I Should Be Marking

I was skimming through my RSS feeds the other day when I came across a mention of mobile videos of teachers on YouTube. An hour of flicking through later, watching mostly American teachers venting at arrogant little shits, I decided to do some more carefully structured searching and came across some of the pupils from my school practising Parkour (the sport of jumping over walls and railings, similar to Free Running).

That in itself is fine but some of the clips were clearly taken on the school premises. So do I inform SMT that pupils are

1. bringing in video phones (hardly news, admittedly) and
2. practicing a potentially dangerous sport on school property

Or do I keep shtun?

Consider this. The videos show groups of up to a dozen teenage lads running around public, but uncrowded, areas performing some remarkable athletic and gymnastic maneuvres. Not happy slapping, shop lifting or joy riding. Not harassing innocent folk. Not leaving graffiti. Not damaging property. They’re getting fit, expressing themselves and enjoying themselves.

I could easily ignore the non-school related bits but if one of these lads breaks an ankle performing one of these stunts on-site then we’re potentially liable. Especially if I knew it was going on and did nothing to stop it.

Personally I want to encourage them. Professionally I can’t be seen to do that. The question is, do I actively discourage them? I suspect I will have a quiet word with one of the ring leaders with a view to keeping it off school premises, but I welcome your thoughts.

My 6th formers are bored.

I’m not, but there are utterly fed up at the minute. We’re working through the Edexcel GCE in Applied ICT Unit 2 which is all about transactional websites - structure, backoffice, security, databases…

This should be an interesting unit. Not setting the world on fire perhaps but there is plenty of scope in there to actually gain some understanding and insight into how the Internet works and what effects it has. In practice though I briefly run through the necessary bits that apply directly to the coursework mark scheme and set them going. I write step-by-step instructions for importing data into a database because otherwise I’d end up holding twelve different hands. Unfortunately it seems I’m still going to have to do the hand holding as they seem incapable of folling the instructions. We had a week to do this and we haven’t managed it. If I want to teach them how to build a database for themselves I would need more than 2.5 hours to do it and my coursework deadline slips another week.

This isn’t just in AS Applied ICT. I’m suffering exactly the same with my 3 GCSE classes. I’m running through spreadsheets with Year 11s but I don’t feel I’m actually teaching them anything, just getting them through the coursework.

We spend:

• 2 weeks identifying the problem
• 2 weeks analysing the solution
• 3 weeks designing the solution
• 2 weeks building the solution
• 2 weeks documenting the solution
• 2 weeks evaluating the solution

So in a 14 week term we spend 2 weeks actually building a solution and the rest of it writing. There is only 1 week for ’slippage’ so there is constant pressure from the very start. If I thought I would get away with it I would seriously consider providing the majority of the writeup myself and spending the time actually teaching the pupils how to use ICT, discussing whether ICT is actually the best solution, all that crazy crap I believed in before I actually started teaching.

They’ve even taken Year 9 away from me now. I’ve spent the whole of the first term on a revised Theme Park Project aimed at preparing pupils for the QCA Test. There’s no ability for me to do what I want to do, or what the kids will enjoy doing. In Years 7 & 8 I can sneak in comic books, video editing, voice recording and lots of other fun stuff. As soon as we hit Y9 it’s so utterly, utterly dull and uninspired that it hurts. I can try the odd lesson here and there but all I seem to hear from above is statistics, comparisons, FFT data, ALIS data… No wonder I overhear Y12 students advising Y11s not to take ICT because “it’s shit”. No wonder the numbers signing up at KS4 & KS5 are falling. No wonder the Computing course won’t exist next year (2 students at AS just doesn’t justifythe cost of running the course).
Hopefully the new iMedia course we may (but may not) be starting next year will help. Hopefully the budget will allow me to replace some of the ageing iMac G3s and roll out iLife across the whole suite. Hopefully I can find another idea to replace the PPT part of the GCSE course.

And hopefully I can manage to convince at least one pupil that computers are about more than word processing and taking screenshots.

Marking some GCSE coursework the other day has really unsettled me. For those unfamiliar with the Edexcel spec students have to come up with a problem and then find the solution. As part of the Analyse section (pt. 2 of 5) pupils have to specify hardware and software, describe data flow and various other things.

This pupil in particular has gone beyond saying that the computer used in the final solution will have to be connected to the Internet and explained that cable would be preferable to ADSL as there are no issues of speed drop-off caused by the distance from the exchange. He also specified Windows XP using x86 architecture rather than a Mac as he is not as well versed in OS X and would eventually like to migrate to a Linux distro, probably based on Red Hat/Fedora.

The pupil in question is clearly wasting his time with an ICT GCSE as his abilities and interests reach far beyond the very limited scope of the exam board. While this guy is happily off writing his own macros in VBA rather than recording a simple print macro with the rest of the class he will gain no better marks and will have to spend many tedious hours describing what he already knows. When asked if he’s interested in extra curricular activites such as Java Programming he doesn’t really show much interest. He clearly does have an interest in computing but I suspect that the lack of opportunity to use/test/expand his knowledge at GCSE has turned him off completely. It’s a terrible shame and I just can’t help thinking that I’m failing him by not providing him with the opportunities he needs.

During lessons he rarely speaks, especially with the rest of the rowdy, mixed ability bunch. Any ideas how to engage him again?

I’m in a bad mood tonight. Actually, make that a stressed mood.

My Y11 GCSE pupils are slipping behind our, admittedly tight, timescale to get Project 3 done before the mock exams. One of them has just left for 2 weeks in the sun, he’ll be back 3 days before the hand-in deadline. He’s only 2 weeks behind (at the moment). Another one sat there for an hour after school, supposedly catching up on the work he should have done 4 weeks ago. After the hour he asked if he could go and was astounded when I said no because he hadn’t actually done anything. It’s unbelievable that when informed he wasn’t going anywhere until the target we agreed was met he did the work in a very literal 5 minutes. Actually it isn’t unbelievable at all, it was a trivial amount of work and the pupil in question is undoubtedly bright enough to be forging ahead with the top of the bunch.

My GNVQ class on the other hand don’t appear to realise that the work they are doing has any actual impact on their final results at all. They’re raving because they got their certificates through this week for their first unit. Lots of them got a distinction and the rest got merits. And yet they’ll turn up, fart around for half an hour, ignore me when I ask them to put their name on their work before they print it out and then carry on their conversations while I turn into Stressed Eric.

I seriously considered just leaving them to it, and collecting the grade they deserve, but would that do any good? They’d blame me for that, for not teaching them properly (technically they’d have a point but I’m in a mood so it doesn’t count). And yet sometimes they follow the subtleties of cause and effect incredibly well. They are quite capable of grasping that when I break tasks down for them and provide written, rather than verbal, feedback it makes life easier and they get better marks. I don’t even need to tell them that, they tell me! And yet lately they seem to be obstinately ignoring that fact. They seem to deliberately wind me up in lessons, which makes me less effective and therefore less helpful. This winds them up further and so the cycle continues. Somehow this cause and effect seems to pass them by.
I tell them that I know the train from London to Oxenholme leaves from London Euston and is a Virgin Train because my family comes from the Lakes and I’m over there all the time. I tell them that they could get the train on a Friday evening and stay over in a hotel rather than setting off at midnight on a GNER from Kings Cross and having a 6 hour layover in Norfolk. And yet I end up with 12 unique, and yet uniformly crap documents. None of which has a name and one of which suggests that the travellers in the scenario who work in London should set off from Newcastle, fly to Bradford and get a taxi to their final (and yet cunningly undisclosed) destination.

Anyway, I have a printer today (for the first time this year!) which means I could get their work printed out. Now, instead of having to spend 5 minutes looking over each pupils’ shoulder at their work and just about getting round the class in a lesson I can spend an hour doing it at home, give them their written feedback and chunked targets. If it means 2 stress reduced hours (one at home, one at school) rather than one stressed and unproductive one then it’s worth it in the long run. I wonder how long it’ll take them to notice…

We had a group called Lindisfarne Press in school today, mostly working with the lower sixth form and running a series of seminars entitled ‘Bridging the Gap’.

They covered several aspects of summative assessment at KS5 and pointed out a few obvious (now) things that perhaps some of us weren’t aware - at least not from the students’ point of view. I know this because they also had a session after school - a cross between a debrief and a summary.

The main things I came out of it with were (in no particular order):

• Just how close some of the grade boundaries are.  28/60 might be an E but 34 could be a C. So 6 marks can have a student jump up (or down) 2 grades. So when you give a pupil with a D grade piece of work feedback, then give them the grade boundaries instead of the grade. It’s easier to go up 6 marks than it is to go up 2 grades.
• Chunking exam (& coursework) questions. We went into a lot of detail about how to break down even a short exam question into 6-8 chunks (often one word per chunk). What does ‘investigate’ mean? Is ‘and’ a joining word or a separating word? ([Describe] how the [World Wide Web] {and} [other technological improvements] have [affected] the way [people collect] [information].)
• It might be worth resitting an A graded unit if you only just scraped 240 UMS points as the potential other 60 would also carry through to other units (only 17% of people go up a grade or more from AS-A2). If AS is a lower level than A2 (and it is) then it might be worth trying to make up some UMS points at the lower level since they’re weighted equally.

Unfortunately I had to leave early (I say early, the hour long meeting was already 90 minutes old) but it certainly seemed a useful exercise. Apparently the 6th formers have been wandering around all day singing (to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle):

If you get just 3 or 4
You need to chunk a little more

If you get 5, 6 or 7
You will be in exam heaven
…yeah! (apparently the ‘yeah’ is very important to the 2 year old inside all of us)

An ocdcasional Monty Python reference is inevitable I’m afraid, sorry

I am thoroughly fed up with spam at the minute. On this blog I get the occasional spammy trackback, usually one of these cryptic ones where it’s hard to actually see the benefit for the spammer. What really annoys me is that over the last few days I’ve had over 60 spam trackbacks on my pupil blog. And not just common-or-garden spam trackbacks but really nasty gay porn type trackbacks.

Of course I can delete it, and I’m old enough and big enough to filter out the nasty stuff in my own head, but the poor 11 year old kids who log on to write about what their doing only to find that some *£%$ has essentially vandalised their work with obscene references are going to end up traumatised.

I’ve now expanded the blacklist fairly dramatically but I’m actually quite disheartened at the amount of time I’m having to spend going through and deleting 20 spam trackbacks. It seems B2E can only mass-delete comments when they’re from the same domain. I will stick with it though, I must stick with it

#spam, spam, spam, spammety, spammey spam…

I love spreadsheets, I really do. This probably makes me quite sad but I don’t much care (I long ago accepted that I am a geek beyond redemption). At the minute my Year 11 pupils are ploughing through their third coursework task which just happens to be their spreadsheet.

The thing I love about spreadsheets is that they look like they’re just for adding things up. You can use the fill handle and there’s that funny $ thing that none of the kids really understand (sigh), but they look pretty dull.

And then you teach kids how to create drop down menus and use VLOOKUP formulae and suddenly that dull looking table thing actually does something pretty clever. I’ve taught Year 8 pupils how to do this stuff and they thought it was great. I’ll try it again this year (different school) and see if it’s more interesting than ‘Mobyphone’ (cue a collective groan from all of the other ‘Nat Strat’-ers).

Imagine my joy last Friday then when I had about a dozen pupils back to work on various bits of coursework. Some were just getting caught up with the DDMs and VLOOKUPs, some were there to have a crack at a simple Print Macro and 3 were there for me to show them some more of that clever stuff. We went through some of the VBA basics and ended up throwing For Loops around and some reasonably significant conditional statements (a simple 3 line IF - ELSE IF - ELSE is soooo much easier than nesting IF statements in the formula bar). I love this stuff and was happily wandering around hacking code while I chewed on the pen I had shoved into my mouth like a cigar.

It’s almost pathetic that the feeling most teenagers seem to get from watching a football match or calling the nearest ‘Emo’, I get from solving problems in a proprietary, high-level programming language. I think I might have scared one of them away permanently. On the plus side I just hope that some of my enthusiasm has rubbed off and that I genuinely do find this stuff fascinating and am not just there for the high pay, short hours and frequent holidays.

Last year I was asked to help a fellow teacher who wanted to lead an animation club. I agreed and enjoyed it immensely. We went from a Digital Blue camera (horrible things, terribe user interface on the software side) to Logitech webcams that had some nice software bundled with them (forget the model but pricey @ £80 each).

This year I’ve managed to bag a trio of Canon MV890 DV cameras (but only two tripods, harumph), a suite of Macs and a site license for I Can Animate. We started this Monday with a new cohort (mostly Y7s but a couple of Y8s as well) who had been considerably trimmed down from the original applicants (we could have filled the room 3 times over, which is a comforting feeling).

Naturally I’ve started a blog to document what we’ve been doing and I’ll get the kids involved ASAP.

Pop along to the Egglescliffe Student Blogs for more details.

The next challenge is to have a good go at Chroma Keying (I’ve had a few experiments with sugar paper but could do with a better green/blue screen setup).

Non-ICT related this evening, but very interesting and excellent for teachers of subjects where asking ‘big’ questions is a fairly regular occurence.

INSET is often a dreaded thing, being reminded that ‘Evey Child Matters’ (wow, I’m really glad someone pointed that out to me, just a shame they took 2 hours to do it) is not necessarily the way I like to spend an hour and a half of my evening. Today though, we had a teacher-led session on Communities of Enquiry or P4C (Philosophy for Children). This kind of links in with the Thunks I posted about a little while ago.

The idea is that we go through a certain routine in order to reach a philosophical or ‘BIG‘ question which the pupils then consider. The point is not to get to a particular learning objective (e.g. pupils will learn that…) but that pupils will become better thinkers, better discussers and will reach a conclusion of their own (note: they may all leave with different conclusions, but that’s a good thing).

Before I forget, here is a basic outline of a P4C lesson:

Before the lesson the pupils will have needed to establish a set of rules themselves - don’t shout out, let others finish, etc. Pupils are best at doing this because they know how they, and each other, work and this way they will have ownership rather than having rules imposed upon them.

The class sits in a circle or horseshoe, wherever they like. Pupils will naturally sit in peer groups so we need to move them around.

Ask pupils to move if they agree with a number of statements (e.g. “it is always wrong to break a promise” - move - “it is wrong to eat peas with a knife” - move - etc.). This will get pupils thinking and split up peer groups. The teacher should take part in this as well, moving some, but not all, of the time. This means that the teacher can also break up some of the peer groups by nicking a key seat

Give pupils a piece of inspiration (there was a better word but I forget what it was) - a story, a picture, a rhyme, a song - but don’t give them a question! Let them read through or look at the picture and then have them discuss it in pairs or threes. Don’t give them a point to discuss, just let them discuss whatever comes from having looked at/read/heard the item. It might be an idea to wander around the circle doing some paperwork and quietly make sure they’re at least reasonably on task (but be aware that their conversation  may wander around the houses a bit, naturally).

Show the pupils some example BIG questions (be wary of using the word ‘philosophical’ at first in case it scares them - you can start dropping it in as things move on). Some examples might be “why do bubbles form when water boils”, “what does beautiful mean”, “what is the name of the big river running through Paris?”, etc. Have a brief discussion about which ones are good BIG questions, and which ones not so much. And why.

Pupils should then write one BIG question of their own, about the artifact. In a big class it might be less time consuming if pupils write them in their pairs or threes. Perfect opportunity for a Post-It shower.

Read through the questions when they’re all at the front and tell pupils they will have to vote on which one they want to discuss. Make them vote with their eyes shut (having just done this it is incredibly difficult to keep them shut!) to avoid peer pressure. If there is a tie then have a revote over just those 2 or 3 that are tied.

Have your discussion (at last!). You’re probably 3/4 of the way through the lesson now, this is a good thing. If you rush the first sections you’ll end up without the foundations you require and everything will end up crashing down (apparently). During the discussion the teacher is equal with the rest of the group and everyone must follow the class rules and wait their turn. It might be a good idea to have a ‘facilitator’ whose job it is to make a note of who is waiting (on a piece of paper perhaps) and allow pupils to speak in turn. Other jobs (especially for the ‘key leaders’ could be monitoring the best non-shout-outer, taking notes of what was said, etc. It is also a good idea to have a discrete symbol to show you are waiting (little thumbs up?) with an equally discrete acknowledgement from the facilitator rather than a full hands up affair as that will probably distract the waiting pupil.

Be careful to get the balance right between finding new avenues to discuss and keeping the conversation on-task and away from anything too inappropriate. Also, try not to jump in, but allow the discussions to progress naturally.

When the time is up or the conversation comes to a natural close then the pupils need closure to the session. They could each get a chance to summarise in 10 words, blind vote on a consensus, anything you like.

Of course you should then follow the lesson up with some written work next time around in order to cement whatever opinions and conclusions they have shared. The topic could be anything - crime in Citizenship, anything in History, a novel in English, anything at all.

The first few times will doubtless be difficult and imperfect but as the routine beds in they should find they get more and more comfortable with the lesson format. Also, you shouldn’t use this technique every week (obviously) - once or twice every half term (5-7 weeks) was suggested.

No doubt I’ve missed an awful lot out and there are bound to be subtelties in there that neither of us has considered yet but it sounds like a rewarding activity to me. Watch this space…

PS. for more details you can see details on Communities of Enquiries at the Sapere website.

Another posts that follows a thread on the TES Forums tonight. Someone was asking for some examples of common misconceptions (GTP assignment, and a fairly standard question). In response I left a list of genuine and slightly more caustic suggestions. Others followed up with some even better suggestions and I have shamelessly stolen those as well. Rather than attributing comments to individuals, assume the best ones are stolen

Happy Hippy’s Pupil Guide to ICT Lessons

The ICT suite is a special place in your school. It is a sanctuary where the normal rules do not apply. As you will see, the ICT suite is a bastion of chaos and a source of never-ending entertainment. With a little care and attention you can make ICT lessons something to look forward to, despite the best intentions of any teachers or other meddling adults. Follow the simple instructions below and you will find that school actually can be fun. Who would have believed it?!

Part 1 - Essential Equipment

The Scouts’ motto is ‘Always Be Prepared’. And possibly something about a Dib-Dab. Two great ideas if you ask me. Planning is essential so you must make sure you have all of your necessary equipment with you. For asuccessful ICT lesson you will need the following items:

• Fizzy drinks, preferably the sticky sugary kind. Coke and Sunny Delight are good examples. Energy drinks such as Red Bull and Kick can be useful too.
• Sweets - a combination of sticky and hard. Lollipops are great for damaging equipment and those little necklace bead thingies make fantastic weapons.
• A USB pen - great for all kinds of mischief. You can load them up before hand with MP3s and flash games in case you get bored, load them up during lessons with other people’s MP3s and flash games or you can even try some really clever stuff to do with ‘boot options’ which I’ll talk about later on (and no, I don;t mean Doctor Martens v Caterpillars).
• A bag, and ideally a big one. Big enough to fit a keyboard in, or even a monitor if you’re feeling lucky. Stick to flatscreens though, the big ones are just too heavy and bulky.
• A mobile phone. Your school may have banned the use of mobile phones under the pretence that you don’t need them , they are a distraction and they can be stolen. Don’t fall for this, it is part of the conspiracy intended to keep you from having any freedom. Teachers want to control things, including you phoning your mate during his Geography lesson, arranging alibis for skiving off by text message and recording teachers when they get really radged. It is therefore essential that your phone can record audio and video. It should also have Bluetooth. One tip though - you can give your phone a name, but don’t name it ‘Paul’s phone’ (well, not if you;re called Paul. If you;re called Georgina or Andrew this might not be such a bad idea. In fact if there is a Paul in your class that you hate then go for it). Some teachers have been known to use Bluetooth on their computers to scan for other devices and using your name is a dead giveaway. More on this later.
• Muddy trainers - you should always have a pair of disgustingly muddy trainers with you at all times. Keep them in your bag, it doesn;t matter if they get mud all over your exercise books, it can actually be used to help hide the fact that you did your homework on the bus into school this morning, resting on that ugly kid’s head. That’s assuming you were daft enough to actually do your homework.

Once you have your equipment you’ll need to know how to use it, so tune in next time for part 2.