OllieBray.com

Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning – Introduction

 

Tim Scratcherd (the School House Partnership) and I were recently asked to write a report for the Oxford Education School Improvement Series on the use of Tablets and Apps. The purpose of this report is to provide practical support and guidance for school leadership teams who are considering the purchase of tablet devices. The report is aimed at school leaders and teacher in England but the ideas within the report are transferable to other parts of the world.

We launched the report at BETT 2013 last week.

With permission from Oxford I’ll be duplicating some of the report on olliebray.com over the next week. You can download the full report or order a paper copy over at the new Oxford School Improvement Tablet and App Help Centre.

The Oxford School Improvement Tablet and App Help Centre aims to be a hub of advice and resources on the use of Tablets and Apps in Schools. As well as the report written by Tim and I there are also a whole range of other resources that will be of interest to school and school leaders.

These resources have been produced by respected educationalists such as David Mitchell, Ian Addison and Jan Webb. Ian’s guide to the ‘Top Ten Apps for Maths’ and the ‘Top Ten Apps for Teaching’ are worth a look. David and Ian have also been busy recording some advice on the how to get started using tablets and apps in the classroom on a wide variety of topics from basic functionality to getting children blogging. Jan’s jargon buster and tablet comparison chart are also very useful to anyone looking to make a tablet purchase in the short term. 

The thing that I enjoyed the most about working on this project for Oxford is that Oxford University Press is ‘arms length’ to many of the big tablet manufactures. It meant that we could talk openly and honestly about the range of different tablets and other devices on the market but at the same time keep a very strong focus on learning and teaching.

I’ll kick off the series of posts tomorrow but talking a little bit about the ‘big picture’ – but please remember that you can download the full report at any time from the OUP Tablet and App Help Centre.

Young Digital - A guide to using digital media for research, consultation or participation activities with children and young people [Resource]

Digital Consultation with Children and Young People can be a real headache and something that we still seem to be unable to get right in most instances.

As far as I am concerned the world leaders in this are Young Scot out National Youth Information Agency here in Scotland.

Three years ago I was asked to get involved with a project that the University of Edinburgh University were running on Using Digital Media in Research with Children and Young People through their Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR). I’ve delivered the opening lecture at the start of the two day course every year since the courses conception.

Last year the same team who run the course secured funding to create Young Digital.  Young Digital is a resource for anyone with an interest in using digital media for research, consultation or participation activities with children and young people.

The site contains information and advice about:

• the technical aspects of using digital media in research with children
• some of the methods that are available
• ethical issues and how to deal with them
• analysis and dissemination with digital media
• involving young people as co-producers

As well as practical advice and case-studies around digital consultation methods with children and young people. The site also contains a variety of short videos. I contributed the Games Based Learning and On-line Safety Videos to the resource.

I’ve embedded the videos below for interest and added them to OB TV.

 

 

I would be interested to know if you make use of the Young Digital Resource and what you think.

Related articles

Social Media in Learning and Education (SMILE) - 5 of 6: Internet Safety and Responsible Use

Moving Image Education and Digital Media in CfE [Conference]

Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn (5 of 5): Social Networks and Privacy

Social Media in Education [Free eBook] - supported by #Bloxx

So much is written in the press about the negative use of technology (in particular social media) and young people. Yet technology and social media has become such an integrated and important part of our lives. We see ‘tweets’ on the television, read facts on Facebook and gather information on Google+.

In the past 24 months social media has toppled governments, helped us rescue flood victims and delivered us both localised and international news in almost real-time.

Social media is both powerful and purposeful yet its full potential is still to be realised in education. How can it be used to transform our classrooms in the same ways that it has transformed many other aspects of our lives?

As you might know I've been doing a lot of work on this recently (partly linked to the SMILE project) and now in partnership with my friends at Bloxx we have turned lots of these blog ramblings into one easy reference guide / eBook.

It is free and you can request a download from here.

Maps for Free .com

Here is a nice little Google Map and Open Street Map Mashup that would be useful for any teacher wanting to introduce a bit of place into the classroom. It is essentially an interactive Atlas that allows you to quickly select countries, capital cities, volcanoes and other global locations.

Just mike most Google Map Mash Ups you can toggle between satellite, map and terrain view. It also has a range of ‘layers’ that you can overlay on your special data. These layers include Tundra, Forests, Ice Sheets, Roads and Railways, Grassland and topography.

One other really nice feature of this mash up is the ability to be able to take a screenshot of the ma you create using the camera icon on the left hand side of the screen.

Explore the maps for yourself at: www.maps-for-free.com

Google Body - An amazing free addition to the science classroom

Google Body is a detailed 3D model of the human body. You can peel back anatomical layers, zoom in, and navigate to parts that interest you. Click to identify anatomy, or search for muscles, organs, bones and more.

You can also share the exact scene you are viewing by copying and pasting the corresponding URL. In order for it to work you will need a web browser that supports WebGL, such as Google Chrome.

This is an amazing classroom resource from Google that should find a place in any science classroom or in any lesson where you are trying to teach young people (or adults) about the human body.

The YouTube Video below shows some of the features of Google Body, but why don't you just go and explore yourself...

Rudy for Kids - useful to computing departments?

I’ve never pretended to know very much about computer programming languages but this resource called Ruby for Kids strikes me as an interesting set of tutorials to get young people learning Ruby.

There are a number of user generated games, screencasts and programming examples on the site to help illustrate what is possible with the Ruby language. The source code is also included for all of the games so it is possible to un-pick and modify them.

Useful in computing departments or just for home grown projects?

#BETT2011 – Brainpop UK

Always great to catch up with my dance rival Moby and although we didn’t have time for re-match from our SLF 2010 ‘Dance Off' I did have a chance for a quick photo in the Moby photo booth.

It is great to see Brainpop doing so well in the UK and it is no secret that I have always been a massive fan. This has included the very early days when it was only available in the US at it took me about 5 mins to load a movie on dial up!

Reflecting on this it is great to see how times have changed. Just before BETT 2011 BrainPop UK announced the featured movie App for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It is a free and a must download for both teachers and students, particularly if you are a school with a 1to1 iOS deployment.

Brainpop continues to do what it says on the tin, ‘explain complicated ideas in simple and fun way’.

 

Apart from the quality of the movies one of the other reasons I like Brainpop is that the featured Brainpop UK movie is always relevant. For example, if the world has a major volcanic eruption Brainpop makes the volcano’s movie free. If the Olympics are on the Olympic movie will be free. Some movies (the really important ones) are always free these include on-line safety, bullying and mourning.

In short, Brainpop has a real commitment to supporting teachers when they might need it the most.

Another Brainpop UK service that people tend not to know about is the POPbox. This enables you to embed the featured movie into your own blog or website. More details about this here but I would like to see this as an optional widget on Glow Blogs – it would be amazing optional feature for school websites.

Keep up the good work Tim and Moby! See you soon!

 

Internet Safety and Responsible Use Training Video for Staff and Parents (@LTScotland)

Over the past few months I have been doing more work around Internet Safety and Responsible Use for Parents and Teachers. Quite a bit of this work involved speaking at conference, running professional development for teachers and engaging with parent focus groups.

The work is very important but it can also be quite repetitive so to try and help this and to reach as many people as possible we recently made three films that covers some of the content that I normally address in various talks.

The videos are available to view on the Learning and Teaching Scotland website and I have embedded the one for teachers and parents below.

I feel it contains the minimum amount of content and information needed for all parents and education professionals.

As well as covering some of the issues regarding Internet Safety and Responsible Use it is designed to try and get people thinking about how do we tackle some of these big issues at home and in school.

As always I would be very keen to find out what you think of the resource as I hope to up-date it on a 6 - 12 monthy basis.

The Bank Holiday Britain Blog - a great resource to support cultural geography [#geographyteacher]

Alan Parkinson (Geographical Association) recommended the ‘Bank Holiday Britain’ Blog to me and I have been following it ever since.

Its a photo journal of some great pictures (mostly from Scotland) which often show the quirkiness of life, UK culture and society.

My favorite recent image was posted on 30^th August and titled ‘Building Blocks’ and was taken in Pink Lane, Newcastle.

There are lots of ways the ‘Bank Holiday Britain’ Blog could be used with a class.

For example the urban culture of the pictures could be explored, you could discuss what the picture is of and what is it trying to represent you could even try geo-locating the images.

A great resource to spice up your settlement unit and teach a little cultural geography!

Education Resources to help teach the 2010 Winter Olympics (1of10): Winter Olympic clip art, lesson plans, worksheets and other resources

This is the first in a series of ten posts about some resources and ideas that might be useful for teachers getting ready to teach about the Winter Olympics.

As you can imagine there are lots of good websites that have already been developed and created by teachers. For anyone wanting to look for a bit of inspiration on the sorts of things that can be done with classes you should have a look at Vancouver 2010 Project Showcase Site over on the official Vancouver 2010 pages.

There are lots of good ideas for projects in the showcase area. I particularly liked the 80 students from Athena Consolidated School in Summerside who co-ordinated their clothing and created ‘The Living Inukshuk’ on their gym floor.  I thought it looked like pretty good fun!

There is also some great information on the Mascots for the 2010 Games – as well as heap of other resources. I really liked the cartoon animation on meeting the mascots and finding out why Miga love snowboarding? What Quatchi loves to do when he’s not playing hockey? What some of Sumi’s amazing powers are? There are obvious links here for student to create their own olympic mascots or to have discussions about what their countries mascot would be in the olympics were held in their country.

Another good website with a lots of Winter Olympic resources on it is the Teachnology Winter Olympic pages. Here you can find worksheets, clip art, lesson plans, ideas for web quests and links to other Olympic resources.