©Several Seconds

I’ve taken the plunge like many other people and I have signed up to a hosting service and I’m in the process of getting everything on my new site ready to go. It’s a work in progress, a bit like an oil painting. I’m playing aorund with themes and widgets and working out what suits my site and more importantly, what visitors would like. If you have any ideas about what I should include or remove then feel free to let me know. This will be my last post on this wordpress.com hosted site so I hope you can all update your bookmarks and point them towards ictsteps.com

See you soon

Thanks to a blog post by Vanessa Cassie I have just discovered this gem – iNudge. It is a rather interesting sound creation tool with which you can create a looped pattern of melodies, beeps and percussion sounds. There are 8 sound patterns to choose from (small matrix icons on the right of the iNudge tool) and with a bit of trial and error you can create a rather pleasing or annoying musical loop. It’s very easy to use and I can imagine a class of children composing quick and interesting sound patterns to be used in Podcasts or short class films.

Myst V - End of Ages

Over the next 2-3 weeks we will be strolling through ‘Stories set in Imaginary worlds‘, a unit of work from the Literacy  Primary Framework. It suggests a range of activities including using digital media as well as ‘traditional’ books. Teachers are left with a choice – use the activities suggested, adapt the acitivities suggested or take the objectives and create your own activities. I’m going for the latter.

I first used Myst with a class whilst teaching in Gran Canaria and I can only describe the outcomes as fantastic. These are children who had English as their second language and still, they wrote powerfully descriptive stories and used ideas to create game trailers. The unit was a success but the most important outcome was the sheer enjoyment, inspiration and enthusiasm the children showed throughout. Over the next 3 weeks I will revisit Myst with my new class and I am looking forward to this inspirational teaching and learning experience with fervour.

Using a game as a source of teaching and learning is creative. Use it well and it will inspire.

Home page #3

Over the past few weeks I have been busy setting up my school’s Virtual Learning Environment. It’s been a stressful journey but I now feel quite confident in deploying it throughout the school. Above is an example of the current Home page that my class are greeted with when then sign in. This is my third version and it still requires tweaking but I and the children like this. We think it’s simple, uncluttered and provides a platform to get to other learning pages. I’m looking to incorporate an RSS feed as a scrolling banner just under the page title in due course and I use the Voki as an easy way to include new information about the page.

What do you think?

Have you got a home page design you would like to share?

Can we make any improvements?

Many thanks go to @ianaddison and @lisibo for inspiring me

BETT2010

I went with an open mind to the BETT show yesterday. I knew that it would be big, bold and brash but I had not realised how big, bold and brash it would be until I walked in through the front door into the main hall. I can safely say it was very noisy and very busy. The whole place is pictured very well by Roger Neilson’s post ‘Swimming with sharks or a village market‘. There are many other blog’s posting about BETT (Jan Webb’s ‘A Big BETT2010 day out‘ for example) that brilliantly describe the day’s events. I want to concentrate on what I got from it.

• BETT is a showcase filled to bursting – it needs to diet not gorge out next year
• The Teachmeet Takeover was brilliant – a successful mix of inspirational teachers demonstrating the effective use of free tools in the classroom
• Teachmeet BETT2010 was outstanding
• Meeting teachers from my Twitter PLN was the single most important part of my day
• I had great conversations, exchanged many ideas, learned about new tools and left refreshed and energised!

You walk around BETT, like many others, with a face of non-compliance. You window shop and occasionally chat to the sellers about products that have no place in the classroom; 3D tech wins the most pointless tool award.

What made BETT worthwhile for me? The sharing of ideas with genuinely inspirational teachers and educators.

Tweeting at TeachMeet (Photo by Mr Ush blur added by myself)

Unfortunately, I can’t get the Mbedr of Flickr notes to work with wordpress.com so please click the image above to view the original image on Flickr with notes.

Maybe it’s time to upgrade to a hosted site!

Crystal ball by David Reece

Okay now, a floater to some might raise a few brows and cause a few to smirk. But a floater to me is an idea, and one that doesn’t go away easily. A floater comes to mind when you are usually not following the ‘rule books’, when you decide to go with the flow in the classroom and see what the outcome will be rather than try to get to the outcome you have written down. A floater can be brilliant but also annoyingly out of reach. But it’s always there and always wants to be given a chance. Here are my floaters for the year ahead.

1. Allow my class to talk more
2. Make the school VLE a LEARNING ENVIRONMENT!
3. Create an ‘old school’ interactive learning display
4. Be more creative in my approach to other parts of the curriculum e.g. Use Green screen in RE lessons to retell stories from bible
5. Bring my guitar into school everyday for no other reason than to sing with the class
6. Be positive and stop moaning (but some things I have to moan about and I will continue to do so)
7. Ask my class for more feedback
8. Talk to my class more rather than getting through the mountain of objectives
9. Continue my personal pursuit to rid the world of pointless homeworks
10. If Oftsted do actually make an appearance this year, welcome them with open arms and have fun

Let 2010 commence.

See you all in 2010

Back on the 19th November Doug Belshaw (who has many brilliant ideas) had a particularly brilliant idea -

I’d like to propose a new hashtag to help new and existing teachers share and pick up tips.

Using the #movemeon hashtag so that the posts could be collected on Twitter, the idea took off and hundreds of posts were made and gathered together. Doug and Stuart Ridout put the tweets together into an e-book which is available for download (free) from here. But if, like me, you are keen to have in your possession a book of suggestions to help you in teaching, a book that is filled with inspiration and creativity, a book of helpful hints and practical guides then you would prefer a physical copy to put in the staff room and encourage even more teachers to join in the discussion.

You can buy it from here