We live in an increasingly audio-visual world, and while blogging and social media is on the increase, so too are videos, animations, music and games.
In my previous post, I alluded to Scratch, one way of creating audio-visual content (creation of games, quizzes, basic animation), but there are other excellent ways too. Here are a few of them:
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Scratch is a wonderful creation. It allows children (and adults!) to learn the basics of coding on a computer or iPad. This helps children to understand the basics of computer science and achieve digital literacy, which is a key part of the national curriculum for computing. The interface involves: a screen that hosts backgrounds ('stages') for your project; 'scripts', a collection of jigsaw pieces that can be put together to make a program; and a work area where these pieces can be placed. The pieces are broken down into coloured types, these are: Motion, Looks, Sound, Events, Control, Sensing, Pen, Data and Operator. With these pieces you can make anything - games, stories, quizzes... anything you can think of. For example, in just twenty minutes, using the program's intuitive interface, I was able to create a simple game in which my 'sprite', a cat shaped creature, has to outrun a ghost. When teaching children how to use Scratch, there are a number of approaches. The first is the prescribed route, where children follow teacher's instructions (perhaps on a worksheet) to make their product. The second is the part-whole method, where the teacher explains what is required, but allows the children to explore, create, evaluate and 'debug' their work. I think there is something to be said for both methods. The first raises confidence in the program, and may be more suitable for lower key stage 2, whereas the latter requires a certain degree of proficiency, which upper key stage 2 may be ready for.
I love Scratch because of its potential. I intend, next time I work in Key Stage 2, to use it and help inspire a new generation of coders. Bee Bots
Once children understand the theory behind coding (by learning ‘unplugged’, as mentioned in my previous blog), they can then move on to working with physical props. Bee Bots are an excellent way of learning the early basics behind coding. They are essentially bee shaped robots, black and yellow, with directional buttons on the top and wheels on the bottom. They can be programmed to follow a particular pattern, and then the bee bot zooms off, following its prescribed program. It is another example of a machine doing EXACTLY what it has been told, and teaches children about specificity. Here is a Youtube video I used to self-teach myself how to use them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=52ZuenJlFyE In terms of practical application beyond learning to code, the bee bots are also a wonderful tool for teaching space/co-ordinates in maths, electronics (further up the school) in science, and is a great stimulus for writing, DT (make a home for the bee bot) and even orienteering in PE. It is worth noting, even if there are not many bee bots in school, that this learning can also be completed ‘unplugged’. Simply teach it as normal, but use a template image of a bee bot for groups to predict where the bot will end up. This allows children to still be active while they await for the technology to become available. One activity that I have been desperate to try out as part of a computing lesson is an unplugged introduction to coding. Coding (or programming) is essentially a computer language, it is our way of telling a computer, via a program, what we want it to do. Before Bee Bots, before robotics, before Scratch and before Makey Makey, this activity is bound to get the concept of programming into children’s curious minds in a funny and engaging way. The task then… HOW TO MAKE A JAM SANDWICH! Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. We as humans take the task of making a jam sandwich and we do several steps at once without thinking. But, in this activity the teacher is a ‘robot’ and takes all instructions literally. Take the following example: “You put the jam on the bread…” Sounds like a fair starting point. But this is what you end up with: So next, the children might say “Take the bread out of the packet” – so naturally, the robot does this: Eventually, of course, the children will begin to understand and take on board the learning objective, to be as specific as possible when giving instructions to ‘robots’ or machines. This is a lesson that will serve them well when it comes to early coding on Bee Bots and then, later, Scratch Jr/Scratch.
The ‘correct’ instructions, by the way, are:
Congratulations, in just 22 easy steps you have made a jam sandwich! This pick and mix module is separated into several parts. I shall cover them all in order.
1. Learning through games Learning through interactive games is considered by many teachers to be a positive activity that can engage children in fun, competitive and exciting ways. Websites such as Espresso, which I had experience using during my time as a teaching assistant on iPads, allow children to play various games across the whole curriculum. It’s also quite handy for any special days throughout the year, such as remembrance day, mother’s day, Eid, Diwali etc… as it often updates with relevant activities to those times of year. Espresso and Education City both work in similar ways. They are packed with units of work for children to complete which include games. Children can work through these individually on iPads, or collaboratively during carpet time. 2. Handheld devices In some schools the ratio of equipment (often laptops or iPads) is 1:1. Sometimes however this isn’t the case. On iPads I can recommend the following apps: Garageband, Audacity and one of several stop motion animation applications. Fancy apps aren’t always necessary, though. Simple recording of video and audio can also be of great value to a class and can help teachers provide evidence when it comes to formative assessment. On laptops, I would thoroughly recommend Scratch and Scratch Jr. I will be blogging about this in the next few days. 3. Behaviour reward systems When I worked in the infants of a school in South Manchester, we used Class Dojos. This is a system whereby children can be rewarded with points (recorded on an animated avatar) for good behaviours. The programme has the capacity to also take away points for negative behaviour, but we opted not to use that function, so children consider the technology to be a positive force. In many ways this is a technological version of Skinner’s operant conditioning. 4. Harnessing YouTube Safely As many schools ban Youtube from being used in the classroom, it is worth planning ahead, downloading videos using a Youtube converter, and playing them without the adverts (which could show potentially inappropriate and uncontrolled material). 5. Classroom Voting SystemsI do not have any experience with classroom voting systems. That said, I have researched them and I am very excited at the prospect of using them in my classroom. They appear to be fantastic in terms of generating discussion, eliciting information that children do or do not know, and engaging children using technology. The advantages are numerous: they gather information very quickly and efficiently, pinging them to an associated app (program); they retain anonymity of children (great in terms of eliciting without causing potential embarrassment); they are a great formative assessment tool, which can direct teachers to what the next stage in teaching should be. One disadvantage though, of course, is the cost associated with a) the purchase and b) the upkeep of the technology. The most commonly used Classroom voting systems are called Socrative and Activote. First it is worth noting that not all schools have a favourable opinion to children/classes blogging or tweeting, citing safeguarding issues and noting some of my findings from my post on internet safety. As most social networks have a minimum age limit of 13 (including Twitter), these views could be warranted. That said, with parental permission, and under the guidance of a professional teacher who understands how to deliver a rigorous computing curriculum (computing, of course, being a national curriculum subject), it might be acceptable to the school… or even, dare I say it, celebrated.
There are arguments that blogging is beneficial to children in various ways. Firstly, there is the computing skills learned – how to manage a website or microblog. Then, there is writing for an authentic audience which can be very motivational – more than just the class teacher will see it, therefore it is a real, important piece of writing that is ‘out there’ in the big wide world. Also related to literacy, it can help children to engage with English in a way they wouldn’t normally, spotting and using features of ‘good’ writing. The website, “Teacher Challenges”, has an excellent guide for setting up a class blog. It tells you how to create one, edit it, and polish it to look professional. If you are looking to set up a blog, I would recommend the site I am using to host Primary Newbie – Weebly. Finally, some tips for Tweeting.
The Primary Newbie Twitter account is here. Give me a follow if you are so inclined! What is a QR code?
QR code is short form for “Quick Response Code”. It is essentially a unique, pictorial link to a website, which is accessed by scanning it with a QR code reader on a smartphone or tablet device. What does it look like? Generally, they look a little like barcodes. They are a randomly generated collection of black marks on a white background that are completely unique. How do they differ from barcodes in supermarkets? On barcodes on the back of packaging, the barcodes are made with vertical lines, alternating in black and white and of various thicknesses. The code is capable of holding 30 numbers, and the combination of these numbers dictates what the machines think the code is for. On a QR code, the image holds up to 7,000 numbers, which allows for a greater range of unique outputs. In essence, they can do more. How are they of use to students? In the classroom, pupils may use QR codes to direct family members to online work displayed on class blogs, videos, pictures, or websites. Teachers may use them to link pupils to homework or useful information. Pupils may also write their own online work and link their teacher to them by creating their own unique QR codes. How are they of use in the real world? QR codes can be put on anything. Bus stops, newspapers and magazines, t-shirts, books. Anything printable. How do I generate my own QR code? By visiting one of the following websites (others also exist). http://www.qrstuff.com/ http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ http://quikqr.com/ Have a go at following the following QR codes! One is for the computing primary national curriculum (captured from the University of Manchester Computing handbook) and the other is for the Primary Newbie twitter account. I have now completed the mandatory Internet safety module on the University’s Blackboard page.
One thing that drew my eye was the key stage 1 friendly (and I suppose early ks2) Think U Know videos which help to enhance the digital literacy of 5-7 year olds. One of them, “Lee and Kim’s Adventure”, explored the dangers of giving too much information to people that you do not know personally offline. By showing how they can be tricked when playing a game by somebody pretending to be a child, it was exploring a heavy message that was delivered sensitively. The featuring of a wise superhero character who sang a song at the end was a good move as it prevented the piece from causing upset and anguish to its young audience. In order to take this e-safety module further in the classroom, Blackboard suggested turning the videos into short mini-dramas. Having recently explored drama in the classroom, I’d also suggest that this is an area that conscience-alley or freeze framing could work well in. Due to a little thing called Christmas (no, I’ve never heard of it either) most computing lessons that were timetabled during my GPP were cancelled to make way for activities, assemblies, and rehearsals. This clearly left a dearth in the amount of the ICT curriculum covered. This, owing to a lack of internet signal for parts of the placement, was quite tricky to amend.
I decided, as part of the children’s history topic (Ancient Greece), to model an unplugged ICT lesson. The children were supposed to be learning about “The War of the Gods”, a significant part of Greek Mythology. As a prelude to that lesson I provided children with a list of questions that we could use to find facts in a search engine. I deliberately designed these questions to be too vague for a search engine to feedback with decent results (for example: “Who won the war?” and “Who was the king?”). We spoke about them and then I asked the children, in Kagan pairs, to rewrite the questions so that (on another day) a search engine would give us a better quality of information. The lesson was a success in that every child achieved the learning objective and could tell me A) what a search engine was and B) how to create a question in a search engine to give you the best results (be specific). Unfortunately, the internet was still down a few days later, so instead of allowing them to research using their questions on the iPads, I provided them with an information pack that I created from their questions. At my GPP school, reading for pleasure was a huge focus. There was a system in place called “Around the world in 80 books”, which asked children to attempt to read 80 books in the eight(ish) months of term-time. For each twelve books (approximately) the children could move their names from one continent to the next on a world map, to indicate progress.
To facilitate this unplugged system, the school employed an online library system, which certain children (Librarians) were given the responsibility to use. Each book was scanned (using a shop-like USB scanner provided by the company) into the library system (using the book’s barcode to automatically download information about the title) and attributed to a unique barcode for the system which was stuck in the inside front cover of the book. Each child in the school was also given a unique barcode so books could be scanned in an out. Aside from the technical glitch of the internet in the school going down for two-weeks (as mentioned in my previous blog), this system was extremely popular. It is a prime example of technology enriching the school lives of children, in this case by giving them a taste of responsibility. It is also a useful system that ensures that there is accountability for all books which, in theory, prevents the loss of school stock. |
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