Simon Haughton's Blog

Teaching Digital Photography to Year 3

I've blogged before about the benefits of teaching digital photography skills to children and thought I'd follow it by sharing a pair of lessons that I've just done with Year 3 to teach them how to properly: shoot, edit and use digital photographs.

In the first lesson, I began by having a discussion with the children about their experiences of using digital cameras - Why might you want to take photographs? What cameras have you used? What have you taken photos of? How have you tried to make sure they were good photos? What have you done with the photos afterwards?

As the children have already been taught how to take simple shots lower down the school (see this lesson), I felt that just a brief recap on the basic steps to follow was needed before I could then teach them how to do some more advanced techniques, such as: when/how to use the flash, how to zoom in/out, how to use the macro function to focus on near-to subjects and how to properly align shots so that they catch the viewer's interest (e.g. using a grid).

Next, the children then went off into groups around the school to have a go at putting these skills in practice, taking photographs of different things that caught their attention. Each group had their own camera to pass around (I borrowed them from other classes) and the adult working with each prompted/reminded them to have a go at trying out the various advanced tools/features they'd just been shown. Why have you used the zoom/macro tool? Why did you choose that focal point? Why did you need to re-take that photo? Why do you want that photo? Are you pleased with that photo?

After about 15 minutes, everyone returned back to the classroom and turned on their laptops. Whilst they were doing this, I quickly transferred all the photos they had taken onto the school network. Since each camera was helpfully labelled, I created a folder for each camera into which I could import the photos from it.

I then showed the children how to manipulate their photos using the Pixlr O-Matic website. There are many other similar sites out there but at the moment this is my personal favourite for using on a PC because it offers just a nice amount of effects to apply and has a wizard that is extremely easy for children follow - load a photo, add a colourisation, add a light effect, add a border and then save. For the remainder of the lesson, the children just had a go at applying different effects and borders to their pictures to create a collection of edited photos on the network. (For information, Pixlr O-Matic is also available as a free app for iOS devices.)

In the second lesson, I asked the children to create a document instructing somebody how to shoot good photographs with a digital camera. They'd already had lots of experience using PowerPoint to do this sort of work so the aim of the lesson was to consolidate these skills whilst also recapping on the understanding of how to use a digital camera.

To say that the children worked well would actually be an understatement. I gave them a clear set of four steps to follow to achieve success and with the incentive of the 'Independent on the Computer Tokens' that I've been using recently they all worked very independently to complete the task - even the less confident children hardly needed any support! The only help that I actually needed to give was to a couple of children who were having technical problems with their laptops that I soon solved.

Here is the prompt sheet that I made for the children to help them with their writing/spelling:

I would honestly say that these two lessons were literally fantastic - not only did I enjoy delivering them but the children also enjoyed doing them to! They were all motivated by the topic, keen to develop their understanding of how to properly use a digital camera and liked being given the opportunity to practice their PowerPoint skills with a bit more independence. When you see children excited by doing ICT lessons like these it reminds you what a lovely job you have!

New Bee-Bot App

I've always been a fan of using the Bee-Bot to help teach control programming skills in the EYFS - see this blog post.

As children get older and want to make it travel along more complex routes however, I've often found that they can get a little impatient waiting for their turn. To address this issue, our Year 1 children are therefore taught how to program the on-screen version of the Bee-Bot using a program on the computers called Focus on Bee-Bot - see this article I wrote about it a couple of years ago.

This weekend, TTS Group launched a new app for iOS devices that offers a similar experience for handheld devices - download it here on iTunes.

Replicating the real Bee-Bot, this version is controlled by tapping on directional arrows to enter the commands before then pressing the green 'go' icon to execute them. It even makes the same sound effects as it moves along!

At the time of writing, the app consists of 12 levels of increasing difficulty in which you need to direct the Bee-Bot around various tracks in a garden to reach a pretty flower. There's a tiny timer displayed in the top-right corner of the screen and when you complete a level you have the option of typing in your name to record your best time.

• 
• 
• 

My initial thoughts on the app are that it is a great addition to the suite of Bee-Bot-related resources that are now available and would happily keep young learners engaged and focused in developing their programming skills. This first version is however, in my opinion, rather limited - there seems to be no actual need to use the 'pause' button and all the mats are based in a garden, for example. As the app is currently free though, I have high hopes that later versions will address these issues by including more variety in mat environments and places where the Bee-Bot needs to temporarily stop on its travels (perhaps through in-app purchases).

What are your thoughts on the new app and how would you like to see it be improved?

'Great Gadgets' PowerPoints

Creating information slideshows in PowerPoint has fallen out of fashion in recent years, however I do still feel that they deserve a place in the curriculum and children need to be taught how to create them properly.

I don't actually do any lessons on creating full PowerPoint presentations until Year 5 - lower down the school I instead focus on using more child-friendly applications (such as: the apptivities on Purple Mash, Microsoft Photo Story 3 and 2Create a Super Story) whilst they are still developing their skills to present researched information using ICT. With PowerPoint, I've found that just asking children in Years 3 and 4 to create single information slides/posters (with the orientation set to portrait) is enough as they can clearly relate the space available for working on to a blank sheet of paper.

By the time children arrive in Year 5, they are hopefully capable at finding facts online and using basic PowerPoint skills to present them (e.g. adding text boxes, formatting the appearance of text for effect and inserting pictures as illustrations) so are thefore ready to be allowed to create presentations made up of several slides that play in a linear order. Whilst some of these slideshows may be made in literacy lessons, in ICT lessons I deliver two short PowerPoint projects:

1. Firstly, I teach them them the main techniques involved in creating a basic presentation (e.g. adding new slides with different slide layouts) and ask them to create a factual presentation about a particular topic being studied in class with a lot of step-by-step guidance about what to include where and when.
2. Secondly, I give them a more independent presentation to create in which they have more choice about what to put on each slide and what tools to use to improve their appearance.

For this second independent presentation, I came up with the brilliant idea this year of letting them do it on their favourite ICT gadgets. This turned out to be hugely successful - not only because it meant they could do work on things they were interested in but also because it enabled me to do some lessons on the impact of ICT in modern life too (something that I've really found hard to think of how to cover in the past).

I began by doing a quick game of 'rally table' with them - this basically involved them passing a sheet of paper listing a dozen gadgets on it with a partner and them taking it in turns to write down how each could be used. This got them thinking about the wide variety of uses different gadgets have and it allowed the class to have a discussion in which they shared their experiences of using some of them.

After that, I then gave them a sheet of PowerPoint ICT skills that I expected them to use/include in creating their presentations about their favourite gadgets before just letting them work on making their presentations up. Having done lots of specific-skills teaching in the previous project and through using the 'Independent on the Computer Tokens' system, it meant that lots of children could simply then spend the rest of the first lesson and the majority of the second lesson working on the laptops independently. The 'tick-off' skills sheet and my learning intention slide displayed on the IWB clearly gave them my expectations of what I wanted them to achieve and is was highly evident that everyone was focused and engaged in the task.

Shortly before the end of the second lesson, I then asked them to share their completed presentations with others. This meant that everyone could appreciate that PowerPoint presentations are made for playing in full screen mode and gave them the chance to peer-assess each other's work.

In conclusion, the work they created was of a high standard and they all really enjoyed making their presentations - "this is the best ICT lesson this year" one boy told me! From an ICT viewpoint, it enabled them to develop their PowerPoint skills whilst learning about the wide variety of technology that is around in society today. The feedback they gave each other at the end turned out to be quite interesting too with one comment being that one presentation had too many entrance animations in it - this will hopefully be something that they learn to correct in Year 6 when their PowerPoint skills are built upon through creating a nativity story retelling (developing custom animation skills) and through creating a non-linear presentation about the Titanic disaster (teaching them how to use master slides and apply action settings to objects on slides).

To end, here are some resources I've made (using some of @bevevans22's fabulous clip art) to create a display of their work with in the ICT suite if it's of any use:

Independent on the Computer Tokens

(Credit to my Deputy Head for the initial idea behind this blog post.)

At my school, ICT lessons with KS2 children take place in the classrooms, with nearly every child having their own laptop to work on. Since it isn't practical to ask children to bring their laptop to the desk at the front every time they need help, I often spend a lot of the main activity part of ICT lessons wandering around the room supporting individual children where they are sitting.

Whilst this makes the room easy manage (as everyone should in theory be sat down), it does however mean that I end up walking a good mile-or-so in the space of an hour continually bending up/down and navigating my way around the desks and chairs. It can get quite tiring and sometimes frustrating too - especially the times when I end up crossing the room only to have to point out that the 'undo' icon needs pressing to correct the mistake!

The solution - hand out an Independent on the Computer Token to each child. Explain to the class that the table with the most ICT tokens at the end will win some team/house points. Every time a child is given help when they ask for it, the table loses a token - however extra tokens can be rewarded to those tables on which all the children are focused and on-task. (You obviously don't take away tokens for any help you choose to give - such as to teach an additional technique to challenge a particular child a bit more.)

 

The system worked fantastically this afternoon with Year 4 - the children soon realised that they would be more likely to win if they tried to solve problems independently by themselves and not keep pestering me for help. They all managed to successfully complete the task set them (which I had clearly outlined at the start and kept them reminded of using one of my 4-step learning intention PowerPoints) and it was great to see children on each table working together as a team, with the more confident children eager to share their knowledge/skills with the less confident children. I also finished the lesson a lot less tired too! 

  

Please do try using Independent on the Computer Tokens with your class and send me a comment to let me know how you get on!

Internet Research using Quiz-Quiz-Trade

Teaching children Internet research skills is very important however it can sometimes get a little bit boring just asking them to find out answers to lots of comprehension-style questions on particular topics. Whilst I'm not suggesting that this type of activity isn't valuable or doesn't work, I do believe that giving children some variety in their ICT lessons can be extrememly effective and can indeed challenge them to think about different ways of approaching ICT tasks.

One such creative approach to developing Internet research skills is to ask children to design their own quiz-quiz-trade cards to test each other with, like I have just done with our Year 4 class.

An example of a Kagan structure for co-operative learning and activity engagement, quiz-quiz-trade involves the children quizzing a partner before then 'trading' cards with them to repeat the process with a new partner:

1. The teacher tells students to "Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up."
2. Partner A Quizzes B.
3. Partner B answers.
4. Partner A coaches or praises.
5. Partners switch roles.
6. Partners trade cards and thank each other.
7. Repeat steps 1-6 a number of times.

Although it was originally designed as being a method for use in PSHCE lessons (e.g. to develop social skills), it can quite easily be implemented in any subject, in my opinion.

Our Year 4 children are currently learning about the Tudors and are extremely motivated by the topic - it would therefore have been a wasted opportunity, I felt, if they weren't given the chance to spend some ICT lessons researching online for additional facts about this major part of British history.

For the first lesson, I directed them to my Primary School History Encyclopedia website and gave them a short time to just explore the Tudors section on it. After about fifteen minutes, I then asked them to write their own set of questions which could be used in a whole class quiz-quiz-trade game about the Tudors - the idea being that they were given ownership of the task and were allowed to choose themselves what aspect of the Tudor period they wanted to research (and subsquequently write questions) about.

   

We discussed the various ways of doing effective research on the site, including: doing key word searches (with just 2-3 key words spelt correctly), navigating the menu and remembering to scroll down to the bottom of each page to not miss anything, and I gave them a blank template document I had created for them to enter their questions and answers into to create a set of quiz-quiz-trade cards.

Following this lesson, I next went through all the saved cards to cherry-pick out the best ones to use next time. I tried to pick out questions that covered a variety of different aspects of Tudor History (i.e. not just on Henry VIII) and printed them onto three different coloured sheets of paper to indicate their relative level of difficulty.

In the second lesson - after a recap on the outcomes of the previus lesson - I then just let the children play quiz-quiz-trade with the cards they had helped to compile.

As well as reminding them of the structure itself, I also gave them a few organisational pointers too, such as:

• walk around the room with your hand up to let others know you are searching for a partner;
• look at the colour of your partner's card to prime your brain to think how challenging it will be to answer (it would perhaps be difficult to say that the questions were providing differentiation as the children get very mixed up when playing the game);
• research for the answer on my Primary School History Encyclopedia on the nearest laptop to you (I checked that all the questions could be answered from it beforehand and going to the nearest laptop would save children time walking to 'their' laptop when a nearer one would be just as good);
• give your partner a high-5 when you have traded your cards with each other (a fun way for them to celebrate answering their question correctly and an easy way to indicate to me when a trade has taken place).

To say that the two lessons were successful would be an understatement - every child was getting involved, every child was developing their Internet research skills and I could clearly see that every child was enjoying it all too! The quiz-quiz-trade game literally had the whole class motivated and wanting to use their ICT skills to develop their understanding of Tudor history - even the usually less-confident children were wanting to take part and really seemed to benefit from being coached by their more-confident peers in how to research for the answers online.

I know that I often recommend that you try out my lessons but I can assure you that this one is a real gem to deliver!

Long-Term Planning for ICT

Anyone who knows me well will know that I like to be super-organised and like to get myself prepared for things well in advance.

When I first started in my job, long term planning for ICT was extremely straightforward to do - the QCA Schemes of Work dictated that you did five or six units of work on different topics in each year group, each lasting about half a term each. As time went on however and I became more confident and creative in my planning, it became more necessary to look more carefully at the bigger picture of when particular topics were being covered.

Whilst some topics do still work best being taught as longer blocks or sequences (e.g. Scratch programming or my theme park spreadsheet work), I've found that the more generic skills relating to Internet research and creating Word/PowerPoint documents are much better being delivered alongside humanities topics so likely get spread throughout the year more into small chunks (I quite often do a research lesson followed by some lessons presenting findings, for instance). It's also nice to do work relating to current events/celebrations too which occur at pretty random times: Christmas and Bonfire Night happen every year on the same date, other festivals like Easter and Chinese New Year change their dates each year and then other national events occur every few years as one-offs like the Royal Wedding or Diamond Jubilee.

To help me plan what lessons I'm going to do when, I therefore create a grid system which has become so successful it's now even been developed my deputy head into the whole-school yearly plan too! It contains:

• a row for each week of the year that the school is open;
• a column detailing what national event/celebration is taking place either in each week or soon after;
• a column detailing what the class topic is for that week (at my school the topics are done 'intensely' for: 1, 2 or 3 weeks);
• a column detailing what my ICT lesson is going to be.

All I then do is: mark in which national events/celebrations I'm going to do an ICT lesson for, mark in when to do my block projects that needs a few weeks to cover (e.g. during 'quieter' times in the year or when practical science topics are being covered) and then fill in the remaining gaps with either topic-linked lessons or one-off ICT skills lessons - you can guarantee too that a couple of these lessons will get cancelled due to trips out etc.

I've found that the table is an amazing aid to help me plan my ICT lessons because it enables me to see a one page a summary of the whole year in which I can easily swap and change what I'm doing when - I would certainly recommend it for other people to follow too!

Download ICT Long Term Planning Template

Retelling the Christmas Story using PowerPoint

A few weeks ago I blogged about teaching Year 6 how to use the custom animation tools in PowerPoint to create mini scenes with moving characters on them - click here to read.

Since then, in the following lessons, I set the children the challenge of creating a short sequence of animated scenes to retell the nativity story. By letting them work quite independently on this task, it would mean that the lessons would be differentiated by outcome (i.e. the more confident children would have the chance to combine a range of effects to play in sequence whilst the less confident children would have the chance to practice inserting simple effects that animate 'on mouse click') and that things could be a little more flexible with regards to children missing parts of lessons to go off and rehearse for/help out at various Christmas things going on in school.

I began by giving the children a copy of the traditional nativity story to read which I had taken straight from the Bible itself, combining elements from the Book of Luke and the Book of Matthew together. After a short while, we then discussed the key plot points in the narrative along with the definitions of some of the more unusual words to ensure that everyone had a clear understanding of what exactly happens in the story.

Next, I then gave them a little time to create a quick storyboard to plan what scenes they would like to include in the slideshow and what event(s) would be happening on them. You might think that there isn't much room for originality here but as I tried to limitthe children to just five slides of story (plus a title slide), this task required them to do some careful thinking to pick out what they thought the main points of the nativity story are. It would also make each completed slideshow different - you certainly don't want 30 identical pieces of work being produced as it isn't particularly exciting and doesn't exactly encourage personalised learning. As a quick summary, here are the main events that children tended to plan to focus each slide on:

1. An angel visits Mary to tell her that she will have a son named Jesus.
2. Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem on a donkey.
3. There is no room at the inn so they have to stay in a stable.
4. Jesus is born.
5. The shepherds are visited by an angel whilst in the their fields.
6. The wise men from the east follow a star to visit Bethlehem.
7. The wise men bring gifts for the baby Jesus.

Having done the planning, I then just let the children load up PowerPoint and start creating their slideshows. The process of fully completing them took: half a lesson, two full lessons and another half a lesson. During this time I went around the room: checking everyone was staying on-task, supporting anybody who needed help using the custom animation tools to realise their ideas and challenging the more confident children to include additional effects to add further realism to their work.

I gave each child a checklist of skills that I hoped that they would do/include in the work and tick off when each had been achieved. These were listed in order of difficulty and ensured that they were aware of what I hoped they would do to create a pleasing and successful series of animated scenes. As you can see below, most of these 'skills' are ICT techniques and it would be up to the children to combine them together appropriately as processes to create the best effects possible (see this blog I've wrote about developing children's ICT capabilities). I also squeezed in a few extra skills that the National Curriculum for England requires children to do that are slightly more generic, notably to regularly: review, edit and improve work as it progresses (e.g. by using the 'undo' tool or by trying out alternative designs/animation styles until the most effective one is found).

To save children a bit of time when creating their slideshows, I put together a collection of: clip art pictures of characters, a nice selection of background images and a few short sound effects for them to include on their slides. I will admit that finding/creating all these took me nearly five hours to do one Sunday afternoon but it was definitely worth it as it meant that the nobody needed to waste a lesson searching online for suitable images and so the children could therefore focus all their efforts into creating quality animated slideshows instead.

Download Nativity Media Resources (zip file - 12.6mb)

Once all the nativity slideshows had been completed, we then finished off by watching them all back on the IWB. As you can see here on my schools's website, they all look extremely good and I'm very impressed with what they managed to achieve. We talked about what features in each slideshow worked well and discussed what they had learned through doing the project. I would definitely repeat it next year as not only did they really enjoy doing it, but it also proved to be a great way to teach them how to use custom animation effectively for a purpose and gave them some valuable independence in discovering the uses of various tools for themselves too.

Creating Photo Collages in PowerPoint

Creating photo collages using ICT can be useful for showcasing a selection of pictures alongside each other and for creating fancy backgrounds (e.g. for a desktop wallpaper or a slideshow margin).

I regularly use a program called Shape Collage to create collages of photos to put onto the school website and have used it occasionally in lessons too (see this example from a few months ago). Upon reflection though, whilst I find it easy to use to quickly generate a collage, the children seem to find it a little bit too fiddly to work with because there are lots of options and the interface isn't particularly 'intuitive'.

Today I taught Year 3 how to create a collage of photos using PowerPoint instead and they all seemed to respond much better to the software. Asking them to build up their work by repeatedly inserting and layering picture after picture seemed to help them appreciate the aesthetic value of overlapping each picture and realise how best to layer the pictures to highlight particular points of interest within them.

I blogged a few weeks back about simplifying instructions displayed to the children by breaking them down into just four manageable steps (see here). Since then I've found that all the lessons in which I've followed this 'Fantastic Fours' principle have always been good and this lesson seemed to carry on the trend with all the children have a clear understanding of what things they had to do and when to achieve success by creating a pleasing photo collage. Note how I've also included some extra, 'bonus' techniques the more confident children could try to do to progress their ICT skills and improve the appearance of their work even further.

You could quite easily do a similar lesson with your class applied to any curriculum topic that contains a variety of images that could be contained together - such as: castles in the UK, landmarks in a country or flowering plants to name but a few. The only preparation you really need to do is to re-size the images so that they are just fractionally smaller than a PowerPoint slide for easily being shrunk and positioned by the children - I did this by using the 'process multiple files' tool in Photoshop Elements to quickly set them all to 800x600 pixels in size and saved them as medium-quality JPEG files in a folder on the network for the children to access.

I allowed those who finished the collage in good time to attach their work onto Edmodo for their class mates to view and comment on - this is pretty straightforward to do and all PowerPoint files on there are automatically converted into a CrocDoc format for viewing online (i.e. the children don't need to open them in PowerPoint when at home). You might also like to save any completed collages as .PNG image files for putting onto your school website either directly or using a slideshow tool like PhotoPeach.

Photo collages are very simple to make in PowerPoint and look great for putting up on displays because they are so visually appealing. Teach your children how to make them - I can guarantee both you and them will be extremely impressed with the results!

Exploring Custom Animation in PowerPoint with Year 6

I've always found that children love using the custom animation tools in PowerPoint to make the text in their presentations appear in exciting ways - even if I do try to encourage them just to only use a couple of effects each time so as to not distract the viewer too much from the content.

As Christmas time approaches, I decided this year that I would like to give our Year 6 children the opportunity to greater develop their capability in applying custom animation tools by letting them learn how to use them effectively to make clip art characters/pictures move around the screen to tell a story - the idea being that these lessons would balance out against the more serious information slideshows I'm intending to ask them to create later on in the year (read my blog post here).

Download Example Animation.pps

To begin with this week, I gave them a whole ICT lesson to literally explore the tools by themselves and investigate what they can do with them. Giving children the time to independently discover what their functions are with no desired end-product is extremely important I feel - it hopefully: gives them the chance to personalise their learning, enables them to try things out without the fear of being wrong and lets them feel pleased when they learn a new skill all on their own.

I did obviously give them some direct input at the start in which I demonstrated how to actually access the custom animation tools but after this I then just gave them a collection of clip art pictures (download them by clicking here) and let them go off and animate them.

During the lesson, I went around supporting children who needed help realising their ideas exactly how they wanted and prompted the more confident children in ways that they could improve their work even further to make it more 'interactive' - such as by drawing callout/text boxes to add dialogue/narration or by inserting triggers in which elements only animate when other objects are clicked on by the viewer. I did create an instruction sheet that I put on the shared area on the network but in hindsight this wasn't really needed as all the children seemed to respond well to using the animation tools how they wanted to.

I've not put the children's work from the lesson online as most of it is just clip art pictures moving randomly across the screen - for once I encouraged the children to simply try out different effects to see what they did rather than waste time trying to ensure that their completed work looked neat. Did this strategy of giving them extra freedom work? In my opinion it most certainly did as: all the class were focused on their animations throughout the whole lesson, many enjoyed sharing their discoveries with their friends and lots of the children wanted me to show off their work at the end because they were so proud of it! Over the next few weeks I'm now going to ask them apply the techniques which they've learnt/discovered during this lesson by carrying out a more purposeful project - I'll blog about how successful this is later on in December...

Super Sketchup!

Google Sketchup is a free graphical modelling program that enables you to create 3D representations of buildings and structures on your computer screen.

I would consider it to be quite a complex, 'professional' piece of software but I have found that children in upper KS2 can be taught enough of its basic tools quite easily for them to create quite pleasing models with.

I cover Sketchup with Year 6 each year and I always like seeing the reactions on their faces as they turn their designs into 3D and rotate around their constructions for the first time. Usually some of the children are so amazed by the capabilities of the program that they boast about how they intend to download it at home. Last year, for instance, I had one boy demonstrate some outstanding work that he had done adding fine interior decorations to a house and this year I had one child discover how to create a square-based pryamid by himself!

I've found that two lessons is normally sufficient enough to cover Sketchup because it gives the children enough time to see what its potential uses are without having to dwell too much on getting their designs perfectly accurate - something which I think is unnecessary at this age and which would likely take away the 'wow' factor of the program from them. Briefly:

• in the first lesson, I give the children a quick tutorial on how to build a simple house before then letting them have a go at exploring building their own, encouraging them to try out different tools to find out what their effects are (e.g. the zoom/navigation controls);

• in the second lesson I ask the children to create a future representation of our school which they can temporarily place onto Google Earth at the end (I have a snapshot of the aerial photo already loaded into a template Skechup file for them to build on with the: X, Y and Z axes already correctly positioned).

The older versions of Sketchup used to contain a pre-installed gallery of items that children could add to their designs - such as: flowers, trees and benches - but sadly the newer versions force you to connect to their online store to download them which I've found to a little fiddly in a whole class situation. Nevertheless, the children enjoy being given the task of adding features to their design which can only be achieved with a little thought - for example: panes of glass can be done by filling a rectangle shape drawn on a wall with a translucent fill colour, a fence can be constructed by drawing a cuboid, erasing the top and bottom faces and filling the outside faces with a fence texture, and a lawn can be made by filling a rectangle with a vegetation texture. I like to prompt them with few ideas and let them come up with a few of their own too - this year for instance we had outdoor pools and jacuzzis!

During the second lesson in Sketchup, I progress the children's skills by requiring them to build their model of a school up to a specific height (either by entering the desired height when pulling a flat face up or by using the tape measure tool afterwards to help find out where any adjustments need to be made). Inspired this article, this lesson hopefully helps them to appreciate the importance of keeping to a design brief and ensures that their models look as realistic as possible.

I ask the children to create a model of a school for the more purposeful task, however it could be adapted to link in with lots of specific class topics - I've seen work from children in other schools who've managed to successfully build: churches, African huts, Aztec/Egyptian pyramids and WW2 Anderson shelters. The Isle of Man also encourage their schools to use Sketchup to plan D&T models by filling the faces of a model (representing a box container of sorts) with custom images/art work to great effect - see here. As a rough guide, I think that at primary school level, buildings with no curves on them are perhaps the easiest and most effective models for the children to build whilst they are still learning about the full capabilities of the program - although this could involve tracing aerial photos of buildings using the pen tool as illustrated here. If your children are very confident though, this video of what some year 6 pupils created at one school is just phenomenally inspirational if you want to set them a bit of a challenge.

Throughout their work in Google Sketchup, I regularly ask the children to try out alternative designs and to use the undo tool to make any modifications - this links in perfectly with the 'modifying and reviewing work as it progresses' strand of the current ICT National Curriculum here in England.

Google Sketchup is a brilliant program that never fails to get children enthusiastic about doing CAD (Computer Aided Design) work and hopefully helps them better appreciate/understand the work of modern-day architects, including the benefits of and challenges they face with using such software in their occupation. I can't recommend it highly enough that you teach Sketchup to your children!

Using Google Earth to Research about the UK

After an initial lesson just exploring the tools and features of Google Earth with Year 6, for the second lesson I do with them I like to give them the opportunity to use the program for some specific research purpose. In the past, this has included labelling a specific country using placemark pins (see here) and locating historical buildings in the local area (see here).

Following a discussion with my deputy head, we felt that this year it would be nice to give the children the chance to have a bit more independence and let them choose where they themselves wanted to research. Initially, the idea we had was letting them research any particular country that they wanted to and labelling its major towns and water bodies surrounding it using saved image files inserted into PowerPoint. Whilst having a stroll around the park yesterday afternoon though, I then had the idea of giving them a list of postcodes of places in the UK and challenging them to find out what famous building/natural feature can be found at each of them instead, before then labelling them using PowerPoint - this would give them a little bit more structure than just allowing them to label any country and they would hopefully enjoy the mysterious element of not knowing what they were going to find at each postcode.

To save on the precious battery life of our laptops and so that they were clear of my expectations, I spent a good time explaining the task to the children beforehand. I also created a template PowerPoint file for them to work in containing a pre-inserted satellite photograph of the UK ready for them to work around ( Download UK Poster Template). The process which they had to follow was:

1. From the given list, search for a postcode's location in Google Earth.
2. Use the pan and zoom tools to place the building/natural feature nice and big in the centre of the screen.
3. Press the 'PRT SCR' button on the keyboard to take a screenshot.
4. Paste this screenshot into PowerPoint. (We have the 2003 version at school which sadly doesn't contain a screenshot tool unlike the 2010 version, plus I felt that using the 'save as image' tool in Google Earth might be a bit too long-winded.)
5. Use the resize and crop buttons to highlight just the main thing being focused on and place it alongside the UK. (I've struggled for years to describe what the crop icon looks like - I loved one boy's description of it today when he compared it to a 'sweet'!).
6. Make a text box label next to it, possibly changing the: fill, outline or fill colour for effect.
7. Draw an arrow from it to its location in the UK, possibly changing its colour or thickness for effect.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the posters the children managed create during the lesson:

They all seemed to enjoy discovering what was at each postcode and in the plenary could quite confidently discuss all the new ICT skills that they had learned to combine together to create a pleasing and informative piece of work (e.g. doing postcode searches in Google Earth, taking screenshots, cropping pictures to focus a viewer's attention etc.). The lesson was differentiated quite well in that the children were expected to find different numbers of postcodes but at the same time, they felt that they had control over their own learning as they had the freedom to choose which postcodes they looked up and how to combine various PowerPoint drawing tools to best present the aerial photographs of what could be found at them.

I'd love to read any experiences other classes have had using Google Earth to help them develop their geographical researching skills and would be keen to know if anybody has any other interesting postcodes of places that I could share with my children to get them to locate!

Exploring the World using Google Earth

Google Earth is my favourite online 'atlas' - whilst there are other browser-based mapping services which are perhaps sometimes more convenient to load up, I believe that Google Earth offers by far the widest range of tools for: searching, navigating and researching different localities.

Since Google Earth is made up of millions (if not billions) of aerial and satellite photographs, it can be quite a drain on the battery life of portable devices used in school when new imagery has to be downloaded to the machine every time the user moves around to view a different part of the globe. In attempt to keep the batteries working for as long as possible, I have to try to limit the time spent by the children actually using Google Earth, using strategies like doing as much teaching/demonstration as I can before they load the program up.

I always begin my introductory lesson on Google Earth with Year 6 by challenging the children to find the school by using just the zoom and pan tools (i.e. no key word searching). It's interesting watching how different children react to this task and seeing how they then gradually realise that in order to complete it, they have to zoom in to: the UK, the nearest city, our nearest town and then to our school. (I do eventually let any who are really struggling put our postcode into the search box.)

Once everyone has found the school, I next ask them to find their house and to use the ruler tool to measure the distance between the two - either in just a straight line or by drawing a custom path showing the route that they normally travel along.

After this, I then teach them how they can select to display layers of information on top of the Earth and give them some time to: see what photographs of our local area they can find, read the Wikipedia entry about our nearest town and view the latest weather information - I remember one time a child cleverly informing me that this was wrong as it wasn't raining over lunch time, only for their friend to then gently tap them on the shoulder to tell them to look out of the window to see that it had just started raining!

Giving the children the opportunity to become familiar with all the tools available in Google Earth and the time to get excited about its potential in geographical research are the two main aims of this lesson. I therefore then let the children have some time to just go off and explore any localities in the world that they wish - this can be absolutely fascinating to observe as the children become keen to visit places they've holidayed in to show their friends and enjoy discovering what different tools in the program let them do. Popular activities include: exploring football stadia, looking at Street View imagery from the roads around where their residential trip will be, admiring the 3D buildings re-created in cities like New York and comparing the current weather conditions in the UK with places like Greenland or Australia.

If there's time, I also try to show the children how to turn on the 3D terrain to view the landscape more realistically. Most places in the UK appear to have just a generally hilly landscape, so here's a few famous natural features that are quite easy to spot once they are entered into the search box:

To finish off the lesson, we talk about all the potential uses of Google Earth (e.g. exploring holiday destinations before visiting, using the time slider to examine the historical development of places etc), as well as some of the potential limitations it may have (e.g. the need to have a fast Internet connection, less portable than a paper map etc.)

In my opinion, Google Earth is just an outstanding program that never ceases to amaze children. They really enjoy using it to help them learn about the geography of different places and respond well to this introductory lesson because it gives them some freedom to discover the program's wide-ranging capabilities through exploring places where they themselves want to visit/investigate.

Improving my ICT Lessons

I'll be honest and say that sometimes I finish a lesson feeling that it's not quite succeeded how I intended it to and in hindsight I would have changed it in certain ways.

Trying to teach ICT lessons which are bit more creative or unusual often leads to either what OfSTED would call oustanding teaching and learning or to a situation where the children begin to question their enjoyment of ICT. Sometimes the technology fails, sometimes I think that I've slightly over-estimated the complexity of a task for a child to do.

Over the years, in my opinion, my ICT lessons have improved massively as I regularly tweak, refine and improve them. Those activities which I know work well I quite happily repeat, those which don't I either attempt to modify or scrap altogether - after all, my main aim in school is to get the children: excited, motivated and interested in the marvels of ICT to help their education.

Once I've slotted in all the lessons that I know both the children and I enjoy doing into the long-term plan, I get left with a few slots that need filling up - I then plan either some form of 'consolidation' activity re-inforcing/practicing already acquired skills or plan to do something a bit 'different'.

Today I had one of those 'filler' lessons that I felt didn't quite work as well as I'd hoped and thought that I would attempt to reflect upon it to help me find out some of the ways in which it could have been made better.

Our Year 5 class are currently studying the history topic of 'the Stuarts' so I definitely wanted to do some work with them on the Gunpowder Plot as I thought that it would appeal to them - gunpowder, treason and plot! As in previous years, I'm planning on participating in Chris Leach's Gunpowder, Tweeting and Plot project and this year wanted to challenge myself to getting a whole class of children engaged in writing up the timeline of the story's plot from the perspective of one of the characters in it. 

It is a fairly complicated story when you research it thoroughly - indeed at one point the other year I even got a map opened up to plot the movements of where everybody was at certain times on certain dates! When preparing the lesson, I therefore decided to create a simplified timeline of everything, just with the events associated with: Guy Fawkes (the explosives expert), Robert Catesby (the leader of the plot) and King James I (the Supremem Head of the Church of England). This took quite a while to put together and I even highlighted the names of the three characters we were focusing on so that the children could easily locate them within the text.

To start the lesson, I gave the children about seven minutes reading time (timed using the lovely Fiery Ideas Super Timer) so that they could get a grasp the key points - this should have been quite straightforward as they had spent last week's lesson doing a fun quiz about it all. Next, I then attempted to implement one of the Kagan Co-Operative Learning Structures by getting them to move around the classroom telling different children two facts about one of the characters (I gave them a character to talk about based on which school house they were in). After that, I then asked them to open up a pre-prepared template timeline for them to fill in the actions of their character from their character's viewpoint. I displayed this slide on the IWB detailing the lesson's learning intention and steps needed to achieve success:

Despite what in writing seems like quite a reasonable lesson, I came out of it feeling that it had some faults:

• the children didn't seem as interested in the Gunpowder Plot as I had anticipated;
• some of the children found the length of the timeline too long so didn't read/understand it particularly well;
• the number of events that they had to retell for each character was slightly too many for most children.

The lesson wasn't a complete failure - quite a number of children did complete the activity successfully, but to improve it I would have:

• done more work in the previous lesson on the actual timeline of when the story's events happened as well as what they were;
• shortened my timeline even more - perhaps simiplifying some of the language and cutting out Robert Catesby to just focus on Guy Fawkes and the King;
• reduced the number of events they had to retell for each character from about ten down to seven.

Some of the finished work was definitely good enough to submit for the Gunpowder, Tweeting and Plot project - it's just ashame that I only really had work from the more confident children to select from. You can view some of the completed timelines on my school website by clicking here.

I had thought the Gunpowder Plot was quite an interesting topic to cover - perhaps it would have been better for just a small group of children to work on this particular project instead (e.g. via an assignment on Edmodo) and perhaps  next time retelling the events as a graphic novel like @chrisleach78 did on Monday would be more appropriate for doing as whole class lesson (click here to see his blog post on the lesson).

Nobody's perfect and every lesson is unlikely to be amazing. I certainly want to try my best though and I'm willing to learn from my mistakes and correct them - I don't want my ICT lessons to be boring, I want them to be fun, exciting and inspiring!

My Primary School History Encyclopedia is Complete!

http://history.parkfieldict.co.uk/

I'm extremely pleased to announce that my online history encyclopedia of Britain for primary schools is now complete! It contains all the information that I would consider to be relevant and appropriate for children aged 6-11 who are interested in researching and learning about the major events and key people that have helped to develop Britain from the Mesolithic to the dawn of the new millennium in the year 2000.

I've been working on the site in my spare time for nearly a year now and have found it to be very interesting work which has greatly improved my knowledge of British history - I must have: watched over 200 episodes of Time Team, read over 50 books and explored dozens of websites to gather all my facts together.

The website is divided up into the different periods of our past and I've included a timeline of the main events in each as I feel that it is important to understand the chronology of when events happened in them. In my opinion, the encyclopedia is now comprehensive enough to declare it as being 'complete', however if somebody has a suggestion of any particular topic which they want adding, I will be quite happy to do so.

Creating this website has been an enormous but extremely fascinating task. With over 200 pages of information, I hope that schools do find it useful and I look forward to reading people's comments on it!

2 Minute ICT Challenges

Each KS2 class at my school has a whole class ICT lesson each week using a set of laptops. Whilst this setup gives lots of scope for delivering exciting and inspiring learning opportunities, it has one tiny setback - it takes about ten minutes for all the children to get 30 laptops from the trolleys into the room and logged on ready to start. Even with lots of practice, I've found that this cannot be cut down much further as the laptops still have to be carried from their charging point and still have to spend a few minutes booting up/downloading user profiles once logged in (I can't do it beforehand during lunch as they need charging up after being used during the morning).

Last week I was therefore challenged by my deputy head to come up with a collection of activities for those children who login quickly to do to keep them occupied whilst the others get set up and received any help from me if needed (especially those children who get their laptops first and are very confident at setting them up). The result was an evening spent creating the 2 Minute ICT Challenges website - a list of websites that the children could visit that would keep them engaged and learning something whilst the rest of their classmates caught up.

By directing the children to the site it not only gives them the chance to do some extra independent learning but it also gives me the reassurance that they are doing something that is: safe, educational and which  won't distract others in the room whilst they get their laptops ready. I've tried to put together a mixture of activities for them to do to accommodate different 'tastes' - but the key rule I followed when finding them was that they must be able to be completed successfully within two minutes. At the moment they include:

• find out something which is happening in the news (explore the Newsround);
• practice your typing skills (play a short game to test your typing speed);
• play a maths game (do a quick game on TutPup);
• see what festivals and celebrations are coming up (visit an online calendar of events);
• read or write a book review (using my My Library website).

I was also kindly given permission from Brain Pop to include their daily, free video explaining a particular concept in a fun, cartoon format too.

I used the website for the first time with Year 6 this afternoon and they all really enjoyed it - the usually hectic setting up of the laptops felt noticeably calmer and a few of them liked sharing something that they'd discovered with me (including that it's International Chocolate Day tomorrow - mmm). The whole thing only took two minutes (timed exactly using the stopwatch accessible by clicking the logo on the site) and all the children clearly understood that once the time was up they then had to: stop, close down any open windows and sit up ready to listen to the ICT lesson.

You are more than welcome to use the site in your classroom and as usual, I would enjoy reading any comments/ideas for improvement you may have on it!

My Library

At some point during last year I made up a website called My Library but things got a bit busy at school and I never quite got the chance to promote it as such.

Put simply, it's a website that allows children to read and write book reviews online. It contains a link to a Google form which can be used to write a review and a link to the resulting database where the reviews are collected into.

It isn't particularly complicated as I felt that such a service needed to be quite straightforward to use - so long as you can see the book reviews then you don't really need it padded out with any distracted clip art/pretty pictures etc.

Schools are more than welcome to use the site themselves - whether it be collaborating by getting children to contribute book reviews or by just letting the children search through the reviews already submitted (which can handily be filtered by genre and year group).

Submitted reviews are automatically added to the list of reviews for everyone to see. I will check regularly to remove/edit anything inappropriate, however if anyone would like access to be able to do this moderation themselves too I would be more than happy to give them editing privileges for the Google Spreadsheet.

Please write a comment below if you find the My Library website useful!

Teaching Current Affairs using the BBC Newsround Website

If you've not already spotted, the BBC Newsround website - that provides an online news service tailored for children aged 6-12 years old - got given a major relaunch a few weeks ago.

The new look appears much more modern and appealing than the previous design, offering a range of features to help children engage with sometimes difficult topics, including:

• embedded video reports;
• a greater collection of high-quality photo slideshows;
• little activities like word searches and jigsaws alongside articles.

Beyond the front page of 'main headlines', the website can easily be navigated by either clicking on one of the article category buttons at the top ('news', 'sport', 'entertainment' and 'animals') or by performing a key word search (which helpfully just searches through pages on the Newsround site).

In my opinion, the website now offers a fantastic resource for schools to help them teach children about topical events and current affairs. Indeed, this report on children's consumption of the news states that: "37% watched it [Newsround] ‘most days’ and over two thirds (67.7%) watched it at least once a week" - so there is clearly a large group of children out there who are keen and interested to learn about the latest events in the world around them.

I'm keen to try and explore ways to promote/encourage children to access the BBC Newsround website during this next academic year - the ideas I've got floating around in my mind at the minute are:

• recount a news story within 100 words (encouraging children to read the facts and understand them before re-interpreting them into their own words);
• write a weekly list of 'five things in the news this week' - either like a mini diary or along the lines of the popular Memiary website;
• record a '60-second' news bulletin as an audio or video, informing people of the latest headlines (similar to the show on BBC Three);
• create a 2DIY missing words game or multiple-choice quiz about a particular new story

Do you have any great ideas for including the BBC Newsround website in your lessons - please write a comment below to let me know!

Creating a Video Advertising my School

A few weeks ago I was challenged by my deputy head to create a video advertising the school that included each child saying a different word - the idea being that it would showcase how our children are aged from 4 to 11 years old but still all feel part of the same whole school community.

His initial thought was for me to get Year 6 children editing together all the clips - but as: past experience has shown this is easier said than done, the only video editing software we have in school is the old, rather 'clunky' Windows Movie Maker and that I would have had only a few ICT lessons with Year 6s before they leave, I therefore decided to embark on doing the project by myself.

The first thing that I did was to write down a script for the advert which would be mixed in between some photographs in the final video to describe what aspect of school life they show. This was quite easy and I just printed off a few sentences for the children to read out.

The second thing I had to do was go around school with the Flip camera recording the children reading various lines from the script. I decided I would get as many children as I could (more than necessary if possible) to take it in turns reading particular lines of the script. As I wanted to record both infants and juniors doing the talking, the best time to get them was at playtime and lunchtimes - it actually took me over a week however to find a day where: all the classes were in school, all the children were in uniform (we had a summer fair forfeit day one day and a sports day on another) and the weather was sunny! Thankfully, all the children seemed eager to be involved and I went around different corners of our field and playground recording them against a variety of backdrops.

The next job I had to do was edit all my videos to create a series of short clips, each containing several children each reading just one word of a sentence from the script. The software I chose for this is something called Pinnacle Studio 14 which I got bundled free with my TV capture card I bought a few months back - Windows Live Movie Maker didn't seem to like editing clips from specific frames and I don't own a Mac with their great video editing software on. For each sentence in the script I inserted all the clips into the timeline which I had recorded of children speaking it before then cutting out and rearranging them to produce a short video lasting about 10 seconds. I tried to choose a first and last child who paused for a bit before starting and ending their sentence so that the clip wouldn't seem too rushed and, for variety, I also tried to include both infants and juniors in each clip stood in front of a range of backdrops too.

The last thing I had to do was use Animoto to create the final advert video. I: uploaded all my required photos and video clips, positioned them in the timeline, chose a suitable piece of background music and then clicked on the 'produce' button.

I will admit that it did take a fair amount of work in my supposedly free time to make the advert - writing the script, a playtime and dinnertime recording children speak it, about three hours editing the video clips together, about an hour selecting the best photos of school life to include in the advert and then a final half hour uploading it all onto Animoto. I do think that the finished advert looks even more impressive than I was expecting though and as I now know how to best create it I would definitely recommend other schools create one and would happily update our advert it in a couple of year's time to include different photos and children.

Early Years ICT Blog Site

Continuous provision is something that it highly promoted within early years settings - children being given the independence to choose when they access a range of resources within the classroom to develop their learning. Through careful planning, practitioners are able to support the children whilst they engage in activities and are able to challenge them to develop their knowledge and understanding across different areas of the curriculum.

I've previously blogged about the importance and value ICT in the early years has - http://simonhaughton.typepad.com/ict/2011/03/ict-in-the-early-years.html.

Starting in September, I'm planning to update a blog I've designed specially for early years children to let them know of some fun (and educational) ICT activities/websites which I think they would really enjoy doing during their continuous provision time (http://parkfield.typepad.com/earlyict/).

My intention is that it will provide them with some ICT tasks which they can focus on doing by themselves which are linked to current class topics - thus broadening their appreciation of all the fabulous ICT resources that are out there (and trying to discourage them from going on the CBeebies website all the time too).

Designing a website for such young children requires a little extra thought about their needs and so I've tried to make everything on it look: big, colourful and appealing for them. There are no distracting widgets, there is no commenting ability - the whole blog is just very simplistic as that's what I think early years children need.

Hopefully the children will really like using the website when they start school in September and that it will become a useful resource in other EYFS settings too.

ICT in the Early Years

I was asked the other day about what ICT work I do with reception children and just felt that it deserved a blog post writing about it.

During the year, my aim is to get the children familiar and enthusiastic about using a range of ICT hardware and software to support their learning. Rather than just putting them on a painting program or CBeebies game every week, I do like to try and give them variety in what they do to hopefully give them the broadest possible range of experiences.

Each of my activities are about twenty minutes long and are designed for being carried out with a small group of about six children.

In my yearly overview it's worth noting that I've carefully positioned activities across that year so that certain skills are re-visited to ensure that the children gain confidence in them (e.g. controlling the Bee-Bot or operating the digital camera) and that certain activities are placed to match in with seasonal events (e.g. Bonfire Night or the arrival of Spring).

As a general rule, I tend to: focus heavily on mouse skills in the Autumn term, introduce typing of letters/words in the Spring term and then do some basic sentence typing in the Summer term - the reasons being that I need to be certain that children can accurately control the mouse as it's a fundamental skill so do this first and hold off introducing typing skills for a while until they have mastered some understanding of the alphabet/spelling strategies already in class (especially since the letters on the keyboard are formed very differently than how you average four/five-year old would expect them to be).

Hopefully by sharing my overview you can see the mixture of activities I do with EYFS children and that it has inspired you to be a bit more creative in your planning for ICT.

Finally, here are some blog posts I've written about specific EYFS ICT activities too if they're of any use:

• Learning to Control the Bee-Bot
• Using 2Simple City to Encourage Independent ICT Work in the EYFS
• Teaching Reception Children how to use a Digital Camera
• Dot-to-Dot Pictures
• Infant Encyclopedia
• Going on a Minibeast Hunt
• Teaching Reception how to Compose Music using ICT
• My Collection of Christmas Lessons 2010