For the past few weeks my class have been totally engrossed in a project called "Blog the World Cup" (see the earlier post about it here). For this project we have been trying to find out as much as we could about Italy - the country, people, places and football team.
Throughout this project, the use of web2.0 tools has been a key feature. The whole project has been carried out as a blogging task (using the resources provided by @peterford and @HGJohn), and some of the extra tools that schools and groups involved in the project have used have been amazing. Here is a selection of some of the tools used;
- Animoto - a lovely way to set up a combination of video / photos and music. I used this twice in the Italy blog to show SerieA teams, as well as the whole Italian squad.
- Coveritlive - this is a great tool for live discussions held remotely. Used on the Germany blog during matches, it allowed pupils to comment "live" as the game progressed.
- Dipity - this timeline tool has been used to great effect by pupils in New Zealand, as they created a timeline for the New Zealand blog showing the results of all the matches.
- Google Earth - we installed the Ancient Rome layer and went for a tour around Roman Rome looking at all the buildings in 3D. We also took a look at modern day Italian cities, and viewed 3D models of some of the most famous buildings.
- Microsoft Autocollage - pupils at Halam school used this tool to stitch together images of animals for their Cameroon blog.
- Photopeach - used to great effect on the Germany blog to display an entire class of work, for example during investigations on perimeter of football pitches.
- PurpleMash - Using the apptivities available, match reports, player profiles and country information can be created by pupils, saved as an image, and placed into the blog. Other features within purplemash allow pupils to create graphs and analyse data - as demonstrated on the Germany blog.
- Quietube - a useful tool I used on the Italy blog to display YouTube videos without the often undesirable comments and "related videos". You simply see a page with the video, and nothing else.
- ShapeCollage - as used on the Chile blog, allows a series of photos to be shown together in a pleasing display.
- Spot the Ball - a great online version of the classic newspaper competition, as shown on the Argentinian blog.
- Voicethread - used on the Germany blog to great effect, this is a great way to allow comments about a particular topic onto your website / blog using text / audio or video.
- Wallwisher - I set up a wallwisher wall for pupils, parents and friends of the school to leave us suggestions for what to research about Italy, provide us with some information, or point us in the direction of some websites.
- Wordle - a brilliant (and simple) site. Just paste in a lump of text - we chose the BBC reports about each Italian match - and it displays them as a tag cloud with the most frequent words appearing largest. We have some wordles here.
- YouTube - Pupils at Birkdale PS used YouTube to communicate with students in Brazil on their blog, getting pupils in Brazil to answer their questions.
- Zooburst - I've used this a couple of times within the project to show the team that the Italian manager chose for his three [below par] group matches. What I like about Zooburst is the ability to use Augmented Reality to actually place the resource within your hand. See it in action here.
I am sure I have missed some more excellent tools used by all the various schools involved in the project (if I have, please leave a comment below).
What would be a real shame now is, after the excellent use of web2.0 resources to enhance learning, we are blocked from using all these wonderful tools as the new government goes about defining it's view of ICT in education for the next 5 years. The signs are not good for the future of ICT within schools, but it is projects like Blogtheworldcup that show the positive impact of it and make the argument for allowing further investment in school ICT, (and more importantly the opening up of the filters to allow schools to access tools like those mentioned above to assist with learning), stronger.
If you are reading this Mr. Gove (and I sincerely doubt it as it is not written in an old fashioned text book), take a look at this project and let us do more. It works. Just ask the kids involved.
