Friday 21 February 2014

Things We Wouldn't Know Without Twitter*

*or at least as easily as we have.


This post is probably a follow up to A Year on Twitter. It is certainly something for anyone hoping to Bring a Teacher to Twitter to share. Below are things we've discovered on Twitter over the past three years and now use in our Key Stage Two classrooms: 

Apps, apps and more apps - (@AppyMail, @ebd35, @TheiMums, #appFriday
There are many users sharing app ideas, particularly highlighting price drops (some of them even use Android). Most of the apps we use have come from Twitter suggestions. #ThanksAll 

Geography & History Encyclopedia - (@simonhaughton
An easy to use, straight forward, online encyclopedia for children to use. #ThanksSimon

Google Forms for Home Learning - (@raff31
Take a look at Peter's example or one we used for inspiration and explanation. Children complete online. Offers an assessment opportunity. Download responses as spreadsheet file. #ThanksPeter




Padlet - (@SwayGrantham
Using Padlet within a lesson to record childrens' work and thinking. #ThanksSway

Paint Chart Vocabulary - (@shornymorgan
Using paint charts to aid children's vocabulary development. #ThanksShorny 




QR Codes in Reading Journals - (@tombrush1982
We don't have positive postcards - so we adapted a little. When children's work is published online, a QR Code and accompanying TinyURL is stuck into their reading journal for parents to see. #ThanksTom

QR Codes Embedded in Pictures - (@ICTEvangelist
Combine a picture and a QR Code. Here's our example. #ThanksMark




Show YouTube videos without all the video recommendations and comments. http://tinyurl.com/p8ndabz #ThanksJulian

VGA switch - (@JoeDale
In assembly we often have two or more laptops on the go. The swapping was, well, less than seamless. Now it's smooth, crisp and highly professional. We got one for about a fiver online. #ThanksJoe

3x3 Home Learning Grid - (@tomhenzley
Look at the blog post. We've enjoyed using them, so have the children and it's something a bit different. #ThanksTim

7puzzleblog - (@7Puzzle
Daily maths puzzle to get your children thinking (and more). #ThanksPaul

So, there you go. Have a look at those. Did you already know about them? There's more too. This is just what came to mind. As a disclaimer: We're not saying the above were the originators of each idea or claim to have invented them - that's who we saw Tweet it first (they informed us about it).

Thursday 6 February 2014

Sunday 2 February 2014

Countdown Inspired Literacy Game

Last week, I was working with a group in literacy. Our focus was sentence structure and making our sentences more interesting. Whilst working on whiteboards I come up with the following...

I asked each of the six children for a word or type of punctuation:

"James give me a verb" - jumping

"Oliver, an adjective" - pink

"Sarah a piece of punctuation please" - exclamation mark

"Luke give me a noun" - football

"George, another punctuation" - brackets

"David an adverb please" - quickly

So, I wrote down: 'jumping, pink, !, football, ( ) and quickly' and told the children to write a sentence including all of those.

Some did it easier than others, some found it very tricky and sometimes the sentences were bizarre. They could add anything they wanted to the sentence, but it had to make sense and include everything from the prompt.

Quickly, Adam (who did not like heights) climbed the large daunting tree to retrieve the pink football!


It's like asking for letters or numbers in Countdown. In time, a set of cards with words and punctuation may even be made...