Gifts / Cards - Word Clouds

Bit late for this year UK teachers - sorry. But, you can start planning for next year...

For two and a half terms this year just gone we actually taught the same class. Mates, assistant heads, bloggers and job share teachers. Think we drove each other a little crazy at times. Anyway, come the end of the year we were thinking of a gift for the pupils in our class and this is what we came up with: 

Again this year, we undertook the summing up of each day in three words. At the end of the year we therefore had 190 X 3 words. We stuck these words into a word cloud generator, purchased some picture frames and hey presto, they look rather good. They certainly look like they cost more than 80p each to make! And, they're full of the children's thoughts, word choices and experience whilst in our class.

I hope that most of them will keep it and look back upon it fondly. And, as for 'english', we decided it looked good as a design choice - but it bugs me the more I look at it! There's the off typo/spelling error too... However, look which word came out top!

We'll three word blog again next year and may even use word clouds on Christmas, Mother's/Father's Day (and so on) cards too.

Word clouds from some previous years too.

'We Make Use of...' Night Zookeeper

Again, something we've know about for sometime, but took a while to get around to using. Over the past five years, we've shared the work of Night Zookeeper many times and often spoken to and shared ideas with 'Night Zookeeper Paul'. Since September 2015, we've been using the Night Zookeeper website with our classes.

Free Elements

First of all, it is possible to use the Night Zookeeper website for free. Something Night Zookeeper state is that they are a 'Social Enterprise' and will always offer 'free elements' of their site. This allows all children, in all schools, from all walks of life to access and benefit from what they offer. For us, this sums up the company and the employees (many of whom are co-founders and company directors). They're just a nice bunch! Take a look at 'Free Resources', every class gets a Class Blog (ours: http://tinyurl.com/pqmc7lo & http://tinyurl.com/ouo84vx) and Star Writing. 

Image credit: twitter.com/nightzookeeper

Subscribing

We just said it can be used for free. Why subscribe? We thoroughly recommend a subscription. Through this, a teacher can set their own 'Teacher Missions'. This is where the class complete a task that their teacher chosen the objectives for, work bank and more. In addition, Children can complete their own missions, change their avatar, create animals and more. As a teacher, the writing can be assessed against the criteria set. In the time we've used the site (seven months), there have been many, many useful upgrades and there are more in the pipe line. What we've written here is only a taster of the site. When signing up, full access is initially given for free, so sign up and try it to see how you get on with it.

What We've Done

We've used it to complete the 100 Word Challenge on a weekly basis. In addition, we've also completed the Star Writing Challenge. We've read other children's work on commented upon what they've written. We've received comments ourselves. A small number of safeguarding issues have cropped up (sharing information), but when they have (in this safe environment), it's been a good opportunity to learn for the children involved. We took part in World Creative Writing Month 16, finishing 19th and writing over 94,000 words in about 20 days. The children enjoyed using the site, have written lots and been enthused by it. It has been a positive addition to our classrooms. Most of our writing has been in addition to our English curriculum and some has been part of our English work. Many children have chosen to use it at home and during break times in school.

'We Make Use of...' 100WC

We've been aware of the 100 Word Challenge since 2011. In the past, we've used the prompt occasionally in class and commented upon children's writing shared via the 100 Word site. And, in 2012, Julia, the creator of the challenge, even attended a TeachMeet that we organised. 

This year, through the Night Zookeeper website, we've started to use the 100 Word Challenge on a weekly basis. We've made time each week to complete the challenge and to comment upon other children's work. We've seen it be hugely beneficial to the children and had an impact on many of their writing abilities. Generally, in our English lessons, the children need to demonstrate their ability to follow a certain text type in a certain way (there are success criteria and learning objectives to meet). The 100 Word Challenge is different: write a response to the prompt in your own way, how you like... 

Some children have written entries as good as their normal every-day writing; others have been really enthused by it and created writing better than they do at other times. Once the children have completed their 100 Word entry, they visit other class' entries and read the children's work. After they've read it, they leave comments for that child. Thus, widening their experience of writing and being critical of their peers. 

Image credit: https://100wc.net

All-in-all, it's been a wonderful addition to our classroom practice. As we use Night Zookeeper, we've also made use of the Star Writing each week. Although the 100WC can be carried out through the Night Zookeeper website, any blog site can be used and Julia has recently started offering blogs hosted on 100wc.net (Contact her for details).

Should you wish to pop by and read our writing or leave us a comment or two, our Night Zookeeper writing can be found http://tinyurl.com/pqmc7lo & http://tinyurl.com/ouo84vx.

#Comments4Kids Without a Blog

On Twitter, the Hashtag #comments4kids is used to share blog posts written by children so that others may find them and leave the child a comment. The comments give the blog post purpose, the children an audience and help to encourage children's writing.

In our blog post about Blog Books we offered a way for classes who wanted to blog, but for whatever reason were currently unable to, a way to start their blogging journey. This is another step that could be taken.

If children produce work and it's place online, but not in a blog, a Google Form could be set up to allow people who view the work to leave a comment. An example of this can be found here. Through the above link and QR Code, our children received some nice comments that, if needed can be moderated, from 'strangers' who kindly read and commented upon their work.

Again, as we said in that previous post about blogging, if you ant advice about blogging? We'd suggest contacting David Mitchell.

Blog Books

Want to blog? Heard about how other schools are succeeding with it and making strides forward with writing progress? But, you can't blog...

Maybe it's the school that's in the way, technology not allowing it, you're not convinced...

Here's an idea I've had: 'Blog Books'.

Ideally, the children would be blogging online, building up an audience and receiving comments / feedback. If that's not possible, you may like to try this:

- Grab a pile of books that are not being used.

- Stick a class list in the front cover of each one.

- Give the class a writing task. 100 Word Challenge or 5 Sentence Challenge would be a good start. Maybe a recount or just as the children to, 'write something'.

- The children write.

- Now, the teacher marks nothing. The children give their book to someone else, who leaves comments and feedback. They also tick their name off on the class list in the front of the book. Each 'Blog Book' session, the feedback and commenting needs to be done by a different peer.

Children will be carrying out many of the skills associated with blogging. After a few weeks or months, there'll be evidence of children 'blogging' and commenting, and maybe, just maybe this may lead onto blogging on an online blog...

Want advice about blogging? We'd suggest contacting David Mitchell.

Not all Displays are for Children (Part 2)

The Part 1 of this blog post came almost two years ago now. In December, we finally got around to putting something in place we'd been meaning to 'get around to' for a while. We wanted to place a display on the outside of our classroom for, other classes, parents, grandparents and general passers by to see (and interact with). We posted the picture below to our Twitter account.

The picture and idea was well received so we have decided to write about it in more than 140 characters.

The purpose of the display? Advertise what the class have been doing. Generate website / blog traffic. Show off a bit.

The first thing added was a word cloud. Each member of the class was asked for a sentence to describe their year so far. They only wrote positives. :-)

Next, some QR codes were added. These link to the class website (containing examples of work, recounts of events and photographs) as well as Padlet walls and other examples of children's online work. The QR Code provides a quick link for anyone with a mobile device and should the QR Code not work for any reason, each has a TinyURL below as a back up or alternative.

Our most recent addition is some augmented reality. Using Aurasma, we created a link to a slideshow of photos from a recent school trip. This is probably the 'show off bit'. 

When parents and other family members come into the classroom they look at displays, ask to see children's work and enjoy seeing what's being done. Now they can do it from outside and (if QR Codes are used) realise they can also do this from home.

We've since presented about this as part of a TeachMeet.

Why Bother?

Why bother? Why bother to blog, to Tweet, to Pin?

We are teachers, we enjoy seeing others learn, daily. It's what we do, it's what we enjoy. So, helping others to learn, people doing the same job, is just as rewarding. Hearing back from others about the ideas we've shared here and how they've been used is rewarding. It reaffirms the belief that we're doing the right thing. We share a Google Doc and visitors come - awesome. We post a Tweet and one person, just one, ReTweets it - excellent. Someone comments on a blog post, "Really like this" - fantastic. 

We're busy; books to mark, lessons to plan, clubs to run, meetings to attend, whilst also seeing family, friends and generally living.

We don't earn money from this.

We share ideas here. We read blog posts elsewhere. We're allowing others to learn from us, just like we're befitting from the blogs written by others. If we do something outstanding* in our classroom and tell no one, 30 children benefit. If we write about it here, there's the possibility that the whole world could benefit. That's an amazing thought.

At the time of writing, just under 100,000 visits to this blog have been registered in its first 26 months of existence. We have hundreds of Pins on Pinterest, Likes on Facebook and Circles on Google+. Videos on YouTube.

So, should you join Twitter? Yes. Use Facebook professionally? If you want. Look at Pinterest? At least take a look. Start a blog? It's daunting, read some others, give it a go.

As already said:

We are teachers, we enjoy seeing others learn, daily. It's what we do, it's what we enjoy. So, helping others to learn, people doing the same job, is just as rewarding.

*Technical vocabulary for 'good' or 'engaging'.

Three Worders

After previously using this idea at the end of a lesson I have now started using it at the end of each day.

Image credit: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p2dfq

On Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio2 Drivetime show he asks listeners to sum up their day in three words and send them in for him to read out. I decided this would be a good way to sum up each day in our classroom. So, I purchased an academic diary and each day I pick a child to sum up their day in three words. The three word recounts can also be found here.

If Twitter is micro blogging I’m not sure what this is! The children enjoy it. It’s another way of making them think about their writing and at the end of the year it’ll be nice to look back over as a record of our year.

So go on, get your class into ‘Three Worders’. Text or Tweet them to Simon and he might even read one out!

#EduBookmarks

We've realised we have hundreds of brilliant websites stored on our computers as bookmarks or favourites. They're great on our computer for us to use, but no one else can see them!

So, we've decided to use #edubookmarks hashtag on Twitter to start sharing them. We hope some other educators might start posting to it too.

A Year on Twitter

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“Join Twitter”

“You’re not on Twitter. Why not?”

Image credit: twitter.com

These were some of the comments I received in January and February 2011. I didn’t see a need to ‘be on Twitter’, I thought I didn’t really have anything to say and didn’t really understand what it was all about.

So, in March 2011 I joined. Set up my own account. Followed a few friends, the odd celebrity and some sports teams. I initially wrote the odd Tweet and picked up the odd useful snippet of information from friends and the sports clubs.

In May 2011, I attended an event run by Apple. The event had its own hashtag. So, I followed and tweeted using the hashtag. I quickly realised that there were a number of educators using Twitter. And, not only using Twitter, but also using it in a way that I could see was really useful! During that weekend, I picked up some new followers, followed some excellent innovative educators and began another step into seeing how useful Twitter could be.

As a result of finding these new educators on Twitter I next became aware of TeachMeets. My first TeachMeet visit was to BedfordTeachMeet in June 2011, again picking up new followers and finding new educators to follow. This was then followed by attending the E2BN Conference with the same results as before. In addition to these events, I found that subjects have their own hashtag as well as things like #edtech and #ukedchat.

I’ve been pleased with the amount of followers I’ve built up, as it’s nice to know what I’m writing about is useful to others. But, it’s those I follow, the members of my PLN, that are most useful. I have found many new resources, engaged in interesting discussions and read numerous interesting articles that I would possibly never have found without Twitter and those sharing excellent snippets within 140 characters!

August 2011 then saw the formation of @primaryideas and this blog. My initial thoughts about this were the same as outlined in at the start of this post with “why?” and “I’ll have nothing to say” being the initial thoughts. But, at the time of writing, 799 followers on Twitter, 15 likes on Facebook, 88 circles on Google+, 1140 channel views on YouTube and over 5000 blog views all in 6 months I think I may have underestimated the usefulness of a blog.

In addition to all the educational usefulness there’s also been a personal use. The educational Tweeps I follow often write about personal goings on which can be interesting to talk about and give an insight into personalities. Those sporting clubs I mentioned at the beginning have also come to be useful tweeting about tickets going on sale, travel arrangements and breaking news. And yes those friends, somewhere in amongst all the ‘teacher talk’ there are also updates from friends.

Who’d have thought a bunch of people you’ve never met could be so useful and helpful? So if you’re not using Twitter yet you need to start. You don’t even need to write anything as it’s those you follow that you’ll find most useful. Although, if you do start to write then having a blog is a useful extension to that 140 character limit.

QR Codes and TinyURL in Education

We started using QR Codes in our classrooms in the summer of 2011. We began investigating how we could make use of them and found a large amount of information online about the potential for QR Codes being used in the education environment. Some of these can be found here:

Interesting Ways to Use QR Codes in the Classroom 

QR Codes in the Classroom 

QR Code Classroom Implementation Guide 

In addition to these websites there is also much more that can be found on YouTube, in blogs and by searching for 'QR Codes Classroom'.

Initially, we only made use of QR Codes and made them using Kaywa. This was good as it allowed easier access to a URL through either an application on a mobile device or a desktop QR Code reader. This worked in most cases, but we found that sometimes children struggled to manipulate the QR Code for the reader to pick it up easily and that children and parents didn’t always have access to a QR Code reader at home. 

We then, after seeing them used on Twitter, started to look at the use of URL shortening services. We have found www.tinyurl.com to be the most child friendly. Some others (www.bit.ly and www.awe.sm for example) are case sensitive, where as TinyURL is not case sensitive. So, we now provide links to websites as both QR Codes and as TinyURLs.

As a result of using TinyURL we also discovered that if the TinyURL is used to create the QR Code rather than the original URL it makes the QR Code much simpler and therefore easier to read. The two QR Codes below link to the same webpage, but one is much simpler than the other:

So, when creating your QR Codes to link to a URL pop the URL into a shortening service and use that URL to create your QR Code.

Finally, we initially used Kaywa to create our QR Codes in black and white, but have recently discovered www.unitag.fr which allows you to do this:

We hope that adds a little more to the QR Code discussion and is of use to you.

Edublog Award Nominations

Here are our nominations for this year's Edublog Awards:

Best individual tweeter: @ICTMagic

There is something useful from Martin on his Twitter account every single day!

Best Twitter hashtag: #edtech

The resources shared through the edtech hashtag enable and encourage innovation through ICT within education.

Best free web tool: http://video.online-convert.com

A useful online tool for converting videos to various different formats. I have used it for converting videos to .flv to use within SMART Notebook.

Best ed tech / resource sharing blog: http://ictevangelist.com

Mark's blog does just what is says in the title: "A blog where I discuss ICT, education, my teaching, their learning and everything else in between".

Best educational wiki: http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com

Again, this is from 'ICTMagic' and it's an amazing collection or resources and ideas to use in the classroom.

Best open PD / unconference / webinar series: TeachMeet

We attended two TeachMeet events this year. First of all as 'lurkers', but stepped up the second time to present. Those two TeachMeets were so useful for both generating ideas and for networking. Through Twitter and various blogs we've also been able to follow the goings on at TeachMeets we've not attended.