I Don’t Feel Like Writing

Raising Boys’ Achievement and Interest in Writing – Regional ICT Conference Presentation by Spencer Cartwright 1st July 2009

Today was asked to speak again I spoke at the Regional ICT Conference at UWE on the subject of Boys’ Writing. This was an updated version of the presentation I gave last year which  offers ICT based strategies and resources to help motivate and engage boys more in the writing process with the aim of raising attainment. Since last year, we have seen Talk for Writing entering schools and this series of tools and techniques fits in with the strategies I talked about. This blog post is effectively an updated repeat of last year’s entry.

The Regional Conference is always a wonderful event and I always come back buzzing with new ideas and inspiration. I’ll endeavour to post a full report on here in the next week or so. The aim of this post is to provide support material and quick links to resources I used in the presentation. A link to a scaled down version of the PowerPoint presentation can be found here. It is also available from the SWGfL’s Conference page, along with the other presentations.

Raising Attainment

Following the last available SATs analysis, there are several key features of writing that can be developed further in order to achieve a higher level of attainment. I suggested that these could be arranged into three broad headings -  Sentence Structure, Sentence Content and Paragraphs.

Visual Literacy

There has been a number of projects and initiatives using visual literacy as a way of bringing another dimension to working with texts in the classroom. With the presentation technology of projectors, speaker systems and interactive whiteboards, the modern classroom is a great environment to make the most of what the rich and diverse material available has to offer.

I’m suggesting that the cinematic techniques and visual shorthand that is used in film and television production, can be used to support children in the structuring of their writing. After all, children are very media aware and are immersed in this rich visual world every day. The language of visual literacy is a language that they are already familiar with and seem to pick up almost intuitively.

For example:

Film Technique	Writing Style		Film Technique	Writing Style
Close up	More detail and description		Reaction Shots	Character viewpoints & emotions
Shot Composition	Place adverbials		Special Effects	Word play
Establishing Shots	Settings & time connectives		Slow motion	Sentence length & structure

Resources

AVS DVD Player – free DVD software that has a capture frame tool (also see Wendy’s post on capturing screen shots from Windows Media Player)

DVD Ripper – trial version of AOA DVD ripper which allows up to 10 minutes of a DVD to be converted into a file format to use with PowerPoint or other software. Please respect copyright.

PhotoFiltre – free image editing software that has a range of tools allowing photographs to be manipulates. Also see this post.

Photo Story 3 – Microsoft’s animated sideshow software

Comic Life and Kar2ouche can all be used by children to create alternative to written texts while exploring characterisation and settings.

The BBC’s Dr Who site has a Comic Maker and also the Trailer Maker.

Anasazi - Free Stop Frame animation software. Examples of Lego stop motion animation can be seen at Brickfilms.com. However, it is a site I wouldn’t recommend young children use but there are lots of useful tips and resources on the site. Also take a look at Cleoflics from the Cumbria & Lancashire Grid.

Teachers’ TV – great programs on Boys’ Writing (1 and 2) and Story Starts (1 and 2).

See our Helpsheets page for advice on creating mulitmodal texts and extracting elements from photographs and replacing backgrounds. There are also related posts on our blog here, here and here!

Finally, a version of the PowerPoint that I used today can be viewed here. Please note, this isn’t the full multimedia animated version due to size and copyright restrictions.

I would love to receive any feedback and in particular how you used any of these ideas or resources with children. Please leave a comment below or if you prefer, please email me.

Reflections on a Digital Summer

Our goal in ICT education is to help children become discerning users of ICT to help them in their education, their lives and their future. To me this means that we are wanting children to use IT tools and applications in a way that allows them to achieve what it is they set out to achieve.

What got me thinking about this? How lost without IT I would have been this summer. For me (and this is where I hear choruses of “geek” or similar) IT is part of everyday life. Not surprising really when my work revolves around it. However, I use IT in so many other areas of my life I do wonder I would survive without! Take this summer for example.

Subject Leaders’ Meeting

Today we held our second Subject Leaders Update Meeting, at Fry’s Conference Centre in Keynsham. Once again it was good to catch up with what has been going on in schools and to share good practice.

We heard about what challenges the year ahead holds. The main (and highly anticipated) event for next academic year will be the implementation and roll out of Merlin, the SWGfL’s foundation service for your school’s learning platform. As the roll out gets underway, please check this blog for updates.

Esafety has been in the headlines recently and we looked at the implications of the Byron report. Many schools have clear policies and guidelines in place, but these do need to be regularly checked and reviewed. The SWGfL’s policies and guidance can be found here.

We also looked at the many quality resources offered by the SWGfL to help with teaching and learning.

Once again we’ve set up a resource page with all the links and further information on the topics covered. It can be found here.

IWB Resources to support Literacy & Mathematics

Rob from Camerton recently brought it to my attention that the National Whiteboard Network website is no more and although some of the resources have been transferred over to the Primary Frameworks website some haven’t made it there as yet. For example the able challenges notebooks. Oxfordshire LA have a lot of these resources on their website. They are in Smartboard Notebook format but will open in Activprimary, you may need to move the odd thing around a bit but still a lot quicker than making from scratch.

Thanks to Simon from Wiltshire LA to pointing us in the direction of the electronic texts directory that Oxfordfordshire have put together. This is a useful collection of online texts and stories to use on Interactive Whiteboards. The page aims to take the time out of finding suitable ICT-based texts on the Internet to use in shared, guided or independent reading.

Creating Custom Image Headers in WordPress

Following on from our highly successful Subject Leaders’ Meeting last termlet, many of you asked “How do I get my school logo into my blog’s header?” – or similar. If you want to replace WordPress’s headers with one of your own like we have, then here’s what you need to do.

Firstly, using a paint program design your header. Set up the image size to be 760 x 200 pixels (look for Page Setup in the File menu, or look for Attributes in the image menu). Once you’ve created your eye-catching header save it as a .jpg file.

In WordPress, login and go to Site Admin and then select Presentation followed by Custom Image Header. Upload your newly created image using the upload tool.

You should now see your header, but you’re also likely to see your Blog’s name and tag line written over the top. This is because your header is effectively a background and WordPress still insists on putting your Blog’s header text over the top. This may or may not fit in with your image.

If you want to hide the Blog’s tag line, click on the Hide Text button below the header.

To hide the Blog’s Title, go to Color Header (next to Custom Image Header) and click the Advanced tab below the header. You then have a Toggle Text Display button. Click that to turn the text off.

You should now have a just your image showing in your header. Remember to save your changes at each stage. If you want to restore everything back to how it was, click on Restore Original Header on the Custom Image Header screen.

Finally, Freewebpageheaders.com has some…, guess what? Free web page headers! They might not be exactly the right size (800×200 instead of 760 x 200), but they more than make up for it quality. You can use them under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial licence.