Kirklees ICT Showcase

I took four of my Year 5 class to the ICT Showcase in Kirklees today. This was only the second time the event had been run by Kirklees, following its success last year. I took as much tech as I could carry including our Nintendo DSs, four netbooks, flip videos, easispeak microphones and still cameras.

We were there to showcase our mental maths ability using the Nintendos, but we actually ended up showing lots of Web 2.0 stuff to anybody that would listen - and they listened - our stand was never empty all day!

The children took photos of the Fair as soon as we got there, downloaded them and made slide shows using photopeach and animoto. We embedded them into our wiki there and then! Meanwhile, the children took it upon themselves to record their thoughts on easispeak mics and email them to @dughall via our VLE Digital Brain, as he couldn't be at the event to see it live.

I'd given the children passwords to glogster and they'd been using it at home (as it's access denied in class - eek!), so they created posters using the pictures we'd taken. Over lunch I showed the children Zooburst which I'd been playing with at the weekend, within minutes they were making their own!

In the few 'lulls' that we had, the children were surfing the net and using all the other Web 2.0 apps I'd introduced over the year - Primarypad, Stykz and Sumopaint were all been used with such confidence!

Visitors were really impressed with the work that we are doing at our school and I had to say I felt really proud of the children and myself! It was also fab to see so many other schools doing great things with ICT including Podcasting, VLE work, webcams in birdboxes, TV stations, Wii work, e-safety and geocaching to name just a few things!

I also met several people that came to our stand last year when were demonstrating ComicLife software. They had gone out and bought it for their schools and the children were absolutely loving it!

I guess what I'm trying to say, is it was a great day of sharing good practice, letting the children do the talking and the doing and I'm sure everyone who visited went away with a least one brilliant idea!