http://www.socrative.com/ is a great “student response system” (think voting system but a million times better than the clunky, expensive ones).

If you are looking for engaging ways to assess your class, socrative should be added to your arsenal of tools.

I spent last Monday in a school in London where I shared some favourite web 2.0 tools with teachers and socrative was definitely top of the list.

Use it for oral questionning, or create a quiz and set it for your students, deciding whether they do it at their own pace, or you control the timing. You can share quizzes with other teachers, see live results as they come in and download reports (some summative assessment sorted).

Students go to m.socrative.com and put in the room number you give them. After that you control the activities they see on their screens.

The best things about socrative…it’s free and works beautifully with a range of devices. Time to get those mobile phones out of the bags!

Well, what an interesting start to BETT!

I was really cross this morning by many of the headlines flying around, for example, Gove’s Move to Scrap Boring ICT Lessons. What a demotivating headline to read for existing ICT teachers and certainly not the way to go about instigating effective change! Many of the ICT teachers I know work very hard to ensure their lessons are exciting, innovative and engaging and I certainly did when I was head of ICT.  Mr Gove states in his speech; “Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11 year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch.” Erm, Mr Gove, this is happening NOW in schools all over the UK!

Anyway, away from the headline-grabbing soundbites, Mr Gove actually said that teachers no longer have to follow the National Curriculum. This is great! However, again a little outdated. As James Greenwood tweeted;” ”Truth is that many ICT teachers worth their salt have been exceeding the reqs of the NC for a long time”. Having flexibility to do what is right for your students is very important, and, despite what many may be saying in the media and indeed Mr Gove mentioned a great deal in his speech, in my opinion, that will not always be Computer Science.

I totally agree that more could be done in schools to make ICT exciting and challenging, and including programming skills which are relevant for the 21st Century, is an important way. I loved teaching Computing elements to my classes years ago. However, I do think that there is a danger of, as many people said on twitter this morning, “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. There are some elements of the ICT curriculum that are great – animation, modelling, web design for example. I know these can be incorporated into an engaging Computer Science programme, but I am concerned that “coding” will be seen as the only worthwhile activity. It’s not.

For example, I am reminded of my low ability year 9 class, a delightful bunch for whom getting that cat moving backwards in forwards in Scratch was a major achievement. Teaching them programming or coding for a prolonged period of time would be agony for everyone. So, it’s great that teachers will have the flexibility to do what is best and I hope it stays that way.

I also hope that Mr Gove will take teachers’ expertise into account during the consultation process and not simply be swayed by what big businesses, influential voices and the media are saying. Teachers such as Mark Clarkson and Andy Field have been sharing excellent practice and taking a balanced view for a number of years. Those teachers involved in #ictcurric are also very passionate about making the ICT curriculum relevant, challenging and exciting and Open Source Schools and Computing at School have been advocating many of the things he discussed in his speech for years. Mr Gove, his advisors and those baying for ICT’s blood should respect that teachers have a great deal more practical knowledge than academics, enthusiasts and big companies about what works in schools. Although such organisations have their part to play and I respect that they bring different ideas and viewpoints to the discussion, they do not have the professional training, experience and knowledge to be shaping educational policy. Great teaching is about inspiring and enthusing students and giving teachers an official pass to get on with teaching what they think is best for their students, together with the time and resources to learn new skills, is key.

Image cc gpoo

Last week I was lucky enough to be asked to deliver a workshop to around 20 international delegates on the use of Google Sketchup 8 for teaching design. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and we created tables, interiors and buildings in the session. I have to say that the results were some of the most impressive I’ve ever seen (far better than my own efforts) and I put that down to the creative, design-brains of the teachers involved!

Sketchup, as many of you ICT teachers already know, is an excellent, free resource for teaching 3D modelling, design, architechture (amongst many other things). It integrates brilliantly with Google Earth and really fires up the imagination. Perfect for a bit of pre-Christmas fun in the classroom!

I’d like to share the resources we used on the day – these are resources for learning, rather than teaching Sketchup. I have included a mind-map of teaching ideas and a quick idea for a pet home project. The resources are all available here. Please use as you wish.

We are delighted to be running three Google Apps for Education Workshops this Autumn Term with great Google Certified Teachers and Trainers. As always, the workshops will be packed full of ideas, examples and hands-on activities, leaving you full of ideas and enthusiasm for using Google’s free tools in your class and school.

Places on all workshops are limited, so book your place now!

Google Apps Hants  on Monday 17th October.

Google Apps Zero to Hero in Gateshead in collaboration with Vital and Synechism on Wednesday 16th November 2011

Google Apps to Engage Students & Support Literacy at Holywell High School on Thursday 10th November 2011.

So if you have a corner, corridor or classroom that you would like to cheer up with this colourful, fun poster, all you have to is make sure you are following us on Twitter, and RT one of our competition tweets with the hashtag #bdayposter. You can also enter by liking us on Facebook. You’d better be quick though as entries close at 5pm on Monday 19th September!

Happy Birthday!

T&C
On Monday 19th September the names of all those people who have followed us and re-tweeted one of our competition tweets with the hashtag #bdayposter on Twitter and those who have liked us on Facebook will be entered into a random name generator and 3 names will be chosen.
We will send you the poster in a poster tube to your school address (you need to supply the blue tack / pins to pin it up).

Figures are all well and good, however I’ve found it much easier to use some very simple infographics to make some of the data easier to understand. The infographic below, for example, shows what projects we’ve worked on in our first year. You can see instantly that workshops have been our main focus, however there’s been lots of other work going on too! The infographics I’ve created have genuinely helped me with this important review and strategic planning process.

If you’re interested in finding out more about infographics, and maybe creating your own, I’d recommend you head over to the wonderful ‘Information is Beautiful‘ website for starters and/or buy the gorgeous book. If you’d like to get a bit more technical, A Practical Guide to Designing with Data has some great ideas along with mathematical explanations (thanks to Dan Humpherson for the recommendation).

This recent blog post is also a useful starting point, as is the great blog post series of Data Reveals Stories from Ewan McIntosh (thanks to Oliver Quinlan for the recommendation). This Smashing magazine post gives a range of infographic resources.

Infographics can be as simple or as complicated as you wish, from a simple word cloud, to a complex graphic. I ended up creating mine using simple drawing software, however IBM’s free set of data visualisation tools, Many Eyes, is a great place to start creating your own!

Despite it being my first year non-teaching year, it does now feel like the end of term and the start of the summer holidays. Not because my son and my teacher friends are all now off school, but because we’ve just completed the first term of our workshop program.

Overall, I’m thrilled with how the workshops went. There are of course lessons to be learnt for next time – more cake being the most important clearly. However, feedback from attendees was generally very good with several teachers saying it was, ‘the best CPD they’d ever had.’

In total, over 100 teachers attended our workshops this term. So if they take back what they’ve learnt and share it with just one class, that’s over 3000 pupils that will hopefully have a better experience of ICT. I know it’s not quite that simple, but it’s a great result nonetheless!

We’re currently finalising our program of workshops for next year and will let you know as soon as possible. In the meantime, have a great summer!

Zoe Ross is founder of DoDigital, a social enterprise which promotes the creative use of technology in education. A ICT teacher, Zoe is a Google Certified Trainer and together with other Google Certified Teachers is running a Google Apps for Education workshop on 8th June in London.

I’m particularly excited by the collaborative workshops that are going to be happening with some of those teachers that have, and continue to inspire me, in my own professional career.

For example, the ICT teachers that are joining me for the Creative ICT for KS3 workshop all share the same philosophy in making ICT a more dynamic, engaging, challenging and exciting subject. Subsequently, the sessions they will lead, from which teachers can choose, cover a fantastic range of topics, from App Inventor to Google Sketchup, Flash and Aviary, which really can transform ICT lessons in school.

There is much interest in Google Apps for Education at the moment, for a variety of reasons, particularly to do with the superb collaborative learning opportunities provided by Google’s suite and the low (free!) cost. Therefore, I am absolutely thrilled that some of those educators with both enthusiasm for Google Apps and experience of using Google tools in a variety of ways within their own classrooms and schools are joining me for the Google Apps training workshop.

Sheffield Deputy Head Julian Wood will also be sharing his considerable expertise and great enthusiasm for web2.0 tools to inspire writing in the Storytech Workshop he is delivering where he will demonstrate how digital technologies can be used to enhance written and oral storytelling and raise achievement in literacy.

There are also workshops in using Scratch & BYOB, Primary Computing, and using Flash and Dreamweaver. They promise to be inspirational days which will support teachers in using innovative technology in their classrooms and schools to support good practice, encourage creativity and help teachers to teach and students to learn. That’s what it’s all about.