Posts Tagged ‘Olivia Wexelstein’

Teach-It in Practice

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

One thing we all appreciate here at Do-Be HQ is feedback. Be it from our CPD attendees, Local Authority representatives or Do-Be practitioners, we embrace feedback as a positive way for us to engage with you and plan for our future. It was great to hear from Olivia Wexelstein recently on her continuing progress as she leads the way in implementing Teach-It in her own local authority – Fife.

Olivia got in touch and provided HQ with the following feedback and the impact using Teach-It can have in terms of shaping local authority policy.

Thanks Olivia (Olivia is also one of our Do-Be Do-Er’s) from all the team – and keep up the great work!

“I have been using Teach-It for 8 months now. After exploring and identifying the resources required in terms of internet website access, I have found that there are loads of valuable resources, activities and ideas that could be used to make Teach-It a viable resource in any educational setting. I am now currently trialling the new websense policy for Fife which allows greater access to various Web 2.0 technologies and websites that allow for further development of the resources supported in Teach-It. This has had a great impact of the current use of Teach-It and Teach-It 2.

This new websense policy will hopefully be phased into all schools after the summer break if not before.


I am presenting at an EIS CPD event on Saturday on my use of eportfolios. I’m am planning on using the SMS survey website you have in Teach-It 2. I will also be doing similar presentation at SLF and was hoping to do the same.”


Olivia Wexelstein Do’er #2

Monday, February 21st, 2011

using vokis (Medium)

This is the first blog post written by our second certified ‘Do’er’. Olivia Wexelstein is a teacher at Wellwood Primary School in Fife and Do Be Do’er.  She is  a fab person to follow on Twitter and is also chief organiser of TeachMeet Fife.  In her own words…..

I came across Teach-It two years ago at the Scottish Learning Festival.  I was very impressed with it’s simple, attractive layout and especially it’s content.  ICT has always played a very important part in my teaching and learning but I often found it difficult to find new ideas to stretch my learners.  Teach-It has been an invaluable tool in looking for new ways to support ICT across learning.

Most recently my class have been learning Scots poems to celebrate Burns day.  In order to encourage them and give them more confidence to read their poems in front of an audience we decided to record their voices using Audacity (Teach-It 1, Media lesson idea 8/9) and then create a Voki to add the sound to (Teach-It 1, Web lesson idea 7).

The majority of the class have used Audacity before and are quite confident in recording their own voices and then exporting them as a .wav file which is necessary so it can be used in a Voki.  This was the first time most had created a Voki and they really enjoyed creating their own character, especially the ability to personalise it.

The children then added their sound recordings to their Voki’s and published them in order to create the code required to put in our Glow Group and their personal Glow Blogs. Click here to view some of the Voki’s my class created.

The children thoroughly enjoyed this activity and for the majority of them, their confidence increased and they found it much easier to recite their poems in front of their peers.