My Stuff

Last night after much tinkering and pushing myself way out of my comfort/understanding zone I managed to embed my Primary 5 French podcast within my school blog - success!! This might not seem like a huge achievement to some of you bloggers out there, but to me it is another learning leap! Of course I had to do the actually posting at home as I couldn’t upload it within the school network, but I can listen to it in within the school network which is great. The kids are well impressed with how it/they sound and this is just another motivation for them. They love the idea of “real French people listening to them speak French”! Check it out for yourselves!
It really makes me think about the tools for collaboration and sharing that will be available within Glow. Having had access to the GLOW pilot, I was impressed with the GLOW groups and the functionality of them but must confess to getting a bit lost when trying to get anyone to join my group - Pam no pals here! I would really like to have seen the interface the children were viewing to give me a better understanding of how it all works for them so hopefully there will be that opportunity in the next round of the pilot.

I have neglected my own blog over the past week mainly because I have been so busy pushing on with all my great inspirational ideas from SETT. Our school website is beginning to take shape with lots of great suggestions from the staff about how to give the children ownership of their class pages. I spent another productive afternoon with Susan working on our school blogs and on Thursday morning my Primary 5s were so excited to find they had 36 comments! Their enthusiasm was fantastic to see and I was particularly impressed to find some had gone home and got big brothers/sisters who are now at High School or in P6/7 to leave a comment. It really gave them an audience and they were so motivated. They couldn’t wait to go and leave comments on Kirklandneuk’s blog. The standard of their written French after only 7 weeks is just staggering! They insisted that I showed them how to add the accents because “it wasn’t right to miss them out, French people wouldn’t!” and they posted really full comments. What a motivator!
I have also begun gathering photos and information from each class for our first edition of Inchinnan Newscast which we will be filming, editing and, fingers crossed, posting on Wednesday, 25th October. This should be a great challenge for the children and I hope they will get loads out of it. I will post details when it is complete.
Enjoy your holidays all those teachers out there!

I had a meeting today with Susan Ronnie from Kirlandneuk PS about setting up our French blog between the two schools. It is great to be involved in this kind of collaboration and we both feel it will really benefit the children. Susan had found a great French podcast which she had encouraged her P5 French class to download and listen to on their mp3 players. The children loved this idea and were highly motivated to complete their homework!! Those who didn’t have an mp3 player were able to listen to it online.
So here we are, two enthusiastic Primary teachers with no real ICT training, apart from (me) a PostGrad in Educational Computing 8 years ago, really excited about setting up this new technology but the stumbling block for us is the understanding of how this new technology works and about html language, RSS feeds, tags, etc. It is a steep learning curve but one we feel really worth while. At least both of us can follow instructions from the help menus - just don’t ask us to repeat it on our own! We have set ourselves the task of linking our blog to Bubbleshare with pictures and audio this week and are meeting again next week to compare notes. Hey, we are nothing if not ambitious!! So please bear with us as we muddle our way through and thanks to all who have been leaving us comments.