Why did the Chickenman cross the road?

This week with a group of Year 7 students I have started working on the .COMmunity project inspired by Saltash.net teachers James Edwards and Jen Dunkey.

What is it?

“This project has been set up to empower the students to take control of their learning and promote independent learning as well as peer to peer collaboration. The students will be deciding on what the content will be and therefore shaping how this project develops.

As teachers we hope to link students and their communities from around the world. It is our hope that this project will help show the similarities and diversity of the different cultures and communities in our world.”

The idea is that students and schools to collaborate with each other via the projects website http://dotcommunity2012.wordpress.com/  to allow them to build and establish their own communities. Showing what they
value as individuals as well as the importance of the different roles we all play within our communities in the places where we live.

I spent an hour with some Year 7 students talking about what community meant to them and then collaboratively creating a PowerPoint to produce some background information on them and the school to upload to the website.

http://www.slideshare.net/chickensaltash/international-school-dot-community-project

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons next week!

(Actually this could probably be called a 1 second wonder as it really is that simple)

Tiny URL – http://tinyurl.com/

This is a free website where you can take long and complicated URL’s and convert them into simple, short and convenient addresses that can easily be written and copied from the board just by copying the URL in and pressing a button. I showed a class this week how to use it and they had never seen it before, I was uploading some of our class notes to my Sky drive and then converted the very long URL to just a few characters.

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Tiny-URL-ing

I have been working at the International School Seychelles (ISS) for nearly two weeks now and I really love it, the staff and students are very friendly and supportive. Resources wise (ICT etc) are at time patchy and I am adapting to life with less opportunities for reliable and effective use of new technologies but still enjoying it. I will try my best to blog about what is happening here over the next few months.

In my first week here I asked over 150 students to select one word that summed up their school to them. As a group we then recorded them saying their word in a Word Wave using Audacity and captured a visual expression of this using Wordle. Here is our video of it:

http://youtu.be/ODLi0r3ZM-g

It was the first time they had seen wordle or audacity!

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help
brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be
posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to
read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons
next week!

Many Eyes – http://www-958.ibm.com

This is a brilliant tool to create your
own visualisations, it has the normal word cloud examples like Wordle and Tagxedo
but it also has so much more, there are lots of different types such as maps
and graphs. You can also use this as a visual way to compare data such as that
collected in surveys or for example in a Science practical. I just wanted to
have a quick go with a new class of mine here in the Seychelles. We were
talking about what they thought about their school, they all chose one word to
add to the visualisation and this is what it looked like.

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/what-we-think-about-our-school-iss

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it
only takes a minute…’

Happy Manyeyes-ing

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons next week!

Here is my first from the paradise island, this is the beach right next to my house taken last night (a bit of sunshine for you)

Toondoo – http://www.toondoo.com/

Toondoo is an awesome free online comic paper, it is really easy to use and within just a few minutes students can create and customize their own comic strips about whatever they want to.

One way I have used this, this week is by getting students to interpret a concept from verbal/textual form (provided by teacher) to a visual form (created in ToonDoo).

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Toondoo-ing

Check out my recent article in the TEs all about Pecha Kucha

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6204429

For the next few months I will be working from the Seychelles, I will be working temporarily in the International School of the Seychelles: http://wp.internationalschool.sc/

I will be updating posts here on the blog so you can keep up to date!

I will still also be working for Imagine Education see here: http://www.imagineeducation.net/whoweare.html

You may also notice a twitter profile update:

https://twitter.com/#!/chickensaltash

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons after Easter! I hope you all have a great holiday!

Blabberize – http://blabberize.com/

This is basically a site where you can make any picture talk just by uploading your picture then assigning a mouth wherever you want to on the picture. You can then record a narration on the website or upload audio content that you have already recorded, yes it is really that easy. It is a nice way to get students to present and talk about their learning without standing up at the front of the class and doing it.

Here is one I made earlier:

http://blabberize.com/view/id/331604

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Blabberize-ing

Special congratulations to Katie Boothman this morning as last night at Microsoft’s European Innovative Education Forum in Lisbon @boothmank won the award for her project called the H.I.T squad.

This is fantastic news for Katie, her students and the school she joins a long list of UK, European and Worldwide winners from Saltash.net over the last years working with the Partners in Learning programme.

Katie is in her second year of teaching and already a leading figure in the innovative use of technology across the school which is saying something considering the national and international recognition that Saltash.net has as a specialist school in ICT and new technologies. As an NQT Katie from day 1 has strived to engage and inspire all the students she has taught to use new technologies to enhance their learning. After just one term into her NQT year she was leading a workshop for other teachers across the South West as part of a regional training event for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, modelling good practice from her classroom.

The H.I.T squad is underpinned by utilizing student’s passions for ICT and history to fully created their own resources which can be used as a teaching resource within lessons in addition to resources used to within partner primary schools. She saw how much students loved using new technologies and she wanted to embrace that so she created this project. The objectives were to: to use ICT to increase knowledge of and enthusiasm for History; to facilitate pupil led teaching and learning within peer groups; to develop links within the broader community using ICT and to encourage students to read, write, and peer assess one another’s work through the use of new technologies.

You can see some of the HIT squad in action on their site:

http://wwwhitsquad101.edublogs.org/

You can read more about the project from this newspaper article here:

http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/Teacher-Katie-wins-prize-innovation/story-14258802-detail/story.html

Congratulations Katie we are all very proud of your achievements!

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons the following week.

Spaaze – http://www.spaaze.com/home

Special thanks to a great Biology teacher at Saltash.net called Fionn who passed this site to me this week. It is similar to http://en.linoit.com/ & http://corkboard.me/simple & http://www.wallwisher.com/ but is basically a real time collaborative online sticky note site.

I tested it out and tweeted out the link to see if anyone else contributed to it to test out the collaboration element of the site. Here are the results, although it is still live so it could continue to have contributions and I am not moderating it anymore as this goes to press!

http://www.spaaze.com/board/77c934f7b8a282a7590c05b6479c1784 

One tip to share it you must publish it!

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Spaaze-ing