BlockCAD: Modelling Onscreen with "Lego" Style Blocks

I have had lots of fun playing with BlockCAD in between my other dabblings this week. This freeware tool has been pointed to for a while now by colleagues, with referals through feeds from del.icio.us and my colleagues on Twitter. Having seen it used in school on a Teachers TV programme this week I thought it was time to have a play for myself.

BlockCAD, is a computer aided design (CAD) environment allowing its user to build onscreen, 3d models using LEGO type bricks.

Screenshot From Anders' Corner of the Web home of BlockCAD

On opening BlockCAD the user is presented with an empty base board in the main design window onto which bricks can be laid. The dimensions of this board are not fixed and can be changed by typing the desired dimensions into text boxes to the bottom right of the window labelled base. To the right of the design window is a component gallery. To begin your creation, select your block clicking and dragging it to the baseboard. Clicking the left mouse button locks it in place. Rotating a block is achieved by right clicking the mouse before placing it. Within the gallery are a wide selection of blocks, that include many familiar components including wheels, windows, doors and so on. The colours of these components can also be changed by clicking the colour pallete above the component window.

I found that it was easiest to place bricks accurately if the baseboard was rotated to a plan view. Rotation tools on the tool bar allow the models you build to be turned through 360 degrees in both vertical and horizontal planes at any time during the construction process. There is no undo button. Deleting a brick requires the use of a mouse and del key combination. Pressing the del key before clicking on the brick in question, highlights the brick with a frame and hitting the del key again removes the brick from the model.

Throughout the making process the 3d model as a whole structure can be viewed from diffferent perspectives using the rotation tools. Using the capture tool, images of these various perspectives can also be captured and saved. Clicking the capture tool opens a dragable window that can be dragged around like a camera viewfinder to frame the image and view of the structure you want. These in turn can can be saved in a number of different image formats for use in other software environments.

I really like this tool, and as freeware students can access it and download it away from school too, opening opportunities for them to extend their creative uses and learning away from school. It uses as a model a construction kit type that we have readily available for students to use in school, and that they themselves may have at home.

The tool has obvious cross curricular applications within DT, where it could be used in the IDEAS and FPT phases to model outcomes and facilitate evaluation onscreen before students begin construction. If included as part of an onging design and make process by groups of students it could also be used through a cascade save process to track, monitor and present changes they make as a result of difficulties or considerations within their making processes. The images could be used in DTP outcomes for display or included alongside photographs in learning stories presented in Powerpoint or even photostory.

I also like the idea of the environment being used as a scaffold for onscreen instructional writing, mediated by talk. Images exported from the environment could be used to help students create and design new models, and frame instruction leaflets for others to use as reading tasks. Context, purpose and audience for their work. I'd like to add this to our modeling and simulation tool box and see what the crew make of it.

A Simple Animatic: Digital storyboard Using MS Paint and Photostory

Preparing materials to use in class next week, including a storyboard model to help my students frame their thinking as they plan a short animation about materials and change. To begin I created these four simple, sketch like images using Microsoft Paint. Using each through a copy and paste process I then compiled six further sketch like images figuratively representing the melting and freezing process to use in a smart book.


As I was working I wondered about how the images might work as as part of a simple "animatic" story. The result of my wanderings, is this video clip created using photostory and my story board images.

A similar process has been used previously to help students think about the changing seasons, by creating landscapes with PhotoFiltre and MS Paint. Through a "cascade" saving process the students were encouraged to revise and edit a template image they had prepared to show what they thought the same scene might look like at different times of the year. Completed images were then imported to photostory, chronologically sequenced and background music added before export to video for sharing. The process also supported documentary work and recount development with my class earlier in the year as they told the story of Grace Darling. and shared their feelings as we left our old school building behind. MS Photostory is a really nice tool to use with students and these simple techniques great starting points for thinking about animation and digital story telling if keen to have a try but concerned about the process and how to begin.

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.

Adventures with iSpring Update: Changing the Embed Code

I was really excited when I set out to share the work I had displayed on my blog using iSpring with a colleague other day. Imagine my horror ... when in the midst of my excitement the files didn't download or play. It was easier at the time to think the firewall was preventing this and even though disapointed I thought no more about it until I got home

As it turned out it was a problem with the way the browser in question was using the page that prevented the files from rendering and this morning I have experimented using some code previously used to embed flash files to my blog, that seems to have fixed the problem. If you are interested here it is. Right clicking and choosing to view image will make it easier to read, though I have also shared a txt version of the file can be downloaded from here and edited.

A number of folk have asked about how to embed flash files created by export from tools such as 2create, and 2create a story. I am no whizz in the code department but I have found this works for this too. In order for it to work you must have the files hosted on a webspace, this could be your VLE. You will need to do some editing to meet your own needs and point your page to the file you have created and uploaded, hopefully the colourcoding in the image will help.

The blue part refers to the space where your file/s are hosted
The foldername section is the folder structure and breadcrumb trail to where the file actually is
and the red part the name of the file itelf with extension.

I hope this is useful. Now to fix my previous post:o)

ICT in the Early Years

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ICT in the Early Years

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Thanks to Anthony Evans for his recent post pointing to and sharing this inspirational web space. ICT in the Early Years is a fantastic resource, that exemplifies current practice at the Homerton Children's centre, in Cambridgeshire.

There is much to learn from a visit to this space for all of us about how ICTs can be exploited and embedded in support of daily classroom life. Throughout the space it is evident that ICTs do not stand alone here, but are viewed and used as part of a wider social and physical toolset to support and mediate the learning experiences of students and the pedagogy and practice of practitioners. Computers form part of roleplay areas, Cameras are used by students and professionals to capture activities, points of interest as well as to evidence, share and support review of learning. Software tools are carefully chosen to contextualise learning within real life situations for students, and utilised to create and share learning stories and colate and present assessment for learning materials within digital portfolios. Throughout the site materials developed are also offered for download and use in CPD.

The planning area of the site is a real boon as Early Years and Foundation Stage Principles are used to illustrate and exemplify potential uses for ICT tools. From my point of view as an ICT subject leader, with little to no foundation experience this is an extremely valuable resource. One that I can share with colleagues in school and that will help inform potential directions for ICT investment and development, support audit of current practice and aid as a starting point for planning next steps in our professional learning. Thanks to all at the Homerton Children's Centre involved in the development and sharing of this fantastic resource.

Looking Into The Past And Playing with Images

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Looking Into the Past: Market Street, Leesburg, VA on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

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I love this idea From Jason Powell pointed out by a colleague on Twitter. In previous posts I have reflected and waxed about how we might use historical images to investigate, locate, discuss and compare modern scenes within a given location. This use of digital photography to embed the past within the modern scene however is a really interesting idea. I like the way the historical landscape is not removed from the scene, but used as integral to it and fits like a missing piece from a jigsaw puzzle. Just pondering how this type of image composition process might be used as part of a digital photography project. How practical it might be to embed it in field trips or orientering type activity.

Being a bit of a Pink Floyd fan, and ambling off track a little as usual, seeing these images and a recent tweat around using ICT to support art projects reminded me of a small scale project with some students a while back using a trial version of Serif Photoplus I picked up at a conference. The project involved creating images in the style of Magritte.

Downloaded scans of paintings from the Internet were used initialy to create template files and masks, where for example in this image the landscape was removed. The painting and window used to form a framing layer. The students used digital cameras to capture views and images from around school including landscapes and objects captured from unsual angles.

Once downloaded to the computer the children chose a frame for their image, and applied filter effects to their own images, before inserting these to the template, and exporting these as jpegs. This video presentation contains the student outcomes from this activity.

Within the National Primary Framework for Literacy there are number of references to using graphic manipulation to apply effects to images either in response to texts or in support of composition through the creation of scenes and settings. Some of these images particularly the landscapes make for strange viewing.

A number of Magritte's images make great starting points for discussion generally, but would also make brilliant talk for writing prompts in developing openers and links to the weird and wonderful in narrative units such as those associated with Fantasy and Strange World Settings. Here are a couple that set my mind a whirring.

• Time Transfixed
• The Blank Cheque
• The Oasis

Playing With iSpring Free

I am looking forward to a bit of time over the next couple of weeks to kick back, unwind, play, write and share some of the things I have been up to recently. I have decided to begin by exploring a tool I was introduced to and shared before Christmas but that in the midst of our move to new premises I have not had time to play with.

The tool is iSpring Free, a downloadable plugin for PowerPoint, that enables the slideshows we create to be exported, shared and displayed as flash video files. I originally came across the tool as a recommended "gadget" by a pilot partner from Netmedia, as a way for colleagues to use an environment they are familiar with to develop multimedia content for the VLE.

With iSpring we initially identified how colleagues could use the tool very simply alongside PowerPoint to create

• photo albums
• simple illustrated texts
• Visual writing prompts and models etc

to support online projects.

The tool could also be used in a similar vain with students to allow multimodal texts they created in Powerpoint, to be published directly to webspaces without their reader needing to download a viewer, or as we have often done in the past, publishing their show as a web page for upload and sharing.

I have used online host spaces to publish and share simple linear shows such as learning stories and those I want to use with colleagues away from site, and either embedding these to my blog or logging on in situ to access them full screen. The functionality of PowerPoint however allows so much more than this in terms of developing content. The inclusion of hyperlinks for example allows navigation to be included, and a multidimensional or layered effect to be added to the shows we produce, allowing us and our readers to explore and move around a show in our own way by travelling directly from one slide in the show to another and back again. This feature is generally lost when we upload files to sites such as these.

iSpring while creating its flash file, maintains the hyperlinks enabling the slideshows to behave as they would in slideshow view in PowerPoint. The slideshows remain navigable. Here are a few examples that I converted today to show what I mean.

This Linear show is a learning story/Documentary developed with students as an integral part of a Creative Partnerships Animation Project a number of years ago. Clicking on each slide or using the control bar allows the reader to move from one slide to another in sequence. The show is rather long, but was presented to the students as behind the scenes look at the project and contextualised as DVD behind the scenes look at the film making process. It was later used as a kiosk show in school and at a a local conference on loop to share the process behind the project developed with students. It may be of interest in its entirity as a learning story in this context as well as a demo of this particular piece of software.


This textured or layered show includes hyperlinks. As you navigate watch out for arrow images embedded on some of the slides. These invite you as a reader to engage and interact with the content, to move to other slides that present development ideas and thinking points based in the page you have just visited and also direct you back to this with another hyperlink. The slides can either be navigated in a linear fashion by clicking the slide, or by clicking hyperlinks the reader can move between slides directly. This show created a number of years ago in PowerPoint was an early attempt on my part to create a layered text, with and for students. This has also been published previously on this blog as a swf file generated using 2create.



This file also a linear presentations, contains three poems developed by groups of students using images from the web to think about similes and set to auto run.



These files developed by students, both use hyperlinks in Powerpoint to navigate the show in different ways. The first was created as an esafety unit outcome with Y6 students scaffolded by by this great online resource from teaching ideas. The second example was created by pairs of Y 5 students as part of a challenge to create a CD ROM style book for younger students based on the Non Dialogue based Narrative Bert.





It has been great this morning while looking for files to play with to revisit earlier works, and through experimenting with iSpring to give a new lease of life to some of them, and to display them as I would have originally liked to share them. It has also been useful to begin extending thoughts about how tools such as this can open new paths for old tools, thoughts and ideas.

UK based colleague at porchester has been using iSpring as a tool to help his students publish developed content to their school's blog based web site, and says

Particular favourites of mine from the work presented here are poems such as this based around snowfalling. The power of this for me lies in the multimodal nature of the presentation. Moving beyond text and images, the animation effects applied to the text, with the addition of sound add much to the overall atmosphere and depth of the piece. Very cool.

This is a tool I think I will have to come back to some more this week.

Tracking a Learning Story: Using Powerpoint and Slideshare as Digital Floor Books

Perhaps I should now entitle this post "Tricked into a learning story." I was amazed today when I visited my Slideshare space to find one of the Powerpoint files I uploaded a while back had been viewed 100504 times.

I don't usually quote my site stats, this space for me is not about that, it is a place where I reflect and share the work I do with my students and ideas that inspire me as a result. However I recieved an email from slideshare a site I trusted as a member and set off to see what it was all about. I was really excited as you may imagine by what I saw when I visited my slidespace having not visited for a while. I didn't expect a service like this to play about with my stats, and certainly not in a public facing space. I put together the original post and published a link on twitter to celebrate. As it turns out I have been well and truly had by what has turned out to be their april fool. Thanks to members of my Twitter network, and especially NeilAdam, I found out about this, and am feeling suitably foolish as a result.... Well done slideshare!

Now feeling marginally calmer about it I have decided I should take the "prank" as a dose of medicine to remind myself of all the esafety lessons I have taught my students. Now however it seems I have to add to these sessions, that even the sites you think you can trust may not be what they say they are. I can take a joke as well as the next, but am seriously unhappy about how this has turned out, and with the availabilty of my own hosting space am now intending to move my files as a result.

Originally the show in question was created as a "digital floorbook" as part of an MSc Assignment on the potential of ICT in assessment for learning. It follows through and tracks a teaching sequence, using IWB notes and photographs as evidence, in a planned process to move my students toward the formal algorithms for addition and subtraction, drawing on and evaluating the range of mental methods and informal jottings they were using at the time.

Using mental methods to construct a standard written method for addition and subtraction

View more presentations from twowhizzy.

This "floor book" has been shared a number of times, and featured in a previous post. It is now buried away but so this post does not become an entirely wasted space I am embedding it again in the hope that you may find it useful.

Thanks to everyone who really has viewed or downloaded the show, however many of you there are. Maybe Slideshare will be able to give me a more accurate view on this soon!

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.

Preparing our Asus Machines

It has been a really interesting week, our Asus Eees have been on site for a while, but actually getting them into the hands of the students has proven a challenge. Taking the bull by the horns I wondered how the process might work, if I got them charged up and worked with the students to set up the devices from scratch.

We have done a lot of work across a range of software environments, but not with an operating system before. The process proved to be not so challenging as I first thought, taking the process step by step, working in pairs and using peer review as part of the activity, we have managed to get 20 machines setup from first boot, installed a wireless connection to allow students to access the guest network, and set firefox preferences so that the browser's home page is that of the school web site, the home page for our emergent learning platform.

After a nervy start I was impressed with how quickly the students managed to achieve our goals. For an adult in the know, it can take around 10-15 minutes per machine, possibly a little less once in the flow, and with sets of machines powered up. It took a little longer around half an hour, because of the stop start process involved, supporting the process with a projected monitor on the IWB, and ensuring we were all keeping together and to task, but the students were really pleased with themselves and quite rightly so. When they were finally able to access the web and open some familiar tools.

Step 1
Normal first boot process for a PC involved setting up the keyboard, choosing a language, and a time zone. Followed by setting a password for the machine, and un hatching a radio button to allow bypass of this when the machine is turned on.

Step 2
Setting up a wireless connection using the wizard, this was largely a skip through process but because our wireless connection is hidden, required input of an SSID, and giving our network a friendly name.

Step 3
Logging onto the school's guest Proxy, before being able to access the web and setting the browser's home page preferences.

Of all the machines set up, only 2 would not accesss the web when we had finished, and both of these were down to cursor slip when the students were selecting network types in the set up wizard. The touchpads seems really sensitive on these versions of the machine. In terms of managing the process of set up correcting two slipups, beats the time scale to set up 20 machines from scratch. I have another 10 on charge this evening, to complete 2 class sets tomorrow during assembly. Planning to go through the process again next week knowing the pitfalls with 2 year 5 classes, hopefully having some of my Y4s as technical support will help.

As for the Y4s who will be using their class sets next week for the first time, we have a webquest in store. The VLE currently hosts a collection of short texts and image galleries about India. We have added some useful web sites, and uploaded a powerpoint template with key areas to investigate. In literacy we will be looking at notetaking, and using three simple slide styles to present our research.

1) Simplifying a short web based text for a slide aimed at a younger audience.
2) Selecting key points to prepare bullet lists
3) Picking out key ideas from a text and presenting these as images from a web search.

Building around these ideas the students will be encouraged to choose from each to develop their own digital slideshows as part of a Passport to India Challenge. The value of the tools being placed on the VLE is that some children may choose to carry on their work at home, giving the opportunity to introduce the file box tools on their home pages as a way of moving work between home and school. This morning J arrived with his flash drive and a copy of the completed Vishnu tale he had been working on, he certainly may benefit from introduction to this device as a means of sharing his work with both myself and friends. Working in the smaller group setting, where the tool is embedded in the overall activity, and with access to the tools by all throughout the challenge process it will be interesting to see how the students use and adapt the space throughout the week, and engage with each other within the environment.

Next week will certainly be one for the Digital Camera, and with material uploaded for sharing hopefully a starting point for a spot of review and reflective writing over Easter.

I Stand Corrected

Experiences of using spaces such as Think.com, have lead me to appreciate the dialogue that can emerge through working with students in online spaces. We are currently using the Netmedia Primary VLE in school, as part of an LA Pilot, and a couple of my students, building on their class blogging experiences, have begun maintaning their own blogs, using the space to write about things that interest them and building on the experiences from school away from class in the form of simple learning logs. Visiting the spaces is a treat, listening to the student voice, and gaining insight to how they interpreted things, or how they choose to develop and extend things for themselves. Last week we began phase two of our unit on stories from different cultures, and I noticed that one of the students had begun to write his own version of one of the stories we had previously engaged with. Added to this was a comment, asking what the text was about?

Reading the text which began so well, I could see where the commentor was coming from, as the plot began to slip towards the end. Commenting on a blog is a really challenging thing even for adults, so I decided to leave both a comment. First of all asking the commentor a year 6 if he could explain more clearly what he meant, and what the year 4 author might do to make his meaning clearer. To remind the author of the plot of the story I wrote a quick draft of my own, publishing it to my VLE Blog Space, and inviting both students to see what they thought of it by email. How could I improve the text? Would they like to have a go at developing the story for themselves, or perhaps use some of the ideas to clarify the plot.

On Monday morning I arrived in school not so much to a greeting, as a discussion around the typos I had made. I wasn't aware of these in my haste to get together the story frame, though no doubt my readers are. It was interesting though to see just how much detail my story had been engaged with as a starting point. I have been aware for some time that my students also visit my blog here occasionally, to share the things they have been doing in school, the potential power of these spaces as "models" for writing seem too good to miss, the sense of audience, purpose and need to be clear if our meaning is to be made. This is certainly something I hope to exploit more widely having recieved this today. I have been out today on a Primary Strategy day, I thought that Monday's dialogue was over but checking my email and the VLE inbox this evening I came across this "Your Corrected Story." Not only has all of my spelling and grammar been checked - thanks J!- but we also now have another starting point for discussion in part of our Literacy session tomorrow. Our plan was to review and evaluate the work the students have been doing today, building on this to edit and improve, but since J has spent so much time reviewing mine already, I am wondering about having him share his process as a starting point before sending the children off to engage with their own stories in pairs. Building on this to help students think about their texts framed by our marking ladders and agreed success criteria, seems quite a powerful in.

A lesson or idea I would like to share or take away from this is how a VLE even for the youngest of students need not be a web based flash drive or delivery platform. A way of transferring, accessing, storing or sharing work that teachers make for children and colleagues to use at school. If I am honest this is one of my biggest fears and concerns about how these spaces are often portrayed within the literature we recieve or in the conversations we have with colleagues. There is a danger also of seeing these environments as places where traditional homework types and tasks can be uploaded in a digital format in the assumption that this somehow makes them more appealing. I would like to see our space increasingly seen as a shared space where we all have ownership, and a sense of belonging. VLEs like classrooms and schools need to be considered social learning spaces extensions and mediators for informal as well as formal learning experiences.

Our Asus web books are just about set up, and ready to be used. What further opportunities will wireless access on a one to one and paired access have on their development and use of this space?

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...

Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions: Digital starters for Explaining Processes

A couple of weeks ago I posted some thoughts and starting points as we began working together on texts that explain processes how they work and how they are presented. This is something we have found students can find challenging, not describing the process but the aspect of the work that requires the use of passive voice, a commentary on action without personal involvement. The text type can very easily change from one to another depending on the use of pronoun for example

First of all Wallace or we pressed the big red button, and the arm came out.. places the author in the recount domain.
First of all you press the button places the author in the domain of instructional writing,

What we were aiming for was for the students to be able to describe a process as if they were looking in on events as the device does all the work while they commentated on the action.

Visualising and rehearsing this type of recording process is a real challenge, especially I find with youngsters who no matter how hard they try are in the middle of the experience. For this unit then we decided to use talk as the vehicle to engage with the process, and to enable the children to hear how the process sounded and from here to develop their writing skills.

The unit began with the children engaging with and exploring a number of explanatory texts and providing opportunities for the children to hear the differences between

• recounts
• instructions
• and explanations

Texts that explain processes rarely exist in isolation, but are usually found as part of larger textual bodies. The texts we provided included longer textual pieces that had a process explained somewhere within in it. We were keen that these texts should not be just traditional paper based forms, and among the texts we provided was also a Video explanation about web search strategies from Commoncraft. This was an interesting tool, that really made us sit back and think. As with many such texts it opens with a general statement, but at times the tone and movement of the text meant it was tricky to distinguish between it and a set of instructions. Was the text explaining how a web search works, or providing tips on how to use a websearch more effectively. Actually it seemed to be doing both at different points. So what was it that differentiated the instructional part of the text from the explanation part. We used this video alongside other written texts to help us unpick the features that made one type of writing different from the other. This was then used to help us create a marking and review ladder to use when we began working on our own writing.

Talk for Writing: Rehearsing the Process Using Video

To frame and practice the process of writing an explanation we began with modelled and guided talk for writing ativities based on "The Tellyscope," an Aardman's Wallace and Gromit short. We watched the video together, and then spent time talking about the device, in its context. A wild and whacky tool for controlling the TV from the comfort of an arm chair. Next the sound was turned off and elements of the video used to focus on the process involved in operating the device, before in talking twos the students were encouraged to describe the sequence of events to each other. The process was played again and the children tried to commentate on what they could see happening, matching their commentary to onscreen action. At this point we also began to introduce the use of passive pronouns such as it, and the addition of time connectives to act as sentence openers and to extend the ways we could describe and link sections of the sentence to include causal connectives,

eg. A big red button is pressed which causes the arm of the chair to open. A ball is placed in the hand and pulling this back results in a spring being squashed down.

After rehearsing and engaging with the explanation in this way, the children were provided with flow charts containing frame captures from the film, that showed significant points in the process. The children worked in pairs following modelled writes and building on their their oral work to describe the stages in the process. Key to these tasks were choice of sentence openers and how they would join pairs of sentences that described cause and effect.

Having described the process the children were then encouraged to work together to create a short generalised opening statement for the explanation, saying what the device was for and who might find it useful, and to write their own headings for their written piece. The children also used computer based versions of the writing frames to re-present edit and improve their work against our success criteria.

Independent Have A Gos

With the guided and modelled part of the process completed and our marking ladders and rubrics developed, we watched together another Walace and Gromit short, The Snooze-a-tron, we had chosen to be our big write focus and stimulus.

This marvellous machine designed for the discerning chomper of cheese lulls its user to sleep by fluffing pillows and tucking in with ted, before the long suffering pooch becomes integrated within a sheep counting machine that will carry him off to the land of nod. As a home learning challenge the children were asked to design their own "snooze-a-tron" or "wake-a-tron," that they would use to frame an explanation text of their own.

The children responded marvellously to this, bringing in models, diagrams and sketches. Some students had begun to rename the suggested devices. I had a particular fondness for the machine known as the "Alarm Cluck," the name conjured up all sorts of ideas even before I found out how it actually worked. Again this series of sessions began with the students talking about their devices, explaining how they worked to their friends and rehearsing how and where they might use particular text features. Throughout the post are a few examples of the students engaged in this process. All that was left now was for the students to put into practice what they had been learning as a result of these activities.

During this unit of work a number of ICT tools were used to support first of all, the talk for writing process and also the student's presentation of written outcomes. These were developed from a series of Collect, Store, Prepare and Share activities.

• The Common Craft and Wallace and Gromit videos were downloaded from You Tube to allow use of them in school.
• The Wallace and Grommit videos were downloaded as MP4 files using the "get You Tube Video" bookmarklet mentioned in this previous post.
• The MP4 files were opened in Quick Time Pro, enabling frame captures to be made. These images from the movie were used in the development of table top talk and writing frames, as well as in the making of IWB notebooks to help with sequencing and ordering.
• Talk for writing frames were also made available on the school network so that students could use these to present their explanations, and facilitate further discussion and review of their texts.
• Within the talk process children were also encouraged to use Podium as an audio recording device to help them present and hear as a reader the texts that they had been authoring.

Thanks to Aardman Animation for the inspiration, and Wallace and Gromit for their help in our learning process.

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.

Great Multimodal Starting Points for Writing -Text Number 8 and 9

Would like to take credit for finding this movie, but I found it as a suggested tool on the Lancashire Grid For Learning's, website as frame and starting point for a unit of work on explanatory texts. The Shirt Machine by Jon Davis. Also on the Lancs site is a suggested plan for developing work around the video, linked to the new framework for Primary Literacy's longer unit structure.

get The Shirt Machine in HD on sph3re.tv

While thinking about this post a number of other possible digital texts began to spring to mind that could be used as talk for writing frames with this genre, in explaining processes.These include personal favourites such as Wallace and Grommit's Gracking Contraptions by Aardman's, that were included on The Curse of The Were-Rabbit DVD release, but can also be found as part of this Aardman Playlist onYouTube.

In reading, thinking about and comparing types of explanatory texts, we also used a downloaded CommonCraft video, displayed on a laptop in class, as part of a carousel task today. Encouraging the students to use this alongside marking ladders to identify features used in this presentation type and to begin comparing it with other written explanations.

Great Multimodal Starting Points for Writing -Text Number 7

This might just be Text Number 7 in my collection of great multimodal starting points for writing. Spotted on You Tube Today and having thoroughly enjoyed its puns and back story, am beginning to wonder what it might offer as a starting point for persuasive writing or perhaps as a stimulus presenting one perspective for a discursive text.

Early Examples of Our Iron Man Moving Story Books

To complete our extended literacy unit on stories set in imaginary places the students have been developing prequels to the Iron Man and presenting these as multimodal outcomes in the form of pop up or animated storybooks .

As an extended literacy unit this has worked extremely well, and the students have been completely captured by the process. The use of ICT has been limited to the development and presentation of text for their DT project and as a literacy tool has acted to scaffold paired text review and editing by supporting the talk for writing process. The children were encouraged to use the wordprocessor to help review their work and revise stories developed over the drafting period against agreed success criteria. The key benefits of using wordprocessors in this way are that work does not need to be constantly rewritten, it can be revisited and text altered without the resulting outcomes needing to be continually rewritten. I also use a cascade saving process with my students so we can track changes in a document over time, and if we should lose something we later decide we want to keep, we can go back to previous versions of the file and copy/paste it back in.

During the writing process I have introduced the students formally for the first time to use of the spell checker. There is a tendency for students left to use this tool without specific teaching to spot the red zigzag, drop the spell check menu and then choose the first word that appears. It is important for students to realise the contingency of these devices, and that the same spelling strategies they use when they write by hand apply when we write on the computer. A wordprocessor is not the font of all knowledge and they need to take an active part in the decisions they make when using tools such as this. The students have been encouraged to use the spell checker alongside a host of other classroom tools, including dry wipe whiteboards and provided spelling banks as well as to draw on their own and their learning buddy's reading experiences to check the "look" of the words they are selecting. A real challenge was that in our success criteria we had included the use of invented words and obviously these did not appear in the dictionary. This did however lead to the challenge of how we actually spell these? Whether we have used the correct phonology? Does this word say what I want it to and will my reader be able to understand and pronounce what I have written?

Since we have been using Word to work on our stories I also asked the children to think about what the green grammar checker might be telling us about what we have written. Have we written in full sentences? Can we hear why Word may have highlighted this as an error. Sometimes even this tool makes mistakes, as anyone constantly reminded to insert semicolons, remove then, rearrange a sentence or add a comma will no doubt confirm. The tools allowed some challenge to student thinking in support of recent thinking around homophones, and the appearence of Fragment suggestions prompting suggestions to think about whether what was presented was actually a full sentence, or serving as a reminder about the inclusion of appropriate punctuation.

Within the evealuation stages of the DT Process the children did a great deal of prototyping, and were encouraged to use recycled materials to develop these. Some children decided to recycle their prototypes too or extended their work at home hence the use of lined paper for some of the illustrations. What does not appear here, but I want to add later perhaps as a Flickr slide show, is the range mechanisms used. My favourites include a rocker mechanism developed to show the Iron Man emerging and decending into the waves, that set out to give the sea its rough feel, and another that tried to illustrate and simulate the swimming/bobbing motion of the Iron man heading for shore.

As a class the opening lines and "where did he come from? Nobody knows," No longer applies. From

• crash landings caused by asteroid or meteorite collisions
• encounters with chocolate eating candy monsters
• attacks from intergalactic space termites
• being shot down during orbital battles
• being distracted by our ring-a-mones, boiling kettles
• or taking turns too tightly during space based drag races

Each Iron Man in our stories finally plunges, falls, tumbles or roars towards the seas of the small blue planet we call home, before walking or swimming towards the opening of the Ted Hughes Tale.