Embedable Sports Leagues: Tour de France

Fantasy leagues always have loads of potential for maths lessons (working out budgets, predicting outcomes etc), so was really pleased to find a Tour de France one - my favourite sporting event. Better still, once you’ve signed your class/crew up, you can embed the league in your blog. Cool.

Photo by jctdesign
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

One of the big issues facing the use of ICT in schools is the very lax culture surrounding the use of images and multimedia. When children produce presentations they are often given free rein to use image search tools and music download sites to create their own works. Little or no thought is given to licence attribution or copyright, and teachers are often as guilty of this lazy approach themselves in creating their own resources.

The simple fact is that, unless specifically granted, you do not have permission to reproduce images (or sound files, or video etc) from someone’s website. Period.

Fortunately, there are many people using the web nowadays who are happy to share their work and allow people to copy, re-use and even adapt original pieces of media. An organisation has grown around this trend which makes it easy for people to identify work that they can use safely. This is Creative Commons.

The volume of work now licensed under Creative Commons is such that it is now possible to use certain web tools to identify images and sounds so licensed. One such tool is the image search engine, Compfight. Compfight is a search tool that trawls the well known image hosting service, Flickr. First thing to note, Flickr is sometimes blocked by LA filters - test it in your school to see.

Using Compfight

1. Make sure the safe search tag is set to “on”
2. Set the Creative Commons tag to “All” - finds all images licensed under the various Creative Commons attributions
3. Set the “Seek Original” tag to “Off”
4. Enter your search term

Examples:

“romans” found about 250 usable images

“Kandinsky” found about 60 images

“Mountain” found thousands of images

In other words, you should be able to find some usable images for any curriculum project you care to mention. Once you’ve spotted an image you like, click on it to bring up the Flickr page containing that image. Click on the small “All sizes” button at the top left hand corner of the image and select the size image you wish to download to your pc. Once downloaded, you can then upload your image to your blog post via the media uploader.

Once uploaded, you usually still need to attribute your source, as most Creative Commons licenses require you to do this (see John Johnston’s search tool below).

Educating staff and children alike about Creative Commons and the use of tools such as Compfight is good practice and helps engender a responsible attitude towards the internet.

Other Creative Commons Search Tools

Besides Compfight, there are a number of other Creative Commons search tools - all seem to be based on Flickr - will be an issue if Flickr is blocked in your school!

Flickr Storm: Click on the “advanced” tab to search for Creative Commons only

FlickrCC: Has the advantage of giving you the Creative Commons attribution and the URL of the image, so need to go to Flickr to embed it.

John Johnston: A neat Flickr mashup from a colleague that adds the Creative Commons license into the embed code. Search, click on the image you want, copy the embed code and paste it into your blog on the html tab. Voila!

Photo by Waka Jawaka
Attribution License

Thanks to Peter Ford’s excellent Silverstone Study Centre blog for drawing my attention to Mystudiyo. It’s a very simple quiz creator, which, once you’re finished you can embed in your website. The example below is just a quick multi-choice quiz with no login required. You can, however add a login, which will give you much more reliable statistaical feedback for homewark tasks, or for finding out what children know about a subject. You can also include images and video in your quiz, and you can create quizzes to which your audience can add their own question - perhaps part of a research project. Embedding is simple, just copy the code the quiz generates as you complete it and paste it into the html tab on Wordpress.

Through my blog platform, Creativeblogs.net, I now have some 20 schools with multi-user blogsites, mostly here in the northwest. When a school signs up to the service, one of the most common questions I get asked by teachers (some of whom were not party to the decision to go with a blog platform) is, “How will it affect my already heavy workload?” This is a perfectly legitimate question to ask, and one which I will attempt to answer in this post.

The first thing I would say is that none of the following points are likely to persuade anyone unless you are willing to give it a go. The actual mechanicals of getting a piece of writing published on a blog are ridiculously simple, and, like all software, you do need to spend a short period of time familiarising yourself with the basic features of your chosen blog platform (in the case of Creativeblogs, it’s Worpress MU). Once you are happy with the basic wordprocessor controls of your class blog you are ready to start blogging with your class - and remember I’m trying to show you how you can do this without adding to your workload.

Shared Writing

Wherever possible, use your blog to work on shared writing sessions with your class. You are planning to do a shared write anyway, so do it on your blog. And, by doing it on the blog you can get extra benefits:

• A new published piece of work with no extra effort;
• Go back to it in the future and edit or add to it;
• It’s online for a later session when your class might be working on laptops or in an ICT suite;
• Structure a homework task around the post by asking children to comment at home. Perhaps by writing the next paragraph of the story; giving their point-of-view; writing their own verse or poem etc;
• By “tagging” each shared write according to its genre (science-fiction, autobiography, argument, chronological report etc) you can quickly build up an index of searchable resources to use in future.

What have we learned this week?

Once a week get a small group of children (possibly with a TA) to reflect on the week’s work and what they have learned. They can also mention any special projects, who has had class rewards etc. Again, this gives other children the opportunity to respond, and it’s amazing how often children will visit a class blog and add a comment on how much they have enjoyed a particular activity.

Put homework on your blog

The preparation and marking of homework can be really tedious and time consuming, so try and make it fun and interactive by using your class blog. Posting videos from Teachertube is incredibly quick and easy (instructions here) and adding links to educational websites such as the lovely Tutpup is also really simple. Tutpup has the added benefit of being a fun and competitive way to learn tables and spelling while giving you, the teacher simple feedback to see who is actually having a go. Don’t forgot to also structure homework tasks around your shared writes as mentioned above.

The basic principle is to find tasks that you have to do anyway and see if you can think of a constructive way you can do this via a class blog. The easiest way of doing this is to structure tasks around the shared write/pupils feedback via a comment approach which can work for loads of different contexts, not just literacy.

Remember, blogging is a habit: once you do it regularly enough it becomes second nature. With a little bit of effort in getting to know how to publish stuff on your blog you will be very surprised how quick and easy it becomes I’m reminded a little when interactive whiteboards were introduced - a lot of teachers felt threatened and were way outside of their comfort zones with all this new hardware in their classroom. Nowadays I’m really surprised when I go into a classroom and I don’t find a whiteboard in it. I’d like to think that it could be the same with class blogs, after all, what better way is there to demonstrate the excellence that goes on in your classroom.

Special Offer on Creativeblogs.net

Until the end of the summer term schools can order a multi-userblogsite from Creativeblogs.net and get their training half-price (£250 instead of £500). Simply contact  john at creativeict.co.uk for more details.

Schools with blogs powered by Creativeblogs.net

Click on the tags to find a link to their blogsite.

This timeline is created using Dipity . Simply create your timeline, then, in “Timeline View” click on the embed button and copy the iframe embed code (labeled as “Regular Embed”). Paste into the html tab of the Wordpress MU visual editor and publish.

This timeline is an automatic creation using feeds from this blog, and from Twitter (I’m HGJohn on Twitter if you want to follow me). I did this just to show how easy it is to display a timeline, however Dipity Timeline’s real worth is as a curriculum tool where a group of children might research and edit a timeline on whatever topic they might be doing - the timeline displayed in the blog post will grow as the children add to their work.