Simon Haughton's Blog

Diamond Jubilee Resources

Here are some royal-themed backgrounds I've made for PowerPoint that might be useful if you're going to ask your children to create a poster about the Diamond Jubilee this week. They each have different numbers of columns to enable you to differentiate the amount of work you expect different children to produce. Also, here are my Diamond Jubilee weblinks too - http://www.edmodo.com/folder/267030

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Year 3 Exploring Simulations Lesson 2012

The ICT National Curriculum for ICT says that KS2 children should be taught "to use simulations and explore models in order to answer 'What if ... ?' questions, to investigate and evaluate the effect of changing values and to identify patterns and relationships [for example, simulation software, spreadsheet models]."

Examples of their use within the classroom are numerous – music composition software, on-screen science experiments and on-screen interactive geography diagrams for instance – however it’s easy to overlook the need to actually teach children about their role in the real world and how to realise that they do have their limitations as well as their benefits.

For these reasons I always like to spend some time with Year 3 ensuring that they fully appreciate what exactly simulations are, how to use them effectively and how to evaluate their usefulness (before they move on to designing their own spreadsheet models themselves in Excel in upper KS2). In the old QCA Scheme of Work for ICT, a whole unit of work (6 lessons) was spent on this which, in my opinion, meant a lot of valuable time was being wasted on what is actually quite a simple topic to deliver/understand. Over the years thefefore, I've gradually condensed this down into fewer and fewer lessons until this year when I finally managed to cover all the key ideas in one, concise lesson.

I began the lesson this afternoon by explaining to the children that a computer simulation is a program which attempts to mimic a real-life scenario (unlike a computer game which often has an imaginary setting that you must complete a quest in for fun).  They let you trying things out which would be too: difficult, dangerous or expensive to do in real life.

  

After this, I then let them spend a good half an hour exploring three of my favourite simulations on the laptops:

• pilot a hot air balloon;
• park a car;
• give commands to a virtual dog.

I prompted them to think about how each was controlled and in what ways it was/wasn't realistic (e.g. by how animated the graphics were), providing a simple worksheet for the more confident children to complete to record their thoughts onto:

Once they had all had the opportunity to try out each simulation and explore the effects of making different choices in them, I then played a 'Fan and Pick' game with them. One of the Kagan Structures for Co-Operative Learning, it involved the children working in groups of four to play a card game to help them consolidate their evaluations of the three simulations. Each group sat around a spinner I had made and took it in turns to rotate it around so that every child had the chance to do each 'job':

As the seats in the classroom aren't aranged in fours, I did allow some groups to sit on the floor (I know many schools that encourage this like here but that's another blog post in itself...) The activity itself seemed to work really well with most groups because it: allowed the children to share their ideas with their peers, encouraged them to do positive listening and gave them more reponsibility to give good contributions than working in pairs would have done. You can download a printable version of the 'Fan and pick' spinner by clicking here and here are a copy of the questions that I printed cut/out for each group:

Finally, to end the lesson, I had a short discussion with the class to find out which simulation they thought was the most useful/effective and why, including referencing back to the reasons why simulations are often used. I also got them to self-assess each other using the 'good, great or super' criteria so that I could see how well their understanding was:

Trying out simulations is always very popular and the children clearly enjoyed the lesson this afternoon. Condensing it into one lesson certainly made a lot of sense and by including the evaluation sheets and the 'Fan and Pick' game I hopefully put some structure into what is otherwise quite a 'light-hearted' topic to teach.

Year 5 E-Safety Lesson 2 2012

For the second e-safety lesson, I ask the children to produce a leaflet describing some of the online hazards/dangerous situations discussed in the previous lesson and how to safely respond to them.

We begin though with a quick recap/discussion on what they learnt by doing the quiz-quiz-trade game at the end of the previous lesson, since this introduced a range of strategies to them for staying safe online:

• the importance of checking email attachments are safe to open (e.g. by confirming with the sender or using an anti-virus program like the free Microsoft Security Essentials);
• the need to just delete any spam messages as they are likely going to be unwanted adverts or messages asking you for personal information to claim a prize you've apparently won (which likely won't exist and your details will be used for fraudulent reasons/to send more spam instead);
• to never agree to meet up with strangers you've only met online in case they aren't who they say they are and you are put in a vulnerable position;
• to always report incidents of cyber-bullying immediately to a trusted adult, keeping the received messages as proof/evidence and not responding to the bully with a nasty comment back (which makes you as bad as them).

After this, I then ask them to spend 10 minutes planning their e-safety leaflet out on paper, with reference to my: good, great and super expectations:

The idea behind this being that they can: see the layout of where things can go on the page (especially as it contains folded elements), try out alternative designs and check that they are including all the required information before they start on the computers.

Next, I then give them a brief demonstration of how to create this leaflet using ICT on PowerPoint. I know that there are alternative applications about but since this is one that they are extremely familiar with and the focus is on understanding e-safety rules (not desktop publishing skills), I feel that it is the most appropriate for the task. You can download the backgrounds I provide them with here (these illustrate how each slide is divided up into three folds).

I spread the leaflet creating task out over two lessons to give them enough time to create a good quality piece of work for printing out. During the second lesson, I even do a quick 'two stars and a wish' peer-assessment activity to get them to evaluate somebody else's work so far and give them suggestions of ways it could be improved (the idea being that they then have the time to make any necessary amendments).

The important thing to stress whilst they are creating the leaflet is that it's going to be printed out - thus meaning slide transitions, animation effects etc. aren't needed. Since there is little way to extend this work (as by its nature you are limited by space), I allow the more confident children who finish the opportunity to explore the fabulous Cyber Cafe website from CEOP which has been specifically designed to help them learn how to keep safe when using different types of technologies, reinforcing all the things we've just covered in a more interactive way. It is split up into various sections, with each one containing an activity where they must make the right decisions about how to deal with potentially risky/dangerous/upsetting situations (e.g. cyber-bullying through mobile text messages) as they click through it. I especially like the 'personal profile' section on this which teaches them that whilst your address is personal information, your town name isn't (as thousands of people live in it so it would be hard to identify you amongst them) - indeed, being aware of this information about other people can be interesting and helpful if they live in a different country where a time difference is involved.

Finally, to end the lesson we have a discussion on the reasons why you should only communicate and join age-appropriate websites, highlighting points such as: you won't be breaking the terms and conditions of the site by lying (I stress this word) about your age, there will be greater safeguards in place to ensure that you don't become the victim of cyber-bullying attacks and the material on them is going to be more appropriate for your age (e.g. not contain explicit/violent images which could offend/upset you).

I always think that its a fine line between making children aware of e-safety issues whilst at the same time not scaring them too much about the dangers that are out there. This pair of e-safety lessons works well though as it gives them the right balance I find between learning the risks associated with using digital communication tools whilst at the same time teaching them that they can be managed using a variety of methods to help minimize them. You can view some of the leaflets they produced on my school's website by clicking here.

Pivot Stick Animator

Pivot Stick Animator is a great little program that lets children create short animations with on-screen stick figures (that save as GIF image files). It can be downloaded for free from http://pivotanimator.net.

Whilst at first it might appear quite limited in use, the things that I have seen children achieve with it after less than an hour have honestly amazed me. It's perfect for a one-off ICT lesson or to use in an ICT club!

To start off, I begin with a brief demonstration of the main tools in the program, including how to:

• to add frames to the timeline sequence by moving one or more of the figure's limbs and then pressing 'add frame';
• change the size/colour of a stick figure;
• add extra stick figures/objects (although as this is tricky it's best just to keep to simple things).

After this, I then let them spend the majority of the session working independently at creating a number of animations. I find that with practice they themselves realise what's possible in the program and learn how the smoothest and most realistic movements are obtained by only moving the stick figure a tiny bit between each frame.

To encourage them to try out using a combination of different tools though, I explain my 'good, great or super' expectations to them:

At the end of the lesson, I display some of the better animations on the IWB to showcase the children's achievements and I'm often surprised by the high quality of their work - this year, for example, I even had stick men juggling and riding skateboards (see here)!

Whilst I've had great success at spending a single lesson on Pivot Stick Animator, you could easily extend it by letting them paint backgrounds themselves to add behind their characters as well.

If you haven't done so already, please do try to show the software to your children - I can promise you that afterwards they will be buzzing with excitement and eager to show off their animations to their friends!

Recording Video Tutorials

Video tutorials can be extremely useful both in and out of the classroom. You can:

• display them on a loop on the IWB during a lesson to act as a visual reminder of what steps children need to follow to achieve sucess (see this example from one of my year 3 lessons);
• let children access them on a laptop/tablet during a lesson to encourage independent working and so that they can control their playback by themselves - such as to pause after each instruction whilst they carry it out;
• share them online for parents to access at home to demonstrate the method(s) you are encouraging them to use when helping their child (e.g. with homework).

Whilst there are a variety of screen recording applications available, my two personal favourites are both free and very simple to use:

• Smart Video Recorder comes bundled with Smart Notebook when you install it. Whilst it does only let you record the whole screen, when you set the screen resolution to 1024x768 (so any on-screen text can be read when projected on an IWB) this doesn't really become an issue. It also lets you choose whether to record audio or not as well as produce video files which are suprisingly small in size (about 1mb per four minutes of video).

• EduCreations is both an online tool and iPad app. It lets you insert images onto a blank, on-screen whiteboard that you can write on and produces videos that can easily be embedded onto a website/blog.

You can view a variety of video tutorials online at:

• ICT Video Help
  
• Maths Tutorials
  
• Gone in 60
• Under 10 Minutes

Introducing Google Docs to Year 3

I signed up for Good Apps for Education when it was first launched a few years ago but it was only this week when I decided to 'launch' it with the children. Originally I felt that its tools were too limited (the ability to import images had some restrictions on it if I remember correctly) and from a 'teaching and learning' viewpoint, I felt that other online services needed to take priority (e.g. Purple Mash) so that the children could develop the more basic ICT skills first.

The tools available within Google Docs are quite advanced and I would never use the rather grown-up interface it has with KS1 children. With KS2 children however, I recently began to feel that they needed an additional online tool to access to further challenge their ICT creativity and the massive improvements that the Google Docs applications have had in the last few months (e.g. you can now easily do an image search from programs) prompted me to finally go ahead and introduce it to them. It's important to stress my use of the word 'additional' though here - I strongly believe that children need to be shown a variety of ICT tools to help appreciate the value in online content creation and sites like: Purple Mash, TES iBoard and Myths and Legends still have a large role to play within the curriculum as they provide different sets of tools for developing different sets of skills in a much more child-friendly way (e.g. read these posts on: creating databases, designing 3D models, developing typing skills and teaching control programming).

Setting up a Google Apps for Education account is a fairly straightforward process - the only 'issue' being that it can take a good few weeks before they validate your application request by checking that you really are a school. You can read more details about the set up process on Ian Addison's blog by clicking here. A selection of different 'apps' can be turned on or off - I chose just to switch on Docs and Sites for my school because that's all we really need at the moment (communication is done using Edmodo).

I had planned to teach Year 4 children how to create their own document on Google Docs on Tuesday but I hit problem number one - the LA filter had decided to block the site over weekend! It turned out that since the URL had changed the previous week from docs.google.com to drive.google.com, it had automatically decided to re-classify it as 'peer-to-peer networking'. Sadly, I only spotted this at literally the very last minute (it had worked fine on Friday) so had to do a backup lesson instead whilst I waited for it to be unblocked. By the end of the afternoon it had been unblocked with no problems but it is something that I urge you to check if you are deciding to use Google Docs (on Google Drive) in your school.

Undeterred, I decided to have a second attempt at introducing Google Docs this afternoon with Year 3 and I'm pleased to report that (despite the whole network being switched off accidentally minutes beforehand - making me think the lesson was cursed), it eventually was fairly successful. I say 'fairly' in that there were a few initial problems but these all seemed to be sorted by the end and the children's learning progressed.

As I knew that the class were all very confident in using a range of PowerPoint tools to create posters by this point in the year, I decided to just demonstrate to them all the main tools available when creating a new word processed 'document' and let them have a go at trying as many of them out as they could in the session. Being an ICT lesson, the focus was clearly on developing ICT skills but I decided to get them to try and do a bit of work linked in with their current topic of 'plants' by asking them to create a document explaining the definition of a key scientific terms, each illustrated with an image. The idea behind this was that they would be creating a new document for every word and thus be practicing the skill of creating a new document and naming it a few times within the lesson (i.e. not just once). Normally, I might have produced a sheet with a load of definitions on it to prompt their typing however as I only came up with this idea at 9:30pm last night, I decided to use these flashcards which I purchased from simplescience.net instead - in the end these worked just as well and perhaps would also be useful to use as a quiz-quiz-trade game in a science lesson too!

In the main teaching part of the lesson, I asked for a few children to come up and help me demonstrate how to do certain tasks - this not only made the chosen children feel more special/involved but also assisted me in being able to stand in the middle of the room near the IWB whilst they sat at the side and operated the connected laptop (I still think that a proper keyboard and mouse is both quicker and smoother in a lesson for doing certain tasks). Whilst this seemed to work very well at the time, it went on to unfortunately lead me to problem number two - it took me over five minutes to work out why I couldn't access the username list in the Google Apps dashboard to check a child's username when they were struggling to login. You should have seen look on my face when I realised that it was because I was still signed in as the child who had come up to demonstrate! The solution in future would be to do the demonstration in a private browser window (e.g. going 'incognito' in Google Chrome) since this fools the computer into letting two users login to a site from the same machine simultaneously.

Once the children had all managed to login to Google Apps, I then faced problem number three. Although minor, it was a bit unexpected - users are forced to now sign up to Google Drive before they can proceed to create a new document. Whilst it did only require the press of a button, the fact that the button was illogically paced in the top-right corner of the window did initially confuse a few children. I'll obviously be more aware of this in future and warn children to expect it!

Creating the actual documents in Google Apps did prove to be quite a straightforward activity and most of the children did manage to do this quite independently, being prompted to change various font settings to improve the appearance of their text. Problem four (which I hadn't anticipated) was that the children wanted to drag any inserted pictures around the page like in PowerPoint but this resulted in either the screen flashing grey or a hyperlink being inserted instead. Whilst this was a bit of a nuisance, a quick press of the 'undo' icon fixed it and I found that asking the children to press ENTER two times before putting a picture in and aligning it to the centre stopped it from happening again.

By this point I do admit to being a bit flustered since this had been the fourth problem that I had encountered. Having mostly been rushing around the room sorting them out, it was only when I actually stopped to see what was on the screens of everyone else that I realised that most of the lesson had actually worked well with many good quality pieces of work appearing to be produced!

I finished off the lesson by referring back to the: good, great and super criteria I had briefly mentioned at the start. After a little bit of thinking time, I asked the children to talk to their partner for 30 seconds telling them what level of achievement they felt that they had done and why. This is always and interesting thing to do as when you discuss it afterwards you can then prompt children into thinking how they can improve their skills in future - How could you improve and do 'super' work next time? A quick show of hands showed me again that, despite my initial concerns, a good two-thirds of the class had actually felt that they had done 'super' work. Indeed, at the end of the day, I wasn't bothered too much about the quantity or quality of work produced, I was more concerned with them being able to know how to use a variety of word processing tools to create it which many of them told me that they had managed to achieve!

I am now intending to introduce Google Docs to another class soon and will hopefully be able to learn from the issues I encountered during this lesson to make it run more smoothly. It certainly looks like it's going to be a great addition to the collection of online tools our children can use! (Indeed, I have high hopes for it helping children to type/edit literacy work - especially since it integrates with Edmodo so nicely now, allowing them to share their writing with others/submit it as an assignment.)

Year 5 E-Safety Lesson 1 2012

Whilst e-safety skills should be embedded into any lessons you do involving using the Internet and good online behaviours promoted at all times (see this blog post about how I do it on Edmodo), there does come a time when I think that you do need to spend some time with children actually specifically teaching them about the hazards that they might encounter online and strategies that they should use to help minimise them.

With Year 3 children I teach them about the importance of creating strong passwords, with Year 4 children I teach them about the reasons why they should only join child-appropriate websites and with Year 5 children I teach them about the risks associated with revealing too much personal information online.

The two e-safety lessons that I do with Year 5 have gradually evolved and improved each year as new government-backed campaigns have been launched and I've thought up more exciting ways to convey what isn't necessarily the most 'fun' of topics. I'll explain the first lesson that I've just taught today in this blog post and will hopefully write up the second lesson in a forthcoming week.

To organise this lesson neatly and to ensure that the children stayed motivated throughout, I basically split it into four parts that each involved a different type of activity for the children to complete. You should notice that they each include a different level of pupil participation - ranging from independent work on the computer to doing some co-operative learning with their peers - as well as a delivery method that meets children's differing learning style needs (i.e. visual, audial and kinaesthetic).

Even though it was quite a divided lesson made up of lots of short tasks, I still made a quick reference to the: good, great and super criteria too, in order to show my differing levels of expectation for the children in the class:

For the first activity, having discussed with the children the difference between an online communication (that uses the Internet) and an offline communication (that doesn't use the Internet), I asked them to complete a Venn diagram to sort out a variety of statements which describe some differences between the two methods.

They completed this independently on their own (using this PowerPoint activity file I made up) - the idea being that we could then discuss their answers as a whole class together afterwards so they could all understand the key idea that people can lie more convincingly when you can't see them (and therefore pretend to be someone they're not).

For the second, activity, I let them watch the Jigsaw video by the CEOP and think about what mistakes the girl (Becky) made in it that had helped a stranger to find and follow her. These included: making her profile page public, sharing photos of herself wearing her school uniform and telling people when and where she meets up with her friends each day. This then lead nicely into a discussion about what the term 'personal information' means (information that can uniquely identify an individual) and how revealing too much of it can be unwise as a stranger can piece together lots of small facts (rather like a jigsaw puzzle) to find out exactly who you are.

 

At this stage, I also asked the class to verbally suggest some rules that Becky should follow to stay safer in future, with reference to the 'zip it', 'block it' and 'flag it' slogan (devised by the UK Council for Child Internet Safety):

• Zip it – Don’t share your personal information with strangers. Keep your profile settings private.
• Block it – Block friend requests from strangers on social networking sites.
• Flag it – Always tell a trusted adult if something online scares/upsets you. Report any meeting requests from strangers to a trusted adult. Remember to be as careful online as you are offline.

Next, I then asked the children to answer some questions as though they were talking to a stranger on the Internet to help them learn how they should respond when asked for personal information (politely decline to share it).

To give them a bit of an ICT activity to do here, I got them to draw callout shapes next to each question on the PowerPoint slide in which they could type their answer. I also let those that finished quickly change their fill and outline colours for effect and for a bit of light relief.

Finally, I then taught to the children about some other hazards that they might encounter when using the Internet: receiving spam messages, being a victim of cyber bullying and suffering a virus attack.

To get them to consolidate their understanding of these terms, I finished the lesson off by letting them play a 10 minute quiz-quiz-trade game containing questions about these hazards. The beauty of this structure is that not only does it get every child: up, moving and interacting but it also means that you can get a bit of co-operative learning taking place too (since the more confident children can 'coach' those who are less confident in answering particular questions).

A lot of content was covered in this ICT lesson but all the children seemed to enjoy doing each activity since they gave it a bit of variety. In the next lesson, I'm planning to consolidate everything from today to ensure that every child fully understands it all and to outline any misconceptions that they still might have.

(You might have noticed that I sneaked in a few questions about how to respond to online hazards in the quiz-quiz-trade game at the end - whilst this is going to be the main focus of the next lesson in which I ask them to create a leaflet explaining how to stay safe online, I thought that a tiny introduction this time would reduce the amount of 'new' content next time so that they can spend more time creating a good quality leaflet instead.)

Creating 3D Information Cubes

Having had much success with my animated Christmas trees lesson, I had a great thought last week at Teachmeet Bolton when I realised that I could do a similar lesson inspired by the 'World Box Day' activity that children in Peter Rafferty's class do.

I therefore adapted his idea for my ICT lesson with Year 5 today by asking the children to present information about their current topic of 'deserts' as on an on-screen cube rather than a real one. They all enjoy creating presentations in PowerPoint so I felt that this would be a nice 'twist' on the traditional use of the software.

They had already done a whole session on researching for facts about deserts and had recorded their findings as notes on a worksheet I created based on one of Sue Palmer's non-chronological report writing skeletons. This meant that they already had a good understanding of the topic and so be able to spend the lesson just presenting it. (Click here for my detailed blog post on delivering Internet research lessons.)

PowerPoint slides have a default set of dimensions at a 4:3 ratio suitable for projecting onto boards however cubes need to have square-shaped faces. I therefore began by getting the children to first change both the width and height dimensions of the slides in their presentation to 10cm.

Next, I asked them to add five new slides and to fill them with information about deserts. The most important thing to stress here is that they need to make everything BIG - use a large font size and only type short sentences. The finished cubes are quite small so putting lots and lots of facts onto each slide will mean that they will become unreadable - having two 'information' slides and two 'picture' slides or displaying the picture as a background are both good strategies to use. Using Word Art for the title on the first slide is also a good idea since it can be easily enlarged to fill up as much space as possible.

After that, I then asked them to save their work twice - as a normal .ppt file and every slide as a PNG image file.

Following this, I then asked them to go to http://www.bloggif.com/cube-3d and to upload these .PNG image copies of their slides to create their cube. The third file upload button is for the top face of their cube which is displayed all the time so I tried to prompt them to use this for putting their image of slide 1 (the title slide). They also liked setting the background colour and the cube's rotation speed here. Once created, I finally asked them to download the GIF image of their 3D information cube into their folder on the network to permenantly keep.

As you can see on my school's website, the finished cubes do look very effective and show how two different ICT tools can be combined together to create both an attractive and informative piece of work.

It was the first time I've ever done this lesson today and so it's worth noting a couple of things that I would alter in future to improve it - stress the importance of using a large font size even more than I already did (some children didn't quite seem to appreciate why I didn't want them to type lots of sentences in a small size) and spread the activty out over two lessons (to ensure that all the class create five good slides and leave enough time at the end to create the cubes independently without rushing).

Despite these issues, I would definitely repeat the activity and would definitely recommend that you add it to your collection of creative and interesting ways to present Internet research!

Teachmeet Bolton 2 - A Brilliant Bolton Bash

I've just arrived back home buzzing with ideas from yet another brilliant TeachMeet event, this time at the new Essa Academy in Bolton.

To say that the venue was outstanding would, in my opinion, be an understatement. Opened last autumn, the building has to be the best designed school I have ever stepped foot in - it's open-plan, it's bright, it's clean and I would imagine that it would be a great place to work in (they've even thought of the 'little' things that make a massive difference like ensuring all classrooms look out onto a green space and building dividers between rooms out of a whiteboard surface so that they can be wrote on when shut). The way that they have embraced modern technology is also phenomenal - they have an enormous 4D theatre, every pupil is given their own iPod Touch (with their contribution just being £15 for insurance, managed by the school) and every teacher has their own iPad which can link up to any one of the 80 Apple TV enabled screens on the site, with staff being encouraged to publish their own course books using iBooks. Looking at their website you'll get a glimpse of how impressive the academy is and you'll be able to read about how they hope to extend their facilities to accommodate children aged 3-16 in future years.

Moving onto the presentations, these offered the usual mix of teachers enthusiastically sharing their practice in the hopes that others would be inspired. Time constraints limited people to 5 minutes each but I actually think that this worked extremely well, keeping the pace and excitement going right up until the very end.

In summary:

• Tim Rylands did a Skype call from Spain to share a collaborative drawing tool named Cacoo (as well as the sunny weather there).
• Andy Green-Howard talked about how working in a free school offers you the opportunity to be given a blank sheet of paper to completely re-write how you approach teaching and learning.
• Jasmine Renold praised Edmodo for offering the facility to send out online assignments to her students. (You can read my blog posts on Edmodo by clicking here.)
• Julia Skinner promoted the 100 Word Challenge she sets children across the world, in which children are asks them to write a 100-word paragraph online based on a prompt she sets (such as a picture of a check-list of words to include), from which they will receive comments and feedback on how to improve it. You can find out more information about it at: http://100wc.net/?page_id=6
• Cherise Duxbury gave a real-time demonstration of Cover it Live and promoted http://livewriting.net/ - a place where all the live writes are collated together.
• David Mitchell explained about the success of his 'Well Done' blog that he runs at his school to quickly share children's achievements with the school community online ('capturing the magic' as he termed it) - see more details here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwCQ0TKP64
• JC Sheffield did a musical presentation via Skype from Plymouth University to share how useful playing a ukulele is in school as a class management tool.
• Dughall McCormick managed to make some hoops out of piping bought from a DIY store in exactly two minutes (!) - useful for letting children make dens with as it is cheap and reusable. Scroll down on this page for a picture of it in action.
• Peter Raffety recounted the 'technology takeover day' that he ran with his Year 4 class in which they all brought their own devices in to share and learn with for one day. He also showed some pictures of boxes his class designed as part of 'World Box Day' (as he named it).
• Paul Hutson shared the benefits of holding whole-school theme weeks in which creativity and cross-curricular work are promoted - an example being the Night Zoo Keeper project.
• Chris Cox and Jo Harwood demonstrated Symbaloo as an online tool for bookmarking favourite websites as tiles.
• Ben Gristwood talked about creating a Twitter account for his high school computing department on which he: poses questions to pupils asking them their opinions on topics, shares interesting news articles and broadcasts homework reminders.

I gave my presentation on using 'quiz-quiz-trade' as a co-operative Internet research activity - see this blog post for details.

Although it was a very wet evening, thanks must go to Dughall and David who organised yet another marvellous TeachMeet, along with all the staff at the Essa Academy who stayed to provide us with the room facilities and nice meal to eat too! Special mention to Abdul Chohan as well for his fantastic guided tour of the school.

What inspirational idea/tool will you try in your classroom after tonight's TeachMeet?

Progression in Internet Research (Years 1-6)

I often find it nice to give children some 'exploration and discovery' ICT lessons in which they just spend the session navigating around the Internet to research information on a particular topic independently.

Teaching them the skills to search the whole World Wide Web to locate answers to particular queries is something that I gradually introduce to them in Year 4 (and then develop in Years 5 and 6) - up until this point however I've found that it is much: safer, quicker and effective to simply direct them to a collection of useful websites/web pages that I've found to carry out their online researching activities.

As a brief overview:

• In Year 1, children navigate around my Infant Encyclopedia website to learn information about a variety of topics conveyed using a variety of media (e.g. text, pictures, sounds, videos etc.).
• In Year 2, children carry out key word searches to find relevant pages within my Infant Encyclopedia website to find out the answers to simple questions (i.e. they follow straightforward lines of enquiry).
• In Year 3, children navigate around small collections of useful websites that I've put together to read and discover interesting facts about specific topics, with some simple questions given to help prompt particular lines of enquiry.
• In Year 4, children then learn how to compare and contrast websites in pre-selected collections to help find out the most interesting facts and most comprehensive answers to questions on particular topics. They are also shown how to do simple Internet searches, often using key words provided.
• In Year 5, children develop their Internet searching skills by learning how to select suitable search terms themselves (i.e. 2 or 3 key words) and are allowed to research their own areas of interest within topics, filtering results to show different types of media.
• In Year 6, children are taught how to properly cross-reference information found on websites to help verify their accuracy and evaluate their helpfulness, including checking the date and author of them.

I've always found that children enjoy being given the freedom to look up information on the Internet by themselves and by following this progression in skills I can be sure that they won't come across anything irrelevant/unsafe and will definitely spend valuable time in lessons learning useful information that is relevant to the topic.

By giving them plenty of opportunities lower down the school to learn the rules and conventions of navigating within websites it therefore means that they gain good experiences in recognising how information is presented online and how to best understand/interpret it. I believe that it is extremely important that they gain confidence in these skills before they are then able to be trusted to properly and effectively use an Internet search engine on their own higher up the school to do more 'open', 'unguarded' Internet research. Hopefully then, by the time they leave Year 6, they will be equipped with the skills of being able to find relevant sites quickly and the knowledge of how to properly evaluate their usefulness/accuracy.

To help illustrate these ideas, here are some extracts from my ICT planning documents for Years 1 to 6 that show how I go about delivering Internet research lessons based on particular topics currently being studied in class:

• Download Year 1 Planning
• Download Year 2 Planning
• Download Year 3 Planning
• Download Year 4 Planning
• Download Year 5 Planning
• Download Year 6 Planning
• Download Progression in Digital Research

Also, here are examples of some of the 'learning intention' slides that I display on the IWB in Years 3-6, together with the criteria that the children use to self-assess their ICT capability. Notice that whilst the learning intention of each lesson remains consistent (and doesn't make reference to the context/topic being researched), the steps to success for the children to follow becomes more complex as they grow older and my expectations of them become higher.

Download Internet Research LI Slides

It's also worth noting that I try to use a variety of methods/resources to help structure their work in each lesson, such as by getting them to do: crossword puzzles, simple worksheets, collaborative mind maps, 'Find a fact about...' worksheets, 'quiz-quiz-trade' cards etc. Doing a quick class quiz or a 'timed pair share' (in which they have 30 seconds to verbally share their findings with a partner) are also good games to do in plenaries too.

In my opinion, specific lessons teaching Internet research skills are extremely important in primary schools and are best followed with lessons focusing on presenting the information found out (not at the same time as - especially in the lower year groups as this creates a conflict over whether the research or the presenting skills are being focused upon and thus usually ends up in lower-quality work being produced as neither set of skills have enough time to be taught/practiced).

What are your experiences of doing Internet research lessons with children at your school? Please write a comment below to let me know!