How could you make a bedtime story into a must-see event for parents? Ormiston Primary School found that one way was to have it read live from Australia - using a web videoconference.
The event was attended by a horde of pyjama-clad children, who enjoyed hot chocolate while they listened to the story and watched pictures from the book appear on screen. Large numbers of parents wanted to make sure they didn’t miss out, and also squeezed into the classroom. The story was read by a teacher from Ormiston State School in Queensland Australia, which has linked with Ormiston Primary to develop reading by use of a web site where book reviews and recommendations can be shared by pupils. You can read more, and see some more photos, over on the Ormiston school site.
Today Sanderson’s Wynd Primary School have used YouTube in school to view a video, made by Edinburgh University, of their engineers taking part in the December First Lego league.
The video has also been embedded on their school web site, where it can be easily found by parents. Since YouTube was recently made available in East Lothian schools, it has proved to be a valuable learning resource.
If you’re an edubuzz blogger and you’d like to embed a YouTube video on your site, just use the toolbar button that’s a yellow circle with a letter “A” on it to paste in the video’s web address and publish as normal.
Law Primary’s P7 students have been blogging from Loch Insh Watersports and Outdoor Centre this week.
They’ve made good use of digital photos, audio and video to tell the story. Again this has proved very popular with those back home, with plenty of comments from Mums, Dads, brothers, sisters and even dogs. Experience is showing this works well not just for keeping those at home in touch with what the group are learning, but is also a good way to let those in earlier years get a good idea of what the excursion is all about, as we see in this comment from P6C.
P6C were having a look at all your photos, videos and podcasts yesterday and they are mightily impressed - they’re already looking forward to their visit next year.
Over at SupportForAll, the blog about support for learners in East Lothian, you can read about how a Polish parent is helping in the classroom at Musselburgh’s Burgh Primary.
She doesn’t have much English herself, but is able to read Polish from bilingual books to a pupil who doesn’t speak English.
We purchased bilingual story books and the mum read the Polish version and I was able to echo in English. When she heard the story in Polish, my P1 pupil was really excited and the rest of the class were fascinated. Now that they are a regular event the other children also enjoy these sessions and are beginning to predict what I am going to say based on what has been read and they are able to pick out some Polish words if they are repeated a lot within the story.
