BETT14 “Making the most of your Digital Leaders” Friday 24th January 2014

6 Digital Leaders / Matthew Smith – eLearning Manager / Chris Sharples (@gr8ict) / Lady Lumley’s School

Prezi for Pearson Education Talk on “Making the most of your Digital Leaders”

Rather than describing their role or giving advice on how to set up Digital Leaders, this session aims to look at how to most effectively deploy your team of Digital Leaders, putting them at the heart of ICT strategy for sustainable and consistent whole-school development. The session will include overviews of example projects, delivered by the Digital Leaders themselves.
Pearson – Hall/Stand: C280

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Intro – Jon (1 min) – Introduce the talk and Mr. Smith.

Hello everyone my name is Jonathan and I am a  Lady Lumley’s Digital Leader .I’m in Year 10 so im the oldest Leader here. So today me and my Colleagues came all the way from Pickering in North Yorkshire to talk to you about How to make the most  fous so we have genuine impact across school.Rather than telling you what we do… or how to set up your own team we’re going to explain to you how to make the most of your own Digital Leaders providing you with overviews of  projects we’ve done so far. So without any further ado I present to you Mr. Smith, who runs Digital Leaders on a Tuesday lunchtime.

LLS badge on Prezi slide in Background

Overview (4 mins) – Mr. Smith

School Council + Padlet – Harriet (2 ½ mins)

Hi I’m Harriet and I’m a Year 7 Digital Leader at Lady Lumley’s. The first project we were set by Mr. Smith was to look at Padlet and how it may be useful for lessons.  This was great as I was a Digital Leader at my Junior School and had used Padlet already.

Padlet is an online notice comment board.Each wall,in essence,is a blank piece of paper for the internet. Users can then add comments, images, videos and files to the wall.Its just like a post-it board with the added benefit of multimedia content and that you can save it for the future. It differs to Pinterest and similar tools in that it allows for instant collaboration and post/media can be moved freely.

We first used Padlet to create examples of Padlet for Mr Smith’s Thought For The Fortnight which is a fortnightly technological tip for the staff of the school. This is a display that goes in the staff room.

(Show pictures of thought of the fortnight and examples)

(Show student view poster)

Mr Smith also ran a morning training session with the teachers on Padlet to show them how they can use Padlet for discussions, as a gallery, annotations or research and once again used our examples!

(Show Picture of Staff Training)

Padlet is now being used in school. One exciting way is for the school council.

We have a student question box on our Fronter which gets sent to the school council team for discussion. They then put all the information that they find out on a wall which is shared with all tutor groups. Starting after the February half-term we will then have a dedicated tutor time to feed back on the different points of discussion.This will be put on a Padlet

(Show either live fronter or screenshots of fronter for backup)

Assembly — Curt (2 ½ mins)

Last term myself,Sam and Liam were asked by Mr Smith To assist him with a assembly on how to make a responsible online profile and what you should/shouldn’t do on and with it.

for this we decided a drama scene would be an effective way of showing some of the dangers when posting online.

We had a few meetings to discuss ideas and came up with a 5 minute scene and a game to play in the assembly, to warn students how everyone can see what you post online and what you say about work or other topics that matter in life.

(We started planning a scene where two people worked in an office and one of them hated their job so posted it on Facebook so their boss (i.e. me) saw it and fired them.)

He then asked the students in the assembly’s to play the game, a different version of snog marry avoid, sacked jailed or fined. Where the objective was to show you what a person said or did online then say whether they were sacked jailed or fined e.g. A teacher on a night out holding alcohol then a student’s parent saw this so wrote into the school (pupils answer sacked).

The message was clear to everybody after that don’t put thing you don’t want others to see online and don’t let others be misled by something you’ve written about someone or something.

The Parrot – Ines (2 ½ mins)

The parrot is the schools online paper. Every month a team of 6th form and reporters put together their work and make a newspaper, which they send to every single person in the school via Fronter email. The parrot is also on the school website and is currently trying to be put on Fronter so it goes live as soon as its put up.

The digital leaders have helped with this by, when the very first edition didn’t have enough content, they were the ones that stepped in and helped. One of our digital leaders even put out a video showing what the exhibition in the school was like.

Now that the parrot has enough reporters, we are the ones that are going to help them edit their work so when it finally gets put online, it reads and looks like a proper magazine.

The digital leaders are trying to get the writing club and the drama club to put on a small cerealised play that the dl’s can film so that it comes out in instalments on the Parrot, like a mini cereal.

The English department gave us the digital leaders a small workshop about how to write an article so we as the DL’s know what to look for in the pieces when we read them over.

If you want to start your own online paper, we would recommend using a programme like Joomag, or something that will give an outline already for a magazine. Digital leaders can help with tech support and we use equipment such as wireless microphones and cameras to film and take pictures for the articles.

what is it?

how have dl’s helped with it?

dl’s helped with content-video

competitions page

how will they help?-writing/tech

link with writing club + drama club

if you want to set it up yourself

-online magazine software( we use joomag but ? is also popular)

-reporters

-dl’s to help with tech support

-equipment eg cameras camcorders wireless microphones

Homework Investigation- Ceri (2 ½ mins)

*Being a digital leader lets us get involved in various projects, also it lets us help troubled students and teachers around the school.

One of the many investigations we have done this year was the  undercover home learning  investigation. This project included several students from each year, so we could get a variety of homework from different teachers.

*Our aim was to find out whether the teachers had been using fronter or not to upload our home learning. We did this project also to see whether the teachers had done what they’d been told in staff discussions.

*How did we do it? Well every night after school we would take a photo of our home learning in our planners, then upload it to a Microsoft document.

*Our planners are what we write our homework in to remember to do it.

*Along with the photos from our planners, we would take a screenshot of the homework on fronter too so we would have proof that there was homework even set!

*If the teacher didn’t upload the homework on fronter, we left it blank as it was the easiest way to show it.

*For an accurate set of results we thought it was best if we did it for a long period of time, so we did it for two weeks. *Instead of printing the results out and using ink, we uploaded it  for Mr. Smith to look at.

*Mr Smith, the one who was in charge of our project collected all our results in . After he finished bringing all our information together, he created an Infographic and then took it to show our headteacher so he could then see who had been using fronter or not!

Screencasting – Sam (2 ½ mins)

As Digital leaders we are here to help both students and teachers.  We wanted to create some support applications but rather than making them spend their lunch sitting at a computer we decided to create some screencasts.

What is a screencast?

  • a screencast is a recording of your computer screen etc.

ScreenCast-O-Matic this helped us to take a video of our screens whilst going through the steps of our tutorial.

We decided to start with an application called Serif MoviePlus X6 .

The screencasts will be very useful for teachers and students. If they get stuck they will click on our screencast in our support room on Fronter and there will be instant help to hand . This will ensure that whole lessons are not having to be modified and changed just because someone comes into technical difficulties. This will also be very helpful for students at the Parrot if they come into difficulty when editing the publication.

Software Trials – Jon (2 ½ mins)

Now for another project that i’ve lead on. In the past I’ve trialed lots of pieces of software like WebPlus, which is a website designing program like Dreamweaver, and PagePlus, which is a publishing program like Microsoft Publisher, but most recently we were asked to investigate Microsoft SyncToy and File Free Sync. Both programs automatically back up files to and from chosen folders and devices.

The reason why this job falls to us as digital leaders is because its much easier to teach 24 students who are interested in ICT, how to use something than a class of 30, as im sure all you teachers will agree. But also because if we don’t like or disapprove of the software going into whole school use we can say so and save a lot of time, effort and money! On the other hand if the software is approved by Digital Leaders and the Headmaster of course. It will then be taught to the rest of the school, without Digital Leaders it would take the teachers forever to teach every single pupil especially if it requires a 1 to 1 but because you have 7 students who already know how to do it you essentially have 7 extra teachers to help the one already and those of you who are good at maths will know that there are 8 teachers in total which means that it will take much less time to teach as you have more knowledge of the program.

Another advantage of getting Digital Leaders to trial software is that teachers are already under pressure with endless amounts of things to do however the students are still busy with Home Learning but have considerably more time to do things than teachers so by using this system of trailing software with Digital Leaders , who are students, is that the teacher may find the software useful and easy however the students may not and if students don’t test it than it would be a waste of time in which teachers could be doing more efficient work.

and now i’ll pass you onto Mr. Sharples for the final part of our talk.

Second talk well done DLs /    

We arrived at BETT this morning – Jon led the DLs and I follow – I couldn’t keep up…

I started DLs as a head of ICT pre computing curriculum

New GCSE

Need an elearning manager as well as digital leaders – examples shown.

Big impact within school with some of the projects you’ve seen

But small examples too

Josh – help for Charlie gamemaker

Sue Brooks – best part of the week

Please consider

Lutterworth high school

All resources online