Past Projects

A couple of videos from yesteryear
Yesteryear


I found these when transferring my google videos over to youtube. 


Just the kind of handover you want from your predecessor at work. This is the message I left poor Sarah Hoyle. I also left her a bucketload of resources and lesson plans on the Fronter MLE so I was a little bit helpful!




Video introduction to the Brentford CLC Fronter MLE room in the form of stop-motion animation.







Stickybits to showcase pupils work
Feb 2011


After two weeks of creating a photo story about the farmers of Fair-trade produce and how fair trade has helped them, the finished videos were published to the world via the bar codes of the Fair-trade products that the children had been investigating. To see the videos you'll need to download Stickybits on your smartphone and scan the following items:


 
Sainsbury's fair-trade white caster sugar

Cadbury Dairy Milk Buttons 145G

the co-op fair-trade rich roast instant coffee granules


 Here is the QR code to download the app


Android






Using Endless Ocean on Nintendo Wii as a stimulus for writing
Nov 2010

After reading many of the pieces on games-based learning, particularly the case studies on the Consolarium Glow group, I decided to try this myself. I found that allowing children to have time to become immersed in the world of a computer game stimulated lots of ideas and generated a sense of empathy reflected in the pupil's diary writing tasks. For more details, see the blog entry.





GPS Treasure Hunt - Hampton Court visit


We attempted a different kind of treasure hunt with my year 4 class. During our trip to Hampton Court Palace, to mark the end of our Tudors topic, we were lucky enough to try Wikitude out on the HTC G1 handsets. The handsets were lent to us by Brentford City Learning Centre to enable us to develop this project.



Children worked in small, adult supervised groups and used the handsets to find points of interest at the Palace.

The children pointed the handsets at in the direction of the point of interest and followed the icon on the screen until they found it. Once there, they clicked the icon on the screen and brought up information and a task for them t


o do in their ideas books.



Using google maps, I marked the points of interest and wrote the information and tasks. Then I was able to upload the .kml file to wikitude.me to create my 'world'. To my surprise, this world was included in the main list of worlds available to users of wikitude and therefore easy to find and isolate using the handsets.



The children enjoyed the chance to use technology to enrich their visit and managed to find parts of Hampton Court Palace that they may not have found had they just walked round as a class. It enabled me to provide more of a focus for the 'exploration' time that children had.
There are several points for improvement for this project which I will work on. I will include a class evaluation shortly.



Here's a short video explaining how wikitude works:





Personal Safety Day - Suzy Lamplugh Trust

Brentford City Learning Centre
August 2009


Get Flash to see this player.

Working with a group of secondary school children from all across Hounslow, we were to create a short film to highlight the importance of considering personal safety when travelling on public transport.
We worked with Hanif Khan from Video-Shoot Productions Ltd to create the video which was very well received by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust as well as other child welfare professionals throughout the borough.






BBC News School Report

Hounslow Secondary Schools
March 2008









I worked with three secondary schools in Hounslow to produce a live news report to be broadcast over the internet on the BBC News School Report day. I visited the schools to support the children as they planned and produced features to insert into their report in addition to the news of the day.



This was a hugely successful project and both the adults and the children gained a huge amount from it. From my point of view, it allowed me to push the capabilities of the CLCs equipment as far as I could with two Sony Z1 HD 1080i cameras, Sony Anycast vision mixer and three-point lighting set up. I mixed live cameras with VT and computer input.


Easter Break - Animation Workshop

Hounslow Extended Schools
April 2009



This workshop was designed to teach children how stop motion animation is produced whilst allowing a hands-on opportunity to produce their own. It was offered to all KS2 children within the borough and followed the theme of travel and adventure. Children used plasticine to create their own characters which they then bent, manipulated and photographed showing them in far away places.

After storyboarding a 30 second scene children used animation software, Crazytalk software and green screen technology to produce a video clip complete with their own soundtrack and titles.


The Sound Collector - Literacy, performance and ICT

2005-8

This is an example of one of the workshops I used to run at Brentford CLC. Year 2 children from local infant schools would come and learn 'The Sound Collector' poem. Each child would learn a line and then be recorded using an ipod with micromemo microphone attached. Once recorded, this would be imported into Garageband and the children would come up to use the sound effect table, choosing sound effects to record. Meanwhile, the others would create plasticine illustrations. All of this would be quickly mixed into garageband to create the poem as a podcast to take away with them.







LEGO DACTA Control Technology
2006


London Grid for Learning were the first organisation in the UK to be working with the new LEGO NXT control technology and I was lucky enough to be part of the LEGO DACTA project. The objective of the project was to raise the awareness of this control technology whilst making connections to reali applications and demonstrate high quality teaching and learning activities in schools. I planned workshops enabling schools to come for a morning or afternoon to learn to programme using the NXT robots and Mindstorms software.


This was one of the most popular sessions that I delivered at Brentford CLC and the programming challenges varied greatly over the 3 years we worked with the technology. LGFL produced a number of videos to promote the project. One featured me with very questionable hair. Having looked at this again in 2010, I can think of a New Years Resolution for 2011 which involves regular trips to the gents barber!


LGFL teacher's video diary: brentfordclcinterview.wmv