Category: images

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Happy Colorful Girl, originally uploaded by Pink Sherbet Photography.

I’ve finally got around to responding to being tagged for the Passion Quilt meme – not once, but FIVE times!
This meme, started by Miguel Guhlin , asks people to consider what their passion in education is, find an image that encapsulates it and explain their passion.
So, thanks to @theokk , @moodlehotpotato, @ajep, @langwitch and @ahenderson, here’s my passion.

Entitled Happy Colourful Girl, this picture is described as follows:
‘I just gave the girls poster paint with no rules…I told them they were free to paint themselves any way they wanted and they were given clean white T-shirts to wear and use as napkins! They had such fun…what you see is the result of pure child’s art…no rules 🙂 ‘

Whilst I don’t think we should abandon the rules completely, this image for me sums up how I think teaching and learning should be –

• colourful, full of vibrancy and life
• child led
• fun
• exciting and thrilling
• offering challenges and activities that inspire creativity
• memorable experiences.

I loved going to school – I’d fight my parents to let me go when I was ill. You may think that’s odd, and it possibly is, but that’s what I want for my children – my own and the ones I teach – to enjoy the time they spend at school, learning so much more than how to read and write, experiencing a wide spectrum of activities and wanting to come back day after day to find out more.

Some of you might have expected me to choose something Spanish – and I could easily have done so as nothing stirs me quite like it – but my passion goes deeper than that into all areas of teaching and learning – not being restricted to one subject but encompassing all.

So there you have it!

Now to tag five more people (hopefully who haven’t already been tagged!)

1.Leanne Simmonds
2.Rachel Hawkes
3.Dave Stacey
4.Sharon Tonner
5.Adam Sutcliffe

Instructions-

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce etc.

Have fun :o)

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Dali in Prague, originally uploaded by George*50.

Whilst searching for a picture for my previous post, i came across this one. As a fan of Dalís clocks and a soon to be fan(?) of Prague, I thought I’d share it with you. You can view the ‘real’ clock in Prague here and have a look at it in a computer simulation programme.
It’s an astronomical clock showing the current state of the universe at any point in time for six hundred years – sounds very impressive!

And, in case you’re stuck for a craft project to keep the kids amused, here are instructions on how to make your own Dalí clock– anyone got a 12″ ?

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El Toro, originally uploaded by sparky2000.

I’ve been (re)exploring Flickr this evening. I joined a while ago and uploaded some photos – but then forgot about it. As my husband was delayed by the Heathrow Terminal 5 fiasco, I had a spare few hours that i have spent browsing a multitude of photographs.

So here begins an (occasional) series of images of one of my first memories of Spain – the Osborne bull or Toro de Osborne.

More about Flickr and Osborne bull in future posts!

Build Your Wild Self

I’ve been having some fun making myself a new avatar. I’ve got a WeeMee (see right), a Yahoo avatar (wearing a Spanish football shirt or a Sevillanas dress), a DoppelMe wearing the Swedish football kit, and a beaver Voki of me pretending to be Mrs Beaver from Narnia (for the benefit of my kids :o))

Build your Wild Self is a site run by the Wildlife Conservation Society and New York Zoo and Aquarium. It allows you to choose a basic body and then add bit of animals, reptiles, birds etc to it to make a ‘wild self’.

I had great fun making myself into a rein-pol-conda-guin-peacock. Cute aren’t I?

I can see using this in the PLL classroom, linking body parts (los brazos, las piernas, la lengua, las orejas, la cola, las alas etc), animals (un pingüino, un reno, un pavo real, una serpiente, un tigre, una tortuga etc), descriptions (colours, characteristics like feroz, grande, tranquilo, orgulloso, peludo etc) and habitats (la selva, la jungla, el Arctico, la sierra, el desierto, el río etc) in a fun activity. Pupils could collectively discuss and describe a model Wild Self, perhaps using a scaffold text. Then they could create their own Wild Self either to match a given description (listening and / or reading) or choose their own design and then describe it (speaking and /or writing).
e.g. Tengo las orejas de un oso polar. Tengo los cuernos de un reno. Tengo la lengua muy larga de una serpeinte. Tengo la cola impresionanate de un pavo real. Tengo las piernas de un pingüino.
Perhaps the class could then play a game with all the Wild Selves – someone says a sentence in Spanish about one of them, and teams have to find the correct image, or perhaps five images and five descriptions to be matched. And what about a quiz akin to the baby photo game – whose Wild Self is whose?

What do you think? Anyone got any further ideas or comments?

I’ve mentioned before the Voices of the World project, initiated by
Sharon Tonner creating links around the world using our voices / sound rather than solely as a way of written word. It’s a genius project as it offers-

• a monthly task – short sharp bursts are great for keeping up interest , and also work well for me as the whole school want to be involved so I can rotate classes to lead
• a different tool each month – so far – Voki, Animoto, One True Media and Voicethread (not to mention using Audacity and Flickr to gather and create things!) so we’re introducing new ideas and techniques into the classroom – and they’re free!
• links with classes across the globe – Greece, Thailand, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Australia, USA… the list goes on.
• the opportunity for my pupils to ‘be’ Spanish. I teach them Spanish and, in the absence of a Spanish school, and because I have to be different, Whitehouse Common are doing their tasks in Spanish (the other schools are doing the tasks in their own language)

This month, the task is on Voicethread and is on the theme of customs. It’s a two part task – Sharon has selected some slides featuring fruit, clothes, musical instruments etc and each school is going to record the name of each fruit, instrument and so on in their own language. Then each school is going to create their own Voicethread based on their country – the food, costume, sport that most represents it.

I must admit, with January half gone, we haven’t started yet. There are many reasons but one is the issue of our icon.

We need to create an icon to represent our school on Voicethread, and Sharon asked that it be the flag of our country. Problem – we are in England, but our words will be in Spanish so which flag do we use? Sharon and I exchanged e-mails on the subject and concluded that it needed to be a hybrid! So, we were about to head off to Paint to redesign the flag when i discovered a very timely post from Langwitches, Silvia Tolisano, on a tool she had discovered on Twitter via Karen Bosch called We are multicolored.
This tool allows you to make a hybrid flag, based on three questions –
Where is your home?
What other country has affected you?
Where have you dreamed of going?

So, off I went and had a play and came up with these – not sure which I like best but it’s a start.Is this one a bit boring and predictable?

I like this one with the English bit of the Union flag at the front – but does the St George’s cross get a bit lost?

And this one is for our Euro08 project – we’ve drawn Sweden!

It’s a tool I wish I’d discovered yesterday when I was teaching Year6 RE about signs of belonging and identity – but we’ll be having a go next week for sure (they’ll be thrilled – tweeting on Twitter with Ewan McIntosh last week, designing flags next week – what will it be next?)

And I also think it’ll be a great new tool to add a new dimension to European Day of Languages next September – we’ve discovered the languages spoken by our school community – wouldn’t it be great to have a display of the 480+ hybrid flags of the pupils? And we thought last year was brilliant!

Need a rest before my brain overheats….

I was just catching up on my del.icio.us tags (you can see them on the right) – haven’t checked out the sites tagged by my network in the last few days. I usually do this daily to check what other people that I have added to my network are tagging (bookmarking). It’s a good way of sharing ideas as the sites are marked by one person but many others can potentially benefit from that research. Whilst checking out ‘what’s new’ I came across something in podfather‘s tags called Spell with Flickr. I checked it out and found podfather’s blog name – Ddraig Goch spelt out in funky letters!

So I had a go – and the result is above.

If you don’t like the randomly selected image for any of the letters of your chosen word(s), all you have to do is click on it and another image will appear. Here’s another version –

Then you just grab the code and put it on your site – I had to choose ‘square’ to make it fit my page.
Possibly not going to revolutionise anyone’s teaching, but it’s fun!