I Should Be Marking

Yet another PD day (one just before H/T), yet another INSET speaker. Oh joy(!)

Actually, though, I was pleasantly surprised by today’s guest speaker, Gary Wilson. With a good blend of observational humour and thoughtful insights I actually feel that I gained a lot from this morning’s session - both as a teacher and as a parent (of a boy, naturally).

Topics covered included literacy (did you know that boys aged 4 and 5 are physiologically unprepared to write?), self esteem, ‘key leaders’ (our term) or ‘peer police’ (his) and how much control they have, mind mapping, P4C (Philosophy for Children/Philosophy for Communities), positive re-enforcement, plenaries, chunking and a host of others too numerous to mention.

On the face of it that might seem a little too shallow and all-encompassing. It may also seem like a lot of things you’re already dealing with. What it actually did was to consilidate the things that we are already doing and to suggest ways to carry that forwards. I now have a whole host of ideas to work on (far more than I actually have time to implement, naturally) and I feel pretty darned enthusiastic (good timing at what is more-or-less the midpoint of the year).

I would thoroughly recommend Gary to anyone who can pin him down as a witty, articulate, engaging and experience former-teacher who actually has a lot of positive ideas that can be put to good use.

I’ve been teaching the Edexcel specification GCSE in ICT for almost 2 years now (erk!) and created a spreadsheet to help me mark it. I’ve been meaning to share it with a couple of colleagues at least and I thought that this might be a suitable platform.

It’s a bit ‘alpha’, but click onto the ‘Main Menu’ tab and change the names (you’ll have to start one cell above and use the cursor key to go down as the names are hyperlinks).

Anyone familiar with the spec should then find it straightforward to use - just traffic light the individual criteria and assign a mark for each section. The Overview page is a handy way of examing the class’ progress as a whole.

It’s currently limited to 15 pupils (simply because that’s my largest GCSE class size) but anyone competent enough to be teaching the course ought to be able to modify it sufficiently

Edexcel GCSE ICT Marking Spreadsheet

I’ve been getting myself re-aquainted with del.icio.us over the last couple of days and stumbled across this heavily tagged site. Musicovery is a Flash based music discovery tool - you select what kind of mood you’re in (or how ‘dance-y’ you’re feeling) and it will suggest and play music for you. You can narrow it down to specific time periods or musical styles and looks to be a fun way of running your own radio station.

Notepad’s great isn’t it? The best HTML editing tool there is on Windows. So when I took over a Mac suite I thought we’d start off our Year 8 HTML unit with Textedit - the OS X equivalent.

Except that it was a disaster. Textedit appears to try and act as a WYSIWYG editor - so the tags all appeared onscreen but didn’t actually do anything. So I had to find an alternative - Taco HTML Edit. This great little app is like a programming IDE for HTML. Tag colouring, live preview, it does absolutely everything I need to make this a damn site more accessible for 12 year olds.

NVu (pronounced N-View) is yet another free, open-source and cross platform package (this time released under the Mozilla Public License). I’ve long been a builder of web pages and web sites (although I would never call myself a web designer). The first 7 years of that consisted solely of working in Notepad which (IMHO) gave me a really good grounding in the basics. And then I discovered Dreamweaver and have used that pretty much ever since.

In Year 8 we introduce pupils to web design and the majority of schools use either Word/Publisher (I nearly fell over when I heard that one), Frontpage or Dreamweaver. Here we go for the latter, although the kids invariably find it quite difficult to get to grips with, and of course there are no opportunities to use it outside of school. So while it is a great, fully featured and professionally quality app it just isn’t right for us at the minute (again, IMHO).

So enter NVu - a remarkably similar application in some ways (the manage sites window, apart from having moved, works in an almost identical way AFAICT) . I think it looks a little simpler though. I’ll be honest and say I’ve yet to use it with a class, but I intend to next time unit 8.2 rolls around. If we can then switch the graphics to Gimp or Gimpshop (see a future post on those 2) then all we need is a replacement for Flash and we can save ourselves another expensive (if discounted) site license.

OK, so I made a post a week or so ago suggesting that I had cracked how to deal with my form group. Well, perhaps not so much after all. Waiting silently for them to be quiet is still a technique I’m using heavily but it’s not doing the job as well any more on its own.

Once a week (or sometimes twice) I have a full 20 minute registration with nothing to do - no assemblies, no planner signing, just the register and any notices to read out. So we played a counting game I read about on the TES forums and it seemed to go down fairly well. It was noisy, but fun and I think we need more of the latter (and I’d be happy for a better balance of the former - quiet for the register and notices, noisy when th activity allows it).

What I really need to do is find a strategy and stick to it in order to allow the kids time to get used to the routine. I’m getting better at doing that but there’s still a way to go - too many of my (good?) ideas fall by the wayside after a week or two and I’ve watched enough reality TV to know that isn’t the best way to deal with kids!

One of my jobs this weekend was to get to grips with Quark Express. Having run through half of the basic tutorial before getting bored I made 2 different versions of a poster for IT careers. The plan is to make a series to decorate my classroom with.

Having had no real experience of ‘proper’ DTP (ie. not Amstead) I’d really appreciate any feedback.

Warning: The PDF download is 35MB (unzips to >130MB! I need to figure out how to compress the files a little aand my poor PowerBook was starting to struggle towards the end). The link expires in 1 week.

Alternatively click on the thumbnail to see a screenshot.

I’ve spent today on a number of projects, one of which was to have a crack at using Blender. It’s another open-source, cross platform package - this time a 3D modelling tool (apparently capable of animation as well although I haven’t got that far as yet).

It takes some getting to grips with and I can see KS3 struggling like mad, but it might be worthwhile to run it with some of the more able pupils and they can pick it up in their own time if they’re interested. I’d be fascinated to see what Art could do with this as well - a lot of the time was spent arranging the composition and lighting (although that doesn’t mean it’s actually any good!)

Having spent more than an hour on it I’ve got a few techniques under my belt (although I’m still having to refer to the tutorial I was using). Anyway, I’m quite impressed with my fully rendered and semi-transparent dice, no matter what the rest of you think.
NB: Click on the picture for a blown up version.

A fantastic video is doing the rounds that sums up Web 2.0 almost perfectly.

I really fancy doing a short unit on Web 2.0 with my Y9 once they’ve done their KS3 summative tests at Easter although I’m not sure exactly what to do (particularly without access to Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, etc, etc, etc…)

Not necessarily the best, but I think it would be worth documenting some of the freeware/open-source/beta/shareware applications that I use in some capacity as a teacher.

Where possible I opt for open-source[1], cross platform software to give pupils the opportunity of using the same software themselves.

The first application I’m going to talk about is OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office and features a word processor (Writer), presentation software (Impress), mathematics package (Math), drawing package (Draw), spreadsheet (Calc) and database (Base).

The interface is not quite as polished as it’s commercial opponents but it will happily read and save documents in a vast variety of formats. The core functionality is there in every application and, although pre-written macros in Excel are not going to run, you can make use of the more advanced features to automate tasks using the OOo equivalent. You can certainly complete GCSE level tasks using Calc and Base.

OOo comes in flavours prepared for Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS X and FreeBSD. The OS X version can be somewhat troublesome, however, and NeoOffice is an alternate implementation that I use in the classroom.

OOo is useful, not just because it is considerably cheaper than Microsoft Office, but it offers an opportunity to introduce transferable skills. Instead of teaching pupils how to perform an action in Excel, you can teach them how the action works and then they can use whichever spreadsheet package they like to achieve the same results. This means that my Year 9 pupils should be well prepared when they first meet the KS3 test environment this week[2].

[1] Open-source means that the original ’source code’ or programming instructions are available to the general public so that anyone can improve or add functionality. It is often called ‘free as in free speech’ as opposed to ‘free as in free beer’. Most open-source software does not cost any money to use, although some does. The Linux operating system is probably the most famously open-source software in use.

[2] Yes, we’re still doing the tests. A summative test can be a good motivator and we’ve spent 3+ years running pilots and writing Schemes of Work so we’re not abandoning it just yet.