So I made this:

Which is my desert dune buggy with a difference. It is designed for people to travel long distances without too much heat – fewer windows means you can travel for a while without sand and the sun getting in too much. You see I do not like being too hot! In this vehicle you can travel with a bed in the back and make your way comfortably on long, arduous journeys. There is ample storage for water with tanks in the back so that you will never run out of water on your journeys and always be refreshed. You get in and out of the buggy through the window at the back and when you make a stop you can attach a slide to slide out onto!

It looks good in the desert doesn’t it?

Send me a pic and description of your creations to creation@gettingintoliteracy.com

Don’t forget to include your name and age (or “adult” )

I live next to Westfield in Stratford and they have a Lego store (how lucky am I) and in the store you can fill a tub with Lego bits for £11. It actually fits in quite a bit as you can see from the photos. So this is a lot more than the 25 pieces in the competition but I have stuff for all eventualities you see! Doors, wheels etc

I have decided to take on this idea and make lots of things from Lego which would fit various backgrounds/settings/prompt ideas.

I will pull an idea or theme from a tub of precreated ideas and then build my Lego creation.

I am starting fairly easy so we can build up from there (see what I did)

Today’s prompt is “City Skyline”

Here is my creation:

Here is a little bit about my creation:

This is a special bakery. It looks from the outside like any other bakery and sells everything you would expect – delicious iced buns, scrumptious cupcakes in every variety known to man, doughnuts oozing jam with every bite and crunchy flapjacks just like Grandma used to make. But the real speciality of this bakery is that it is the hub of this downtown neighbourhood. Everyone knows the owners and everyone who works there knows all the customers by name. If ever anyone is down on their luck they know there is always a sandwich with their name on it at Mama’s Lil Bakery Shop. And Mama wouldn’t have it any other way…

If you would like to submit your own ideas please email creation@gettingintoliteracy.com

Please attach a photo of your creation and a description of what you have made. Remember the Literacy is key here so be as bold with your writing as you can! Use exciting adjectives! Please also include your first name and age to be published on the blog (if you are an adult please join in too but I won’t publish your age you can just say adult!)

Please also say which prompt you are using – i.e. “City Skyline”/”Space”

You do not have to use Lego – you can be creative with whatever you like!

The best ones will feature on the blog and the website.

On Easter Sunday I got married to the gorgeous Vincent Lopez. You can now call me J-Lo if you wish! The wedding day went fantastically well and all ran smoothly – but what else would you expect from the girl who took 14 coaches and 1100 children and parents to Margate for the day?

After the wedding we had a week of relaxing before getting back to work.

I started my first week of freelance with a midnight keynote speaker slot in Australia. Except in Australia it was 9am and I was connecting via Skype and Elluminate. Despite a perfect technical rehearsal on the Friday before we had some audio issues Australia-side and had to conduct some of the talk via me showing screen shots and typing the words to be read out the other end! Not ideal but will be videoing the rest of the talk this week to send over for the staff. I was talking about use of Learning Platforms and my experience with Fronter. The school I was speaking to are rolling out to their secondary age students and were looking for inspiration for the teachers and other staff. I wish them all the very best with the project ongoing and will be in touch regularly to help where I can and also steal their ideas when they have got it all going!

Then I got a few hours sleep and went to a school in Essex for a supply day in Year 6. Although the supply work is a way to earn my bread and butter money until the freelance is full time I do enjoy seeing different schools, meeting new pupils and finding out how different schools organise themselves and the school. It is a bit like being a fly on the wall and I am always grateful for any tips I pick up at each school.

On Tuesday I worked from home and started to work behind the scenes on the website getting ready to launch some new free resources which should be live by the end of the month. Also my email inbox had gotten pretty busy over Easter so spent so time replying as needed.

Wednesday I was asked back to the same Year 6 class as Monday which is good. Always nice to be requested again as it means I did something right! Another lovely day with the very high level class.

On Thursday I went to a school on supply for a Year 4 and then a Year 3/4 class. After nearly getting lost on the way to the school I arrived for a nice day teaching the students.

And I rounded the week off on Friday by meeting with the lovely people at Green Schools Online who designed my gorgeous website for me and are my go-to guys for business advice and help as needed. This week I needed advice on all things tax related for working out on my own. Not exciting as such but certainly necessary.

Throughout the last few weeks offers of work have started to come in. Next week I will be off to Torquay on behalf of Fronter for a Learning Platform event. I am looking forward to catching up with Oliver Quinlan who will be talking about Google Apps.

I have started work also on my presentation for the Teacher’s Conference in Singapore where I will be leading a session on “Using ICT to Enrich, Engage and Enhance the Curriculum.” I am excited to be speaking at my first international conference and also spending some time talking to teachers from all over the world about their experiences and expertise. I will also be part of a teacher panel for a discussion on day two of the conference which should get realy interesting.

With a few consultancy days already booked and other conferences in the pipeline I am very optimistic about the future of my career. I hope I can use my experience and expertise to help many schools in the UK and overseas to implement ICT in an engaging and authentic way for their pupils and staff.

The Happy Couple

I am on the 3 week countdown for the wedding which is wonderfully exciting and just a bit nerve-wracking as it feels like the last few weeks is where it all goes crazy after a year of careful and gentle planning!

Also planning a few more talks at various places. I will be speaking at the National Teachers’ Conference in Singapore at the beginning of June which I am thrilled about. Such an honour to be asked and I hope to meet many of the inspirational teachers over there. Would like to chat to people about comparing education systems!

I will also be appearing at a few TeenTech pre-events with the lovely Dawn Hallybone and many other fantastic teachers – a humbling crowd.

But the first one to be prepared for is the Pearson Classroom of the Future event at TechHub on April4th at 6.30pm. I am really looking forward to this as I love events which bring the educators and the entrepreneurs together. Working alongside each other is, in my view, the only way to ensure that education really prepares children for higher education/workplaces/21st Century life.

Hope lots of you can make it. If you haven’t signed up click the link above – it is free and the first of hopefully many similar events.

My favourite part of these events is the networking and meeting inspirational teachers/entrepreneurs/developers and more. Am sure this event will offer a diverse group to meet!

In the interests of good balance I will also be including many of my favourite blogs at the bottom of the post as I have a great many people to thank for their exciting and useful blogs which have served me well in 2011.

However, that said, I am concerned by the sudden rise in blogging numbers and here are my reasons why.

1) Not everyone can write in an interesting way. Now I am not saying I am an expert either but some people in life, I am afraid, are dull. Putting their words online makes them no more interest I am sorry to say. Some other people are very interesting in person but blog in a very dull way. In real life their hand gestures and body language makes for a great story which just does not translate online with strangers.

2) Not everyone has anything to say. Most of the blogs I read are by or for teachers. The vast majority, therefore, are grounded in fact or, at the vey least, an educated opinion. They are usually written in a professional way – aside from those who deliberately hide their true identity to allow them to speak freely and openly. But there are also those people who have nothing specific to say, teachers or not, and who do not focus their blogs in any way – the “online diary” type of writing. These posts consist of telling us about their bus journey to a hilarious (if you were there) incident. Now if you have a fantastic writing style (refer to point 1) you can get away with this and we will all happily read your day-to-day mishaps in much the same way as we watch a stand-up comedian and laugh along, not because the content is hilarious but because the delivery is. If you do not have this writing gift then please keep your diary private. Do not spam me on Twitter asking for my comments as the only thing I am tempted to write is “Thank you for wasting my time please shush.” And that just wouldn’t be very nice of me. Also who am I to judge your life? So please don’t ask me to.

3) How many blogs can you really expect/be expected to read in a week? This point refers more to the idea that blogging “has” to be done by everyone. I have read a few blogs like this lately and observed conversations on Twitter between teachers who are all desperate to get all of their colleagues and students blogging daily. I am all for showing them blogging and giving them the opportunity to try. But if you badger them to do it – especially those who are reluctant – you are more than likely creating more blogs than anyone will be able to read. In one fail swoop you will be robbing them of  the very “global audience” you wanted to give them in the first place.  Because we just don’t have time to read and comment on every person’s life do we? Again this can be organised well such as with @DeputyMitchell’s Quadblogging – where each school is placed in a group of 4 to comment on each other’s blogs regularly. This gives a guranteed audience and comments to at least give a proper taste of blogging and gives the children the motivation to improve their writing (see point 4) . But force adults into blogging non stop and they will be effectively shouting into an empty room or just being the equivalent of the person who stands and talks next to you at the bus stop when you aren’t listening and don’t want to as you have your own life to get on with.

4) There has to be a purpose. I don’t blog very often as you can see from my list of posts. This is because I only blog when I start to feel the need. I don’t open a blog and then stare at in it much the same way as I stared at the blank paper in my first General Studies ‘A’ level mock exam. (I quit the ‘A’ level as I had nothing to say about any of the given question prompts). I fear that those forced into (you can call it coerced or encouraged if you like but for any non-believer it is likely to be a force with a smile added) blogging will do just that. Open a blog because they are “supposed to” with nothing to say and then either make something up or talk about something dull (ref point 2). Children especially, I feel, need a purpose for their writing when blogging as even some children’s blogs I have been asked to comment on have nothing to say. I am all for encouragement of course but any child who has ever been taught by me knows that I will never celebrate average work/minimum expectations and I am not about to start – if you want a sticker/comment from me then you better be prepared to earn it! ( Update: This is not to say I do not appreciate that the post may be little Johnny’s best work. But if you tell me this is a blog from a Year 6 child I will expect Year 6 level work, not 3 lines about their trip to the supermarket with not an adjective in sight. If this is his best work as he has Special Educational Needs then by all means celebrate it with him and the school but me putting a comment on should not make it more valuable to him – he should feel proud because it is his best work and the same applies to Gifted and Talented children too – celebrate the best work but often I don’t believe this is the case with many of the blogs forwarded to me. If you are unsure ask yourselves this first – if they had written the same on paper would you have been as happy? )

5) Spamming. I mentioned this earlier but spamming has become no longer the job of desperate businesses or virus hackers alone. Teachers, I am afraid, have taken to Twitter as a way of pushing blogs (their own or their students’)  in our faces 24/7. And as ICT professionals we feel the need to encourage this. Why? Well because we want them all using it don’t we? Well no, actually I don’t want them ALL using it anymore than I want them ALL using Microsoft only or Windows only. I want them to know about it. To know how to do it. To make a choice as to when to use it. To know why they are using it. But I don’t want them ALL to do it ALL the time.

6) It isn’t the ONLY way. I am a bit naughty writing this post because my biggest push in education has been for the Getting Into Literacy programme. I believe firmly that ICT as a tool for encouraging literacy is key. So of COURSE I love blogging! But I also love film making, podcasting, Games Based Learning, digital storytelling and much much more. And each one has to fit the purpose. For children who cannot write very well then a podcast is every bit as powerful as a blog. A film made well is fantastically powerful and has global audience in places like YouTube. Films have been going viral long before blogs haven’t they? Give the children/adults the choice of blogging, please please do, but please do not force it upon them as in YOU MUST BE SOCIAL NETWORKING AND BLOGGING OR YOU CANNOT ENTER SOCIETY. This is as wrong as the forcing upon us of SATs tests and league tables. One size DOES NOT fit all.

With the contented sigh of someone who has gotten something off her chest I will leave it there for now but may add others as they spring up! My final message is this:

Blogging is exciting and great when it has purpose and a global audience and an element of sharing (comments etc) but if it becomes something we just “do” because we “should” then it becomes as exciting as writing a hundred Christmas cards – We know some people will like it a bit but we also know that they will be in the bin soon and our hard work will have been a waste. Make it meaningful, make it interesting and make sure you want to do it.

And on that note here are some of my favourite  blogs:

http://www.oliverquinlan.com/liveblogs/

http://www.timrylands.com/

http://heathfieldcps.net/

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/

Their blog is here

http://southrise.primaryblogger.co.uk/2011/03/21/tsunami-blog-year-6-have-their-say/

It is a group blog – some sections are facts copied from websites and wikis but the rest is written by the boys from their perspective while trying to conjure up as much empathy as a Year 6 child with no experience of these situations can. I am so proud of them for the different ways they approached it. They worked in pairs but each pair had a different take on the task which made it very rewarding.

At the end of the session they each wordled (wordle.net) their blog before editing and emailing to me. They tried to change words which came up often to give a more varied writing style. In some cases though the words given are the only available.

Today I wordled the whole blog – and the result has really touched me. Here it is

Year 6 Tsunami Blog wordled

I hope you find it as special as I do. I don’t think any further explanation is required!

For me the biggest losses are in ICT of course. We are losing the Greenwich CLC services and facilities which is a MASSIVE shame. There is so much for the CLC to be proud of over the last few years. I, for one, have learnt loads there and use the resources and facilities to turn my school into an ICT-led school. We have borrowed Nintendo DSis – which led to me buying 16 from the school budget. We have borrowed MacBooks and webcams and worked on Animation Projects and myself and other teachers used the RTC element to learn about Animation for ourselves – and had one of the best days of my teaching career in terms of professional development.

I also learnt there how to use and teach Comic Life which is now used throughout the school by all teachers from Nursery to Year 6.

Also my Fronter support and ICT Coordinator meetings will be coming to an end which should be fine for me as I pre-empted this by going on the Intermediate and Advanced Administrator courses to ensure I could deal with 99.9% of issues for myself. I worry, however, for those who have only just started their Fronter journey and those who have struggled on the way but might be ready for a boost from outside. I hope these schools will team up with confident schools. I volunteer my help whenever I can and am hoping to organise some training and meetings for the Greenwich borough ICT Coordinators but we all have our own full time jobs to do as well so unless I am funded part time for this then it will only ever be tokenistic I am afraid as much as I want to do more.

I will continue to add teacher resources to the Getting Into Literacy website in a bid to provide some distant training for those not able to visit.

But I think the key point is that we must all collaborate. We must share our good practice and we must have an open mind about all other schools as they can all teach us something. Please get in touch if you want to help support collaboration across Greenwich and across London – and even further afield. Our communities must grow in order to keep ourselves ahead of the game.

As a starter here is a walkthrough of our Fronter use for those who are interested in ideas for how to use and implement Fronter at their school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og7LZZcD3Dk

As he is sadly moving on but did amazing work I would also like to highlight the website of Stuart Swann (Greenwich CLC Manager) www.adventuresinradicallearning.com – if you have any interest in Handheld and Games-Based Learning his site is well worth a read.

We had Ofsted this week. The call came Monday morning at 9am. A staff meeting was called for 10am.

I then spent the next two days (til about 2am each night) updating the Ofsted Room on Fronter (our VLE) . I created the room last year as a practice for when Ofsted came so all I had to do was move folders and information with the most up-to-date information – timetables, planning, policies, action plans, performance management reviews etc etc. And yet still it was VERY stressful.

By Tuesday lunchtime most of the work was there so the Ofsted lead inspector was given the login details so she could have a rifle through before the BIG DAY on Wednesday.

Then I got to work with the Borough advisor organising and printing data analysis from the Pupil Tracker. I sorted the tracking reaults by SEN, Free School Meals, boys, girls, EAL and EMA. And I produced some of the prettiest graphs ever made on Excel. I wish it was not confidential information cos I would love to share! I will at some point do a version with made up figures just so you can see! (I am a geek and I love me so I do not care if you find that too much)

Then Wednesday arrived and I did more pretty printing – colour-coded timetables this time. And the inspectors arrived and the rest is history – the report however is the future so my lips are sealed until moderation etc. Now I have said before that our results are not too high up the league tables – that is no secret. So we all know that the Ofsted criteria means our attainment provides a limiting judgement on us so I will just leave that hanging there for now.

Over the next two days I didn’t see much of the inspectors. They didn’t come to see me – as I guessed they wouldn’t after being introduced on the first day and they said they recognised me from the Teaching Award photo. The true benefit of winning awards is people don’t tend to question your impact or ability as much. Will probably wear off soon though!

What I was REALLY pleased to hear was that the children during their interview with the inspectors spoke at length of their in-depth e-safety knowledge and awareness and said that I don’t block all the sites I teach them how to use them properly which went down as a positive

I eagerly await the full report from Ofsted and hope that there is a good mention in there for the ICT side of things! But also from a whole-school point of view I think we all have a lot to be proud of. The school is virtually unrecognisable from the one I walked into as a supply teacher 3 and a half years ago. I think our headteacher has worked miracles and the children love being at the school.

The key for me is that the children are so keen to learn and that makes every day in my job so worthwhile.

Anyway I have been looking through the photos, videos and podcasts from the Paris groups and am feeling nostalgic – last week was such a simpler time!

With the blog group this week we put all their previous posts – both those online and those still on my email – through wordle.net and identify the words they used the most. They then used this to analyse their own vocabulary uses. Then they edited their previous posts and resent them to me with adaptations – for example where they used the same word a lot they have tried to use more variety. Where they had no higher level vocabulary they have tried to add a few more WOW words.

Due to my own data analysis we need to carry on with this tomorrow.

We will also be having a blog group focussing on how the Japanese Tsunami may affect the Tourism Industry in Japan – as their Unit of Inquiry is focussing on World Trade.

I know this may seem like a heartless way to look at the Tsunami but actually I hope it may bring a very real human element to this disaster for them and not just focus on the many horrific deaths and injuries.

Our thoughts will be with all involved in the Japanese disaster, their families and the rescue workers searching for and saving lives.

The children got the opportunity to go with the French children to a professional recording studio to record the songs for the soundtrack of the film – which will be filmed in London when the Paris children visit us in June.

To listen to the songs click here http://podcast.lgfl.org.uk/channels/2032920South-Rise-Podcast-Club.xml

So we set off at 6.30am on Monday and we visited all the major sites. The children were desperate to visit the Eiffel Tower of course and we got a chance to go up to the top which I am sure they will remember forever.

We then stayed and watched the lights come on and they got very excited!

Throughout the week I asked Roshaan, my roving reporter, to create some podcasts using the Digital Voice Recorder so that we would remember what we did each day.

The podcasts are not ready to upload yet but I did start listening through to them last night and found an absolute gem.

On the first day we were sat at St. Pancras International waiting for the Eurostar. I asked Roshaan to interview some children to find out what they were looking forward to about going to Paris.I listened back to this conversation:

Roshaan: I am now interviewing Jack. Jack what do you want to do in the future?

Jack: Have a flying car

Roshaan: Oh, I meant this week in Paris

I love this conversation for two reasons. First of all for Roshaan asking about the future meaning this week but Jack straight away thinking about the long term future.

Secondly I love Jack’s answer. Not only did he not give a career answer (“be a doctor” etc) but his answer is soooo fast that it is clear he has thought carefully about this before!

Later this week I will upload the videos from the week to our school YouTube channel and add the rest of the podcasts and also the children will be making a video about their week in Paris for you all to enjoy!

I will also be adding more teacher resources I promise!