ICT Cluster Spring 1 - Roundup Pt1

So, another ICT cluster has finished and this one seemed to fly by like a whirlwind! I think I probably tried fitting too much into a short space of time. I promise next session I will slow down and give more playing time! (and find a room with a decent projector)
So here is a round-up of some of the things we did, and didn't, cover. I will also send this out on twitter and hopefully people will add examples below too.

The purpose of this session was to show you some of the exciting websites that I have found recently, the majority through Twitter. These range from time-saving to collaboration-based tools. After meeting with some teachers before Christmas and one of them stating that there seemed to be a lack of innovation from Lead Teachers and above, I thought I'd try my best to lead by example. Who knows if it worked or not!

So, what did we look at? (BTW, all of these are free.)

Delicious - http://www.delicious.com/
Examples: www.delicious.com/ianaddison or www.delicious.com/parkfield
What does it do?
It allows you to store websites and favourites online so that they can be accessed from anywhere. Now this might sound like a small thing for some people, but if you think a bit bigger, such as creating a school account like @simonhaughton has done, then collaboration becomes much easier. I showed this at an inset day at the start of term and the teachers added their favourite sites, within an hour we had 50 websites for them to share. even amongst this small number of teachers, they were all adding websites that others hadn't heard of. This means that next time they want to find a site for poetry, it might have been found by someone already. Very useful indeed. Next step? What about a Hampshire-wide account? hhmmm..might need some thought!
Top Tip
If you create a school account, make sure you decide on the tags beforehand. Otherwise, you'll end up with KS2, KS 2 and Key Stage 2.

PrimaryPad - http://www.primarypad.com/
What does it do?
Primary Pad is a tool that allows you to upload a word document or start from scratch and then have multiple users adding to and editing the document at the same time. Sounds chaotic? It can be. But now that @johnmclear has limited it to 6 people per pad, it works brilliantly for small groups of children. We have used in Hants to plan testing for Wizkid, we were all online plotting our next steps in real-time. It's quite a lot of fun too!
Possible Uses
Why not get the children to collaborate on a story or piece of writing? Poetry? Playscript?
What about teachers editing a policy?
Top Tip
Go to www.primarypad.com/whateverwordyoulike and providing someone hasn't put that word on there before, you can make a new pad. This means that you can have a pad tailored for your class or group, much easier to remember than using the random letters at the end!
Also, let the children try it first, then decide on rules. They can edit and delete each others work, so session 2 may need some rules!

Wordle - http://www.wordle.net/
What does it do?
Wordle takes a selction of words you have typed or pasted and create a collage of them with the more frequent words appearing larger than the others. The best way to see this is to copy and paste a news article from a site such as http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and then try to see the key words of the article. I showed this using Andy Murray's match report and the key words were 'Murray', 'Tennis' and 'Open'. Useful to see if a child has written one word more than the others.
Possible Uses
Why not ask the children to list different words for 'said' or 'walked'? Write the main word e.g. 'said' 3/4 times, then the others will appear smaller. Great for a vocabulary display or a way of creating a wordbank before starting a poem.
Top Tip
When typing words, put ~ between them. This way, the words stay together e.g. once~upon~a~time would stay together as a phrase. Perfect for story starters! More tips can be found at www.delicious.com/ianaddison/wordle

Part 2 will follow with Wallwisher, MyEBook and Animoto as well as details of Home Access

So here I am. Finally in the world of blogging. I've always hated writing or maybe it was just because I wasn't any good at it. At school it wa my weakest subject and when I started teaching, I hated literacy. Working hard on it with my year 3s helped, but I'm still just a beginner. So who knows, maybe I'll enjoy blogging, maybe I wont.
Anyway, what do I do? I'm a primary teacher currently on secondment working with the local authority, Hampshire, on the rollout of their learning platform Studywiz. It has its ups and its downs but the potential for collaboration across Hampshire is huge. As we stand at the moment in October 09, we have trained just under 200 schools and will have 420 onboard by January. It is a mammoth task and one that has been exciting, but full of struggles and learning opportunities.
Throughout the secondment my mind has always been torn about what to do next. Do I go back to my old school, Hulbert? Do i look somewhere new? Do I try and combine Studywiz and teaching? I think the half and half approach was where my mind has been at for most of the past year, but joining Twitter has given me an enthusiasm for trying new things with children.
I follow a few teachers on Twitter and constantly, every day, I see new sites, new links, new ideas that I wish I was using with a class of my own. Seeing the virtual timeline gave me ideas about creating a class timeline or maybe one for the whole school? Looking at blogs about the use of the Wii for maths or deep sea diving has made me want to go and see what other opportunities there are for learning.
A visit to Hulbert last week gave me a buzz. They are using Community outreach money to equip an empty classroom with 6 Wiis! I mentioned I had heard of ways of using it and now I've been invited to lead the training.
What about Wii golf or baseball to find out how far the ball has gone? Manipulating the numbers to provide the different sums needed. What about using Mario Kart to explore different worlds and settings? The fire of Bowser's Castle, the dark, broody scenes of the highway, all rich for vocabulary collection.
So now I'm thinking I want to go back and teach full time. The opportunities are huge. I want to use the learning platform to share a radio show. I want to create animations and games using tools like Scratch. I want children to comment and share ideas using Edmodo or Studywiz. I want to share vocabulary using Wordle. Am I being greedy? Maybe. But I have always tried new things with my class, but maybe this time I need to think more about the whole-school. How will Google calendars help with whole school organisation? How will the website help with invigorating home-school links? I have ideas bouncing all over the place and this is even if ignore 90% of the links on Twitter.
I've signed up for a delicious account. What about sharing websites with the whole staff? We have a school account and tag the bookmarks to share with everyone. I need to play with it more but it could work. Are the staff too old-school for it to work? Who knows. Will the head want me to go in and change anything? Will there be another job available that tempts me instead? Who knows! But the opportunities are there.
Anyway...thats the first blog post. Not sure what will become of this, it will probably just be a list of the useful things I find on Twitter, tagged and ready for use next year when/if I go into class again. Tomorrow I'm off for the first join meeting with the Primary and Secondary Leading ICT teachers. Could be interesting, and I know at least one uses Delicious so I'm sure he'll be my first friend on there!