Alphabet Challenge - How Fast Are you?

P4 pupils have been looking at keyboarding skills and have been trying to build up their fluency and accuracy. One site that looks purely at speed, as opposed to finger position etc is the Alphabet Challenge.

It's all very simple, you just have to type the alphabet as fast as you can.

So how fast are you? Let us know in the comments below. The speed of some pupils is amazing!

You can visit the site by clicking the link here.

Which M&M is your favourite?

Year One pupils have been looking at Data Handling in their ICT lessons. First of all they looked at pictograms and found that it was very easy to create presentations using ICT, although maybe it was not so much fun!

They then went on to look at more complex graphs using Data Sweet. The real life question they were asked was:

In bags of M&Ms and Skittles are there equal amounts of each colour?

We weren't sure of the answer, so we carried out an experiment to find out. In groups we counted the number of each colour and recorded our results in a tally chart. This helped us to work out the totals for each colour.

BubbleShare: Share photos - Play some Online Games.

We had to type into the software to help create a graph, adding a title and inputting the data. This was quite time consuming although it was easy to see those pupils who are quite used to keyboarding at a fast pace. Most pupils were able to save their work and print out their results.

To our surprise, there was a huge variation in results, some bags had quite close totals whilst others were a long way apart. With the use of ICT we were able to interpret the data efficiently and find out what we wanted to know.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta

Just don't.... trust me... don't!!

New Toys

So what did you get from Santa?

After a highly optimistic series of Christmas letters, here, and here, I was hoping for a bumper festive season. Oh well, it's not long until Santa visits again!

On returning to school though, some late presents were waiting for me. Our order from TTS in the UK finally arived and we've already had some great fun exploring the two peripherals we bought.

First out of the box, was the handheld USB microphone which I mentioned early last year. These look extremely useful and clearly have a wide range of curriculum uses. Unfortunately, three hours after I opened the boxes, the P5 teachers stole them off me and I haven't seen them since! Apparently they are being used extensively by P5 students in a series of interviews. When I get them back I'll be sure to test them out and plan to use them in KS1 after Chinese New Year.

BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing
Our 6 ProBots also arrived and Computer Club have been taking them for a test drive. These programmable cars build upon work carried out in the Foundation Stage with Bee Bots and add a degree of complexity to our study of Control Technology. Not only do they cover directional control, the addition of light, sound and sensors mean that they can be used throughout the primary years.

We all look forward to seeing them put through their paces!