Morfo booth and crazy talk

This week my year 2/1s will be using morfo booth for more than just creative free play. They will be using it to scare Mr BB with their very own monster creations (I will share these soon). I have been thinking how lovely it is that my children can do this, as my previous method of animating people was through crazytalk, which I believe would be too hard for my infants to do.

I have used crazy talk a lot to start an enquiry or bring a celebritiy into the classroom. Amongst other things it enabled me to get a gnome to request a St Lucia holiday brochure, Richard Branson to offer support to a charity and Dr Who to send us on missions. The great thing about crazy talk is that you can manipulate faces carefully, upload sound files, such as those created in audacity, change backgrounds and give your animations great voices. Watch the video below then check out some more examples here to see what crazy talk can do.

The main problem of crazytalk is that can be time consuming - and I am always looking for easier options. I was more than happy when I realised that morfo booth on the ipads can do the same job, in minutes. I have only got the free version, but it is fine for what I want. Take a look at the examples below. They are more than adequate for my needs - and the children love having 'celebrities' in the classroom.

Being employed by Oliver Jeffers.

Gruffalo work will be shared soon

A special request

The digital leader network: At the Norfolk ICT conference

Good morning conference attendees! I hope that you will find some useful posts on this blog, but in the meantime get involved! 
Get involved 1: Why not place a digital leader pledge to the linoit below! You can see examples of what other teachers have pledged here at the Naace hothouse last year. 

Get involved 2:
Add your answers to the answergarden.

Get involved 3:
Check out my name-dropping list too for links to marvellous digital leader/ICT work going on in the UK. 

Get involved 4: Impact of digital leaders
Read about the impact of digital leaders, according to the schools that employ them, here. Find out why Tom likes being a digital leader too.

Get involved 5: Badges If you are looking for some of the digital leader badges, you will find them here. If you would like to see some of the slides from my presentation again, you can view them here. 


If you start nodding half way through the keynote, try doing something from this blog post. Appshed is a fab challenge!

Free screen capture tool

ScreenR is a free screencasting tool for PCs. To show what it does I have made one of my digital literacy project. I usually use explain everything on the ipads, but had trouble showing prezi through that. Excuse the audio - it was done of the cuff and I hadn't realised how noisy my right click was! It does show the possibilities for digital leaders to use this as a method of tutorial creation though.

Darn the tech ... a wee warning for my GTP students

Last time a group of GTP students came for some training the school network failed. I wrote about it here. It was a good lesson in about tech failures. I now have another lesson!

Picture from http://chennai.olx.in 

Last week my new (8 week old) laptop died. This is the third time a laptop has died on me (not counting the one I dropped a book on and smashed the screen). The mini lecture I received this morning from an ICT chap was not helpful. He must have repeated reasons why I should back up regularly about 5 times in the space of 5 minutes. This put my back up. I bit my tongue, switched off and politely said thank you when he had got to the end of his reprimand. I could have told him that most of my important stuff is stored online now, but to be honest I couldn't be arsed to have a conversation.

I feel mildly frustrated that some IWB resources that I had prepared for the students has been lost, but it's not the end of the world. My digital leaders want to be involved in helping the students with smart and promethean boards. Fortunately I had created a document in drive with ICT resources, which would also show the benefits of collaboration through gdocs, and of course this hasn't been lost. These are good teaching points.

I like writing my plans, it suits my thought processes . I'm not sure why it is different to writing on the computer, but it is. I have tried using popplet to create plans similar to my written ones, but can't sustain them and they are harder to annotate. If my plans are for me, then I have decided that it doesn't matter that they are written anyway. So now the only computer based ones are my maths plans and weekly overviews. My mantle planning could not be followed by anyone else (though people are always welcome to look at it), so there is no point storing it on our school network. I can be quite minimalist with my plans and think that planning to far ahead is counter-productive, especially for maths. I often end up adding resources and ideas retrospectively, but I rarely return to them so am unsure why I do this.

ICT has undergone a significant change in schools. It is no longer seen as a discrete lesson, but more as a tool to support learning. We make choices every day about the best tools for the job and how we should not just be using tech for the sake of it, so surely this is the same for our planning?

Taking the bull by the horns: The proposed computing curriculum

Quick link to the computing doc for those who don't want to read this post!

We were very fortunate at Roydon Primary to have a forward-thinking head who embraced ICT innovations. Although some may have described him as a bit of a maverick, he took risks that paid off and encouraged us to do the same. Because of this we managed to keep abreast of ICT developments and indeed were innovative in things such as our use of class blogging in 2007. His commitment to developments meant regular in-house training and lots of trips to Bett and other conferences to see how we could apply new ideas to our curriculum.
Although our new headteacher confesses to be a technophobe, she has embraced our passion for technology by saying yes to my iPad request and fully supporting outreach and digital leader work. For that I am most grateful.

This post is not just a thank you to our school leaders, it is setting a context for the environment I work in. Our teachers embrace change. They take the bull by the horns because they feel supported and are not patronised.

That said, when I first looked at the computing document I was concerned that even the teachers at Roydon may be a little 'freaked out' by the language. ICT is very well embedded in our school (and I truly believe that if we had devoted time to it we would have gained the ICT mark a long while ago), but I know that words like 'algorithm' would cause concern, so I decided to put together a document to show what we are already doing in school to cover it.

When I started adding ideas I thought how they could be helpful to others. I then considered how a lot of people in my twitter PLN could contribute and if I made this an open document that could potentially help many teachers. So that's what I did: added it to the digital leader network blog, tweeted it out, asked specific people with expertise ( e,g. @MBerry and @eslweb) to contribute ideas and Bob's your uncle - a document with crowd sourced ideas to help you deliver the new computing curriculum started growing. As always I am inspired by my PLN and their commitment to helping others.

 This new curriculum really isn't scary! It's a positive thing for ICT. We can keep using technology as we always have done - as another learning tool - whilst making sure that the area that many teachers avoid (in my experience from outreach work) is covered. Clever! Although the creative element of ICT isn't specified at KS1/2, it may be because it is taken for granted that it happens throughout the curriculum. Now what I aim to do is to get schools to employ digital leaders to support computing in schools. Why is it important? Maybe this video will explain.

If you find the computing document useful, please let me know. If you have an idea that is not already there-please add it! Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed already! 

Related reading

 Please do check out Ant's fantastic blog post 'Coding, computer science and ipads' not only because he shares most of my opinions, but because he writes them so much more eloquently (and in more detail too!) Don't be put off if you don't have ipads -the post is much more than that and shows some great PC resources too.

Pete Yeomens (@ethinking) and Mile Berry (@mberry) have both written posts about the 'National Curriculum Consultation' and 'The New Computing Curriculum'. Pete as always has muddied my thinking (in a good way) and has made me take more time over the wording in my response to the computing curriculum.

You can read about some of my favourite free ICT resources in previous posts.

Apologies for my poor grammar.

The DLN Naace nomination

It was with mixed feelings that I received nominations for the Naace impact award last year. It felt a bit undeserved as the Digital Leader Network blog is very much a collaborative effort. It would not be so successful without the time and effort that other teachers and digital leaders have put in. The people who kindly nominated me were very generous with their praise and encouraged me that this would be a positive thing for everyone involved in the DLN, so I filled in the form and said why the 'DLN' deserved an award.

I would never take credit for other people's work - I hate it when others do it - and have always been careful to acknowledge sources of inspiration. Finding out that I had been shortlisted renewed the mixed feelings I had before. Being in the same category as Chris Mayoh is difficult as he was the person who inspired me to get started with digital leaders in the first place. I wish him the best of luck - I truly believe that he deserves more than an impact award! 

I have however submitted a short film and would be proud to receive an award on behalf of all the other people, including Chris, who have contributed to the blog's success. Please excuse my Norfolk twang - I am a country bumpkin, but not quite as simple as I sound!





Take a look at the Naace Impact Awards shortlist for all shortlisted nominations. Some of my good tweeting friends, like Anthony Evans and Julia Skinner have been recognised for their hard work and contribution to the world of ICT.

Blogging with 5-7year olds

The positive effect of blogging on writing has been documented by Deputy Mitchell, who has inspired a multitude of teachers across the world to join in with projects such as quadblogging (my class do it!) and Feb29th (I contributed 'Accidental children!') . Knowing that you have an audience can have a powerful effect on writing. I know that from experience. A request from someone unknown can lead to me taking time to write a post or add content to any number of blogs that I have.

A short blogging history

In  2006 I had a talented young lady in my class who was lucky enough to go off travelling to Thailand and Australia with her family (during school time). She blogged about her travels, showing us many sights and making us feel like we were on a journey with her*. This got me thinking about our children's journeys at school and inspired me to start a class blog to showcase the work going on, to let our wider community join in our journey. We had an audience at this point, but very few comments. I'm also slightly ashamed to say that I wrote most of the content in the early days as we were a little unsure of esafety considerations. My children had their own blogs, but these were locked away safely in our VLE, so they only really had their peers and me for an audience.

Space Transportation and Restoration Specialists - one of my first mantles on  one of my first blog posts. 

 In some ways the most successful school blogs were from our residential trips as they kept the parents informed of our antics. We receive plenty of comments from parents on these blogs and they expect lots of news! This should become even easier in the future as our children can blog themselves using iphones and ipads. Our blogs have evolved greatly since the early days and for the past few years, since the 'loss' of our VLE, I have incorporated a workbook into them, to support children's learning@home.

Our children have also become increasingly involved with the blogging process and our year 5/4 and 4/3 children have their own kidsblog and frequently participate in writing online via Livewriting and Julia Skinner's  fabulous 100 word and 5 sentence challenges. These online activities not only inspire creative writing, but give children that all important audience for their writing. How nice for my children to have their posts featured in Julia's new blog dipping venture too - another global audience!

Blogging on our ipads

The introduction of ipads at our school has made the blogging process so much easier. The four ipads that I have in class are set up with the blogger app so that my children can blog when they like. It has made the process so much easier and more flexible than it ever has been. I don't change their work, though I have occasionally made suggestions for improvements. My children take the ipads outside and blog, which in turn is great AFL evidence for me. Because they were adding content to our class blog, it seemed to be getting too 'hefty' so I decided to set up a separate blog for my children and my colleague did the same for our parallel class. This is their work. They are often writing for pleasure and request to blog about things, though sometimes I ask if anyone would like to take the ipad into assembly etc if I want a record of special events.

An infant ipad expert!

Although our parents still seem a little shy about commenting, we know they look because they tell us in their child's learning@home journal. They are proud of what their children are doing. One family were so inspired that Xanthe (aged 5) started her own blog at home! This can only be having a positive impact on how my children see themselves as writers.

My digital leaders use the ipads to blog too. Their posts are like mine - more of a reflective diary. They will no doubt prove useful for future digital leaders, who I am guessing will want to go one better! They also do a great job as commentators on the aforementioned 5 sentence challenge and understand the value of thoughtful comments and impact on the writer.

So would I recommend blogging in school? Most definitely! Remember to gain consent from parents, devise some blogging rules / etiquette and find the right blogging resource that works well for you. There are plenty out there, but my favourites (for ease of use and free tools) are:

• Blogger - perfect for ipads
• Wordpress
• Posterous
• Weebly
• Kidsblogs

If you need inspiration, @RedgieRob has kindly put together a shed full of class blogs for you! The winning blogs in the 2012 edublog awards may prove useful too. 

*We used this idea when seven of us from school went to India to visit children's homes that we sponsored

Seven go to India