Lightning McQueen: Control and Show and Tell

It is two terms now since I worked with the BeeBots and Year 2, and they are still excited about the work we did. I work with this group every Friday and one of the children excitedly came to me yesterday with a toy he had brought for show and tell. Lightning McQueen from the movie "Cars," made a guest appearence during our check in. I asked what had brought Lightning to class today and was told, how he was like our BeeBots only different, and how he thought I would like to meet him. Programmable toys are available in a multitude of varieties these days, but this toy particularly was nice as it's control inputs were readily identifiable by the child as being like those he had used in class. Making links is an important factor in the progression of any area of the curriculum, and I wanted to share this today, as it is the first example I have encounterd in my school of a student making links between a classroom based control activity and his real world experiences. It is a real step forward for me in terms of how far the children's ICT capabilities have progressed since the beginning of the year. As a class we spent some time discussing with him how the toy worked and having him demonstrate this, this was not only good for him, but also then enabled children to talk about toys they have at home that work in a similar way. It made me think of an earlier post, and how as part of an emergent aspect of the ICT curriculum I really want our students to see control as a meaningful and relevant aspect in their lives, and to begin identifying and evaluating control systems in the world around them. Using toys as a starting point might be just such a vehicle to begin enabling children look beyond the interface, and develop oral evaluation and visual disassembly tasks drawing on the personal experiences students have of control in the real world. Thanks J, not only did you make my day, but you were an inspiration.

Spot The Inference: Using Video and Multimedia Authoring In the Literacy Hour

I haven't embedded video to my Blog, before, so this is a bit of an adventure for me. I thought I'd give it a go with this particular entry to give a context to the sessions I have been developing, using digital writing frames with two different year groups in school this term. I also wanted to share how I have used the same digital text, to introduce and extend children's skills using mutimedia authoring tools, while supporting writing outcomes. The video I have been using, and which is embedded below, is the computer generated, animated short "Bert," created by Moonsung Lee. 

My Sequence For Reading This Video

As I have spoken about in previous posts, I have been using video data to inform my classroom research project, and this has in turn begun to inform the way I use Video snippets and short films with my students as literate objects. Video as a text presents meaning in several modes, and sessions involving video require us to engage with these as we do others. With written texts we engage with them on a word, sentence and text level, with a video I tend to view them on a visual, aural and whole text level. To begin the unit we spent time "watching" the film in different ways:

I minimised the movie, and we listened to the soundtrack. Bert is great as it has no dialogue, there are lots of sound effects to listen for, and a jaunty score which changes to reflect mood. Every now and again I would stop the film, and encourage the students to discuss firstly in pairs and then as a class what could be heard and to infer what they thought was happening from the clues they could hear.

I muted the sound, and we watched the movie as a series of moving pictures, pausing the film at approximately the same points as before, cueing the children to recall the sounds they had heard in a particular section, and focussing on the actions, the facial and physical gestures of the characters. Using these to devleop inferences about feeling, and to predict actions that might happen next.

We watched the movie with sound and pictures together, and spent some time rehearsing and retelling the story orally before beginning our own versions of the story.Preparing To Write.I have a copy of Bert in MPEG format, and have used this previously to support narrative writing and recount in the literacy hour. For previous table top units of work, I created and used Smart Notebooks with drag and drop storyboards, to support sequencing and oral storytelling.

To create the Notebooks Quick Time Pro was used, to capture significant scenes from the film and to save these as image files. These images were inserted within the Notebooks, to support sequencing and discussion of how the story unfolded. Images of characters, featuring facial expressions and gestures, were also used as prompts to support discussions about feelings or why characters might be behaving as they were. To some images I added thought bubbles and speech bubbles, and using "pair and share" or "talking twos" used small drywipe whiteboards to encourage discussion and suggestions about what the characters might be thinking or saying. Since the film is without dialogue use of images such as these out of sequence, also enables revisits to predictive tasks from previous sessions. What happened before this? What happened next? and facilitates the use of inferencial skills to consider why characters might be doing or saying what they are, drawing on the visual cues and the student's sense of events drawn from the aural and visual evidence within the film itself.

From this immersive work, I went on to develop student's own versions of the story through collaborative storyboarding and comic strip type activities. The Writing outcome initially being to orally retell, using images their versions of the story to the class. This immersive approach I found worked particularly well with struggling writers, who were able to use the visual narrative to support their independent work later.

The last time I used this movie was with a group of reluctant writers, and students who had significant literacy difficulties. Our unit's final outcome was based onscreen, and used images captured from the movie in MS PowerPoint, as writing prompts to support creation of a picture book for younger students. This term I have developed the unit to become two multimedia text units one at key stage 1 and the other in Key Stage 2.

Extending This To Develop Onscreen Multimedia Texts

This term I have drawn on the activities above to develop familiarity with the story, but have used the images captured previously to create digital writing frames.

In Year 2, I was asked to use a unit originally about graphics and text to support the student's understanding of features of recount writing. We have been using 2 simple's 2 create a story, and Bert as a context to support this. Before we began the onscreen writing task, the children helped me to choose 8 images from the movie and 2 create a writing frame, inserting the images before saving the file to the network. The children then worked in pairs, opening the shared frame and drafted their texts on screen, using the images as writing prompts. On completion of their writing the children were encouraged to think about what they had written and choose animation effects for their images that would help support the story they were trying to tell. Finally they were asked to add sound effects to the page that would add to the feelings of the characters and action within their story. I have published the first completed text to the school website.

In year 5 we are extending their experience of digital texts by writing a digital story book for younger children, using PowerPoint. The story is much longer, and as well as using images from the film, they are inserting action buttons to enable their readers to navigate the story on screen. We have turned off the onclick default setting for slide movement, which means that the strories they produce will function very much like a CD ROM story in slide show view. Some of the students have asked if they will be able to include sound effects, as the CD ROMS they have used often jingle when pages are turned, and also about the possibilities for having their story read to their audience, or hiding sounds or actions in the pictures. These types of questions I find particularly exciting as they reflect an awareness of the creative potentials of ICTs in the classroom, which we may overlook. They reflect student knowledge and experiences of digital technologies, experiences we tend not to utilise or draw on in our need to teach particular skills, or perhaps because they are beyond our personal experience. They also reflect a move I actively encourage, the "how do I get the computer to do this, rather than what can I do with the computer today" approach we often see in classrooms. We discussed how we might be able to achieve some of these, but time is an issue here, though I really would like them to have the opportunity to build on this interest and the excitement and sense of achievement I am sure it will generate. I had planned to insert page turn sound effects, and am considering how we might insert hyperlink effects through image hotspots. We also have the software environments available that would enable the students to create self made sound files to read the stories through action buttons (and on mouseover), in the form of Podium and Audacity, this however will mean the children needing to work in small groups to create these. Watch this space for further developments.

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.

Monitoring and Sensing Change: Blogging with Year 1

I set up some year group blogs, with ethink, a month or so ago, and have begun introducing them slowly to colleagues as a way of sharing the ongoing work they engage in with students in class. My initial reason for introducing blogs, was an attempt to encourage a wider ownership of and engagement with our growing online community and website. It also struck me that the increasing use of the IWB in classrooms, meant an enormous amount of readily available and publishable work was going to waste. Shared and Guided writing for example consumes a considerable amount of our time in the literacy hour. Granted students use these as models to support their own texts, but saved to hard disc, this collaborative and high quality, guided and shared work, never sees the light of day beyond the classroom where it is made. One of the keys I feel in promoting the value of writing is a sense of audience and purpose. What better way to develop this than by sharing our work with people who visit our website, and enabling them to offer comments, that can help us to consider how we might improve our work, or better still praise and celebrate our achievements, and motivate us to keep trying.

I have spent the last couple of weeks working with year one students, initially using the space as a newsboard, and somewhere to share the things we have enjoyed doing in class. Today, we uploaded our first focussed use of the space. The students have been learning about plants and the conditions they need to grow. They have planted bean seeds, and will be keeping a bean diary. This diary will be developed over the course of a few weeks, with pictures and simple annotations as the bean grows. We began today to develop a digital version of the diary, using our blog space as a place where we can include digital photographs of the process, and as a class annotate these. Uploading the photograph and their comments to the blog together, means we will be able to share our "logging" process not only with each other but with a wider audience too. Although constituting primarily a science based literacy activity, this also introduces the use of ICT to sense and monitor change. At key Stage One much of science's AT1 is about making and beginning to relate observations. Using digital photographs we can capture visually the process of change over time and use visually captured data, to compare and contrast evidence, relating what we have done to what has happened. Through "thinking together" around these images we can introduce the vocabulary and explore and discuss the processes involved, drawing on the visual evidence we have collected. You can visit our bean diary on our year 1 blog, we would love to hear from you.

Wilbur Helps Out

Have just uploaded a few fledgling comic strip how tos, to our school website. If anyone is interested in having a look at these they can be found here. I would be grateful for any comments that might help me improve these. They are intended to support colleagues and older students in my school, so some sections are school and network specific, but perhaps visitors may also find them useful.

Tizz's Travels: Adults Having Fun With 2 Create a Story

Have just spent a couple of really good fun days helping a member of our support team get some really exciting things out of 2 Create a Story. It never ceases to amaze me just what this tool can do. We haven't quite finished, but I think this is probably my fault not bringing the right file home with me, but what amazed me was seeing the real sense of achievement when the work was done, and the surprise at what was possible using this apparently simple kit as a multimedia authoring platform.

I had this idea a few years ago of building a zoomable website which would enable students to navigate the globe, zooming in and out of places they were studying and adding information, or uploading postcards and images people sent from their holidays. This became a bit more realisable after visiting world atlas.com and took initial shape during a geography focussed book week when we used Where's Wally? as a context for a whole school project. When our Key Stage One Students adopted Tizz The Bear as character to roam the globe with them early in the Spring Term, this seemed too good an opportunity to miss to play with and develop this idea even further. As students have been covering geographical topics I have tried to encourage them and their teachers to contribute material they develop to this space. This hasn't always been as successful as I would like, but the aspect which is now just starting to take off, is the idea of travel logs, and sending postcards to school from Tizz. 2 Create a Story with the ability to save files in swf format, may just be that additional catalyst I have been looking for.

My colleague, spent the morning with me and a group of year 2 students, while we prepared a writing frame together using screen captured images from a video. She had originally decided to use PowerPoint, to present her version of Tizz's Travel Log, but having seen how easily this tool enabled the students to build image supported texts, create animation effects and to use sound files, she decided this might be the tool to help her get the best from the materials she had.

Using teacher the options we have set up the software to give access to the full set of drawing tools, and this also enables on right click a file import, copy and paste option on a pop up menu in the drawing space. So to set up her travel log, she firstly imported each of the image files she wanted to use, sequencing these to tell her story as she went. In the writing space she added supporting text, before moving to add her animation and sound effects. When you are in the flow, confidence is growing with a piece of software and you have identified a purpose for what you require it is amazing how adventurous you can get and to what lengths you are prepared to go to achieve this. You cannot really imagine a visit to spain without the appropriate music, and in her final slide, as Tizz reclines on his last day, she decided she needed some Spanish Music. This was not available in the sound effects so we needed to aquire some. She had brought along a CD, and with a bit of playing around we used Media Player to extract the track she wanted to use in .wav format. Using Audacity, she spent some time trimming and cropping her file to extract about 10 seconds from the file, before saving it. Using the import a file option in the sound effects menu, she then attached the sound file to the page. To say that she had never used either piece of software before, the outcome was amazing, and from her point of view unexpected. This also, again demonstrates just how powerful this tool could be as a multimodal resource in the hands of young children, with teacher preparation, and student access to, collections of theme based images and additional sound files.

Combined with a zoomable and tagged map created at Quickmaps.com, this document is currently displayed on Tizz's Travels, on our school web site. As I said above, I think I brought the wrong swf file home with me this evening, and so will need to update these pages tomorrow to gain the full effect. Well Done Ms C. I am sure others will be inspired to follow in your footsteps...

Images from the Past:Thinking Aloud

I wanted to flag this site, which I found when visiting del.icio.us this morning. Old Pictures has on display a collection of photographs taken over the last 150 years, and although being American in origin also has some interesting photographs from Britain, including its colonial past, and Europe. They have also displayed painted photos, which I think are great, as we tend to see the old days as being black and white, an interesting talking point for an ICT session, and perhaps an ICT lesson where we could use Photofiltre, 2 Paint a Picture or MS Paint to "touch up" some old pictures, suggesting how they might look today.

In their introduction the authors say "It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Even with a thousand words, how do you describe the look in a Mother's eye...," and it is this statement which set me off today, thinking about visual literacy and how I might use these images in the classroom. Not all of the images on this site might be considered appropriate for use with younger children, but many are evocative, and interesting starting points for discussion with older students. As a teacher resource or as a source of material for developing clsss based materials I feel this site has much to offer.

I think I would start by downloading one or two images, which I could use to make rub and reveal activities, in my Smart Notebook. With the image above for example, slowly rubbing out sections of an applied ink layer I would focus on parts of the image, encouraging inferencial activity to build up a class view of the context and what the woman is thinking or feeling, as information is gradually made available to the students. Views will change within the group as the picture is slowly revealed, ideas and vocabulary could be collected which we would build on from the stimulus towards perhaps a big write, or a guided and shared writing activity.

Perhaps using the searchlight tool to highlight specific areas of an image, and prompt question such as:
Who are these people?
What are they doing?
What do you think this object is?
What is it made of?
What do you think it was used for?
Does it remind you of anything?
Where or when do you think this photograph was taken?
I would seek responses from students and groups about the evidence they can find in the image to support their thoughts. We could change the direction of the discussion to form a starting point for historical enquiry, around visual evidence. I have also used this technique with paintings and photographs of archeological evidence, from the distant past.

In between questions I would use "talking twos" or "pair and share," to enable the students space to develop their own ideas, collect vocabulary, or "rehearse and write," around the image as a stimulus.

Having engaged together as a class with the image I might use prepared tasks, for students to work collaboratively, using prepared DTP or word processed files to carry out onscreen text development focusing on the images. Perhaps we could work in pairs to write a diary entry from the view point of the woman or the photographer, develop a newspaper report where the photograph informs the headline, and based on an imaginary interview with the subject, we might write an empathetic letter, or use the image to develop textual openers. As a paired activity in class based ICT areas I might provide simple texts developed through shared writing to encourage students to expand and develop, revise and review these to include WOW Words. We could also provide comparison charts for "then and now," where perhaps having explored an image of the "Wright Brother's plane," and made observations from the image, children could look for simailarities and differences between the aircraft and a modern counterpart.

My experiences of working with video tell me that a picture may paint a thousand words, but in all likelihood it will paint a thousand different words for every reader. So one of the purposes of written text in evoking shared understanding comes into play through such activities. In addition in photographs as with other images, we only see what the camera sees, or what the photographer wants us to see, images are framed and biassed by the choices orignially made by the artist. We don't see what happened out of shot. Using a portrait, it might be interesting to try to recreate the image through mime. Children could work in groups to set up their version of the shot, with friends replacing the real participants. Can they recreate the scene, including the expressions of the people featured? Using digital cameras their scenes could be used for comparison with the original and further discussion evolve around how the visual text is similar or could be altered to improve its accuracy. They might also try to create an imaginary view of what happened before the image was captured, and what might have happened next? Maybe they could use the original image, placed in the centre of a piece of paper, and try to expand the scene to show what might have been beyond the picture frame.

I also enjoy using the spotlight tool with students to focus on what we can see when sketching from images. By inserting a photograph to a notebook, or viewing it as a slideshow image, we can use the spotlight tool to highlight a starting point for a sketch. The children sketch what they can see, and then the spotlight is either moved to another area of the image to focus on, or is gradually resized to include more of the image which must be added to the previous section sketched. Using the idea of line, and mark making in observational drawing sessions such as this the students are frequently surprised by the quality of outcome created in their final sketches. I personally enjoy listening in on the discussion and langage use which evolves when children try to help each other or notice a feature and try to describe it to their friends. Ultimately though all of these activities contribute to the children's understanding of images as textual artefacts and how they evoke meaning and emotional response, and support the use of oral language in support of cross curricular and multimodal text development. I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have on this site or post, or any other ideas you may have about the use of digital images in the classroom.

MS Powertoys for Windows XP, and Year Group Blogs

I downloaded 2 PowerToys yesterday which I think will be really useful in preparing materials for upload to our school website. Gaining ownership of our website has been a real challenge, since it is not an out of the box solution, but has been developed internally using MS Frontpage. The links provided by Anthony Evans in his post the other day, led me to the PowerToys page, and reminded me of a conversation with Scott one of our LA technicians who recommended Image Resizer.

Image Resizer adds a tool to right click menus which, after selection of images in Windows Explorer, enables batch conversion of images to predetermined sizes. The handheld option shown here we think is about the right size for upload to photo galleries to fit screen size 240 x 320.

Another potentially exciting tool from this space was the HTML Slide Show Wizard which runs from the programs menu as an application. Opening the wizard and importing your resized images, this "toy" creates a slideshow, by generating the page code to a local folder. From here the pages generated can be imported into an existing website, where with the addition of hyperlinks this becomes part of the site. Captions cannot be added to the images, but from an e safety point of view this is a potential benefit, and the slick windows XP feel to the show generated, with its familiar Windows navigation buttons makes the outcome, easy to use and look great too. Prior to discovering this I have used other web slideshow generators, but this is relatively simple, and in combination with the image resize tool above, should help enable less familiar members of staff and students, bearing in mind our esafety guidelines, to begin preparing materials for inclusion in our website.

We have also begun to develop the idea of year group blogs, as learning stories, to help with the regular update of site content. Hopefully over this term we will begin to see regularly published posts from students and staff about the work they have engaged in, in class. From humble beginnings I hope these will expand to wider possibilities as students and staff become more familiar with the affordances of these tools.

Big Kid! New Toys!

Have spent quite a bit of time playing with Comic Life over the holiday and had a blast, but also discovered at the same time a new role for MS Publisher, an old favourite of mine. I have used this with children from Year 3 to Year 6, for everything from drag and drop sequencing tasks to building web pages and combining graphics and text to develop picture books, advertisements and poetry, see previous post"We've been doin' bold today", but never considered using it until this week for making comic strips.

Many of the how to handouts I have made to support staff in the past, have probably ended up as supports for wobbly desks, rather than guides to software and how they might be used. These have often been overly wordy with the inclusion of screenshots to help. I hope though that My new Wilbur Helps Out guides might be a bit different. Wilbur as a character emerged a couple of years ago to act as a guide for a web design initiative I had to develop within my Masters Course. Over the holidays though Wilbur the Book Worm, has aquired a new role, as a guide to new software, appearing in his very own comic strip for student and staff how tos. I have been impressed by the way this format strips away the often longwinded explanations, and how a carefully selected image or series of images, combined with captions and speech bubbles can clarify the most seemingly complex of tasks. I will be trying these out with colleagues and students first, before uploading them to my webspace and our school website for sharing.

During the week I also made a surprising discovery... This is probably really familiar to everyone else, so I'm going to look really silly.... Do I care! Not a jot, as it came as a complete surprise to me and was really exciting too... I was familiar with being able to drag images from Windows Explorer into open documents and files, but while playing with the Mac on the web last weekend discovered how you could drag images off a web page in the Safari Browser, directly onto the desktop. What I didn't realise however is that you can now also do this with Internet Explorer on the PC. Never again will I spend hours saving images to file from right click. I can now simply open or create a new folder and drag the image from the page directly to it. Since then I have also discovered that images can be dragged from the web page directly into open documents in some applications, or image editors. So in making for example smart notebooks, opening the notebook software, tiling it onscreen alongside Internet Explorer, the image can be dragged from the web page straight into the notebook. This process also works with text, by highltighting the text you want in the browser, then dragging and dropping it directly onto the page, as a text object.

On Video Data, Comic Strips and Learning Stories

Finally got back to my Masters Dissertation this week, and began by reading a thought provoking paper, by Lydia Plowman and Christine Stephen, of the Interplay project based at The University of Sterling. I had the priviledge of meeting Lydia a few years ago, at the CAL'05 Conference. Some colleagues and myself, had also presented our emerging work from a Research Project based at The Graduate School of Education in Bristol, as a symposium. Our methodology then as mine does now involved the analysis of video data collected in my classroom, and since this medium was also used by Interplay I was very interested to hear what Professor Plowman had to say. In the case of my current project, the data was collected by colleagues during the InterActive Project. It involved video capture during 8, Year 4 numeracy hours, where the students used Excel in guided investigations, to support exploration of the functions of graphs and charts. As my Tutor can verify, and I have to say she has been incredibly patient with my perfectionist attitude, I have spent a considerable time stumbling around the methodological process, not the analysis per se, but the sheer volume of data collected, and how I am actually going to write it up. There is also, an at times, alarming character based facet to this, in that everytime I come back to it I find something new, and with this a new set of questions emerge. This is an unfortunate by product of a rambling mind and not a lack of focus in my questions.

We have used the idea of "iterative cycles of review" as a way of facilitating "ways of seeing." Video at first hand seems to offer a cornucopia, but it is easy to make assumptions that what we see is what we get, and to assume that everyone will read the data and see the same things that we do. This however is frequently not the case. Lets take the example of a visit to the cinema with friends. On leaving we may have all watched the same movie, yet from the discussions which emerge you could be mistaken for believing differently, as the group identify different parts of the film to talk about. Taken out of context, by an outsider listening in, these apparently disperate episodes would seem disjointed, even alien and have little meaning. There may be common high impact moments, but more often than not we highlight very specific individual moments of interest, parts that stood out and had personal impact and meaning for us, and which are very different to those of our friends. Even the same episode, might be described from a different perspective, the visual effects, the protagonists reaction and so on. As the discussion evolves we might eventually come to focus on specific moments, as the outing was a social event and we seek to create a common experience from the whole we have shared. Our approach to "Iterative cycles of review," involved a similar idea, a number of "viewers" worked together collaboratively to identify common themes within data collected, and using our shared experience over time set out to negotiate common meanings through discussions mediated by the data we had engaged with, attempting to tell a shared story based on the common experiences presented in the evidence we had evaluated. Within the analytical process for the symposium above we also used the Studio Code software environment, to tag episodes from the video which corresponded to instances of events and actions within categories we had agreed upon and identified in the data. This introduced some interesting questions for me around perceptions of what happens when children are learning in teacher designed ICT mediated situations, the role of the teacher, and what learning looks like during ICT supported tasks, and so my return to the original InterActive Project data I am using for this project.

In the Plowman and Stephen paper, the authors have used Plasq's Comic Life, to present screen captured video data alongside captions and examples of dialogue between adults and students in the preschool/foundation stage playroom to exemplify particular forms of what they call "guided interaction." They use comparisons between ICT and non ICT based activities as frames to support "ways of seeing," and presenting how interactions observed within more traditional activities, might be developed, evolve and compare with interactions mediated by ICTs as learning tools. The use of the comic strip format sets out to share what has been learnt from their research and as well as forming part of the frame used in data analysis, is intended to support the dissemination process of findings to pre school staff, helping them to identify examples of guided interaction within their use of technology.

I am very much an amateur Mac user, and "emergent researcher." My Mac has largely been employed for multimedia work, video editing and the like, but I was so inspired by what I read, I felt I ought to try out the software, which I feel may help me present the data I want to discuss in my project submission. It also has the potential to extend my current assessment for learning practices and evidence collection activities as I prepare my porfolio for NAACE Mark assessment. In previous assignments for my degree I have presented data from video as "snippets from Learning Conversations." or as "Narratives of Learning." using text supported by images captured from video, or linear presentations using PowerPoint to support observations, analysis and presentation of visual evidence. These digital PowerPoint learning stories (Narratives of Learning), have proven to be useful tools in presenting classroom learning as it unfolds through linked events emerging from the class as a community of practice. I have however become increasingly aware through engagement with video captured of my students at work of the dangers of focussing solely on "the moment," and using dialogue and conversation as evidence when observing students using ICTs. I have also begun to think about what I have come to see as "meaningful inactivity," times when students seem not to be involved physically or verbally with a task at the computer, but when asked about this are able to discuss what they and their partner have been doing or what they have learned from the experience. This type of action has drawn into focus, some practical everyday issues, like those annoying moments when a student who has apparently not engaged with a class task, is then able to relay what has been happening around them. There are also occasions when single word utterances between students seem enough to change the direction of a computer ( or non computer) based task, however when these utterances are viewed within the original context of the video, gestures and visual feedback from the screen become part of a more complex picture than this apparently simplified student discourse would tend to suggest. Language may be a key support in the movement of a task, but the other tools used also seem to mediate and facilitate changes in direction through feedback, with the gesture and motion of the participants communicating what they would like to happen. The richness of the visual and verbal context presented in the video from the activity system which evolves around in this case the computer presents a much broader context to the activity from which so much can be lost, as elements are removed during analysis. And here in lies my conundrum, how to present this richness. I have used a range of methods, including transcription and an emerging framework for multimodal analysis of the data so far, but this is heavily dependent on detailed description, and reliant on the written word to provide context for the activities and actions of those involved. Maybe a multimodal approach to presenting data, will help support the refining of the analytical and presentation process. It will be interesting to see whether using the comic strip format will enable me to engage with the data and tell this particular set of learning stories, while enabling me to visualise and formulate more clearly what the evidence seems to be telling me about what learning looks like as action in ICT mediated situations.

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.

Puppets and Animation II: Completing Our Movies

This week I wanted to build on the storyboardng activity from last week, and for each group to develop their own short movies based on the Ramayana. Time was an enormous issue, and concerned that we would not finish on time, I reorganised the activity.

I decided to set the scenario of the class being a film company, where each group would focus on a particular section of the story instead of working to make five individual films. We delegated scenes from the storyboards we had made, dividing the plot into sections, each group filming self styled stories, based around their particular episode.

Using the puppets made in previous weeks, and the digi blues, the students made short animated clips, which on completion were exported to a shared folder.

Coming together as a class we used Microsoft Movie Maker, to import, organise and sequence the clips. Using the Interactive Whiteboard as an editing space, we were able to organise and discuss the sequences of events, as a shared class experience. Drawing parallels between Movie Maker's timeline and the storyboard structure we had used to plan the scenes, we were able quickly to sequence the clips we had developed together, and to add a title frame, and rolling credits.

All that was missing at the end of the session, and I have to blame myself for this, was the popcorn. However with all mobile phones switched off, media player set to full screen, and the lights dimmed much discussion arose from the final outcomes we had created. These have been recorded on thought bubbles, for display with photographs taken, puppets made and storyboards developed over the course of the unit of work.

What has excited me most during the development of this sequence of activities, is how much was gained from the process of engaging with the media as a storytelling device. The students were immersed in the text as they created it, and the story that evolved went through a constant process of revision and review, as they discussed, negotiated and considered how the characters might physically respond to events, or how the actions of the characters could be used to support the narrative they were trying to present. This approach to deconstructing traditional texts is definitely something I will revisit again.

The Journey of a Banana

It was food week, Year 2 were exploring how they navigate internet pages, and comparing life in their current location with that on St Lucia. It can be very easy for students to begin seeing the internet as a play space and not an information source, so from the very beginning of this unit, simple web quests had been built in to our sessions together. The sites we were to use had also been preselected, and linked to our school community pages. Initially they involved students in locating pictures or key words in simplified online texts such as those to be found at schooltrain, but later involved labelling maps from online and CD based atlases, which share many of the features with a web page.

Learning how to navigate and locate information on the web is fine but the next stage is actually learning that we can do stuff with it. In this case we began with the Oxfam Cool Planet Website,

and their Bonkers about Bananas pages. Using these as a starting point, we discussed the origins of Bananas and the processes involved in harvesting them and transporting them from the Windward Islands to the Supermarket and how all this had to happen before the tasty yellow fruit ends up in our lunchbox. The photographs on the site are excellent, and break the process down, as well as providing a map which locates the islands and texts which support discussions about Fair Trade and the lives of banana farmers.

In this session we opened 2 create a Story, and using the teacher options I enabled the full toolset view. With the children at the Interactive whiteboard, we set up a writing frame, by copying the images of the process from the approriate web pages, and pasting them to the image box at the top of each page in the writing frame we were creating. On completion of the process we watched the slideshow, and discussed what text we might add to support our readers in understanding the journey of a banana. We saved the file to the shared space on the network and the children were asked to work in pairs to find, open and begin writing their story of the journey of the banana.

As mentioned in a previous post I introduced pictorial folders to our network in September, and these 6 and 7 year olds have learned through regular practice, how to log on, and how to find their work independently. One or two students still find this a bit of a problem, but most can not only open files they have saved, but are beginning to cascade save their work, adding numbers to redrafts and edits. This has obvious benefits for assessment for learning practices, and in enabling them to go back to previous work, if they make mistakes. The outcomes of the activity was developed over two sessions, the pictorial support structure within the texts enabling them to develop continuity in their work from one session to the next, and in some cases to go back and reread, check and make simple revisions to the texts they had input previously. In the final stages before publication the students were encouraged to recolour their slides, and fonts to make them readable, and to input animation and slide transition effects from the menu. Discussing this first, and the effects we might choose, the students were very choosy about which would bring about the effects they wanted. For example, swinging bananas in trees were given a rocking animation, bananas from the supermarket, were sent spinning or exploding into the shpopping basket, and processes were often faded in or faded out of the frame. Review during the plenary session of the purposes of the animation effects chosen, yielded good reasons for the effects the pairs had chosen. These documents were so exciting, that over the next couple of weeks, I will be including them in Flash format in a gallery on the school website. In the mean time the students have moved a long way from September when they required everything they produced to be printed out, and instead were really excited at the possibility of sharing their work with their class teachers in class on the IWB or through the website, realising the animation effects they had chosen would be missing from any paper based work. This has very exciting possibilities for the view of publishing that these students are beginning to develop. It will be interesting, with the introduction of class Blogs, developments of the school website and the introduction of a VLE, to see just how much of the "textual" work these students develop in the future will be promoted and displayed by them in digital format.

Thinking About Email

Our LA are about to begin a VLE Pilot, and some time over the next two terms some of my younger students will be required to engage with that QCA or LA unit on E mail, as part of our schools' scheme of work. I have often thought about why we teach this unit where we do, and why E mail, a device with such powerful potential seems to be used so little as a learning tool in the classroom.

We use e mail with students in schools largely it seems as an ICT only resource, a device where skills based teaching takes priority over context, meaning and purpose. Yet without purpose and context there is no meaning to learning about or with E mail. In literacy sessions we work with our students to develop their letter writing skills, hopefully in situations where they have a particular audience and purpose for the final outcomes. Within an email environment then we should be expecting the same thing. For sure there are skills specific to emailing which need to be taught and learned, but why are we sending an attachment, what is it's purpose, who am I writing to and why.

I do not feel, that students should only encounter e mail as a subject in the context of ICT. Students and teachers alike would find E mail as a tool more exciting, if units were regularly planned, to include email as part of simulation activities within theme based and topic work. For this to happen we need to see email as more than a unit we teach at year 3, but as a supporting structure for wider curricular activity, which could start through the use of email simulation software in Key Stage one, and develop through shared class work as a starting point or stimulus for ongoing classroom activities with the real thing. I have published a bright ideas page to my website today, what a fantastic christmas present this was, to share some of my thoughts. How about an online interview with Henry VIII at yourschool.org.uk, or keeping in touch with that roving reporter Barnaby as he trots around the globe? What if we could talk to Katie Morag, as a pen pal? Recieve a mysterious time warped message from a Saxon Villager or Roman Soldier stationed at Hadrian's Wall or Caerleon?

A favourite session we ran with Key Stage 2 students a number of years ago, involved a simulated hot air balloon flight. Set up by colleagues from a local secondary school, the students used simulated data, collected by a local ballooner to track his mystery journey from Bristol, until he landed. Within the simulation they were required to keep in contact with him, imaginary flight controllers, the local police and to write and submit press releases for a newspaper we published later to a set deadline in school for parents and other students. It was great fun.

All of these things obviously take time to set up, but as with most ICT resources, once collected, made and saved, sample texts and materials are there to be developed, changed and extended for later reuse. With a view to developing creative curricular and the new longer unit formats for the Primary Literacy Framework, perhaps their is a place for email as a learning tool within these areas, acting as stimuli as well as the ICT tool it is often considered solely to be.

From Floor To Screen: Imaginary Journeys and LOGO

In a previous post I talked about using BeeBots with year 3s to develop floor compasses and promote discussion around the cardinal compass points. Since then we have used Roamers, borrowed from the Local CLC to explore and develop these compasses, introducing numerical values for the measurement of turn, and helping to establish and consolidate the language associated with rotation. We have introduced the idea of right angles, quarter, half, three quarter and full turns as multiples of these right angles, applied 90 degrees as a value of turn in a right angle, and introduced the idea that we can turn easterly and westerly, clockwise and anticlockwise as well as good old right and left. We have also introduced and consolidated the eight points of the compass and derived through our knowledge of halving and doubling, that the turns in between must be 45 degrees more or less than the compass directions we, or our turtle are currently facing. The hardware used for these floor based activities may be quite expensive to buy, but there is no doubt that the concrete and physical experiences they have provided, have made acces to the on screen turtle in LOGO smoother and less painful. They have also informed my intention to buy a class set of floor turtles. Currently my first choice for this is likely to be the Probot, from TTS.

Extending these experiences from floor to screen, the LOGO environment I have chosen to use in school is an open source tool called MSW LOGO . It has none of the bells and whistles of some of the commercially available packages, but with an uncluttered interface, it does exactly what it says on the tin, for this reason I think it is easy to use, with fewer distractions, and is more accesible than many of its counterparts. The turtle is a simple triangle, the apex it's head and the base it's tail. Transferring experiences from the BeeBot (as I didn't use or have access to Probots this time), forward is always towards the head end, back towards the tail. East and clockwise equate with right, and west and anticlockwise the left. A common problem children seem to find with the onscreen turtle is wanting to input up and down for forward and back, encouraging the children to visualise the BeeBot in it's place, helped them to understand what inputs needed to be given, and that head directional movements would be forward, while tail inputs would be back.

Why develop this unit? Well I felt we needed a unit of work for Year 3 which would bridge concrete floor work in key stage one, with the onscreen environment, and that this should incorporate an element of play and familiarisation. The suggested use of LOGO in Year four is quite heavy going, and a steep learning curve for the uninitiated. A nice feature, of MSW LOGO is the ability to import and use background images. Building on previous floor work where we had made treasure trails for the Roamer to follow, and written mystery tours, I decided to extend this on screen. I could have used Roamer World or a host of other similar tools, but was interested in the skills progression and familiarity students could build on later. Besides, with this software, making backgrounds for the turtle to move in is quite straightforward, and good fun too.

Opening MSW LOGO, you can export the workspace as a bitmap, or graphics file. I began by inputting a procedure to draw a very small square at the home position of the turtle, eg repeat 4 [fd 5 rt 90], then saved this as a background. This was then opened in Microsoft Paint, and the background created. The image at the top of the post is what I eventually produced. The icons and compass rose, were made from clipart, which was copied, pasted and resized before placing around the map. This was all done before the land and sea were floodfilled.

Using MSW Logo, the students used the bitmap menu to find and Load the map, and following the main teaching session were left to explore the island, inputting commands to travel to different locations. It was a fascinating to watch the interchanges as children made decisions about whether to turn right and left, by how much, and as they estimated and refined decisions about the distances the turtle would need to travel, adjusting inputs in response to on screen feedback. The physical gesturing and body movement of the students also reflected their thought processes, turning hands, and whole body movements seemed help with their predictive processes. For the remainder of these sessions we will be continuing to build on the outcomes of this session, by writing mystery tours for our friends, consolidating the ideas of the eight points of the compass, before in the the final session using storyboards to record the views on the island, we would see at various stopping off points planned for us by our friends.

Playing With Our Website

I guess as with many of us I have been flooded recently with a plethora of flyers and adverts from people offering to set up Learning Platforms and School Websites, indeed one company recently contacted me to tell me about the fantastic website they had built for a local school, and it was, but I have to admit to being more than a little upset that they had done so without even looking at the one we already had, one which I had spent many hours lovingly tending to. It would have been nice for them to say, how they could offer their services in managing and maintaining our site, rather than assuming we did not have one or offering the editable template structure approach.

As a school we have had a website since 1998, and in that time it has not lead a static existence, but has gone through several incarnations, from my early experiments with visual development tools, through a class based project with my students that was later adapted to become an LA scheme of work unit, having stopped off on its way to form the basis of a local school's network project. Our site's current incarnation began in June last year when I began to reorganise and restructure it with an eye to supporting school based and extended learning within the wider local and educational communities. I recently discovered an article about Learning Platforms which expressed sentiments, I feel that any school website designed for learning should share. Unfortunately since then I have lost this article, but the description was inspirational. Learning platforms were likened to "Railway Stations," places where learners came with a view to travelling to "new destinations," embarking from here to widen their learning horizons. As a community school, with a long commitment to extending and supporting the learning not only of our students, but all stakeholders, this metaphor and vision of a learning platform shares much with my own views on the role school websites.

A website is little more than a navigable filing system, and can be much more than a shop window. It too can act as a portal, somewhere that not only potential clients, but existing stakeholders want to visit, to celebrate and share all that is good about us as a learning community, and a place to share tools and resources that we, our students and wider community can draw on to engage in and extend our learning opportunities.

This weekend I have uploaded the latest version of our website, it has a new look, but still contains all of the previously developed content, reorganised and filed as it had become a little tatty (behind the scenes). It builds on the work that has gone before by including links to new content too, some of which exist outside of the site, with the Teyfant Site acting as a portal, platform or starting point where all of this is pulled together. Some of the new content represents trials and experiments currently going on in school, with emerging technologies. I am pleased to include this time some experimental class blogs, which will grow out of class community pages and community ICT projects and which hopefully will enable delegation of some of the sites maintenance and upkeep tasks. Can't wait to see how these develop. I was intent at the beginning of the year that any learning platform we did adopt should meet our needs and not be bought into solely to meet someone else's agenda. After Easter we will be participating in a pilot scheme, for a commercial VLE, but I would like this to become part of our school's wider web strategy, and meet with our learning agenda. Using the school web site to frame our thoughts about what a learning platform is, and the potential affordances they bring to a school such as ours has already been a beneficial process, but will help us further when we consider what we truly want from the VLE. I feel that our school website has the potential to form the basis of our "learning platform," and that tools such as a VLE, should plug into this, in order to expand it's functionality. Lets just see how things pan out.. What do others think?

Puppets and Animation

Last week as part of their introduction to stop motion animation, my year 4 students worked with potato heads, this week in class they had been sharing the Ramayana as part of their topic work on India. They had made some beautiful articulated stick puppets in class, with jointed limbs, and I felt these would lend themselves beautifully to the work they were developing in the suite.

It was interesting this week with puppets and a familiar story, how the focus of the group's work changed, from ICT skill development, to story telling, and how much better the students became at working together, as they retold the story to each other, and began negotiating next steps, for their work. Previous points of group disagreement found their resolutions in the decisions which had to be made if the story, however short they were trying to tell, was to be achieved. The tasks which evolved were also much more student lead, and the outcomes demonstrated the benefits of structured play activities in previous weeks. At the beginning of this week's session we reviewed some of our previous work as a starting point highlighting some of the diffficulties we had had, including staying out of shot, our excitement to shoot frames before we were ready, and the problems some of us has had in taking turns and working together. Looking at the visual evidence through the films we had made in previous shoots the effects of these were inherent and evident, as moved cameras, or shadows, or hands in shot. Discussing these we decided that the animation, direction and camera activity might work better as a "carousel activity," where everyone had to take turns and would have the chance to take on every group role during this "shoot."

The favourite scene was a battle scene between Rama and Ravana, as you might imagine, with Martial Arts type moves being devised during the short 150 to 200 frame films that were made, rather than the flight of Rama's golden arrow. Some groups also devised a dance scene with Rama and Sita, while one group thinking about how they might tell the whole story in 10 seconds, introduced ideas drawn from experiences of Silent movies and cartoon strips, and added written captions, and speech bubbles.

In our plenary this week we shared the shorts we had created, and it was interesting to see how far the groups had developed in such a short time, and what they had learned about the film making process and use of the camera. The children had used boxes to raise their cameras so that they could shoot down onto the desktop stages we had created. Some characters began their action out of shot and moved into the frame as the action developed, the students had clearly used the onscreen viewfinder to frame shots, as their was little evidence this session of student body parts or shadows in shot, and the quality of movement of characters was smoother. To compile evidence of learning for this unit, as a result of this session I am considering using Movie Maker to pull together the progression of files into one place.

Our next session will be classroom based, building on the work from this session, and developed through a literacy session. The students will work in their groups to plan a retelling of the story, using a storyboard. In the sessions to follow, the group will be encouraged to use the six planned scenes from the story, to shoot six short animated scenes using the puppets they have created, with additional scenery props if needed, made during this time. Building on community ideas developed this week I will also suggest that they might like to consider and create additional support prompts for their story such as captions and speech bubbles. During the final session I am intending that the students be introduced to Movie Maker to compile the clips they have created, and add a title frame and credits.

A common concern I find expressed regarding the introduction of techniques such as this within the classroom is the time element involved, or understanding of the wider curricular potential and relevance such activities can offer. My experiences tell me that often much of the learning which takes place in ICT mediated learning situations, is not readilly evidenced within the outcomes created, though can often be inferred from what has been developed in the process. I am beginning to think that perhaps some of our problems relate to trying to fit too much in, and as a result of this repeating similar things in different formats. What maybe we could consider is how we might be able to do less in order to achieve more. The longer unit format of the New Literacy Framework may help with this. A unit of work on for example playscripts, might see not a traditional written outcome as evidence, but performance of the script through the development of a podcast, video news programme or an animation. Focussed written and practical tasks in the class leading to the eventual perfromance and publishing of this text, for further evaluation of the final outcome, by a wider and real audience. Animation could be linked to a host of traditional text genre, including visual documentary style approaches to the explanation of processes (a sequence describing digestion or the factors necessary for plant growth), journeys (using real or imaginary maps and icons to document an imaginary journey to a remote location), recounts and recording of visual or oral tellings of familiar tales through for example puppets. The final multimodal outcome seen as integral to and emerging from a wider planned engagement with similar text types in other formats, could challenge ours and student perceptions of what texts are, what they are for and how we portray meanings for remote audiences? Literacy activities would also be set in the context of wider subject learning taking place around the unit as it develops, and make use of such tools as the digi blue, more relevant. This is certainly an area I will be reflecting on more widely as I extend my views of what multimodality may mean for ICT and the wider curriculum through the new literacy framework.

2Create a Story: Making Flash Files

Having read Keith's Post about 2 create a Story (2cs), I was reminded of some minor issues I encountered when I first tried to export to flash from the software. I love 2cs as a tool , and am not sure if my issue was a bug within the software at the time or whether it was a by-product of the way it had been installed on our system.

What would happen is when I exported as .swf, the software would create a .2cs file instead. This file could not subsequently be opened in 2 create a story or in flash player, I tried renaming it's file extension to .swf, and this then solved the problem enabling the file to be played in flash player, and to be inserted in my web pages. If you encounter this problem, and feel comfortable with trying out this process, then the Fix I used goes like this.

1. Follow the save process from 2cs as usual, in the file types box selecting export as flash.
2. Close 2cs and open windows explorer. Browse for the location where you saved the file.
3. In the tools menu select folder options and then the view tab.
4. Scroll down and ensure the hide extensions for known file types box is unticked. Press the apply button, and then ok. All files should appear with their name followed by their extension (eg .htm or .2cs)
5. Select the file you have just saved, and then right click to rename.
6. replace the .2cs extension with .swf.
7. Double click to open the file in flash player.

If this doesn't work, then rename the file with the .2cs extension, and seek advice from 2 simple.

In more recent versions of the software this problem doesn't seem to happen, 2simple I have found are a very approachable company, and having visited their website the other day before writing this, you might rather prefer to call them if you encounter this difficulty, to seek a version upgrade. In the meantime I hope this might be a helpful stop gap.

Thank You

Wanted to say thank you to the ICT Subject Leaders at The I this afternoon, for the opportunity to share some of the things we have been doing in school. I really enjoyed the session, and hope you gained as much as I did from the experience.

Even Potatoes Have Feelings: Introducing Stop Motion Animation Using Digi Blues

A couple of years ago we invested in a set of Digi Blues. This term I have begun to adapt one of our LA units of work for Y4 an introduction to animation. This week being a whole school food week I really wanted to link our session to the work students were doing in class. I had considered, making simple stop motion films using pulses and stuff, but couldn't quite map out what I wanted the students to achieve. Then I remembered Toy Story and the scene where Mr Potato Head having rearranged the parts of his face announces "Hey look! I'm Picasso."

Introducing the session to the students, we explored a colection of characatures I had collected from the web that showed how the shapes of our facial features change, to express our moods. Using a Manga style outline, we began to explore how the character's face might appear according to their moods or feelings.

The children had been previously organised into groups, and roles had been decided on, one child would control the camera, a second would direct and monitor scenes, calling the shots as it were when the scene was clear, while the other's would act as animators, making the small movements neccesary in between each shot.

Each group was given a potato, and a few cocktail sticks. The facial features for our potato head were to be formed from plasticene. The cocktail sticks would act as anchors on the potato while the students manipulated the plasticene shapes to gradually change mood of the forlorn vegetable.

As an introduction to the principles of short film making and stop motion animation the activity was good fun, and the students gained a great deal from the experience. The biggest challenge for them was understanding that the movements of material had to be very small in order that the movements of the character would appear smooth. They also soon discovered on playback that being in shot, meant appearing in the monitor image on screen and not just stepping back, which challenged the director and cameraman.

One problem with the digi blue is the file format that the video is saved in. I have struggled for a while with how we get the files made on these cameras to play on PCs that done't have the softwarw package that comes with them installed, and the solution had been starring me in the face for some time. Importing the .avi files into copies of Microsoft Movie Maker on the same machines, allows them to be exported as Window's Media Video Files, which then can be played in Media Player. It seems that not only the children gained from this experience.

New School Project

This week we began a project with our students, supported by colleagues and friends from Calling the Shots and Creative Partnerships. Our current school will eventually become part of a new school, developed within the DfES "Building Schools for the Future" programme. This will result in the development of a through school campus due to open in 2008-9, the disappearence of our current school buildings and a complete reshaping of the landscape around us.

This Cross Curricular, Living History Project seeks to embed the use of digital technologies in logging and documenting the processes of change and transition during the building of the new school complex. It will provide students with the opportunity to develop their skills in using and editing digital photographs, film making and sound recording while they develop a new area of our school website dedicated to the documentary making process. Within this project we are also taking our first, embryonic steps into blogging, and will as the project develops, begin exploring podcasting as a communications medium.