Podcasting on Soundcloud with Year 6

This week the Year 6 children have been podcasting their stories of anything bewteen wild fantasy to mediating life's problem's a la Jaqueline Wilson.

This isn't my work but that of Ms. Barker and her merry troops! In ICT though these stories will be used as the basis of the multimedia project in January in ICT - quite possibly a mix of Storybird and/or Tiktok plus the new iPod touches we'll have delivered very soon.

So, please enjoy the work and effort gone into these stories and, the intonation I know Ms. Barker has instilled in the children to produce captivating stories. Well done Year 6!

Part 1 of our class podcasts:

Part 2 of our class podcasts:

ICT and English -Twist your words from Channel 4

This is the Twist your words - the image below shows you how the words can be dragged and dropped to the line at the bottom. The embedded caption shows what is produced. A fantastically funny way to get kids creating with English.

Twist your words

Collaborative Writing Online and Creating Stories with Storybird

I stumbled on this today: Storybird. It's a kind of Art meets Literacy typ of site and produces wonderful imagination in myself when I try to write so heaven knows what it must do for children!

There are so many illustratons as with tis kind of tool the resourcing is sometimes a little too weak, limited or just turn inappropriate for school as I just found out with Bookrix (Ok for older kids and will post later about it). Limited, as in the quite binding offering from Barnes and Noble where you end up making a book only to find the sharinng function offered in the beginning is lost and you have to purchase the book you're making (e-book $2.99 x 66 in year group means you'd better be in from the get go) Tikatok is here. I will post about that in more depth later.

But for th time being Story bird is just a delight providing you allow the children to view the images forst and build an imaginative journey through the art work after. I suppose this is similar to the porcess of animation. Make the story first and record then animate it.

The great thing about the story bird is that the creators have got it sussed. Sharing and collaborating is key to the success. You can embed any of the stories as I've done below. Sign up and get writing.

To dream again. by Sparkle11 on Storybird

Digital Biographies Topic for Year 6 Literacy

Lately we've used this for thr focus of our Biographies Topic in Year 6 Literacy. The Children craft the biography in Literacy time while in ICT we build the timeline based on where their sources were based. This included youtube, wikipedia and news sites such as Newsround at the BBC. They then pasted the links, content and locations (dipity has a fabulously easy mapping link) to their timelines. The example below is the life of Tony Hawk the skater made by Kai in year 6. You can see that the time line is centered on his birth. The next time we use this will be on Explorers and Advernturers mapping their journeys.

Tony Hawk's biography on Dipity.

Kerpoof and Digital Story Telling for Primary Children

The Children in Year 3 have been using Kerpoof to make animated stories together with the Easi-speaks and the picture editor within Kerpoof. The templates on Kerpoof are extrmemely varied and allow the children to take their stories to great depths. The children here in this clip were mostly EAL children performing marvellously if a little nervously. 

The video you see here is the display we used for assembly introduced by the 2 children who made the movie in movie maker.

Well Done Year 3!