St Paul’s Computing department was lucky to have a visit from Dr Rachel Menzies, a lecturer at Dundee University School of Computing. Dr Menzies worked with the pupils using our programmable Arduino boards. Pupils got to try out wiring up and LEDS and some even got round to programming their own tunes through speakers that they wired up to the boards.
Twinkle Twinkle Getting started
Podcasts at Braeview
As an alternative to past papers, a revision technique I use (which is perfect for filling a double period) is getting pupils to create revision notes on key exam topics and record them as podcasts.
Resources required: Audacity (on virtual apps), microphone, speakers/headphones, Glow Group (optional if you want to upload and share podcasts with other pupils).
Summary of steps involved:
1. Produce a list of revision topics/titles for pupils to randomly choose from.
2. Get pupils to write a study note/summary on that topic.
3. Pupils then use Audacity to record their study note.
4. Pupils can edit the track perhaps altering the sound of their voice using the pitch control.
5. Pupils Export the track as an MP3. (Note for Audacity to export as mp3 you will need the LAME dll file, which can be downloaded from the web)
6. Pupils can then transfer this to a memory stick or MP3 player. In addition to this as a teacher you could gather the class’s podcasts together and upload to the documents tab of your subject Glow Group so that pupils can share/pool resources.
Education Scotland have today published advice and guidance, with exemplification in a range of subjects to support learning and teaching in the new NQs. More material will be published over the coming months.
The updated NQ website can be found here:
http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/nationalqualifications/index.asp
Arduino at Braeview Academy
Education Scotland have a facility called CPD Consolarium whereby teachers can sign up to the Glow Group and then make a bid online for software and hardware which if successful you can use for loan period, the condition being that you give feedback through a Wiki created for you by Education Scotland.
This past year I have had a loan of Arduino kits which are programmable boards to which you can motors, lights, sensors etc.. and then by plugging the board into your PC using a USB cable you can then write computer programs and upload them to the board. I used the boards with my Advanced Higher pupils and also arranged for Chris Martin from Dundee University who has some experience 
in this field of physical computing to deliver a workshop to my Higher pupils with his wheeled robots made from Arduino boards.
Rather than repeat the information on the blog the link below takes you to the wiki I am working on.
I strongly recommend putting in a bid for some kit as Education Scotland has a huge amount available from Nintendos to PS3s. If my bid is successful I hope to try out some other programmable boards that they have made available.
I’m Lesley Young and I’m a teacher in the Modern Languages department in Grove Academy. As the final stage of the Chartered Teacher programme, I had to carry out an action research project. I chose to research listening acquisition and listening skills and focused on Higher French. A large part of the research project related to metacognitive strategy instruction, but I also created materials to help pupils with sound discrimination.
Learners at the beginning and intermediate stages of French sometimes find it difficult to recognise words they know when they hear them. They have not learned the correct pronunciation, or they have poor knowledge of the rules of liaison. I developed a booklet and sound files on pronunciation and liaison and created a Glow learn course. Pupils were taken to an ICT suite and introduced to the course, and the listening activities were then issued as homework for the holidays on Glow learn. From August onwards, almost every listening activity done in class was uploaded onto Glow learn. I painstakingly copied cassettes onto CDs to rip the tracks into MP3 files. We are lucky that the activities we do in class mostly have been written and recorded by our language assistants (unfortunately no longer employed in school), so are not subject to copyright restrictions. The MP3 files were issued as homework and pupils were asked to listen again, along with the transcript which I also issued. If they had had difficulty identifying the sounds that they heard in class, they were asked to read the transcript, anticipate what the words will sound like, and then listen to the MP3 file whilst reading the transcript. Finally, they were advised to listen again, without the transcript, trying to visualise the words. (This advice is taken from a recent research study into the listening skills of AS level students in England.)
There are two main advantages of Glow learn for sharing sound files with pupils: 1) there is unlimited storage space 2) although it’s time consuming to upload files, it’s easier than asking each pupil to bring in a blank CD and copying the tracks onto CDs. The disadvantage of Glow learn (compared to Scholar) is that although you are able to check that the pupils have accessed the task, you cannot actually tell if they have opened the file, and cannot tell how long they have spent on the activity. On the other hand, they are able to copy the files onto their own ipods. Pupils tell me that they have been doing this and seem appreciative.
All this listening should of course lead to an improvement in their speaking and pronunciation as well as their listening. As most pupils seem to feel compelled to listen constantly to their ipods, I feel that we should be exploiting this and providing them with educational listening whenever possible.
Post written by Lorraine Munro, Dens Rd Primary School Dundee
Blogging with our class has helped me and my colleagues engage with parents in their children’s learning and the life of the school, and given an opportunity to consulate, communicate and open a dialogue with both learners and parents. I hope that by sharing our experiences, I’ll give you some ideas for starting your own class blogs.
I work in Primary One in Dens Road Primary School in Dundee, Scotland. Our Scottish Schools Digital Network, GLOW, introduced Glow Blogs and we decided to think about blogging as a way to engage parents. These are blogs based on WordPress. I wasn’t really familiar with blogs and wasn’t sure of their purpose, but we were really enthusiastic about trying to use them to engage parents with learning.
Parents in nursery (pre-school) usually have quite a lot of contact with staff, can ask about learning and see their child’s progress when they collect them. Moving into Primary One (ages 4 and 5) is slightly different. Parents tend to have limited contact and pick up and drop off at the school gate. Children are also notorious for answering ‘nothing’ when asked what they have been doing at school!
We embarked on using a blog to show parents the learning that was taking place in school and hopefully foster good home/school links. We called it Dens Road Primary One. At the beginning, we didn’t gain permissions from parents/carers as we only used images of areas or displays in the classroom. As this is a public facing blog, we knew that if we wanted to use images of children we would have to gain permission from parents/carers.
We started by sharing what our topic was and some of the areas of learning that children would have an opportunity to use during the school day. We also uploaded images of sound work that they were introduced to by the teachers and number work we were doing in the classroom. Here is an example of the type of images we used. These images were used when we were learning about growing and plants.
The blog posts were shared with the children every week and the children were encouraged to ask their parents to comment on the blog posts.
We put up some website links that children could access at home to support learning too.
The URL for the blog was printed on the bottom of our homework diary so parents were reminded where they could access it.
The comments that were made by parents were really encouraging. Here are some examples:
Chloe’s Mum – What fantastic sock puppets! Chloe is going to show her little brother Callum how she made hers this weekend so he can have one too! Keep up the good work primary 1.. Can’t wait to see what your up to next week!
Caseys mum – hi Casey really enjoyed Idris and had lots to tell me about him it is fun and interesting to look at the blog and see what Casey has been doing.
Donna (lee’s mum) – Hi, Really enjoying seeing all of the photo’s of the school. This blog is great. Look at it all the time. Enables me to see what Lee does at school. Keep up the good work. Thanks
kayleigh´s mum – I loved the caterpillar and the pictures.Thank you teachers for all your hard work . Kayleigh is so happy and everywhere we go she explains how wonderful her school is. When is the next party?
During snow week – when the school was closed for a week – we put up websites that the children could access and gave them ideas for having fun at home in the snow.
We put reminders up on to the blog about events in school, for example, as an extra way of keeping parents informed.
We also blogged with another P1 class, as our school was celebrating its 100-year birthday. The other school, St Andrew’s Primary School in Dundee, is a very new school. The children took photos of our school and I put them on the blog. They helped me write the blog post. The other school took pictures of their school. We looked at the photos and commented on the blog posts.
We used tags to build a word cloud of the popular posts and made it easy for people visiting the site to find areas that they were interested in.
We added a ClustrMap widget to the blog and we soon saw that it was getting lots of visits from around the world. This gave us an opportunity to share a totally different learning experience with the children.
We looked at the world map and discussed different countries names and where they were. We had some parents who had relatives abroad who were visiting the blog and children were able to discuss this in the classroom. We also looked at how many people were looking at our blog every day. Nearly 3500 visitors and we are still very popular!
Blogging in Primary One has been a great way to help engage with the parents of our pupils. Some things we will look at next include promoting the use of the local library for free Internet access and having drop-in sessions at the end of the school day as a way of reaching parents who don’t have Internet access so we are truly inclusive.
Professor Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Scottish Government, has said that science, engineering and technology are not only essential for driving our economy – now and in the future – but are also significant parts of Scotland’s heritage and culture.
Here in Dundee, eminent local scientist Sir Philip Cohen has said of our city that it is no longer famed for “jute, jam and journalism” but “biochemistry, biomedicine and biotechnology.”
Young Dundonians with an interest in science may hold the key to Dundee’s future prosperity. Such a responsibility rests with us as teachers then, to deliver science topics in an active, confident way to inspire these scientists of the future.
Our local DSC – Sensation has loads of interesting exhibits and activities all year round and there will be lots of opportunities to do extra science activities in November at Dundee’s Science Festival. Look out for more news on this!
CPD for science teaching is also in the pipeline. CPD Online will have sessions on the ASE “Be Safe!” material for primary and early years staff, and also a secondary review and exploration of free online resources. Secondary sciences and social subjects teachers will also have the chance to sign up for Carbon Capture, a one day session to be delivered by SESEF (Scottish Earth Science Education Forum) later in the session.
Scottish Government is investing in science education, and we are definitely getting something right – see this article about science subject uptake in Scotland. Make the most of the resources being provided – our pupils and our city will benefit. Check out STEM Central and Do Science sites.
Even more importantly, please share your science lesson success stories here and what you are doing for Curriculum for Excellence delivery in the sciences. See the instructions on posting at the side. We can all learn so much from each other!
This blog is managed by all education staff and pupils across Dundee. It allows teachers and pupils to share and celebrate learning. Tell everyone what is happening in your class, school or cluster. You can add a link to your Glow Group, blog or wiki to share all the exciting learning that is taking place within our nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools across Dundee.
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