Kellett Tellit

Well done to the Kellett Tellit team for producing a very readable and informative edition of their termly magazine, which can be read below. Good to see some stories looking at environmental issues, too.

School Closure Activities

With the school currently closed, there may be some of you at a loose end!

Here are some suggestions to keep you actively involved in ICT. I am still at school and looking forward to hearing from you.

P4,5 and 6. Visit http://www.scribblemaps.com/ and create a map. It could show your year group camp or a recent holiday or two! I've created one showing the locations of FOBISSEA Games events here; http://www.scribblemaps.com/#id=fs7yR2RlxI

P2 and P3, visit www.kerpoof.com and have a go at creating a picture. If you're feeling a bit more ambitious why not try making a video within the site.

If you're in Reception or P1 why not visit a couple of our favourite web sites if you can get somebody to help you! http:/www.boohbah.com or http://www.poissonrouge.com/

Good luck! If you have any problems, e-mail me or comment in the space below!

Digital Photography Competition

Photographer Beulah van Rensburg recently visited Kellett to cast her expert eye over our entries to the Digital Photography Competition. Beulah has worked with Kellett students before and is well known for her stunning images created from everyday household objects. There is a great opportunity to view Beulah's work at the Fringe Club in Lower Albert Road, where she has an exhibition from the 19th-29th June. More details can be found here.

Beulah was given the very difficult task of judging this year's competition, choosing a winner for each year group as well as an overall winner. She was very impressed by the standard and was amazed by some of the images taken by our Reception pupils. Given her expertise as a photographer, Beulah was able to explain what it was that made each photograph special and what techniques she spotted that our students had incorporated into their work. Having spent a lot of time looking at the photographs myself it was fascinating to hear her opinion and seeing her point out aspects of the photos that I had missed.

Beulah gave up a large amount of her time to judge the competition and we are very grateful to her for doing so. I'm looking forward to returning the compliment and going to view her exhibition later this week.

Below is a slideshow of each year group winner and runner up as well as the winner of the Best Portfolio, which appear at the end. I'm sure you will all agree that the standard is very high. Many thanks to all those that entered, we had over 500 individual images entered!

BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing

Education Leadership Summit

So, day one of Apple's Education Leadership Summit. Firstly, what a pleasure to see so many influential, creative people come to HK to talk to the education community. Heppell was the same as ever, completely engrossing, and what a bonus to see Greg Whitby, hadn't expected him to be there. A good excuse to embed one of my fav vids (below).

Over 200 schoools from 21 countries represented, a truely global event.

First up, Dave McMaster of Canadian welcoming all and talking about their tech journey. Then Tom Kelley from IDEo with a hugely entertaining session on innovation. Some really interesting definitions of the types of innovators and a real bonus, a FREE copy of his book. I was too cool to get in the line to get him to sign it though, maybe I'll sneak it to him tomorrow when nobody's looking.

Vivienne Stewart from the Asia Society was next to speak concerning education and globalisation. Her words struck a real chord and have massive significance for a school like ours. Our "Islands of the World" project with among others, Martha's Vineyard and the Orkneys is a start, but we clearly have much to do in fostering the sort of collaboration and understanding she talked about. As usual, it's all about giving teachers explicit support and the time to explore the possibilities available to them. Hopefully our upcoming International Day can be a springboard for more of this work.

Lunch was an extended one, purposely I assume to give people the chance to connect. I was lucky enough to meet Noah Katz from Renaissance College's Digital Technology Team. One of the features of events like these is that just when you think you might be beginning to master the skills, concepts and knowledge you need to move forward, you meet somebody like Noah who makes you realise the journey has only just begun. He was naieve enough to give me his contact details... big mistake, Noah!

A discussion panel on 21st Century Leadership followed by a breakout session gave us greater opportunity to explore global collaboration and some good ideas from Greg Israel.

The day ended with John Couch, VP from Apple Aducation talking about Apple's Vision for Modern Education. All you need to know about John's session is that it was due to finish at 5.30 and at 5.50 on a Saturday evening, everybody was still sat listening.

With events like this there's little chance for deeper reflection until the event is over, so the above is a brief, rushed summary of Day One. I'm off to Day Two now!

Apple Conference Countdown - Bring It On!

It's fair to say that I'm pretty excited about this weekend's Education Leadership Summit at Canadian International School. I've spoken to quite a few teachers who are attending in the last few days and it seems I'm not the only one! Clearly Hong Kong is ready for this type of event now and it's to Apple's credit that they have assembled such an impressive list of speakers and persuaded delegates to attend from all over Asia. It's important that the ed-tech community here in HK builds upon this weekend and moves forward, not only at our own conference in September, but also in the future.

Hopefully, more exciting collaborative projects like the one documented below will be born this weekend.

On another note this will be the first major conference I have been to since the "Birth of Twitter" and I suspect that it will be a major feature of the conference, providing an interactive back-channel to the proceedings and enriching the conference experience for delegates. Twitter is a great tool for teachers. It helps them to learn. Yes, it has been trivialised in the media to an extent, but it's helping teachers to connect and converse with each other. Without Twitter, we would not be involved in the Islands of the World project, which came about through a Twitter contact.

Thanks to Tom Barrett (again!) for pointing out US Principal Bill Carozza's blog post with regard to teacher's use of Twitter - well worth a read. He makes the telling point about the tool;

"Twitter and its ability to form a PLN has been one of the most useful professional development instruments in my 25 years in the biz"

So, I'll be sure to have my laptop charged ready to tweet the weekend away...

During my teaching career I've heard the word's "Thank goodness it's Friday" mentioned a few times. That's how I feel... I can't wait to get to work... on Saturday morning.

Global Collaborative Project

You know that you are beginning to win the battle when a student approaches you at the end of the lesson and asks if you can post links to what they've just covered on 'your blog'....

So...

P4 have begun to look at the global collaborative project on islands that I've been tweeting about a lot recently. We looked at the project Wiki and also located the other schools using Google Maps. We spent time looking at Hong Kong Island making sure we knew the districts so that we could explain them to a student from another school.

During the next session we will begin to assemble the resources we need to present information abour our island life and about our school. As we were looking at satellite images of the skyscrapers in and around mid-levels we thought about how the students of one of the schools in the project might feel about our island. Their island, in the Orkneys of Scotland has a total population of 70 - most of the buildings in mid-levels have at least that number living in them!

Google Maps is a great resource for studying your own locality as well as that of others - here's the link.

For this of you who want to explore Hong Kong a little more why not take a look at out Google Earth quiz from last year?

If you would like to know more about our global islands project, the Wiki can be viewed here. We've only just started but hopefully more should appear shortly.

Easter in HK

Easter hols are almost over, hope everybody had a good one.

Here's a few of the places I visited, maybe you've already been or you're considering going there at some point. Anyway, here are a few thoughts.

First up a visit to Shau Kei Wan to the Museum of Coastal Defense. Based within and around a coastal fort the museum documents Hong Kong's relationship with the surrounding sea and the various conflicts that have occured on it. It's a great way to spend half a day, especially if the weather's not too hot and there's plenty of interest in the different historical displays, which are broken down into different time zones. As an added bonus, there are some big guns to look at as well!!

Next up was Wonder Park Plus, situated on the 6th floor of the World Trade Centre in Wan Chai, this much hyped Japanese gaming centre has long been on my list of places to visit. Whilst it's true there are a huge array of fantastic arcade games available within the centre the problem is that they are all in the adult section. It's hard to understand why games such as Virtua Tennis and all the motor racing games there are deemed to be only suitable for adults. All that's left for the under 16s are the grabber type games which are frankly a waste of time. Wonder Park Plus gets a big thumbs down from me, I'm afraid. My junior sidekick was not happy there!!

Given it was the holidays that means it was necessary to visit some of the great shopping areas in HK, namely my two favourites! No, not IFC, but 188 gaming mall and Sham Shui Po Flea Market. Great fun as always.

So, refreshed and rested it's time to start a new term. There are some really exciting things going on in ICT this term, not only at Kellett but in the wider HK ICT community as well.

More on these developments soon. Meantime, here are some of my holiday snaps!

BubbleShare: Share photos - Play some Online Games.

Kellett Is a Nice School

It's important to make that clear before we continue with this thread! The short films you are about to view bare no relation to what school life is really like at Kellett!

Year 7 students have just completed their English/ICT film module. During the module they are encouraged to look at aspects of movie making, including scripting, directing and editing. They also have to story board their films, file a shooting schedule and arrange for props and locations themselves. Important lessons include how to frame action and how to ensure continuity within their films.

Three of the completed films are shown below.

This is the second year we've worked on this project and again it has been a huge success. Working with a much larger year group was challenging but the students rose to the challenge and applied themselves really well. A great job!

If Teacher Tube is downloading slowly, the movies are also hosted on our Youtube page here.

School Visits

It's always good to get out and visit other schools to see what they're up to.

Last week I was lucky enough to visit two schools in HK for completely different reasons.

First up was Yew Chung Inernational School in Kowloon Tong. I met with Dan Everest from there along with Jane Harris from CIS to discuss our use of the programming software Scratch.

We've all used the software in completely different ways and it was good to talk about what we had learnt and share our expertise. Yew Cheung have been using Scratch in their Literacy lessons to enhance student understanding of MacBeth, whilst CIS have embedded their work on Scratch within Numeracy, using it to explore shape and space. At Kellett we've been using Scratch to investigate aspects of computer game design with our P6 and Y7 classes.

Whilst our experiences are clearly different there were some common trends for all of us.

Firstly, the usefulness of Scratch as a classroom tool is obvious. It is engaging and stimulating for pupils and there is an easy entry level for those students who need to work at a basic starting point.

Secondly, the scope for students to extend and self-explore progression in the software is enormous. Tasks can be open ended and exploratory in their nature, which means students can continue to expand their horizons within the environment at their own pace.

Thirdly, we all agreed one of the marked successes of working with the software was the emergence of experts within the classroom who take on the role of mentor with their peers. These self-acting "pupil teachers' are able to add their advice and insight into the software. Students seem to naturally accept this type of help and have far fewer hang-ups about it than teachers do.

The days of the 'sage on the stage' are long gone. It's simply not possible for teachers to have a wide enough experience and expertise on new software and we need to accept that's ok! That can be quite a difficult thing for teachers to do and can be a major barrier to 21st Century Learning. Most students don't have a problem with it.

As a result of our discussions and sharing we now have a bank of good practice using Scratch and we are now formulating ways we can develop this further. It may be that the upcoming World Scratch Day Event at the Cyberport in Hong Kong gives us the opportunity.

Saturday May 16th is World Scratch Day and events are taking place around the world to showcase and introduce the software to teachers who are new to the platform, as well as those who have more experience. HK's event is at the Cyberport and the programme looks to contain some interesting sessions. I will be meeting with the group involved in organising the event shortly, so will have more information then.

My second school visit in as many days was to Canadian International School. I accompanied our new ICT Strategy Manager, Billy Ling to look at Canadian's successful implementation of the Apple platform into their school. It was certainly impressive and gives us lots of helpful information as we look to develop our infrastructure for the future.

One of the key aspects of schools progressing in the the 21st Century is the ability they have to share their expertise, either through a teacher's own development of their personal learning netoworks, or through good old fashioned sitting down and talking face-to-face! Without that things would be so much more difficult.

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.

Google Lively - the protest spreads

I'm a big fan of Google, I think they do some great things that impact hugely upon teaching and learning. We've used loads of their tools at Kellett... Earth, Sketchup, Maps, Docs, Picasa, and sometimes students even use it for searching!

However, their recent decision to shut down Google Lively at the end of December has caused dismay amongst many in education who see the opportunity to extend classrooms into virtual environments as an important strand of 21st Century Learning. Whilst it's true that major virtual grids exist elsewhere, such as Second Life, the ability to create your own rooms and customise them for your own students offers huge potential.

Education is still only just dipping it's toe into the possibilities that virtual worlds afford us, but it's companies like Google with it's track record of creating innovative tools for educators that should be leading the way, not bailing out without giving leading innovaters time to experiment and share their practise.

A huge well done to Vicki Davis in leading the way on this. Her students have been using Google Lively as a means of investigating aspects of Digital Citizenship and quite rightly they are dismayed at Google's decision to pull the plug. They have recently held a protest to try to convince Google that they should change their minds and they have the full support of our Year 8 students who have begun to explore Lively.

Education takes time to discover, investigate and formulate strategies for using new tools. They can't just be adopted because they look good, they need an educational context to justify their use. Two years ago we looked into setting up a Kellett Island in Second Life but the cost was prohibitive. Lively offers us the opportunity to do it for free but we need more time to structure our approach.

Please give us the time, Google. You can sign the Google Lively Petition here.

What do our Year 8 students think?

Year 7 Scratch

Both Year 6 and 7 have continued to look at the programming language Scratch in the last three weeks. Whilst P6 have begun to look at controlling images of themselves within the Scratch environment, the Year 7s have been considering aspects of computer game design whilst creating simple games that could be played by younger students.

A number of the games are very playable and include important aspects of game design, such as scoring, timers, levels and targets. The study of Scratch not only helps students to understand aspects of Control Technology, it also encourages review and refinement as well as offering a relatively simple path into the world of programming.

Hopefully a few of the games will be available for playing shortly.

Parent Forum

Day Two of Robyn Treyvaud's visit kicked off with an early morning session with the Kellett parents. Over 60 parents gathered in the Auditorium to hear Robyn speak about the experiences of young people today in their online worlds and how they can be supported. She stressed how our students see online as an extension and enhancement of their real-world existence and how it can be used to build upon friendships and relationships rather than replacing them.



She also talked about the importance of connectedness for our pupils and it was clear that much of what she said struck a chord with our parents. Sadly, the session only lasted for 70 minutes. I suspect that most present would have been quite happy to stay and listen to Robyn talk all day!

The initial feedback from the session was very positive;

• "the talk today was fantastic, great lady in tune with parental concerns but still able to talk to children"


• "A very good talk, good update and positive"

Robyn has made the text of her presentation available to parents and these will be ready shortly. She also has a Delicious account where you can access some of her links;

You can access the resources by clicking here.

After the parents had left the Auditorium it was non stop for the rest of the day as Robyn ran four sessions for pupils at KS2 and 3. Yet again she was able to connect so well with students that they discussed their issues honestly and openly. The sessions were also extremely valuable to those members of staff that attended.

Staff were able to listen to Robyn again after school as she reiterated some of the aspects covered in the earlier Parent Forum. Tomorrow morning will be an opportunity for our Educational Support Staff to meet Robyn.

During a series of meetings tomorow key staff will discuss events from the week and plan how we can move forward as a community to come to terms with what Digital Citizenship means.

Rising To The Top

It's true what they say, you can't beat age and experience.

The first few weeks of the Fantasy Football season saw the students out in front, but as the season has progressed the teachers have begun to dominate matters. In fact, as of today, five of the top six spots are filled by the teachers.

Clearly they know much more about football than the Kellett students. Oh well, keep trying!

A small glimmer of hope for the students might be that current leader, Ms Lewis and 4th placed Mr Hulbert are this week celebrating the arrival of Katie Jane, born at the weekend. Many congratulations to all of them and here's hoping they still find time to manage their teams!

P3 Animoto Slideshow

P3 have just finished their Art in ICT module and it was a great success. We studied the art of Bridget Riley and used ICT to mimic some of her methods. Firstly we looked at the artist's early drawing in black and white and used a template to master the fill tool in Colour Magic.

During the second lesson we looked carefully at some of her coloured paintings and used templates to mimic them. We made effective use of ICT by saving our work continually after making changes, thereby enabling us to create a much bigger portfolio of work.

The later lessons involved students creating their own templates to fill. They used the Snap-to-Grid tool to help them create grids before filling them with colour and again saving lots of versions of their work. Some of their designs were amazingly intricate, as can be seen from the Animoto slideshow above.

There was some really creative work in the latter part of this module and the P3s worked really hard. Well done!

All the KS2 students at Kellett now have their own Animoto accounts so they can make their own slideshows on aspects of their studies.

Scratching Around

P6 students have begun to use Scratch in their ICT lessons. This brilliant piece of software from MIT is a great learning tool, allowing access to theories of programming as well as creativity.

We have been looking at different ways of learning the software, either progressing through a series of tutorials provided by Learnscratch.org or simply playing with the software and trying things out. Interestingly the results varied between classes with those set the task of investigating through play appearing to have a better understanding of the software than those who were working through the tutorials.

Learn more about this project

However, the tutorials do contain some excellent ideas for extended projects which we will be visiting in the next few weeks.

Scratch is an extremely engaging piece of software, students quickly become immersed in the intricacies and require little in the way of support from the teacher and are at ease with methods of self-support or helping each other out;

"How do you get rid of what you've drawn?"

"Right there."

Another great aspect of Scratch is that it's completely free and downloadable from the MIT website. It's a must have download for all students at the top of KS2 and up (or maybe even younger)

You can download Scratch here.

For those digital immigrants who like me require the security blanket of organised tutorials, LearnScratch is a great place to start.

Sham Shui Po

A trip to Sham Shui Po is a good opportunity to browse the computer mall and market stalls and pick up a few goodies.

On the crowded MTR on the way there I was near to a group of three children (prob Y7/8) all of different races who between them had around five devices and spent the whole trip completely engaged with each other and their technology, listening to their music via shared headphones, viewing images on their cameras and constantly making phone calls, sending photos to each other.

A few things struck me as we travelled northwards. Firstly, how at home they were with their technology. They were competent users who used their devices as part of their everyday lives, socially and recreationally. Secondly, how can we transfer this enagement and this seamless use of technology into the classroom? Yes, we're making progress, but we must keep trying to extend what we do. The everyday use of technology musn't stop at the school gates, it needs to be completely embedded into the curriculum. Our students have an entitlement to that.

I like the manifesto/vision statement of a local school I read recently which stated that students should use ICT for 25% of the time they are in school. That sounds reasonable at primary level, depending on the sort of ICT they were doing, of course.

In recent weeks we've begun some exciting projects at Kellett using ICT, and not just in the ICT suite itself. Our new Flip Ultra video cameras (pictured left) have seen a lot of use in both KS1 and 2 whilst Year 7 and 8 continue to progress with Google Docs. On the horizon are some extremely exciting projects using our new facial animation software, Crazy Talk, and looking at games as a stumulus for writing at P6.

I'm really looking forward to continuing to embed technology within the curriculum and a few more goodies from Sham Shui Po will help a little! Our Flip Ultra sits proudly atop a new "Gorilla-Pod" "type"(!) tripod purchased on my recent visit. A few spare sets of headphones and smaller animation tripods were also bought on the day trip...

We're Published

Towards the end of the last academic year, students in Year 7 spent time looking at how to add content to the photo positioning web site Panoramio. They looked closely at the locations they visited during their visit to Kota Kinabalu, but also added images of the school. Although it's possible to see your images translated onto maps within Panoramio... like this one, the real aim is to get your images added to Google Earth.

The good news is that one of our images recently made it! If you visit Wah Fu in Google Earth and have the Panoramio option switched on you can see our photo, and so can the whole world!

The ability to publish content is an essential part of 21st Century Learning and is a powerful motivator for students. Only ten years ago, students published their work to an extremely limited audience; their teacher, theirselves and maybe their classmates and close family with selected pieces of work.

With the development of the internet and the huge number of Web 2.0 tools now available students and their teachers can publish their work to much larger audiences, through collaborative work with classes and students from other countries, or to the internet in general.

During the past year, the small number of videos Kellett has published to the web have been viewed over 14,000 times. Compare that to the number that view a wall display in even the busiest of schools....

Google Docs

Year 7 have been working on the creation of a PowerPoint presentation about themselves. Whilst the use of PowerPoint may not be exactly innovative, the challenge for students is to make their work visually interesting and give them the scaffold to talk to their peers about themselves for three minutes.

As I've mentioned before we've looked at some aspects of PowerPoint that people often mis-use; intrusive backgrounds, inappropriate animations etc and we're trying to avoid those mistakes.

Whilst the use of PowerPoint might be labelled as old fashioned, it does have its uses and is still a standard software package for presentations. When our presentations are finished we will be looking at alternatives to PowerPoint and comparing applications.

We are going to try something different and innovative during our presentations though. When each Presentation is completed all students will have the opportunity to peer assess their classmates via Google Docs. Hopefully, each presenter will then have 23 pieces of feedback to help them evaluate and if necessary, refine their work.

That's the theory anyway! Setting up Google Docs has taken a little time but we seem to be getting there. Check back to see how it goes.

Rather conveniently, I will be attending a session on using Google Docs in the classroom at Hong Kong University this Saturday. Hopefully, I will return with some good ideas on how we can use this excellent resource across the school.

At A Loose End?

The EBD's decision to close schools today in the wake of Typhoon Hagupit means that some students may be at a loose end! Not so the teachers who are in school working hard!

For those that would like some ICT related 'stuff' to do today, here are a few ideas for a rainy day.

Brainormous has some great Numeracy related games in the free demo section. Try blasting through some subtraction problems. Click here to visit the site.

Another really useful site for a range of abilities within Numeracy is Super Maths World, which uses gaming type scenarios to teach subjects such as addition and subtraction of decimals. Click here to visit the site.

Younger students may like to visit Help Kidz Learn which has lots of fun games and activities, including T-Tex Build Up and Knock Down! Click here to visit the site.

Another old favourite worth a visit is Samarost. P5 spent some time looking at this stunning problem solving game last year and loved it. Click here to visit the site.