First Meeting and First Job!

Ceri and Tracey met with all the new Digital Leaders last week to decide on when and where we should meet and what we plan to do this year.

It has been decided that we will meet on Thursday afternoon during Assembly time in the Hive. Some weeks it will be Ceri at the meeting and other weeks it will be Tracey depending on what sort of things we are talking about at the time.

Our first job is to make a film about the school to showcase what we think makes our school so special. Ceri will be leading this. If you have any ideas to share please comment on this post.

Digital Leaders for 2016-17

A very big well done to the following children who have been appointed as Digital Leaders for the next school year. Ceri and Tracey were very impressed with the way you answered all the questions that the current DLS asked you in your interview the other day. You certainly know your e-safety stuff!

We hope you will enjoy the experience and are proud to be Hertford DLs.

Congratulations!

Alex, Annis, Ariella,  Bridey, Blake, Chance, Caelen, Daniel, Ellie, Grace, Lotta, Lydia, Martha, Stan, Tahlia

and our reserve DL is Megan

Digital Leaders Application 2016

Are you interested in becoming a Digital Leader in September?

Are you responsible? Do you like helping others? Are you good at computing?

Please leave us a message by clicking on the speech bubble at the top of this post and tell us:

• Why do you think you would make a good Digital Leader?
• What activities do you enjoy doing on the computer at home and at school?
• How do you stay safe online?

Don’t forget to tell us your first name only and which class you are in.

Good luck and we are looking forward to reading your replies.

The New Digital Leaders are announced!

On Monday the current Digital Leaders met to discuss the applications for the new Digital Leaders. They discussed the merits of each applicant and then voted on whether they thought they would be a good DL.

Today Tracey announced in assembly who had been successful. There was lots of excited anticipation in the hall and one by one as each name was called there was cheers and clapping. The good new is that we have decided that everyone who took the time and effort to apply will be a DL for next year.

So here are the names:

From Penguins – Katie, Eva, Callum

From Puffins –  Skye, Zoe, Kitty, Elijah, Ella, Poppy, JoJo, Rose, Chloe, Emily, Georgie and Arun

Congratulations everyone and I’m looking forward to working with you next year.

Tracey

Plickers

We trialled an app today called Plickers. Everybody gets a Plicker card. They are all numbers and each number belongs to someone inthe class. Each card has a letter on each side of the square. A B C D



The teacher asks a question and there are 4 possible answers (ABCD). Everyone picks the answer they think and hold the Plicker card up with that letter pointing to the top. The teacher takes a photo of the class on the iPad and the app works out who got the answer right. Very clever! 

Watch out to see if we use this in class in the future.

A busy meeting

We got so much done today at our meeting. 

• We looked at the surveys that we discussed during Safer Internet Day and each completed one. Now we know what the questions are we are going to go around the school and ask other people the same questions about e-safety at home. We have decided Independent Learning Time on Friday would be the best time. 
• Tracey shared that there is a competition about staying safe by Brighton LSCB (Brighton&Hove Local Safeguarding Children’s Board). We are going to enter the posters we made for Safer Internet Day.
• We investigated how The App Plicker works (separate blog post to follow) 
• We discussed which mornings might be best for us, with the Learning Leaders, to go out to photograph dangerous parking outside the school. We are going to upload these photos to our school twitter account. 

Safer Internet Day 2015

The digital leaders did an outstanding job again this year leading the whole school in e-safety lessons.
On Monday, watched by some of the governors they discussed their plans with Zoe as part of her headship interview process. The governors were very impressed with their knowledge and confidence.

Then on Tuesday the DLs led an assembly when they showed the Kim and Lee esafety film (available on our school website- esafety pages).
Afterwards pairs of DLs went into each classroom and talked to the classes about how to stay safe on the internet. They showed the film again and answered questions and taught everyone the song at the end of the film.
They gave out SID dot to dot pictures for everyone to fill in and gave everybody a SID sticker which gave a link to the e-safety pages on our website.
At the end of the day everyone had a leaflet to take home to help their parents learn all the e-safety rules too.

The e-safety posters the DLs had made at home have been enlarged and posted around the school.

Well done and thank you Digital Leaders! I am very proud of you all.

Computational thinking with Marble Runs

On Friday the DLs (and a few honorary DLs for the day) spent the morning working with Adam from Everyone Can Program (http://everyonecanprogram.com/?page_id=226)
Adam brought in lots of his special designed marble run pieces and we tinkered with the pieces to see what we could do. Adam set us some challenges to make us think carefully about how to put the pieces together.
Although we were having fun playing we were actually learning something very important called computational thinking.

Tracey and Rachel were deciding whether to buy one of Adams kits for our school. We said we liked using it and we would like a set. Next time we will show the rest of Year 2 what to do.

Catching up

Although we haven’t blogged recently we were very busy last term.

We have been taking photos around the school which we are slowly making into a tour of the school for our website. We learnt a lot about how to take appropriate photos and how to caption them following our school e-safety rules. We have been using the app called Pronto on our iPads to do this.

A friend of the school called Mark donated 3 digital video cameras to the school just before bonfire night. He set us a challenge to make a film of the first Firework night lantern parade. We practised using the cameras to get a good quality bit of film. The trick is to move slowly.
On the night we filmed the singing in the hall, the parade and the fireworks. Our final challenge was to edit the footage we had. This took quite a long time. The film is now complete and Tracey is going to publish it so everyone can see.

Another job we did was to help Uniservity, who provide our school website. They are making some changes in the new year and they asked us for our opinions on the changes. We liked what they are planning to do so we said so!

Finally Charlie has joined us as a digital leader to replace Leen who left our school.

First job on the list

Hello all my new Digital Leaders. I’ve been busy today sorting out the staff page on the VLE  http://www.thelifecloud.net/schools/HertfordInfant/resources/Pages/OurSchoolStaff.page

and I’ve noticed that we will need to make avatars for some of the staff who don’t have their picture on there yet.

If any of you want to have a go over the summer the website to use is http://www.doppelme.com/

You can make the avatar then save it by right clicking on the image and ‘save image as…’

Then send it to me traceybowers@hertfordinf.brighton-hove.sch.uk

These are the missing staff  Sarah Unsworth (Puffins old teacher), Stanya (Blackbirds TA), Sian (Puffins old Thursday TA), Hester (school counsellor)

Ceri and Ciara, our new members of staff we can do once we know what they look like a bit better in September!