Wednesday 20 January 2010

My favourite finds at BETT

I know that BETT finished ages ago (well it seems like it anyway) but it has been a busy few days packing boxes and such like so I haven't had chance to post about my BETT finds. Some of these are obvious and some less so. What I have tried to do is also contact the company to find out more information to help you out. There is nothing in it for me, I just liked what I say and thought some of you might like them too.I must say that this post is aimed at my ICT cluster, but obviously, if you find it useful, that's great!

So in no particular order...

Brainpop - www.brainpop.co.uk/freetrial
(30 day free trial)
Brainpop seemed like a great resource for explaining difficult subjects and ideas. These also include quizzes to test the children's knowledge. The videos inject humour into the range of topics and would be useful for teaching children about a range of different topics.


Class Pet - www.scholastic.co.uk/classpet
(3 month free trial)
I was initially attracted to the Scholastic stand because they were playing a huge part in TeachMeet Takeover (as were BrainPop). I was around presenting and attracting teachers to the stand to listen to the ideas that were being shared by other teachers. After a while, I had a look at their demo of Class Pet and liked what I saw. You can easily assess the children using a number of objectives and activities. Activities can be assigned to specific pupils so that they can assess themselves at their own pace. This looks like a good way of using ICT to assess maths and literacy. 


Anithings - http://www.anithings.com/try.html
(15% discount for Hampshire schools - email me)
Anithings was one of the products and companies being showcased on TeachersTV in the run up to BETT. I was immediately drawn to the characters that could be used within the animations. Younger children will love the cartoony creatures, but you can add and adapt the characters too. It is easy to move them around the screen and then the final animation can be embedded as a flash file. Maybe it's just the googly eyes, but it is good fun!






2Simple - 2Create a Super Story - http://www.2simple.com/super/
(30 day free trial)

As always, 2Simple have delivered. There are many blogs already about their incredible new product so I will let you read those below. It easily lets you create stories, information texts and anything you like really. Characters are dragged on to the screen and then manipulated in a number of ways to animate them and move them around the screen. Sound can also be put in very quickly and easily. The finished article can then be saved as a flash file and put into a VLE, blog or website. Great for sharing with parents or for extending learning after the lesson.
Read more from some of the experts:
2Simple Blog
Bev Evans - @bevevans22
Simon Widdowsden - @xannov
Simon Haughton - @simonhaughton
Mark Warner - @markw29

Not really new but...
Espresso - www.espresso.com
(Reduced rate until Feb half-term 2010 for Hampshire Schools)
Espresso is a fantastic resource when it is used well. I used to use it all of the time at school, it made searching for content a nice, simple task. I would often use the resources for assemblies or as part of my input. Espresso have made two major changes recently. Every video can now be embedded into a VLE, making it very simple to share the videos as part of a discussion or a test or maybe even a blog. They have also just launched a home access module allowing the pupils the opportunity to explore the resources themselves at home.

i-board - http://tes.iboard.co.uk/
i-board was my favourite find of Bett 2009. A whole host of inexpensive, fun activities for Key Stage 1 children. This year I was given the fantastic news that these are now completely free. Fantastic news for anyone with KS1 children. They are so good that many Year 3/4 teachers have used them too.

What did you see at BETT? Have I missed something?

Sunday 17 January 2010

My feelings after BETT

I have finally returned home after a long, but exciting few days at BETT.I went for 2 days last year, but managed to stay for 3 this time around. Posting this on the Sunday means that everyone has already made it home and blogged already!
The most exciting thing for me was the TeachMeet Takeover and the Teachmeet event on the Friday night. I want to say thank you to everyone for organising the events and the effort that was put in. It was scary enough volunteering to present at TeachMeet, let alone being the first one chosen to present! Luckily @lisibo followed me and I think our talks complemented each other quite nicely as I explained how to make a Voki and then Lisa showed them in use!


Here's a pictureof me in front of 250+ people, thanks to @iusher for the picture.


I will post later about the exciting products I saw at BETT, but this post is more about Teachmeet and the wonderful people that I met. I was lucky enough to meet some fantastic people and to list them all would take ages and I am sure to miss someone! But thank you to everyone for all of their help and support before and during BETT.

The supportive tweets after my presentation also took my breath away and I thank everyone that made a comment! I know at least 2 people have made a VOKI since and one that is using it with her class on Monday. I have never thought of myself as innovative before, but I love that I can share ideas with others.

To quote Lisa, 'What seems like old hat for you is a lightbulb moment for someone else'

The biggest inspiration from anyone though came from the guy that talked about the TeachMeet in Holland. I immediately turned to Phil (@baggiepr) and began planning how we would go about organising a TeachMeet Hampshire at our annual ICT Conference. I have drafted an email already and who knows Maybe we can make it happen.

Thanks again to everyone for inspiring me and making BETT very enjoyable this year!

Thursday 14 January 2010

Bett on thursday

I've finally sat down after a crazy day at bett. After the train announcer said there was a motor fault on the train, i was a little worried how the day would go. Luckily marion from @netintelligence offered to look after my bag, helping reduce queueing time. First stop was to go and see @digitalmaverick at the first ever #tmtakeover. While there i met @joga5 aka bill lord and @dughall, although i was also tigged too! My tmtakeover went well, the crowd started with about ten, reduced to 5 or so at one point but finished with about 25, so i'll take that as a success. Thanks to @chrisrat for hosting. Bett is a strange experience, wandering from one stand to another, watching people just walking up to take pens and the like. My freebies today include chocolate from espresso and free tea and coffee from o2 upstairs. It was great to meet the fellow tweeters and also great to be present at the naace stand to see droxford school recieve their ict mark award. The second tmtakeover had just 3 attendants, but that just gave it a more intimate feel. I've had a great day meeting people, catching up with 2simple, espresso etc and sharing ideas with others. Here's to tomorrow where i'm looking forward to @lisibo and @tombarrett and of course teachmeet. brilliant day, well done everyone. Oh, @johnmclear looks just like his avatar, it.s weird!

Posted via email from Ian Addison's Blog

Wednesday 13 January 2010

My bett blog, the night before

I'm just testing my blog before bett. I'm heading off tomorrow morning, with a busy day planned. There are two teachmeet takeover presentations, midday at the scholastic stand, g40 where i'll be talking about vles and some of the challenges we've had in hampshire. I'll also be showing some examples of learning too. Then later in the afternoon i'll be at the netintelligence stand to show some online tools such as myebook and animoto. Inbetween those there's the chance to meet with john to discuss primary pad. Very busy day ahead, but should be fun. I'm definitely looking forward to meeting people from twitter and seeing the 2simple stand and seeing an expert using 2cass properly! If you're there tomorrow, send me a tweet. But if you're 'it' then stay away! Search for #betttig if you want to know more...

Posted via email from Ian Addison's Blog

Monday 11 January 2010

Let me map it out for you

So what did you do today? This morning I spent time using Google Maps to create a map of all schools in Hampshire that are using our VLE, Wizkid. This is the Hampshire name for Studywiz.
Why do we want a map of our schools? Well, there are a few reasons:

*To see which schools have signed up to the county solution- many of us are visual people!
*So schools can see if the others in their area are using the same VLE and when they started using it
*To help us plan support sessions depending on the amount of schools

We have around 400 schools that have started, finished or are halfway through their VLE training. The last batch of schools are all starting this term, so this is the last map we will be producing. In the past, I created a map at each phase of training. This was fine for the first 100 or so schools, but Google Maps had the odd problem of allowing 200 points on a map. This was an issue and meant our map didn't look very good due to the second page.So something else was needed.

We created 4 maps, splitting the county into areas. They can also be overlaid to produce the picture below.



Now, why am I telling you about our Google Map? If you are outside of Hampshire, surely this is pointless?
Well, no...

For those of you that are thinking I spent hours plotting all 400 points, you are wrong. I used a fab service called MapAList This is a service that allows you to create a map using a Goolge spreadsheet.  It is designed for businesses to map their customers, but I thought it could help me too. 

I had a list of schools already in Excel, I deleted the information that I didn't need and then uploaded this into Google Docs. MapAList then links with Google Docs and transfers the data into a map. You can give all points the same pin or use the advanced tool, as I have done, and assign different colours. All of the pins with the same colour started their training in the same term. You can then save the .KML file and import it into Google Earth or Google Maps.

So how would I use it within school?
@deputymitchell is teaching a zoo based topic(starting today) and asked for people to suggest zoos for his children to investigate. Putting these onto a Google Doc would enable him to map them across the globe.

What about plotting the countries in the World Cup/African Cup of Nations?

Where do we have relatives? Plot their locations on a map and investigate different parts of the UK.

I saw a school that had a local map on the wall and they had put sticky labels to represent children. This showed how far and wide the children had travelled to attend their school. This could be done very quickly and simply using Google maps and an exported CSV file from the school office.

How would you use this mapping service? It would be great to hear your comments.

If you wish to see the maps, click below:

Sunday 10 January 2010

My bett blog

I will be keeping a blog during the bett show. I've just set it up on my phone thanks to @markw29 i'll be using it to keep track of my thoughts and views of the bett show!

Posted via email from ianaddison's posterous

Saturday 9 January 2010

My First Story with 2CASS

I have been lucky enough to have a play with an early version of 2Create a Super Story. One of the schools here in Hampshire will be using it with their children in the next few weeks too - snow permitting!

What does 2CASS do? Er...a bit of everything really. There are a number of different writing templates. Actually writing is wrong. Story/book templates is better. There is a flip book, a scroll and other ways to display your writing learning.

To start, you choose an object and drag it into the main screen. I started with faces and a few other things and then I found the dinosaur. The 10year old boy in me took over and my 'story' became about a dinosaur. Obviously called Rex...I should probably point out I did this late in the evening and it is probably not my best work, yet.

So, I had my main character. But what was he going to do? If I was planning this properly, I would have discussed it with my peers or my class, but I made it up as I went along letting 2CASS dictate the story for me.

There is the option to make your characters/objects move along the screen. Perfect. Rex would go for a walk. In the rain. I dragged the rain object on, coloured it blue and voila, rain fell. To add the rain effect took about 30 seconds. 20 of these deciding which shade of blue to use!

I saw an interesting object that to me looked like a worm, so on my cover, you will see a worm wiggling across the screen. Is it important to the story? No, but who cares!

Finding a house object, I set about designing my house and background. I thought it would be good for Rex to roar as he reached the house. Now, I searched through the sound effects available and realised that the sheep noise wouldn't make Rex very scary so I went with the lion. (My house was far too quiet for me to record myself roaring)

After about an hour of fiddling with helicopters and deleting pages and editing, I found the 'whole page' option. This enabled me to make the whole page shake! It could shake as Rex stomped around. Fantastic!

I had a great hour and a half playing with 2CASS. I laughed a couple of times and smiled almost constantly. It was a real pleasure to explore and set my mind off on a million things. If I showed a class my story without words, they could write the text, why is Rex unhappy? What sort of character is he? Why are people scared of him?Are people scared or is he misunderstood?

What happens in the end? Click on the link and find out yourself!

The only problem I have is that now I have to find time in my schedule to play with 2DIY and 2CASS!

Wednesday 6 January 2010

School's Closed! (But has the learning stopped?)


As you may have noticed today, it snowed. A lot. Here in Hampshire, a lot of schools were closed as they were across the rest of the country. 

Now what happens to the children's learning while the school is closed? This could be due to snow, burst water pipe or whatever. What do you do to continue the learning? Now, I must say that if my school was closed for a day due to snow, I would be encouraging pupils to get out there and enjoy it. It doesn't happen much in my part of Hampshire! But what if it is closed for 2 or 3 days? a week? Is there something in place for the children? Even if they do go and play in the snow, they will want to come in the warm eventually and maybe they will venture online...Maybe they live away from their friends and would love to have the chance to chat online. Maybe they are just enthusiastic about their learning? If set as an optional task, then this will definitely win over parents. Be careful that it isn't set as compulsory, especially if not all of your pupils have internet access.

I heard reports of schools using VLEs last year in the Far East when Swine Flu was a problem, but it hasn't really been mentioned much here in the UK until now. 

I saw a lot of Twitter posts from the likes of @primarypete_ and @Deputymitchell about their 'snow lessons' that went on today and I know that these inspired other teachers too. I was sitting here wishing I had a class to work with! In Hampshire we are in the middle of our rollout for the VLE, lots of schools are using it a little bit and quite a few have it embedded throughout the school. How many have been using it today? It is hard to tell without looking into the stats and that will come in a few days time. But what did your school do? Did you plan anything?

So what could you do if it was snowing? How about:

*Using descriptive language to describe a snowman example 
*How deep is the snow outside?
*Give the children a title and ask them to write a story on PrimaryPad together
*Using a gallery to share pictures of the view from their house and describing what they can see
*Using these descriptive words to write a story setting / start a story
*Embedding videos of the snow and asking the children to discuss a new form of transport to cope with the weather

There are some things that can be done and set up for the children to access without a teacher and some with teachers involved. From what I can gather, most of these examples had teachers online with the children too. But if you don't want to be as involved (or you fancy going outside yourself) then why not set up some activities for them to do?

Studywiz has a great gallery tool. Get the children to upload photos of their garden and use the comment box underneath to describe it. Think about the vocabulary, think about how your sentences make the reader feel.As a teacher you could start this off and let the children access it throughout the day. Some of people on Twitter sent texts to their children informing them when the online lesson would start, but having resources available to all is also an option. 

It really shows the potential of the technology. I know a few schools are now planning to add activities for the children as they enter the 2nd or 3rd day of snow.  

Very exciting indeed!



For a much better description of what went on, read about it below on their blogs instead:

I would watch the Twiddla link on medium/fast, lesson starts around 340, the number is in the top left. 

Friday 1 January 2010

ICT Cluster Meeting Spring 2010 - Ideas to Inspire

Next meeting: Thursday January 28th 2010, 4-5pm
Hulbert Junior, Waterlooville, PO7 8ED.

Ideas to Inspire

I will be showing some new technology and websites that will hopefully change the way you work, improve your organisation and improve collaboration. I have a few sites I want to show and all are free. There will also be guides and ideas of how to use them.

The idea is that I want to be innovative and showcase some fantastic web 2.0 technology that you probably haven't seen. There has been an explosion in free online software for classroom use recently and I have been working with a few teachers across the country via Twitter to develop some resources to aid the use of these sites. I want you to leave the session inspired with at least 1 resource or idea to use in the classroom the next day.

We will be showing sites such as:
Delicious
Wallwisher
MyEBook
Interesting Ways to...
Voicethread
PrimaryPad
Google Reader

The cluster is open to anyone from schools in Havant or the surrounding areas. If you can make it there, you're invited. We often have people from Petersfield, Fareham and beyond!

Please email me if you wish to attend.
ian.addison@hants.gov.uk