This morning workshop held at the Guardian news-room in Farringdon, London demonstrated to teachers how the effective use of newspapers in the class-room can improve standards in reading and writing. Britain is 9th in the world league table of newspaper readership and a close correlation exists between the literacy of a nation and its readershipof newspapers.
George Kelly of Creative Media Concepts underlined the importance of 'getting kids reading' and sharpening up their awarenness of the world around them.
He suggested 4 activities for teachers to use with immediate effect:
- Show a picture and come up with a headline
- Find 3 successful people featured in the paper and explain why you think they are successful.
- From the people mentioned in the paper, find two who you'd like to invite to your party. Would they get on?
- Find somewhere in the paper where you'd rather be- explain why.
The Guardian showed how their Learn News Desk site can support pupils' learning. Greenacres Primary school used a controversial article on teenage pregnancy to stimulate debate and encourage an empathetic repsonse from pupils.
The ballot box feature on the site also engages pupils interactively in the news.
For more information, see the Guardian Newsroom site.
Having attended the G&T Conference last Thursday, I was really impressed by the quality and challenge provided by the e-resources on the
London Gifted and Talented site.
Ian Warwick demonstrated the potential of some of the English resources designed to stretch the most able pupils to produce work beyond a level 7. By engaging pupils in controversial topics such as
Designer Babies and The impact of advertising on young people, London G&T aim to develop pupils' higher order thinking skills through innovative and creative activites.
Last wednesday, West Kent colleagues had the opportunity to find out more about what is involved in applying for the ICT mark from Neil Adams of Beacon ICT.
Lesley Johnson, Secondary ICT Consulant and Terry Burton of Hugh Christie Technology College (who have recently been awarded thre ICT mark) were also on hand to answer any questions.
More details on this are available by clicking on the link above.
There are a wealth of interactive resources available on the
Kent NGFL site including a virtual wall chart to keep track of all the results.
These web-sites were mentioned and recommended at the Tonbridge IWB twilight last week, run by Sarah Chapman at the Hayesbrook School:
Matti USU
Coxhoe Durham
Stumbled across this on my Yahoo home page whilst checking email. Yahoo now owns
Flickr (an on-line photo blog which allows collaborative uploading and viewing and commentry of images.) You can
tag all images to make them easier to find too.
These ones are of the Solar Eclipse- pretty cool!!
My colleague James Barrett has created this web-based starter activity for Kent MFL teachers. It is ideal for use on the IWB and allows pupils to select the date and the weather electronically. Click on the link below.
NOW AVAILABLE IN SPANISH
Hope you have fun using it!
http://www.ictgames.com/dateChartFrancais.html
Yesterday, about 20 teachers from across the Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells clusters met to develop their ICT skills in languages teaching and to share ideas and good practice across schools.
Four 'Hands On' workshops were offered: Powerpoint and MFL, using Kar2ouche to create stimulating role-plays, Hot Potatoes and Interactive whiteboards and MFL.
The afternoon demos included FREE world-wide audio-conferencing using SKYPE, watching the news and weather via broadband on TF1.fr and the use of web-cams such as the one trained on the Eiffel Tower!
Task Magic (software used to create interactive gamesand quizzes similar to Hot Potatoes) was shown in a variety of ways. This can be purchased with your ELCs.
I have seen Activ Vote used with Promethean boards and today saw Quizdom in action. It allows pupils to not only answer multiple choice and true/false type questions but also input text and numerical answers which broadens its scope for classroom usage. You can also quickly adapt existing ppts to use them interactively with your class.
On another note, Orange, the mobile phone people are offering a free video resource to schools. Future Home showcases the new technologies pupils will soon encounter in their own homes. This was recommended by ICT teacher, Lyn Chalk of St Gregory's in Tunbridge Wells.
Mandy Barrow (HoS KS2/3 Consultant) did a demo of these 2 resources at a meeting in Dartford this afternoon. I love the interactive calendar which gives you links to topical resources such as the Winter Olympics ready to use in lessons.
Secondly, seeing as I'm welsh, I have to give a plug to NGFL Cymru for their wide range of e-resources for all secondary subjects.
Lastly, the secondary library of resources on the NGFL site is growing but please email me with anything you would like Mandy to upload to the site so we can encourage more secondary teachers to visit!
I found this link to Discovery magazine article on Will Richardson's blog. It talks about emerging software which better equips us to connect our reading and writing and move away from linear research. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in developing your understanding of the read-write web.
Alan Day told me about this yesterday. It opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for teachers and clusters to share their resources more easily and should facilitate collaboration across networks of schools.
I found this on Mark Ahlness' blog a few weeks ago and it's a great introduction to blogging for those who are just starting out with it. Alan, Will and Mark are great believers in how edu-blogging and the read-write web in general can empower kids, encourage creativity and independent learning. I would recommend subscribing to their blogs via RSS
(look out for this symbol or 
the XML one so you are automatically updated when they publish a new post.
Happy Blogging!
TRE was mentioned by a Wendy Adeniji whose seminar on the use of the IWB in MFL I attended at BETT a couple of weeks ago. It's a growing library of teacher and pupils resources produced and shared across subject areas. You can search by key stage or subject.
Sharing ideas and good practice forms part of the ethos of Hands on Support. I would be interested if anyone has found other great sites which promote collaboration and allow teachers to access quality resources to promote teaching and learning.
Alan Day's 25th Jan post mentions the practical support pack which will help teachers embed ICT effectively in subjects.
This is the new secondary HOS blog and will replace the previous November Learning one.
I hope that it will become a forum for secondary colleagues to exchange ideas, share resources and spread effective practice on how they use ICT in their subjects.