New Year

I like the start of a new school year, a time for making plans and starting afresh, using all the things we learnt last year and putting them into place.

It's going to be an interesting year for us.

Due to the reorganisation of middle schools in Suffolk, my school closes in summer 2012, which means our new Year 5s are our last intake of new children. We've known about the changes for a while but this is going to the year when staff begin to look for posts elsewhere and I'm sure it's going to be a difficult year in many ways. I also have a feeling we're going to get a visit from Ofsted this year!

On a personal level, I'm excited about researching and writing my MA dissertation.

It's a year since I joined Twitter and when I look back at the changes and development I made in my teaching last year, a lot of it had to do with inspiration and motivation from other teachers I follow on Twitter, so I'm excited to see what else it will bring this year.

Inanimate Alice

Inanimate Alice is an interactive digital story hosted online and told in 4 'episodes'. It follows the story of Alice as she grows up and moves around the world, I'm not going to tell you much about the story, because you should go and read it!

The story is told through a combination of text, pictures, music and interactive games and when I introduced the first episode to my Year 6 English set they initially weren't sure what to make of it. They didn't take it seriously, and, because it wasn't a 'book' they thought they were just playing a fun game and were surprised when I asked them to think deeply about it in the same way I would if we were reading a book. Who is Alice? What do we know about her? What don't we know? Why does she do this? Why did she say that?

Responses to my question 'What is Inanimate Alice?' Included 'film' and 'cartoon' but other children answered that it couldn't be because you can understand those without being able to read, this has text and without it you can't understand the story. Is it just a website? They decided no it wasn't, because it's a story.

It was when we started to look at the structure and features of a digital text and compared it with a written text that they began to understand properly what it was all about.

"In a book you would have to describe the picture Alice drew or describe what her player does but here you can do it with pictures."

"The music helps to tell the story, you know where they are in the world and it creates atmosphere, makes you feel tense when the story gets scary."

After they had read all 4 episodes the children started plan their own episode 5, we talked about what all the episodes have in common and how important it is that they stick to the same style and features. We decided they would use Powerpoint to create the digital version of their stories because they are familiar and comfortable in using it. In pairs, the children planned what would happen to Alice next, and once they had a story outline began to write the story slide by slide, on paper first so they had the text of their story alongside notes about what else could go in the slides. I was impressed and excited by their enthusiasm and creativity, they are a set of borderline level 3/4 writers who usually struggle to get started. When I asked each group, how are you going to turn this version into a digital version? They knew exactly what they wanted to do and had a good idea how they would achieve it.

And that is as far as we have got. I will write another post when their work is finished and hopefully share it here.

Many of the ideas I used in my lessons came from this Inanimate Alice Wikispace I found through google. But best of all, thanks to the wonderful power of Twitter, after tweeting about using Inanimate Alice in class, Kate Pullinger, one of the creators, started to follow me. I sent her a message and will be sharing my class's work with her when they're finished. There's nothing like a quality audience to get children motivated!

Waiting for the Dust to Settle

It seems like it was all a distant dream now... the holiday, the ash cloud, the delay.
Six days stranded in Istanbul without which I wouldn't have had the pleasure of talking my children into collaborating with 2simple on an activity for Purplemash. It's amazing how these things come about, a tweet, an idea, an email, a few photos, a short video and a couple of days later an interactive Newspaper report writing activity for KS2.

The story of how it came about was featured last week in a couple of local newspapers which my girls were extremely excited about and proud of.

Authentic, topical educational resources are hard to come by, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, let someone who can use it to make resources know!

Handwriting

At the beginning of this academic year I came across a boy in my Year 6 English set whose handwriting was barely legible. He had ideas, he had a good vocabulary, he understood the structure of texts and sentences but you couldn't read what he had written. At parents' evening a few weeks ago his parents told me they couldn't read his writing either and pleaded with me to help. So I sent him home with a handwriting text book and exercise book and for the past few weeks his parents have made him sit down and do handwriting practice every single night (I know this as he's been quite vocal in complaining about it!).

This week he brought in his handwriting book to show me and I was shocked, I actually questioned whether it was him who had done this beautifully precise handwriting. Yesterday he did a piece of writing for me in a lesson and I was even more shocked! It's one thing to do lovely writing in a handwriting book but another to actually put it into pratice away from the exercises. A few weeks of regular handwriting practice has completely transformed the way this boy writes.

Today I was talking about him and showing his work to a Key Practitioner I'm working with and she made a comment which she admitted was a sweeping generalisation, but which was that in her experience children in year 5 & 6 in middle schools have much worse handwriting and presentation than those in the same year groups in primary schools. Which got me wondering why. Is it that middle schools but less emphasis on presentation and so the children just don't care what their work looks like? Or is it that middle school teachers don't teach 'handwriting'? When was the last time this boy did 'handwriting' in a lesson at school?

I taught English in year 5 last year and my group did regular handwriting practice but I'm not aware of other teachers in my school doing the same. This year I haven't done it with my year 6 group at all. I suppose my attitude was that if they could get to age 10 and their writing was still that terrible (and so many of them are!) then there wasn't a lot I could do to change it, I saw handwriting as something they focus on in KS1 and not really relevant in Year 6. The change in this boy has made me realise it's something I shouldn't forget about and that for many of them it isn't too late.

I'm interested to know if the comment that was made today is generally true, there are many things Primary schools are better at than Middle schools for children in KS2, is the problem of handwriting and presentation another one?

Maths Maps

Maths Maps are the brainchild of Tom Barrett and are a series of placemarks in a Google Map with maths activities. You can see Tom's Maths Maps at his Edute.ch Blog.

I decided to make my own Maths Map for my Year 6 top set using the grounds of our school and the surrounding area and (after running out of inspiration on the fourth placemark!)handed the writing of the questions over to the children. They know the area much better than me as they live in it and delighted in finding their villages, roads and houses to base their questions around.

As one girl said at the end of the lesson 'It's fun mixing maths and ICT'!


View Halesworth Maths Map in a larger map

Climate lesson using Wallwisher, Google Maps & Linkbun.ch

Year 6 are learning about climates at the moment in preparation for an investigation into microclimates around the school.



Last Friday I set up a new Wallwisher page called Climate and sent out this tweet on Twitter, I also sent messages on Facebook to several friends who live in different countries asking them to help.

What I wanted was for as many people outside of the UK as possible, in as many different climate zones as possible to post their location, temperature, weather conditions and, if possible, a photo. By the time of their Geography lesson on Friday 48 people in locations all around the world had posted their data on the Wallwisher.

I wanted the children to be able to compare the temperature and weather in the different locations, identify where in the world they were and what climate zone they were in. In order to do this they were going to use 4 different websites, Wallwisher, Google Maps (to find the locations), an online conversion website (to convert Fahrenheit into Celsius) and a website which has a map of the world with climate zones mapped in different colours. To make this easier I added the links to the 4 websites to Linkbun.ch , if you haven't seen it Linkbun.ch is a really useful site that lets you put multiple links into one small link, so when you click on the small link it opens all the links at the same time. This was my first time using it after seeing Ian Yorston demonstrating it at one of the TeachMeetTakeover sessions at BETT2010. It made working with multiple websites much easier for the children who just had to click on one link and everything they needed for the lesson opened automatically for them.

At the start of the lesson I explained exactly how I'd got the weather data for this lesson and the children were immediatly interested, curious and eager to start looking at all the information, the fact that many of the people who posted on the Wallwisher are people I know really motivated them and they had lots of questions. The children were really interested in the pictures but unfortunately most of them were hosted on websites which are blocked in school(Flickr, Twitpic etc) so they couldn't access them which was a shame.

At the end of the lesson we talked about what they had learned and apart from the obvious things about weather & climate they talked about many of the features of Google Maps they hadn't explored before (streetview for example), some of the children hadn't known that there was a difference between F and C or which countries used which unit of measurement before, and they also said they learned that "it's not just the British that like to talk about weather", and "Miss Brownsword has a lot of friends who live in funny places"!

Bett 2010

I've just got back from my first visit to the BETT show and my first TeachMeet with my head now even more jampacked with fantastic ideas than it was before I went!

I had several reasons for wanting to go to BETT, one being a hunt for visualisers, but the main one was for inspiration and ideas.

Ok, for me, BETT was rather like one giant shopping centre and I don't really do shopping. If I need something I'll research the possibilities online and either buy it there and then or go to somewhere I know sells it, buy it and leave, which is what I did with the visualisers. If I do venture into a city centre full of shops I'm likely to get distracted by two things, tea and street entertainers! So for me TeachMeet takeover was the perfect distraction, a fantastic idea, and the one's I had the pleasure of seeing were full of really useful stuff I can't wait to use. I really think this idea should be made bigger and better for the next show, and well done to everyone who was involved in organising it.

I was really looking forward to TeachMeet on Friday evening, by the time it started I had already spoken to many Twitter people and was excited about meeting more and watching the presentations. With free beer and Dyson Airblades in the toilet I knew I was in for a good evening! I have to say it was lovely to have so many people come over, introduce themselves and say hello. I have, in the past, been described as 'unapproachable' so I'm hoping it's a sign I'm softening in my old age!
Lisa's (@lisibo ) presentation reminded me that it was after coming across her on Teachers TV talking about using Twitter to teach Spanish that resulted in me joining Twitter in the first place, I had completely forgotten! And, like she was after her first TeachMeet, I have been inspired to get up and talk. I have set myself a challenge to put my name down to present something at the next one I go to.
All the presentations were excellent, have a look at Dawn Hallybone's blog or Stuart Ridout's blog for more info of who talked about what and Tom Barrett's thoughts on TeachMeet Takeover.

I went to TeachMeet with someone who isn't a teacher, he doesn't even work in education, and he was impressed by the enthusiasm and passion we have for our work. He also commented how he didn't realise what a male dominated profession teaching was. Except it's not is it? 85% of primary school teachers are women, secondary is more even but men are still in the minority with 56% being female (that's according to Office for National Statistics, I didn't make it up!). It's easy to see how you would think that by looking around TeachMeet and BETT though, I wonder if it's just the 'technology' side of it that brings out the blokes or perhaps because many attendees are in management positions rather than class teachers and there's more men in those positions?

On Saturday I went to seminar on Enhancing Creativity and Innovation through International Partnerships, I hadn't heard many positive things about the seminars at BETT so I wasn't sure what to expect but as I am planning on creating links with schools abroad I thought this would be a useful one to attend. And it was. It was really inspirational to hear about the work of schools who have links with, amongst others, Finland and Afganistan and how, with sponsorship from Nokia they've been using Mobile phones for their students to communicate with children in other countries. We heard about a primary school who brought their WW2 topic alive by linking with schools in Malta and Poland and sharing videos the children made of their grandparents talking about the war, fantastic stuff.

All in all, apart from the hotel bathroom injury I sustained, and mostly thanks to everyone involved in TeachMeet, I had a fabulous weekend!