Miss Brownsword

New Year

2010-09-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

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!

Wallwisher Feedback from Children's Questionnaires and Interviews.

2010-01-07T02:34:00.001-08:00

I am doing an MA in Advanced Educational Practice at the UEA in Norwich, this year, Year 2, is School Based Research Methods and I have just finished writing up my first research project ready to hand in on Saturday. After introducing Wallwisher to my class as a way to do homework here, I decided to do some research into how they felt about using Wallwisher;
I was interested to see what effect doing their homework online would have on the children's motivation, whether their usual homework 'behaviours' remained, and what they thought of the website itself. I used written questionnaires with a mixture of closed and open questions as well as in-depth interviews, I'm not going to post the whole project but here is some of what I found from the children.

21 children completed the questionnaires, 13 boys and 8 girls; 100% of them responded positively to the question 'How do you feel about doing your homework using Wallwisher?', 81% found using it easy or very easy with the remainder giving the neutral answer 'ok'. It would have been interesting to see whether there would have been a 100% positive response if I'd included a neutral answer to both questions, or whether anyone would have chosen 'difficult' instead of 'ok' had I not included a neutral answer in that question. I wonder whether not including a neutral answer in the 'How do you feel...?' question has given a false positive result and if I were to use this questionnaire again I would probably change that question to include a neutral answer. It was the open-ended parts to these questions where the children explained the choices they had made that I felt were the most useful, many of the things they said I had predicted but some came as a surprise to me.

Why the children liked Wallwisher

Reasons for answering that using Wallwisher is 'easy'.

I had expected the children to enjoy using Wallwisher and find it easy, but I wasn't expecting so many of them to refer to the fact they didn't have to do any writing or have to think about presentation, around 40% of the children in my class are working below the expected National Curriculum level in writing and are unlikely to reach level 4 in writing by the end of Year 6 and having to do writing for homework is obviously a big concern for them. The actual content of the homework would have been no different had they not used Wallwisher but the very fact of not having to pick up a pencil and do writing made this homework more accessible and enjoyable to those children who struggle with literacy. There was no difference between the presentation of the homework of the children who are working at Level 5 and those who are still at Level 2 and as the actual task was manageable for all of them, doing the homework on Wallwisher put the children on an equal level.

57% of the children claimed to have changed their normal homework behaviours for this piece of homework, with 38% doing it sooner than they normally would and the remaining 19% doing it later than they normally would. Of the children that did it later all but one gave their reason as not being able to access the website at home (those children completed the task during a lunchtime at school instead) with the remaining reason being, predictably 'I forgot'. The children that completed the homework sooner than usual gave the following reasons:

Again, the issue of writing came up, those children who would normally put off doing their homework because of the writing had no issues with being motivated to complete this task.
76% of the children said they would like to use Wallwisher for homework again, with 14% being not sure and only 10% said they would not want to use it again, the negative responses were all from the children who had not been able to access Wallwisher at home.
The final question asked the children to write down anything else they thought we could use Wallwisher for in school, many of their answers referred to things we had already done in class that they thought we could have done using Wallwisher instead, for example one child answered 'English poems' which was a reference to a lesson where they had written a collaborative poem using lines written on actual post-it notes; but it was also good to see the children coming up with ideas of their own, many of which I hope to implement.

What we could use Wallwisher for.

Although I didn't know which child had said what, I used the questions and responses from the questionnaires to guide the in-depth interviews which I conducted with two children, Edward and Elizabeth. The children talked a lot about the same kind of things that came up in the questionnaires but they also elaborated on many of the issues that they have generally with homework such as forgetting to do it, forgetting what they have to do and forgetting to hand it in, using Wallwisher eliminated all of these issues for them. Edward said that he found using Wallwisher quicker than traditional methods of homework, if these children are living within households where the computer is already on and connected to the internet it would simply take a couple of minutes to complete a short exercise like this. Elizabeth talked about the fact she had tried to make her own Wall after she had finished her homework, she didn't manage to but it was positive that she had seen Wallwisher as something she might like to use for herself and not just as something she had to do for school. Neither Elizabeth nor Edward needed any help from their parents to use the website and both of them said that this was due to the fact I had demonstrated how to use it in class and how easy the site is to use. Edward told me that he didn't go onto the internet specifically to do his homework but that he was online doing something else when he remembered he had homework to do, he went on to talk about how he would like to do more homework online and mentioned both English and maths. He talked about how he would like to have his homework task on the internet so he could both access what he had to do and complete it in the same online space, “it's quicker, quicker than getting out your pencil case, deciding which pencil to use and then putting it all back”. If Edward is typical of the children in my school it is a shame to see children so eager and motivated to access learning online completing the majority of their education in a school that has neither a website nor a VLE. Edward also mentioned that his parents responded positively to him doing his homework online.

How Are We Connected? Photopeach Presentations

2009-12-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

Following on from my post on using wallwisher for homework here's what my Year 6 classes did next...

Using the countries they posted on the wallwisher walls, I paired the children up so that they would be working with someone who was connected to the same country as them and they spent the next few lessons working on their presentations.

I decided to get them to do their presentations using Photopeach instead of Powerpoint. My main reason for doing this was I wanted them to use the comments section at the end to do some peer assessment. Unfortunately with having our Geography lessons on a Friday we ended up with a shorter than usual number of lessons with xmas stuff going on and we haven't got to that point yet. But their presentations are finished and in our first lesson of the New Year will be spent assessing each other's work.

I wasn't sure how Photopeach would handle multiple groups of children signing in on the same login and working on different slideshows at the same time but it wasn't a problem. The only problem that did occurr was some children working for an hour on their presentations only to lose everything at the end of the lesson, this happened during a lesson I was being covered for, so I wasn't there and have no idea how it happened!

So here are some examples of their work, look out for the quote from me on the Italy presentation!

Canada by Hollie s & Alfie v on PhotoPeach

Italy by George B and Ryan L 6A on PhotoPeach

Using Wallwisher for Homework

2009-11-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

This term's Year 6 Geography topic is 'How are We Connected?', for the last part of the topic over the next few weeks 6A and 6S will be doing a project on a country they are some way connected to. For homework last week I asked them to make a list of five countries they are connected to in some way in preparation for the next lesson.

Rather than asking children to bring in the list on paper I set up two wallwisher pages.

6A Wallwisher homework

6S Wallwisher homework

This was my first time using wallwisher and also the children's. They went away from their lessons excited about the prospect of doing their homework in a different way and I was pleased to see that, by the time I got home on Friday evening, several children had already done the homework! It is good to see the children motivated and keen to try new things.

One of the reasons I decided to use Wallwisher is so that we can look at the homework together as a class on the IWB at the beginning of the next lesson. The children will be mapping their connections and eventually paired up with someone who has the same country as them to do the project, having the information online and in such a visual way will hopefully make this much easier.
One of the things I like best about Wallwisher is its ease of use, setting up a wall takes about 5 minutes!

Year 6 English Word Clouds

2009-11-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

Year 6 have been doing some work on synonyms in English. I gave them some boring words - walk, look and speak and with the aid of their brains and a thesaurus asked them to come up with some more interesting words.

We used wordle.net to make word clouds out of the words they came up with. The children put in the 'boring' words 6 times so they that would come out larger and the more interesting words once.
Unfortunately the font changes you can do with Wordle wouldn't work on the computers the children were using so all their word clouds ended up in the same font.

Year 6 loved using Wordle!

6A Geography How Are We Connected?

2009-11-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

In Geography 6A have been working on the topic 'How Are We Connected?'
For homework children made a list of 5 towns or cities in the UK that they are connected to.
In the next lesson we plotted some of those places onto a map of the UK using Google earth.

Welcome!

2009-11-05T13:18:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Miss Brownsword's blog.

Here you will find information, pictures and videos of work some of the children at Halesworth Middle School are doing in Miss Brownsword's lessons.