Speaking gadgets - Week 4

This week we looked at more gizmos, but gizmos that particularly applied to speaking and listening and how these gizmos can help with children's literacy.

Using ICT alongside literacy allows greater opportunity for sustained forms of talking, provides instant feedback and encourages more interaction.

So what gizmos do we use to help with our literacy and how can they help?

Podcasts - Podcasts are similar to a radio show, where we are able to record and then distribute the recordings over the internet. There are thousands of these over the web and can vary from topic to topic. In our ICT lesson we looked at Audacity which the website describes as being 'a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder'.

I think these are a brilliant idea to use with a class of children. It allows children to share their ideas and experiences with a potentially huge audience. The Teaching Ideas site highlights many benefits that can be gained from using podcasts with children. They are able to develop their speaking and listening skills and can particularly be benefical for EAL children. Podcasts also encourage children to work well together and to do so in a fun interactive way. I love the idea of creating a class radio show and linking with a school elsewhere in the world, where we can listen to their show and they can listen to ours. The children can then write comments and responses which is a valuable way to feedback to them.

Talking Photo Albums - I absolutely love these. They are literally a photo album that can talk to you and can be used for a variety of things. They aren't even that expensive; Amazon are selling them for as little as £24.99!

In schools they are again ideal for EAL children and also have great cross curriciular links. For example, they can be used in geography to show highlights of a school trip, or in literacy to recreate the scenes from a school's nativity play. Each child can have their own page, with a photo and a description of themselves or they can be used in PE alongside a picture of an activity to go with a verbal instruction. For instance, in PE we have been teaching the children how to do a forward roll. A page could show the action and the child could record what they had to do and this could benefit other children who were learning.


Talk Time Cards - Talk Time Cards are like postcards that have a recording chip in them. The cards can either act similar to a whiteboard where you can use a pen to draw on the surface or some have a plastic pouch to insert a drawing. The pupil or teacher can then record a clip to go with the card.

These are ideal in literacy for teaching phonemes to KS1 and can also be a great help for EAL pupils. The larger cards can be used as storyboards.


Talking Tin lids - These might sound slightly bizarre. The very thought of having a tin lid on your baked beans that talks to you sounds fairly crazy and you can indeed use them for just that. (As seen below). However, they do have other purposes.

Talking Tin lids have up to ten seconds recording time and as well as being used as tin lids, they can also be used for a variety of other things and can be placed under tables or on doors. In the video below I show how they work:

 

 

 

 

 

So how can we use these in a classroom environment then? Again they are ideal for EAL children recording high frequency words on them. They are also great for children writing sentences. So often children come up with a sentence and then forget about it when they come to write it down. By recording their sentence on a talking tin, they can they replay it back before writing it down. Like with the talking cards they are also good for helping with phonics, especially in modelling vowel sounds, which can regularly be a struggle for the pupils.

 

 

Photo-Story - The photo-story was what I spent the most time on in the ICT lesson and had quite a lot of fun doing. It works by putting together a group of photos and creating a story out of them. It is very easily downloaded by the Microsoft Photo-Story link .You are able to add recordings to the clip as you can see in our version, or try adding a song or another sound file. We made a photo-story of my cat Sky (as this is what we had photos of at the time). For each photo we put up, we were able to make a recording and put a caption on it. I would definitely watch the viewing of our photo-story below, just to hear Peter's entertaining 'miaow' sounds.

 

 







Now obviously we aren't encouraging the children to necessarily make photo-stories out of their cat but we are encouraging them to make stories. Just as they would create a story, or report in Literacy, they can do it using photo-story. They are still using the same skills as they would be in Literacy, just with ICT as well. It is particularly beneficial to dyslexic children or just children who struggle with their writing. It is also extremely fun for children to do. A blog from a school in Norfolk highlights how much children enjoy doing the the photo-story and have come up with a variety of suggestions and ideas including:

* Illustrate and narrate a story.

*Create a tourist guide 'book'

*Create a short history film

*Explain how to play football, rugby, netball etc.

So not only are they suggesting links between ICT and literacy but also links between Geography, History or PE - they can also be used in most other subject areas! I also think it was a nice idea to think how teachers could use it for parents evening. Overall it is definitely something I want to be using with my class!

As the weeks go on I am definitely appreciating this blog as I would no doubt forget all these wonderful ideas that I am so keen to develop and use in my own classroom next year! I have now completed my ICT assignment, where I created a starter for a science lesson on Variation. I had a lot of fun creating this project. It goes to show that for someone like me, who claimed to not really enjoy ICT and be a 'techno-phobe', that after these weeks in ICT I have come out the other end and really started to enjoy it. I think that this is interesting to note as should I have children who don't respond well at first to ICT, I know that they will eventually come round to it and start to love it!

Playing with robots-Digital Media and Computer Control Week 4

Another week, another fun interactive ICT lesson. This week we were looking at Digital Media and Computer Control. Digital media refers to any electronic media where data is stored in digital form and transmitted over the internet or through computer networks. This is done through text, graphics, audio and video. Computer control on the other hand is a set of instructions programmed into a machine, which then causes it to operate. This can be anything from microwaves to washing machines to CCTV cameras.

In this weeks session though, we did look at something far more exciting than microwaves. We looked at toys and robots! You certainly can't get much more fun that that, especially when we got to have hands on experiences in all the areas. Although possibly a bit too much hands on experience especially with the flexiscopes when they are aiming up somebody's nose!

We were lucky enough to spend a good amount of time looking at the various programmable toys and robots. There were the beebots, which were programmed to move, and the pippins that were programmed to draw with a pen. Dataloggers were used to measure and record temperature whilst the digital microscopes and flexiscopes could be used to take close up snapshots and videos. It was easy to see how each would benefit and be enjoyable for a primary class. It certainly got 25 adults over excited and acting like children!


James is using the datalogger to
record the temperature of the soil.

Andy and Sam are programming the
beebots to find specific colours
and shapes on the board.



The pippins had very good cross curricular links to mathematics, as you're required to know not just the direction (as with the beebots), but also the angles that the pippin needed to turn. The programming side of this was slightly tricky and it certainly confused me a bit but after some trial and error it was great to see the shapes drawn without needing to write a thing. Something I'm sure that would definitely appeal to children and a more enjoyable way of doing maths. It could also be used for project work and art. In the video below we can see how Jack uses the pippin to draw an equilateral triangle.

However, my favourite digital tool of the day was definitely the flexiscope. The flexiscope is perfect to use for any investigation and has excellent cross curricular links to Science. I actually preferred it to the digital microscope as I found it was far more flexible at looking at different objects and wasn't limited to just seeing a small space as with the digital microscope. The Digital Blue website describes the flexiscope as being able to "capture high quality images at magnifications of up to 200x" and also has an LED light should lighting be poor. The flexiscope can also be used, as with the digital microscope, to record videos, take snapshots and even has a microphone should you wish to record a documentary of the object you're investigating. They are also compatible with the Interactive Whiteboards to help make the lesson more interactive and enjoyable for the children. It means that they can be used individually or in a whole-class setting, they can even be used in assemblies in front of the whole school! I remember we had one in the school I worked at last year and the children really enjoyed it when our teacher showed the whole class a close of up of his hair.

Children are able to combine their science with ICT as they learn how to upload the snapshots and videos. The more able children or older year groups could perhaps make a whole science project on the computers using this uploaded information. This is also a good way of being able to assess their skills due to the quality of the image and what they have to say about it. Have they managed to tie in ICT with their project well!?

It helps with differentiation as the flexiscope can be used interactively and is an excellent visual aid. It also encourages children to work collaboratively together.
However, there are some limitations to take into consideration. Sometimes the flexiscope can take a while to focus and this may cause children to become impatient and perhaps snatch the equipment from one another. As it is an expensive piece of equipment, it is important to ensure that children are aware of this and look after the flexiscope properly. Overall I think it is an excellent tool and considering what it does, I don't think it is too expensive. You can even get them with your school vouchers at Tesco for Schools.

Peter shows us how the flexiscope can be used to provide
a detailed image of his eye.

It was a really fun, interactive lesson last week and I'm looking forward to working with more digital media this week!



Interactive Whiteboards Week 2

Interactive whiteboards (IWB) are still a relatively new concept to me and something I certainly never had at school. Instead these were in the classrooms --->
Simple, plain whiteboards that the teacher wrote on and rubbed off again. And before that there were the black chalkboards. I actually had one Geography teacher who would still insist on using his blackboard as opposed to our whiteboards. Who knows what he would have made of the Interactive whiteboards?!

What are Interactive whiteboards then and how can they benefit children in the classroom? As the article Interactive Whiteboards in Education states, the interactive whiteboard is 'an electronic version of a dry-wipe board on a computer that enables learners in a virtual classroom to view what an instructor, presenter, or fellow learner writes or draws'. The key word here is 'virtual' and by being virtual gives us so many more possibilities than just writing on a whiteboard and rubbing it out again.

Tekgia, as well as the article above, highlights the benefits of using the Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom. These include:

* Replacing the scenario of a large group crowding around a single computer. The interactive whiteboard allows a large group to sit and participate comfortably in a presentation.

*Creates a collaborative layout and an environment of engagement so that there is naturally more dialogue between tutor and students, peer-to-peer and within groups.

*Ability to enhance any presentation or lesson by easily integrating video, animation, graphics, text and audio with the spoken presentation.

*Children benefiting from the interaction with the knowledge and task, both personally and socially.

These are just to name a few and for all the old-school chalkboard and whiteboard fans, it can still be used in just that way. We can even select a crayon on a black background to try and create a similar effect - that should keep my old Geography teacher happy!

In some aspects though he may just have a point. Sometimes complicating a simple idea can have its downfalls. For instance, what do you do when the Interactive Whiteboard decides not to work? I remember this happening to the Year 6 teacher that I worked with when he was about to have an observation - definitely not the prime time for it to break down on someone! What can you do when most of your teaching uses the IWB? Surely we can hardly be expected to do more planning just incase the IWB fails on us.

There are also the things we have to take into consideration when using the IWB - the room can't be too bright, the positioning of the activities on the IWB shouldn't be too high or else many of the children (and me!) won't be able to reach and no matter how much I may like the colour yellow, it should NOT be placed on a white background or nobody would know what the task is!

Despite the downfalls and considerations I do believe that the IWB is an excellent invention for all the advantages mentioned earlier, and if used as an interactive tool, I think it is extremely useful for a child's learning and engagement.

For me though, I am a slight techno-phobe and have only tried to use them briefly last year when I was working as a Year 6 TA and failed miserably. In the end it was the children trying to teach me!

Fortunately our ICT Interactive Whiteboard session helped to sort out some of my fears and was thoroughly enjoyable. In our lesson we were put into groups and all had to use a specific effect to make a presentation/lesson starter. Ours was the 'Magnifiying Glass Effect' where we used a virtual magnifying glass to reveal hidden information. I think this is a great idea for children as they will probably love the idea of being investigators and using the magnifying class to come up with something new. We decided that our 'children' (the rest of the group) would have to use the magnifying glass to reveal words with the 'oa' phoneme in it as you can see below. I think it is a good fun, oral starter and this is where the children can really interact with the activity.


The Checker Tool

Magnifying Glass










As other groups also presented we were able to get to know what other effects we could use. My particular favourites were the Random Generator tool, where values or pupils names can be randomly generated, and the Checker Tool. The Checker Tool can provide the children with instant feedback to questions they have answered. This is again another fun, interactive tool where another group used it to ask questions in Science, which you can see above.

Now I've printed off how to do all the effects we were shown and downloaded the SMART software I should be all ready to get on with my assignment - designing part of a lesson using the IWB. I'd love to develop on our Phoneme idea but I'm hoping to come up with something completely new and despite my fears I'm actually quite excited about getting started on it.

I've also located the site Box of Tricks, which has some additional ideas that I may just have to borrow so watch this space :)