Tuesday 26 February 2008

Newham is Live and Free

Well done to Ken, Karen and the team @ Newham, their ICT scheme of work is now online and open-source. Many of our schools, our leading teachers and myself have been looking at these resources over the last few months, and we have all been impressed with the detail of the materials and the inclusion of help videos and support documents. There are also teaching materials in the form of brilliantly presented whiteboard files in Activ Primary Format.**

What's more the materials address skills while still basing the units within a themes, so they are both 'teaching the skills' and allowing for 'the cross-curricular'.

Redbridge schools that have Activ-Primary and a dull,wilting ICT scheme work could pick this up of the shelf and use it. Though its is to be remembered that the units are based on Newhams toolkit of Primary software and many of our schools may not have software such as Dazzle.

However a good ICT coordinator could take these post QCA materials as a starting point and fashion them to their school.

***But hang on we don't have Activ Primary - easily solved- either use SMART board software to open th e Activ File (version 10 will do this) or download a free Activ primary Viewer.


Friday 22 February 2008

Video Conference Form


At 10:57 this morning the form for VC booking (see below) looked like this.
The power of Google Docs!!!

Space Centre Link Up

Note this post is also on the VC Blog

During our Subject Leaders Event we hooked up with the National Space Centre in Leicester to chat with Charlotte. We were told about a new E Mission for Key Stage 2 , which is open to Redbridge schools.


We aim to offer these to 6 schools over week beginning the 30th of June. If you are interested in taking part and hosting an E Mission, then you will need to attend a prior training session at the Teachers Centre with myself and MinaPatel on the 12th of June. Once you have applied to take part in the E Mission and this has been accepted, you will need to register for the course by booking on Redbridge PDC

If you have never seen an E Mission before, then you can look at how Parkhill Juniors got on with their Operation Montserrat mission earlier this year. You may remember that Rob from Redbridge was really enthused by the E mission at his school too, and took some time to tell us about it @ our last Subject Leaders event.

The Emission event will take place around 10am or 1pm on the week beginning the 30th of June 2008. If you were at the Subject leaders event, then you should have been sent a google form to express interest, if not then you can access the form here, or email Anthony Evans @ the usual address.

Thursday 21 February 2008

ICT and Inclusion Course- free

As a Redbridge Teacher you are entitled to free attendance at Senjit courses.One of which is:

Inclusion and ICT in the Primary Classroom
on
17th March 2008
10:00am- 3:30pm
@
The Institute of Education



Senjit (Special Educational Needs Joint Initiative for Training) is a partnership between the Institute of Education and local education authorities which provides short courses, support groups, local training and consultancy for teachers and other professionals working on inclusion and special educational needs.

The course above is described as follows:

This course will explore the range of resources and
approaches available to primary teachers to help improve
curriculum access through the use of ICT. The main focus
will be on commonly available programs, but some
reference will be made to specialist resources, both
software and hardware. Tutor: John Galloway.

Further details can be found on their website, click here

Byron Review Competion



Can your children help Tanya Byron to help others stay safe and have fun when using the internet or playing video games?’

Here is an excellent context for both using ICT and discussing issues of E Safety. Tanya Byron, who is conducting a review into the safety of the net and video games, is asking children to write or make a film about being Netsmart or Gamesmart.

What do your children have to do?

'All you have to do is to write half a page (roughly 200 words), make a short video, or draw a picture giving your advice to other children and their parents on how children can stay safe and have fun when surfing the net or playing video games.

What could they win?

'All the winning entries will be presented to the Prime Minister in the final Byron Review report.
Winners will also be invited to London where they will help Dr Byron launch the report to the public at the end of March.'

Closing date: Sunday 2nd March

For further information visit :
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/byronreview/yoursay-comp.html

Or download the flyer from here:

Sunday 10 February 2008

Subject Leaders on Thursday

So far, we have five confirmed guests at Subject leaders, this is according to Facebook!!. While Redbridge PDC, tells me there are 26 people confirmed guests. We may have to share PCS, but I'd like to see as many people as possible in S4 when it matters, Thursday 9-4pm.

The agenda looks roughly like this @ the moment:


We will be talking about your involvment with projects- therefore you need to be in it to win it!!

Agenda Provsional:
9:00- Welcome and Updates- Anthony and Nicholas
9:45- Clicker 5- Look what it can do- Anthony
10:45- Coffee and Networking
11:05- Video Conference with the Space Centre
11:45- Fiona Moorehaed Lane- SMART 10
12:15- Lunch
13:00- Unconference session
13:45- Logo -it is a bit hard isn't it?"- Nichola Hughes
14:45- Coffee and networking
15:00- Closing Remwarks - Anthony (including Wikki input)

The part you need to be worried about is the Unconference section, here I'll be expecting everyone in attendance to share something, whether it be a good idea for the ICT lesson, a successful IWB lesson, the rules are anything ICT goes really!!

See you there!!