Primary Blogging

Blogging is now a worldwide phenomenon with weblogs reaching a potential audience of hundreds of millions. Blogs have been described as the ultimate in publishing for the people and have been used to challenge governments and the press. Steve O’Hear, one of Britain’s digital evangelists, explores how blogs can be used in schools. Steve finds some enthusiastic primary age bloggers and sees how it helps in literacy, ICT skills and a range of other subjects. He finds many of the benefits extend beyond the curriculum. Blogging can help pupils:

• Develop confidence
• Improve their self expression
• Get a real sense of fulfilment from publishing their work

Watch the video on Teachers’ TV to learn more about how primary aged pupils are exploring this new technology.

Learn how to blog and podcast on our Developng New Technologies course

26-4-07

Melksham PDC

Developing Use of New Technologies

The Magic Sorting Hat

I was lucky enough to sit in on the inspirational seminar by Tim Rylands at the Wiltshire ICT Conference this week. During his introduction he used a brilliant, free download from Harmony Hollow which takes all the stress out of selecting a volunteer. Once downloaded and installed, you add the names of your class and click on shuffle. If you reduce the size of the window so that it just shows the top name then when you click on stop you will randomly choose a member of the class.

 

I was also really pleased to see that Tom Robson has taken the first tentative steps into the highly addictive world of the blog. Go Tom!

Primary Framework for Literacy and Numeracy

An electronic version of the renewed Literacy and Numeracy frameworks are now available online:

 www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primaryframeworks

A Sound Recorder

Audacity is a free to download piece of recording software which is easy to use in the classroom in a variety of ways including recording children’s musical compositions or for speaking and listening projects. Useful features include being able to record a number of tracks on top of each other and edit them as required. There are also tools to manipulate the sounds recorded. Don’t forget to connect a microphone to the computer. Find out more about audacity including tutorials at Wikipedia

It is free to download from a number of sources including here