On Thursday 31st January, the shortlist for the Naace Impact Awards 2013 was announced at BETT 2013.

I am thrilled to share that I am one of seven others on the shortlist for the “Inclusion Impact Award”
An award which recognises excellence in the provision of a technology-enhanced learning experience that includes all.

The judges have nominated me ….  ”For her use of technology and gaming to motivate students to learn, dramatically improving their writing skills and behaviour”.

I am hugely pleased to be nominated for 2 consecutive years and very pleased for both myself and my school.

The winner of each category will be announced at the Naace Strategic Conference 7-8 March 2013.

You can see the entire shortlist here:  Naace ICT Impact Awards 2013 Shortlist.

I would like to thank everybody who has sent messages of support and encouragement in person as well as via Twitter and e-mail.

The HOTs project (Hold onto Sports), originally called the Wii-lypmics is the London 2012 Inspire Project for Hounslow.

It was first started in 2009-2010 by Dr. Jo Armitage and Sarah Hoyle from Together We Create and was created to get young people involved in sport through the use of  technology. The aim of the project was to help children learn how people become top athletes, how they prepare their diet,  look after their bodies and present themselves in the media.  The children would research different areas of the athletes: life as the trainer, dietician, physiotherapist, the PR Manager and the athlete itself.  They then present to the judges their project for judging and the children also learn how to play their given sport on the Wii.

This is the third year that my class has taken part in the The HOTS project. Here is our 2010 project and our 2011 project.

This year we again focused on Darius Knight, a London born 2012 Olympic hopeful in table tennis.

We will find out in the next few weeks if we make it to the finals. Fingers crossed!

The boys built their cars using card, thin cardboard, foam or old packaging. For the axles they used spools or the outer casing from felt tip pens. They then taped a balloon around a straw with Duck tape which they then attached to their cars.

We quickly discovered that the straw needed to be as short as possible in order for the balloon to produce enough power to move the car at all and then after a few more trials the decision was that slightly wider tubing made the cars move the best.

Conclusion: The cars that traveled the best had a light frame, wide and short tubes attached to the balloons and free moving axles made from felt tip casings
We hope to add a video of the cars racing as soon as possible.

Here is a video of the cars being built. The music is Drive My Car by The Beatles.

Have you ever made balloon powered cars? How far did yours travel?

This has also been posted on our class blog Adventures in Oak Class

Read All About IT HERE

Thank you very much.

I would like to say a HUGE Thank You to everyone who took the time to help me with comments, clips, kind words, advice and a good ear for the video I was required to create for the judges of the Naace ICT Impact Award to view.

I am only sorry that I wasn’t able to add all the clips, soundbites and comments that you wonderful people left but it is amazing how short 3 minutes turns out to be!

I thought that you might like to view the finished project

The winner will be announced at Naace Strategic Conference Gala dinner on Friday 9 March 2012.

The Naace Conference 2012 is being held 8th – 10th March.

I am looking forward to an exciting evening and wish everyone nominated the best of luck!

Once again a giant THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!!! I am truly honoured to have such fabulous people in my Personal Learning Network (PLN)

How YOU can help…..

If you could please leave a quick comment about how this blog has had an impact on you; how it may have given you ideas of apps to use, ideas to try in your classroom…or anything else you may think of  I would really appreciate it!

This is because….As part of the final judging process
“all shortlisted nominees are being invited to submit a short edited video (of no more than 3 minutes) – perhaps working with their pupils or colleagues – which demonstrates the impact of the work that you’ve done.  Please note that entries will be judged on the basis of impact rather than video quality.“

My PLN has been incredibly helpful and supportive to me and I would really like to include in the video that I make any impact my blog or tweets may have had on others.

I know that many people have said how they have tried some of the ideas from this blog and tweet and found them useful.

If you prefer you could even send an audio or video clip to mary3things@gmail.com  or else just tweet me. I am @ebd35 on Twitter

Thank you very much to everyone who has taken the time to read this!

Mary aka @ebd35

The first of these lessons was Making Gloop which you can read about on our class blog. We had been looking at Materials and their Properties and had been examining the properties of solids, liquids and gases. Gloop (also known as oobleck) is a bit more difficult to classify. In fact if Sir Isaac Newton, the British scientist who gave us the theory of gravity, were alive today, he might be confused by gloop. Back in the 1700s, Sir Isaac Newton identified the properties of an ideal liquid. Water and other liquids that have the properties that Newton identifies are call Newtonian fluids. Gloop doesn’t act like Newton’s ideal fluid. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid. Gloop is a solution that behaves a little like a solid and a little like a liquid and seems to defy the laws of gravity.

When gloop is molded into a ball, it stays that way for a short time, but then gravity pulls it down — and it becomes a liquid. As you can hear one of the children saying in the video…..”It’s Amazing!” (click on the photo to go to the blog post).

Is it a liquid or a solid?

Our second WOW lesson Diet Coke and Mentos looked at what happens when you put a solid (Mentos) into a carbonated liquid (Diet Coke).

To say that there were explosive results would be an understatement. You can read how some of the class described this WOW activity here. Here is the video we added to the class blog.

The science that they learnt was that the surface of the Mentos is covered with many small holes and that this increases the surface area available for reaction thereby allowing the CO₂  bubbles from the Diet Coke to form rapidly.  When the mints come into contact with the liquid, a reaction causes the formation of foam at a rapid rate.

Our third Cool Science experiment was to investigate if ALL liquids mix together. We looked at mixing squash and water, which of course they then needed to drink and tested whether various other liquids would mix together. We decided to investigate if oil and water would mix but rather than just mixing it together we decided to make a ‘Lava Lamp’.

In the morning we looked at pictures of lava lamps online and the children sketched pictures of them and in the afternoon we used vegetable oil, water and food colouring to make our own lava lamps. We think they looked pretty 1960ish cool ;o)

Oil and Water are made of different types of molecules that are far too small to be seen. When you poured the molecules of water into the bottle, they settled to the bottom as a liquid. The molecules didn’t fly apart and fill the entire bottle because water molecules stick together. Likewise, the oil molecules also stick together. Different molecules have different tendencies to stick together. The oil and water did not mix. This shows that oil molecules do not like to stick to water molecules.  When two liquids do not mix they are considered immiscible.

It has been great fun planning these lessons and even greater seeing the children’s faces as we did each of these activities!

What is YOUR most WOW science lesson?

They kept looking at each other with the biggest grins; it was truly one of ‘THOSE‘ teaching moments. And when I read them the comments that were left for them, they gave up trying to sit in their seats and jumped up and down!

A HUGE, HUGE, HUGE thank you to everyone who took the time to comment.

For both of these boys to have told their Werewolf story through traditional ways might have been a bit like this for them: 

but instead by using a little technology it was a bit more like this:

Today Freddie and Lee ‘wrote’ their second story. For this story the boys drew the pictures first and added the narration afterwards. Freddie is telling the story and if you listen closely you can might hear some of the sound effects Lee is creating.

We hope you like it as much as the first one.

During lunch play Lee and his friend Freddie stayed inside and as they listened to the recording they discussed what they should draw. It was fabulously to sit back and watch two children who often find the writing process difficult work together to plan how they would present Lee’s story.

They were hugely excited when I told them I would turn the work they did into a movie. Later in the afternoon we again used my iPhone to take photos of their pictures and import them into iMovie.

I imagine they will be very pleased with the end result.