Why did the Chickenman cross the road?

Students at Saltash.net participated in the Big Bird Watch organised by the RSPB. This involved students collecting real scientific data to identify bird species using Ipads. The Ipads were a huge hit with the students allowing them to document bird sighting, discover scientific information regarding the specific species of birds identified and listen to the individual bird songs.

This is an important ecological survey as the data collected will be used by the RSPB to see a snap shot of bird numbers in the local area. Their data may identify whether some birds are disappearing such as house sparrows and starlings. None of which were identified by the students on the day.

The students participation in the Bird Watch received much local interest and involved ITV Westcountry visiting Saltash.net. to film what they were doing. You can see the news piece here:

(Is there anyway of downloading the video? Or just put the link to it? It will disappear in a few days)

http://www.itv.com/westcountry-west/birdwatching-survey06945/

What the students thought?

“It was nice to do something that would help someone else and be used by real scientists rather than it just for our own learning” Peter Yr8

“I loved using the technology because it made it more interesting rather than just writing down stuff, you find out more about the birds to verify what it was and we could use the Ipads to listen to the sounds they make” Lydia Yr8

“I really enjoyed seeing all the different types of birds using technology I’ve never had contact with before” Georgina Yr9

If you would like to join in with the Big Bird Watch then please visit: www.rspb.org.uk/schoolswatch

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons the following week.

Zondle – http://www.zondle.com/publicPages/welcome.aspx

Special thanks to Gwenn Tvinec a great French teacher at saltash.net who passed this weekly wonder on to me to share to everyone. It is brilliant! It is a free website where students and teachers can create their own free online games to help learning. Or you can just play the games that are already there which cover individual subjects, revision and games about phonics and learning languages. You can then embed these games on your social networking sites or blogs and challenge others to play it.

You can have a go at my favourite game at the moment which is a chemistry revision game based on chickens and eggs:

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Zondle-ing

As part of our preparations for Safer Internet Day 2012, I have been running Esafety sessions with Year 4, 5 and 6 students from our primary partner schools over the last couple of weeks. In addition this week we have been running whole school assemblies raising the profile of Esafety, here is an overview of what we have done in the 15 minute assembly:

The power of technology

Students watched the Google Chrome featuring Jamal Edwards as they were entering:

We then highlighted all the ways that they use technology in positive ways and some of the entrepreneurial ways they are using it in school and outside of school.

We then asked them do they always use it appropriately? Do they act responsibly online? Do they safeguard themselves and their friends?

The potential dangers 

The students then watched the ten minute new film from CEOPS called ‘Exposed’

We then highlighted some of the other potential dangers or activities that seemed to be happening recently regarding the use of Facebook etc.

Where to go for help?

We highlighted all of the in school support and where they could go if they had any concerns or worries regarding any of the content in the video and then shared the national channels of support which are discussed in the video such as childline.

Key message

We ended the assembly by saying that we know they use the internet and technology in wonderful ways, it is integrated in their way of life, it is how they socialise we don’t want them to be scared of using it or to stop. We just want them to use it responsibly, safely and appropriately. By understanding the potential dangers they can ensure they safeguard themselves and their friends and family.

We ended showing the video clip below to go back to the positive things about technology and to look to the future.

Other activities

We will be running other activities in the next week or two such as a competition to write and perform a rap all about Esafety and also a competition for a group of students to write and perform their own short piece of drama centred around the social issues of the internet. We will be posting examples of the winners on the school website in time for the 7th February 2012. Some of our students will also be taking part in the Safer Internet Day radio broadcast details of which can be seen below:

This is my second #BETT2012 related post, I can’t believe how busy it is at the moment and how long ago BETT was already and I am only getting to write the second post about it.

A couple of weeks ago the phase 1 Cloudlearn.net report was released at BETT. It is a research project run by Heppell.net and funded by the nominet trust.  I have been one of the lead facilitators in researching what effective practice have schools used to integrate things like mobile phones, facebook and YouTube in their classrooms.

The full brief taken from the Cloudlearn website is:

“When this project started many schools had adopted locking

and blocking by default. But just saying "open them up" obviously isn’t enough – schools need policy guidance, the confidence that others have already tried with success, an evolutionary model, and authentic advice by teachers for teachers, by school for schools, that they might build from, with trust.

Thus the aim of the "cloudlearn" research project was (and is) to source, collate, reflect on and publish proven effective practice from experienced classroom teachers and practitioners – building forward from what worked for them, in their cultural and educational context, to offer a portfolio of general and proven approaches.

As phase one of the research, itself largely conducted within the very social media it embraces, comes to an end, the papers and details will appear indexed from here at www.cloudlearn.net – and many of you are anticipating them already of course.”

To get your copy of the first full report then please visit:

http://rubble.heppell.net/cloudlearn/media/Cloudlearn_Report.pdf

I have been part of the Partners in Learning Community for around 5 years now and it has made a positive impact not just on my own professional development, but also the teachers that I work with and more importantly it has made an impact on the learning of the young people in our community.

Last week at #BETT2012 the brand new Partners in Learning network was officially launched: www.pil-network.com As you can see from the current home page below I can’t speak more highly of this community and urge you if you are a teacher or involved in education to join this community, after all what have you got to lose? It is FREE!

It is really exciting to see the new look and feel to the site, it really is awesome. As soon as you go to log in you can see many of the new features, for example it is really easy to register or to sign in you can do this from either a windows live id, facebook, gmail or yahoo id… what else could you ask for?

Once you are in you can start browsing all of the free content and resources that are on there, Microsoft’s new Learning Suite is there now for you to download, I will talk about this in a future blog post.

You can then also upload your own content, resources and tutorials and if you do then you can be rewarded with gaining some cool badges as recognition for your hard work. Here are some I have already acquired.

Better still when you join and start using the network you can start to build up contacts and start to collaborate and start to form professional relationships with other teachers not just here in the UK but all over the world.

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons the following week.

Storybird – http://storybird.com/

If you want to add an element of literacy into your lessons why not get your students to create their own short art inspired stories based on what they are learning in your subject at the moment. These stories can then be shared, read or printed. They can even embed them on to the Facebook accounts and get feedback from others. It is really easy to use, I set up a teacher or class account so others in the class could use the same log in details. Here is my first ever storybird called The Chicken and the cakes, it took the sum total of 2 minutes to produce and I do believe it has the potential of winning the Man Booker prize winner for this year!

The chicken and the cakes by chickensaltash on StorybirdIn the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Storybird-ing

I discovered last night about some more award finalists that I didn’t know about and just wanted to say a big well done to them.

The Naace impact award winners will be announced on Friday 9th March 2012 at the Naace Annual Conference in Leicester.

One of the finalists is Microsoft’s Partners in Learning community which basically is led and driven by Stuart Ball @innovativeteach. They are up for the Award for Adviser or Consultant or Support Service sponsored by Fantastict. This is fantastic news and so deserved whether they go on to win or not, I have seen first hand the impact that this ‘support service’ is having on the professional development of teachers and then ultimately the impact that is having on the learning of young people in the classroom here in the UK and all over the world.

I am extremely proud to be a member of the network and am very pleased that all the hard work of Stuart and his team is finally gaining recognition in awards like this.

I was also delighted to see many others on the list the likes of Chris Mayoh @chrismayoh, Mary Farmer @ebd35 and of course Derek Robertson @derekrobertson who are doing some fantastic work!

Finally it was lovely to see Leon Cych be shortlisted for the lifetime achievement award this is brilliant and very much deserved but I am sure he still has much more to give, not sure the title works maybe something like Outstanding contribution over many years may be better for Leon @eyebeams

I have to say I was a bit shocked and still am really to receive the news via my answer phone, text, tweet, email and skype yesterday from many people I know. They were all telling me the same thing that I am a finalist in the Learning Without Frontiers Special Achievement Award for 2012. I can’t believe it… somebody sent me the link to the awards page and then I couldn’t believe who else was in my category and you start to think what am I doing there with those amazing people? What am I doing in a category with the likes of Emma Mulqueeny, Ian Livingstone and Tim Rylands? I know I won’t win but to be shortlisted among people like this is amazing!

You can see the full list of winners here for every section:

http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com/lwf12/awards/the-finalists/

It is a real honour, privilege to have been nominated and shortlisted by the judges so thank you to the judges and thank you to those of you who nominated or have supported me over recent years, supported my school but more importantly supported my students.

If you look at the full list of finalists for each individual category every single person is doing fantastic things within education which is just brilliant! They all probably deserve the awards so it will be hard on the public in the voting and the judges but I guess these things always are.

I didn’t really want to single individuals out and say vote for them because I believe that all of them are worthy winners however I did want to talk about 3 people in particular who I was especially chuffed to see on there and finally starting to get some recognition for the fantastic work that they do. I am a huge fan of their work and have been lucky enough to spend long amounts of time in their company discussing education and sharing good practice. They are:

Gareth Ritter @ritzertech who has been doing some amazing work in the last couple of years as a music teacher in Wales, it is great to see he is finally getting the recognition: http://www.agent4change.net/innovation/innovation/1299

Ray Chambers @lanky_boi_ray who has been doing some amazing work with creating kinect apps for teachers, he does all his own coding himself and is doing some brilliant things: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/teachers/archive/2011/12/09/microsoft-partners-in-learning-uk-forum-2011.aspx

Unfortunately Ray and Gareth are in the same category and I have had the pleasure to work alongside them as part of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning network over the last few years.

Finally Pete Yeomans @ethinking a lecturer at Plymouth University who has been doing brilliant work over the last few years creating a new breed of teachers who are really pushing the boundaries with technology within education. I am been fortunate to work with the big yellow cat for the last couple of years as part of the Teachmeet circuit in the South West, The Plymouth Education Society and the last couple of years on the brilliant International Educational conference: http://pelecon.net/

As I said everyone of the list is a winner in my eyes so good luck to them all Special thanks to Graham Brown-Martin for organising what sounds like it will be another awesome event.

How to vote?

Graham Brown-Martin sent me this info:

Voting by the public to determine the winners has now started and closes at midnight (GMT) on Saturday 21st January.

Please feel welcome and encouraged to publicise your achievement via your networks and social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (the hashtag is #lwf12).

Voting is conducted by web or SMS.

The winners will be announced and presented with their award at the LWF Awards event being hosted at Olympia, London on the evening of 25th January.

Finally….

I was extremely lucky to win a secondary innovation award for my project last year at LWF. The project Recharge the Battery http://chickensaltash.edublogs.org/2009/06/07/recharge-the-battery/ was competing with Channel 4 and Sony for the special project award and unbelievably it won! This was great recognition for a project my students created back in 2008 and which so far students all over the world are still using 4 years on in fact it has impacted on now 100,000’s of young peoples lives. Read more here: http://chickensaltash.edublogs.org/2011/01/11/if-carlsberg-made-staff-rooms-they-wouldnt-be-like-this-or-would-they/

Thank goodness it’s Friday, to help brighten up your day and to help you with your planning at weekends, I will be posting a weekly web based idea that will take just 1 minute of your time to read about. If you like what you read then why not try it out in your lessons the following week.

Doink – http://www.doink.com/

This is a free web 2.0 tool where anyone can create their own animations really easily. My students have recently created their own and when you have finished the animation you can then publish it to youtube or embed it on your social networking site or blog or email people your animation movie. I think this is a brilliant tool, the students loved using it and a few of them have said they will be using it at home to create their own animations to help with revision in many different subjects. Check out one of my students animations that they created during a 1 hour lesson on enzymes:

http://www.doink.com/clips/chloeemily/562254

In the famous words of Gary Barlow ‘it only takes a minute…’

Happy Doink-ing all!

There was a good article in the TES just before Christmas – actually the TES Pro which isn’t available online however the same article is now available in the TES Scotland online here:

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6162190

Be interested to hear what you think?