Paramore in Hong Kong

The news that Paramore will be playing Hong Kong in August reminded me of the time we created some Lip Dubs in our Computer Club.

I just had to go back and find the one of Paramore's "That's What You Get". It was great fun to make!

PhotoPeach

The news that our photo slideshow provider, Bubbleshare is about to close down is a bit of a disaster. Our slideshows have been viewed over 9000 times there and it's a great way of showcasing our work.

Originally, we used RockYou for this purpose, which remains an excellent platform too. Sadly, and for no good reason, our ISP, PCCW decided to filter RockYou in school. Despite lengthy protests on our behalf, their rigid (and flawed!) policy persists, meaning we have to look elsewhere.

Thanks to my Twitter network, we have started to experiment with PhotoPeach, and here's our first try, which is a repost of work we had on Bubbleshare. The images show students working with the computer game Samorost in Literacy and Drama and will be used when three of our teachers present at the upcoming Hong Kong 21st Century Learning Conference.

Good luck to them and fingers crossed that PhotoPeach meets our needs!

Using Samorost in Literacy on PhotoPeach

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.

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 Resources

Day three of Robyn's visit began with a session for Educational Support Assistants. The staff listened intently to Robyn and there were lots of questions at the end!

Feedback from yesterday's Parent Forum continues to be positive and for those who wish to read further or who couldn't make yesterday's meeting, here are a number of resources to help you out.

• A summary of Robyn's discussion with parents is now available and can be viewed here.
  
• Childnet International offers a variety of resources to support students, teachers and parents. Click here to visit
  
• Digizen hosts a variety of resources including the film Let's Fight It Together used with our older students. Click here to visit
  
• Kidsmart is another good source for support and parental advice and includes an interactive presentation which is a great help. Click here to visit
  
• Symantec also offer a set of resources including a checklist for parents. Click here to visit

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.

Creating Resilient Digital Citizens

Digital Citizenship expert Robyn Treyvaud joined us today for the first of three days looking at the challenges and opportunities that face young people today.

After a tour of the school Robyn spent the first part of the morning discussing aspects of Digital Citizenship with staff. We touched upon safe and appropriate conduct, copyright, illegal downloads, cyber-bullying and a myriad of other subjects in a fascinating conversation.


Robyn then spoke to the P3 year group about their experiences using the internet and fleshed out how our students use the net and what issues they are concerned with. Robyn's manner encouraged the children to be reflective and they produced some extremely thought provoking comments, particularly on the subject of pressure from advertisers.

After lunch it was the turn of P4 who discussed a wide range of internet use, including blogging, games playing and illegal downloading. As in the earlier session, staff present were fascinated to hear the extent to which our students are immersed in the net and the types of activities they get up to.

At the end of the day Robyn spoke to the Early Years staff about how they can work with pupils to ensure positive use of the amazing resources available to our students and also discussed Digital Footprints.

A busy but fascinating day! Tomorrow promises to be just as interesting with Robyn starting with a Coffee Morning with Kellett parents, as well as sessions with our older pupils.

More to follow.

Dear Santa... Part 2

Even though I spend a lot of time using a keyboard I do still use a pen or a pencil on a daily basis, using a notebook to make notes on lessons.

Whilst it's inevitable that examinations will soon offer the option of typed answers, the ability to write fluently (if not neatly) is an advantage, as it the ability to type speedily and accurately, of course.

The next item in my Christmas list looks a real winner and could even have some uses in school for students, although the price might be a little offputting.

The Pulse Smartpen offers the ability to record audio files and download to a PC or a laptop and can seemingly synch the audio to your handwriting.

It sounds amazing, and if anybody has seen these on sale in HK, please, please let me know! The only downside for me is that on average I lose around 3.7 pens a week.

Thanks to Merlin John for pointing me to this. Here's the ad;

I bumped into Merlin John at BETT earlier this year and his blog is a favourite in my Google Reader. Without him, it would have taken me much longer to find out about the Smart Table, another great application from Smart. As a Smart refugee living in a Promethean world it may be a little ambitious adding this to my list, but one can only hope!

Digital Citizenship

Next week promises to be an exciting time at Kellett as we will be joined by Robyn Treyvaud for the first three days of the week.

Robyn is founder of Cyber Safe Kids and is a renowned speaker and trainer on all aspects of Digital Citizenship and the ways young people use the net. During her time at Kellett she will be running sessions for all KS2 and 3 students and working with staff to develop policies and coursework to reinforce her ideas.

She will also be speaking at a special Coffee Morning held on Tues 18th November in our auditorium to which all Kellett parents are invited. She will discuss the issues that face parents and suggest ways of coming to terms with the world in which our young people live.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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.

X-Raye

X-Raye is a nice example of a problem-solving/strategy game. Minclip has a number of this type of game that require strategic thinking and planning as well as keyboard and mouse dexterity.

Whilst it's true that some of the games are of the 'shoot 'em up' variety, there's a lot more to Miniclip than that.

XRaye Guide Raye through all 14 levels.

Play this free game now!!

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.

Wish You Were There?

Another important event following on from Shanghai Learning 2.0 is the Scottish Learning Festival which has an extremely stimulating and thought provoking series of seminars. Hopefully, some of the presentations will be available online for those that are interested.

Through the work of Ewan McIntosh, Derek Robertson and their colleagues Scotland are leading the way in innovative uses of technology within the curriculum. Any conference that has a seminar list including 'Using the Sony PSP as a Learning Tool in the Primary Classroom' and 'Please Miss, My Nintendog Needs Fed' is certainly worth taking note of.

As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, Games Based Learning is an integral part of the ICT curriculum here at Kellett and we are always looking for interesting and innovative ways to expand our provision. Hopefully we can learn from the expertise the Learning and Teaching Scotland has put together, a case study of which appeared in the TES recently.

PowerPointless?

It's hard to believe that Microsoft PowerPoint is 21 years old now! During my lengthy time in education I've seen some interesting PowerPoints, but I've also seen some awful ones, many of them delivered by adults! The desire to include lots of brightly coloured backgrounds and animated text is not just limited to students.

Whilst it's true that PowerPoint is a useful communication tool, it's not exactly cutting edge and needs to be used carefully within the classroom. Is it the right tool for the job? Is there something that might work better or be more appropriate, should we be using Slideshare to enable us to reach a wider audience, or Google Docs to allow collaborative work etc? Is PhotoStory a viable alternative, or even Movie Maker, or Animoto, or one of a range of other Web 2.0 type tools?

If we decide it is the right tool, how can we ensure we use it to achieve our objectives? Year 7 are tackling these issues as they look at preparing to give a presentation to their peers about themselves.

There are lots of tasks to carry out surrounding collection of resources before they think about creating their PowerPoint, do they need photos scanned, will they use sound, where can they source digital images?

Examples of poor design have already been looked at and students have been able to identify aspects of poorly made slideshows. This will hopefully allow them to avoid making mistakes when they give their presentation.

Giving the presentation is a different matter of course. This relies on speaking skills and presentational style. It's imprtant to remember that the slideshow is merely an aid to your presentation, not the actual presentation itself.

For those of you that need a little tech help with the software, here are a few suggestions;

http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/powerpoint101/a/begin_guide.htm

Useful short tutorials… ignore the ones that talk about inserting clip art!!

http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/classrooms/tp/student_tips.htm

Some good advice for students on how to create interesting presentations

http://www.teach-ict.net/software/ppt/powerpoint.htm

Easy to follow basic tutorials

http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC011368101033

Slideshow Tutorial from Microsoft – too long to find out the answers, maybe, but the template creation video may be helpful to you.

Shanghai Jealousy!

I have to admit to more than a twinge of jealousy towards those HK schools that set off for Shanghai earlier this week for the 2nd Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference. This new event was a huge success last year attracting an impressive list of speakers and attendees.

I'll be sure to be paying attention to the Conference Ning to keep up with developments and listen to speakers such as David Warlick.

Good luck to all present. Maybe I'll make it next year!