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

Last week I was very lucky to be working in Dubai. I presented at the Digital Education Conference giving a keynote and also taking part in an App Battle with Steve Bambury. It was brilliant! I had a great time. I also was very lucky to get my hands on an Appy Kids Smart School Kit. The kit includes a toy, which can double up as an iPad stand, and a set of cards. The cards cover letter, shapes, colours and numbers.  There is also an app, which is free and available on both the app store and google play. The following video shows what the kit is all about. It is a fantastic tool to use in the classroom. To have one that you can set up and have in the continuous provision area or as a small group activity would be a great way for children to build confidence and practise their letter, number and shape knowledge. It is a great way to take learning beyond the screen. I decided to put the app to the test and do a live facebook video with my son. Completely o...

'Tis the season! It is nearing the festive season and as always our televisions are full of some Christmas themed adverts. They have almost a tradition in themselves. For a number of years, I have blogged ideas for using these adverts in class. Despite seeing plenty of other blogs, I thought I would share some ideas that have a unique text-centric approach. Here are some of the previous blog posts about Christmas themed adverts: Developing Emotional Literacy through a great Christmas Advert John Lewis Christmas Advert 2015 John Lewis Christmas Advert 2014 Sainsbury's Christmas Advert 2014 With all the work I now do with John Murray, my approach to using visuals in class has changed somewhat. Film can be a very powerful tool in the classroom, I talk about how motivating it can be for children when it comes to writing. However, the more I see it used in classrooms and the more I see ideas being blogged and shared, the more I see it being misused and in some cases detri...

I am very excited to announce the release of the latest Read Write Perform pack - Dual Narrative: The Hunter and The Hunted. It takes a lot of time and effort to create each pack but both myself and John are so proud to see the packs being used by schools worldwide and the fantastic feedback we are getting. The idea is simple - a cohesive and engaging approach to teaching English. A meaningful project that covers: reading, writing and performing.  Technology is not essential to use the pack however the pack demonstrates how technology should be used to enhance and transform learning.  This pack focuses and building tension effectively in writing. The pack uses the dual narrative technique to achieve this. Dual Narrative is a technique used in a lot of stories, most famously in the book Jaws, where the story jumps between characters from paragraph to paragraph. The pack has a huge focus on style and children understanding how sentence length, use of clauses ...

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For the past few years in preparation for Remembrance Day, we have shared our digital remembrance wall to try and get pupils and parents to share details of family members who lost their lives during the war. To do this we use Padlet. Padlet is an app/website that allows you to create a virtual wall that allows you to share ideas, pictures and weblinks. It is a great way to try and make Remembrance Day more personal to our pupils. Once we have some contributions, we can share these on a whiteboard and allow the children to see the sacrifice and impact it has had one people close to us. Here is our Remembrance Wall so far: Another idea I really liked was this from @InspiredMind5: Poppies made from adjectives that describe soldiers - made to accompany thank-you letters! @alanpeat @ICT_MrP pic.twitter.com/0WSuP9m7Jx — Mat ✎ Inspired Minds (@InspiredMind5) November 15, 2014 You could do something similar on an iPad using the app Type Drawing:

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 ...