A winning song!

 Collaborative work, ICT, Term 4  Comments Off on A winning song!
May 172014
 

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Our 2014 Schoolovision entry was voted into 14th position out of 30 countries by the pupils of Europe, which was a result we can be very happy about. But, perhaps more significantly, the teachers involved in the project also voted for their favourite songs in various categories, and I’m really delighted to announce that Scotland came out top in both the categories we entered. These categories were “voices” and “cultural traditions”.

Many thanks to the Polish partner, Marek, for his work in creating the certificates for all the winners in each category.
It’s no surprise at all that we won the “voices” category- as we certainly had the most positive comments you could imagine on the original entry. You can see these comments for our own song, if you look under the song entry on the Schoolovision blog itself.

You can also watch the song again below:

Schoolovision news

 Collaborative work, ICT  1 Response »
May 052014
 

We now have entries from 30 countries on the Schoolovision blog, and this week, all the children in all the 30 countries will have watched and voted for each of their favourites. This is a massive undertaking, and we in P5 were ahead of the game a little, by starting to watch and evaluate each of the videos last week. We’ll finish this later this week, and prepare our overall class results. These will be added to the votes from all of the other countries – which must be submitted to me by Thursday evening by email.
This allows me to total up all the votes, and determine the winners of the contest. On Friday morning, starting at 9.00am, primary 5 will lead a Europe-wide live webcam conference, where we go round the partner countries alphabetically and ask them to submit their votes so that all the others watching can hear and see what they are being awarded. At the end of this, the totals are announced, and the winners will no doubt be very excited and ready to celebrate! As has happened in previous years, I send a trophy to the winning school, which they can keep as a memento of their achievement.

In the meantime, if you wish to see all 30 entries in one go, have a look at the round-up video below.
30 countries
1000 children
6 minutes of pure joy.
That’s Schoolovision 2014!

Collaborative work with school in Finland

 Collaborative work, ICT  Comments Off on Collaborative work with school in Finland
Dec 182013
 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Click on the pictures to see both classes working together and saving goodbye!

Yesterday, P5 played the online collaborative game Saarella (The Island) with a class of primary school children from the town of Tuusula, close to Helsinki, in Finland. As many parents already know, this game involves pupils working together to create a safe living environment on an island that they have been shipwrecked on.
We had great fun, and indeed, it appears that by working together very closely, we scored one of the highest scores recorded in the game so far!
After the games, we had an interesting discussion via webcams, with questions going between the two classes. The first question asked by the Finnish children was: “Why are you all wearing uniforms?” !
PS If you wish to play the game, it doesn’t work using Internet Explorer, but works very well on Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

P5’s Human Chain Reaction

 Collaborative work, ICT, Term 2  4 Responses »
Dec 062013
 

Our first part of our Chain Reaction project was unveiled this morning at the class’ assembly. A big thank you to all the parents who came to the P5 assembly this morning. In addition, I’d like to thank parents too for their help in putting together the home-based chain reactions which we all enjoyed at the assembly! (Apologies that I didn’t include them all)
In the last week of term, we hope to put together our technical chain reaction, so I have asked that children bring in any resources that you might have at home that they think might be worth including in this big, class chain reaction. (Please name anything valuable!) The human chain reaction we played at the assembly today is now on the European Chain Reaction website and our technical chain reaction, along with all our competitors’, will be there in January! The website url is http://ecr2014.blogspot.com

Human Chain Reaction 2013 from Michael Purves on Vimeo.

Accelerated Reader

 ICT, Literacy, Term 2  Comments Off on Accelerated Reader
Oct 232013
 

Doing an Accelerated Reader quiz on the class PC.


As you all know, we use a reading program called “Accelerated Reader” in school.
When we read a book, either in class in our reading group, or at home in our own time, we can then take a quiz on the computer to test our understanding.
Almost all the books we read are already on the program’s database, so as we take more quizzes, the program keeps records of all our scores. It also notes the number of words we have read each year- and we get special certificates once we have read more than 1 million words! Accelerated Reading is fun!
In addition, parents can keep track of their own child’s progress via the homelink of Accelerated Reader. It’s even possible to set up an email alert, so that each time your child takes a quiz, you receive an alert at home to let you see the quiz they have done, along with their score.

Internet research on inventors

 ICT, Term 1  1 Response »
Sep 062013
 

As part of our project on inventors, we spent some time this week using the laptops to:

1) Do some research about various famous inventors and inventions. We did this in pairs, working with someone who had an interest in finding about the same inventors.

2) Once we had read various websites, we used some of the information we had found out to create a mixture of Microsoft Word documents and Powerpoint presentations. It was important while we were working at this stage to remember to try to put the information we had found into our own words, rather than simply to copy and paste it into our own presentations!

3) Finally, once we were finished with our work, we saved it into our own personal online folder on the school server. Each pupil from P4 upwards has their own folder, which, as they progress through the school, accumulates a variety of the things we have worked on. By the time pupils reach P7, their folders should be full of interesting ICT work!

Using the information from the internet about inventors to create Word documents

Researching inventors via the internet.