Soft Toy Project

Primary Intranet - Soft Toy Project Author and Affiliation Ms Kylie Bulman Year 6 Classroom Teacher [email protected]

Mr Brenton Harty IT Manager [email protected] Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School PO Box 417 Niddrie Victoria 3042

Presenters Biography Kylie Bulman is a Year 6 classroom teacher at the Girls campus of Penleigh and Essendon Grammar. She has a keen interest in the use of ICT in the junior school and acts as an ICT mentor. She is currently supporting the Year 1 Soft Toy project.

Brenton Harty has taught in both the Government and Private school system for 19 years. He currently holds the position of IT Manager at Penleigh and Essendon Grammar and is responsible for Network management, IT Professional development, IT support and integrating ICT into the curriculum across K-12 levels.

Abstract A traditional project is re-invented with the use of ICT. Soft Toy Projects have been used in primary schools for many years. In this version a multi-campus school uses a soft toy project at year 1 as a language, literacy and communication project involving multimedia web sites, email and cross age collaboration. Year 1 classes adopt a soft toy as a member of their class. The toy has it’s own web site and email address that are used to facilitate and motivate student reading and writing.

Introduction Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School (PEGS) is a Uniting Church School catering for students from Kindergarten to Year 12. The school has three separate campuses, in Raleigh St Essendon, Park Street Moonee Ponds (Penleigh) and East Keilor. The primary boys are situated at the Essendon campus and the primary girls are at Moonee Ponds.

The aim of this soft toy project is to develop a Year 1 on-line collaborative project between students at our Park Street girls and Raleigh Street boys campuses. The activity highlights the use of ICT in an integrated curriculum.

Soft Toy projects have been successfully used in primary classrooms for many years. This project involves each class adopting a soft toy, which becomes a much-loved member of the classroom. Each child takes turns to take the soft toy home. At home the child writes a few sentences in the class journal describing the adventures the toy had at their home e.g. “Smarty (the toy's name) came with us to swimming lessons and then he sat at the table and ate all of his vegetables”.

At school the following day extracts of the toys adventures are posted on its web site. The site is placed on the school intranet where teachers post diary entries, digital photos, stories, scanned images of children's artwork and links to literacy and numeracy activities.

Each soft toy also has its own email address and the children and parents are able to correspond with it via email. In the future it is envisaged that our Year Five students will be responsible for answering emails on each toy' s behalf.

As each of our Year One classes adopts a toy of their own they are able to correspond with each other about the adventures of the various soft toys.

Benefits of the Project The Soft Toy project has many educational benefits, especially in the Key Learning Areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking. The soft toys are very popular and students are fascinated by their web sites, checking each day for new stories or pictures. By visiting the web site the children are exposed to a wide range of literacy. There are sentences written by other students and teachers about the toys, encouraging the students to read short texts with familiar topics and vocabulary. Digital photos on the site enable the students to use a range of sources to gain meaning from print eg a picture of Smarty on the slide can have an accompanying caption of "Smarty is on the slide."

Although the child may not recognise the word slide or be able to decode it, he may be able to use the photo of the slide to work out the sentence.

Prep and Year One PEGS students have long been encouraged to learn some Basic Sight Words. In English there are one hundred frequently occurring words that make up, on average, half the words found in reading and writing. We have placed these words onto the toy's websites with digital photos of it holding a certificate for knowing 'one hundred sight words.' By incorporating these words on each toy's website we are encouraging the students to become familiar with these words and to gain their own certificates. Storing the frequently used words in working memory, so that they become automatic, enhances a child's ability to read and write fluently. The toys have become a powerful mentor to the children by practising hard, to learn their sight words.

Writing strands are covered in the project by encouraging the children to:  Produce simple written texts that convey an idea or message;  Write short texts that include some related ideas about familiar topics;

The student achieves these aspects by:  Writing simple texts using conventional letters;  Using word processing software to produce a message;  Contributing to jointly constructed texts -e.g. 'Smarty wall stories.'

The use of email gives the children a real sense of purpose to their writing. The children ask many questions of their toy and eagerly await a reply.

The Year Five students in the guise of the toy will be exposed to a great deal of literacy and will need to send replies that show an understanding of their audience as they will be writing for Year One students.

This initiative meets the needs of PEGS in that the technology facilitates a collaborative on-line project that can be undertaken by students on separate campuses as well as students at different year levels.

A great deal of collaboration between staff members at separate campuses needed to be undertaken to set this project in motion. In the first instance staff training needed to be addressed. This involved the staff being inserviced on web page production, scanning, email and digital photography. The Year One students also needed to be taught simple word processing and the use of email. The Year Five students and teachers will also need training on the use of email. This initiative also involves the parent body as they are able to view the 'Smarty' website and assist the children in sending an email to Smarty.

Although many aspects of the project come from traditional primary practises, the use of technology better facilitates and enhances literacy outcomes. A soft toy such as Smarty provides motivation for young children to write and when it is coupled with Information and Communication Technology it is further enhanced.

Equipment The technical requirements of this project are quite modest and should be achievable in all schools where technical services are working closely and supporting classroom teachers. The list below details the equipment needed.  Classroom iMacs, teacher iBooks, scanner, digital still camera  Graphic Converter for the manipulation of digital images o Rotation, resizing and cropping of images o Conversion of images file types o File compression  Scanner Software for capturing existing photographs and student art work o Fully automatic scanning software  Claris Home Page for web site production o Discontinued product o Very simple to use and quite powerful o Far easier to use and more powerful than free web page editors such as Netscape Composer o Simple to use in comparison to FrontPage and Dreamweaver  iPhoto for the production of web based photograph albums o Can easily import images from most sources o Can rotate images and perform minor retouching o Can be used to supply multiple keywords to photographs to enable them to be sorted and extracted into folders of similar images o Can have captions added to photographs o Can export web based photo albums giving the user the ability to control the size of the thumbnail and main images o Can export the photographs using the captions as the file names replacing the difficult file names generated by the camera  Fetch FTP Client o Using a separate FTP client for publishing emphases the publishing step and the nature of the web site being off line and live  Internet Explorer - Email through Outlook Web Access (OWA) o Stateless email client, no set up required o OWA email client is almost as fully featured and functional as the stand alone Outlook client o Logon credentials can be saved to prevent teachers and students needing to remember difficult passwords o If the toy's names are unique within the global address list the program will auto-complete partial names within the address field for students.

Logistics  Provide a Web page template as a structure for teachers to build their soft toy site. The template should have: o Heading area, 3 column x 2 row table o Links already created in the heading table to the school's home page and back to the calling page o Several spare lines below the heading table o Body area, 3 column x multiple row table o Several spare lines below the body table o Footer area, 3 column x 1 row table o Author and modification information entered into the footer table o All table columns have a fixed width of 33% of the width of the page  At times it proved much easier to photograph student art work rather than scan it. This is a more easily understood process and could deal with the large paper sizes used by students.  iPhoto web based photograph albums are edited in Claris Home Page to add missing features such as extra navigation links.  Soft Toy Names - Global Address Book o It's important that student name their toys with a name that is unique in the school address book. o With a unique toy name, students are able to enter a partial email name such as "Smart" and the server will complete the correct address of [email protected] for them.  Accounts o One email account is set up for the soft toy eg [email protected] o One email account is set up for the class eg [email protected] so that there is an account from which the students can email their toy or receive emails from him/her. o Passwords adhere to the school password policy and are saved in Internet Explorer so that students can use email without needing to know the password.  Purchase multiple copies of the soft toy o In case the worst happens, it's a very good idea to have multiple copies of each soft toy. You can bring out the clone and continue on as if nothing has happened.

Training  Cameras o Basic automatic camera operation o Connection to laptop or desktop computer for downloading photos  Email o Basic send and receive o Saving drafts o Copy and pasting text from other programs o Use of the address book  Web o Structure of the web site o File and folder structure and how to avoid broken links o Merge cells o Changing table properties such as the width of columns o Change page header information  FTP o Uploading files to the web server

Support  Local Support o Each campus has a number of classroom teachers who are also ICT mentors. They are available to assist staff with ICT projects  IT Support o The school has an IT Support department of 5 part time IT teachers working across levels K- 12 and all three campuses. This group has a very high level of technical skill and a time release to assist teachers with projects involving ICT