I Should Be Marking

I’ve taught the Edexcel GCSE ICT every year since I started. My first mentor told me to do coursework unit after coursework unit until the last half term and then to bang through the theory as quickly as possible.

Being an NQT, I did as I was told. And the results have been pretty solid (>90% C grade or above last year and expect to do well this year too). It does create a bit of stress though, and students do worry about the theory side of things.

So in one of my free periods a few weeks ago I put together a broad Scheme of Work in which one of the 5 lessons per fortnight is dedicated to theory – and split the Learning Objectives from the syllabus up into good sized chunks.

I’m now sat here starting to plan each theory lesson (or at least the first term’s worth) and  can’t decide if I’m doing the right thing. Our results are clearly good. The students DO pick up bits of theory during the coursework – I do actually teach them something! And this is going to be a hell of a lot of work to plan many more lessons in a very independent learning style – especially when you consider that this is the last cohort due to the new GCSEs the following year.

I think that it would be a really worthwhile exercise and potentially a very interesting way of tackling the course – but is it worth all that effort to totally rewrite all the SoW and resources for one year when the current method is clearly working? I’m very tempted to say no.

What to do, what to do… Sleep on it I think. Thoughts and opinions, as always, are very welcome.

Although this is primarily a post about Twitter, it has implications in a whole range of online communication tools.

There has been a sudden rush of teachers protecting their tweets for a number of reasons, and it’s worthy of considerable thought before making a decision.

Advantages of protecting tweets:

Only people I approve can read what I am saying.

Recently two pupils from school have followed me, and I have blocked them both. One of those pupils is clearly still reading my tweets (presumably from the website – twitter.com/mwclarkson) and keeps dropping hints to that effect. I have had discussions with the pupil about why I have blocked them and about whether it is appropriate for them to be reading my tweets. I have to accept, though, that there is nothing I can do to stop him.

People who do use the website to follow me only ever see my half of the conversation, with absolutely no context whatsoever. If tweets are protected it limits that very one-sided view.

I don’t know who’s watching. If readers have to be followers then there is some accountability. It’s not impossible for someone to use a false name, but creating a persona, gathering followers and making a ‘real’ account is a hell of a leap for someone who just wants to see what I’m up to.

I don’t have to worry quite so much about what I say. I’ll still be posting in a technically open forum – my posts can be retweeted and some of my exisiting followers may be some of those I am trying to isolate myself from by protecting tweets.

Advantages of an open system:

Anyone can read my tweets. As a point of principle, I like that. I’m not ashamed of what I have to say and hope that a wide range of people would find it useful.

When I get followed, I like to look at that person’s tweets before making a decision to follow or not. This means that I might lose out on potentially valuable additions to my network.

As I said at the start, a number of teachers have protected their tweets recently. And I confess that I thought this was largely a knee-jerk reaction to a certain Scottish news story. I dislike knee-jerk reactions, often do the polar opposite indefiance and left mine open as a statement of “Look, it’s fine. I’m confident that what I am doing is right”. Now the knee-jerk reaction has died down I’m haveing a serious think.

I haven’t made a decision as yet, but it is a serious concern. Where will stand if I do end up in front of the governors? I don’t think I’ve done/said anything wrong but will those that don’t understand Twitter agree with me? Will my union back me up?

The same argument applies with my blog and my TES postings. Hopefully my blog is more carefully considered than my tweets (as that’s the point of it). I initially started both under a pseudonym that has been repeatedly worn away to the point that I swapped out the ‘HH’ references for ‘mwclarkson’ in the About page, above.

So if my tweets do become protected, at least you know why – and that I’ve considered it carefully.

Ivan Pavlov first used the term ‘reinforcement’ as a psychological theory back in the early 1900s. In the famous experiment trained dogs so that when he rang a bell they knew they were about to be fed. After a short while they would start salivating (a conditional response) upon hearing the bell (a conditional stimulus).

The same principle applies in classrooms. In practice, many of us recognise that praising a pupil reinforces their positive behaviour, and most of us refer to this as positive reinforcment (although it differs from the technical term as used in psychological theory). It seems a sound enough argument – reward somebody for doing well or trying hard and they are more likely to want to do well and try hard in the future.⁽¹⁾

My first thought after this is ‘what is negative reinforcement?’ Is it reinforcing negative behaviour, such as giving attention to attention seekers when they behave poorly? Is it taking punitive measures when somebody misbehaves? Or is it as simple as not providing postive feedback when someone has done well or tried hard? Which of those lead to negative results?

I’ve been thinking about this after watching my daughter (4) at her dance class. She was mucking about and not listening to the teacher and so I gave her ‘the look’ from the sidelines and made it clear that I wasn’t happy. She immediately started sulking and paid no more attention to the teacher than she had before.

A few minutes later she looked back over to me and I gave her an encouraging thumbs up and a smile. The response was immediate – a happy, smiling, attentive and energetic little girl dancing around and keeping to the steps.

It’s often difficult to offer positive reinforcement when there isn’t positive behaviour to reinforce. There is, however, always positive potential – and if we can reinforce that then maybe some of those situations that are turning sour might just be turned around.

It’s not a perfect solution and it won’t guarantee a good lesson from that horrible class you dread on a Friday afternoon. I can’t even honestly say I use it often enough myself, but it’s worth bearing in mind. In an attempt to remind me, I’ve made up and printed out the image at the top of the post and stuck it in the corner of my whiteboard, to remind me that my actions have a heck of an impact on students. Something worth remembering.

⁽¹⁾ Interestingly, the ideal outcome would be for a pupil’s positive behaviour (conditional stimulus) to invoke positive feedback/praise (conditional response) – making the teachers the subjects of the psychology, not the students.

It’s interesting to think that badly behaved attention seekers use psychological tools to get their desired conditoned response…

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before, but a few months ago I started a collaborative Google Docs presentation (in the style of Mark Warner’s Ideas to Inspire) aimed at gathering ideas to share with colleagues at work.

Since then I’ve had much inspiration and many ideas from a range of people (particularly Mark Berry) and have so far printed up two issues of ‘Techy Tips for Not So Techy Teachers‘ (although I would love to go for a non-paperbased version, I would miss the very market I am aiming for) and have had a few positive comments from individuals.

Have done a bit of work today on the next two, I’ve published all four at mwclarkson.co.uk. Feel free to use as you see fit, but please do provide a link back to me (here / my website/ my twitter account) if you do.

No pithy title for this one, but it does what it says on the tin.

GCSE ICT is changing from 2010 with completely new specifications across all exam boards. One of the major changes is that ‘coursework’ is out, and ‘controlled assessments’ are in. These are not practical online exams in the style of Edexcel GCE Applied ICT, but more like the DiDA Set Project Brief (SPB) with a certain number of hours for students to work independently but under supervision.

There are a number of short course and double options, but I’m only looking at single award qualifications for now.

So here is my take on some of the specifications and sample assessment materials I have come across.

AQA

3 modules – 1 written exam (40% / 90 minutes), 2 controlled assessments (20% / 15 hours & 40% / 30 hours).

The content in the specification looks pretty similar to what we have now (Edexcel) with hardware, software, applications, legislation, control and so on. The sample paper also looks OK, although in the middle there appears to be a spelling test in which students have to correct 3 errors in a paragraph of text. Errors include a missing capital letter, the word ‘of’ repeated (”The great advantage of of word processing”) and a misspelling (”wthin”). Now while lack of proof reading is a problem for students, it seems a little irrelevant for the middle of a 90 minute exam. Bizarre.

The second unit looks very much like the kind of webquest we would give to Year 7 for a cover lesson, doing some research in advance of a foreign exchange trip and you get more than half marks for “plan[ing] how to tackle the problem”.

The third unit is a bit more like the traditional GCSE coursework in that students would have to complete two activities, e.g. create a website for a band and a spreadsheet model to track costs and expenses.

OCR

This course has four units – B061 (60 minute exam), B062 (20 hour controlled assessment), B063 (60 minute exam) & EITHER B064 or B065 (20 hour controlled assessment).

The first exam (ICT in today’s world) features many of the topics from the current syllabus, although without most of the more technical aspects. The sample paper looks at, for example, input/output and storage in the context of a mobile phone as well as the traditional spreadsheet and database questions.

The second unit looks like a traditional courseowrk unit, making a spreadsheet model in the example documentation.

The third unit is a written exam in a business context with pre-release material. I haven’t seen a sample exam paper yet but it should keep the Business Studies teachers who have been shuffled into doing ‘a bit of ICT’ quite happy at least.

The fourth unit is either to produce some multimedia product (e.g. a multimedia advertisement or simple computer game) or a programming project (e.g. a spelling game for youngsters with a low reading age). This adds a touch of ‘iMedia’ to the syllabus, although it isn’t clear whether the school will have to swing one way entirely or whether individual classes/students will be able to opt for one unit specifically. It is nice to see some options though.

Edexcel

Edexcel astound me. They appear to have spent the whole of their planning budget producing a very flashy but insubstantial PPT presentation which is then not available on their website. I have a copy of it on a USB pen and all I can say is that it looks worse than DiDA. There is no sample syllabus, no sample assessment materials and no clue as to what would actually be involved in the course. They have paid someone to make some particularly unflattering cartoon images of three of the lead people though. At least it makes that part of the decision simple.

WJEC

The single award has 4 units – 2x 90 minute exams (20% each) and 2x 22.5 hour controlled assessments (30% each).

Units 1 and 3 both look very much like traditional GCSE exam papers with the topics you would expect, along with some new looks at animation techniques (e.g. rotoscoping) to go with the spreadsheet, database, HCI, legislation, etc.

Unit 2 is about obtaning and presenting information (topics look to include letters, flyers, spreadsheets and databases) and Unit 4 is based around the creation of a multimedia product (Flash, websites, maybe PPT)

OCR Computing

Yes, you read that right. OCR are releasing a pilot GCSE in Computing.

There are three units – a 90 minute exam (40%) and two controlled assessments (30% each).

The exam picks up on all the things missing from the ICT exam, including logic, denary to binary to hex conversion, some pseudocode, detailed looks at CPUs, Operating Systems, image filetypes, compression and other techy goodness.

The second unit is about researching a current trend, e.g. backing storage. Research should look at books to see what WAS done and look online to see what will be done in the future. It has the potential to be quite dry, but also quite interesting once you start looking at RAID and other technologies. I know a (small) number of pupils who would have thrived on this stuff.

The third unit is a practical programming unit with 3 tasks. In the example there is a Scratch game, a password assessment tool and a database problem.

It certainly looks challenging, but the geek in me loves it.

Summary

Edexcel is hopeless. Based on what I have seen I’m not touching their new course with a barge pole.

AQA seems a little odd with some of the content choices that have been made, but is probably the closest to the old GCSE in terms of the exam paper at least.

OCR looks OK. The first exam seems to be pitched at a fairly low level and the third unit is still a bit of a mystery.

WJEC looks to be the closest match to the previous GCSE model, although with 3 hours of exams and the longest controlled assessments, it’s a bit assessment heavy.

OCR Computing sounds like just thing I’ve been looking for for my more technically minded and capable students. It will be interesting to see what sort of numbers we can get signing up from our current Y8 cohort (who look to be a more challenging yeargroup) but I would love to do this.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

Addendum

A kind soul has pointed out to me that the OCR ICT Unit 3 sounds very much like the current Module 4 from the GCSE Spec B which is not so much business oriented as it is about a detailed look at how ICT is used in the real world. Apparently one of the more interesting and worthwhile elements of the course. I’ve not run that spec personally, so can’t comment beyond that, but hope it clears up the situation a little.