Mr P's ICT blog - Tech to raise standards!

Pokémon GO was released on 14th July 2016 by the end of the day, I had already had tweets and messages asking about how I would use it in class.

If you have followed the blog you will know I am a massive fan of using video games as a stimulus in class through my Camouflage Learning approach. Pokémon GO is another engaging game that joins the list alongside Angry Birds, Temple Run, Minecraft and Kinectimals as games that can inspire some quality writing in class.

What this blog post isn't going to be is a list of ideas for using the game; people have already beat me to it. I have already seen some great blogs about the potential of the game as a stimulus in class. Here are some I have enjoyed reading:

Ways to use Pokemon Go in the classroom14 REASONS WHY POKEMON GO IS THE FUTURE OF LEARNINGPokemon Go in the Classroom14 ways to bring Pokemon Go into the classroom.Pokemon GO for EducationWhy all teachers should play Pokemon GoHow EdTech should react to the next big thing5 ways to use…

As well as being the computing leader in my school, I have also been the PE coordinator for a number of years. We have been very successful as a school over the years in a number of sports and try our best to value physical education and understand the benefits the subject can have on children both physically and mentally. It there is one job I loathe in my role as PE co-ordinator, it is organising tournaments. 
We regularly host a variety of sporting tournaments, including our local football league and it can take me hours working out the logistics of who plays who etc. However, over the weekend someone suggested the app 'Football Tournament Maker' on the iPhone and it is brilliant! 
The app is completely FREE and it allows you to create a tournament, add the number of teams and it will then generate a fixture list, a matrix of results and league table. You can also set up the tournament to be a knockout format. 

 The app will also give you individual team breakdown througho…

This web page is brilliant for showing how much information and data is being generated on the internet in real time. The orginal webpage seems to be down or not working, so I have embedded it here so you can access it.


Click the animation to open the full version (via pennystocks).
Click above to view the full version [h/t Penny Stocks].

Click the image to open the interactive version (via Penny Stocks).

Click above to view the full version [h/t Penny Stocks].

Click above to view the interactive version [h/t Penny Stocks].

Today Year 4 were given a mammoth challenge in English. We introduced the idea of a Rashomon story: a story told from different perspectives. They had to choose a familiar story and retell it from two different character's perspective. That sounds a challenge in itself but I decided to take it a step further by explaining that the character's version of the story had to be told through 5 tweets, each of 140 characters EXACTLY!

The children relished the challenge and had my new app. 1-4-0 to help. The app allows children to write a story or text within a grid of 140 boxes. The app has a word counter and a character counter to make sure children keep to the constraint. This is an idea I have previously blogged about and share on my training to actively encourage pupils to play and experiment with words and language. What I love about the idea of using twitter as a constraint is that a character can be a letter, a space or a punctuation mark. So children will actively muck about…

Any followers of this blog and teachers who have attended my training know I am a massive fan of using Minecraft in the classroom. As a creative tool, it is a fantastic way to let children build settings, historical structures and different environments.

Last week, I was working with my Year 1 class. Their topic this half term is the seaside. After learning all about features of the seaside, I challenged the class to try and build a seaside scene in Minecraft. Encouraging them to include as many features as possible, it wasn't going to be an easy task for Year 1. However, I was lucky to have some helpers in the form of Year 6 students, who are nothing short of experts when it comes to Minecraft. As most of the cohort were away visiting their high school, I had a few pupils transform into teachers helping and guiding the Year 1 pupils through their task.


Some of the efforts from the Year ones were amazing! I was really impressed but I loved the discussion and collaboration between …