Pivot Animation

I was browsing Alison Mitchell’s Mulhall’s British School of Amsterdam Senior School ICT blog and came across Pivot, a simple but very effective stick animation software. Sometimes the most simple software is the most fun. Loads of creative fun to be had with this. I think I am going to organise a Pivot Animation Competition. It would be cool to see what everyone else created. Click on the thumbnail to see my efforts.

First Lines Blog

Think of the First Lines Blog as a bag of props to help inspire us over the writing starting line.The whole school community can add ideas and resources that are designed to help us to create! This is not a project that needs to be finished but could evolve over many weeks months and years.

The First Lines blog might contain a great opening to a pupil’s story or poem, an idea, a headline from a newspaper, a photo taken on a school trip or a piece of atmospheric music created in a music lesson or at home. The possibilities are only confined by our imaginations.

In my classroom there was a box containing various photos, news headlines, bus tickets, jottings and other random objects of varying size, colour and odour. Students would both rake through it when they wanted some inspiration for writing, and also add to it as they came across the weird and wonderful in their everyday lives and travels. One pupil added a seed pod washed up on a beach in Jamaica. It looked and felt smooth and soothing, doubling too as a shaker-type instrument. Another added an Oscar Award replica statue and yet another a descriptive set of made-up words we had cooked up during a literacy session. Sometimes it contained a smattering of wood shavings because someone hadn’t managed to find the bin when sharpening their pencil. We never found out the culprit but we did write a series of poems about the ‘Elusive Sharpener’ who left his calling cards around the school. We suspected they were working in a gang.

Who owned this box? We all did! Both teacher and student had a stake in it – both were responsible for adding interesting objects for the benefit of others. We all used the box at some point during the year. It wasn’t a magic box though. Sometimes it gave us ideas and inspiration for writing and sometimes it didn’t. However, the box was more than just a box of ideas for writing – it was a box of our ideas for writing, an expression of our creative and collaborative intent.

The First Lines blog idea is like an online version of the above box. In a very small way, it seeks to extend the climate of collaboration and creativity that we are all looking to develop in the meatspace of our classrooms, into the online arena. It is important that we develop that link between our class community online and in physical space, aiming for a responsibility and creative ethos that branches both areas.

A class could throw in their own ideas and stimuli to the First Lines blog as and when they feel like it, serving the class community as a whole while exercising their own creative processes online. The blog can just evolve over time like an ongoing, organic, online scrapbook.

The actual process of setting up a blog like this is covered in the Teachers’ Notes and the First Lines Guidelines are there too.

This is just a proof-of-concept in a continuing series of ideas for using blogs in schools.

Blog 101

Room 101 was the room in George Orwell’s novel ‘1984′ which contained “the worst thing in the world”. Programme makers have taken this concept and turned it into a TV show in which various celebrities talk about things that they hate.

On Blog 101 you are the celebrity. You now have the chance to banish some of your worst nightmares to the depths of Blog 101. What are your pet hates and why are they worth banishing to Blog 101? Your reasons will be put to the vote to see if your arguments are persuasive enough.

I’ve been exercising my mind recently to come up with some hopefully creative and fun ways to use blogs. The Blog 101 idea came up in conversation with one of my students so we created a blog and built up the basic content for getting the idea off the ground.

Here is the process after the initial blog has been created. We are using a multi-user install of WordPress but the principles could be applied to most blogging software.

1. Fill in the About page to outline the plan for the blog.
2. Create a Guidelines page.
3. Create three new categories – Nominated Item – Entered Blog 101 – Escaped Blog 101
4. Create an initial post to model the type of writing in nominating something to go into Blog 101.
5. Use the comments on the nominated item post above to discuss with students the merits or non-redeeming features of the proposed Blog 101 entrant.
6. Use the democracy plug-in (or other polling software) to create and display a poll about the nominated item.
7. Run the vote for a set amount of time.
8. Edit the initial post to be added to the ‘Entered Blog 101′ or ‘Escaped Blog 101′ category.

Once you have been through the process once, you can let students start to nominate their own entrants to Blog 101. If you add students as users to the blog with ‘Contributor’ access they will be able log in and write a nominating post that will need to be moderated by the teacher before publishing.

This blog could be used in many curricular areas to address a whole range of issues and styles of writing. If anyone would like to propose an entry into Blog 101 or collaborate with some of my students or schools then feel free to leave a comment. Feel free to vote on the issues as well.