We had a fantastic beginning for the school year in Chalkwell Hall Junior school in Southend, Essex. We were asked to plan and deliver an INSET day for all of the 28 teachers in the school. The day was a mix of talking about some Internet based tools that teachers can use to engage kids as well hands-on learning about taking better photographs and producing their own podcasts.
Our main premise for the day was that anything we’d do, the teachers could take to their classroom and use with the pupils straight away. With the podcasts we asked them to introduce a subject to the pupils that would be new to them this year. Although we only had fairly little time for this, 3 hours or so, all the groups of teachers were able to write their scripts, plan their shoots, film and edit by the time the day was over. Great success.
Here’s some of the web 2.0 tools I recommended for the teachers to have a look at:
Flockdraw.com. Collaborative drawing space where many students can get involved at the same time. I see this working like the game where you ask a class of pupils to form a a shape in the hall and no one can say a word. In the same way you could ask the kids to illustrate things together as a group without being able to talk to each other.
quietube.com is a simple website where you input the address of a YouTube video and it then shows you that video on a very plain back ground, without all the comments that you might not want to show a room full of 8 year-olds. Unfortunately, it still requires you school to have access to YouTube but I think it’s just a matter of time when that possible in most schools.
buildyourwildself.com. Here you can make an avatar of yourself using parts of different animals. This could work nicely as a starting point for story writing in English lessons.
wallwisher.com is kind of a collaborative noticeboard. It allows you to create your own noticeboard where the kids can then post links, embed videos and photo and write notes. Could be used for collecting research results from kids or giving out homework. Very versatile.
Similar to above is spaaze.com which I found out about after our session at Chalkwell Hall. It’s similar but first of all isn’t Flash so it works on an iPad but also has a lot nicer design. You should check them out, too!
xtranormal.com again this would be fantastic for, say, an English lesson. What’s better than bringing your stories alive with animated characters? This simple to use tool allows you to do just that. All you need is your script and you’ve got an animation ready in less than 5 minutes.
To find out more about the INSET days we can deliver, check out our CPD section!
Here’s a few photos from the day:
