Educreations and The Flipped Classroom
Educreations is a tool that allows teachers to create videos for children, similar to the popular showme IPad app. However Educreations is different. How? Sure it has an IPad...
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Progress Progress Progress…
Education has changed. 18 months ago I experienced an Ofsted inspection that appears to have been a blueprint for the new 2012 September inspections. How do I know this? Because...
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Digital Wings
About 2 Years 2 ago we decided to move away from a traditional learning platform and build our own set of link instead. The main reasons were our provider never fulfilled the...
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Blackberry Playbooks in the Primary Classroom – 4 months in.
If you have read this or this then you will know I have championed the strategic use of tablets in the classroom for quite a while and am lucky enough to be able to put the...
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A Voting System for Any Device
Most people have heard of a whole class voting system (each child having a controller linked to a response program on the ‘host’ computer). I’d wager a fair...
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IBoard+ The super quick way to set quality activities.
A lot of people liked the IBoard. I have to say I never really used it much. It had lots of resources for Foundation and KS1 but not really organised in a way that made it quick...
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Tablet Time…
Okay, so you wouldn’t know it from the headline catching post title, but this post is not just about the hardware. Instead, it is about how I am fortunate enough to be able...
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Busy Things
Very rarely do I write a post about a commercial piece of software. But Busythings is no ordinary piece of software. For an annual subscription you get access to a range of...
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Zondle in a Primary School Setting
This post is designed to go through the simplest and quickest steps to get www.zondle.com making an impact on children’s learning in a primary school classroom. If you have...
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Strategically planning for use of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the classroom
***After all the below post I finally decided to hold fire for a few months on purchasing tablets. This will allow me to see the durability of such devices and wait for their...
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Posterous: The perfect school blogging platform
This post explains how I have used the free Posterous blogging platform across all classes in our school. Now I admit to being behind the game in terms of using blogging in...
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RIP Flip Video Camera. Hello there Kodak Playsport…
On April 12th Cisco announced that they would no longer be selling the extremely popular Flip Video Camera. We were early adopters of the Flips in school (I imported them via...
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Using ICT to impact on basic skills
Our ICT skills curriculum is being used fantastically well. We have the ICT Mark and regularly use software to support Literacy such as Windows Movie Maker and packages such as...
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Instructions: Zack & Wiki Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure
I wanted to use a computer game as integral part of our Year 1 Pirate theme. We had touched on this with the Epic Citadel app during our Cinderella theme and it had helped create...
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Evernote for a Skills Based ICT Curriculum
Evernote has lots of possibilities in developing supporting systems for learning. I’ve already written about using it as an evidence storage here and as a way of organising...
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Pirate Theme
For our latest theme we have become pirates, sailing across the high seas to visit distant lands. The starting point for planning was to combine two themes from last year’s...
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Evernote for Evidence
For a while now I’ve been trying to think of a way to capture those learning experiences that occur outside of traditional books. I felt this would be valuable as...
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Cinderella Theme
A theme based on Cinderella? Surely that will switch boys off? Read on and find out… When forming this theme I started by looking at the Year 1 Literacy Units...
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QR Codes for Individual Targets
Today I had my first proper play with QR Codes. If you are not familiar with them, they are basically weird looking ‘barcodesque’ things that can be scanned by a QR...
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Fa Mulan Theme
My final theme in Year 4 was based on exploring the Far East, under the title of the fantastic Chinese story, Fa Mulan. The bulk of the theme was based on the book by Robert San...
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ICT Progression Maps
I created these progression maps in 2007 to support teachers’ use of our ICT Curriculum, which I developed from The Creative Learning Journey. I hope they are of use! Click...
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The Future
Several things have occurred in the last few months that have led me to writing this post. Firstly, we stopped our subscription to the fantastic Bett award winning Mathletics...
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The Missing Tool: Online Document Editing
In 2007 I introduced Google Apps for Education at our 2 form entry Primary School. This was continued to be used successfully as the primary communication method until 2009,...
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ICT & Writing: STORYBIRD
Storybird is a website that allows you to write a story using fantastic artwork by illustrators. You can collaborate with other writers on the same story or write it yourself....
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Wild Earth. I love it when a plan comes together.
I’m really excited about the theme we are starting next week, ‘Wild Earth’. It’s our year group’s contribution to our whole school ‘Great...
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ICT & Writing: VOICETHREAD
Voicethread is a website that allows you to comment on images, pdfs, word or excel documents and videos. You can comment through a written message, an audio recording or several...
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APP Spreadsheets
I’ve been trying to work out the most efficient and effective system in using APP for personalised assessment. Previously to this, I have selected 6 children for Maths,...
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Digital Media Theme 2
By the end of our Creating Images Literacy Unit, the first core element of our Digital Media Theme, the children had created their own ‘hit singles’ complete with CD...
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Digital Media Theme 1
I’ve been excited about this theme since I introduced it for the first time last year. It’s based around the Year 4 Literacy units ‘Creating Images’ and...
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#Snowlesson
Today our school was closed due to the weather, so I decided better put my money where my mouth is and create an online lesson for the children whilst they were off. I decided to...
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Macbeth Micro Theme
Following on from our Armada Tudor theme, for the 3 weeks preceding Christmas we switched our attention to Macbeth. Our Literacy focus was Year 4 Plays with lots of speaking...
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TMETRU09 “Wii are learning” Mario Kart
This presentation was created for Teach Meet Ed Tech Round Up 2009. It focuses on the use of Mario Kart Wii in a year 4 classroom to enhance learning experiences....
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Getting the most from your Twitter learning network
This post is designed to support educators get the most out of a twitter based learning network, with the minimal amount of effort. Go to a page on the twitter website of someone...
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The Armada Theme
I’m going to be honest here… I wasn’t really looking forward to our Tudor theme during half term. We had just finished a very successful mini book theme based...
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ICT Mark and Self Review Framework Focus
This post is designed to help support those using the self review framework to lead ICT and to work towards achieving the ICT Mark. It outlines some of the key elements that I...
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Reflections on Use of Google Apps Education Edition
In February 2007 I began to introduced Google Apps Education Edition. Until July 2009 it became the Primary method of communication in school. This blog is designed to give a...
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Mario Kart Theme
Below is an overview of our first theme in Year 4 this year, Mario Kart. It shows how we blended learning platform activities and free websites with established...
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