It took some time agreeing how to go about this with my school, concerns over pupil safety and representation of the school were obviously paramount, but to be fair school have been wholly supportive of the project. I have kept the terms of use as simple as possible and spent half a lesson discussing the correct use of the wiki and how important it was the pupils used it respectfully. They have taken to it fantastically, they are taking great pride in seeing their work online.

At present I am simply letting 1 or 2 pupils per lesson be our blogging scribes, recording the details of the lesson and then afterwards I am adding copies of anything that I think useful (for example photos of pupils work and copies of the IWB pages). This has proved fantastically useful at the start of each lesson as a means to recap what we have done so far in the topic.

At first I asked pupils to sign up to wikisapces themselves as a homework, this was not successful and I ended up with only two users. Instead I spent a little time setting up accounts for each pupil using the gmail address trick, each pupil having an address of myclass+THEIR NAME@gmail.com. This also has the advantage that any messages sent via the messaging function in wikispaces automatically get sent to my email account.

I must admit that wikispaces messaging function hadn’t crossed my mind at first, it is effectively an email system within wikispaces. The pupils found it within about 5 mins! This was a concern at first, especially as I read this at the same time the issue arrived at my door. However after a little reflection I decided that it shouldn’t be a great problem and sent a simple message to all pupils asking them to use it responsibly for discussion on topic and nothing else. AS I was receiving copies of all messages I was rather pleased to see a “maths has become cool” replied by “yeah!!!!! this is better than doing work” which made my day.

Please head over to the blog and leave the pupils a comment if you feel inspired, I’m sure they would be delighted. I plan to continue with this for the next half-term and if successful I’ll roll it out with some other classes. Some ideas in the pipeline at the moment are getting each pupil to add something as part of a homework, and also to get them all to take pictures using their mobiles for use with one of the forthcoming topics.

To quote:

Computers for Pupils

Computers for Pupils is a £60 million, two-year programme (2006–2008) aimed at helping some of the most disadvantaged secondary school children improve their education and life skills by putting a computer into the home and providing internet connectivity. It aims to narrow the achievement gap between those children and their peers. Up to 100,000 pupils in England are expected to benefit from the initiative.

108 local authorities are involved in the programme, with funding allocated through the Standards Fund Grant. Local authorities identified as having eligible schools and pupils attending in their area have been given funding to make this happen. They are also receiving help and advice covering all aspects of the scheme.

Our school has been allocated 270 laptops, which is obviously a fantastic thing.  However we have nearly 900 pupils so it has also become a somewhat divisive issue.  The allocation has taken into account a number of factors, including something of a post-code lottery.  Explaining to one pupil why they have a laptop and another why they haven’t has been awkward today.

With the possibility of  internet access also being provided in the near future this is overall great news.  We have been making good headway with online homeworks in Maths, using MyMaths and Achieve, and this will dramatically cut the number of pupils who cannot complete these at home.

I haven’t seen the machines yet, as ever with technology I suspect that had they will have missed the boat with the range of excellent low cost laptops that are seeping onto the market such as the eeePC.

Get rid of those pesky adverts:

Adblock Plus - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
Adblock Updater - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1136

Shrink the menus:

Compact Menus 2 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4550

Hide all the menus and toolbars:

Fullerscreen - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4650

Speed up that fox:

Fasterfox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Change the text size at the click of a button:

QuickZoom - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2540

Were this a personal machine I would probably add some others, but for pupil use in the classroom, this is my list so far.

Do you have any others you would add to the list? Please let me know in the comments.

Full Screen mode (F11):

Normal mode:

^{Thanks to Ewan Macintosh for the image.} 

So yes, the screen and trackpad are a tad on the small side, but they are quite usable.  The cost and speed saving build of linux works great straight out of the box, although the tech guys at school are finding it a little buggy to get hooked up to the wireless.  They are also avoiding altogether any attempts to access network drives etc for the time being.  Hopefully as uptake grows, so will support for these issues.

Initial impressions from the children are that they love them!  Hopefully I will have them all wifi’d up this week and will be able to start using them on a lesson by lesson basis. Our main first uses will be access to MyMaths.co.uk, playing online maths games as rewards, and I’m looking into copying the videos from our Mathswatch CDs onto them, might have to invest in some headphones for this.

More soon….

MyMaths.co.uk has been around for a couple of years now and continues to grow. When I originally bought it for my previous school it consisted of a series of excellent lessons with interactive elements for use on the IWB or a pupil’s individual computer.

Sample lesson:

There are also a wealth of excellent games focussing on all manner of mathematical skills.  These are tremendously popular with pupils and work brilliantly on IWBs.  A particular highlight of these are the leaderboards, showing the highest score of the day and of all time for all users.  It’s a great incentive trying to beat other schools!

Over the last year online homeworks have been introduced.  Each pupil is given an individual login so that their progress can be tracked.  All of your class and pupil details can be uploaded with a simple csv file.  This gives you the ability to set whole classes homework tasks and to monitor their progress online - no marking required!  These combine with the excellent ‘Booster Packs’ designed to move pupils on to KS3 Levels 4 and 6, and GCSE levels C, B & A*.

The Management Console where you can assign tasks etc:

Pupil Feedback:

Overall MyMaths is a comprehensive suite of lessons, games, homeworks and other tools that covers the entire UK National Curriculum for Maths.  The resources are well written and of a much higher standard than alternatives such as SAM Learning, it is also much easier to navigate than many of its competitors.  Our pupils now complete more homework than they used to and have been spotted playing on the games in spare time during other subjects!  A considerable number of pupils come back to the department during their lunchtimes to work through the Boosters.  I must add that this includes a number of pupils who were not greatly engaged with Maths previously and who are now excelling.

At a cost of £400 per year, MyMaths represents excellent value for money.  I am expecting to get much more use out of it now that I have taken delivery of 6 eeePCs for my classroom.  Initial tests show that the site scales well to the size of the screen and I expect pupils will use it in the majority of my lessons.

So a gushing review, but one that is deserved, well done to the team behind it and long may the improvements keep coming.

“Blue sky thinking”

Thanks Frank for tagging me to participate in the meme passion quilt. It’s the first time I’ve been ‘tagged’ in one of these things and I appreciate it

The picture I chose is a photo I took at Glastonbury Festival some years ago, I got lucky lying by the Jazz stage with an old digital camera. I chose it as it encapsulates by passion for sharing the bigger picture with my pupils. Something that is increasingly easy to forget to do with the institutional pressures of so many key exam classes this year. So thanks for reminding me of this Frank!

I’ll tag these 5 educators who’s blogs have inspired me: kwhobbes, coolcatteacher, tombarrett, dougbellshaw, jonesieboy

Here are the rules:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I’m planning on investigating it a little more in the near future, there are a wealth of mathematical possibilities for it from algebra, logic, geometry, probability etc etc etc.  However I’ve been thinking of a quick way in to it for my pupils, and Simon Mills work he has been doing with Logo got me thinking, why not use Scratch to emulate logo?  Below is a quick copy of the work Simon started on Logo, but using Scratch.

More to come on this when I have the time!

I can just imagine the arguments if we tried to enforce this at our school!