I’ve been given the Key to GLOW
Thanks to Katie for the helpful e-mail attachment …… and to Con for the homework 🙂
I’ll do my best!
Thanks also to Jaye and Ollie who promised that I could pay a visit to their schools to see the good work they’re doing – can’t back down now that I’ve made the invitation public 🙂
Thank you also to John and to Robert for allowing me to use their good practice in my ‘Active Math’ CPD presentation today …. the teachers who attended were suitably impresssed 🙂
John provided ideas for using ComicLife to help P6 stage pupils understand ‘shape properties’ and was very impressed by the motivational aspect of giving them a camera and a new resource.
Robert used Go!Animate and wrote on his blog:
The pupils are enjoying learning how to make animations. Enjoyment is sometimes a bit thin on the ground in maths for some of these students, despite my efforts to jolly things up, so I’m delighted to see them turning up early to the computer lessons, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
The pupils are experiencing success. Some students who find maths very challenging seem to see maths as being either babyish (their definition of the maths they can do) or impossible. This project has enabled them to experience success at learning how to create animations, a task they consider to be cool enough to be worth mastering.
Pupils are learning from each other as they explore the functionality of goanimate. It has been delightful to see the pupils helping each other out as they learn. I’m hearing things like “Paul [fake name] – how do you add that explosion?” or “that’s cool, but the frame is a bit quick – here’s how you can slow it down a bit.” These positive interactions have definitely improved the atmosphere back in the maths classroom.
Pupils are actively considering real life applications of numeracy. I presented the students with a simple challenge once they had developed some basic skills with goanimate: create an animation that shows how you use maths in real life. I made it clear that animations without mathematical content would not do. This led to some interesting discussions, and some great animations.
I amended their resources so that they could also be available offline. I’ve uploaded my offline versions to photobucket – apologies if I’ve done them an injustice (sorry about the change of music, Robert, haven’t yet mastered how to capture both video and audio using smartnotebook recorder so had to substitute!).
AND!!
Some of my pupils have started to use Goanimate recently. I like this idea of using it for money. There are so many great ideas but my problem is not having enough access to the hardware with only 1 visit to the computer suite a week (and any other time I can scrounge!) but I can see this being a bit of a problem once pupils have logins for glow too.
Hello Shirley,
I know what you mean about not enough access to computers! We’ve always had to be very creative in how we use them. Usually 2 children at a time work on the classroom computer, and there’s also one in the area. I suppose it was ok introducing programmes like GoAnimate. 2 pupils were taught how to use it, and they became the ‘experts’. They then taught another 2, etc. etc.
As for Glow, we’ll not need to worry about that for quite some time here 🙂
How soon will it be before your pupils have access?