Charlie Barrow's Teaching & Technology: Portlethen Fair-trade Videos and Stickybits

I've now finished the first part of my 2nd school placement which has been at Portlethen Primary just South of Aberdeen. This has been a steep learning curve as Primary 2 has been about as far from my comfort zone as a rural school near Banff but, like the 1st of my placement, I've gained new confidence and learnt many new skills.

However, like most teachers, it's far more fun when given the freedom to try new things and exciting ideas. So, when I began the placement I jumped at the chance to create Fair-trade animations as part of Fair-trade Fortnight.

After some minor problems (no compatible camera, no microphone, only one laptop and no ability to install Crazy Talk software at short notice) we changed the animation project to a more simple video story format using the backgrounds and characters that the children had created.

The change worked really well as I soon realised that managing a P2 class was far from managing the 8 and 9 yr olds I'm used to. Not to mention that I now had a dozen netbooks with Movie Maker at my disposal. I now realise that it is not outwith P2 capabilities to independently order their collection of images into a sequence based on their co-written script. I must stop underestimating children!

So the finished results will be published on the class' Glow Fair-trade blog. In the meantime, the videos can also be seen attached to certain Fair-trade products by way of scanning the barcodes through the Stickybits Smartphone app. The class plan to make use of some of Aberdeenshire's iPod Touch devices to further enhance their Fair-trade table display. Until the children have had a chance to zap the products, the videos will remain hidden amongst the barcodes. So, get zapping with Stickybits and see if you can uncover Portlethen Primary's story of Fair-trade bananas, coffee beans, chocolate, cotton or sugar. Good luck.