5 Awesome Starting Activities on Seesaw

Hello, internet!

I wanted to post an update about using the Seesaw app with our Junior Primary shared iPad lab. Seesaw has been a fantastic tool in our classrooms here at Bridge House School. It's a brilliantly simple app and it often takes very little time for a teacher to understand how it works. The first snag can come, though, when you want to begin using it with your students but aren't sure where to start. This term I've been guiding my Junior Primary colleagues through Seesaw and many now feel ready to start using it on their own with their students (yay!). The important thing to remember is that Seesaw is a tool to record and reflect on learning. Add Seesaw to enhance learning and it will be hard to go wrong.

To help with getting started, here is a list of the top 5 activities that I have done with students ages 6 - 9 (Grades 1 - 3) on Seesaw using our iPads. It's in countdown format, but all have been equally fun and valuable.

5 Awesome Starting Activities on Seesaw

Bubbles the Fish: Labelling skills on Google Slides

I want to tell you about a great lesson that I did today!

Something is fishy...

Last year we hadn't yet moved to GAFE. This was the lesson I did last May:

• Use Microsoft Powerpoint to label an elephant. 
• Teacher chooses elephant picture and demonstrates the labelling tool. 
• Students label the elephant and print

2016: Not terrible, but all the finished pieces of work were exactly the same.

I knew that this lesson needed spicing up for this year. I wanted to teach students how to label an image but wanted to make it feel more enjoyable and less cookie-cutter. Google Slides made this possible.

Labelling on Google Slides!

I learned a fun new trick at the EdTechTeam Summit: On Google Slides, you can add a background image to a slide. The background image cannot be moved or manipulated once added, which is ideal for my age group. This way they can add to an image without accidentally changing or deleting it.

You can use the background button or right click on the slide to change background.

I chose to add a picture of an empty fishtank into the background and acted surprised when we opened it. Where was Bubbles the Fish? My students were surprised by this turn of events and so I suggested we try and find a replacement fish using the built-in Google image search. By allowing them to choose the fish that we labelled, I gave my students agency and control over their own work. It also allowed me to teach them two brand new skills instead of just one! Bonus!

Students had great fun selecting their own fish from the built-in Google search.

Once they had chosen our fish, they then had to start working on our labels. As they all had different background images, they had to change their font and arrow colours to be seen clearly. This lesson was a great learning experience as working with the arrow tool can be fiddly at times. My students took great pride in making their piece of work unique and are looking forward to printing them to show their class teachers.

Colourful fish and colourful labels.

Grade 2: Wow Day Invitations

Just a quick one today, in between Minetest updates.

Next week is our Wow Day at school. Our Wow Day is similar to a parent showcase, the children have their classwork and artwork ready to show to their visiting families. We had been asked to create an invitation for Wow Day and it was a great excuse to polish up our MS Word skills. I had provided the Grade 2s with a very standard template for an invitation to our Wow Day. It looked something like this:

Yawn.

Functional, but not very exciting. Within an hour lesson, they managed to transform their bland templates into these!

Jazzy underwater invitations.

Skills that we worked on:

• Inserting picture - This is a tricky one for my students since it involves navigating through the file directory which they are still getting used to. 

• Formatting picture - The only way we could get our invitations the way we wanted them was to use the wrap picture - tight option. This is a new skill for us.

• Adding page border - Brand new skill. At least this option is easy to locate. They were excited about the large range of borders on offer and I think we'll be adding a border to every piece of work from now on!

• Formatting font - We do this often but students still needed reminder about where the font style options were. Many children went all out and changed font colour, style and size.

• Adding adjectives - We jazzed up the boring sentences by adding our own adjectives to describe our artwork and the Wow Day.

Making Games in Scratch with Junior Primary

This post marks the end of an 11-week adventure. For the last couple of months I have been running a Coding Club for a group of 8 and 9 year olds. I wrote briefly about this in May but I thought that a more comprehensive wrap-up post would be fun for me and formative for you.

At our school we are lucky enough that each week we have some time set aside for Clubs. In club time our teachers host a variety of interesting, hobby clubs that our Grade 2s and 3s choose from voluntarily. It's a great exercise in student choice, that they don't have to choose an activity based just on what their friends are doing. We encourage them to choose an activity that is something that they personally would really like to do.

My eager bunch of coders had a mixed background - some had participated in Coding Club last term, some had taken part in the Hour of Code we did last year and some had never done any coding before. They were incredibly enthusiastic, particularly because I had framed our club around making games.

An example of some Scratch code created by one of my Gr 3 students.

All About Scratch

We used a freeware program called Scratch for our club. In case you haven't heard of it, Scratch is a hugely popular program where click-and-drag blocks are used to create instructions. It's very kid-friendly even though what you can create can get quite sophisticated. I had never learned coding before becoming a teacher and Scratch is a great introduction to the concepts behind coding, Coding has method and logic attached to it, and Scratch teaches that using method and logic can produce art, games, puzzles and even more. Coding has really become a type of 21st century literacy and Scratch propels that form of literacy forward.

CS First is a fantastic website that creates entire Scratch coding courses around themes. Our limited bandwidth means that I couldn't use the CS First built-in courses that function with the Scratch online site, so I used their course materials and an offline version of Scratch. Click here for instructions and links to what you need to get Scratch running offline. Our coding club was built around the great Gaming module on CS First. Each week I would take the group of students through a Scratch template projected on the board and demonstrate what coding blocks we would be using for that lesson. Then I let them loose on their desktops, sometimes in pairs or on their own depending on the activity.

This is what the Scratch platform looks like in action.

The Benefits of Using Scratch at a Junior Primary level:

I was incredibly impressed with the focus that this group of kids had. Despite their young ages, they managed to grasp the outcome of what I was steering them towards and really went for it. I learned along with them as we created:

• a racing game for two players
• a space-themed maze game
• a platform game where we had to program x/y co-ordinates (!)
• a bunch of other wacky and weird experiments

A sample of my students' creations.

The Challenges of using Scratch at a Junior Primary level:

There were very few challenges that we found. The offline version worked well and was very stable. 

Navigating file structures: We were able to save our projects into our local drives and retrieve them, and though some of my students still struggle with a Windows file structure we managed fine.

Reading: Literacy levels could be a barrier to enjoying Scratch because although the blocks are colour-coded the students still had to read the functions of the blocks. Using Scratch enhanced my students' vocabularies with words they were not using before like degrees, co-ordinates, sprite, percentage, function ... the list goes on! Coding was so fun that it was great motivation to tackle any tricky reading required.

Expectations: When explaining the concept of coding to my students, many wanted to immediately create Minecraft or Clash of Clans. It took a bit of work to get them to have realistic goals that they could achieve in a few sessions. Once they got the feeling of what they could do with Scratch, they regained their enthusiasm and really started to experiment.

Coding to create a magic spell!

At the end of our last session I awarded certificates to all of the students who took part. They received them with such genuine glee that it really made my day.

I would highly recommend Scratch for anyone who wants to introduce coding to primary-age children. It's offline client really saved us because so many amazing online tools are just not reliable for us yet due to our limited bandwidth. My students loved their creations and will now often choose to play on Scratch during free-time during IT time.

Sun Safety and Reptiles

Hello!

We have kick-started our way into the New Year here at Bridge House School. In Junior Primary we were lucky enough to be kitted out with a brand-new set of 26 lab computers, all upgraded to Windows 10. My students (as well as myself) have been tackling the new features with much enthusiasm.

The Grade 3s have been learning about sun safety. As we live in South Africa, it's summer right now and our sun can be extreme! We created Sun Tips posters using MS Publisher. This was done without a template, after our discussion about being safe in the sun I let them design their own posters.

These are proudly displayed in one of the Grade 3 classrooms.

Our Grade 2 students have started to delve into the world of reptiles. The acrostic exercise was my inspiration, despite how common they seem to be I've never used them in a lesson before. I laid out the R E P T I L E S on an MS Word page and had the students use their imagination to fill in the letter lines. I got the snazzy reptiles border from Sparklebox. 

Link to template for R E P T I L E S Acrostic page here.

Reptile fact acrostics on display outside in the Grade 2 playground.

For Coding Club this year I have tentatively begun to use the desktop-installed version of Scratch. This term I have a boisterous group of 15 young coders. I'm pleased to report that 3 girls are included in that number, and are just as boisterous as the others. We are slowly learning what we can do in Scratch, the possibilities seem endless!

Powerpoint Comic Creations

Last term, the Grade 2s worked around the theme of Superheroes. They had even had a Superhero Dress-Up Day which was, coincidentally, the same day as their IT lesson. Since my lab is decorated in a superhero theme, I really wanted to find some sort of activity that celebrated superheroes.

Enter this wonderful page by Communication 4 All. The first thing on that page is a neat Powerpoint activity, letting you easily build a comic strip. It allows you to create a Powerpoint template that the students can each open and save a fresh copy onto their drives. I edited the template to add a few more superhero pictures and actions. After giving a short intro where I toured the students around the layout and showed them how to get the superhero images in place, I let them loose. Both classes surprised me with their creative superhero comics.

A Grade 2 girl really understood the Superhero theme.

We'll be definitely using this activity in the future. Comic strips are a unique genre and fun to create, but I find many of the online comic creators clunky with extremely long load times. As usual, the winning activity for me is offline-capable.

Tux Paint: Penguin Power

Early this year I discovered Tux Paint. These are some of the many, many lessons that we have used it in recently:

Grade 2: The Solar System

Grade 0: African Culture

Grade 00: Drawing a Dinosaur

We have found Tux Paint to be incredibly useful in the Junior Primary lab. It offers artistic control that children as young as 4 or 5 are able to access. In addition to that, we use it for reinforcing themes that are being taught in the classrooms. Many parents have asked for the name of the program so that they can install it on home computers, and are amazed that Tux Paint is a free operation. On any given afternoon, half of the children in the lab have Tux Paint open and are working on experimental artwork, stories, or drawings.

In this day and age I struggle to find any programs that are age appropriate, offline-accessible and free. Thank you to the makers to Tux Paint, it is truly a program that we use daily.

iPad Projects on Book Creator

In Junior Primary we have access to a shared mobile lab of iPads. One of the apps we use is Book Creator, which is a great tool for putting together a simple presentation. I popped into the Grade 2 classes and was very pleased to catch the tail-end of a series of presentations on sea creatures. Our students presented with great enthusiasm, I was very proud of them! They had created their presentations from scratch, with no parental or teacher takeover - it was all their own. I was also most proud of the audience of their peers, who listened well and clapped at the end of every one.

 The combination of Airplay and our Windows desktops can sometimes cause great frustration at not being able to sync correctly, but the results can be so worth it. 

Excel Art

Fourth Term already, gosh! The days are flying by. It's hard to believe I've been working here in this IT Lab for nearly a year.

We started the term off with a bang: a Microsoft Excel kind of bang! None of my Junior Primary students have used Excel before, so we've been experimenting.

The Grade 1s built up brightly-coloured columns of stairs, carefully tracking the number of cells they were shading. We learned about cell names, rows and columns - as well as the idea of scrolling the sheet to see more cells. I used the example that Excel was sort of like a treasure map, you needed to know the exact cell names of where you were working. We produced beautiful, interestingly-shaded stairs and will most likely finish this activity and print them next week.

For the Grade 2s and 3s, I wanted an activity with a little bit more thinking involved. After much searching I hit upon this great activity on Maureen Schoenberger's website. You create an Excel template with the cells shaped into squares, give the students lists of cell names and instructions to shade them with specific colours. The results were great and I even allowed them to print their finished gingerbread houses. I was impressed by how focused and interested my students were. One boy pointed out that the Excel cell-art looked similar to the Minecraft pixel style, and who am I to judge? This activity was a big hit and it's inspired me to try my hand at creating another Excel art template in the future.

RPing with Kids: The Ongoing Quest

At my school, the Junior Primary are lucky enough to have Clubs. Once a week, for 40 minutes, the Grade 2s and 3s are allowed to choose an elective club, run by a teacher. Usually the clubs are focused around a specific activity, such as Cooking Club or Music Club.

Last term I ran Coding Club, where a group of boys and I explored the web version of Lightbot. We all really enjoyed that as an introductory activity into 'thinking like a robot'. This term, I wanted something different.

Grade 2 and 3 boys problem-solving using Lightbot.

Roleplaying is one of my passions. I thought that I would try to use the medium of Clubs time to introduce roleplaying to my students. The name Roleplaying is a bit abstract to the 7-9 year old market I'll be targeting, so, the idea for Story Game Club was born. It's a bit convoluted but it does describe what I want to do- use a game to tell a story.

Clubs time is happening later today, so I wanted to do my write-up beforehand. I have found a system that will probably work great- Hero Kids by Justin Halliday. He has a great bundle on DriveThru RPG that is reasonably priced for the content included. I've chosen an introductory adventure, printed out the 10 prebuilt character/classes and read the simple core rules.

There is one thing that is concerning me, and that is number of players. Those of you that are familiar with RPGs will know that generally it's better to have a small group of players, 4 is ideal, 6 is maybe a push. As a school club, it would be better if I had a club concept that is 'open to all' in order to:

a) give all the students the right to choose their elective
b) ensure other teachers aren't left with massive groups to control

If I end up with 10+ students who want to do Story Games Club, then the concept for the Club will become unobtainable. I've worked on my pitch for today in order to try and draw the right students, and I've been given the nod to have a small group of 6 or so... I'm hoping I can draw these students into roleplaying and show them something new. I'll report back after our first session today.

Bonus picture of a Grade 00 and his bunny tower made in Sheppard Software: Paint and Make Easter Egg Hunt.

A Busy Term

Some snapshots of the last couple of weeks.

We've been investigating offline software options in the Junior Primary lab. While we have awesome online resources and websites we use heavily (our Symbaloo web here), we live in South Africa and our internet can't always be relied upon. We have good infastructure here at school, but still have to rely on Telkom to come to the party and give us our internet! As a result, I'm starting to investigate offline tools our kids can use on those days the internet is too slow or unavailable.

TuxPaint has been amazing. I saw it mentioned all over and I had dismissed it as an MS Paint clone. Finding little other options, I gave it a try and was instantly won over. It has a config .exe that can be run to set parameters (Allow printing, simpler mouse control, full-screen options and loads more). It has a wide range of painting/drawing tools. Then, we get to the stamps. Stamps are an image gallery which can be instantly inserted into a page, most can be resized and flipped horizontal/vertical. My JP students are in love with TuxPaint. Recently, the lab has come alive with creative investigating, both during my lessons and after school.

Students exploring TuxPaint for the first time.

I loved how their individual styles came out through exploring the program.

TuxPaint boasts an impressive array of stickers, which are ready-made images, to insert.

In keeping with the penguin theme, this term Smartie the Penguin came to visit my Junior Primary classes. I wanted to have the discussion with my classes about appropriate behaviour online, and found this great resource by KidSMART. Smartie's story about internet safety was the perfect time for me to test-drive the concept of using AirServer to show the class my iPad screen. It worked (nearly) perfectly, and I've already recently used AirServer to demonstrate Book Creator as well as during my Junior Coding Club.

Smartie the Penguin, observed a clever kid, came to visit the IT lab because it was so cold there - and penguins like the cold.

Using AirServer to send my iPad screen to the PC projector.

It's taken me about 6 weeks to really embrace the iPad as a tool for teaching and learning. I was convinced, eventually, by the Director of our Learning Commons, Shaun Kirk, and his passionate speech about our upcoming 1:1 iPad scheme. I am now starting the process of filtering through the enormous amount of iPad apps to see what Junior Primary can use in their classrooms. I've sent a trial list of 10 apps to the Pre-primary and JP team to see what they think we can try out.