Simon Haughton's Blog

Drawing Pad

I've explored and tried out several painting apps on the iPads in school over the past year but the best one has clearly been Drawing Pad. It has just the right amount of tools for children to use and presents them using an realistic-looking (and therefore intuitive-to-use) graphical interface.

Children can use the touch of their finger to make marks with virtual: pencils, colouring pencils, felt tips, poster paints, wax crayons and chalk. Different paper types, stamps and picture stickers are also available. The most recent update to the app now allow text labels to be added (great for putting names onto work!) and custom brush styles/colours to be chosen, if desired.

I've used the app with great success to a wide age range of children and they've all loved the creative possibilities it offers and been able to independently improve their digital painting skills to a level appropriate to them.

Lots of painting apps are either too simple and don't offer many ways for children to really develop their skills or are too complicated and have interfaces which aren't really child-friendly - Drawing Pad strikes the right balance in my opinion and I highly recommend you download it so you can share it with your class!

Maths Calculation Videos

Here's a brand new website that I finished creating this week that I'm sure you'll want to share with your colleagues, children and parents:

www.mathscalculations.co.uk

Made by me, my deputy head @mrmkemp and a few Year 6 children from my school, Parkfield Primary School, it contains a series of maths tutorial videos explaining how to progress and improve doing: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division calculations.

The skills have been broken down by calculation type and then by year group (differentiated into four different levels of challenge: good, great, super and outstanding).

The videos have been recorded using the Educreations app on an iPad - they can be viewed via Flash on a PC or opened up in the free Educreations app on an iPad (I'm led to believe that an iPhone/iPod Touch version is coming soon).

You can use the website to ensure that there is a consistent approach to teaching calculations at your school and use it in lessons as a tool for children to independently access for support, such as when completing a calculations sheet like this:

Download Calculations worksheet template Word document

Download Calculations worksheet template PDF document

I hope you find this site useful!

Creating Audio Podcasts in School

You've probably heard of a few schools that have their own in-school radio shows which are broadcast from their own miniature recording studios and been envious of their achievements - well I now reckon that you can create something similar in your own school which is just as good but costs just a fraction of the price...

An audio podcast is basically a short audio recording which is shared over the Internet, published as part of a series of similiar episodes often at regular intervals. Whilst radio shows have to be broadcast and listened to live, audio podcasts can be downloaded to listen to by children at a time of their choosing thus giving them a much wider audience reach.

A weekly school podcast doesn't have to be particularly long (just a few minutes will do) and the episodes could even all have a similar running order of content, such as:

• introduction of the presenters;
• school news/reminders;
• sharing the school dinner menu;
• current national headlines (e.g. taken from the Newsround website);
• a 'strange but true' fact;
• a book/website/app of the week;
• a reading of a child's work they have done this week in a lesson;
• 'happy birthday' shout-outs;
• a funny joke to end with.

The key is designing a show which is so easy to create for each podcast that you could hand the running of it over to a group of able children, assigning roles to different members of a 'podcast team', such as:

• two presenters (who host the show);
• a producer/researcher (who organises future content);
• a sound recordist (who does all the technical set up).

Script writing could be done as a collaborative effort between different members of the team to ensure that they all have direct input into the final show. Unlike producing a school newspaper which: costs money to print, takes quite a while to design well and is limited in size by the paper type, producing a weekly podcast: has no running costs, is extremely easy for children to produce (since they just have to read out sentences from a script) and isn't limited in size (since audio could be recorded for any length of time, within reason). Having so few restrictions, I really believe that children could produce their own regular audio podcast much more independently than with a printed newspaper. Watch this example of Bethke Elementary School in the USA to see a podcasting team in action for yourself:

Although they obviously have a big set up with microphones etc., you could quite easily record and publish your own podcast online using just with an iPad/iPod Touch and by sitting in a quiet room. The app I would recommend for doing this is Voice Recorder Pro app because it: is free, has a simple trimming tool to cut-out the start/end of the recording with (so it is nice and clean) and offers a range of sharing options for outputting the podcast with.

You could even play in sound: cues, jingles or effects from another device whilst recording using the My Custom Soundboard app (69p) too.

How you choose to share your podcast is up to you, but the way that I'm thinking would work best at the moment is: converting the recording into a .mp3 file, opening it up in the Edmodo app's library and then attaching it to a new post to share with a 'podcast' group which children can join. I like this method because it: is free, has no limitations (e.g. upload limits), promotes technology which children are already familiar with, encourages online discussion through writing replies underneath and creates an RSS feed automatically on the public page (which you could even set social media services to auto-post updates from).

Setting up a school podcast could really have a big impact in a school because it: encourages children to use technology, gives extra responsiblities to a group of more able children, allows regular prasising of children's achievements and is accessible to everyone who can listen well (unlike a newspaper which would likely be written by a high-attaining child at a reading level above most other younger children in the school).

How would you set up a weekly podcast at your school?

Creating Multimedia Story Books

I wanted to get Year 1 and Year 2 children to create their own multimedia story books on the iPads. Although this would seem like a fairly straightforward aim, the amount of preparation that I ended up doing to ensure that the children were given an appropriate level of challenge and the finished books were all of a high quality was quite a bit so I felt that I should blog about it.

The most child-friendly e-book authoring app available for iPads is Book Creator so this naturally felt like the most appropriate app to teach the children. What's nice about it is that it allow you to create a fixed-layout book (some e-book authoring apps don't have this option) and offers just the right amount of formatting tools so as to not be too confusing for young children.

Since I have 30 minutes a week to teach ICT to: a Year 1 group, a mixed Year 1 and 2 group and Year 2 group as part of my school's 'Fabulous Friday' afternoons in which the children carousel around different subjects, it was clear that the whole project would have to be broken down into small chunks that were each self-contained lessons. These were:

1. Type the beginning part of the story.
2. Paint a picture to illustrate the beginning part of the story.
3. Type the middle part of the story.
4. Paint a picture to illustrate the middle part of the story.
5. Type the end part of the story.
6. Paint a picture to illustrate the end part of the story.
7. Insert the illustrations into the e-book and record any narration.

I did think about swapping the order around slightly to do all the typing lessons first then the painting lessons but felt that spreading them out would make the project more interesting and likely consolidate skills more since things would be re-visited over a longer period of time.

For the three 'typing the story' lessons I gave the children prompt sheets from which they could copy-type their stories from. I chose to do this because there is limited lesson time to get a group of 20 children to each come up with a creative idea and the focus needed to be on ICT skills not literacy skills. To allow them some creativity and ensure they all typed slightly different stories though, I created different story outlines for each group:

• the pure Year 1 group's story would be about going into a forest and meeting a baddy at a castle or cottage they came to;
• the mixed Year 1/2 group's story would be about going to a magical setting and meeting a baddy;
• the pure Year 2 group's story would be about going up a beanstalk and meeting a strange character.

In the prompt sheets, I also gave them lots of open-ended parts in which they could insert their own vocabulary (e.g. adjectives) and produced two or three different sheets with varying amounts of sentences on for each group (so the more confident typists had more to type and were challenged to include a greater range of punctuation which they would have to find on the keyboard). Here are the prompt sheets I used, although be aware that they are in a slightly jumbled order and sometimes contain a few of the same prompts on one page so that I could save on printing:

Download Story Prompts

Obviously, the 'typing the story' lessons couldn't just have the children copying from the sheet so I encouraged them to change the text style and page background colour once they had finished to make it look nice.

For the 'painting the illustrations' lessons, I chose to teach the children how to use the lovely Drawing Pad app which has a very graphical user-interface which is perfect for KS1. As I'd given the children set storylines to follow, this meant that I could support them effectively when it came to illustrating them - I could clearly instruct them to 'paint your character, a house and a beanstalk' rather than the more vague 'paint what happens in the opening to your story', for instance. I modelled what I expected a good painting to look like beforehand and encouraged them to add fine details to it too:

For the final lesson, I then asked the children to do three things:

• type a title for their story on the front cover;
• insert their pictures onto each page alongside their story text;
• add sound recordings of themselves reading out their stories.

From doing the project, I discovered a few little things which you might find helpful:

• in the first lesson, get the children to type their name of the front cover of the book before they start typing the story on page two - this makes it easier in later lessons when they have to re-open their work as Book Creator generates thumbnails of books from what's on the cover;
• as each child has to go back to the same iPad to work on their book, create little cards to put with each one detailing the names of the children in each group that are using it to remind them;
• copy the prompt sheets onto different coloured paper for each group so that at swap-over time you can instantly visually see what needs giving out/collecting in;
• creat three photo albums on each iPad for each group into which to place their three illustrations - this will make it easy in the last lesson as you can just say to them 'go to the Year 2 album then insert your first picture onto page two' rather than 'scroll through the camera roll until you can find your first picture';
• use slightly fewer iPads than one each (e.g. I used 16 for about 20 children) - this means that you can pair up those children who would benefit from working with a partner and you can get children to cover somebody else's work if a child is off one week to save you having to do it;
• encourage children to speak near to the microphone when recording their narration so as to drown out any background noise.

Don't be afaid about the setup required - it isn't actually that much when you consider it's spread out over seven weeks. The project, in my opinion, is brilliant - the range of ICT skills that it covers is huge and the quality of the finished work is just superb. In the last lesson, get a few children to share their books with the rest of the group using Apple TV, stand back and be amazed. I very nearly got emotional yesterday when the children did this - they were just so proud of what they had achieved it was lovely to see!

You can view the story books I created with Year 1 and 2 by clicking here to visit my school's website.

Update on my Independent ICT Curriculum Idea

I've done a couple of things today to develop my ICT/computing curriculum idea:

• I've created this generic LI slide to display during lessons to remind the children of my generic success criteria (and to make it clear to any visitors that focused learning is actually going on in the room!):

• I've created a website up for the children (in Years 4-6) to access independently which contains: a list of tasks in order of difficulty for each strand of learning, shortcuts to apps/websites and a link to the associated LI slide for each tasks (or rather will do, when I put the PDF files online):

http://www.parkfieldict.co.uk/ict/

The more work I do on this idea, the more that I'm beginning to realise that it could actually work...

Recording and Sharing Audio Stories

I've recently started listening to the fabulous Big Finish audio dramas (which I would highly recommend by the way) and it got me thinking - wouldn't it be great if children could record and share their own stories with others as audio books?

There is a free app called Voice Record Pro that would let children record their voice quite easily using the built-in microphone on an iPad/iPod Touch:

All they would then have to do is share this audio file onto Edmodo (either using the 'Open With Other Apps' tool or by emailing it to me so I can upload it for them) and then all their friends could enjoylistening to it!

As ideas go it isn't new but the technology is now available to make the whole process very child-friendly and so much simpler to do!

You read a lot about children sharing their writing online but I also believe that sharing children reading stories out aloud could have just as big an impact in schools since it allows:

• (younger) children to enjoy listening to stories even if their reading skills might have otherwise limited their access to written versions of them;
• the readers to develop their: reading, speaking and drama skills (including using different: volumes, accents and speeds for effect);
• children to learn about the use of foley effects to help add realism to a narratives.

To implement this idea all you need is: an iOS device (which many schools now have anyway), a set of headphones (which I would imagine every school has), the free Voice Record Pro app and possibly a free Edmodo account too if you want to use their service to share the stories on. Consider the price of all this in comparison to the specialist hardware that is available elsewhere on the market being sold to schools for hundreds of pounds!

ICT skills checklists

As well as displaying a learning intention slide on the IWB during ICT lessons, I also like to give older children an accompanying skills checklist too in some lessons when they are doing longer projects spanning a few sessions. These contain a matching set of success criteria as displayed on the board (with a few extras) but with space for children to 'tick-off' where they're currently at in their work. When they're using software with lots of tools available, this can be extrememly useful in helping children track their progress and see what tools they've still got to try out using. These are broken down into the: 'good', 'great' and 'super' sections to make it clear how relatively challenging each skill is and thus how the task can being differentiated to meet each child's current ability. I also like to include space at the bottom of some of them for a small peer-assessment box into which another child can give them some feedback part-way through a project which they can then respond to.

Please let me know if you find these checklists useful in your classroom!

Download Checklist for Book Creator

Download Checklist for Comic Life Document

Download Checklist for Creative Book Builder

Download Checklist for Edmodo

Download Checklist for Introduction to Spreadsheets

Download Checklist for Keynote Leaflet

Download Checklist for Keynote Presentation Y5

Download Checklist for Keynote Presentation Y6

Download Checklist for PowerPoint Animations

Download Checklist for Word processing skills

Learning Intention Slides

Projecting a slide in front of a class of children reminding them of the lesson's learning intention and the steps that they should follow to achieve it successfully is a useful strategy to include in all ICT lessons. Not only does it give the children a point of reference for if they get stuck but it also makes it clear what work is going on to any visitors who might arrive in the room part-way through a lesson.

Most ICT tasks can be completed by following these four easy-to-manage (and therefore remember) steps which should be modelled and demonstrated to the children during the lesson:

1. Open a specific: app, program or template file on the computer.
2. Use a combination of tools to create a: pleasing, informative or functional piece of work.
3. Edit and improve the work to make it better/more effective for the intended audience or purpose.
4. Save and/or share the work with others (e.g. via email or on the school's learning platform).

In this sequence, step two can be further broken down into a series of 'I can...' statements of increasing difficulty, labelled as: 'good', 'great' and 'super'. By listing the ICT skills that: all children must, some children should and a few children could be expected to do by the end of the lesson, it shows how the task is being differentiated so that every child is challenged to develop their ICT capability whilst still being able to successfully meet the learning intention. Also, letting the children themselves choose what level they want to work at allows them to take ownership in their learning and appreciate what they themselves need to do in order to work better and improve.

The language used on these slides should be child-friendly and be written using just short words or phrases (so that they are easy to read and so that as much content as possible can be fitted onto them). Important ICT vocabulary could be highlighted too, perhaps in a different colour so that the words stand out from the rest of the text.

• 
• 
• 

Download LI for Posters in Keynote

• 
• 

 

• 
• 
• 

Celebrating the CBBC website

I'm sure that many of you will be familiar with the BBC Bitesize and Learning Zone Class Clips websites being great to use in the classroom but I wonder how many of you also take time to look at the CBBC website too? Whilst a good proportion of its output is clearly meant to entertain its target audience of 6-12 year olds, there are quite a few parts of it which can be used in school as well for educational purposes:

• the Newsround section is a fantastic resource for teaching about current affairs (see this blog post I wrote about it);
• the Blue Peter section has lots instructions for creating things - models, items of food, photographs etc. - on it (see this ICT lesson that I recently did inspired by them);
• the CBBC iPlayer is a filtered down version of iPlayer that contains catchup videos of recent children's programmes - I'm looking forward to watching the new geography series Fierce Earth and the new Johnny and Inel sketch show with moral lessons attached on it which both start next week;
• their e-safety section includes some great guides for keeping safe online as well as some funny Horrible Histories clips too;
• their mobile version of their Games section includes some high-quality HTML5 games that can be played on an iOS device (useful for golden time since it saves you paying for and installing apps which aren't really educational).

My Christmas Lessons 2012

As an early Christmas present to my readers, I've decided to share my Christmas-themed ICT lessons with you so that you have chance to do them with your children before you break up!

• Use: the Pages app, this template and these pictures to create a document re-telling the Nativity story, as shown in these examples here.

• Use the Drawing Pad app to paint a Christmas picture (e.g. of a Christmas tree or snowman) - see this link here.

• Use 2DIY and these pictures to create a multiple-choice quiz about Christmas celebrations in different countries, like these.

• Use 2DIY and these images to create a Christmas-themed collecting game, like these.

• Use Keynote (open via this link) to create a Christmas shape by combining different shapes together (see here for the work produced).

• Use Keynote (open via this link) and Picasion to create an animated GIF image of a Christmas tree with flashing lights.

• Use PowerPoint to create an animated re-telling of the Nativity story, like these using this clip art by Bev Evans.

Developing Outstanding E-Safety Provision

The first thing to realise when thinking about e-safety is that it does not involve teaching children how to communicate online - the skills needed to: create online avatars, attach files to messages etc. should be taught separately. E-Safety is about ensuring that children can understand the risks associated with communicating online and can describe some safe and responsible strategies/rules to follow to help minimise or respond to them.

 A few months ago, Ofsted published a document (see here) detailing what they consider to be outstanding e-safety provision in primary (elementary) schools. Some important things that they mention include the need to:

• provide all staff with e-safety training;
• ensure families can access e-safety education/advice;
• use a variety of 'locked down' and 'managed systems';
• have procedures in place for reporting e-safety issues;
• have a rigorous e-safety policy (including an acceptable usage policy);
• have suitable Internet filtering;
• display e-safety rules and ensure that children can recall them;

All of these can implemented fairly easily using simple strategies like:

• giving training to staff;
• raising parent's awareness of e-safety issues through the school website (e.g. by including the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency button to link to: advice, guidance and, if required, the ability to report online crime);

• promoting the use of a variety of methods to communicate online (e.g. allowing both moderated and unmoderated posting of messages on a virtual learning environment like Edmodo which I use);

• regularly reviewing the e-safety policy, ensuring that it corresponds with other relevant policies too (e.g. behaviour);

• having a good Internet filtering solution, including the ability to get certain websites both blocked and unblocked when necessary;
• displaying posters of Internet safety rules around school;

• rewarding pupils when they access e-safety resources outside of the classroom (e.g. I have created an e-safety group on Edmodo which I positively reward children virtual badges for joining - http://www.edmodo.com/public/e-safety/group_id/367065)

In addition, Ofsted also emphasise the need to have in place a comprehensive e-safety curriculum that is delivered across the school.

Over the years I've worked extremely hard to produce a series of outstanding lessons for different year groups that are pitched appropriately and show a clear, sensible progression in content (i.e. so younger children aren't made too scared about online dangers). As with all my lessons, they each have the same overall learning intention but have differentiated expectations associated with them of increasing challenge:

The three main lessons that I teach the children are:

• the importance of creating strong passwords and keeping them secret (the children watch a video and then create a poster explaining about passwords);

• the advantages of joining only age-appropriate websites (the children: watch this video, create a poster comparing child-friendly and adult websites and do a 'What if...?' game);

Click here to view examples of e-safety posters.

• how to safely respond to online hazards like: receiving spam messages, being a victim of cyber-bullying, getting viruses and being asked to share personal information with strangers (the children: compare the differences between online and face-to-face conversations to realise that people can lie more convincingly online, do a quiz-quiz-trade game about online hazards, discuss the Jigsaw film by CEOP about a girl who meets a stranger she'd 'friended' online and create trifold leaflets explaining about how to stay safe online);

Click here to view examples of the trifold e-safety leaflets.

As a final note, I always think that you have to be careful when teaching e-safety as you need to make children aware of dangerous issues without scaring them to much. By: sharing e-safety rules, regularly teaching e-safety lessons and making them aware of the CEOP website, I find that children can develop a good attitude to communicating online and acquire a safe and responsible set of online behaviours.

My History Encyclopedia iPad App Launches!

With thanks to the amazing work of @therenegade78 at Angel Applications, my history encyclopedia now has its own iPad app!

It is the perfect companion to help children learn about the history of the British Isles from the Mesolithic period up to the year 2000. 

• Access over 100 pages of child-friendly information about the main events and important people that lived in each period of British history!
• View detailed timelines that give you a chronological overview of when key moments in the history of Britain happened! 
• Read twelve fantastic activity ideas for integrating the encyclopedia into school history lessons (including printable worksheets too)!
• Find out some top tips for how teach outstanding ICT and history lessons using the encyclopedia!

If you have found this app helpful, please take a moment to rate and review it. 

• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Planning ICT Lessons for 2012

I've been asked a few times this summer what my ICT plans are for September. A combination of: having no statutory ICT teaching requirements any more, my school now having Apple iPads as well as Windows laptops for children to use and various new topics being introduced into the school curriculum has led me to come up with an ICT scheme that is hopefully more: interesting, flexible and easier to manage than in previous years.

As you can see below, I'm now only going to fully plan about a dozen different applications to use with each year group. This will mean that the ICT skills can be applied and consolidated several times during the year, linking in with different class topics as I feel is appropriate. As long as I cover each year group's list of applications, I can be as creative as I want with how I use them, whilst safe in the knowledge that the children are being given suitably-pitched lessons to develop their ICT capabilities over a range of devices and programs.

I'm still going to create an overview for each year group (see this blog post) and create accompanying LI slides for each application (see this blog post) as these are two things that I feel have worked extremely well in the past.

All my ICT learning intentions (without the 'To...' opener) are shown on the mind map below and each of my ICT lesson will use one of them - the idea being that ICT tasks stay consistent throughout the school. I've grouped them into five areas/strands:

• 'text and graphics' ('static' work that can be printed out);
• 'digital creativity' (work whose quality is possibly subject to personal opinion);
• 'multimedia authoring' (work created for vieweing on a computer);
• 'computing' (mathematical-based tasks);
• 'research and communication' (using the Internet).

To allow for differention betwewen year groups, each LI has a series of ICT skills associated with it that I can select from when writing the 'good'/'great'/'super' criteria for each lesson to provide an age-appropriate level of challenge. These are presented in order of complexity so that progression in ICT capability is clearly visisble. Here is an example of the ICT skills for 'multimedia authoring':

Lastly, to ensure a broad coverage of skills in each year group, I'm aiming to cover at least two learning intentions from each ICT strand in each year group as well as use both a mixture of laptops and iPads. My list of software above takes this into consideration and my year group overviews will record which strand and device each lesson is associated with.

Personalising the ICT Curriculum

From September, the ICT National Curriculum has been disapplied. This means that schools now have the chance (if they're not already doing so) to innovate their curriculum and teach the skills that they feel their children need.

Over the last few years I've already revised the ICT curriculum that I teach to make it up-to-date (see this blog post) but last weekend I had a spark of inspiration of how to take this one step further - ask some of the children what they themselves want me to teach them. The idea came from when I was doing my GCSEs and my geography teacher started the year by asking the class to pick what topics we preferred to learn about - it really motivated us as it basically meant the curriculum was being personalised to our interests.

With Year 6, I have about a term's worth of lessons that I either feel that I 'need' to do (e.g. to teach spreadsheet modelling skills) or that work really well (e.g. creating nativity animations). For the rest of the year though, I often just make it up depending on what new online tools appear or what topics are currently being studied in class that I can do lessons linked in with (e.g. I did work on the sinking of the Titanic this year). This therefore felt like the ideal time in which I could devote some ICT lessons to teaching children the ICT skills that they want to develop.

As I like to be very organised and knew that last week was our last week before the holidays, this meant that I really needed to ask the children for their thoughts fairly quickly so that I would have the time to respond to them/plan lessons accordingly over the summer. I felt that the easiest way to question them would be to create a Google Form and invite them to fill it in. In it, I basically listed several ICT projects that they might want to be taught and asked them to rate them on how many lessons they would like devoted to them. I also included a question about doing more indepent project work (i.e. to help introduce 'learning log' style tasks to them) as well as a box to say if they had any other requests for things I could teach (e.g. if they knew of a good iPad app).

Whilst it was a bit of a challenge to get the current Year 5 children to actually fill the form in (since I wasn't actually with the class in the final week so had to find them at breaks/dinner), all of them seem pretty keen to be asked their opinion and were happy to spend a couple of minutes saying what ICT skills they would like to be taught next year.

The results of the survey showed me that:

• The  topics that the class would like to spend 'lots of lessons' doing were (in descending order): website design (16), Internet research (15), digital art (14), video/photography editing (10), creating e-books (9), programming (6) and e-safety (1).
• Nearly all the class were either definitely interested or possibly interested in doing an independent research project.

Over the summer holidays, I'm now going to work out how to best incorporate the most popular topics (website design, digital art and Internet research) into the Year 6 curriculum to hopefully engage their interests next year.

If you're still in school next week, I definitely think that doing a similar survery with your children would be a great way to find out how you can innovate your ICT curriculum to meet their interests (obviously once core ICT skills have been covered)!

My Primary ICT Curriculum

I've had a lot of requests recently from people asking me for copies of my long-term planning for ICT - possibly because the government has just announced that the current ICT National Curriculum for England has been disapplied from September 2012 as it has been deemed to be "not fit for purpose".

My current ICT curriculum consists of three documents that I have written:

• objectives for each year group broken down into 'key ideas' and 'techniques' for seven different strands that I have divided the curriculum up into;
• a table for each year group detailing: each week of the year, the event/topic taking place then, my ICT lesson and the curriculum strand to which it is linked;
• a set of learning objectives and skills from which ICT lessons can be planned to ensure progression and provide for differentiated levels of success.

Since these three documents all relate to each other, they greatly assist me in ensuring that ICT lessons: are pitched appropriately for each year group, allow children to learn a wide variety of skills/tools and are given an interesting context wherever possible.

It is essential to realise though that the focus of ICT lessons needs to be on developing ICT: knowledge, understanding and skills - their context should be secondary and just be there to help foster cross-curricular links. Roughly speaking, about half of my ICT lessons are 'discrete' ICT lessons (e.g. covering things like: e-safety, spreadsheets, word processing tricks etc.) whilst the other half relate to current class/school topics (e.g. Internet research on periods of history, examining digital maps of localities being studied in geography etc.). Finding the right balance between these two types of lessons is very important in my opinion to enable children to be given the chance to learn new things and purposefully apply them to contexts that are familiar to/interest them.

Anyway, for your reading pleasure please find below all my ICT planning documents that you are welcome to use to help inspire you to develop an outstanding, creative approach to teaching ICT at your school! Note that they are working documents (so do contain some of my scribblings) and that I do tweak them as new technologies emerge and become more relevant/widespread in society, thus squeezing out other aspects.

• ICT Objectives:  Download Curriculum Overview  Download Data Handling  Download Digital Research  Download Modelling  Download Sequencing Instructions  Download Text and Graphics  Download Multimedia  Download Digital Art
• Year Group ICT Plans (obviously relating to this academic year):  Download Year 1  Download Year 2  Download Year 3  Download Year 4  Download Year 5  Download Year 6
• ICT Skills Checklist:

You might also find this post about how I display each lesson's: learning intention, steps to success and differentiated sucess criteria usesful too, along with this post about progression in Internet research.

Please do let me know what you think of these documents by leaving me a comment below as I would greatly appreciate any feedback on them!

Comparing Communication Technologies

Whilst e-safety teaching should be something that is embedded into any lesson in which children access the Internet, it is still necessary to spend some time specifically teaching it at some point for each year group so that they understand what good online behaviours are and why they are needed, at an age-appropriate level.

As is important to show progression in ICT skills from one year group to the next, I start with the basics in the the first 'e-safety' lesson that I do with Year 3 - learning about the historical development of communication technologies and how different digital devices enable different types of messages to be sent.

To start, we have a discussion about what communication technologies they can name/are familiar with, emphasising how digital devices are those which are powered by electricity. I explain to them how different digital communication hardware allow you to do different things:

• portable devices let you communicate whilst travelling;
• a microphone and headphones/speakers are required to send/receive audio;
• a screen and a camera are required to send/receive video.

I also point out to them that some methods have limits (e.g. attachment sizes, character limits).

Next, I ask them to create a poster in PowerPoint comparing and explaining the functions of three different digital communication devices - a webcam, a computer and a mobile phone. (Thanks to Bev Evans for the original idea!)

I provide them with a sheet prompting them with some key words/phrases that they might find useful to include:

After that, I teach them about the historical development of communication technologies - notably how older methods in comparison to modern methods only let you send short messages and these were slow to send. I let them have a go at completing three on-screen learning activities I've made using 2DIY to cover the history in an interesting way: a cloze procedure about the history, a sorting activity about old/modern communication methods and a drag/drop timeline to show the order in which electronic communication methods were invented. Children really enjoy doing these activities - they seem to like learning about how people communicated in the past and how technology has developed/improved over time. They are always espescially fascinated to learn that emailing came before the World Wide Web so I use it as a convenient point to explain how the Internet is millions of computers connected together and that emailing and web browsing are just things that you can do over the Internet. 

• 
• 
• 

I find that the lesson is nicely pitched at a Year 3 level and enables the children to understand/appreciate how different communication devices are suitable for different purposes.

Download Communication Devices Poster Template File

Diamond Jubilee Resources

Here are some royal-themed backgrounds I've made for PowerPoint that might be useful if you're going to ask your children to create a poster about the Diamond Jubilee this week. They each have different numbers of columns to enable you to differentiate the amount of work you expect different children to produce. Also, here are my Diamond Jubilee weblinks too - http://www.edmodo.com/folder/267030

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Year 5 E-Safety Lesson 2 2012

For the second e-safety lesson, I ask the children to produce a leaflet describing some of the online hazards/dangerous situations discussed in the previous lesson and how to safely respond to them.

We begin though with a quick recap/discussion on what they learnt by doing the quiz-quiz-trade game at the end of the previous lesson, since this introduced a range of strategies to them for staying safe online:

• the importance of checking email attachments are safe to open (e.g. by confirming with the sender or using an anti-virus program like the free Microsoft Security Essentials);
• the need to just delete any spam messages as they are likely going to be unwanted adverts or messages asking you for personal information to claim a prize you've apparently won (which likely won't exist and your details will be used for fraudulent reasons/to send more spam instead);
• to never agree to meet up with strangers you've only met online in case they aren't who they say they are and you are put in a vulnerable position;
• to always report incidents of cyber-bullying immediately to a trusted adult, keeping the received messages as proof/evidence and not responding to the bully with a nasty comment back (which makes you as bad as them).

After this, I then ask them to spend 10 minutes planning their e-safety leaflet out on paper, with reference to my: good, great and super expectations:

The idea behind this being that they can: see the layout of where things can go on the page (especially as it contains folded elements), try out alternative designs and check that they are including all the required information before they start on the computers.

Next, I then give them a brief demonstration of how to create this leaflet using ICT on PowerPoint. I know that there are alternative applications about but since this is one that they are extremely familiar with and the focus is on understanding e-safety rules (not desktop publishing skills), I feel that it is the most appropriate for the task. You can download the backgrounds I provide them with here (these illustrate how each slide is divided up into three folds).

I spread the leaflet creating task out over two lessons to give them enough time to create a good quality piece of work for printing out. During the second lesson, I even do a quick 'two stars and a wish' peer-assessment activity to get them to evaluate somebody else's work so far and give them suggestions of ways it could be improved (the idea being that they then have the time to make any necessary amendments).

The important thing to stress whilst they are creating the leaflet is that it's going to be printed out - thus meaning slide transitions, animation effects etc. aren't needed. Since there is little way to extend this work (as by its nature you are limited by space), I allow the more confident children who finish the opportunity to explore the fabulous Cyber Cafe website from CEOP which has been specifically designed to help them learn how to keep safe when using different types of technologies, reinforcing all the things we've just covered in a more interactive way. It is split up into various sections, with each one containing an activity where they must make the right decisions about how to deal with potentially risky/dangerous/upsetting situations (e.g. cyber-bullying through mobile text messages) as they click through it. I especially like the 'personal profile' section on this which teaches them that whilst your address is personal information, your town name isn't (as thousands of people live in it so it would be hard to identify you amongst them) - indeed, being aware of this information about other people can be interesting and helpful if they live in a different country where a time difference is involved.

Finally, to end the lesson we have a discussion on the reasons why you should only communicate and join age-appropriate websites, highlighting points such as: you won't be breaking the terms and conditions of the site by lying (I stress this word) about your age, there will be greater safeguards in place to ensure that you don't become the victim of cyber-bullying attacks and the material on them is going to be more appropriate for your age (e.g. not contain explicit/violent images which could offend/upset you).

I always think that its a fine line between making children aware of e-safety issues whilst at the same time not scaring them too much about the dangers that are out there. This pair of e-safety lessons works well though as it gives them the right balance I find between learning the risks associated with using digital communication tools whilst at the same time teaching them that they can be managed using a variety of methods to help minimize them. You can view some of the leaflets they produced on my school's website by clicking here.

Pivot Stick Animator

Pivot Stick Animator is a great little program that lets children create short animations with on-screen stick figures (that save as GIF image files). It can be downloaded for free from http://pivotanimator.net.

Whilst at first it might appear quite limited in use, the things that I have seen children achieve with it after less than an hour have honestly amazed me. It's perfect for a one-off ICT lesson or to use in an ICT club!

To start off, I begin with a brief demonstration of the main tools in the program, including how to:

• to add frames to the timeline sequence by moving one or more of the figure's limbs and then pressing 'add frame';
• change the size/colour of a stick figure;
• add extra stick figures/objects (although as this is tricky it's best just to keep to simple things).

After this, I then let them spend the majority of the session working independently at creating a number of animations. I find that with practice they themselves realise what's possible in the program and learn how the smoothest and most realistic movements are obtained by only moving the stick figure a tiny bit between each frame.

To encourage them to try out using a combination of different tools though, I explain my 'good, great or super' expectations to them:

At the end of the lesson, I display some of the better animations on the IWB to showcase the children's achievements and I'm often surprised by the high quality of their work - this year, for example, I even had stick men juggling and riding skateboards (see here)!

Whilst I've had great success at spending a single lesson on Pivot Stick Animator, you could easily extend it by letting them paint backgrounds themselves to add behind their characters as well.

If you haven't done so already, please do try to show the software to your children - I can promise you that afterwards they will be buzzing with excitement and eager to show off their animations to their friends!

Introducing Google Docs to Year 3

I signed up for Good Apps for Education when it was first launched a few years ago but it was only this week when I decided to 'launch' it with the children. Originally I felt that its tools were too limited (the ability to import images had some restrictions on it if I remember correctly) and from a 'teaching and learning' viewpoint, I felt that other online services needed to take priority (e.g. Purple Mash) so that the children could develop the more basic ICT skills first.

The tools available within Google Docs are quite advanced and I would never use the rather grown-up interface it has with KS1 children. With KS2 children however, I recently began to feel that they needed an additional online tool to access to further challenge their ICT creativity and the massive improvements that the Google Docs applications have had in the last few months (e.g. you can now easily do an image search from programs) prompted me to finally go ahead and introduce it to them. It's important to stress my use of the word 'additional' though here - I strongly believe that children need to be shown a variety of ICT tools to help appreciate the value in online content creation and sites like: Purple Mash, Interactive Resources by TES iBoard and Myths and Legends still have a large role to play within the curriculum as they provide different sets of tools for developing different sets of skills in a much more child-friendly way (e.g. read these posts on: creating databases, designing 3D models, developing typing skills and teaching control programming).

Setting up a Google Apps for Education account is a fairly straightforward process - the only 'issue' being that it can take a good few weeks before they validate your application request by checking that you really are a school. You can read more details about the set up process on Ian Addison's blog by clicking here. A selection of different 'apps' can be turned on or off - I chose just to switch on Docs and Sites for my school because that's all we really need at the moment (communication is done using Edmodo).

I had planned to teach Year 4 children how to create their own document on Google Docs on Tuesday but I hit problem number one - the LA filter had decided to block the site over weekend! It turned out that since the URL had changed the previous week from docs.google.com to drive.google.com, it had automatically decided to re-classify it as 'peer-to-peer networking'. Sadly, I only spotted this at literally the very last minute (it had worked fine on Friday) so had to do a backup lesson instead whilst I waited for it to be unblocked. By the end of the afternoon it had been unblocked with no problems but it is something that I urge you to check if you are deciding to use Google Docs (on Google Drive) in your school.

Undeterred, I decided to have a second attempt at introducing Google Docs this afternoon with Year 3 and I'm pleased to report that (despite the whole network being switched off accidentally minutes beforehand - making me think the lesson was cursed), it eventually was fairly successful. I say 'fairly' in that there were a few initial problems but these all seemed to be sorted by the end and the children's learning progressed.

As I knew that the class were all very confident in using a range of PowerPoint tools to create posters by this point in the year, I decided to just demonstrate to them all the main tools available when creating a new word processed 'document' and let them have a go at trying as many of them out as they could in the session. Being an ICT lesson, the focus was clearly on developing ICT skills but I decided to get them to try and do a bit of work linked in with their current topic of 'plants' by asking them to create a document explaining the definition of a key scientific terms, each illustrated with an image. The idea behind this was that they would be creating a new document for every word and thus be practicing the skill of creating a new document and naming it a few times within the lesson (i.e. not just once). Normally, I might have produced a sheet with a load of definitions on it to prompt their typing however as I only came up with this idea at 9:30pm last night, I decided to use these flashcards which I purchased from simplescience.net instead - in the end these worked just as well and perhaps would also be useful to use as a quiz-quiz-trade game in a science lesson too!

In the main teaching part of the lesson, I asked for a few children to come up and help me demonstrate how to do certain tasks - this not only made the chosen children feel more special/involved but also assisted me in being able to stand in the middle of the room near the IWB whilst they sat at the side and operated the connected laptop (I still think that a proper keyboard and mouse is both quicker and smoother in a lesson for doing certain tasks). Whilst this seemed to work very well at the time, it went on to unfortunately lead me to problem number two - it took me over five minutes to work out why I couldn't access the username list in the Google Apps dashboard to check a child's username when they were struggling to login. You should have seen look on my face when I realised that it was because I was still signed in as the child who had come up to demonstrate! The solution in future would be to do the demonstration in a private browser window (e.g. going 'incognito' in Google Chrome) since this fools the computer into letting two users login to a site from the same machine simultaneously.

Once the children had all managed to login to Google Apps, I then faced problem number three. Although minor, it was a bit unexpected - users are forced to now sign up to Google Drive before they can proceed to create a new document. Whilst it did only require the press of a button, the fact that the button was illogically paced in the top-right corner of the window did initially confuse a few children. I'll obviously be more aware of this in future and warn children to expect it!

Creating the actual documents in Google Apps did prove to be quite a straightforward activity and most of the children did manage to do this quite independently, being prompted to change various font settings to improve the appearance of their text. Problem four (which I hadn't anticipated) was that the children wanted to drag any inserted pictures around the page like in PowerPoint but this resulted in either the screen flashing grey or a hyperlink being inserted instead. Whilst this was a bit of a nuisance, a quick press of the 'undo' icon fixed it and I found that asking the children to press ENTER two times before putting a picture in and aligning it to the centre stopped it from happening again.

By this point I do admit to being a bit flustered since this had been the fourth problem that I had encountered. Having mostly been rushing around the room sorting them out, it was only when I actually stopped to see what was on the screens of everyone else that I realised that most of the lesson had actually worked well with many good quality pieces of work appearing to be produced!

I finished off the lesson by referring back to the: good, great and super criteria I had briefly mentioned at the start. After a little bit of thinking time, I asked the children to talk to their partner for 30 seconds telling them what level of achievement they felt that they had done and why. This is always and interesting thing to do as when you discuss it afterwards you can then prompt children into thinking how they can improve their skills in future - How could you improve and do 'super' work next time? A quick show of hands showed me again that, despite my initial concerns, a good two-thirds of the class had actually felt that they had done 'super' work. Indeed, at the end of the day, I wasn't bothered too much about the quantity or quality of work produced, I was more concerned with them being able to know how to use a variety of word processing tools to create it which many of them told me that they had managed to achieve!

I am now intending to introduce Google Docs to another class soon and will hopefully be able to learn from the issues I encountered during this lesson to make it run more smoothly. It certainly looks like it's going to be a great addition to the collection of online tools our children can use! (Indeed, I have high hopes for it helping children to type/edit literacy work - especially since it integrates with Edmodo so nicely now, allowing them to share their writing with others/submit it as an assignment.)