Old Cupboards, New Treasures

Basically, I had an idea.

Hopefully a good one, I decided to take an old cupboard in my Primary 5/6 classroom and transform it into a video 'reflection booth.

More and more I can see the ease, relevance and sense of using video in the classroom. It's so straightforward now to shoot, edit and share video that I'm going to make an effort to use it more regularly next session.

I'm not really talking just about special 'video projects' but more as a way of recording the everyday working of school life for the individual children in the class. Assessments in maths, language and traditional subjects as well as Challenge Based Learning projects and interdisciplinary work.

So, with the help of one of my daughters and some old movie posters from a local IMAX cinema, we set to work.

Here are the results.

Perhaps we'll glean some new 'treasures' out of that old cupboard!

Stay Where You Are, Don't Anybody Move... Unless You Want a Whole Lot of Work!

Man, it's been some year!

Today we are being visited by a delegation of interested educationalists from Switzerland and Holland, to talk about 1:1 iPad, unsurprisingly. They will leave impressed with the difference that the integration of an incredible tool has made to our school this year.

Hopefully they will not miss the fact that the iPad itself does not form half of the story. Surrounding and supporting the device, willing it to work and straining to wring every drop of innovation and creativity from it's sleek, shiny form, there is a whole lot of people working hard. Very hard.

Don't anyone be fooled that transformation with iPad comes easy. The device will happily sit unused on a desk or in a cupboard, it won't shout 'There's a better way to do this!' or even, 'Wait! There's an app for that!' it needs coaxing, it needs to feel wanted, to be used.

A teacher needs to give time to discovering the sometimes hidden depths of the App store, to integrating sound pedagogy and curriculum outcomes with new apps and ideas. Some work, some don't. You have to refuse the temptation to use the iPad as an educational soother - to keep the kids quiet and give you an easy life. You have to integrate digital work and ideas with 'get out of your seat' activities which stimulate the body and mind. You must consider records and storage, where to keep files that students produce and how to assess them. How you mark and give student feedback must also be considered, along with coming up with classroom use rules for the sudden appearance of the internet in the hands of every child.

Perhaps above all, the teacher has to learn to analyse the heady 'eureka' moments where you suddenly have a 'great idea' for another way the iPad could help do something really great ('Let's start an iPad band!,' 'I could do the report card as an ePub!'). Remember: these don't just happen, even in iPad land, they require a whole lot of... yup... work.

These are just the start. If you're not prepared for all this, keep your money for new textbooks, stay comfortable where you are and plan your summer holiday.

Hang on, maybe I could give the kids access to the class blog to post over the holidays...

...maybe next year!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Classroom of the Future...?

I'm currently thinking of the class I will have next year.

17 children aged from 9-10. Enthusiastic and motivated in the main. They'll be moving into my classroom which is big enough for 17 but only just.

So what can I do in the classroom to give me the spaces that I want for teaching? What kind of space do I want for teaching? Firstly I've started brainstorming features of my 'ideal' classroom space.

Here's my start:






Many of these things are obvious and would be included by any teacher in a wish list for a classroom space.

I searched this morning for the classroom furniture of the future online. Mostly i found desks that were square and individual but perhaps had some 'system' to incorporate a desktop or laptop computer. See below





Is this really the classroom of the future? To me it looks like the classroom of the past.

Now, the technology is not king, finally, the learning is king, and how we achieve that learning.

So many of these solutions claim to be 'the future' because they are obviously built around the computer on the desk. I can't see that it would be easy to form a working co-operative learning team around such desks or clear them away for challenge based learning activities, for example.

So what is it we really want? Flexibility, the ability to adapt and change the space depending on the task and the chance to use technology to achieve the learning we want.

I know that whatever my classroom looks like next year it will not be a perfect solution.

But it will be a start.

Come on... through the Wardrobe!

So my blog has been slightly neglected of late, I've been out of the country, out of the world in fact! We're currently immersed in what seemed like a great idea a couple of years ago - a stage production of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Clive Staples Lewis' classic childrens book has thrilled and fascinated generations of children since 1950 when it was first published. It tells the story of the discovery of the fantastic world of Narnia by four evacuee children in 1940.

For us it is a huge project. We are a small school of 100 children, about 60 of which are in the cast, and we've taken the town hall where we live for two nights, printing 700 tickets for each. The production kicks off next Thursday and Friday with dress rehearsals on Monday and Wednesday night.

So my head at the moment is full of fawns, dryads, dwarfs and talking lions, not so much different there then!

In the midst of all that we have two delegations of visitors to the school today and tomorrow, one from Greece and Turkey and one from the north of England. They're coming to see our 1:1 iPad deployment.

It strikes me that, like the many from all over the globe who have dropped in on us this crazy year, they're really coming through the wardrobe.

It looks like any other ordinary wardrobe door but the world we've found beyond is unlike anything we imagined. In this world, information is available in seconds to every child. Individual children can create amazing content on their own device, share and connect with staff and their world, and learn in glorious technicolour through thousands of apps for everything from learning letter formation to advanced science concepts.

It's a world from the slightly dreary, tired place the other side. A place so different from the one we imagined and still changing every day, as new software updates and fresh apps make iOS more and more of a serious platform for creative teaching and learning.

The only difference I suppose is that this is the real world.