Saturday 10 November 2007

USA, Latvia, UK, Australia and Japan Virtual Meeting

Yesterday, working closely with Lorraine Leo (a BIG thank you), Technology Integrator at Jackson School, Massachussetts, we were able to facilitate an online meeting between 5 nations around the world, including myself in the UK, Lorraine and Noel in the US, Tanja and Madara in Latvia, Geoff in Australia and last, but not least, Sigeto Sakari from Japan.

The session allowed the students to meet each other and then to use the online discoverE interactive whiteboard software to draw with each other creating an underwater ocean scene - we used a background from one of the Roy the zebra games and discoverE's drawing tools and then text tools to give all our sea creatures names and to say something about themselves...

It was an amazing feat and we all felt very proud of ourselves, great that we had managed to meet, communicate and create without any barriers...

Sakari also kindly shared other news with us from Japan... specifically a concert that his students had performed at.

I have included a screen grab of our output - beautiful octopus from Madara and some great fish (especially Speckles) from Noel... well done everyone!

If you're reading this and would like to network with other schools and engage in this way please send me an email..., thanks again to Lorraine for bringing everyone together and also to Geoff from discoverE for allowing us to use his software.

Best wishes Tim...

Sunday 23 September 2007

Networking Schools Internationally

Last week’s meeting with Jackson School, via Skype and discoverE, in Massachusetts highlighted to me how easy it is (via the internet) to virtually meet with schools across international borders - which could be used to great effect for learning (and of course it’s free).

However, one of the issues might be finding an appropriate school that would like to meet with your school.
With a large number of registered roythezebra users in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand plus other nations (a big hello to schools in Buenos Aires...), I was thinking I could quite easily put you in touch with like-minded teachers and schools in order to meet virtually - it could be to share or read stories that the children have written or simply to explain what it’s like living in a different part of the world... having that ‘real life’ contact can be so important for motivation and learning.

Naturally everyone involved would need to be vetted prior to meeting, but this is just an initial thought... if you’d like to get involved just let me know... tim@roythezebra.com

Best

Tim

ps. leave me a note here if you think it’s a good idea... if I get an overwhelming response then I’ll put it out to everyone via email...

Thursday 20 September 2007

Virtual Classroom Meeting / Jackson School Massachusetts

Very exciting afternoon yesterday - via Skype and some rather cool ‘Virtual Classroom’ software I was able to spend some excellent time with a small group of students and their teacher from 'Jackson School' in Newton, Massachusetts, USA (www.jacksonschool.org)...

Using Skype the students were able to ask me questions about the interactive Roy the zebra story and also to ask me my thoughts on the ‘Rescue Lucy’ online story and how that was coming along.

We then used the ‘discoverE’ virtual classroom software (www.compued.com.au) which allowed me to upload a powerpoint presentation with a number of my recent sketches - this included some new characters for the next story... we were able to talk about the story and what the plot could be.

Also using the discoverE software I was able to draw Roy and friends on the virtual interactive whiteboard. The students were able to draw with me adding stripes and to colour some of my drawings... wow...amazing to think that we’re thousands of miles apart... and using Australian software!

A big thank you to Lorraine Leo, their teacher, in helping to facilitate this, all the Jackson students and to Geoff Kaye, of CompuEd, for letting us use the virtual classroom software.

It was so great to meet the students and get direct feedback on roythezebra.com and the other good thing... it was totally free as we were talking through the internet - VoIP (Voice over the internet protocol)...

Wednesday 5 September 2007

Operation: 'Rescue Lucy' Interactive Story

Work has begun on ‘Operation: Rescue Lucy’ - lots of you have been asking me when the next story is coming out and now with the new site designed I can put all my effort into writing the next interactive story... I’m interested to know whether I should go with the original title, which is ‘Operation: Rescue Lucy’ or go for the ‘Get Lucy’ (like Get Carter)... you can see I’ve got far... stuck already on the title.. (!)

I kinda like the latter... if you have a spare moment leave a note here letting me know what you think...

Also, the last story was written into 9 parts... which meant the story could be spread over a couple of weeks I mapped out the plot this last Friday and and I think it’s going to be another nine part story... I guess you could do the first story and then leave it a month and do ‘Get Lucy’... any thoughts or strong feelings welcome...
So, armed only with a pencil and a sketchpad I’m forging forward... even though I love the internet and all the flashy things that it can do my favourite tool is still the ol’ pencil and a piece of paper... HB to be precise, tried using a 4B the other day - what a disaster...

As I draw the pictures - I’ll be uploading some of them to this blog... you can try and guess what’s going on...

Best Tim

Thursday 23 August 2007

Roy's new interactive reading website

Many of you may have missed out on the launch of the new interactive reading roythezebra.com website at the end of last term... I uploaded it quietly on the weekend of 7th July 2007... did you know the date 070707 is lucky, I chose it by accident but there were plenty of other people out there who had been hatching and planning to do things years in advance - just do a search on Google.

So what's changed and why did I redesign Roy's site... here's my thinking...

  • The old site was looking really 'old' - I've been quite ashamed of it... I knew I could do better...

  • After creating 80 interactive reading games and lesson plans over the past two years and 'shoe-horning' them into the old site things just didn't seem to flow and the site wasn't logical with the individual reading games difficult to find...
  • I wanted to introduce some programmes that would allow the site to start to pay for itself (at worse...) and to give me an income (at best...) to continue the work full-time (... if I could focus full-time we'd be flying...)
  • I also wanted to increase the quality of the resources and literacy worksheets by using .pdfs

  • ... and finally to make the site more Google friendly so more people can find it...
Everything you could find on the old site is on the new site - no passwords added or barriers created to using... you should never be more than three clicks away from what you want.

I hope you like it... feedback, good or bad welcome, as always...

Best wishes

Tim

P.S What's with the random pics for this blog? I'm not allowed to add blogs without sketching a new image, thus forcing me to draw... which I always procrastinate with...

Sunday 19 August 2007

Welcome...

OK, thought it would be a really good idea to create a blog for the Roy the zebra website - this way I can communicate where the site is going, ideas that I have, share feedback and other websites that might be useful for literacy and the ones that inspire me the most.

This blog will also allow everyone who uses Roy to post comments on any of the blog entries that I create.