Simon Haughton's Blog

Student Selector

This year I have been introduced to the power of Kagan Structures for Co-Operative Learning (see here and here for more details).

Quite a lot of the structures involve children being picked randomly from within a group to take a more leading role in a task. The 'official' random-number spinner is only available as a commercial release so I decided to create my own version of it using PowerPoint (which also contains an extra circle for groups of six children) for you to download for free to use in your classroom. Enjoy!

Download Student Selector by Simon Haughton

Creating a Book Review Group on Edmodo

I've found that children really like joining groups on Edmodo - probably because it makes them happy when they feel they belong to lots of different communities.

A couple of weeks ago I created a 'book reviews' group for my school in which children could write and share reviews of any books that they have enjoyed reading recently. Since then it has become very popular and nearly every day I now see a new review being added to it by a pupil - indeed, it's turning into a fantastic way of promoting and improving children's enjoyment of reading books for pleasure.

To make everyone aware of the group's presence, I asked a couple of eager children to each design a poster advertising it and explaining how it could be joined (i.e. what the group code was). This helped to put a bit of child-ownership on the project and seemed to be a great way of attracting members who would likely be more interested in promotion by a friend their age than by an adult. 

In order to keep the group's message stream tidy and free from distracting 'chat', I opted to implement the new 'moderate posts' setting in Edmodo. This means that all messages sent to the group are held for moderation by the owner (in this case me) before they appear. Any new reviews/replies that aren't good enough quality I simply delete before others get the chance to read them. 

To encourage good review writing, however, I ensured that the first message posted to the group contained my expectations and success criteria for what features should be included and I also created a badge to reward to those who successfully follow them. 

Download Book Review Badges

Have you created any interesting groups on Edmodo for encouraging online learning?

Creating Display Lettering

I was asked the other day by a colleague what I thought the best way of creating lettering for a display title was.

Presuming you actually want to make it yourself (i.e. and not use a website like http://www.instantdisplay.co.uk/alphabetsets.htm), then my actual preferred piece of software is Microsoft PowerPoint. The steps I follow are:

1. Measure how much space you have for your lettering. The simplest way is to just get a couple of sheets of A4 paper and count how many of them in landscape orientation are needed to go from one side of the display board to the other (remembering to leave room for the border).
2. Choose a suitable font for your lettering. I often find that a fancy font works well for a display title as it helps to grab the viewer's attention. Fonts can easily be downloaded for free from a range of websites, although my personal favourite is http://www.dafont.com/ as it lets you search for fonts based on particular styles. Remember that somebody will be cutting this lettering out so try to choose a font that isn't too busy around the edges and that doesn't have lots of tiny holes in it.
3. Open PowerPoint and insert some Word Art text containing your title in your desired font style.
4. Change the fill colour (perhaps using a gradient going from a lighter to a darker shade) and outline colour (if you so want to) of the Word Art.
5. Resize the Wrd Art until it is the desired size. Holding down CTRL+SHIFT whilst moving a corner handle will resize it in all dimensions at the same time. You will likely need to keep dragging it around the slide until it is the correct height and to check that it can be spread out over the correct number of slides horizontally (as a normal 4:3 slide prints landscape on A4 paper).
6. Change the outline thickness if you want to - perhaps to make it easier for cutting out.
7. Print the Word Art title out. Drag the lettering so the first few letters fit on the slide and click print. Next, drag the lettering to the left until the next letters appear on the slide and print them. Repeat until all the letters have appeared on the slide and you have printed them.

A few extra tips I've learnt over the years that are also helpful are:

• print your lettering out onto card to make it more stable - especially if it contains lots of fiddly edges;
• if you want your lettering to be exactly the same colour as the paper work for the display is backed in: fill the lettering in white in PowerPoint (as this won't print out), set the outline colour to black and flip the Word Art horizontally before printing it out onto coloured paper (so that when you cut it out the outline edges which you cut around don't show up when the lettering is looked at on the other side);
• cut out your lettering before you laminate it and cut it out again - this stops the edges of it fraying over time;
• draw temporary white rectangular boxes over letters that you don't want to be printed out from a slide (e.g. half of a letter that is getting cut off the edge);
• save your lettering PowerPoint file - just in case you need to use again (e.g. in case you measured the display incorrectly).

I'm sure there are many other ways people have to make lettering, but I find this way the best because: every member of staff has access to PowerPoint (unlike Publisher) and Word Art can be enlarged up to very big sizes (unlike in Word).

Please let me know if you've found these instructions helpful!

Internet Research using Quiz-Quiz-Trade

Teaching children Internet research skills is very important however it can sometimes get a little bit boring just asking them to find out answers to lots of comprehension-style questions on particular topics. Whilst I'm not suggesting that this type of activity isn't valuable or doesn't work, I do believe that giving children some variety in their ICT lessons can be extrememly effective and can indeed challenge them to think about different ways of approaching ICT tasks.

One such creative approach to developing Internet research skills is to ask children to design their own quiz-quiz-trade cards to test each other with, like I have just done with our Year 4 class.

An example of a Kagan structure for co-operative learning and activity engagement, quiz-quiz-trade involves the children quizzing a partner before then 'trading' cards with them to repeat the process with a new partner:

1. The teacher tells students to "Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up."
2. Partner A Quizzes B.
3. Partner B answers.
4. Partner A coaches or praises.
5. Partners switch roles.
6. Partners trade cards and thank each other.
7. Repeat steps 1-6 a number of times.

Although it was originally designed as being a method for use in PSHCE lessons (e.g. to develop social skills), it can quite easily be implemented in any subject, in my opinion.

Our Year 4 children are currently learning about the Tudors and are extremely motivated by the topic - it would therefore have been a wasted opportunity, I felt, if they weren't given the chance to spend some ICT lessons researching online for additional facts about this major part of British history.

For the first lesson, I directed them to my Primary School History Encyclopedia website and gave them a short time to just explore the Tudors section on it. After about fifteen minutes, I then asked them to write their own set of questions which could be used in a whole class quiz-quiz-trade game about the Tudors - the idea being that they were given ownership of the task and were allowed to choose themselves what aspect of the Tudor period they wanted to research (and subsquequently write questions) about.

   

We discussed the various ways of doing effective research on the site, including: doing key word searches (with just 2-3 key words spelt correctly), navigating the menu and remembering to scroll down to the bottom of each page to not miss anything, and I gave them a blank template document I had created for them to enter their questions and answers into to create a set of quiz-quiz-trade cards.

Following this lesson, I next went through all the saved cards to cherry-pick out the best ones to use next time. I tried to pick out questions that covered a variety of different aspects of Tudor History (i.e. not just on Henry VIII) and printed them onto three different coloured sheets of paper to indicate their relative level of difficulty.

In the second lesson - after a recap on the outcomes of the previus lesson - I then just let the children play quiz-quiz-trade with the cards they had helped to compile.

As well as reminding them of the structure itself, I also gave them a few organisational pointers too, such as:

• walk around the room with your hand up to let others know you are searching for a partner;
• look at the colour of your partner's card to prime your brain to think how challenging it will be to answer (it would perhaps be difficult to say that the questions were providing differentiation as the children get very mixed up when playing the game);
• research for the answer on my Primary School History Encyclopedia on the nearest laptop to you (I checked that all the questions could be answered from it beforehand and going to the nearest laptop would save children time walking to 'their' laptop when a nearer one would be just as good);
• give your partner a high-5 when you have traded your cards with each other (a fun way for them to celebrate answering their question correctly and an easy way to indicate to me when a trade has taken place).

To say that the two lessons were successful would be an understatement - every child was getting involved, every child was developing their Internet research skills and I could clearly see that every child was enjoying it all too! The quiz-quiz-trade game literally had the whole class motivated and wanting to use their ICT skills to develop their understanding of Tudor history - even the usually less-confident children were wanting to take part and really seemed to benefit from being coached by their more-confident peers in how to research for the answers online.

I know that I often recommend that you try out my lessons but I can assure you that this one is a real gem to deliver!

NAACE ICT Impact Award – A call for your help!

Three years ago I joined Twitter - out of curiosity more than anything after seeing it praised on several teachers' blogs.

Two years ago I started blogging my ICT lesson ideas and display resources on my very own blog - www.simonhaughton.co.uk.

One year ago I began to realise how teachers from across the world were being inspired by my shared ICT expertise.

Last week I was shortlisted for NAACE's ICT Impact Award for Primary.

I do feel slightly awkward asking this as I am normally quite modest about what I do, however I really need your help now - I have to create a short three-minute video to persuade the judges that I deserve to be given this recognition for all my hard work and would really appreciate any contributions you would like to make towards it.

How useful have you found the advice on my blog?

How have your children used my resources/websites in your classroom?

How much of an impact have I had on teaching and learning in your school?

Ideally, I would really love a mini video/audio clip explaining the impact I have had on you/your children (even if it's just one word - that would be fabulous) but I would obviously welcome any text comments/photographs too.

You can email me your contributions at:

simonhaughton@ymail.com

All being well, I will hopefully be able mix all these together to produce a something very special and would be proud to share it with you on this blog when it's completed.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and being prepared to have a go!

Simon Haughton.

BETT 2012

I had what I could quite easily describe as being a 'perfect' day on Saturday as I travelled down to London (on the extremely early 0555 train from Manchester!) to attend BETT 2012.

Like last year, it was a bit of a whirlwind as I wanted to visit lots of stands in quite a short amount of time at what is quite easily the largest ICT supplier's exhibition in the country. In addition, I also wanted to watch several talks too (both showcasing particular products and as part of TeachMeet Takeover demonstrating innovative classroom practice by teachers) - indeed at one point I even wanted to be at two ends of the main hall at once so apologies if I didn't quite manage to see the beginning/end of your presentation. 

Click here to my photos view on a mobile device.

Some of my highlights from the show included:

• TTS letting me try out their new Bee-Bot app (which I was assured will appear on the Apple App Store imminently) and showing me their new rechargeable Bee-Bots complete with charging station;
• Scholastic Education (with the help of Chris Ratcliffe and Ian Addison) introducing me to Class Pet - a new online resource kit for primary literacy and numeracy;
• getting a free copy of the great Teach Primary magazine which although it is half-full of adverts, is also half-full of some really good articles/lesson ideas written by teachers too;
• being reminded of the power of CoverItLive through the new livewriting.net website which @simcloughlin and @cherise_duxbury doing a live lesson with children from High Lawn Primary School;
• trying out a Chrome Book (basically a stripped-down laptop with nothing but the Chrome browser on it) on the Google stand ;
• taking part in a writing workshop on the Nelson Thornes stand run by Pie Corbett (author of this new Story Ideas iOS app) in which he: explained how to write stories from images, taught how to describe a setting/character in detail to help build a picture up of it/them in the reader's mind and pointed out the value in doing a full shared writing of whole story with your class to model it fully to them before they are expected to write one independently;
• meeting the creator of the Testbase software we use at school for filtering old SATs questions by topic and year to give out to the children to solve/answer on the AQA stand;
• listening to Jane Fisher talk about the impact running after-school Mathletics clubs has had on improving her children's mental calculation skills;
• getting a free pointy hand stick from the SMART stand;
• being reminded how fantastically child-friendly the educational videos on Brain Pop are;
• meeting up with many of the outstanding educators I follow on Twitter for the first time like Claire Lotriet, Matt Lovegrove and Dawn Hallybone.

I also enjoyed giving a short presentation on the 2Simple Software about the amazing impact several of the creative tools available on Purple Mash has had in my school.

Finally, I ended the day with a scrumptious dinner at a Spaghetti House restaurant before then going to watch Matilda in the West End. This was by far one of the best musicals I have ever seen, being: funny, heart-warming and wonderful - I, along with the whole audience, came out of the theatre with huge smiles on their faces. What a fantastic way to end the day! :-)

Long-Term Planning for ICT

Anyone who knows me well will know that I like to be super-organised and like to get myself prepared for things well in advance.

When I first started in my job, long term planning for ICT was extremely straightforward to do - the QCA Schemes of Work dictated that you did five or six units of work on different topics in each year group, each lasting about half a term each. As time went on however and I became more confident and creative in my planning, it became more necessary to look more carefully at the bigger picture of when particular topics were being covered.

Whilst some topics do still work best being taught as longer blocks or sequences (e.g. Scratch programming or my theme park spreadsheet work), I've found that the more generic skills relating to Internet research and creating Word/PowerPoint documents are much better being delivered alongside humanities topics so likely get spread throughout the year more into small chunks (I quite often do a research lesson followed by some lessons presenting findings, for instance). It's also nice to do work relating to current events/celebrations too which occur at pretty random times: Christmas and Bonfire Night happen every year on the same date, other festivals like Easter and Chinese New Year change their dates each year and then other national events occur every few years as one-offs like the Royal Wedding or Diamond Jubilee.

To help me plan what lessons I'm going to do when, I therefore create a grid system which has become so successful it's now even been developed my deputy head into the whole-school yearly plan too! It contains:

• a row for each week of the year that the school is open;
• a column detailing what national event/celebration is taking place either in each week or soon after;
• a column detailing what the class topic is for that week (at my school the topics are done 'intensely' for: 1, 2 or 3 weeks);
• a column detailing what my ICT lesson is going to be.

All I then do is: mark in which national events/celebrations I'm going to do an ICT lesson for, mark in when to do my block projects that needs a few weeks to cover (e.g. during 'quieter' times in the year or when practical science topics are being covered) and then fill in the remaining gaps with either topic-linked lessons or one-off ICT skills lessons - you can guarantee too that a couple of these lessons will get cancelled due to trips out etc.

I've found that the table is an amazing aid to help me plan my ICT lessons because it enables me to see a one page a summary of the whole year in which I can easily swap and change what I'm doing when - I would certainly recommend it for other people to follow too!

Download ICT Long Term Planning Template

Reasons Why Teachers Should Blog

Here are five benefits that I would consider you would have in starting up your own teacher blog this year to assist you in your professional development as a teacher:

• it enables you to share your lesson ideas and resources with a wider audience - thus creating an online directory/portfolio of your work to easily compare with others;
• it helps you to reflect on your practice - by writing down what you do in a lesson (both the activity being done and the way in which you teach it to to the children) you will often find yourself discussing your reasoning behind it and analysing how successful it was;
• it encourages you to deepen your understanding of different topics/teaching methods - such as  by: reading, linking to or responding to other people's blog posts to reference/guide/justify your own writing;
• it lets you get feedback on your work through people writing comments on your posts - these can be very useful as they either praise it (affirming what you say you do in the classroom is good practice) or give you some useful suggestions on improvements that could be made (to support you in becoming an even better educator);
• it makes you realise how good you actually are at your job - there's nothing better than getting a lovely 'thank-you' comment from a teacher inspired by your ideas or looking on a site like Google Analytics, for example, to track visitors and see how popular your blog is with teachers from other countries across the globe.

How has blogging helped you develop professionally? Please write a comment below to let others know!

Improving Digital Photography Skills

Digital cameras are now common place in society and as they are found in all mobile phones it's highly likely that your children will be fairly confident in taking shots with them. Recently though, I've been wondering about how much of a role schools should have in specifically teaching children the skills needed to use a digital camera properly.

From my experience, most of today's children are fairly capable in taking basic 'quick' photos - indeed, I regularly read excellent case studies of classrooms in which a camera is readily accessible for the children to snap work achievements they're proud of (see this blog post by @primarypete_). With the curriculum already being described as being overcrowded however, I would doubt that many teachers would consider taking up valuable lesson time teaching more advanced digital photography skills when they believe that their current provision is perfectly adequate for their children's needs.

In Early Years Foundation Stage and KS1 classrooms, time can quite easily be allocated to teaching the simple techniques needed for operating a digital camera to take a simple shot by going on photo 'hunts' around the school. This cross-curricular approach can work well and can be applied to several subjects to allow for reinforcement of skills - examples include: looking for shapes, looking for signs/labels, looking for 'people who help us' and looking for flowering plants.

Providing such good opportunities in KS2 can be more challenging though - not least because the larger adult/child ratios means that the supervision and support which can be given to let a small group of children go around sharing a camera to take photos isn't there. What's needed instead is some creative thinking to plan ways to teach the more complex digital photography skills that I would suggest are both valuable to know and actually quite interesting to learn. These include:

Key Ideas

• that still photography can be captured using a digital camera;
• that a digital cameras allow you to review and evaluate photos on the spot, and to make decisions about re-taking them;
• that digital cameras have a range of settings which can alter a shot;
• that digital images can be captured in a range of common file types which can be changed depending on the required use of the file;
• that the way that elements are arranged within the frame of a picture constructs a focal point;
• that there are compositional rules (e.g. the golden rule of thirds) governing how the eye makes sense of a picture;
• that pictures taken with a digital camera can be imported onto the computer.

Techniques

• to capture stills photography using a digital camera;
• to evaluate the composition of digital photos in the camera with reference to their intended purpose/audience, and re-take if necessary;
• to use a tripod to stabilise a digital camera;
• to frame a digital camera shot appropriately, identifying the focal point;
• to change the settings on a digital camera to improve a shot (e.g. flash, zoom, 'macro' function, 'burst' function etc.);
• to save digital images in suitable formats and resolutions.  

I'll admit that in the past this is one aspect on ICT that I have really struggled with - even ignoring it at times. I desperately want to change this though having read two fantastic examples of how two schools are encouraging their children to take better stills photos:

• Matt Lovegrove and Peter Rafferty set photo challenges to their pupils - these prompt the children to practice using their own equipment outside of school and seem to be especially effective during school closures when the children are keen to get their work showcased online for their friends to see (such as interesting holiday destinations or super snowmen designs) - http://year4.greenparkschool.org.uk/2010/01/06/the-great-snowman-competition/
• Mr Broadfield combines the teaching of digital photography skills with the teaching of photo manipulation software in his ICT lessons with Year 5 to create these highly amusing pictures - http://mrbroadfield.blogspot.com/2011/10/more-digital-art_14.html

Coming up with a focus for the digital photography lessons is probably the hardest things to think of (as ideally you want something that is fairly easy to find but has enough variety in it to generate a range of unusual/'different' photos). The ideas that I've had so far (as well as replicating the two examples of good practice just mentioned) are: taking photos of (control) technology in the school/local environment, taking photos of a friend operating a digital camera effectively and taking photos of different people using digital cameras for different purposes. Whilst these don't have any curriculum focus as such, they would certainly be considered as specific ICT activities and would help children appreciate the usefulness of digital cameras in society today. The captured photos could then be developed by the children themselves by applying some photo effects on them or adding borders around them (e.g. using the tools available on: http://pixlr.com/express, http://www.picnik.com/app or in PowerPoint 2010) and could even be inserted into a word processing/DTP document to illustrate some written work.

Here's an example of a prompt sheet I've just wrote to help Year 3 children create a set of instructions explaining how to take a good photograph with a digital camera:

I would argue that being able to operate a digital camera effectively is one of the most important ICT skills there is alongside digital literacy (even more so than the more 'traditional' skills of working in spreadsheets and databases) so it is necessary that good provision is given in schools to teach it.

If you have any inspiring ideas to teach these skills in KS2 I would genuinely love to read them - please write me a comment below!

Using the 2Publish Projects to Produce Cross-Curricular ICT Work

I regularly use the 2Publish Projects (available on Purple Mash) with children at my school to produce documents and posters with linked to topics currently being studied in class.

Each of the project templates - also known as 'apptivities' - are linked to a different: theme, celebration or event.  At the time of writing there are over 200 of these available covering a diverse range of titles from 'Seaside Senses' and 'Blitz Poem' to 'Superhero Profile' and 'Election News', with the list growing and being added to on a regular basis. They can be easily retrieved by: going directly to a specific project's URL, doing a key word search or by looking through the different subject folders on Purple Mash itself.

The projects all begin with a helpful instruction screen explaining to the child what they should do in it (e.g. write a persuasion leaflet or recount an historical event), with many containing a short video clip too which helps children relate their work to a real: person, setting or scenario. A word bank is provided as well, containing questions to prompt children's thinking and useful vocabulary/sentence starters which are typed in automatically when a button is clicked on - extremely useful for encouraging reluctant or struggling writers.

In addition, the children can also enhance the appearance of their work by making use of one of the desktop publishing tools available to illustrate it - such as by:

• importing high-quality photographs;
• inserting lovely clip art pictures;
• painting on pictures.

The ability to rotate/resize the clip art and use a simple cropping tool to bring emphasis onto particular areas of photographs gives children the power to be able to control the appearance of their work even further. 

Whilst most of the 2Publish Project functions are free to non-subscribers to Purple Mash, children from subscribing schools also get the added functionality of being able to save their work online and to change the format of their text from the default settings - such as by increasing/decreasing the font size or by change the font colour. This helps them personalise their work even more to their own individual requirements.

Each project is very highly focused and tailored to the theme it is about - the clip art, photos and associated word bank only contain a selection of relevant text and pictures, for instance. This means that all the resources that children may require are all easily available and they don't need to waste time searching for them (especially useful for the more obscure topics).

To ensure that the 2Publish Project apptivities are accessible to as many children as possible, they have been carefully designed by the staff at 2Simple Software to have:

• a 'speak aloud' function on the words on the word bank to aid the less confident readers;

• a high-contrast colour scheme that is visually quite clear to see;
• child-friendly icon graphics whose functions can be quite easily interpreted.

As I only have a limited time for each ICT lesson (whose main focus obviously needs to be on developing ICT skills), if any cross-curricular links can be made then I always consider it is a bonus to the session. To help prompt the children in entering the text for each apptivity, I therefore provide them with a sheet containing some words to help inspire them with ideas/aid them with spellings. These include: sentence openers that need finishing off, cloze procedures that need completing and lists of key words that need putting into full sentences. Whilst this may be seen as not being very creative, it's important to remember that the children are taking part in an ICT lesson and not a literacy lesson. Obviously, I do try to differentiate the sheets whenever possible and like to encourage the more confident typists/writers to add extra detail/information  to improve their work further. 

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In conclusion, I think that the 2Publish Projects have a valuable contribution to make in ICT lessons during the middle primary school years. They allow children to learn and to develop confidence in using a variety of ICT skills to produce posters/documents which can then be easily utilised in other subject lessons and later transferred to other software packages too (e.g. PowerPoint). I've always found that the children really enjoy using the 2Publish Projects, mostly likely because they are literally so straightforward to use for creating both pleasing and attractive pieces of work with - you would be amazed at what a difference to their levels of independence and motivation having all the clip art and photos readily available to illustrate/inspire their writing has. The fact that they be accessed online at home too just makes them even more perfect and I highly recommend that you introduce them to your children!

How do you use the 2Publish Projects in your classroom?