An afternoon with Tim Rylands…

Wow! Have you ever had one of those days which completely refreshes you, gives you lots of new ideas, and makes you want to get straight into the classroom to try something out? I had one of those days today.

I was lucky enough to have a day out of school visiting the Kent ICT conference. This was a chance for me to find out more about VLEs, and to explore any new and exciting ideas / products available. The highlight of the day though, and the bit that I was looking forward to the most, was definitely the afternoon session with Tim Rylands.

The morning:

I spent some time in the morning finding out about different options for our yet-to-be-chosen VLE. If I’m honest, I didn’t really know much about the facilities that they offer, and how they can help the teachers, parents and pupils within our school. After trying a few out, and looking at different suppliers, I definitely feel more knowledgeable, although I know I still have a lot of research to do. Some of them looked very interesting, although one that I saw didn’t look very child-friendly and was definitely not something that I would like to introduce at school. I won’t mention names for fear of being ‘Belshawed‘.

I also spent time in the morning finding out about some interesting ICT projects which other schools have got involved with, and hearing from JANET about video-conferencing opportunities. We use VC mainly within our History work at present, but this is definitely something that I would like to extend across the curriculum, and make links with other providers that we haven’t connected to before.

The afternoon:

I’ve heard quite a bit about Tim Rylands, mainly through his work using Myst to inspire children’s writing. So, I was expecting an afternoon hearing all about that and learning how to start using the software in my own classroom. However, Tim’s presentation only touched upon Myst relatively briefly, and he mentioned lots of other great ideas. I’m going to try and record some of these ideas here, along with my own reflections, if only so that I don’t forget them!

Using video to record children reading / performing their own Literacy work - we often record children’s playscripts as these naturally lend themselves to being performed and filmed. However, I don’t often ask children to perform their other writing on camera. It only really leaves the page when they might read it out to each other in class, or they may read each other’s work. Some of the recordings of Tim’s Myst work with children (using background images and music) were very powerful, and they really brought their writing to life. Definitely something to try. The Flip Video and CuePrompter look perfect for this.
Using Quicktime VRs to stimulate discussion and explore ideas (with Tim’s suggested link to Panoramas.dk). We’ve made Quicktime VRs as part of our ICT, but I’ve not actually used them in my own teaching.
ThrillerWhizz - A fantastic tool which generates titles for stories. Lots of fun can be had with this!
Half-Portraits - I’ve tried this idea a number of times in Art lessons, but this could also be attempted on screen. Get the children to crop a digital photo of themselves, and then complete the other half using drawing software of their choice. Older children can select which program would be most suitable for this task.
Making iPod Scrubs - These look quite complicated initially, but I’m dying to try it out!
Adding editable text boxes to Powerpoint slides, so that children can watch an embedded movie and make notes / answer questions based on it, all whilst in full-screen presentation mode.
Using The Hat to make random selections… enter in the names of your class, and let it choose one / two or more children at random. The audience were all very excited to see our names spinning around on screen, as the lucky person chosen won themselves an Asus EEE. I can imagine myself using this free software at school on a daily basis.

Tim’s presentation style was excellent… he seemed incredibly keen to share as many ideas as he possibly could with us, using lots of humour along the way. His use of Powerpoint (and Powerpoints within Powerpoint) was very effective, with not a bullet point in sight! Tim has posted his blog entry about his visit, with lots of links and extra ideas.

All in all… a really enjoyable day. I can’t wait to get back to school tomorrow!

Image: ‘IMG_8118‘ - www.flickr.com/photos/18374272@N00/183503927
Image: ‘Myst games collection‘ - www.flickr.com/photos/14714189@N00/2502055857