31-01-2012

...Wow, the end of month one, 31 days into the daily blog post routine. I must admit that getting back to blogging on a regular basis is rewarding in many ways. I have maintained my rather eclectic mix of rants followed by more regular photo blog posts. Of course this means that any audience of the blog have to wade through an amount of obscure posts to perhaps find something that is mildly interesting.
Looking back at blog stats ( Blogger stats are impressive) I know that the most popular blog posts over time have been tech related, my praise of the Asus Netbook still being the most visited along with others along the same lines.
It is sad that at present even though I still remain facinated by 'tech stuff that I feel somewhat distanced from my former 'classroom based use of new tools and apps, I just loved attempting to make the new tools at the time relevant in a teaching setting. I was pleased as you may surmise when Mr Gove the UK Education Secretary finally admit what many had suspected for many years - that the UK IT or ICT curriculum was not fit for purpose. For years many of us who believed strongly  that using technology to create content and to connect was the way to inspire these skills in our pupils was the way to go. The only shame is that a generation of puils will have gone through our schools believing that technology was 'boring'....... which teaching to the curriculum definitely was. It was only by cutting loose and allowing creativity in that pupios became inspired .........we nearly lost the 'Facebook Generation'  - I hope that this lesson has been learned at last.

Great news for a friend

Excellent news today for Allanah King a great friend from Appleby Primary School in New Zealand ( seen above on a visit to Cardiff in 2009). Allanah made the following Facebook announcement today:

Happy to announce that I have just won the position of ICT facilitator of Link Learning Cluster of 31+ schools starting next week (one day a week) but I am going to keep my day job- for this term at least- thereafter four days a week so I can still do exciting innovative stuff with my class. 2010-2012

Allanah is a 'world class' exponent on the use of Web 2.0 technologies seamlessly into education for kids, which bring excellent results.

Well Done AK :-)

Mobile Podcast 7th August 2009

It was such a lovely morning in Wales, and I had been spurred into an early morning breakfast blog post about the significance of today's date. This prompted me to consider the nature of 'A Blogger' it is an interesting question to ponder and certainly kept me entertained on the journey to work, I hoipe that you enjoy it, please feel free to respond.... remember comments are the life blood of a blog ( many thanks AK for being top commenter)

Early Reflections on a brilliantly hectic year at Cefn Fforest Primary School

Wow, what a brilliant, but exhausting year we have had using creative ITC in my school this year! I don't know if I would like to (or could) go through another year of personal and school growth like that, particularly as it was largely unplanned.

In May or June of 2006 I found an article in the now sadly defunct TES Online Magazine, which mentioned schools writing online articles at a site called Making The News a site run by the East of England Broadband Network and the Open University.I decided very early on in the year, that this was a project that I would like to run with our Year 6 pupils - there is, as always a BUT! We in Wales suffer often from a syndrome called 'only available for schools in England!' , when I first arrived at the MTN site, there was no category for Wales (my heart sank) - so I fired off an e-mail to Jeff Howson, pleading for permission to join in MTN, luckily Jeff was very positive and set us up a 'Wales tab' and told me that he would be only too happy for us to join in. Since then NGFL Cymru have taken MTN under their umbrella and there are now quite a few registered Welsh schools which is great to see, we hope to develop this further next year (a plan!!!)
I then had to make a decision of who, and when in school!!!! I don't teach Year 6 but decided to offer it to them as a lunch club ( in reality 25-30 mins of intense news writing)

Uploaded with Skitch!

Uploaded with Skitch!

Over the year as you can see we have been posting regularly and have posted over 250 stories throughout the year, having had these stories read by up to 5,000 people ( not all us!!!).
The stories have varied from the silly !!! to the serious - as in the example below where the attached video is handled so well by children who were at the time only 10 or 11 years old.

Uploaded with Skitch!

This shows the power of Web 2.0 style sites which now enable our pupils to have an audience for their writing and creative work far beyond the walls of the school.

Uploaded with Skitch!

We were lucky enough to win the MTN Competition for Best Overseas News Story (under14) and the team who wrote it where invited up to BETT in January 2007 to receive their prize from Warwick Davies (Prof Flitwick in the Harry Potter films), which was very exciting (first Welsh school to compete and win !!!)The group have remained committed to their task through the year, they didn't drift off to football and sun bathing as the good weather arrived - I can hand on heart say that I have only had a hand-full of lunchtimes sat in our staffroom ( I usually eat my lunch on the move between my classroom and our IT suite ( across the corridor) supervising writers and film makers. I don't really regret it, because to see the creativity of these kids has been a real eye opener for me and also other members of staff ( it also means that Creative ICT is gradually taking up a larger slice of our Year 6 end of year Awards Presentations -we had categories for Podcasting, Online News Making and Film Making this year!)

Blogging has been a big part of Class 3H culture this year, we run a Blogger Blog which is for collaborative writing and showcasing our class activities,

Uploaded with Skitch!

We have also mad great use of David Warlick's Landmarks Classblogmeister

Uploaded with Skitch!

This is our Classblogmeister page which has enabled us to link with other schools around the world (blogroll on the left). Classblogmeister is a 'walled garden' where all posts and comments are moderated by myself. We have been using Blogmeister as a personal blogging space since January 2007, previously I tried out Learnerblogs (Wordpress), but my pupils prefer blogmeister.
More reflections on the educational benefits and plans for next year to come.......

** A Date for Your Diaries**

Saturday 13th October The Isle Of Wight Conference 2007

Joe is also floating the idea of having a TeachMeet style get together somewhere (tba) on the Friday evening (12th) prior to the main event. A get together like this is long overdue outside Scotland ( where Ewan has been running these prior or during SETT for a while now). This would be a fantastic opportunity for Face2Face networking almost for the first time in England I think ( unless you know of another ??)


Saturday 13th October:with Rachel Hawkes, Leigh McClelland, Chris Fuller, Lesley Welsh and Oscar Stringer.

Here are the proposed sessions so far:

Rachel and Leigh - Rhythm and Song (repeat of ALL London session)
Rachel - Assessment for Learning
Leigh - Digital Video (Maybe an explanation of MovieMaker and
interesting ways you can use DV in MFL)
Chris Fuller - A year as a MFL blogger and podcaster (session 1) and
blogging workshop (session 2)
Joe Dale - Death by PowerPoint? Keep your finger on the trigger
Joe Dale - Podcasting workshop
Joe Dale - Keynote (blogging, podcasting etc)
Oscar Stringer - One Stop Animation
Lesley Welsh - Interactive Whiteboards, ACTIVote and Classroom Performance Performance Systems.

This sounds like a cool event the price tag is £50 for lunch and sandwiches which seems pretty good value. More news on event venue and timings once I have heard from Joe. Thanks for the information Joe...

NEWS
If you go over to Joe's blog at the moment apart from his latest podcasting news which is fabulous to read, there is also a link to a Flashmeeting that Joe has organised for Tuesday 17th July 8pm -10pm (UK BST- GMT +1).
The main topic will be a sharing of experiences in blogging and podcasting over the past year, I am sure that the chat will be pretty lively if the last Flashmeeting is anything to go by...

Ewan has started the conversation...

Following my earlier blog re Ewan McIntosh's visit to the University of Glamorgan today... the conversation between Welsh Bloggers ( a strange breed) has begun. I had a comment dropped in from the person sitting next to me this afternoon ...... the first time in over 17 months of blogging that there has been a comment from here in the principality - now look what you have done young McIntosh !!!! link to Jimpow blog... now we have a dialogue.

To all educational bloggers using Blogger itself there is a way to get rid of the banner headline which contains the icon for next blog ( this allows any viewer of your blog to click onto a randomly selected next blog - not a good idea in an educational setting ) Allanah king on her blog 'life is a race not to be first finished' has some very interesting snippets of advice including the code needed to get rid of this banner. There are also links to Allanah's work on 'Adding Bling to your Blog' do take a look and let Allanah know what you think.

Class Blogmeister Bloggers from Cefn Fforest Primary

We have just started using Class Blogmeister which is an educational blogging community run by David Warlick's Learning Project. Our main blogspace has become a hive of activity for my kids, I know that it is something new and is bound to have an immediate take up which will slow down - but at present I have pupils in my class begging for 'computer time' during their playtimes and lunchtimes in order to blog ( we have over 12 bloggers now). I have suggested that our now experienced 'bloggers' assist the less able ( and those who don't have a computer at home ) to get 'blogging'
As World Book Day approaches I have set the task for my class to blog about their favourite books - so watch this space for more reports on the Class 3H bloggers - do put some comments on their work they will be really pleased to get comments ( Thanks Miss K your comments have really boosted the bloggers confidence in what they are doing ).
Well done to the Cefn Fforest Year 3 Bloggers.

**Class Blogmeister Account**
Following our troubles with trying to get blogs up and running in school. We have tried out a few including learnerblogs, all have given us problems in uploading or access, we have finally managed to get our Blogmeister account for the school up and running. My hope now once we have got some blogging going that I can use this to encourage others in my school to join the blogosphere. We have had some success already as one of the pupils who has taken our friend cuddly Kiwi home has managed to blog about it - all I have to do now is put a photostream together to show off Leanne's work...