Presenting at FOBIT 2010

Who Am I? What is this?

The Edtechlounge is produced by me, Glenn Malcolm. I have been an ICT teacher for about 8 years and teach primary years from R-Y6 (I think K-6 for American levels).

The purpose of this site is to catalogue the tools, resources, websites, links and handy hints for teachers who teach in these year groups and want to manage their professional teaching of ICT across the primary age range.

How is this different to the usual blogs and wiki collections? This site will try to post original content in video, pictorial and downloadable formats that we either use at school, that has been sent to me on excellent recommendation or, that we're testing and feel other teachers would like to try. Obviously, when I'm talking about applications and web tools I will try to post a comment or 2 about how we use it in a classroom situation.

My Ethos Towards ICT in the Primary School:

Creativity in the classroom is quite simply the backbone to my ethos - it has to be the central element to it all otherwise there’s little enjoyment for all involved. When the children realise that there is as much fun gained from your side of the classroom as theirs then the love for the lesson is there from the get go – even if your experimental lesson goes awry then the kids know that you had their interests at heart.

So many times have I seen or heard someone talk about ICT not being liked by the teacher and I have to wonder why. Many teachers don’t know what’s in this mysterious box next to a ‘TV’ and why does it turn off all the time? They also shy away from the computer and labour over hand written and coloured work. And because of this stumbling block they never return through fear or frustration.

This used to be me. While at school and university I loved sport and nothing could ever get in the way of it. It wasn’t until I had seen first hand the impact of placing a hat-like piece of card around the monitor to show the kids where to click that I knew I had found my niche. Teaching placements became so much more enjoyable (even with what seemed like a dial-up connection).

From this moment on I found that every lesson, every subject and every facet of school life could be helped in some way by ICT. The kids loved an art lesson that began with them seeing in full colour and, from many representations of one artist, what I wanted them to achieve. That DTP allowed a maths and literacy session to be combined into an improvised project based on adverts and ending in fabulous new cereals, packets, logos and all measured in perfect nets with tabs for gluing. Later this became a healthy food news bulletin, that now could so easily be a blog full of collaborative links, images and video responses.

This is how it is: the internet is linked in much the same way. Never has there been a better time to be so creative. The children now have their lives on their website, their community, their phone and we must channel that in creative but safe manner. The projects we create at school haven’t been the same for the last few years. There has alwys been a new and more important tool or application to use that makes a good project great. Presentation, animationa and video tools are a great example; where we once were rooted to PowerPoint we now have avenues to take that allow us to share but even better are the likes of Prezi and Vodio that turns that once (usually) linear presentaton tool upside down.

The kids can record and make the simplest of themes come alive. No longer is it kept to the realm of the older children either as the presentation tool has evolved into a multi-faceted photo/video/text jamboree that children as young as 7 can access (albeit with guidance) can use.Light Painting

Recently of course iOS has become the leader onthe creativity front what with apps such as Mad Pad, Puppet Pals and Toca Boca suite for EYFS.

This is what keeps me motivated and I am pretty positive that keeps my students motivated too.

I am including my CV below which isn’t the first time I’ve done this but I figured that the ante should be upped especially as the other site is getting lots of hits. Enjoy…

CV

CV and Profile Glenn Malcolm ICT Leader