Inter-generation iPad club

Cefn Fforest’s Digital Leaders have been working hard this week organising their first club as Digital Leaders.  They decided that it would be a good idea to get parents, grandparents and family members involved in what they have been doing by setting up an iPad club.

The aim is to work with the adults, showing them how we use iPads in our school but also to show them how iPads can be used on a daily basis in their own lives. The club will look at many things ranging from simple navigation around the iPad to using specific apps in terms of how they work and what can be produced. The DL’s will also teach the adults how to use safari and what can be done with photos and videos that have been taken. The club will hopefully strengthen links with our families but also give the DL’s more responsibility and more of an opportunity to develop their own skills.

 With the club running once a month it won’t be too onerous for the DL’s and will ensure they have the time to complete their ever growing list of responsibilities. They’re doing an amazing job and they absolutely love being DL’s. They constantly look for things to do and get on with their jobs with real purpose and enjoyment. The way they are going they won’t need a mentor at all!!!!

If anyone runs a club like this at the moment and have any advice please feel free to comment on this post or catch us on twitter @cefnprimary or to speak to me specifically @cefnprimaryls

Football Tournament

Hey guys! It's Holly and Olivia here! Wewent with the boys to Risca to compete in the football tournament. We took some amazing photos of the boys playing and we will be putting an imovie up on our school website shortly. We came 5th and sadly didn't make it through to the regional finals :( But the boys had fun anyway!

We all had a great day and had so much fun and we were happy for the team who won anyway!

Overall we had a great experiance and the day was great!

Holly and Olivia

Art exhibition

Hey guys! Its Joseph and Daniel here! on the 16/4/13 we had our art exhibition in the hall, there was tea, buiscits and everything you could imagine. Everybody who had a piece of art in the exhibition tried extremely hard, we had a auction and the auctioniers were Olivia Lane and Milly Davies, one of the paintings in the auction was sold for £9.00 that was by Phoebie Hopkins and another was sold for £7.00 which was by Holly McDonald! OMG!!!!

        

On most of the paintings/drawings the were QRcodes which you can create on an app called Qrafter. It is a very usefull because you can create them, you can scan them and you can stick them on work. There were three settees in the exhibition and aswell as two benches.

Guys please leave a comment or ask a question about our favourite piece of art. Thanks for reading, Joe and Dan.  

World war II

Hey guys! Olivia and Taylah here! On friday 13/04/13 we had a visitor 'which time travelled' from world war II. Her name was Mrs Gladys Jones and she told us all about The Blitz which is our new topic in school.She came to our school in a Welfare officers uniform and she also brought with her a navy uniform, an R.A.F uniform, a millitary captains uniform and a soliders uniform.

There was volenteers to do a shouting competition. One of the girls pertended to be an air raid siren and another girl pretended to wind the siren ( which was her arm). Then the women asked for a boy and a girl volenteer to pretend to be doing an air raid drill which ment they had to crawl under a table. A boy stood up and put a police helmet on ( which was a metal police helmet from the blitz and then the lady dropped a tin can on his head).

What was your favourite part of your week? Leave your answers in the comments!

Thats all from us for now, hope you enjoyed reading our blog!

Olivia and Taylah

Our first assembly

Hey guys! Dan, Holly, Mason and Joe here! We had our first ever Digital leaders assembly yesterday with Mr Stone, it was so fun. We talked about our moodle site (http://learn.caerphilly.org.uk/cefnfforestprimary) to show the Year 3 and 4 children how it worked. We showed them the front page where it shows the race for attendance, the first and second newspaper issues, our twitter posts including our followers and the school news part.

We talked about all the different links to different websites such as cool maths games, wordle, maths fun and woodland games which are all on our Kids zone part, our Audio Boo site (where we interviewed Mrs Farmer), IT zone and our own Digital Leaders Blog spot (http://cefnprimarydl.blogspot.co.uk/). We have nearly 600 views!!! 

We also popped in and out of some of the different classrooms like Miss James and Mr Stone’s classrooms to show the younger children how to get into the classrooms and what they could do in the classrooms. There’s a wall were they can post different things like a wall on Facebook , they can see what their homework is in the home and school work area and we have a gallery were they can look at photos and videos about the things that they have been up to.

We really enjoyed doing the assembly and are looking forward to meeting the Governors in May. We’re showing them the Moodle site and how the iPads work.

Digital Leaders Progress

Hi I'm Mr Stone and I have been working with and mentoring the Digital Leaders at Cefn Fforest Primary. The Digital Leaders have been in place for near enough a full term now and the progress they have made has been fantastic!

We started off by concentrating on creating photo slide shows and videos for the school Moodle website. We used the Animoto app which meant that the DL's could create their sideshow and upload it instantly to the Animoto website. From there we could get the embed code we needed to embed the sideshow into out website. The whole process can be done in less than 5 minutes hence reaping instant rewards. 

The next step for the DL's was to create a blog site and an Audioboo page. The blog page, which you are currently on, enables the DL's to blog about their ideas, write app reviews and give general news about school and what they've been up. Their Audioboo page (http://audioboo.fm/CefnPrimary) is an audio version of their blog page but with the ability for the DL's to deliver interviews about the matters they feel most important within the school.  Both have been a huge success so far with the DL's making them their own. Both sites are managed by the DL's and all of the content are their own ideas and own work. Already on the Audioboo page are interviews with pupils, staff and each other. Their latest piece, an interview about their visit to Techniquest, has had particularly good feedback with many comments and retweets on Twitter by those not involved with the school. 

In order to develop their role, the DL's have started to act as TA's once a week in infant classrooms helping with the use of iPads. Also, the DL's have started mentoring 'Apprentices' from classes lower down in the school, passing on the knowledge and skills that they themselves have acquired. The training the DL's receive is shared with the Apprentices. As a result, every class within KS2 has their own 'IT experts' to help their peers wherever possible. The aim of having Apprentices is for them to be the 'go to' people within their classroom so that the teacher is free to focus on the main teaching element within their lesson. Ultimately, the aim is to have approximately 6 Apprentices within each classroom so that the workload is shared and each Apprentice does not miss out on their own learning. This will mean each DL will eventually mentor around 3 Apprentices as opposed to the solitary Apprentice they mentor at the moment. 


Going forward, the aim is to give the Digital Leaders more responsibilities and give them the opportunity to have more influence on developing IT within the school. During the summer Term, the DL's will begin to get involved in staff meetings to train the staff on the use of the iPads and certain apps, giving the staff a greater confidence in using the iPads for a wider range of activities and purposes within their lessons. They have also identified that they would like to set up and run an IT club based on the use of the iPads as well as deliver assemblies on important issues such as e-safety. As a group, we aim build strong links with other schools and other groups of Digital Leaders. We are looking to share our practice with other schools by hosting Digital Leader visits and by visiting other schools to see how they incorporate the use of IT. The DL's have identified the use of Skype, email and Twitter as a way of sharing ideas and feel regular communication will be important in creating strong links. The links that we create will be extremely helpful in building on the work the children have already done and will ensure Cefn Fforest Primary will continue to build and grow.  

The Digital Leaders have worked superbly so far, taking to their roles like the proverbial ducks to water. I am extremely excited about this coming term and hope the DL's are looking forward to it too.  Well done Digital Leaders and keep up the great work!!

App Review's

Hi guys! Blogging today to review the apps: Grammar wonderland and Math master. Tested them out and  both apps are  quite good!

Grammar Wonderland

Grammar wonderland is an app that helps you with your literacy. There are a range of games on every world. There are three worlds and as you get on to new worlds the game gets harder. On every level the activities  vary, some work on nouns some work on adjectives. There are levels were you are under water and have to swim into nouns that describe 1 thing or more than 1 thing. There are also levels were you have to flick biscuits to the parrot but only if they are describing words. Overall we would rate this app 4/5 stars!

Maths Master

Maths master is an app which focuses on maths. You get a certain amount of time were you have to try and answer as many questions as you can. You can choose Easy, Medium or Hard. Medium is the level I would recommend as it is not to hard but harder than easy if you find easy not so challenging.

Overall we would rate this app 4/5 stars!

Both apps are really good and hope you enjoy them if you download them!

RND 2013

Wow! What a Red Nose Day 2013 we had! Where do we start?!

Well, we all dressed up 80's style with bright colours, tutus and big hair (the teachers did it too! ha ha). Everyone looked amazing! We also had Mr T (Daniel L), Michael Jackson (Ieuan D) and even Rocky Balboa (Gabriel D)! We all made a real effort - it was 'Do something for money' after all!

For the rest of the day children baked cakes, sold items they had made or brought from home and just had lots of fun!

In the morning, Year 5 and 6 had a mini World Record Challenge - coin spin was won by Joseph C who managed to spin a coin for nearly 16 seconds and Cameron and Callum won the Leap Frog Challenge with 42 leaps in 1 minute.

The highlight of the day was the pie throwing in the afternoon. Children bought raffle tickets for the chance to throw a foam pie at one of the teachers. The teachers who volunteered were Mr Johnson, Miss James Miss Williams, Mrs Bishop and Mr Cullen (who dressed as Superman). It was so funny!!! The foam was everywhere! Check out our Twitter page: @Cefnprimary for photos of the teachers getting covered in foam!

We would just like to say thank you everybody who donated money or did something to raise money today, it was brill!

Well done everyone!

Mother's Day tea party

World book day was a great day for all of the school. The book fair came to school and lots of people bought a book. For World book day we all dressed up as our favorite character from a book, there were lots of Wally's in school that day! Ha ha. Daniel dressed as Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit, he looked amazing! We even had a Phantom of the Opera costume!!!!! Check out our moodle page for photos from the day.

Mother`s day tea party was held on Friday 8th, the same day as Fairtrade Friday! Year 5 and 6 were sad to see Miss Fuller, their French teacher leave due to other commitments but we made amazing cards for here and gave her gifts to say thank you for doing such a brilliant job.In the afternoon, Mothers had cake, tea or coffee and had a good old gossip! The mothers really enjoyed themselves and we took plenty of photos of the mother`s having fun. They're also on our Moodle page for you to look at.

Fair trade Friday gave everybody the chance to buy something from the tuck shop in the library. They could buy Fairtrade kit Kats,  pineapple or bananas.We also dressed up in blue, black or green as they are the Fairtrade colours.

What a super day we all had!  Bring on Comic Relief 80's style!!!!!!!!
  

Eisteddfod

Hi everyone! We have had a busy week this week we have had loads of fun with our school Eisteddfod plus it is world education games week!

Our school Eisteddfod,which is basically a competition against each other where you can earn points for your house colours. In our school ty coch won our Eisteddfod this year!

Also happening this week is World Education Games week. It is an event that people from all over the world can play and compete in! There as challenges kin Maths, Literacy and Science! It's amazing!

Our school also has a number of other events coming up this week: World Book Day, Fairtrade Friday and the Mothers Day Tea Party.

We're all dressing up as our favourite book characters for World Book Day and are wearing Fairtrade colours to school on Friday. The Mother's Day tea party last year was really successful so we're having another one this year. It's going to be amazing having our mums in for tea and cake. We're all really looking forward to it. 

Read our next blog to see how it all goes!

Bye!!  

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the Digital Leaders page of Cefn Fforest Primary! The Digital Leaders are Holly, Olivia, Joseph, Daniel, Grace, Jordan and Mason. We are year 5 and 6 pupils but are being paired with younger children (our apprentices) so we can show them how to use certain apps and create different things. Our apprentices can then help other people in their own classes and help their teachers too!

We're really looking forward to helping the school use more IT and love the thought of being IT teachers :)

We'll be back soon with more news about what we've been up to!