Word Class (Parts of Speach) & Colours

As written about previously, we noticed some children really struggling to remember word classes and therefore not form sentences correctly or know how to improve and develop their sentence structures.

We wrote a sentence, in black text and uploaded it to Google Drive. The children then accessed that Google Doc and changed the colours of each word to show what they thought the word class was. Each child had their own copy of the sentence to work on. After the children had answered, the Doc was locked and the answers discussed.

First Lesson with #GAfE

Our school had looked a making use of Google Apps for Education for a number of years. This current academic year, we were in a position to start making use of it. Starting in July 2014, we set in motion the wheels of getting started. By October 2014, we were ready to go. But, it wasn't until we met up with Peter at Bett 2015 and he basically told us to stop faffing around, it's not that hard to get going and to and, well, just get on with it, that we began using it. 

Image credit: www.google.com/edu

As we've blogged about in the past, we are very familiar with Google and the online tools offered by them, we were a bit unsure about how the 'child version' would differ. So Liam posted the following Tweet to get us started:

Starting #GAfE. Good first activity / intro. ideas anyone? @raff31 @ianaddison @jpotterx @whatkatepdoes
— Liam (@ThisIsLiamM) January 29, 2015

We were keen to get off to a good start and ensure the children were engaged. This lesson (entirely based upon the responses to that Tweet) ensured the children were engaged from the very start! Here's what we did:

- gave children a document to write a sentence about their week on to;

- asked for impressive words to be placed in a spreadsheet (this was then turned into a word cloud);

- filling in a form and seeing the responses arrive in a spreadsheet real-time;

- ALL drew on and edited the same drawing (30 children, together);

- we moved items into folders (tidy Drive);

- made a drawing and shared it with a friend for them to edit.

All while having the relevant documents displayed for the class to see on the classroom projection. This gave the class an insight into what Google could offer them

@raff31 @ianaddison @jpotterx @whatkatepdoes Thanks all. Very enjoyable #GAfE 3 hours. No child went to afternoon break! #FF all round.
— Liam (@ThisIsLiamM) January 30, 2015

Since then, we've used Google tools on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. It's aided children's learning and working both in school at home. We'll blog again in the future about what else we've done with it.

Here's how we introduced it to the rest of the staff:

Crowdsource - Who Else Wants to Share?

In the past, we've contributed to other people's crowdsourcing. We decided to give it a go ourselves. Often, on social media, the term PLN (Personal/Professional Learning Network) is used. What is often not mentioned is that on Twitter, someone had two PLNs: The PLN they follow and get ideas from in their feed and the PLN they are followed by and can therefore ask for help. The two PLNs are very likely to be different!

This crowdsourcing focuses on those a Twitter user can ask for help. Your followers. In my classroom, we were preparing for some project based learning around the topic of Space. I decided the groups in my class would all produce a video, that could then be attached to a photo using Augmented Reality and share it with the world. I had some ideas, but wanted more...

So, I set up this document: 'Video Ideas'

I Tweeted it a couple of times and got responses. All of these responses were valuable and offered to the class as options for their video outcome. That document can now be kept and also shared with others. 

Tweet and Tweet often. Direct it at users you know will have ideas. Ask / hope for ReTweets. Share it on other social media too. Send it to friends, colleagues or someone in a certain sector of work. If people add, that's great. If someone has no ideas or can't contribute, nothing's lost. Of course, this does rely on having numerous followers or others choosing to share it further. Ensure you're direct about what you want to find out. It'll allow more space than a Tweet allows for someone to share an idea. 

Having a go? Let us know, we'll respond and, you never know, we may even help to spread the word...

Create Your Own Word Banks

We've written before about Google Forms and how it can be used to generate vocabulary. This time we didn't rely on the kind people of Twitter, parents or colleagues to generate the words, we handed that over to our children. 

We provided them with these two links:

Bossy Verbs

 and

Interesting Adverbs

The children entered up to 10 words each. This generated over 1,000 words for each and we then made the result into word clouds to use during our instructional writing: 

Words for the children to use, by the children who will use them...

E2BN TeachMeet 2013

In June 2013 we presented at the E2BN TeachMeet:


Presentation 1: "Every Day in Just Three Words"

Get the presentation here.

See a blog post from us here.


Presentation 2: "What Can I do With my Google Login?"

Get the presentation here.

See a blog post from us about Padlet.


See a blog post from us about Google Forms.

TMMaths - Using Google Forms for Data Collection

On Wednesday 20th March 2013, we contributed to #TMMaths. Our presentation can be found here:

Google Docs - More Forms...

This is a follow up post to 'Google Docs - Forms' that we recently wrote.

We've been using Google Forms again for collecting information to help our class. This time, we have used it to aid our literacy teaching. With a writing lesson approaching we decided we wanted to help our children extend their vocabulary. So, we posted the question below on Google Forms:

We're looking for some help! Next week, we're writing Robin Hood stories set in a castle. Sometimes we find it difficult to think of adjectives and adverbs to use in our writing. If you can list some below it would really help us. Write as many as you can, even if it's just one!

The form can be found here.
 

Image credit: Screenshot from Google.com

We collected the words and shared them with our class to aid their writing. We shared the form with our followers on Twitter, through the school's websites and also emailed it to the children to ask their families to help. We had positive feedback from people who filled in the form saying they liked the challenge of coming up with words they thought would be useful and would extend our children's vocabulary. The results can be found here.

We also put the words into a word cloud:

Google Docs - Forms

Google Docs is something we are still experimenting with in our classrooms. However, we have both made a start on using their exceedingly simple 'forms' document to gather data in the classroom. It is useful both for larger data gathering projects and for shorter ones.

In Year Five, the maths class have been given the problem of finding the most common names. This is a great problem as there is a lot of historical data to look back at as well as making use of easily accessible current data by looking at class lists. In order to extend this, we created a simple form on the Google Docs. This asked the year someone was born and what their name is. The link was sent out through our VLE and Twitter accounts to ask people to respond. You will be amazed at how quickly real information comes in. Google Docs then converts that into a handy spreadsheet for you which can be downloaded as an excel document or used collaboratively. Not only is data handling being covered but there is also a real life context to the use of spreadsheets for ICT.

In Year Six, we used the same form creation tool in an OMS. The class were asked what question they would like to ask. We then looked at what information we needed to gather to actually answer that question. The class decided that they wanted to know about favourite supermarkets so we decided we wanted to know about age, whether or not you are in charge of buying the shopping and which was the most common supermarket you used. This led to an excellent discussion about the use of open and closed questions to get responses and how we might find out why someone chose a particular shop. In the lesson, as a class, the form was completed and submitted. By the end of the lesson there were already some responses so the class could see the survey in action.

The surveys are still live so please feel free to join in (Year Five here and Year Six here). Later on in the week we will post about how the data gathering went and what we used it for.

Image credit: Screenshots from Google.com