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!