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Filed under:  Eamonn Duffy, Oaks Collegiate Liaison Teacher, talked to an enthralled Birmingham ICT for Education Conference audience about encouraging positive behaviour through safeguarding and monitoring pupils in schools, including tackling cyberbullying and other issues. He finished his presentation with ten ways to use ICT in the classroom.
Eamonn asserts that his ten tips below ‘are things that make it a bit more exciting and engage young people. The more engaged they are, the less you have to manage behaviour.’ 1. Visual stimulus to control noise levels – you don’t need to be shouting at young people. Use three PowerPoint slides – green, amber (when the noise is rising) and red, but red is rarely needed. We’ve done our presentation and now the kids are working on their own, this calms things down without anyone raising their voice – young people are very keyed into visual cues. 2. Wireless slates – whiteboards and projectors tend to chain teachers to the front of the class, often with their side or back to the children through poor design and layout of the classroom. It is very important for the teacher to be able to walk round the class as part of maintaining control. You can do with this with a £200 wireless slate and Bluetooth, which allows you to write on the board from wherever you are in the classroom – you can also load maths grids on to it and so on. You can hand the wireless slate over to a child or children to enable them to write things on the board without leaving their seat, which again can be important for control.  Wireless slate in use in classroom setting
3. Snaggit (www.techsmith.com) – it comes with Windows 7 free but you can buy it as a stand-alone. Snaggit is a bit of software that allows you to ‘cut out’ onscreen images to use elsewhere or you can cut a whole scrolled page out. The latest will even cut out shapes. Good for GCSE course work and very easy to use. 4. Selecting groups – when you ask kids to get into groups, it’s always difficult. Children want to be with their mates and however you divide them up, there are always grumbles. A friend of mine came up with this spreadsheet which creates groups automatically. You ask a child to press the button and bingo. The young people accept it because they see the computer and spreadsheet as being arbitrary, so they tend not to argue. A boon to drama teachers especially. (Click here to contact ICT for Education if you’d like to ask Eamonn for a copy.) 5. CrazyTalk (www.reallusion.com/crazytalk) – animation software which enables you to copy any image off the web, put it into CrazyTalk and then attach a sound file to the image using Audacity, the free, cross-platform sound editor, and away you go – it takes minutes to do it and you can reuse it. If a young person doesn’t want to stand at the front of the class and present, they can do it via CrazyTalk – you take a picture of them, attach a sound file which they can rehearse and redo if they aren’t happy, then they can sit at the back of the class and put their avatar up to do it for them. I have used it in art class, where each lesson was introduced by Van Gogh or Leonardo and the children loved it. 6. SlideShare (www.slideshare.net) – not all children have IT at home and not everyone has PowerPoint or they’ve got an old version. This is a free service that allows everyone to share their presentations, you just give people the URL or stick it on the VLE. 7. Wallwisher (www.wallwisher.com) – an online notice board maker. It’s a wall that you can write messages on, put videos up on it or whatever the young people want. You just give them the URL, they put all their comments on it, you monitor it – it’s a very creative way of doing homework. 8. Wordle (www.wordle.net) – generates word clouds from the text you input. It’s just a way of making things more interesting – you create words, you can change the shapes and sounds.  An example of Wordle
9. Writeboard (http://writeboard.com/) – enables groups to share text-based documents so you just give pupils the URL. Leave the document open and anyone can add a comment, then you can compare the comments. You don’t lose what you’ve written, but you can see those of others. Great collaborative tool. 10. ZoHo (www.zoho.com) – I’m a great believer in PowerPoint but it’s dangerous to assume everyone’s got it and is proficient at it. ZoHo is free and anyone can go to the website and design their own presentation. The beauty of it is you can import your own PowerPoint presentations into it and young people can go home and log in to look at your slides. So it’s all about collaboration and making life easier at home. Birmingham Grid for Learning (www.bgfl.org) is just about to release 21st Century Resources – I’ve been working on it, along with many colleagues, and there will be loads and loads of resources like Wordle and other things which I’ve been discussing, and lots of innovative ways of using ICT. Just trying to help teachers get skilled up in lots of different things. It wasn’t there last time we looked, but keep checking. For more information on the three remaining ICT for Education Conferences – Brighton, Manchester and Bristol – click here. In recognition of the recent changes to government-led budgets across the education sector and the the struggles the industry is facing, all delegate tickets booked at the remaining conferences in 2010 are priced at £69 +VAT. All three conferences offer breakfast and lunch included in the ticket price. |
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