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

I love using music in the classroom for a number of reasons. I have previously blogged about using songs for comprehension and you can read about them here - CLICK HERE. After listening to the latest song released by Harry Styles, 'Two Ghosts' is definitely a song you could use and discuss with your pupils. Here is a lyric video: I would first play the song all the way through and ask the children what the song is about - It is about a relationship ending and both leaving as very different people.  Then consider the lyrics in more detail: Same lips red, same eyes blue, Same white shirt, couple more tattoos, But it's not you and it's not me, Tastes so sweet, looks so real, Sounds like something that I used to feel, But I can't touch what I see. We're not who we used to be, We're not who we used to be, We're just two ghosts standing in the place of you and me, Trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat. Consid...

There was a lot I took away from #ReadingRocks_17 last week. The keynotes from  @TeresaCremin  reminded me of how important Reading for Pleasure really is. As she stated, the research shows Reading for Pleasure has the biggest impact on children's success when they grow up. The website she mention ResearchRichPedagogies , has some great information for how to promote Reading for Pleasure in your school. These awesome sketch notes from @Cazzash picked up the main points from her keynote: Realised the original photo is a bit blurred. pic.twitter.com/0LtXRgFW2h — Caroline Ash (@cazzash) October 14, 2017 It was the same with @MaryMyatt's keynote, a lot to think about echoing a similar message. Again here is another sketchnote from @Cazzash: That was fantastic @MaryMyatt #ReadingRocks_17 @_Reading_Rocks_ pic.twitter.com/ZFq9cpcHrx — Caroline Ash (@cazzash) October 14, 2017 A big message from the day was emphasising how important it is for...

The latest ReadWritePerform teaching pack is now available: The Storm: A Personification Pack challenges your students to read and deconstruct texts describing a storm, then write their own description and perform it as an interactive multimedia eBook. The writing focuses on developing personification and multi-sensory description to bring the storm to life in the reader's mind. Along with John's exemplar text, we also use the brilliant book - The Mousehole Cat written by Antonia Barber and illustrated by Nicola Bayley. This is the stunningly illustrated story of the seaside village of Mousehole Cornwall, where Mowzer the cat lives happily with old fisherman Tom - Tom who rocks the rocking chair just right, and catches fresh fish for dinner every night. Their life is a happy one - until one terrible winter, the Great Storm-Cat comes clawing and snarling and leaping at the harbour walls, so that no boat can go out to sea to fish. Soon, with Christmas coming, there is ...

I had a wonderful time on Saturday at The District CofE Primary School at the second Reading Rocks conference. I want to thank Heather and the staff for all their hard work organising a fantastic event. I was very lucky to be able to host a workshop all about ReadWritePerform . You can see my workshop and how the RWP approach works: I was also very lucky to be interviewed as part of  @RussellPrue 's live radio broadcast. You can listen to the interview here: It was nice to have the opportunity to sit and listen to other inspiring keynotes and drop into  @SmithSmm 's brilliant workshop. What was great how the messages from the keynotes and workshop I attended complimented the key messages from my workshop.

One of the most exciting new features of Apple's iOS11 is the new ARKit and the possibilities with this new feature. The downside, as I discovered last week, the new AR apps will only work on devices with A9 or A10 chips. After installing these apps on most of our school devices, I quickly discovered they didn't work and had to change my plans quickly.  My Year 6 digital leaders did, however, get to try these apps out on my iPad. First, they started with the app AR Runner . The app used AR to create checkpoints which you run to as a way to complete different challenges. It is a great way to combine technology with PE as the children are timed when completing the challenges. Word of warning though, make sure you have decent cases on your iPads as no doubt there will be a few accidents when your pupils are into the game.  The Year 6 pupils all had a few attempts of completing a challenge and collated their scores on a Google Sheet.  Using another Au...

Year 1 are learning all about the human body. Today, we used technology to enhance this topic further. First, we used the brillaint Virtuali-tee app from Curiscope. Click here to read more about this app . To order a t-shirt, click here. Year 1 loved learning about the human body today through Augmented Reality! Thank you @curiscope_official! A post shared by Lee Parkinson (@ict_mrp) on Oct 12, 2017 at 9:24am PDT Once we had explored and discussed the different parts of our body, the children all took turns wearing a green t-shirt and used the camera to photograph each other. They pupils then used Doink Greenscreen to create a picture that looked like we could see inside their body. Once the pupils had uploaded their pictures to Seesaw, we used the explain and reflect tool in Seesaw to label the major organs.  Finally, with the help of our Digital Leaders, some children were able to record a video explaining how some of our organs work,...

Are you guilty of any of these?

The latest ReadWritePerform pack - Wish You Were Here: The Picture Postcard Pack - is now available to download. This Unit of Work is aimed specifically at Key Stage 1 but can be adapted for lower Key Stage 2. Through reading, deconstructing and then writing a postcard of a recent holiday, children will then perform their postcard as a greenscreen video and link it through Augmented Reality to create an interactive video postcard. Each app has a step-by-step guide for teachers who may feel less confident using the technology. The aim is to cover all elements of the English curriculum in an engaging and purposeful way using a variety of media. Here is a snippet of the final piece of work your pupils will create through using the pack: Within the pack, we recommend some books that complement the pack really well. We recommend you using these as your class read as there are many links between the pack and the books. Meerkat Mail - Meerkat Mail is a b...

About 3 years ago, my fantastic Deputy gave every teacher this book - Descriptosaurus.  Written by Alison Wilcox, Descriptosaurus is fantastic for creative writing that is a thematic expansion of a dictionary and a thesaurus. It provides children with a comprehensive resource with which to expand their descriptive vocabulary, experiment with language and sentence structure and build up narratives based around the following areas: Settings - landscapes, settlements and atmosphere, Characters - appearance, emotions and personality, and Creatures - appearance, abilities and habitats. When it comes to writing, teachers can find it tricky to generate effective descriptive language during shared or guided writing sessions. I have been lucky enough to attend training by Alan Peat and Pie Corbett. Both sessions were fantastic and made it look so easy to generate effective vocabulary to tell a good story. They are geniuses and experts in the field. When faced with a class of 30, being pu...

Recently. we discovered this amazing book that would complement our recent teaching pack - Crazy Creatures . This Unit of Work is aimed specifically at Key Stage 1 but can be adapted for lower Key Stage 2. Through reading, researching and then writing an information text about a chosen animal, children will create their own Crazy Creature Fact File. The aim is to cover all elements of the English curriculum in an engaging and purposeful way using a variety of media. It also aims to foster within children their love of the natural world and help them to understand their role and responsibility to it. Sloth Slept On is a picture book all about a group of children who find a sloth snoring away in a tree in their garden. Not knowing what it is, they set out to find out. While the two older children dream up increasingly outrageous possibilities, from an astronaut to a pirate, to a space creature, the youngest little girl investigates books and a globe and discovers what it r...