Soft Technology

And here is a link to the snowgirl activity , if you're interested!

Earlier this week, I did a Facebook live video sharing my top 5 apps of the year. You can watch it here. It made me reflect on 2017 and what an amazing year it has been. Especially when it comes to my social media channels. It has been a year where the videos I make about life as a teacher have had such an amazing response from you guys. I thought I would compile a top ten list of videos from my page based on views from Facebook, I hope you enjoy: 10 - What would Love Island look like in a Primary School Staffroom? 383k Views 9 - Teacher One-Liners 384k views Check out more teacher one-liners here. 8 - Teachers in Summer 523k views 7 - Different Teachers in a Singing Assembly 623k views 5 - Things Teachers Never Say When Writing Reports - 634k Views There are a number of other - Things Teachers Never Say Videos, including: Things Teachers Never Say When SATs are over Things Teachers Never Say in the last weeks before Summer Things Teachers Never Say When Going Back To School 4 - Why

This was such a fun, simple way to introduce students (and teachers!) to PicCollage Kids , and the concept of setting an image as a background and having students complete a project. You could either send students an image (via Seesaw or AirDrop), or let them use the web search tool in PicCollage to find a blank gingerbread man template. I like the idea of using Seesaw Activities to distribute the image to students, plus give them directions. Teachers can give students audio AND visual directions on how to complete the task in PicCollage, then upload to Seesaw under Activities & it will be organized if you tag a skill or folder. I also like that when using Activities, I get the grid view where I can see which students have completed the task, and which I'm still waiting on. Here's what you'll see: Here's what they see: To access this Seesaw activity and add to your own library, click here.   Once the image is on the iPads, students open PicCollage Kids and set the g

Tech Yes City YouTuber did a roundup of Z370 motherboards and really liked the Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming board.  He found it had the best auto OC functionality in bios and was the only one of the roundup to reach 5GHz. He also said he "loved the RGB lighting on the motherboard as well as audio." Grab yourself a bargain gamer board based on Z370 chipset and frag away!  

So as 2017 comes to an end, it is time to reflect on the past year. For me, it has been another incredible year. The support and feedback I have received from teachers all over the world has been amazing. There are still huge issues in education and 2017 hasn't been the best year for schools, especially in the UK. However, it is my mission to change that, take teaching back and get schools working smarter, not harder. I decided to do a LIVE Vlog on my facebook page tonight to share my top 5 apps in 2017. These aren't necessarily the best apps, I have picked them based on which apps I have used the most in the classroom this year. Here is the whole video which also talks about John Murray's new book - Reading Rocketeers.  So here are links to the apps mentioned: 5 - iVisualiser -  Along with Airserver.com, this tool can transform your teaching by turning your iPad into a mobile Visualiser. To find out more, check out this blog post I put together - click here. 4 - Adobe Sp

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The FREE app Epic! is an amazing resource for classrooms, providing students with access to thousands of books. Using this app is so easy, but it does take a little initial set up. It's important to set up an account as an EDUCATOR, so it's free. I also recommend setting up student profiles. It only takes a few minutes, and it allows each student to save their favorite books and preferences, as well as you to track their progress and save their reading logs. Keep reading to see how to get started. Begin by creating an account for yourself.  To set up your account, go to  www.getepic.com   and choose Educators . You'll be prompted to create a free educator account. Once your account is created, sign in and go to your Dashboard. Here is where you can add student profiles. Just click "create profile" and enter your students' names. I don't set a pin, as I want them to login easily, but you could certainly set a security pin if you felt this was necessary in

One of my favourite days of the school year has to be our Christmas dinner day. Not only is the food always immense, we spend the afternoon doing an annual talent show. I've had the pleasure of hosting the talent show for the past few years and have always treated the pupils to a little surprise at the end. I say 'surprise' but as this is the 8th year or so that we have done it, I think the children expect it now. Anyway, this year we decided to make a teacher's version of one of the biggest songs of the year - Mans Not Hot. As much as the students love it, I wanted to share a message that hopefully will resonate with a lot of teachers too. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to share. I will take this opportunity to say a massive thank you for continuing to support the blog, my social media pages and my CPD and conferences. 2017 has been an incredible year, and 2018 is shaping up to be just as good if not better. I hope everyone has a wonderful and restful Ch

It's that time of the year again, HWBOT Country Cup 2017 is upon us and we are about to find out who the best overclocking nation in the world is very soon. If you haven't seen these overclocking competitions in the past, it's basically the world cup of overclocking. Nations get together and complete in numerous stages set by HWBOT. There are six stages this year ranging from SuperPi, Cinebench, X265, GPUPI, 3DMARK11 and 3DMARK Time Spy. It's a mixed bag of 2D and 3D stages with some even dedicated to the latest AMD platforms. The top10 leaderboard is looking interesting at this point. USA is in the lead and we can see last year's winner (Greece) and running up (Australia) down in 9th and 8th places respectively. These competitions are tend to change rankings considerable, particularly near the end of each stage but it's good to see a nice mix of countries. Germany is always a bit performer as is France. Good to see Ukraine and UK pushing up rankings. I wonder i

This project was so much fun! Inspired by Brigitte Hollohan , we used the DoInk Green Screen app ($2.99) to take photos of each student in Mrs. Parisien's first grade in front of an image of Santa in the night sky. We used this image, but you could use any you like. It would be really fun to let students make their own using the Make a Scene: Christmas app ($2.99). Once the pictures were taken, we could have done any number of things with them! Print them for cute Christmas cards or gifts, add to Seesaw and type or tell their story, create a collage in PicCollage Kids ... really the possibilities are endless! We decided to have each student write a Dear Santa letter using this cute FREE template , then load all the photos into Book Creator app, and have students read their "Dear Santa" letters onto each page. It easily shared to Seesaw, and turned out absolutely adorable!

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Loved helping with Hour of Code stations in Mrs. Bishop's 1st grade. Students were split into groups of 3-4 and participated in each of these activities. The combination of hands-on, "unplugged" activities, plus coding on devices, was amazing. The transfer of skills was apparent, and the students' perseverance and stamina for creating code and problem solving was phenomenal. Read more to see the activities the students participated in! 1. Osmo Coding 2. Daisy the Dinosaur FREE app 3. code.org 4. ThinkFun Rocket Turtles game 5. Hopscotch Coding from Teach Outside the Box Brooke Brown from Teach Outside the Box has some amazing resources for coding with little kids on her blog. Check it out here ! I also really loved Seesaw's webinar for K-2 students, How Do You Build An App. Check it out below:

There are several fun, free Christmas tree apps for your iPad that allow students to be creative and decorate their own Christmas trees. Use these apps for math problems: Have them create arrays or simple equations on the trees using the ornaments, then put into Seesaw or another app to annotate, solve and explain their thinking. You could also have them create illustrations for stories and upload to apps such as Seesaw, Shadow Puppet Edu , or  Book Creator , where they can add text and voice.

We recently discovered the Read Write Perform has now been used in over 2000 schools around the world. This is incredible! For a fairly new approach, to see it grow so quickly has been amazing. The best part is the positive feedback we receive from teachers, who say it has revolutionised the way in which they teach English. At present, there are 10 packs, we have mapped out around 30+ to hopefully get to a point where schools could do a pack a half term from year 1-6. Unfortunately, due to the amount of detail and quality that goes into the packs, they take a while to write. However, we love how teachers are now innovating on the approach. After trying one of the teaching packs, teachers and schools understand the pedagogy behind the approach and now use the overview to plan their English. This includes some of the teachers in my school. So Year 2 have been writing newspaper articles about the Great Fire of London. Using the ReadWritePerform approach, the children then performed their

Although Remembrance Day has passed, I wanted to share a couple of activities we did across our school to learn about this important and significant day. In KS1, the pupils created videos using the fantastic Adobe Spark Video app to share their knowledge and understanding about Armistice Day; how it happened and how we remember it. Here is one of their examples: In KS2, the pupils created greenscreen videos as paperboys sharing the news about the end of the Great War. Brilliant little task which challenged the children to think about abstraction and constraints with their writing. They had to be paper boys spreading the news about Armistice day. The challenge was to grab people’s attention but it had to be short, almost speak in headlines. The boys in the video would love to hear what you think, so please leave them a comment!  Watch this space, as this will be developed into a READWRITEPERFORM pack soon.  As a whole school, we created a Padlet wall for families to share stories of re

One of the best ways in which I use iPad in the classroom is to encourage and improve student's speaking and listening. In a culture of teaching, where we are so accountable to prove what we have done in books, I fear we do not develop young children's oral speaking skills. In my opinion, if a child cannot talk you through a story, I don't believe they can effectively write one. So over the past few weeks, I have been using one of my favourite apps - Puppetpals HD Directors Pass , to improve and develop children oral storytelling. The app, which I have enjoyed using for a number of years, allows pupils to add pictures of characters alongside background and record their own cartoon. It lends itself brilliantly to so many different areas of the curriculum. Working with Reception over the past few weeks, we have focused on using it to allow pupils retell stories they have been reading in class. Here are a couple of recent projects the students have created: The Tiger Who Came

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