Farewell Mrs Pattle!

Imagining ICT running smoothly at Kellett without Mrs Pattle is impossible! However, that's just what we are going to have to do when we return to school after Christmas. Friday saw Mrs Pattle's last day at Kellett, indeed her last day in Hong Kong as she left that evening to return to her native New Zealand along with Mr Pattle who recently secured a position at a university there.

Pam has been at Kellett for over six years, intially as an ESA but then as ICT Manager and for the last term as Database Manager, although she was still very much involved in the day-to-day running of ICT, providing just-in-time support for students and teachers alike.

Pam's contribution to the development of Kellett's ICT has been immeasurable; she provided a link to the work of Jessica Brown and had a detailed understanding of the legacy of Kellett ICT and knew everything about why and how we were where we are. It's essential that we are able to build upon her work to ensure we continue to make the right decisions about our future paths. Having lost that understanding of past progression that is going to be very difficult, but I'm positive we can rise to the challenge.

One of Pam's great assets is that she was always able to look at things from a variety of viewpoints; system and hardware management, educational and pedagogical perspectives and carried out her duties with a friendly and helpful manner. Staff always spoke very highly of her and her departure will be a huge loss to our support structure.

I spent three years and a term working with Pam and it's no exaggeration to say that I wouldn't have been able to do my job without her. Her support was always invaluable and when the next history of Kellett is written it will need a serious amount of text dedicated to her!!

So, it's with a huge amount of sadness, but also best wishes for the future that we say farwell to Mrs Pattle. Good luck!!

Alphabet Thinkers Keys

Here's a great little video by our P2 students using the Alphabet Thinkers Key to organise their research on Neil Armstrong as part of their study on Famous People.

An A-Z of Neil Armstrong

Artist In Residence

The week beginning the 2nd of November sees Tom Wood visiting Kellett as Artist in Residence. This project will rely heavily upon ICT and we have been busy preparing for it for some time now, not least trying to learn the basics of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) students will be using to manipulate their work.

Tom Wood has prepared a video giving some background to himself and the project. This is an extremely exciting venture and we look forward to sharing the results with you later in the term.

ICT INSET Day

While the National Day/Moon Festival celebrations were a great opportunity for students to enjoy a long weekend, staff were hard at it on the Friday, attending a training day looking at our use of ICT and considering how we can encourage our students to become more 21st Century literate by providing them with appropriate classroom opportunities.

The day began with a presentation on how technology has impacted upon our lives and the implications this has for our classroom practice. We looked at evidence of students learning outside of school and at ways we can provide more authentic uses of technology within the classroom.

Staff then attended a variety of workshops on the following subjects;
Five Websites You Can't Teach Without!
Creating a Wiki
Using Computer Games in the Classroom
Voicethread
Kellett Kit - easy to use tech in the classroom

The afternoon session was spent looking at teh ISTE Standards for students and considering how we can use them within our curriculum.

The day was a very positive experience and it's a clear sign that as a school, we are determined to maximimise the use of technology to the benefit of our students. many thanks to all those attended and a special thanks to all those who presented some great workshops!

ICT INSET Day from Clive Dawes on Vimeo.

A Big Weekend

Around 500 delegates are expected to be present at HKIS for this weekend's 21st Century Learning Conference. I'm delighted that 10 teachers will be attending from Kellett and look forward to their views on the huge array of presentations and keynotes they will see.

Good luck to three of our teachers who will be presenting their work on Games Based Learning at Kellett. The Slideshare of the presentation is below. It doesn't include the audio or video but gives you a good idea of the sorts of things they'll be talking about.

I will be sitting on a forum discussing Games Based Learning and offering my views and opinions, which should be fun, if a little nerve wracking.

Keynote speakers include Wes Fryer and Robyn Treyvaud, who visited Kellett last year; it will be good to catch up with what she's been up to since we last met!

Games At Kellett

View more presentations from clived.

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

Academic Year 09/10

The ICT Room is in disarray with laptops, leads and boxes everywhere...

That can mean only one thing... it's the start of a new school year!

Staying In Touch

The long summer break in an international school means that it can be a challenge for staff to stay in touch with each other.

In our absence there have clearly been issues back at Kellett with the web site and the e-mail system. I understand these are being tackled and the system will be up and running within the next few days.

For all those who have been looking for the Kellett site and been redirected to this blog via search engines, I'd like to apologise for this situation and reiterate that it will be rectified as soon as possible.

Interestingly, it's at times like this when other, often derided forms of communication help out. During the past few days I have conversed with other staff on school matters via both Facebook and Twitter. Thank goodness for reliable old social networking...

If you need to contact me, please use the Kellett ICT Twitter feed (to the right of this post) or leave a message in the comments below.

Thanks

MrD

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!

FOBISSEA 2009

Well done to all those that particiated in a memorable FOBISSEA Games last week. Hosted by Kellett School, Hong Kong, other schools competing were Taipei European School, Taiwan, ELC International School, Malyasia, BIS Vietnam, St Andrew's Rayong, and Regents, Pattaya.

Below is a copy of the video shown at the Gala Dinner... a very rushed edit compiled throughout the games!!

FOBISSEA Games 2009 from Clive Dawes on Vimeo.

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

Online Learning Project

Last night saw the launch of our collaborative online learning project here at Kellett. This exciting new venture involves Yew Chung and Chinese International Schools working with ourselves to investigate student use of online learning spaces.

The basic outline of the project is that older, experienced users of the programming language Scratch mentor younger users from a different school in the use of the software. Their communications will be entirely online in our purpose built learning environment and will be outside of school time.

As teachers, we are increasingly aware of how the dynamics of education are constantly shifting and how students have access to a huge community of learners and 'teachers' outside of school. We hope that this project will give us an insight into how this community can be used to enhance the learning of our students.

The project is likely to begin next week on the completion of our online environment and students will be involved for around eight months. At various points we will be updating parents about the progress we are making and expect to feed back to the wider education community in the new academic year, most notably at the Hong Kong 21st Century Learning Conference in September.

We are also grateful for the involvement of LEAD who will be evaluating our results when the project is completed.

Below is a copy of the presentation given last night.

Same Old, Same Old

After a hard fought season, the Kellett Staff Fantasy Football League came to a less than thrilling conclusion at the weekend with reigning champion Mr. Lovell retaining his title by a comfortable margin. Runner up Miss Lewis finished a gallant and somewhat unlucky second after leading the competition for the vast majority of the 38 weeks.

In third place for the second year running was Mr Dawes, representing the accumulated brainpower of the ICT Department.

Unfortunately there was a familiar look to the bottom of the league too, but to save embarrassment we wont be discussing that here!

A special well done to Leo who was the winner of the first Kellett Student League. no mean feat as there were nearly 100 entries in that event.

World Scratch Day - Hong Kong Event

It's great that a group like LEAD exists in Hong Kong to help raise the awareness of technology opportunities within the curriculum. Even better that they were able to organise an event to mark the second birthday of Scratch, the interactive programming language devised at MIT.

Hong Kong's event, which added to events in over 40 other countries took place on Saturday at the Cyberport, a fitting venue to consider technology within the curriculum.



On show were a number of Scratch presentations from local HK schools, including the amazing Sawing Down the Tree game. The standard of presentations wa extremely high and I was left a little bemused after a Year 5 student showed me his complex and entertaining presentation. It's clear that there's some great work going on in HK schools and this was a great opportunity to observe, and dareisay, think of ways in which we might be able to catch up!

It was then down to work, as in my haste I had mistakenly signed up for the 'Advanced' Workshop! Edmond from LEAD gave us the complete technical lowdown on how to use external Pico boards with Scratch and it was a fantastic opportunity to play with buttons, sliders, audio and light sensors. We certainly need to add some of these to our stock as they are a great way of adding that element of external control to presentations.

Back to the theatre for a session on how Scratch has made an impact in local schools and well done to the translation team who were brilliantly efficient in allowing colleagues from the international school community full access to the discussion.



Another session on using Web 2.0 tools within Scratch followed after lunch. We covered some of this stuff with Year 6 earlier in the year and hopefully the new version of Scratch may have an improved picture editor so that this type of work can be done within the interface. Nevertheless, the session was useful, it was good idea to use Audacity to add your own sounds and the pitch altering tool made for some fun effects!

BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing

The final session initially involved colleagues from local secondary schools talking about the new secondary curriculum and how Scratch was being used to help with ideas involving, creativity, design and problem-solving - it was great to hear those words being used.

The day rounded off with a panel discussion focussing on A New Paradigm of Teaching and Learning featuring Jane Harris (CIS), Dan Everest (YCIS) and myself. We discussed our feelings about the importance of Scratch within the creative 21st Century curriculum and outlined our collaborative project (more on that later!). We also touched on the importance of games within the wider curriculum, assessment and a number of other issues close to our hearts!

It was a bit un-nerving sitting on a sofa in front of an audience, but moderator Dr Felicia Tsang ran the session well and I only felt stupid the one time!

Well done to all those involved on the day and we look forward to building upon this good work to spread Scratch out of the lab and into the classroom where it belongs!!

World Scratch Day - Hong Kong

Firstly, apologies for the lack of blogging recently. It's not that there's nothing going on, in fact, it's completely the opposite, which is one of the reasons for the lack of blog posts....

That, combined with the 'R' word... r_ p _ _ _ s - no prizes for guessing what the least favorite occupational hazard involved with teaching is!

Anyway, yesterday was World Scratch Day and Hong Kong was one of 42 countries involved, with an event at the Cyberport. I'll add a full report of the day as soon as the other r_p _ _ _s are finsished, but here's Mitch Resnick and Karen Brennan to give a bit of background and flavour: