Category Archives: Reflections

Reflections on BETT 2013

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It has been nearly a week since returning from BETT 2013, and only now have I managed to find five minutes to jot down a few words about the experience. For the first time, BETT took place at the Excel Arena in East London, a stones throw from where my Grandmother grew up and from where her house was destroyed during the Blitz. How things in the Royal Victoria Dock have changed.

The Excel Arena is huge, and the space was really appreciated as there was notably more room to get around. Similarly, the exhibitors appeared to have more space with which to exhibit their vast array of ed-tech products. The seminar halls were also located in amongst the exhibitors and were much easier to find than those of the Excel Arena’s ageing predecessor; Olympia in West London.

For the first time too, I learnt more from the exhibitors stands than I did from the official seminars at BETT. Professor Brian Cox aside, the presentations I saw in the designated arenas were either uninspiring, or rehashing what I already knew. Worst of all were the poorly disguised attempts to sell products. However, by wandering around the exhibitor stands I was able to talk with, and listen to interesting, dedicated and innovative educators such as Julia Skinner, Mark Anderson, Martin Burrett, David Mitchell and John Sutton. I even managed to deliver a presentation of my own on the Acer stand about the blogging journey at ISM.

The exhibitors themselves also has some absolute gems to take back to ISM and make some proposals. For example, I have already set up a MediaCore account for our school. Mediacore is a video platform for schools in which you can upload your own content or content from other sources such as YouTube or Vimeo. All comments and adverts are automatically removed and clearly this is a a huge advantage in an educational environment. Most impressive of its features was its Mobile App with which you can upload iMovies straight from your iPad’s camera roll!

Another product that really got my imagination flowing was the School Radio stand. Although perhaps a luxury, getting a school radio station would be amazing! We could perform plays, broadcast news, broadcast live music, broadcast interviews, create adverts  etc – the options are endless! Conjuring up the €7000 to get the system may prove a bit tricky though. I’ll work on it…

Overall, BETT was a fantastic experience. Its great to meet so many likeminded people; successfully restoring all faith in my drive to ensure learning is at a premium by exploring and utilizing the myriad of creative, meaningful and enjoyable ways in which technology can enhance it.

Preparing the Digital Classroom For The New School Year

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Next week, my new year six class will be arriving back at school, and one of my first jobs will be to prepare them for what will be an exciting, year-long learning journey that tests the boundaries of using (purposeful) technology in education. However, if those confines are going to be stretched efficiently, then a small amount of preperation  and organisation needs to take place beforehand – here is a short guide on what I plan to do:

  • To start with, I will conduct a frank discussion about social networking, cyber bullying, pros and cons of using tech in the classroom and talk about Acceptable Use. Following this discussion, I will ask all students, there and then sign the schools AUP; making it clear that effective use of the wonderful tools we have at our disposal also demand a serious amount of mutual respect and trust.
  • Organise my classes on Edmodo. This simply involves archiving last years classes and creating new groups that my new classes and relevant staff join with the relevant code.
  • Survey the devices that pupils have and are able to bring to school (in my classroom, personal iPads would be the most useful device, further up the school in secondary, laptops may be more appropriate).
  • Establish and record an email address for all students (last year, I noted students personal emails – this year, we have established school email addresses for everyone – which should make life easier.
  • Establish a shared folder on Dropbox/Skydrive and invite students to join. This proved to be a revolutionary move last year. We hardly used the school server at all and work no longer mysteriously disappeared. Students learnt to organise their files properly and could easily access work on any device, at home or at school. This year I will also ask students to download CloudOn. This enables editing Dropbox documents in Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
  • Ensure that our class blog is ready to go (all users subscribed with correct user-rights, design, widgets etc)
  • Organise a class twitter account! This is something I have not done before and would appreciate some advice – I know there are a few Primary Classes throughout the world that are doing this and I will be contacting them to see what they are doing!

I will try and complete all these tasks as a matter of priority over the first couple of days of term. As simple as it is to write the tasks down, actually getting 32 Year Six pupils to accept invites, remember log in details etc, can make things a little more complicated. What makes it all worth while though is remembering how last years Year Six left primary school as tech savvy, proactive, independent learners with a whole host of tech tools up their sleeve through which they could portray their endless creativity.

Twitter in Education: how do you use it?

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On Wednesday, ISM are running a morning of CPD for all our staff in a selection of web-tools and apps that many of our teachers have successfully used over the last few years, both within and outside the confines of our classrooms. There will be seven different display areas with teachers milling between them at their leisure getting a demonstration of the potential of ICT in education and become aware, not only that these great tools exist, but of the variety of imaginative and creative ways they are already being used.

The selection of webtools are:

  • WordPress
  • Twitter
  • Show Me
  • Popplet
  • Story Bird
  • Glogster
  • Photopeach
  • Audioboo
  • Voicethread

I will be attempting to explain the huge potential twitter has for teachers, for students and for education as a whole- this is where I need some help, could you spare 2 minutes to quickly explain how you have used twitter and it has impacted upon your pedagogy. I will use your responses as part of my demo! Huge thanks in advance…

Why Bother with Blogging?

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I have not posted on the ICT Development Blog for over a month, the primary reason being that the blog had been temporarily shut down for ‘review’. During this time I realised just how much I was using the blogging platform for teaching and learning and without it, how the classroom instantly became a more stagnant and mundane place. Paradoxically, I also found that I had more time on my hands as I was no longer moderating posts/comments, uploading pictures, video’s, podcasts, prezi’s, glogsters or popplets!

So this got me thinking; why am I investing so much time in school blogging and why was there such an obvious vacuum in my classroom when the blogs were unavailable? The answer that immediately sprang to mine was simply the versatility of blogging; how with a little creativity you can give purpose, motivation and feedback to all kinds of different work and projects. The fact that the children’s pieces of work had a relevance above and beyond a helpful comment in a book (and maybe a house point here and there) is hugely significant too. No longer is work marked, forgotten and left in a cupboard somewhere slowly gathering dust. Rather, their work can be accessed, revised, updated and indeed port-folioed throughout their school careers! Who knows, the Universities of tomorrow may actually value evidence of creativity rather than a bland set of exam results…

I thought I would also share with you some of the tools we are using in our classrooms and how we have used them in correlation with our blog. There are so many wonderful ICT tools available that can be easily adapted and then published on the blog to share with the world. Please take a look and leave a comment, after all Blogs are all about audience and the comments make it all (even more) worth while:

Audioboo – A simple podcasting App on the Ipad that sends the recording straight to the cloud-based hosting site. The HTML can then be easily copied to the blog. We have recently used them in Year Six to record biographies and reflections on the research process – They Made a Difference

Flipsnack – A great free web 2.0 tool that is used for converting PDF’s to stunning digital books, again the HTML can then be copied onto the blog. We used them in Year Six to publish our ‘Virtual Country Guides’ in conjunction with Audioboo to record their reflections – Virtual Countries

Glogster – Another great web 2.0 tool that is free for individual use, or you can subscribe to for multiple users relatively cheaply. You can use Glogster to make fantastic, interactive posters complete with video and audio. We have been using them in Year Three to make posters their native countries – Link to Come

Prezi – The awesome tool that is Prezi has been widely used throughout our Primary School. It is cloud based zooming presentation tool that is simple, and highly effective. We have used it in Year Six for presenting our scientific work on habitats, in Year Five to present work on Pollution and in Year Three to present about communities! – Science Prezi’s

Popplet – An incredibly user friendly and versatile tool that can be used for brainstorming, planning, mind mapping and presenting. It also has a very handy App on the iPad. We have used this in Year Five and Year Six for presentations on pollution and ‘Animal Farm’ respectively – Y5 Pollution Popplet

Puppet Pals – This a super-simple, but highly effective iPad App. You choose your characters, and move them whilst the App records your narration. We used Puppet Pals in Year Five to record conversations on Pollution – Pollution Puppet Pals

Show Me – Another iPad App that is free, simple and can be used in any number of creative ways. You can record annotations, import pictures and record your voice all at the same time. Therefore, the children can actually produce evidence of their understanding. In Year Six we used the Khan Academy as an inspiration and have started to produce our own ‘Maths Academy’ 

Reflections on BETT 2012

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Arriving at Kensington Olympia for the annual BETT Show is always a daunting experience. Thousands of people from all over the world converge together for what is the worlds biggest Ed-Tech conference and as soon as you walk into the Great Hall the sheer scale of BETT immediately hits you. As you fight your way through endless crowds and stalls, you are left wondering how on Earth you will ever find your way out again, let alone meet all the objectives of the trip.

Nevertheless, after four days of seminars, meetings, bartering and endless conversations with sales-reps, my colleague Nathalie and myself headed back towards Monaco pleased that although not every question had been answered, we had learnt a huge amount about the significance and importance of educational technologies and the positive impact they were having (or could be having) on students and their learning.

My first conclusion is paradoxically positive; I actually left BETT feeling that I had learnt LESS than during my previous two visits. Not less about the impact and significance of digital technologies in schools, but certainly fewer new ideas / concepts to bring back to the International School of Monaco. The positivity lying beneath this seemingly stark statement is simply because at ISM, we are no longer catching up with the rest of the world regarding ICT, rather we now have in place and are using many of the tools that are regarded at the forefront of innovative teaching. Apps and programmes such as WordPress, Prezi, Audioboo, Storybird, Voicethread and Story Creator were all mentioned as outstanding tools for cross curricular integrated learning in ICT and are all regularly being used at ISM in the Primary School.

However, one web-based tool that was repeatedly mentioned and referred to that has not been fully utilized at ISM is Twitter. Described by Piers Morgan in 2010 as a ‘pathetic, juvenile, pointless waste of time’, (a few still shared by many) Twitter is now regarded by some in the Education World as the greatest source of Professional Development and educational information available on the planet. I attended an interesting seminar in which a panel of experts answered questions on the future of ICT in schools. Their views generally agreed; there is no area of education that is more significant, faster moving and innovative yet misunderstood and poorly managed. The barrier between students and teachers and their knowledge and application of ICT is unacceptable and is it integral that things are done to ensure our learners are provided with the knowledge and skills to utilize the tools at their disposal to their full potential. This is all well and good, but in a time of economic crisis how can this be achieved? Well, firstly schools should be utilizing the technology that the children already have in their pockets. Rather than iPads and iPhones being barred in schools, the students should be allowed to use them in class. Clearly, guidelines and acceptable policies would need to be laid out and strictly adhered to, but this cost-effective approach could save schools thousands, give each child that personalised learning potential that is such an advantage. The second cost effective strategy that schools and teachers could embrace is Twitter.

By signing up to Twitter solely for professional purposes, a teacher is entering a brand new world of ideas, strategies and resources that previously were only available by attending full day/week courses (in which only 20 minutes were of any reward) or through hours upon hours of endless internet searching. By using or following a ‘hashtag’, a teacher can very easily pinpoint information on a specific subject. For example, receive every tweet that features #ukedchat. This is a hashtag used by teachers, educationalists or anyone connected with education and therefore gives me instant access to apps, blogs, resources, opinions, links etc. to anything related to education. Furthermore, every Thursday between 8-9pm there is a specific #ukedchat discussion that thousands of teachers contribute to; keeping you well up to date with the latest views, opinions and pedagogical stance on a whole host of different subjects. Even if one never ‘Tweets’ themselves, twitter can be of huge reward although I must admit, it is rather addictive…

Click HERE for a list of educational hashtags.

So, what next? Well, among all the stands and stalls there were some very interesting educational suppliers with many interesting products. The difficulty is working out which is the best and most appropriate for ISM. Much like with educational Apps on the iPad there is a surplus of different manufacturers all doing very similar things. However, we were able to cipher through them all and feel that we have a few excellent options to improve learning even further at ISM. Watch this (cyber) space…

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BETT 2012 on Prezi

Teachers Need to Learn Too…

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This video is brilliant! It was made by a student who beleives that teachers must continuously improve, adapt, and adopt new strategies for reaching their students. A thoughtful message for all those concerned about the best interests of their students and another stoke in the tech debate fire.

100 Best Tools for Learning 2011 – Reflections…

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I was incredibly enthused by the slideshow below, as it demonstrated that ISM are facing in the right direction when it comes to integrating tech into the classroom and preparing our learners for the future that they, not us, will need to survive in. The debate over tech-learning continues to rage, and I doubt whether it will ever be settled by those teachers who were learners in the late 20th Century. However, take the word ‘tech’ out the debate and you are still left with the same question: why are we still implementing the industrial model of education to children in the 21st Century?

With magnificent tools such as these at our disposal, we have the opportunity to give a voice to students that they have never had before. We will give them the possibility, as 21st Century learners, to end the debate about technology, test-based curriculum and industrial cloning. Instead we will produce a generation of tech savvy, independent learners who understand the world around them; a world where jobs, communication, networks and success are no longer measured by obsolete preconceptions of academia.

When you are facing in the right direction, all you have to do is keep on walking…

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011

View more presentations from Jane Hart

iPad Training Highlights The Future of Learning

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A small group of teachers at ISM were fortunate enough to attend a highly informative iPad session with Apple expert Mark Pentleton yesterday. Mark flew in from Scotland and brought with him some remarkable ideas that will change the face of learning at ISM.

The session started with some iPad basics; simple techniques on the iPad that make the device even more user friendly. For example, the international and accessibility functions; both extremely helpful at our International School.

A shared ‘dropbox’ file was then created for all attendees. We brainstormed our initial hopes and fears for iPad integration using the brilliant iThoughts App.

Mark very quickly demonstrated the power of reading through the iPad. Using iBooks, Mark showed us how notes could be made on specific sections of text, the notes could be bookmarked, saved and emailed to the teacher in seconds. The definition of every word in every e-book could be found just through tapping on it and many books had additional interactive functions; podcasts, videos, hyperlinks and pictures. Stunning.

The scary thing was we were told by the end of the day, we would be producing e-books (ePubs) of our own!

Next we used keynote, photo rotate, screen grab and iMovies, to create  beautifully presented movies that could be stored, shared, uploaded to an e-pub or iTunesU in seconds. So simple but with endless possibilities both for teachers and learners.

After Mark was able to prize us away from our iPads for lunch, we re-grouped for some even more powerful ideas and concepts in the afternoon.

Next on the list was creating e-pubs through Pages. We all downloaded ePubs best-practice pro-forma and then used it to make some awesome ePublications. Again – everything was very simple and within minutes we were making professional looking books that had video, podcasts and pictures that we could actually pick from the shelf in iBooks on our iPads!

Finally, we all downloaded book creator to our iPads, and followed simple instructions from Mark and again we were very soon producing our own e-books! Using  drawing pad and iPhoto we inserted pictures and photos and all of us, from Early Years to Secondary Science, instantly realized the potential of this incredible App.

A huge thank you to Mark for such an informative, eye opening and practical training session. I can’t wait to see Mark back at ISM to share more fabulous ideas. We all left inspired, motivated with plenty of food for thought. I now look forward to seeing what we learnt coming to life with the learners at ISM.

 

 

Blog Site and ICT Update

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Following John Sutton’s visit to ISM, our blogging site is undergoing some major re-construction! A lot of teachers have shown a lot of interest in starting a new blog, so we are currently working hard to organise the site. It should be ready very soon!

In the meantime, at ISM, a small amount of teachers have been allocated iPads and are experimenting with them and various different education related Apps. Furthermore, we are currently trialing the use of Edmodo as a learning network. The early feedback has been extremely positive.

John Sutton speaks to ISM

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On Friday, John Sutton, the man behind Creative Blogs visited ISM for the day. The whole school listened to John talk about the power of blogging and various incredible tools that can easily be used to enhance the learning experience in the classroom.

Although our blogging site has been up and running since April, so far it has only been used by a handful of teachers and pupils.

Nevertheless, John’s professional development session was clearly inspirational to many of our teachers as I now have a long list of subjects, teachers and school areas that are desperate to get their blogs started!

The children at ISM come back tomorrow and over the coming days, the ISM blogging site should really start to blossom….