Simon Haughton's Blog

Student Selector

This year I have been introduced to the power of Kagan Structures for Co-Operative Learning (see here and here for more details).

Quite a lot of the structures involve children being picked randomly from within a group to take a more leading role in a task. The 'official' random-number spinner is only available as a commercial release so I decided to create my own version of it using PowerPoint (which also contains an extra circle for groups of six children) for you to download for free to use in your classroom. Enjoy!

Download Student Selector by Simon Haughton

Creating Tables in Word

I ocassionally get asked to show people in school how to create tables in Microsoft Word, such as to make registers or timetables. There are few tricks that you need to do now when working with tables, or else they won't look how you want them to and the information you want to put into them won't all fit:

• plan your table first - know how many rows and columns you need to include (to save you the trouble of adding/removing cell walls later on);
• align the table in the centre of the page horizontally so that it looks neat;
• reduce the top and bottom margins of the page so that you can make your table taller and so fit more onto a single sheet of paper;
• change the font size of the blank line that Word puts under a table to 1 so that you don't get a second page which is blank;
• change the vertical and horizontal alignment of text within cells to position words;
• change the fill colour of cells and the font colour of text to help emphasise certain cells (e.g. headings);
• higlight rows/columns and choose to distribute their heights/widths evenly;
• change the border thicknesses and colours to split your table into sections;
• use the eraser tool to delete unwanted cell walls (e.g. to spread content out over multiple rows/columns);
• highlight the top row of cells and choose 'Heading Rows Repeat' to automatically repeat these at the top of each new page if the table is spread over multpiple pages.

If you follow all these tips then I can promise you that your tables will both look attractive and also be suitable for putting information into.

Making the Community Newspaper

Every term I make a 'community newspaper' for my school - it's basically just a duplication of what I've already wrote for the school website but organised over four sheets of A4 paper so that it can be printed out (onto a folded A3 sheet back-to-back). A copy of it gets sent to all the governors and it gets proudly displayed in the entrance way at school in a folder, along with previous issues. You can view them all my school website too by clicking here.

I regularly see a wide range of school stakeholders  enjoying browsing it (including: children, parents, prospective parents and governors) as it contains a nice summary/showcase of school life - indeed OfSTED have even praised in one of our inspection reports if I remember correctly. 

It does take me around five hours of work to do, but in recent years I have developed a few tricks to make the job easier to do - notably to do detailed writeups for the website when events occur (to save me trying to make things up/remember a few months later) and to use a standard newspaper template I've created (inspired by this school's weekly newsletters) which just needs the text/pictures adding - you can download a copy of the spring template here.

A few people have asked me what software I use to create the newspaper in and they are often quite suprised when I tell them that it's Microsoft Word 2003. If you are familiar with all its features though and are willing to spend the time to use them creatively, it is possible to see how I make the finished design look so neat/attractive appealing:

• All the elements are arranged so that they are floating 'in front of text' so that they can be easily moved about on the page where I want them to go.

• I draw (and subsequently delte) straight lines using the SHIFT key to help align all these different elements neatly.

• I put text in text boxes and fully justify the content. If multiple text boxes are required for an article, I right-click on a text box and create a link to an adjacent text box so that it it fills into it automatically.

• For the majority of the newspaper, I use just two colours - black for text and a royal blue for headings - to help create a consistent design.
• To make the design look a little more interesting though, I do place a couple of articles in a filled text box and make their heading colours match this for effect.
• I rotate the pictures at unusual angles, overlap them and sometimes add an outline colour to them so that they look more exciting on the printed page.
• I fill up any white space by inserting some appropriate clip art pictures to help decorate the pages and make the paper look a bit more child-friendly.

The community newspaper is one of the few pieces of work that I do still plan out on paper first so I have an idea about what I am going to include in it. These are my notes for the most recent edition of the paper (sorry it's very rough - I hadn't planned to blog it when I scribbled it) - you can see how I list all the events that have happened in the term that I could include at the bottom and then attempt to place them on the paper so that a mixture of content from different year groups is included and articles are priorities based on the amount of photos available and how long the event lasted (e.g. a residential trip would get more space than a sports result for instance).

The only bits I still do admit finding challenging when making the paper are to fill each article up with its allocated space (you might notice me waffling on sometimes so that the write up fits neatly into a column or 5 lines exactly) and to meet the printing deadline of the penultimate day of term (espescially difficult if I start work on the paper two weeks beforehand not knowing if certain events are definitely going to happen/how many good quality photos I'll get of them - I usually end up writing reserve articles just in case things don't go as expected, as is often the case near Christmas, Easter and the Summer holidays).

Anyway, that's how I make my community newspaper. I hope that my thoughts and tips about making one are useful to someone out there and it would be great to read comments about other schools that have tried making one.

Creating PhotoStories

Microsoft PhotoStory is a program that I use occasionally in lower KS2 to create persuasive adverts (e.g. to visit South Africa) or documentary videos (e.g. about the geography of the Arctic).

Whilst its functions are fairly limited, what it does offer, it does extrememly well - it is basically a step-by-step wizard for creating your own photo slideshows.

I won't go in to depth describing all of its tools (as I think they're quite straightforward to understand), but I thought that it would be worthwhile me pointing out some tips I shared with my deputy head this week about how to use it effectively:

• restrict the number of images children can include in their work (I've found about eight to be suitable as it gives them enough to work with without requiring them to caption an unreasonably large amount of pictures);
• remove the black borders on all the photos so that the video looks neat when the photos are played back in sequence;
• change the vertical alignment of text labels/captions depending on the subject of each image - you don't want to obscure things but you still want the text to be readable;
• remind children not to put their surnames on their work (I forgot this once and found myself having to spend ages re-encoding nearly a class set full of videos);
• change the duration of each picture to at least 10 seconds (for some reason PhotoStory defaults to 5 seconds which I find is much too short);
• allow children to change the transition between the different photos for effect;
• when adding music, be sure to click on the first picture in the slideshow first to let the software know where to begin playing it;
• if creating your own music, changing the tempo to a quarter is often best as it doesn't distract the viewer from reading the text then;
• save the PhotoStory project file before encoding the finished video - if the laptop battery dies or there's a big mistake spotted in the video when watched then it can easily be re-encoded/fixed.

From my experience, creating a PhotoStory usually fits just nicely into two lessons (with the split being about the point when children are up to adding text onto photo number five or 6).

PhotoStory is a free program that you can encourage children to download at home. They all find it really intuitive to use and are always impressed with the videos they produce using it. I do recommend you try teaching it to your children!

Hunting for Resources on the Internet

Quite often I'll be asked if I have any good resources on a particular topic. For most of the more popular themes (e.g. Tudors, space, rivers etc.) I do admit to having quite a collection that I've built up over the years that I'm more than happy to send people a link to - all of it is available at http://www.delicious.com/tags/parkfield?view=all& anyway.

Ocassionally I'm asked to source material based on a 'new', often more 'unusual' topic that I don't actually have anything on - St. Patrick's day being a recent example. Thankfully though, I do have a trusted list of good websites which I gladly look through to dig out some stuff to help the person out:

• http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/eng/index-new.htm
• http://education.scholastic.co.uk/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/websites/4_11/index.shtml
• http://www.parkfieldict.co.uk/sats/
• http://www.primarygames.co.uk/evalindex.html
• http://www.delicious.com/parkfield/countries
• http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/
• http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/

Often a quick Google will return a few more specific websites too, but these sites always provide me with something to pass on to the person in need to give them a starting point to go from at least.

Creating PowerPoint Activity Files

I was having a play in PowerPoint this morning (like you do) and stumbled upon the fact that you can change the dimensions of slides so that they are A4-sized.

Already being a fan of using placeholders (the proper name for a content box) to enable children to easily and neatly insert text and images into pre-defined positions on a slide, I suddenly had the idea that you use these on an A4-sized slide to allow children to also easily create perfectly-sized pieces of work for printing out.

You can download the template I've created by clicking here.

It just requires just a little setup prior to use however to customise it the particular needs of the activity:

• change the ouline and fill colours of the boxes on the master slide;
• change the default font style/size/colour on both the master slide (for the title box) and slide 1 (for the caption boxes alongside each picture);
• type a little instruction sentence into the speech bubble explaining to the children what they have to do in the activity;
• type a few key words/phrases at the side to help prompt their writing (everything that doesn't appear on the slide doesn't get printed off so these can stay here and don't need to be deleted by the children);
• insert a few clip art pictures for children to drag across onto the slide to help illstrate and decorate it further (I'd recommend you duplicate these a 4-6 times first and carefully place them directly on top of one another to save children the hassle of doing it themselves);
• create a folder of pictures that the children can use to select which ones they want to insert into their work to illustrate it (obviously placed in a shared area where they everyone can access);

The only thing to be aware of when using this template with the children is that if you are using the 2003 version of the software, it can be tricky to change the photographs after they have been inserted (unless you do it immediately using 'undo') so I would get the children to do this bit carefully first so that they don't need to worry about changing it later on. More recent versions of PowerPoint let you just right-click on a picture and choose 'Change picture...' so this isn't a problem any more.

Example of an ICT lesson plan for Year 4 using this template.

One final thing to mention is that because this template is made in PowerPoint, you can easily save the finished work/slides as PNG image files when doing 'Save As..' - this is espescially useful if (like me) you want to bulk-upload examples of work for showcasing on a website/blog using services like PhotoPeach or Shape Collage.

I hope you find this template useful and as per usual, please do write me a comment underneath to let me know what you think of it!

ICT Tips Blog

This is one of those mad ideas I occasionally have and as I had some time tonight, I decided to spend an hour just working on an initial concept.

I've heard of several schools using 'TeachMeet-style' presentations during staff meetings to provide CPD amongst colleagues, and in particular I was most interested in one school that uses this approach to teach/showcase ICT tools/ideas to staff (being given the unusual name of 'ICT Gems' if I remember correctly). As there is the usual time restriction in place and the presentation is limited to just one per meeting, it means that it has to be something quite simple to use/deliver but which at the same time is also highly effective at engaging and inspiring teaching and learning.

Tonight's mad thought was to create a blog for people to share any 'wowy' ICT tips on for people to share/refer to for such mini presentations. As these would likely be aimed at non-techies, I also wanted to set a word limit for each post of 100 words to make sure the description/instructions are are accessible to them.

After just under an hour of work, I set up http://icttips.posterous.com/. Since I used Posterous to build the site, it also enables me to allow anyone to write a tip for publishing just by sending an email  - thus meaning that the site can be easily contributed to and maintained by a range of ICT enthusiasts. 

If you would like to add a tip to the site, I would be extremely grateful - just email it to: icttips@posterous.com (Images can be added as attachments and tags can be added to the email's subject - e.g. Inserting Images ((tags: PowerPoint, Word)) ). Please remember to add your name to your tip as well so people know who it is from!

If you have any thoughts/feedback on this site, please write a comment in the box below to let me know!

My Delicious Encyclopedia

About two and a half years ago I set up an account on Delicious to store all my favourite web bookmarks in one place online, each 'tagged' with a series of key words enabling them to be easily searched.

I've now collected nearly 3,000 links to educational websites, creating what I would consider to be a fantastic starting-point for when planning a lesson/topic. Indeed, I've amazed many people on Twitter with the speed at which I can locate resources on a particular theme using these links - with @diannespencer once calling me a "walking genius".

A few people have asked me in recent days about what I plan to do with all these links in response to the rumours regarding the closing down of the Delicious website. At the moment, my response is that I'm going to keep them there until the status changes as the official word is still that they are "not shutting down" but are instead looking for a different company to take over its running.

Anyway, I hope that you bookmark my Delicious site and I can promise you that if you do you'll end up referring to it at least once in the next few weeks and end up using one of the thousands of fab sites which I've found for you in a lesson!

Using Wikipedia for Internet Research

Doing a Google search on a topic will more than likely bring up a link to its associated Wikipedia entry as one of the top results.

Whilst its main selling point that 'anyone can edit almost every page' gives the opportunity for the site to contain the web's largest bank of knowledge, it does however therefore mean that a lot of information can be published with little or no moderation. Obviously the majority of facts contained on the website are going to be reliable - people wouldn't waste thousands of hours writing imaginary material, but there is always that tiny percentage of people out there that who are going to put erroneous stuff on it (be it through accidental misunderstanding of a topic or for purposeful malicious reasons).

It is the educator's role to teach children the importance of checking the reliability of all information that they find on the web - indeed I use the TASK acronym to help them remember a few useful methods. With multi-authored content like that provided on Wikipedia, children also need to be taught a few additional checks to verify the truthfulness/accurateness of it further by:

• checking the citations/references given at the bottom of each article (that the author has based their writing on) come from reliable sources;
• cross-referencing the information in the article with other reliable websites to check that they match up.

Finally, it is also worth mentioning two Wikipedia sites that are often overlooked but which are, in my opinion, potentially more useful to primary-aged children than the main site - the Simple English Wikipedia (written for people whose first language is not English but is also ideal for children whose reading skills are still developing) and the Wikipedia Selection for Schools (a "hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum").

Using Google Reader to Check for Website Updates

One of the best ways of finding out about the different teaching and learning experiences that go on in other schools is by regularly looking at their websites.

When I first started doing this around four years ago, I simply had a list of about 10-20 web addresses in a Word document that I would click on each week to visit my favourite school sites at the time on which lots of good practice was being shared.

Over the course of about a year this list gradually expanded and it not only began to be a bit of a hassle having to keep loading up the document on my computer to update but it also became annoying when I'd forgotten to transfer the most recent version onto my USB stick and so couldn't open sites I'd recently found in school. For these reasons I therefore decided to copy all my links onto my Delicious account so that they could be accessed online easily wherever I was and adding extra links was just a three-click process ('bookmark' > click the 'websites' tag > save).

This solution worked much better than using the Word document, although having to individually click on the link to each site in the list to check it for updates every week soon became quite a time-consuming and time-wasting process - especially with sites that I was clicking on only to discover that hadn't been updated.

Another year down the line I finally gave in to my curiosity and decided to investigate reading RSS feeds as a way of checking what had then become a list of just over 100 websites. RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and is just an online document generated and updated automatically to contain the recent additions to a website in a standard format which can be read using special software called an 'RSS reader'. Many websites which are frequently updated have RSS feeds now such as to list recent blog entries or news headlines.

Now I am aware that there are lots of RSS readers out there, but my preference is for Google Reader because: of its simplicity, the fact that it's an online application and because it is easy to access when using the other Google services I regularly use. All the site does is 'aggregate' or bring together all the updates from the RSS feeds I've told it to check and displays them in chronological order on one page for me to view. Most RSS feeds nowadays contain multimedia content (e.g. videos) as well as the full text copy of each update which is all embedded in the Google Reader page.

To start using Google Reader, all you need to do is login/register with Google, go to the 'Reader' tab at the top of the screen and then copy and paste the web addresses of the RSS feeds of sites you want it to check for updates from into the 'add subscription' box. Each time you load up Google Reader it will then tell you how many 'unread' items you have from these sites, show them in the order they were put online in and then mark them of as 'read' once you have scrolled down past them on the page.

Since RSS feeds contain content with only limited formatting, Google Reader has to display all the updates in the same font style without any of the styling which would normally be displayed on each website. As I might have an average of 50 unread items a day to trawl through this is no bad thing however as it gives me a consistent reading experience and allows me to quickly skim-read text to look for the interesting bits. There is still an option to view an update on the original website if I wanted to though.

There are lots of other tools available in Google Reader too to help monitor the updates it is receiving from the RSS feeds you've told it to check - like trending topics or statistics about your most/least updated sites - although I'm sure that if you wanted to use them they would be quite straightforward to locate and work.

In the two years that I've been using the Google Reader service I would definitely say that it has transformed the way that I view the web - I can now daily check for updates from nearly 300 feeds quickly and easily just by clicking onto site and scrolling down. If you've not tried it before I highly recommend it as being a fantastic way to catch up on what's happening in other schools and to read about some of the inspiring ideas which other educationalists are sharing with the world on their blogs.

Showcasing Photos

 

I believe that sharing photos on our school website is a great way for both displaying children's work and illustrating the enjoyment that they are having in their learning journeys.

There are lots of websites I use to produce creative presentations of these images quite easily, with my particular favourites being:

• Animoto
• Shape Collage
• PhotoPeach
• MS PhotoStory
• Photovisi

All of these applications are very easy to use in my opinion and I highly recommend them as ways to make your photos more attractive and exciting to look at for viewers.

Ways to Improve Children's use of a School Blog

I've made a quick mind map illustrating some methods you can use to improve children's use of a school blog:

Setting up a Collaborative Google Document

A few weeks back Google updated the visibility controls for documents created using its Google Docs service and at the same time also introduced real-time collaboration to the site as well (likely being connected with the acquisition of Etherpad at the start of the year).

 

I’ve already been experimenting with these features in my successful list of creative curriculum topic ideas and thought I’d share a quick post to explain how to quickly and easily set up your own collaborative doc.

1. Create a new document. 
2. Next to the document’s name, click the hyperlink saying ‘Private only to me’ to load up the sharing settings. 
3. By default your document is private and only you (and anybody else who you specifically give permission to) can access it. To change this, simply click the ‘change’ button in the box that appears on screen. Next, click the dot next to ‘Anyone with the link’ and tick the box next to ‘Allow anyone to edit’ – this will make it so that anyone who you share the document’s URL with can instantly access it and edit it.
4. Anybody who opens your document can now make a range of edits – including changing font colours (a feature previously not included in Etherpad). Whilst Google Docs neatly tracks their editing location by means of a flashing coloured cursor, it unfortunately only displays user names of people who you’ve specifically shared the doc with (i.e. added to the collaborators list) and who have a Google profile – everyone else is simply shown as ‘Anonymous x’ (with x being a number). This obviously isn’t very helpful so I always make a point of adding a section at the bottom of any doc for contributors to add their names to so that their work can be credited. 
5. It’s worth pointing out that going to File > See Revision History will bring up all previous versions of your document. This can be helpful if you want to observe its development or if you want to revert the doc back to a previous version – such as when somebody mistakenly deletes part of it! 

 

The benefits of collaborating with others are huge – not only between teachers but between pupils in the classroom too – and I’ll be interested in seeing some uses of multi-authored Google documents in the year ahead.

PowerPoint Activities using Triggers

As well allowing objects to animate on the click of the mouse and after a particular length of time in a PowerPoint slideshow, objects can also be made to animate when another object on a slide is clicked on. This can be achieved by using triggers, where the start of an effect is triggered by the click of a specified object:

This can be useful if you want things to change the colour of an object in an activity since you simply need to make an object change its fill colour several times using the emphasis animation effect, with each colour change being placed in sequence and starting on the click of a particular object:

To demonstrate this principle, I've created a quick set of addition activities for Year 1 children to complete. They are all basically variations on the theme of making two matching objects the same colour (e.g. number bonds, calculation/answer). Click the picture below to download and play this activity.

TeachMeet Blackpool - Shape Collage

ShapeCollage is free program that automatically creates collages of your pictures. There is both an online (requires you to give URLs of images) and an offline version (allows you to fully customise the appearance and size of your collage). Click on these pictures to see examples of collages on my school's website:

           

TeachMeet Blackpool - Dabbleboard

Dabbleboard is an online program for drawing diagrams on a whiteboard:

• Click anywhere to start typing - an on-screen keyboard pop-ups for you to use on an IWB.
• Just draw - it automatically detects basic shapes and makes them look neat.
• Insert images either from URLs or uploaded from your computer.

Alphabet Cards

These small little cards are such a simple idea but are something which makes a huge amount of difference to the children I work with who are still developing their typing skills (espescially those in KS1).

All they contain are the letters of the alphabet printed twice on two rows - the top row in the popular Comic Sans font which is one they can all relate to since it is a cursive script with lots of similarities to their own handwriting and the bottom row as is displayed on a computer keyboard (in Arial font).

I honestly can't describe how brilliant they are (see the comments on the TES Connect site to back this up). I have a collection of them laminated in the ICT suite available for children to access whenever they need to and the amount of times I've observed them being used with great effect is untrue - no more do I see children getting confused between the letters 'I' 'J' and 'L'!

Now I'm obviously not going to suggest that these should be used all the time - as children practice and grow their typing skills will obviously get better - but as a tool available to them which can be used as an independent support aid, they are simply fantastic!

Countdown Timer Code

I thought I'd share some useful code that I found on this website for creating a web page which displays a countdown timer:

<html> <head> <title>Countdown</title> <script type="text/javascript" defer="defer"> function CD_T(id,e){var n=new Date();CD_D(+n,id,e);setTimeout("if(typeof CD_T=='function'){CD_T('"+id+"',"+e+")}",1100-n.getMilliseconds())};function CD_D(n,id,e){var ms=e-n;if(ms<=0) ms*=-1;var d=Math.floor(ms/864E5);ms-=d*864E5;var h=Math.floor(ms/36E5);ms-=h*36E5;var m=Math.floor(ms/6E4);ms-=m*6E4;var s=Math.floor(ms/1E3);if(CD_OBJS[id]){CD_OBJS[id].innerHTML=d+" day"+(d==1?" ":"s ")+CD_ZP(h)+"h "+CD_ZP(m)+"m "+CD_ZP(s)+"s"}};function CD_ZP(i){return(i<10?"0"+i:i)};function CD_Init(){var pref="countdown";var objH=1;if(document.getElementById||document.all){for(var i=1;objH;++i){var id=pref+i;objH=document.getElementById?document.getElementById(id):document.all[id];if(objH&&(typeof objH.innerHTML)!='undefined'){var s=objH.innerHTML;var dt=CD_Parse(s);if(!isNaN(dt)){CD_OBJS[id]=objH;CD_T(id,dt.valueOf());if(objH.style){objH.style.visibility="visible"}}else {objH.innerHTML=s+" "}}}}};function CD_Parse(strDate){var objReDte=/(\d{4})\-(\d{1,2})\-(\d{1,2})\s+(\d{1,2}):(\d{1,2}):(\d{0,2})\s+GMT([+\-])(\d{1}):?(\d{1,2})?/;if(strDate.match(objReDte)){var d=new Date(0);d.setUTCFullYear(+RegExp.$1,+RegExp.$2-1,+RegExp.$3);d.setUTCHours(+RegExp.$4,+RegExp.$5,+RegExp.$6);var tzs=(RegExp.$7=="-"?-1:1);var tzh=+RegExp.$8;var tzm=+RegExp.$9;if(tzh){d.setUTCHours(d.getUTCHours()-tzh*tzs)}if(tzm){d.setUTCMinutes(d.getUTCMinutes()-tzm*tzs)};return d}else {return NaN}};var CD_OBJS=new Object();if(window.attachEvent){window.attachEvent('onload',CD_Init)}else if(window.addEventListener){window.addEventListener("load",CD_Init,false)}else {window.onload=CD_Init}; </script> </head> <body> <p> <font face="Trebuchet MS" color=black size=6><b> Launching in <span id="countdown1">2010-1-1 01:00:00 GMT+00:00</span> </font> </p> </body> </html>

• Select all the code and copy it into the program you are using to make your website (e.g. paste it into Notepad and save the file as 'countdown.html')
• Change the red date to the time you are counting down to - the correct format is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS GMT±HH:MM

Obviously a countdown would never be a regular feature on a website, but it might be useful to show ocassionally when you want to help build up sense of anticipation ahead of a particular event which is going to be happening in school - like a special celebration or trip.

On a vaguely related note, here's a link to my collection of websites containing timers for displaying on an IWB in a classroom: http://delicious.com/parkfield/timer