Today Is International #DotDay!!

September 15, 2014March 31, 2015 @MarcWithersey Assessment, Child Initiated Learning, Collaboration, Early Years, iPads, Social Media Collaboration, dot day, early years, global, ipad, project, skype

Earlier this month I blogged about the upcoming International Dot Day on September 15th. The day finally arrived today and it has been fantastic!

A lot of preparation went in to the day. We actually began Dot Day on the Thursday before. Our children got to know the text well before the day came, and we had finished our individual dots by close of play on Friday. For the actual day, we enhanced our continuous provision areas with dotty resources which the children had access to indoors and outdoors all day long – an exciting blog post about this has been published on Alistair Bryce-Clegg’s blog here.

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Coding Curriculum Began Today. Am I Prepared? Maybe but let’s have a good sing along anyway!

September 1, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, iPads, Leadership and Managemant coding, curriculum, early years, ipad, leadership, Programming

Today, as I made my final preparations for starting the new school year, I couldn’t ignore the social media coverage of the new computing curriculum. The BBC have written a lot about the new primary curriculum today, from the computing perspective. They also announced a whole host of new projects to promote computer science in their children’s entertainment offerings and in their supporting educational websites.

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Teaching about Life on Earth in Early Years

August 30, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, Child Initiated Learning, Early Years, iPads, Outdoors apps, books, early years, ipad, ipads, literacy, photography

Context

This summer at the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute in San Diego our theme for the week was ‘Life On Earth’. To kick start the week we had a fantastic keynote from famed biologist E.O. Wilson, author of the new Life on Earth multi-touch textbooks available for free from the iBook Store.

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Nottinghamshire County Council iPad Networks

August 29, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, iPads, Leadership and Managemant apps, Collaboration, ipad, ipads, leadership, network, vision

This academic year is already shaping up to be a great one with many exciting projects planned for my class already. Some of these I have blogged about already but today I want to write about the iPad Networks for Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) schools.

During the Summer Term last year I began talks with consultants at NCC about the possibility of running a specific training program for schools in the district with iPads. I have worked closely with the ICT team over the last 2 years, delivering workshops, presentations and drop-in sessions around my use of iPad in school.

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International Dot Day, September 15th 2014

August 29, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, Blogs, Child Initiated Learning, Collaboration, iPads, Social Media child initiated learning, Collaboration, dot day, early years, global, project

As I prepare to return to school for the new academic year and welcome my new Foundation class to our school, I can’t help but feel excited. Usually September focuses on establishing routines, settling in to school life and base-line assessments, but this year will be slightly different for us.

My Early Years group of Apple Distinguished Educators in America are already a few weeks in to their school year and we are about to embark on a year of collaboration and projects between our classes. The first of these projects, which is a great ‘getting to know you’ exercise for my own class but also for all of our classes, is called ‘International Dot Day’.

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Apple Distinguished Educators Global Institute reflection and call to action.

July 24, 2014February 6, 2015 @MarcWithersey Apps, Blogs, Child Initiated Learning, Collaboration, iPads, Leadership and Managemant, Social Media ADE, Apple, apple distinguished educator, Collaboration, ipad, ipads, leadership

This year I applied to attend the Apple Distinguished Educator Global Institute, held in San Diego. My application was successful and I joined 9 other UK Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) on a trip to America which would change my life. Not only would this be a week to meet ADEs from 31 countries, it would be a chance to become a learner again, change perspectives, develop new skills and collaborate on a projects for the next school year.

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Back to Blogging – sharing the vision and seeing the impact.

March 2, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, Blogs, Child Initiated Learning, Collaboration, iPads, Social Media blogs, class blogs, instagram, leadership, social media, twitter, vision

When starting my new school in September, the mission was to turn the school around and promote the great things that happen inside our school. We are half way through the school year now and the work that we done so far has been incredible. Rapid progress is being made and the school feels like a completely different place than it did when I went to look around nearly a year ago.

We are very proud of what we have achieved so far.

Back in November I shared my vision for developing class blogs with head teachers and deputies at a school leadership conference in Nottinghamshire. My presentation was all about what could be achieved by blogging- I had only just started when I ran this workshop. I explained the upcoming requirements of the new computing curriculum and that e-safety and responsible internet use needs to be taught from Year 1. I suggested that blogs embeds this in the school ethos and regular blogging promotes responsible online behaviour.

This week everything fell in to place neatly, and the impact blogs have had on our learning environment and parental involvement has been phenomenal. It has only been 5 days.

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Using Puppet Pals to support choice making and SEN provision.

February 26, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, Child Initiated Learning, Early Years, iPads apps, child initiated learning, early years, ipad, provision, SEN

I have been working with a local nursery who use iPads with their SEN children.

The nursery manager had a vision to use apps to help children make choices. There are apps designed to do this, but most are expensive or present many small symbols for the child to choose from.

My suggestion was Puppet Pals. Even though this app is designed for story telling, it is so versatile and can be used beyond story telling.

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Skype Calls in the Foundation Stage.

February 26, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, Blogs, Child Initiated Learning, Collaboration, e-Safety, iPads, Social Media Collaboration, e-safety, early years, global, project, skype

Today was such an exciting day.

Over the half term I organised a Skype call with a K class at Avenues School in New York City.

It was the first time that I had planned a video call with any class, let alone Foundation children, and I didn’t know what to expect at all.

The call was an incredible experience and surprised me on so many levels. I was amazed at how confident the children were (both my class and the Eagles class at Avenues). They very quickly understood the concept of the link and listened so attentively to the speakers so that they could answer the questions.

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TeachMeet Midlands: What was it all about?

February 8, 2014October 6, 2014 @MarcWithersey Apps, iPads, Leadership and Managemant, TeachMeet A2, Apple, apps, AS, Assessment, Collaboration, eyfs, Feedback, Google, Happiness Diet, Humanities, ipad, KS2, Marking, MFL, Resources, Sharing, TeachMeet, TMM14, TMUK

TeachMeet Midlands was a huge success. This time our TeachMeet was part of National TeachMeet Day in the UK, which helped raise the profile of the event in Nottingham and across the Midlands. With sponsorship from the Nottingham Learning Trust (@NottmLT) and The National College (@the_college), as well as the companies behind TeachMeet UK, Pete (@PeteBevington) and I (@MarcWithersey) were able to promote this event through many channels beyond Twitter and we introduced so many more teachers to the TeachMeet format of CPD.

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