Thanks to Alan Parkinson for pointing out this great PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare to me. It’s along the same sort of lines at ‘did you know?’ and ‘thirst’ – some really interesting facts and figures and would be a useful resource for schools.
Today I had an opportunity to speak to all of the Newly Qualified Teachers in East Lothian who will be spending the next year working for the authority. There were about 100 in total and I spoke to them in groups during four 1hr and 20 minute slots. This was a great way to run the sessions as it allowed time for some good questions and debate.
Over the last 18 months in
Below are the main slides from the presentation:
1. East Lothian Council Internet
Safety Area for Parents and Families
The on-line web resource that we created to support parents and children in East Lothian.
2. CEOP - Child Exploitation
Online Protection Agency:
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre is dedicated to eradicating the sexual abuse of children. That means we are part of UK policing and very much about tracking and bringing offenders to account either directly or in partnership with local and international forces.CEOP also delivers free education programmes into schools to help children of all ages stay safe online.
Think You Know is an education programme that encourage young
people to have fun with new technology, whilst staying in control of
the risks. Importantly, it also signposts (via the 'report abuse' button) where a child can go if they
have any concerns. The site offers various free products which range from films, presentations,
games, lesson plans and posters cover issues of grooming by sexual
predators, children's risk taking behaviour online and cyberbullying.
The ThinkYou kNow website has been produced by the team at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.
Hector’s WorldTM is the 5 - 7 year old area of the Think U Know website. It comprises of five state-of-the-art, animated episodes. It takes children on a journey with Hector and his friends as they explore issues such as personal information, trustworthiness, making positive choices online and how to be open with a trusted adult when they use the internet.
You can download five lesson plans on how you could use Hectors World in the Teacher / Trainer area of the think You Know web site. You can also order posers and stickers, and download colouring in books and song sheets from the teacher / trainer area.
5. Cyber Café:
Cyber Café is the 8 - 10 year old area of the Think U Know website. Within Cyber Cafe you can discover the safest ways to use the Internet, chat rooms, e-mail and send text messages. You can download nine lesson plans and ideas for useing Cyber Cafe with your class in the Teacher / Trainer area of the Think You Know website.
For more information on mobile phones and the law - have a look at this article that I wrote:
Mobile Phones, inappropriate images of children and the Law (Scotland)
Childnet International’s mission is to work in partnership with others
around the world to help make the Internet a great and safe place for children.
For a good introduction to Childnet’s work you can download Childnet’s IMPACT report here.
8. Spokeo
Find something out about your friends on-line.
The Way Back Machine is part of the Internet Archive. In essence it’s a back up of some of the web. Try typing a website URL into the way back machine and if it has been cashed you will be able to have a look at previous versions of the website.
It's good fun but also could be quite scary stuff.
10. I also referred to these articles:
11. Further on-line
Handouts and Information
12. Questions and feedback
If you have any questions about this presentation please get in touch - contact details are at the top right hand side of this website. If you were at one of the workshops feedback is always welcome - please leave a coment below or get in touch by email.
In the past I have spend a lot of time at the old Gateshead LEA Outdoor Centre, Dukehouse Wood, Hexham, Northumberland.
The centre is recently under new Kingswood management and I went back to the centre today with some primary colleagues from the Musselburgh Cluster for an inspection visit. Since my last visit they have spent nearly 1.5 million on the place and will be spending about this again between now and March.
I like the work that they have done and it was great to see so many children having such a positive experience. I was also really impressed with all the staff that we ment and vision for the centre.
The reason that we were on an inspection visit is that we are in the process of looking at the logistics for a cluster camp in October 2009. The camp would involve all of the schools from our associated primary schools. This is a huge but important task and today we started to take the first small steps into making it happen.
Last night we held an Internet Safety and Responsible Use Evening for parents of primary children in P6 and P7 within the Musselburgh Cluster. This is part of our school Building a Learning Community Initiative. I believe that children pick up bad habits of inappropriate on-line behaviour somewhere between P5 and S1.
We had just under 100 people in the audience including some colleagues for other schools. These are the useful websites that I mentioned that parents should consider having a look at to improve their knowledge of Internet Safety and Responsible Use.
CEOP - Child Exploitation Online Protection Agency:
The
Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre is a UK police agency
with a difference. It has the teeth of any other police force and works
to track offenders wherever they may be. CEOP also delivers free
education programmes into schools to help children of all ages stay
safe online and is active in sharing best practice techniques with the
wider child protection community through a number of training
initiatives.
Come
in to find the latest information on the sites you like to visit,
mobiles and new technology. Find out what's good, what's not and what
you can do about it.
If you look after young people there's an area for you too - with resources you can use in the classroom, at home or just to get with it.
Most importantly, there's also a place which anyone can use to report if they feel uncomfortable or worried about someone they are chatting to online.
All the information here is brought to you by the team at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre. We hope you like it.
Educational resources, games, quizzes and activities. Includes notes on curriculum relevance.
Discover the safest ways to use the Internet, chat rooms, e-mail and send text messages. Aimed at 8 - 10 year olds.
If anyone has any questions about the evening please feel free to get in touch or leave a comment below.
Today is the last week of
the current timetable. Next week we go into next years timetable for the last
four weeks of term. If you have never taught in Scotland and you think this is a
little strange – your right, I have never really understood the logic behind it
and still struggle to see any real obvious benefit.
However, because today was
the last day of the current timetable it was also my last day with my current
S1 Social Education class. Over the last year I’ve not really covered the
course in the same way as many of the other social education teachers. Instead
we have spent a lot of year chatting, discussing, telling stories, surfing the
web and blogging. I really enjoy teaching this class and they are a fantastic
bunch with a great sense of humour.
Today we made our last blog
entries of S1, which was a quick refection on the last year and a mention of what
we were looking forward to over the next 12 months. I briefed the group in the library
and then set them loose. As they enthusiastically turned on their computers I
was actually quite taken back – they all new what they were doing. They were
all happy, collaborating, writing, multi-tasking and publishing to a global
audience.
Working with this class has
really been a bit of an experiment. We still have problems with the bandwidth, sometimes
there are not enough computers for everyone and not everyone has a computer at
home. But the class has worked with me to overcome these barriers and have been
patient when the network has been slow, when they have lost work and when they
ran out of time (I only see them for 35 minutes a week). I have learnt a lot in the last year and am
ready to roll out the project on a wider scale for next session. I’ll talk more
about this in a separate post.
I have also learnt a lot for
my student blogs over the year. This evening I was flicking through my aggregator
to remind myself of my favourite posts and web 2.0 moments with the class. Let’s
start with a great post from Zoe
today, she is obviously proud of what she has achieved this year and I’m
really proud of her. She is the fastest typeset in the class and produced some
great blog entries during the last session. It’s interesting how she compares
primary to secondary school,
‘I think first year has been my
favourite year out of all the years I have had at school. You don’t do as much
work in primary but I prefer the grammar.’
I wonder how many other S1
pupils don’t feel as stretched in S1 compared to P7?
During the year we have tried
lots of different ways to use our blogs. These have included posting video from
Google Video as home work exercises. Catherine’s anti
smoking video was one of my favourites. As well as finding what other
people think we have also used our learning logs to express our own views. In
this example Natalie
talks about what she thinks about smoking when we were working on our
healthy lifestyles unit in Social Education.
We have experimented with
posting images, some people have been more successful with this than others and
Chris
finally got the hang of this today! Well done Chris! We have even posted
pictures of some of our own work. Take a look at Fiona’s
Jelly Bean Boat for a great example. The really great thing about it is
that three teachers have commented on her efforts.
A number of departments have
been keen to get on board with the Learning logs. I have already mentioned CDT
and math also tried out a couple of successful approaches. Catriona’s homework on
rotational symmetry was excellent and I even found out from her blog that
she had won a Silver
Maths Challenge Prize, before it was published in the daily bulletin. The English
department have also got involved with a great example here on Colins
Blog when he shares with us his basketball poem.
There have been a number of
other highlights Hazel has
covered all the events that go on inside the school well she has talked about activity days, diversity days and
even my role in the Christmas Panto. Finally, Jades
even commented that she has started to think about her exams in S4!
I’ve really enjoyed working
with this class this year – lets hope some of them keep working on their
learning logs in S2.
I was really pleased that Colin had written a new post on
his learning log today about ‘Why
I now enjoy writing so much’. In a previous post (that he has now edited)
he suggested that he didn’t like writing in English because there was too much of
it. However Don questioned
him on this in a comment and Colin has replied with the following,
‘This (writing in Englsih) has changed for three reasons:
1. This blog has made me enjoy writing much more.
2. Since we have now stared reading better books that I enjoy and like writing reviews.
3. I have now been hooked to the author Darren Shan and can not stop reading his books.’
I have to say that I was delighted when I read this post. I have thought this and believed in this for a while but lacked the evidence from my own work to support my theory. Let’s just hope that some of my other MGS blog projects start to take off in the same way.
I’m meant to be working on the latest version of my SQH application form. Ronnie Summers (my Headteacher at Musselburgh) has agreed to write my reference. This is great news and the first hurdle out of the way. However, I became distracted by my aggregator, because I noticed that one of my social education class has been working on his blog today.
Now I’ve been keeping these blogs fairly quiet. But I will
flag them up with a more detailed post before Easter. However, I just wanted to
mention Colin’s
website, as he has been working so hard on it over the last couple of days.
Yesterday David Gilmore and I worked with a small group of students for 30 minutes or so to show them how the ‘now reading’ plug in works in wordpress and also to give them a bit of intense tuition on using sidebar widgets.
When I asked David to install ‘now reading’ in wordpress multi user a few months ago. I had an idea that students could use it to write book reviews and also help us keep track of what they were reading at home and at school. I thought the English department might be interested in having students flag up their current class text on individual students learning logs.
I shared this idea with the small group of students yesterday and Colin had really embraced the concept. He is currently reading Bec (The Demonata) by Darren Shan and has also added a number of other Darren Shaw books to his recently finished list. He’s written a short review of each of the books he’s finished.
How’s that for using web 2.0 to improve literacy. Well done Colin, you have just earned yourself an invite to the next exc-el open group meeting if you are interested?
Tony Cassidy put me onto this blog about non-profit advertising and social campaigns. I’ve been following it for a few months now and think it’s really good. It’s given me loads of links to material that can be used for Geography. Particularly videos and advertising on:
There is also a lot of material that can be used for Social Education. For example road safety.
This morning I picked up a You Tube link to a re-worked
Apple Key Note produced by Greenpeace.
This is the latest part of their Green
Apple campaign, which I know many of you have been following. I thought the
advert was really clever, so I have posted it below. It got me thinking about
if we dispose of all of all of our computer hardware in East
Lothian in an environmentally sensitive way or if it just ends up in
landfill? Does anyone know?
Graham Wegner from Australia
has recently produced a great post on using mobile phones in the classroom. In
his post Graham talks about some of his ideas to use mobile
phones in the classroom and has even had his students make posters of potential
mobile phone use. Alex Hayes then used this idea to make a short video of the different functions of a phone. The video is imbedded
into Grahams post.
Also in the post there is another short bit of video which shows Alex out on the street interviewing Australian youngsters on how often they use their phones. I have posted my favourite poster below.
I think this would be a great idea or activity to complete with students to help them understand how their phones could be used as powerful learning tools. Could it be built into a study skills workshop?
We are considering a mobile phone trial in Musselburgh. I have been slow to get things into place, mainly because we have recently experienced a couple of instances where students have used their phones inappropriately in school. Perhaps its time to re-visit project. I know Ewan is keen to drive this forward.
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