This is the second in the series of five posts on my experience from Teachmeet North East London last week. Listening to Tom Barrett speak or reading his blog is always so refreshing - he can only be descried as a legend in the edublogosphere. He is a key part of my personal learning network and completely committed to his school and the children in his care. I have learnt a huge amount from over the past few years.
Tom used Prezi really well for his presentation and you can view his Prezi here. If you have not seen Prezi before its well worth a look. Tom’s presentation was called, ‘Mr Barrett there is glue on my laptop’. The title had real meaning as what time was trying to explain that technology should be embedded into regular classroom practice. Tom gave us a video tour of his room which he described as a ‘regular primary classroom’ the big difference being that ‘technology was always on tap’.
Next Tom showed us some of the work he had been doing with his classes. The first example was using Google Earth to help with story telling. It was based around James and the Giant Peach where the children had to use Google earth to plot their own escape story for the peach. They used Google earth to record their story and also used it as a canvas to write their story as well. Tom has a good write up of this over on his website.
Tom then started to talk about how he uses Delicious as a homepage for all the computers in his class. This is a really great idea. If you don’t already know delicious is a social networking site that allows you to save bookmarks to the Internet. It’s well worth checking out, you can find my delicious links here and I’ve also embedded a great little commoncraft video below to explain how delicious works in a lot better way than I ever could!
I’ve used delicious with students before for Advanced Higher (A-level) work. But then I was really only encouraging the students to create their own delicious accounts, so they could save bookmarks and if I found a website that I thought would interest them, I could recommend a link to them.
Tom uses Delicious in a different way. Tom’s class’s delicious page is set up as the home page for his class computers. This means if his class are using the class laptops Tom can quickly direct the children towards a link (it’s tagged for maths, science, geography, literacy etc...) This saves the children from entering complicated URLS and also keeps that more focused on where tom wants them to end up on the Internet. I thought this was a great idea with fantastic potential.
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