Mr P's ICT blog - Tech to raise standards!

As a follow-up to the successful project last year (see here) , we will once again be looking to connect classrooms across the world. In the lead up to Christmas, you can deepen your understanding of different Christmas traditions by asking other children from around the world about how they celebrate Christmas in their community. The project is simple, sign up using the form below, pick a school from the number of willing participants in the spreadsheet and arrange a time to connect using a variety of ways such as Skype, Google Hangouts and Periscope. Please be aware of time zone differences and this website may help - Click Here. You may also wish to live stream an assembly or Christmas show to share with the world to Youtube, Facebook Live or use Periscope. If you have been busy blogging and creating work related to Christmas, you can share it on the global Padlet below. What you may need to take part in this project: An email address Skype Account Google + account U...

Last week, I challenged my digital leaders to create a tour of our school on the iPads. Our current tour  on the website has a birds eye picture of our school with pictures of different parts of the school. I wanted the children to be involved in this process. In pairs, they recorded themselves in different locations around the school, sharing information about the location they were recording from. These were then shared via Airdrop to another iPad where children were then linking the videos to a bird eye picture of the school using the app Thinglink. Once created, the children published the thinglink to our channel and from here we would embed it on our school website. Here is the tour the digital leaders created: To see what this looks like on our school website - click here. It was a fantastic activity that the children really enjoyed knowing the finished results would feature on the school website. It was lovely to see and hear how proud the children are of the ...

As many teachers are preparing for their first Parents Evening of the year, I thought I would create a fun little video sharing what we say to parents and what we really mean! 😂😉 Feel free to share! FOLLOW MR P ON:

Today has been a day I have been looking forward to for over six months. When I first heard about Google Expeditions , I immediately tried to sign up to find out in was only available in America. Fast forward a few months and Google have now deployed the tool in England and what an amazing tool it is! So thanks to  +Dughall McCormick  who sent the Google team my way, I was able to book a day with a Google representative. They brought in two class sets of the Google Cardboard headsets with Android devices.  The cardboard headsets can be used with children aged 7 and over so all our KS2 classes had a lesson with them. On each of the devices was the 'Google Expeditions' app. This is available on iOS and Android. The teachers had to choose from the 250 expeditions available. We tried to link these to our current topics. Each teacher then controlled the session through the leader tool within the app. Here they can load the different scenes from each expedition. On al...

On Thursday afternoons, I work with a select group of children from KS2 who have the responsibility of being our first group of digital champions. Their role includes supporting teachers and other pupils when using technology in class. As one of the first tasks, we looked at sharing some motivational and inspiring thoughts around the school. The students wanted to help other children and give them a positive outlook towards their learning. I set them the task of creating some growth mindset posters that they could then display around the school for other pupils to view and appreciate. The app the children used was Adobe Spark Post . It is one of three FREE apps from Adobe available on tablets as well as through the web. The app is fantastic for creating posters, quotes and graphics. There are a range of options from adding background pictures to editing the text and changing the design in different ways. There is even the option to turn the poster into a short animation. I wa...

On Friday, John Murray and I led our very popular 'Improving Reading and Writing through Popular Children's Media' conference in Manchester. Thank you to everyone who attended and a huge thank you for all the lovely feedback. Here are a few of the comments from the day: The day focuses on inspiring and creative approaches to improving reading and writing through a variety of media. We make clear that text is imperative. Music, animations, film clips can all be valuable tools; however without quality texts within or linked to it, it won't improve learning. Reading Comprehension can only be done through text. Both myself and John are working with schools who have tried to move away from text and teach english through images and videos. This has led to a dramatic drop in results, especially reading. On the conference, we reiterated the importance of using a TEXT-CENTRIC approach and demonstrated the best ways in which media can link in with this.  We are runnin...

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Bitmoji is a great little app where you can turn yourself into a cartoon character and then generate different pictures to show your feelings, moods and thoughts. I have previously blogged about the app here.  Our school is now using Seesaw as a platform to evidence learning. I love it. It is saving our staff so much time and allowing us to now deliver and evidence so much more learning. I talk about it a lot on my training.  I thought of this idea as a way to bring both Seesaw and Bitmoji together as a way to reward attitude, behaviour and effort in a fun way. Whenever you feel a child has impressed you and deserves recognition, use bitmoji to save an image showing how you feel about their behaviour, work, effort, achievement etc:  These are a couple of examples. There are loads in the app, some not appropriate so I would advise only using this app on your teacher iPad. If you then put the picture in Seesaw, tag the child and comment explaining the r...