Imagine the scene. 13 pupils about to arrive from 4 different schools in the local area. Kids who are gifted and talented with ict (what can one old fogey like me possibly teach them!). A sinking feeling – nowhere to put them!!!!! Liaising with teachers and teaching assistants so I could use the (very, very) small group room – the room that is designed for groups of 6 or so. Two small tables, 7 chairs. Boxes of books, folders, files in every part of the room that wasn’t occupied by children. By the time these pupils had arrived, I had done the equivalent of a workout at the gym and the room was just ready for the children – no space to move around and very cosy, as you can see from the picture!!!
But it worked! The aim of the day was to show the children a wide range of tools – web 2.0 tools – so that by the afternoon they could make a presentation of some sort for teachers to show how ict helps us learn throughout the curriculum. We talked about how we learn from other people, how our ideas grow when we bounce them off each other, how ict can help us to do that with an even larger audience. And what tools did we use?
Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.
We had two wallwishers (embedded into our learning platform, as all the children were familiar with the same type of learning platform). On one they put their own ideas about how ict can help us to learn and on the other they put what they wanted to learn to use during the day. We talked about how wikis can be used, we looked at voicethread, mindmaps and then they tried out xtranormal. I’ve written about using wikis and voicethread in previous blog posts and talked about them but I hadn’t actually used xtranormal with a class before, only for my own use (you can see my attempts in an earlier blog post). It’s a great tool for being able to create animations. You simply type in the script for the characters you’ve selected, then add some directions for camera angles and gestures for the characters to make. What a great way to re-tell a story, or put information across to others. I can see such potential for pupils sharing what they have learnt with others – even for us to assess the extent of their knowledge! (@gvibes introduced me to xtranormal at her teachmeet presentation at BETT 2010 and I’ve been itching to try it out with the children ever since!) Best of all it was fun to use. When they were asked how they wanted to present their ideas to other teachers about how to learn, there was a clear winner in the preferred tool race – it caught their imagination.
Unfortunately we had some hitches – I had set up a single account for the group and with everyone trying to use it at the same time, it wouldn’t let them save their work to come back to after lunch 
After several e-mails and some lateral thinking at lunchtime, we decided it would be best to use voicethread for the afternoon, even if it meant taking some screenshots of our animations to use in our voicethread – so we learnt a whole load of extra skills and problem solving! They learnt to print screen, paste into another application like publisher or powerpoint so they could crop, save the picture, then upload into voicethread for their presentation. They used both voice recordings and typed commentaries around their pictures - very productive afternoon was had by all. The ways in which the pupils developed the ideas were very interesting and different. The voicethreads were then embedded into their own areas on the learning platform, ready for sharing with their own schools. Watch the film below to get a flavour of what the children did.
P.S. I know xtranormal has an age restriction – we talked about e-safety issues and they used my account under very close supervision – what I’d love to see is this developing into a tool that could be safely used in a primary context, as it has so much potential for learning, for sharing work and ideas, for afl (assessment for learning).
