Author Archive: Sarah
The Redcar & Cleveland City Learning Centre, Middlesbrough
Following yesterday’s amazing analogue adventures, where we went on a whirlwind whizz through the wonderous world of words, with pupils, teachers and parents of Normanby Primary School, we spent today with those same teachers, plus 80 more from neighbouring schools, on a daring dash through a day trip of digital delights at The Redcar & Cleveland City Learning Centre.
Schools joining us today were Normanby Primary, Bydales Secondary, Galley Hill Primary, Gillbrook College, Handale Primary, Laurence Jackson School, Overfields Primary, Prior Pursglove College, Riverdale Primary, Sacred Heart RC School, South Bank Primary, St Gabriel’s Primary, St Joseph’s Primary, St Mary’s Primary, Skelton Primary, Whitecliffe Primary and Wilton Primary.
Carl Faulkner, the Headteacher at Normanby Primary, explains here how our visit came about:
I had spoken to colleagues from a number of local schools and evangelised about Tim’s content and delivery. Requests for delegates to attend his Schools Professional Development Day soon began to arrive and after speaking with David Major, the manager at Redcar & Cleveland City Learning Centre, an offer to host the event there was soon forthcomming.
I knew the impact that I hoped and expected working with Tim would have on my staff and, in these days of shrinking school budgets, linking up with other Schools was a logical step. We have also been keen for our local Secondary Schools to gain an insight into some of the exciting work Primaries are doing and I offered them the chance to attend. Moving the event to the CLC and taking advantage of Richards excellent technical support helped simplify our organisation for the day.
The day has delivered all I hoped for. There have been many examples today of teachers and schools sharing ideas and planning to take things further. At the end of a busy half term this has been a fantastic opportunity to raise our individual and collective heads, take a look around at how others work and see how Tim inspires learning. Everyone left with an abundance of ideas and innovations. I know we will all enjoy our half term away from School, but I bet we all sneakily want to be back at School to try something we experienced out!”
Carl Faulkner.
Thank you to Richard Porritt, Network Manager at the CLC, for helping us with all the technical side to today.
Text 2 Mind Map
Text 2 Mind Map is a web application that creates a mind map out of a list of words. Useful for creating mindmaps, but also for analysing the structure of information, and how it can be portrayed.
Bundle items under nodes, and arrange the nodes to your liking. Once the mindmap is ready you have an option to download and save it to your computer.
Type or paste text into an input box, using indents to break up your ideas into categories, and then customize the font size, node colors, and more.
Text 2 Mind Map mindmaps are really malleable, dra-gable, and flexible, but one good feature of the maps is that you can also “freeze” maps, and then move elements to end up with your desired layout.
Bullet points have never been so interesting.
British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 3
WOW! Another great day, at the British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, full of challenges and superb successes. Well done indeed, to all of the staff and children, for braving intense heat (for real) and freezing cold climates, where ice shards clawed at our skin “for real” (nudge nudge wink wink – suspend our disbelief) in the virtual worlds!
Thank you to Ian Battersby, Deputy Head at The Tu Xuong Primary Campus, for his thoughts on why he invited us to make this journey to Saigon:
At the BIS, Ho Chi Minh City we are looking to integrate ICT into all aspects of teaching and learning. Tim’s combination of training and demonstration lessons enabled us to make a huge stride towards meeting this objective. As well as providing us with a huge number of Web 2.0 links and ideas, the sessions gave our teachers the opportunity to reflect on their practice and to consider different ways to engage the children and extend their learning.
The children today not only extended their ideas, but stretched and crafted them too:
Many children at BIS have English as an additional language and the games based learning provided a safe environment to experiment with vocabulary and simile. For those native English speakers, the rich settings in Myst and constant ‘dripping’ of ideas allowed them to excel with their descriptive language. As Ian says:
“As we continue towards our aim of using ICT as a tool to aid learning in all areas of the curriculum, I have confidence that ideas from our sessions with Tim will become a part of all our children’s experience – from our two year olds, developing basic phonic skills in Foundation One, to our Year Sixes on the brink of writing their first novels”.
Again, a massive well done and Thank You to the whole of the BIS community, for making our time in Vietnam, so far, such a joyous journey. Now, we are off to Hoi An and Hue to research and explore more. Including a bit of farming and cooking!
British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2
Today we spent a joyous day at An Phu campus and huge “thank you”s to Deputy Head Simon Higham, and Richard Vaughan, Head Teacher, for inviting us to their beautiful school to spend time with their delightful children.
The day started with 60 Year 5 pupils followed swiftly by a group of 40 Year 5 pupils. A quick break, then a further 60 Year 6 pupils followed by another 40 Year 6 pupils – phew! This 5 form entry school has the most gorgeous children to spend time with: up for challenges, up for a laugh, and up for some creativity, in so many ways.
We ended the day with early years teachers, the Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 teachers, exploring the ways writing can be inspired, modelled and developed using some of the games, and we-based, learning opportunities we have been exploring over the last two days.
It is not just the children at this school who are willing to throw themselves at new experiences. Thank you, to all of the staff, especially those who even danced madly, or ran recklessly, when we were looking at verb-adverb clauses. 
The Qatar Academy, Doha, Qatar – Day 5
Our last day at Qatar Academy started with 2 classes of Year 4 pupils and their teachers, followed by a session with some key people (including Sandy Sheppard, the Principal, and Joneen Walker, vice Principal), exploring, sharing, discussing some of the outcomes of this huge, and busy, week.
Next we were joined by the Year 6 teachers, swiftly followed by a whizz of a roller coaster ride with 66 Y3 pupils!!
We ended the day squeezing in a Skype chat with @deputymitchell about Quadblogging, whilst spending time with the TIFs rounding off this full on week. Thank you Steve, Stacey, Scott, for you incredible organisation and energies!
Thank you to Craig and Karyn for looking after us so generously too.
MORE TO FOLLOW ON ALL OF THE HAPPENINGS, AND RESULTS, OF THIS REMARKABLE WEEK …SOON
Well done to all of the folk in Doha, for keeping up with the pace and challenges. WATCH THIS SPACE
Thank you to Jannie Kruger for sending us some of his children’s writing:
The Qatar Academy, Doha, Qatar – Day 4
Today’s timetable was gloriously packed: lessons with 60 Year 6 pupils and their teachers followed by another lesson with the rest of the Year 6 pupils, and their teachers. Next up was a session with the Year 4 and Year 5 teachers, swiftly followed by a lesson with the Year 1 pupils, exploring a beach with buckets of sand and bowls of water.
Lessons over, and all the primary school staff joined us in the afternoon for an iPad session where the teachers wandered through Epic Citadel, made a pot and spotted a pick-pocket. Overheard by one teacher, “we’re kinda just cruising around”. That’s what pick-pockets do isn’t it?
We ended the day working with a graduate class of senior and primary school teachers working towards their Certificate of Educational Technologies through the University of Buffalo, The State University of New York. Having seen a lot of the workshops already during the week the primary teachers dissappeared for a while to solve the problem of the pick-pockets baby using a range of Web2 tools while the senior school teachers got to see the ‘out of this world presentation’
Using Google Sites to create a ‘pick-a-path’ novel
The Technology Intergration Facilitor Team here at Qatar Academy are doing amazing, creative and supoortive projects working alongside the classroom teachers and their pupils. One of the team, Scott Johnson, has kindly shared one on the projects here:
This is a digital storytelling project I’ve been helping a Grade 4 class with this year. The story is all about a talking penguin (their class mascot) who has managed to turn an old ipod into a time machine. However, it doesn’t quite work properly. When the ‘forward’ button is pressed it will go to any random time and place in the future. If the ‘back’ button is pressed, it will go to any random time and place in the past.
At the end of each chapter the reader has a choice: do they want to press the ‘forward’ button or the ‘back’ button? For each option, there is a link to another chapter.
Having started with some teacher modeling, and some shared writing lessons, the students are now creating chapters both in pairs and individually. The important things for them to focus on are tense (present), perspective (the penguin’s), audience awareness (which could be anyone, however the reader is actually in the story, making the decisions) and of course the basic structure of narratives. 
The fact that this story is told on a Google site has allowed the students to embed a variety of other presentation tools to make the story more interesting. For example, students have used Vocaroo to simply tell their story orally. They have used the Interactive Whiteboard to place Chuck in different backgrounds. They have also used a programme called Oddcast to create a talking avatar of the toy penguin. 
This project is still very much a work in progress. In the next few weeks we plan to add animations from Domo Animate and Pivot Stickfigure Animation, Green Screen movies, musical soundscapes for the reader to listen to as they read a chapter, photographs of student artwork. Now that we have Myst 3 in our school (thanks to Myster Rylands!), we will also be inspiring the students to describe an even greater range of scenes and expect the writing to become a lot more expressive!
It has certainly been a highly motivating activity so far, with the students often very disappointed when I tell them that school’s finished and they have to go home!
To follow the story as it progresses, please check out the link below.
https://sites.google.com/a/qaprimary.org/4epick-a-path-story/
Scott Johnson Technology Integration Facilitator Qatar Academy
Thank you Scott. This is inspiring and extremely useful.
