Friday 20 February 2009

Fendalton on Google

Throughout 2008 Rob Clarke and I worked on setting up FOS Live, a new way to share our learning online. We began with the aim of creating a new site which was easy to update by the right people in our school but more importantly was a portal for sharing the learning that takes place every day across our school. Running in parallel to our work on the website was the continuing drive to make better use of online tools that allow children to collaborate and share online. By combining these two strands we have been able to create FOS Live, a website which shows learning as it is happening across the whole school. Whenever a child, or teacher, in school posts to their blog it appears instantly on FOS Live. Whenever children upload new photos to their class Picassa account, those photos are instantly fed into slideshows on FOS Live.

This has all been possibly thanks to the incredible (and free) online tools that Google provide. Blogger, Google Docs, Picassa, YouTube, Google Apps and Google Calendar are all tools that we use extensively across the school.

Keep your eye out in The Christchurch Press next week for a story all about us and how we are using these online tools to support our children's learning. We also appeared on the official google blog in 2008, you can read the post here.

Of course, sitting underneath this is a robust digital safety programme designed to make sure that children understand the risks of using the internet and how to keep safe online. We never use the full names of children online. Parents give permission for all images and video footage that goes online.

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