Pixlr

Here is another great free Photo editing tool

http://pixlr.com/

Pixlr allows you to pinch and distort images along with other conventional tasks, such as Red Eye Reduction. This could happily sit on the virtual shelf of Open Source Apps for primary work on digital images.

Here's what I did with it earlier this week:

sorry guys

This could compliment lesson 2 of the Year 1 unit from the ITASS work on self Portraits/ Digital pictures. Or it could go with the QCA Art unit on the same theme. It would also make for a great display / block of work around the artist Picasso.

Audacity and 2Create a Story Mash up

Image: Rob Ireton

Following some inspiration from Simon's blog I have been pushing the envelope with 2Create a Story and Audacity. And I have used my ideas to support my MFL colleague in delivering a session on ICT and French earlier this week. When not working with ICT Subject Leaders, I have found that it is important to showcase the quick, easy and most appropriate ICT applications. For this reason I chose to use Photostory3 and 2Create a story. There are other more advanced applications, these have toolbars that are far more crowded than is acceptable to an occasional or phobic ICT user. This is why I favour Podium as a podcasting tool, rather than Audacity, even though Audacity allows you alter sound and multi track, whereas we have to wait a while for Podium 2.0 before such features are introduced. Podium is a an easier entry level application that will beeaier for the technophobe to eaily get on with. Though you need to know youRenewed Framework , in order to convince the Technocynic of it's value.

What we did

We begun by creating simple narrated slide shows of landmarks around Pairs and images of prepositions using a cuddly toy. To do this we used Photorsory3 - It is very easy to create a narrated slide show with this free application and mentioning it now, both here and @ INSETS now feels a bit old hat. However, the results one gets with this tool in only about 6 clicks are amazing, and they allow you to communicate meaning in a way that you would often struggle to do on paper- this is surely the heart of multi-modality. I remember seeing some of the MIRANDANET dissertation work @ a seminar in NAACE. I was struck then by the power and immediacy that this medium offered. It is clearly not the only method of communicating meaning, and surely we should not deny the power of the written word and we should continue to find ways to encourage children to craft poetry,arguments, adverts, emails etc with a pencil or a wordprocessor . Yet we can not deny that in our Youtube/Google Vido culture there are literally millions of online clips all competing for our attention. Those like the Maddy video , shown at the Cup final, have the power to provoke and stimulate our minds . And as the pictures are already on screen- you do not need to mentally conjure them up yourself.

Sound Recorder and Powerpoint

We created simple slides picture and text box in PowerPoint and hyperlinked the images with sound clips we had recorded in sound recorder. This allowed for simple teaching tasks- e.g. where is the teddy? Or in my case all my images were of Cybermen. I am afraid my French does not stretch to the cyberman is on top of the upgrade machine.The disadvantage of Powerpoint is that sounds can only be inserted in wav form which is a bit of a pain, when most sound clips are in mp3 format. And also Powerpoint and accompanying music are not easy bedfellows, hence Photostory 3.

Audacity and 2Create a Story

I was asked to show how using Audacity, voices can be changed by altering the pitch and (if your brave) modulation. By using this effect and downloading just two etrc small sound files / I was able to create the story below. This was not the serious outcome or objective, but a context I gave myself to help me internalise the process and skills needed to use audacity. I was amazed at the results. Almost all characters in the story are me! I am sure the idea was that teachers could get a native speaker to record stories in French and alter their voice digitally, or they could do this themselves. I think this great but surely the real value of recording audio in MFL or to be honest any lesson, would be the saving and uploading for later listening

Primary Strategy Day

The learning and teaching with ICT network met late last December. So, this is a very overdue Blog entry! It was another good day, though I was hoping we could have had access to the hotel wireless Internet, so as to blog live, but it was not to be.

I'll try to highlight some of the salient point that relate to ICT, many of which were covered in the recent ICT subject leaders meeting, which was far too crammed as it was!

Foundation Stage ICT and assessment documenting

From this presentation from teachers and consultant in this pilot, we learned about how some schools were using photographs, tablet PCs and talk in learning. Many foundation stage teachers take photographs for recording purposes, but this project hit upon how to best use these as a teaching/assessing/talking tool.

What happens is that the foundation stage teacher would take an image of the children involved in a child initiated activity (or indeed any activity) and he would then insert this onto a PowerPoint page on his tablet PC. Having this shot in front of him he could then talk to the children about what they had been doing, while annotating the image with their comments. This form of assessment/discussion goes against the tick box grain and is very real and immediate.

The images were all saved and used in a number of ways:

• A rolling slide show was shown just next to the parents entrance, in order for parents to see what had been going on- this really helped with parental links


• The images were stored in each child's folder for viewing between practitioners, sencos etc


• The images were used again later in the year as a discussion/ reflection tool with the children- we listened to one example of this where children looked back on a picture taken in autumn, but during the spring term.

There were comments such as

"Why is it dark?"

"Because it is night"

"It can't be night, we are in school'

"Maybe it was our night walk that we had"

"Who is that on the slide?"

These comments and questions, show how an image can be used, even with small children to develop reasoning and questioning skills.

Those involved in the project also found that they soon moved beyond the regular posed shots of children and into more reportage work, though they had not explored the children using the cameras as much.

The BECTA Self Review Grid

Many coordinators that have looked at the BECTA self review grid (srf), have felt daunted by the standard needed to reach ICT Mark status. That is, if you look at every area of the grid and compare where you are and where you could be, but the grid can be a very powerful tool for developing vision and action planning. It needn't be just for those schools that want an ICT mark.

The network recommended using the teaching and learning strand, as a tool to assess where a school might be at with their integration of ICT across the curriculum. This they said, would be helpful when auditing and action planning for the implementation of the new frameworks fro Literacy and Numeracy. If you haven't looked at the SRF yet, then I recommend you go to the BECTA site and register your school. This and Keys to Learning are two very useful tools to help your school move forward with ICT in the new frameworks for Literacy and Numeracy.

Keys to Learning

What is it?

This is what TeacherNet says:

What is it? a DVD and booklet package that supports teachers in making links between their own use of ICT to support teaching and children's use of ICT to support their learning. Keys to Learning covers 7 areas of Literacy and Mathematics:
Early reading
Calculation
Reading on screen
Problem solving
Shape and space
Writing Key Stage 1
Writing Key Stage 2
It offers a wide variety of resources, including:
Professional development meeting outlines, supported by video clips of classroom practice and all of the resources needed to deliver them
Spreadsheet workbooks, interactive whiteboard files and interactive teaching programmes
Reading and writing kits including teaching sequences, interactive and multimodal texts, templates, digital images, sounds and videos
Lesson outlines for mathematics
Support for using ICT to develop early reading
How can it help? It can be used by leadership teams to support professional development, or individual teachers looking to develop their use of ICT, and that of their learners.