photographs scattered throughout the remainder of this post and captured during the coffee break from our VLE session on Thursday. The liberation of Wireless connectivity. Teachers working together in an online classroom, one that exists not in a suite but one of our learning bases, more than that a virtual classroom that exisits somewhere, we are not sure where, but beginning to realise that this may not really be an issue. What is important is the anywhere anytime access to learning tools that this in time will afford. The photos represent for me the value of risk. Starting with colleagues to develop images of 21st century learners, exposing, engaging and presenting contextually possibilities as they explore tools that might make this possible.

All that is mobile or ICT supported is not neccesarily glorious and in this session we experienced the limitations as well as the expansive possibilities of wireless networking, access and mobility at first hand. Yes... we did suffer AP overload and connection drop out, but as part and parcel of the pedagogical experience of engaging with these tools in a classroom. In this situation we were able to experience at first hand, observe the reactions of our peers to this and explore the limitations of the access we had. We had space to think about how this may effect our students and its classroom implications while beginning to equip ourselves with a shared experience of when this happened and how it was dealt with, something we can build on as a "roll back" or reflection point later when considering how these tools might affect our working practices, and the potential pitfalls when we have to work in this way ourselves...

These images are particularly poignant to me because they depict colleagues, engaged in similar types of activities and situations that emerged in my recent MSc research project. In this research process I began to explore and share how it is not just what goes on onscreen that is important as we learn with ICT, but what happens in the spaces we as designers for learning create around the devices. ICTs just like any other classroom tool mediate learning, they can bring people together physically as well as virtually when the situations are intentionally and purposefully designed to do so. They can act as a person plus or scaffold, perhaps even a starting point, but there is still nothing like human interaction as a vehicle to drive forward the process.

In these spaces learning is manifest multimodally, gesture, action and discussion effect what we do as learners. They act to scaffold and suport and extend our onscreen activity as we seek to make sense of and resolve what is occuring dynamically before us. The processes that occur beyond the interface and in the spaces around the devices are as important in evaluating and considering the learning that takes place when we use ICTs, as the outcomes we produce through our interactions with the technologies.

This is one of the key factors I feel increasingly we need to engage with and understand as educators, if the paradigm shift we expect will ever take place. Even in virtual learning networks what we learn is socially determined. Technology does not determine what we achieve indeed it often limits it, so we as social beasts change it, we find work arounds or seek out someone who can to enable the tools we want to use to meet our needs in meeting our intended purpose, the transaction and sharing of meaning between ourselves and others. Understanding how this happens and realising why, requires us to change views and to see ourselves as learners about learning.

Having spent my Christmas holiday celebrating the achievement of my MSc award I am now considering an application to engage with the PHd process. Although interested in the role of ICTs in the classroom, I am have become increasingly interested in how these as tools effect the ecology of learning situations and what learning looks like or how it manifests itself as action in practical and process based learning situations such as those mediated by ICT. How as teachers do we evidence these often transient or momentary learning behaviours? What do they look like in action? Without use of a ticklist how do we evidence and what do we look for beyond student outcomes to "measure" and "share" student achievement within the context of Blended learning situations? This is a very broad question, but is where I feel the next stage of my learning journey needs to begin, not with assessment in its traditional sense, but in engaging with and exploring frameworks that see learning outcomes as multimodal, where all modes of representation have an equal weighting and where learning itself is seen as potential and contingent rather than solely outcome driven within designs for ICT mediated learning,

Happy New Year to you all, and an enormous thank you to all who have followed the learning journeys of myself and students to date.

Reflections: Collect, Store, Prepare and Share

During the half term holiday I was asked by a colleague to consider expanding on and to present some of the ideas surrounding a principle that underpins much of my work using ICT for communication with students, and so how I hope to develop use of mobile and web 2.0 tools within and beyond the classroom in school.

This post sets out to introduce the principle of "collect, store, prepare and share," a concept I encountered at HHL07 but adding a personal twist, using a number of tools and examples to model and introduce the essence of the process as it relates to my work in school. In the first example the context is personal use, and the tools though not readilly accessible for use in school, nonetheless I hope begin to illuminate the possibilities and the processes behind the principle. The second example is a more practical and down to earth example of how the principle underpins everday practice and the preparation of material to use with students, before finally beginning to develop how the principle fits in with the mobile and home school elearning project we are beginning to develop.

Using Twitter and Twitpics: Using Public Tools Personally to Collect, Store, Prepare and Share

The first part of my story uses my mobile phone and the social networking tools Twitter and Twitpic, and begins early on the first Monday of half term, as the sun began hauling itself lazily over North Somerset's lower Mendips in to another day. On this glorious morning I found myself here, with friends on our favourite 18 holes.


It was a beautiful morning as you can see from the photograph. I really wanted to share it with my friends, not later but now. Not only the beauty of the place but the effect of the light on the alien object to the centre left, that gave the eerie feel to the space. I could have texted my friends, attaching the image, but wouldn't it be great if I could put the image in one place to share it with them simultaneously, and where I could go back to later, to download it or use as a reference point in other things we were doing like this?

Captured on my Digital Camera I could share the image with friends when I got home, uploading it to a "share" space such as Flickr or Picassa. Since I had my Mobile phone with me, less bulky and cumbersome than my camera, and that I tend to carry for "just in case moments" I had the additional advantage of a direct network connection, and the possibility of using a space to store and share the moment directly and almost immediately.

Attaching the image to a message I sent it directly to Twitpic. From here friends following me on Twitter were sent a message and were able to visit it on the web, to see where I was, what I was up to, and were able to leave a comment about it or should they choose, to download it or link to it themselves. Twitpic also allows annotation and labels to be added to support the image, or titles and tags to be provided. In this process I "collected" the moment, "stored" it on my phone, "prepared" it for upload before "sharing" it. Several other images were also sent to share visually parts of the story of my morning, and these appeared chronologicaly in my Twitpic space. For esafety reasons we are unlikely currently to use a site such as this with primary age students, but the possibilities for a less public moderated space, specifically designed for use in mobile learning and combined with the widespread availablity of camera phones, or web access through 3g and wireless enabled devices and environments do open interesting possibilities for platforms such as this to be used on school visits and so on. In the the not so distant future our previsits could enable the design of virtual tours using mobile devices to structure activities around particular aspects of a place. Inspirational projects such as Mudlarking in Deptford, and the Create A Scape projects carried out through Futurelab have begun to explore and model the possibilities of such ideas and for putting the tools to do so in the hands of the learner. There are also a growing number of downloadable MP3 and phone based audio tours already, one of which over the summer I used to help me explore aspects of Bristol's Docks.

Going Local: Looking at the Process in the Everyday

The principle of "collect, store, prepare and share" relies on a multiple tool approach and underpins many of the processes I personally follow when developing and making multimedia resources to use in class, and the teaching and learning processes I plan to help students compile and make Multimodal Texts.

A Personal Professional context as a model for this might be useful and so I will use the example of preparing a whiteboard notebook. Before making a notebook I usually spend time compiling (collecting and storing) the elements I might need to design and make the tool. Links here are to both external websites and other posts on this blog that reference my use of them. This might include

• Searching for and downloading collections of images. (flickrstorm, Google etc)
• Using my digital camera or scanner to "acquire" or "collect" images that are more relevant to the students, or which they have collected themselves
• Downloading and converting useful video files from for example YouTube via www.zamzar.com, or directly from subscription services such as Espresso
  
• Inputting text, or copying, pasting and reworking relevant text from the web or CD Roms we have in school, or perhaps from services such as Espresso.
  
• Locating useful websites to support our work, and bookmarking or saving their location (tumblr via Kwout or del.icio.us) or alternatively by copying and pasting to word, then saving as a Web Page.
  

This would represent the collect and store part of the process, but as you can see from the twitpics example as a process the latter elements of this are fairly fluid and placing these materials in a shared network space at school will also allow for use by colleagues and students on later tasks, through adaptation.

The prepare part of the process is about how we use these resources to meet our decided purpose, it might involve

• Importing them to relevant pages in a notebook,
• Using the slide or page sorter to reorganise and structure the file to reflect the path we want to follow within the sessions planned
• Further work on editing the text we copied and compiling examples from more than one source
• Cropping and masking images to include only what we want
• Reviewing video and considering how, as well as when we will use it with the notebook
• Developing hide and reveal or other tasks that include the tools we have brought together in the notebook to meet our intentions.

The prepare part of the process is about adaptation, using materials we have found elsewhere and from multiple sources to create something new, personal or professional, something that meets our needs and designing for learning.

The share event will happen when we use it for the first time in class, or so proud of what we have done we show it to a colleague, who also wants to use the material and we involve ourselves in a dialogue about how the tool will be used, or might further be adapted.

What I find useful in looking at the process in this way is how easily I begin to see that many of the resources and tools I collected, prepared and stored, can be further adapted for sharing with and use by the students as extensions of the work we are involved in through the whiteboard as a shared space. Potentially framing ICT based multimodal tasks for students in local applications and tools or online environments. Since I already have the "raw material" I can develop and make tools to support table top tasks, to mediate talk for writing or ast as writing frames. Once I have undergone the "collect and store" process, the materials I have can be made available on the school's local network through a "shared space," or could be uploaded to an online share space such as Honeycomb, Think.com or our VLE, and from here the students can select, work with and use the material themselves to create and design new content. My own web searches will also give me some indication of the types of things that are returned from Internet searches, and help me structure, advise or support the children in the types of queries we might use to return the type of material we are looking for, or prepare me in advance to deal with the unexpected.

If my intention is to create a text type, based on particular research focus rather than the self search process, then the bookmarks I collected can also be shared to provide and frame the work I want my students to engage with and sites I know will help in the process.

This process I feel is a significant shift from what can be seen as teaching with ICT and technologically determined views that often see children plugged into the computer, practicing skills often out of context. It provides potential for an adaptable scaffolded approach, that challenges perceptions using ICTs to "hide behind." Collect, Store, prepare and share sees the user, the teacher in this first instance taking an active part in engaging with and modelling a process that uses a range of tools to support not only their own professional learning but also that sees the user as an active participant in the design and redesign of content, rather than a passive recipient looking for material that exists and just about meets our aims. It presents a model and expectation for our students that they too should learn to use a range of tools to engage with content available.

So why did I begin by wittering about Twitter? Why talk about local networks and file sharing? What has using a local application got to do with online or e learning platforms? The "collect, store, prepare and share," process outlined in various ways above are key features of the principles underpinning my evolving views and many I have read around e and mobile learning, and are central to projects I am currently juggling with, have set out to develop within school and wondering about how to illustrate concretely to colleagues.

The key tool in developing our projects will be the Asus EE "webbooks" we have invested in, not to work as standalone platforms, but to function as "collect, store, prepare and share" tools. The principle which underpins our their role does not see them as the sole devices that students will use in supporting learning with ICT, but as part of a wider tool set. As a platform it is envisaged, students will learn to use their Asus, as a local applications host in the first instance, a place to "collect and prepare" material to work on other projects, as a tool they can use in school and away to compile, edit and "collect" the resources and material they will need either for inclass use or to support the development of collaborative projects with peers. The process as envisaged will require web access and a networked view of learning as a process. The wireless enabled devices should allow us to use online tools such as our VLE, and plugin spaces we are currently working with such as Honeycomb and Think.com to enable students to prepare and share together the work that they are doing. The local model provided above is an illustration of how we as teachers can begin to engage with the principles and modelling process, and how the model works with tools we are already familiar. However we need to look beyond the technology, to see it as an enabler for changes in pedagogical perspective, a social as well as technological tool. The use of Twitter and Twitpics earlier is intended as an illustration of the potential immediacy and accessibility of online mediating and social sharing tools, how accessible and available we can make resources even in the remotest place. While the webbook and VLE represent a point somewhere in between, where we can begin work with colleagues and students alike in testing and exploring the possibilities and challenges to pedagogy these tools represent, while working from the familiar. I would value any thoughts and contributions readers might have around this that would help develop and extend thinking. The principles are intended from my point of view to help guide through the longer term aims and expansion of our project. They have implications for CPD, which have been raised and highlighted by colleagues. It is this alongside comments from colleague Doug Dickinson who suggested I should try to outline what I meant by the process that has prompted this post. I have referred to the principle in several previous posts, and the ideas behind it he suggested might be be helpful to share with other colleagues. I hope that this proves useful in terms of what he suggested, it has certainly helped me to begin to pull together some of my thoughts and tie together a number of previous posts.

Honeycomb 3: News, Thoughts, Reflections and Tools From Other Places

Thanks to James Watson for pointing me last week to the new Honeycomb Blog a space where Softease will be sharing news and views around the tool as it emerges.

I have also enjoyed tweeting and chatting with colleague John Sutton, about his views on the tool and how he has been implementing and using the space. His recent post outlining introductory work with his Year 5 and 6 groups is a really good read. I like particularly his idea of using lists to create autobiographies, something he has posted on previously in using blogs with students. Keeping these lists short and around themes seems a great way of allowing children to affirm who they are while providing oppportunities to consolidate and discuss further esafety and netiquette issues.

I was thinking how useful they might be to support student response to web based and book based research. Perhaps as John has done initially encouraging students to read together from a range of material, before using a list or series to record, highlight and share the ideas they think are important and comparing these across texts.

A recent post from Angela Maiers, on "Determining Importance" in texts by listening to the author's voice and responding, highlighted again the importance of bringing multimodality to the texts we share, but has come to the fore here through John's post and his reminder of the need to consider bias when working with students in an online world.

Helping students to understand the nature of fact and opinion, and the higher order skills required to sift infromation from disinformation. Deciding what is valuable and what is not,
what is important or trivial are key and critical skills for students using the web, but it is also important to remember, that what is important to us may not have the same value for others, and to consider why this may be.

Angela's post and the video that accompanies it shows how she likes to use the author's name when thinking about and formulating questions and responses. Simple enough you might think, but do we place as much importance on the author and their voice as we do on the way the text is written, and its content? How often do we bring personality and voice into the work we share? Do we do this at all with Non Fiction? Angela's approach here gives a personality to the writer, the text representing the author's voice in the learning space where she and the students are working, and enabling a role for the author in the conversation to be had. With my class we have worked to develop a sense that what we write reflects what we have to say. Angela's video moves this on bringing the author as a person into the space, as she encourages her students to ask and direct questions toward them through the text as an interface, seeking to find what it is they are trying to say, before asking the students if they feel the important points have been made from their perspective. Since the author is not actually there, the students are required to infer what the response might be, and to challenge whether the text provides the outcomes and information they may be looking for.

Looking at John's work using All about Explorers I was wondering what my students might make of the "spoof website," when guided through a process of responding to the texts as a starting point, for critical web literacy work. For those of us unsure or still uncomfortable with linking ICT tools directly to units of work as writing outcomes, this would be an ideal way to use critical reading as a starting point in the process perhaps through notetaking and discussion to begin, using comparison charts and lists to plan and create simple non fiction texts that could be shared online for comment and discussion. The frame provided by Angela, could be adapted to support peer review and commenting work, since it consolidates the presence of the person behind the voice/text and key to what we are looking for in supporting students in understanding the relationships between reading and writing, their purpose and function.

Online collaborative learning tools, (eg Honeycomb, Think.com, VLEs) are not single applications but rather composite toolsets. Honeycomb specifically is intended as an open and flexible environment, that can be used on its own, but which I can see working well and progressively in tandem with others, either "plugged in" or used as a standalone to meet a range of "pedagogical outcomes." Most of the ideas I have been using with my students this term for example have been adapted from previous work carried out in other places, or as in this post built around those borrowed from colleagues. Many of these ideas were initially developed while using Think.com with students, and in turn were adapted from table top tasks used with students as community builders and collaborative/cooperative activities pre web. These links to previous posts present some of these tasks, and are posts that hopefully readers may find useful.

• Think.com: Starting Up Your Community Part 1
• Think.com: Student Voices Part 1
• Think.com Community Learning Activities (Thematic History)
• Bill And Ben's Outstanding Adventure: Closing One Chapter to Begin a New for Online Learning
• Think.com a practical place to engage with E Safety
• Chain Stories

Not Just a Matter of Neatness: Something to Ponder

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Not just a matter of neatness | News | TES

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Don't usually do this but wanted to give it a go today. I picked up this article from the Times Educational Supplement this weekend, via twitter and colleague @yearsixteacher. It is interesting how things come round, and as I read I was reminded of the work of Charles Cripps, who I had the priviledge of seeing talk on the subject of the link between handwriting and spelling hmm hmm years ago.

It is only recently I began thinking again about how handwriting is more than a presentational thing and how as a key skill it has increasingly taken a backseat to initiatives that focus on textual content and processing. Don't get me wrong here, writing as a contextualised process of composition, for audience and purpose and as a representation of voice is still what I want for my students, and I am not backtracking on my multimodal work. However in multimodal work representational modes are what we need to consider and their fitness for purpose. I wouldn't want to send my students on a marathon without having engaged in a regiment of fitness and technical training first, so why would I want to send my students off to write in any format without ensuring they had the experiences, skills, endurance or motivation to do so.

Experiences in the classrrom have often shown how children who do not have a comfortable and fluent handwriting style find prolonged periods of writing uncomfortable. Just like PE if we we do something we are not used to or perform and act incorrectly it hurts. Writer's cramp the precursor of repetitive strain is a possible outcome of incorrect keyboard posture and students who lack familiarity with a keyboard will also find the generation of content slow and tedious.

I recall an interesting activity at Mr Cripps' workshop where he demonstrated how being distracted part way through a word, often leads to difficulty in reconciling the look of what we have written with the word we are trying to spell. I am sure I am not the only person in the world who has found themselves saying a word doesn't look right after we have written it! It seems to occur with more regularity these days as I spend so much time in fromt of the computer too.

In this article the statement "handwriting is a language act and not just a motor act" chimes bells with me. Indeed this term I have revived a practice of starting our class day by combining handwriting practice using Look, Say, Cover Write Check with joining rhyming patterns, eg and.. hand, sand, band, bandage, sandwich for example. I have been drawing on Catchwords and A Hand for Spelling to help with this, intending that as the children improve their letter formation, they should be able to bring increased stamina and pace to writing tasks, and inturn the ability to record what they want to say more acurately and with out losing track of their thoughts.

I have also been thinking about how this process could be used and integrated with literacy sessions to support and contextualise keyboard practice, not as familiarising students with the location of keys alone but as part of a process for developing motor memory and helping to visualise spelling patterns. Some commercial and academic software already includes wordbanks based on learning common spellings as we practice keyboard input, but these could be structured to supplement and support work such as the handwriting and spelling activities outlined above by including rhyming and pattern at there base. Familiarity and consoldiation are dependent on repetitve acts.

Asking children to type up their work on a wordprocessor after the drafting phase has been done by hand still goes on. Just as children drawing letters neatly when asked to publish work for the wall. Could it be we have missed the reason behind this, and that in both contexts the reasons are similar time, pace and stamina, the requirement to run before we can walk, and that we can inherently do what is expected, or wanting to replace one set of skills so desparately with another, that we have forgotten what it was like to learn them ourselves. In the case of ICT based composition there is a danger in assuming that everyone has the tools to enable writing, redrafting and publishing when they desire. Not every child currently has one to one PC access. Some might argue that handwriting is dead, and long live the PC, the PC has certainly been the death nell of my handwriting as the children have commented, but is this because they do not join their writing and so cannot engage with mine because they do not need to engage with their own? Do we want children to draw letters or form them, if we put all of our eggs in over dependence on the computer heaven forbid all children could draw them as comic sans? What happens when the computer is not there, or even more demoralising what happens when the handwriting recognition software does not recognise our input? Would love your comments and thoughts? Ponderous!

This Morning I Have Been Mostly Playing With Joomla 1

Joomla looks like being the tool of choice to manage our Web Site and its Content as we become part of the Bridge Learning Campus. I downloaded a copy a few months ago to play with, having read an article in a magazine, but I haven't done much with it other than exploring online live demos until this morning. Watching Video demos it seemed pretty straightforward, but as with many best laid plans, this morning my inexperience would come back to haunt me.

Following online tutorials I got off to a flyer
Step 1, download xampp from Apache Friends
Step 2, download The Most Recent version of Joomla
Step 3, Set up a localhost Server on old laptop, by installing xampp
Step 4, unzip and copy Joomla Files to new folder called Joomla in xampp/htdocs

But then my inexperience hit in with
Step 5. open localhost/joomla and install

When inputting http://localhost/ didn't find the xampp server space on my c:\ drive. Referring to the xampp read me I found an alternative ip address and used this instead allowing me to move on.

Now I could install the instance of Joomla before
Step 6. deleting temporary installation files and
Step 7 running localhost(or ip address)/joomla and login

If I am honest I am now feeling really pleased with myself as I now have a space where I can practice the skills and processes I need to learn in thinking about how to transfer useful content from our existing website to form the beginnings of the Primary Pages in The BLCs Web Site.

Making a Portable Apps Tool Box

Imagine an ICT toolbox that you can carry in your pocket. A resource set that everyone could share for free. No need to beg that the tools you regularly and choose to use be installed on the platforms you will use before you begin a session. A cornucopia of hope?!*

On Thursday evening I found myself browsing Computer magazines in a Local Supermarket and drawn to the caption "Ultimate Portable Software, store top programs in a USB stick" on the cover of "Web User" magazine. With the Idea of "Anywhere, Anytime Learning," and the principles of "collect, store and share," firmly in my mind, from a funding grant bid this week, the prospect of having a potential toolbox that could be carried in mine or my student's pocket was an Intriguing prospect, and one I decided to investigate further through a visit to the core website, PortableApps mentioned in the article.

PortableApps are versions of existing open source environments, that have been redeveloped for download and installation to run from portable devices such as USB flash drives and mp3 players, and maybe even as the site suggests your iPOD. Once installed to the device, simply docking it with a computer and running the interface or application's .exe file the user has access to a set of generic and "familiarish" applications. Why familiarish, well this is a me thing, keen to try out the GIMP, running from my flash drive to edit the image above, took a little playing with before I finally worked around the process that would have taken seconds in the tool I usually use. This however is no hardship simply a quirk of the tool, and part of a learning process we go through now and again when engaging with something new.

Visiting PortableApps and downloading these applications today has really stimulated me to think about the potentials they offer from a curricular point of view, in terms of shared and common tool access. Since these tools are open source they are free to download, use and distribute under GNU licensing, which could have huge potential for us, as we seek to address issues such as home access to tools and the proposed "digital divide." These tools could potentially enable access to all students for the cost of a flash drive, to a tool box that could be selected from to support a collect store and share process developed through home based learning, and accessible on any windows based machine. So what tools did I think might be useful and download to my flash drive to play with:

Accessibility Tools

• On-Screen Keyboard Portable - on-screen keyboard
  

Graphics & Pictures

• GIMP Portable - Photo and Image Editor

Internet

• Nvu Portable - KompoZer Portable - WYSIWYG Web Page Editor
  
• FileZilla Portable - FTP client (our Website is not entirely web 2.0 yet)
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - the award-winning web browser (love it and we haven't been able to run happily on our network yet)
  
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition - email client including RSS feed reader

Music & Video

• Audacity Portable - Audio editor and recorder
• MPlayer Portable - Movie player with support for most video formats
• VirtualDub Portable - video processing and capture utility
• VLC Media Player Portable - Media player that plays most audio and video formats
• CDEX Portable - My favourite Audio CD Ripping tool
  

Office

• Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition - Calendar and task management
• OpenOffice.org Portable - word processor, spreadsheet, presentations with Microsoft compatibility
• PDFTK Builder Portable - split, collate, watermark and password protect PDF documents
• Sumatra PDF Portable - PDF viewer

Utilities

• 7-Zip Portable - File archiver and compressor
• ClamWin Portable - Antivirus on the go
• PeaZip Portable - Easy to use file archiver and compressor
• PortableApps.com Menu - integrated start menu bundled with the platform
  

There has been considerable debate and discussion about open source versus commercial product use in education for some time, but the emergence and recent excitement generated by devices such as the Asus ee, developed around the Linux GUI and shipped with Open source tools seems set to at least for the time being reduce polarisation of this debate shifting our attention to addressing how we intend to integrate, embed and use these devices to enhance and change our view of home school learning. Using them initially as "collect, store and share devices," is how I hope to begin this process, with colleagues and students within our portables project. Exploring how we extend home school learning tasks, through the planning and creation of content for inclusion in shared school based activities using existing tools and online environments we already use and are familiar with. Providing a local, common and shared set of applications, in the first instance means that students would not be entirely disadvantaged by not having web access at home, as content developed away from school can be built on and shared through access to a wireless infrastructure and classroom based web acccess, or alternatively direct transfer to the network through flash drive. To enable this however the tools for the job must be available. Certainly the Asus provides a basic toolbox, but it would be handy to be able to run other more complex tools as the students become more familiar with the process, if we would like them to support driving innovation. Since current E Safety considerations limit access to the web 2.o world in schools then local apps are required to do this, many of which are currently not available through edu suppliers for Linux based systems, or Window's Mobile Environments for that matter. Portable Apps has a watch this space.. regarding Linux based versions of the applications they currently offer, but certainly these tools seem to me to offer enormous potential in enabling expansion of the tools provided. So in answering my opening question probably more a cornucopia of hope than a complete solution, but certainly something well worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime I will play with the toolbox I have just compiled, and continue to chew over some of the ideas.