Blogvolution

I've been blogging for the past 4 or 5 years as a teacher, with 3w, and Sycamore Class, This blog as well as a few others.  I've found it invaluable to share what we are doing in class with parents and children, to cope with emergencies like foot and mouth outbreaks and Asian Flu and to publish children's work to a wider audience.

I have taken part in blogging exchanges with other classes and have done all of this through blogger.  Most of this I did when working at a leading international school.  Internet was carefully monitored and filtered and I was able to use blogger very successfully.

Since working at my current school I have been protected by a more prohibitive regional security layer.  This has meant that children are safe from the big bad world of the internet when they are in school.  However it has meant that my default blogging platform has been unavailable.  After adding an exception to the filtering, I was then able to access most of the features of blogger, but children were unable to comment from within school and I was unable to post from inside school...the whole platform became much less reliable...and much less interactive.  From then on I have been on a quest for a different platform.  One which was more accessible and interactive.

Enter kidblog.
Kidblog, has

• let me open blogs for each child in my class
• not required children's emails or information
• enabled me to create a safe blogging environment in which I moderate all posts and comments
• inspired my class to read and write for a purpose
• given me the option to give access to guest visitors...the head teacher and the literacy coordinator, for instance
• allowed me to open the blog up to all visitors, should I choose to do so.

Children in my class have taken to it like ducks to water and are finding features, adding hyperlinks, inserting pictures and above all reading and writing for a purpose.

Long may it last!

21st C learning

To type or not to type

My classroom is overflowing with intervention groups...but they seem to be working.
I'm not too sure about the touch typing group however.
This resource gives many possible typing tutor, including dance mat typing, all I need to do now is get one which sends me information about how my students are learning.

Maths resources - algebra and Utah interactives

Found these matchbox resources from my ME830 maths course - while reading Listening Counts.

They are a great way of introducing the unknown in a simple and unchallenging way.  Very clever.

Also stumbled onto these manipulatives - looks like a huge range of resources for interactive whiteboard use or class blogs.  would be great if they were easily embeddable.

Here's the classic towers of Hanoi puzzle.

Great link for web tools

Here are some brilliant tools for the web.

Would add lucidcharts though.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

View more presentations from Jane Hart

Poetry on Slideshare

Just finishing a 2 week unit on imagery in poems and the class have done a great job of using similes.

I like teaching poetry partly because you don't need to write so much so, in terms used on the MAST maths course, it is a lower threshold activity. They used to call this lower barriers to entry in my Degree Economics course. Again, similar to my MAST activities which were rich tasks, it is definitely a high threshold activity, allowing children to soar when they get the bug!

Our home learning in class this week is to write a poem. Last week 29 out of 33 children handed in their project home learning with an incredible range of presentation styles. Have extended the deadline again this week to just over 2 weeks to allow a slower, more thoughtful, and hopefully higher quality end product. I was reminded of the great slideshare site with its enormous range of slides.
Here is a great teacher resource if you want to save some time teaching a number of poetry styles:

Teaching Poetry

View more PowerPoint from mungo13

 Here is one I'll also post to the class blog.

Lucid Chart

This site allows you to create great free visuals.

Here's one which I made for my Year 5 class to learn about explorers.
I like the site because it allows a visual internet supported approach to research.

How to get over the problem of copy and paste though...any suggestions?  Just had a comment from Lucid Chart offering me help with cutting and pasting!  I meant the problem of children cutting and pasting into their presentations!  Thanks Lucid Chart for the quick response!

I also uploaded to TES - an increasingly useful site for finding a multitude of resources quickly.