ICT @ Southwark

Last Wednesday was a very exciting INSET session and I want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who was there and made it great.

This is just to share with those who were not able to be there what we disucssed and the fantastic things everyone shared.

The first thing that was quite popular was the ‘Random Name Generator’ which is avaliable for free from class tools here.

We spoke a lot about how blogging has changed since September and how it can be a powerful tool for communicating with parents and letting the children get invovled in sharing what they have been doing. It was great that people were willing to share different ideas about their blogs and how they use it in different ways.

There was a variety of different websites that people recommended using with their blog. The first was photopeach.

http://www.photopeach.com/ is a great way of putting lots of photos on the blog in the form of a video or ’spiral’. Kathy showed us how she had used it on her blog. It is really easy to use you need to sign up for a free account. Just upload the pictures and follow the instructions for making a video. Set a title and choose a piece of music. You can even add captions or quizes to each photo. Once it is complete click on the pencil icon that says ‘embed on blog’. Then there is some code along the top select the copy button alongside it. Choose story for a video or spiral for a different view. Paste this code into a blog post making sure you select the ‘HTML’ tab at the top.

Sarah shared with us how to add sound files/clips to the blog and created a fantastic help sheet which will be on here soon. It used the website ‘divshare.‘

Sonia shared with us how she uses widgets to make her blog more child friendly! Along the side of her blog she has maps and even a class pet! To add widgets to your blog click on the Appearance tab along the side of the dashboard and select widgets. There are several that you can choose to drag onto the tool bar. If you want to add some more fun ones she suggested the website www.widgetbox.com (unfortunately this is blocked at school so you will have to look at home). The link to the pets one is here… Click on ‘get widget’ and again copy the code. Choose a text ‘widget’ from the dashboard and paste the code into there. Click Save and it should appear on your blog!

I explained how a fantastic website called embedit.in allows you to add files such as word, pdf, excel or powerpoint into a blog post easily. Just select the file, log in with your google details and select the embed code. Paste this into a blog post and it should appear immediately.

The year 6 team explained how they had found using glogster as a way of creating an interactive poster online. It is a new and interesting way or combining text, graphics, videos and sound into one place. The children really enjoyed learning how to do it, although the staff admitted it did take some getting used to! There is an education version here.

Several members of staff have been using Spotify in the classroom. Spotify is a free service that allows you to search for music and save them into playlists. Unfortunately Spotify is only avaliable by invitation at the moment.

Finally we discussed how 2diy was being used across the school from year 1-6. It was fantastic to hear how teachers across the whole school had found the children were really enthusiastic about creating games and making good use of their ICT skills. It was great that the children were discovering things themselves and sharing them with others in the class. There is an archive of different games and ideas people have using 2diy avaliable here. If your children produce any games you want to put on your blog by sharing them here it means that the file size is not a problem and you get to share them with even more people! Get in contact if you would like help with this!

Thanks to everyone who shared something I really appreciate it and hope you learned something new!

As we start our whole school new ICT topic using a piece of software called 2diy I thought I would do a quick post to explain how to post them onto your blogs!

Firstly when you save 2diy files you get two different file types .swf and 2diy document (.2iy) you need to upload the Shockwave Flash file .swf one to your blog as if you were adding media or a photo. This will then give you a web address for the file.  Copy and paste this into your blog post.

You then need to copy and paste this:

<div style=”text-align: center;”><embed src=”WEB ADDRESS” width=”500″ height=”400″></div>

Into the post.  Replace the words WEB ADDRESS with the url from before making sure you don’t leave any spaces. Make sure you click where it says HTML rather than visual at the top right. Finally click Publish!

Hope this alongside this video makes sense!

As lots of people were having problems uploading images to there blog because they were such big files I have come up with a solution!

I have installed a ‘plugin’ onto all the blogs. This means when you upload an image it then gives you the option to crop it, resize it, rotate it and various other things.

Hope this helps!

During the Spring term we will be working with a new piece of software called 2DIY.

Here is the medium term plan for years 1-6.

I would love any comments or feedback about it!

I have installed a new ‘plugin’ to all our blogs this weekend. It is called Poll Daddy and it is a quick and easy way to create a poll or quiz.

You can have up to 10 questions and input as many possible answers as you want or just click ‘other’ for people to input there own answers.

To set one up just click on the circle that looks like this:

Then it will easily help you to produce a poll just like this:

This is a how to unrelated to blogging!
Lots of people have asked me how to download videos from you tube because it is blocked in school.

I would recommend the website:

www.keepvid.com

Copy the url into the blue bar and then choose the lower version .flv will play on real player which you can download.

Or use www.zamzar.com to convert it to a .wmv which will play it on windows media player.

Hope that helps!

Having just read a blog post by Tom Barrett here I felt truly inspired!

This is something that I think would fit really well into our new curriculum in terms of how we produce a final outcome for each ‘big question’.

Tom was trying to use John Davitt’s Learning Event Generator or LEG for short.

The basic principle is simple. You give the children a variety of learning topics or ‘Do’s and a list of ‘As’‘

They then chose a Do and an As.
Therefore for my year 2 history they could present:

School in the 1960s as a flip book

or

Toys in the 1960s as a series of 5 photos.

There is a fun spinner generator here that could be used to get some ideas!

The possibilities are endless! By giving children the options (as open ended or structured as we want) they become motivated, engaged and creative. I think this is what we were trying to do anyway and here is a great resource that could help support us in this.

What do you think?

A friend on twitter @dawnhallybone showed me this fantastic website today:
http://taggalaxy.de/

It allows you to search for photos based upon tags.

Put in a topic and it provides suggestions for further possible options. Then when it has limited the images to those you might actually want just click on the planet and you get a choice shown in a really exciting way as you can see above.

I have just come across the website Cool Tools For Schools here:

http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/

and am amazed by how good it is! It contains all the web2 sites that I have used and many many more.

It is organised in a really easy to use way under separate headings for each possible use as you can see in the screen shot.

What a brilliant site!

Cool Tools For Schools

Along the sidebars of a blog (columns on the left or right) are a varierty of ‘widgets’. These are a variety of nice extras that you can have which provide information or link to things.
This video shows you some of the things you can do and how to add widgets.

Simply put:
Go to Appearance
Click on Widgets
Select the widget you want and click add
Change the order on the sidebar by clicking and draging them up or down.
Click Save Changes