Richard Wilson

Today I am using Cyber Cafe to teach a P6 class more about internet security. We will be looking at how to keep ourselves safe from anyone who has malintent in anyway. I want to encourage the pupils to use the internet without fear and without identifying themselves by givng away too much information. Earlier I tried to see if there were any good sites where the pupils could build themselves a suitable avatar to use when posting. I found one called doppelme which seems safe and I include my avatar for your amusement.


I was wondering if anyone has used avatars for pupils in school instead of using either their real image or none at all. Not using any seems a bit boring and as long as the pupils are not identified it adds a bit when you read their work or see their efforts on-line. After attending a course by Ollie Bray on internet safety I have become much more mindful but want to temper it with the pupils having the ability ,through the use of an avatar, to personalise their presentations. I supppose that if they choose a (suitable!) psuedonym to fit their avatar that should be OK. Or, has Ollie made me paranoid and just use pictures instead?

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It is always a chore to get my son Lewis to do his homework, especially repetative things like times tables and spelling. I’m always on the look out for things that excite him, take the pressure off me as a grouch and let us both enjoy homework with pleasure. I was pointed in the direction of tutpup by one of my colleagues, Dale Armatage, who, like me has a young family. This resource is for addition, subtraction,multiplication, division, algebra and spelling. It reminds me of World Maths Day as pupils play against one another to answer questions against the clock. It’s great on the interactive whiteboard, just watch them go! Another couple of sites are A Maths Dictionary For Kids and Maths Whack ‘Em Booster, both highly interactive and fun. The maths dictionary is great and I know I’ve mentioned it before but I rate the stuff done by Jenny Eather very highly. Her writing for fun is a teacher’s dream resource to aid writing in class. Her other site, Rainforest Maths has had to be taken off line as it was being ripped off by commercial developers. That has always been a concern, all of the sites above are free to use and hats off to the developers altruism. Merchant bankers and the so called money men could learn a wee lesson here about helping others before helping yourself. If you use these sites please use the feedback to let the developers know how much you appreciate their efforts. Better still get your kids to do it……

The above cartoon was quickly and easily created using a super free on-line cartoon maker called Toondoo. There are loads of backgrounds, characters, and a text tool among many other features. There is also a safe search option which is useful. I will be using this with the pupils in school to stimulate their interest in writing. The cartoon can be saved as a png file which is easy to insert in your blog or web pages. Thanks to Rajendran for pointing me in the right direction. Registration is quick and easy, try it out.

I am still perstiting with my collaborative writing project and will be adding work from the pupils here at Pinkie St Peter’s. I have come across some other resources that can help provide advice and a focus for motivating and directing pupils. I have used Comic Life with success in the past and will continue with it as it really motivates pupils and adds interest to their writing tasks across a variety of genre. Please note that is it now available for Windows as well as Mac. Some other comic making free web-sites are readwritethink which is quite a safe one and very easy to use. A couple of others you may wish to use with pupils but need a good checking out are stripgenerator and stripcreator, both of these also have adult content, especially stripcreator, so use wisely. A really good writing resource is to be found at khake which gives lots of advice in communication skills. A good cut and paste piece for your school web-site can be found at the Free Dictionary which has news, word games and a free on-line dictionary. For help with a variety of things Fact Monster is a good starting point, well worth a look.

Irene Williams,(our DHT), and myself have been collating information like mad for our HMiE Follow Through Report and our Quality Improvement Officer’s visit. This alone proved to be a bit of a challenge, not because there was little or no evidence, just the opposite, we had masses. Filtering the evidence was a challenge as it was stored as different media in a variety of places. Assimilating it and relating it to the Quality Indicators for HGiOS 3 was not an easy task. We resolved to set up a better storage system to gather and collate evidence for each QI. We have set up a simple system with a folder for each QI and a word document for each theme within the Quality Indicators. All staff will be invited to add to the bank of evidence we will build up over the year. This will make the self-evaluation process much easier as all the evidence will be located in the one place, hopefully making the process easier and much less painful. I may translate it to a wiki so that staff can add to it on-line without the need to be in school to access the folders. When I’ve done this I will publish it as I haven’t worked out how to upload folders onto this site yet. Any ideas?

You can access the folders at our school web-site, which is currently under re-construction.

Up until very recently I have dismissed the potential for learning through playing electronic games. I know that is wrong and shortsighted but over the October week I have had good reason to re-evaluate and realise the potential of at least some of the games on offer. I am talking mainly about the Nintendo DS Lite handheld gaming machine.

 It is a fantastic piece of kit that has some games that you should check out and give a serious look at. The Nintendo Big Brain Academy  is a game that teachers/parents may want to look at and evaluate, both for themselves and their youngsters. The game has five categories, Think, Memorize, Analyze, Compute and Identify. All of the games have three levels of difficulty and are all challenging, memorizing the 5×5 square at the easy level showed me I have a good memory for forgetting things!  As I played with it I came to realise that all of the components are great tools for training the mind and sharpening it up. I have purchased one for the school and am going to trial it with some target pupils and see if by using the training it can impact on their learning abilities. Meanwhile I’ll trawl the net to see if anyone else is using them in schools and to what effect. If I could get my hands on a set of 5 I’m sure I could conduct a good piece of research. That would cost about £600 or so. Meanwhile I’ll be asking Santa for one for me to use!

BT National Speaking and Listening Awards.

We entered the above competition and were fortunate enough to win a runner up prize of £500 for the work we have been doing in promoting the use of ICT in pupils’ work. As far as I am aware we were the only Scottish school to win! Well done us!!

Two new schools have joined our writing wiki for which I am both grateful and excited. The pupils will have new opportunities to collaborate on something that will stimulate their communication skills and excite them. Thanks to Macmerry and Carronshore for joining us. Ironically, I did my final teacher training placement at Carronshore Primary in 1976. Six weeks of hard work and fun, they were a great P7 class. I passed and this set me on my path to being a teacher, happy college days at Callendar Park in Falkirk. I will have to have a re-think on the wiki as it now includes a lot more than writing. The pupils have included animated movies, powerpoints as well as the more traditional types of “writing”. Maybe a re-name and re-launch. Also, thanks to Ollie for putting me onto slideshare. This is a great free resource that makes the pupils’ powerpoints into a slide show. Get it.

We got the go-ahead for the interview with Ann Widdecombe, this will take place next week and will be posted all over the place to get good coverage. You can view the pupils’ draft questions here.

I’ve been working with our P5 class using ICT to engage the pupils in learning situations that have a visual result. Through the use of Powerpoint and a super programme called I Can Animate we have explored collaborative writing and working together. The pupils very quickly became engrossed in the task and produced great work. We used powerpoint to make a joint presentation about world myths and legends. I am getting the pupils to work to the 10,20,30 principle to avoid really long winded presentations, the so-called death by powerpoint. It was also great fun to do and this can sometimes become a lost art in the drive to reach attainment targets. The use of ICT can be a fantastic tool to motivate pupils and sometimes it has the added bonus providing learning when the pupils do not consider it to be so. It can be amusing to hear pupils saying that we did no maths or writing today whereas they have volunteered to stay in at break to do extra work on their storyboards or their Powerpoint presentations. Ah! The innocence of trusting youth and the conniving underhandedness of their sly Heidie! A joy as ever.

This movie was made by Cameron and Beth, Caitlin made the Powerpoint about an Indian Myth. Enjoy.

dog-drive-thing.mov caitlin.ppt

Part of my passion is to get pupils, especially boys, engaged in writing. The best way is to offer them some form of positive engagement. To this end I have tried really hard to provide the pupils with opportunities outwith their norm. Major successes have been in interviewing Franz Ferdinand frontman, Alex Kapranos and Scotland frontman Jack McConnell. Both interviews can be downloaded from the school web-site for your pleasure. The value of this for scripting, discussing, talking and listening cannot be underestimated. I have secured another coup for East Linton by getting Ann Widdicombe to agree to a question and answer session with my P5 pupils. The pupil questions will be posted on my collaborative writing project where you or your class can suggest questions we may ask Ann on your behalf. The complete podcast will be available on the school web-site. This will take place after the Christmas/New Year holidays. As a learning opportunity it is absolutely fabulous. Contact us at East Linton if you want to collaborate on this exciting opportunity. We’re waiting………….. the Dalek or David Tennant is next on our hit list.

This is son number 4, Harris in a typical pose.

This is an example of a great wee programme called Comic Life which allows pupils to make their own comics from digital images or art work. I found it useful to motivate reluctant writers. It’s dead easy to use, my own boy, Lewis, made this example of our camping and fishing holiday to Glencoe after about ten minutes of instruction. He is currently in Primary 2. It was a fabulous holiday and for once Glencoe behaved itself, no midges, no rain! Fantastic! All fish were capture and release. The only downside to Comic Life is that it is only for Macs at the moment. The other downside was all of those lovely mountains to climb and having a long wait for Lewis to be old enough to carry my spent frame to the tops.