The Whiteboard Challenge

Twitter once again has come to the fore (well it's not really Twitter it's the people who use it) with a connection to a great idea created by 6 very innovative teachers. In this Whiteboard challenge they call themselves the Task Masters. A great name. Meet Jess , Danny, Ben, Lauren, Chris and Tom. Check them all out here.
What they have come up with is a challenge for those who have interactive whiteboards in their classroom. Each week you take up a challenge created by one of the task masters and then write about it in a blog post on the wiki. Check out Danny's challenge number 2 which is whiteboard cloning. They are encouraging you to write, video, podcast, draw, show your learning in pretty much any way you can.
It doesn't matter which whiteboard you have in your school or classroom. It's about the teaching and learning that can be achieved with it.
So why not sign up. Make a commitment to spend a few minutes a week for the next few weeks, have some fun and learn lots more.
I am.

Scratch-learning about programming

For the last few weeks my Year 8 students have been creating their own animations using Pivot Stickman, a very simple freely available animation software. They have created some really cool little animations. I'm going to up load some of them to this blog over the next few days to showcase them. Now it's time to move on and to me it seemed a logical step to introduce Scratch. Now I'm guessing that the purists will probably say that Scratch is not truly a programming language and I am willing to admit that I have such little idea of programming that I couldn't explain it or defend it at all. But to me and my students that doesn't matter. What does matter is exposing my students to a new learning experience that offers a way to manipulate, create, design and compute. According to the website Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art . Yesterday in my Year 8 IT class we began our journey with Scratch. I'm really excited to see what they will achieve. At this stage we are in the 'sandpit' just playing around with it discovering just what it can do. Over the next few weeks we will use some of the tutorials that have been uploaded to Teachertube and we'll also look at many of the examples that are on the official Scratch website. Can't wait.

Another way of learning (and teaching)

One of the things that I find challenging when supporting the development of teachers understandings of ICT and their applications in the classroom is offering simple explanations of what many of the applications are. It's all very well to suggest that a teacher create a blog to get their students to record a project, or create a wiki so that they can collaborate. Harder still is to explain how RSS feeds might be a very effective way to track how students are working on their digital portfolios or why podcasts might be a new way to let parents know about the history of their school community. I constantly have to remind myself that wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasts and many more are for many teachers still techno gobbledy gook and as such, cause angst and feelings of unnecessary inadequacy.
Today via a mailing list, I came across a very cool site called CommonCraft that explains Web 2.0 applications in simple yet entertaining. The appealing thing for me I think is that it uses little props such as drawings and cutouts to visually represent a group of ideas. Very useful for both teachers and students. They are even available for downloading onto the school's local server from Bliptv or YouTube.
Here's one that explains RSS.