Mural.ly

So here is one to try out!

I stumbled upon Mural.ly a week or so ago and have been receiving friendly emails from the developers with helpful hints on how to get started.

In essesence, Mural.ly has been designed so that project groups can play tasks collectively in a web-based environment. 

The web based application lets you add post-it type notes and drag photos and videos onto your mural.ly boards. All participators can then comment on elements of board.

Have a look at this video to get the idea:

Another feature is to add frames to give the viewer a path through your board. This is similar to Prezi, although not as complex as what Prezi can do.

I can see so much potential for this tool in the classroom. From creating 'mood board' type pinboards as a planning device for Art, Design or Drama projects to department brainstorming to creating presentations. What a quick and easy way to create a lesson starter!

Mural.ly embeds nicely as well, so adding one to your Moodle course is an option.

Here is my first attempt:

Please let me know if you have any good educational examples of using Mural.ly in your classroom.

Using YouTube as a classroom resource

Well we all know that our students use YouTube all the time, mostly to check out new music, but is there a place for YouTube in the classroom?

I was playing with the YouTube app on my iPad last night and after a few minutes of tinkering, started thinking of all sorts of ways to use YouTube in my classroom in a much more formal way. Sure, I pull up YouTube from time to time to demonstrate a particular point but how do we formalise that into a resource which is really useful for ourselves and our students.

The answer, I think, might lie in setting up a YouTube channel for yourself. If you have a Google account you are already on your way to a very easy set up. A YouTube channel will allow you to upload your own videos (maybe we'll think about that another day!) but what I was looking at this evening is setting up playlists which I can hopefully figure out how to share with my students.

So this is what YouTube looks like now that I've logged in (with my gmail account details).

On the left I have a list of all the 'channels' I have subscribed to. New submissions pop up as alerts. The middle panel has a list of suggested videos from my channels. To the right are some suggestions of things I might like.

Learning Creative Learning in a MOOC

For the past few months I've been taking part in a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) through the MIT Media Lab. The course was called "Learning Creative Learning" and was run by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group. learn.media.mit.edu

From this I learned a lot about online courses and how people behave on an online course, and more importantly, I started to think about how to facilitate creative thinking and creative learning in the young people I come across. The course was also skewed towards technology and using technology to create in quite a practical way, an idea that is close to my heart.


The Lifelong Kindergarten Group are the people behind "Scratch" which is a programming language for young people which can be accessed at (http://scratch.mit.edu) and this was used in the course as a method for encouraging creativity. This was topical for me because this is what we are dealing with in classes this term. I have observed many more Year 7 and 8 students in the ICT labs at lunch time working on their Scratch games which is encouraging. This is something I'd like to look at more in other classes across the school. Scratch also provides an online community where anyone can share their projects and a teacher's community ScratchEd which gets teachers talking about using Scratch in all sorts of creative ways.

Another fun bit of 'kit' used in the course was the 'MaKey MaKey'

I'll be sharing some of the things I learned over the next few months.