I Should Be Marking

This week I have done a lot of thinking about eBooks, have talked to a few people on Twitter and enjoyed a really good discussion on the subject at EdTechRoundup.

Lots of things were said about the pros and cons of various device;

• Doug Belshaw [I think] said that when £20 phones from ASDA are stable platforms for eBooks then they are truly ready to be embedded.
• Tony Sheppard wondered why a single-use device like an eBook reader would be preferable to a multi-function device.
• Several people have mentioned that various new eBook readers are due out early next year, which should cause prices to drop significantly.

And a long discussion about the pros and cons of using electronic textbooks was very interesting (blog posts by Donald Clark and John McMillen were pointed out to me, and the comments in Donald’s post in particular made for very worthwhile reading).

But having gotten a bit confuddled and started waffling, Nick Dennis gave me perhaps the most sound advice of the evening: “I think the principle we need to think about is what are you trying to achieve? Then ask will the PDAs help?”

I had certainly taken the initial idea and thought “What can I do with this”, rather than the other way around. Tail wagging the dog would be the apporpriate phrase I think.

And what I want to do is to get students reading. Simple as that. How? Buy 2-4 devices, select students from my form group,  load the devices up with free books and stories for a start. Possibly show students how to take online text and package it up in a format suitable for reading and definitely discuss acceptable use (e.g. must bring it on certain days, must look after it, no porn, not to be used in other lessons [as per school policy]).

I would need to decide on a policy regarding installing additional applications, clear the project with SMT (am reasonably hopeful on that one), decide who gets the devices (Reluctant readers? Control group? Random selection?) and also decide on some method of measuring the success of the project.

So lots still to think about, but I feel like I’m making progress – at least in my own mind.

We’ve discovered an interesting trend at school. Although results have consistently gone up and the students are generally good at written work, they’re not as strong when it comes to reading – particularly whn required to analyse what I would consider to be fairly basic chunks of writing. I could rant about spoon-feeding, league tables, a culture that is afraid to allow students to fail and so on (and, to be honest, I have. At lenght. And frequently) but instead I’m looking at methods to improve the situation.

Required Reading

It’s long been a school rule that tutors get their form group to read, silently, for 15 minutes in morning registration once a week. In practice, I know that in some groups this works well, and in others it really doesn’t. My Y11 form seem particularly resistant, with even the bright and usually willing pupils complaining that they would prefer to read in their own time.

Audio Short Stories

A solution to this that is in the pipeline is to take short audiobooks (e.g. Roald Dahl’s ‘The Landlady), give the students a printed copy of the text, play the story through and set some simple multiple-choice questions as a group quiz or competition. I quite like this idea, although I can see it getting old quite quickly if over-used.

eBooks

Now this is the main point of the post. Back in June I attended the Achievement Show, and saw a presentation by Rising Stars relating to the use of eBooks in school (KS2 & 3). There are a couple of ideas including reading books on mobile devices (becauase they are inherently more appealing than reading from paper supposedly, although that’s a whole issue in itself), students turning their own stories into eBooks (a fairly simple process) and potentially even using the device itself to perform some task – writing a review, annotating or highlighting parts of the story, using a built in dictionary to explain the words, all sorts of things.

I’m quite keen to have a deeper look at the practicalities and benefits of such a scheme and have put together a small mind-map outlining my thoughts.

Without wanting to repeat myself too much, I need to consider the pros and cons of various devices. I already use a smartphone for reading books, and SUMSonline are offering a good deal on refurbished Dell Axims with their maths software already onboard – but the screens are going to be quite small.

Sony eBook readers are lovely devices, but are pretty bulky, expensive and can;t do anything else (this is could be a good and a bad thing depending on your point of view).

The DS and PSP option is similar to PDAs, but with more opportunities for blurring the lines between entertainment and education (see comment in parentheses, above).

We have a class set of Asus EeePCs (7″, 4GB versions) which may be rendered obsolete in the next upgrade cycle. Again with the plethora of distractions and the bulkiness, but they are already networked and have a keyboard for performing some of the comprehension/reviewing/discussing type tasks.

So. Lots to think about.

Any ideas?

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.

Following a very hectic week last week I am positively enthused with a vast array of ideas laid out before me. Writing this blog helps me enormously in terms of reflecting upon and describing my ideas in a way that makes it easier for me to recall them, understand them and refine them. But, I have been posting quite a lot over the past few days though and didn’t want to flood the blog with daily posts. Instead, I decided to have a go and putting my thoughts down in a MindMap – specifically, using MindMeister.

I found it to be an incredibly cathartic and useful exercise and my thoughts on the topics at hand are now much clearer. And what struck me was that I have never really used a mindmap before! I’ve been forced into doing a couple at school, but have never really used them as a way of keeping my own thoughts and ideas in order.

This, of course, led me to the idea of using mindmaps in better ways with my students. We get them into Bubbl.us to create a planning document for some of the larger projects – but it would be nice to spend a little time comparing tools and techniques, followed by students actually using a mindmap for something a little more significant. It ties in with a lot of the independent learning that isn’t really going on in education right now. (Point me to a staffroom where nobody whinge about students being spoon-fed). There are also the collaborative and creative sides to mind-mapping.

In terms of tools – you have

• hand-drawn mindmaps
• online apps such as Mindmeister, Mind42 and Bubbl.us
• desktop apps such as Freemind
• online & offline apps auch as Xmind

So I think I’ll get some of my Y7, Y9 and probably Y12 & 13 students looking at mind maps in the new academic year. I’ll let you know how I get on…

Feel free to have a look at the resultant mindmap for yourself.

I saw a link last night, followed it and watched a 15 minute video about something called “Be Very Afraid”, an annual… conference?… organised by BAFTA at which some of the most innovative students attend and show off their work. Amonst the work carried out was a project in which students had gone out, interviewed and photographed 100 people from the age of 1 to 100 (I’m assuming they had help with the very young).

They looked at where each person was born (I gather there was a quite a diverse mix of cultures), what they had for breakfast and much more besides.

I thought the idea sounded fantastic, and after a bit of a natter with Andy Wallis (one of many forward thinking educators form the isle of Islay – it must be something in the water up there) I think it could be a really powerful idea worth stealing.

We could create a wiki, with 1 page per interviewee, embed/mashup with Google Maps, potentially use the data during topics on data handling at KS3 and potentially even try to convince other schools to do the same and compare data.

My main issues with the project are:

• As a curriculum task it’s extremely large.
  Working with 20 mixed ability students, all with varying degrees of interest would make this project very difficult to manage and sustain.
• Child Protection
  The nature of the project is such that students would be required to approach strangers to interview. Now actually I’m not that cyncical that I think it would be particularly dangerous. Most of our students are relatively streetwise and most of th elocal populous are pretty decent people. The students whose idea I am borrowing were working in (I think) Hounslow which (at the risk of a sweeping generalisation) sounds more potentially risky than a quiet and fairly well-off area of North East England.
• Treading on toes
  If I’m going to run this as an extra-curricular project then I’ll need to attract a group of students, and it would only be fair to describe this as a ‘digital media’ project. This would present an overlap with our Drama/Media department and I need to be careful about treading on toes. I don;t think anyone down there would actually object or be put out but it is something that I need to bear in mind.
• I have enough to do!
  [Skip list of jobs I'mdoing beyond the bare minimum - don't want to imply I'm doing more than everybody else]. Do I need / do I have time to really commit to another extra curricular group, one that would take up a lot of time and effort?

You might think after reading that curmudgeonly list that I’m not going to run the club, but of course the idea of a Digital Media club sounds brilliant. We can look at podcasting, video editing, wikis, blogs, image editing, all sorts of topics that really interest me – and with (hopefully) a very interested and enthusiastic bunch of students.

I’ve a horrible feeling I might just do it, you know…

I’m not sure why I do it¹. In recent weeks I have:

• spent an entire day signing every pupil in the school up to the World Maths Day website and collating the maths sets so that password can be distributed
• created Wordle quizzes based on the text from famous books for World Book Day, along with an online quiz using a Google Form which I still haven’t marked
• recorded around a dozen Moodle screencasts for my colleagues
• created resources for a Y9 options evening tomorrow
• set up an interactive (Google) calendar for the school website
• made a variety of subtle, but time consuming, alterations to the school website (you update an old logo and find the page it links to is subsequently out of date, and so you have to rewrite a whole page of text…)
• attempted to enter into negotiations with a major film studio over the use of 50 seconds of soundtrack
• co-created a wiki about copyright implications in education
• installed, edited, tweaked, hacked, advertised, recruited for and moderated a school-wide blog

And yesterday I decided that the visiting Cafe Scientifique visitor ought to be recorded and podcasted, rather than simply blogged about.

So here I sit, at 11:10pm, devising disclaimers for our guests to fill in, trying to work out whether I can use PodPress with a WPMU installation, worrying that the media tech returns the mixing desk tomorrow as promised – and I’ve yet to actually do any of the curriculum planning or marking that i need to get done for tomorrow.

Oh, and I had an idea today to gather some obsolete laptops and start a school Linux User Group.

I think I need a Time Turner…

¹ Of course I know why I do it. I love doing it!

AUPs are signed, accounts set up and students are now posting at the Egglescliffe Student Blogs site. Only two posts so far, one of which was held back until personal blogs start going live after Easter, but a little over a dozen students are poised and ready to report on the latest goings on.

Why run around trying to get the latest gossip from individual departments when you can get the puils to do it for you!?!

Have you heard of TeachMeet? As far as I can tell it’s a semi-formal gathering of technologically minded teachers – or rather teachers who want to make the most of technology in the classroom. Speakers put their names into a (virtual) hat and have a 2 or 7 minute slot to talk about or demonstrate something practical. No PPTs or Keynotes allowed.

I’ve not had the time/opportunity to attend one as yet, but having seen @Lisibo’s contribution from January this year I’m making it my goal to attend one at some point in 2009…

Click To Play

I had it all planned. I needed a citizenship lesson about crime and punishment and after 5 weeks of paper-based reources and activities my form were starting to revolt.

So, we’d watch a video from TrueTube, discuss alternatives to prison and then the pupils (in pairs or small groups) would choose a presentation method – from Slideshare, Mind42 or Museum Box.

Problem #1 – At first everyone loved the idea of a collaborative mindmap, or the fresh approach of Museum Box. 30 seconds later almost everyone had decided that creating a PowerPoint and uploading to Slideshare was the easier option. Harumph.

Problem #2 – Slideshare is blocked in school. Despite testing (my teacher’s account is slightly more open) and then editing the firewall policy I still couldn’t get it to work.

Problem #3 – If you’re using Museum Box and you accidentally close the window without having saved your work then you lose your work. Both pairs who chose that option made the same mistake.

Problem #4 – Once you;ve convinced the disheartened pupils from #3 to quickly knock together what they can, the box then has to be submitted for moderation which is likely to take days.

Problem #5 – Having decided to overcome #2 by uploading the PowerPoints myself, I find that most of them are half finished and not really of presentable quality. So do I upload them as they are? Don’t upload any? Upload just the ones that I approve of? Not an easy decision.

But take heart faithful readers! All is not lost. The class DID enjoy the lesson, certainly moreso than last week’s paper-based activities. And some learning did take place, even if the outcome is not what I had hoped.

A couple of things in one this morning.

Over the weekend I put quite a lot of time into making a World Book Day Quiz using Wordle, Prezi and Google Forms. You use Prezi to view 15 word clouds based on the text from some popular books – you have to guess the title and author of each one and enter it into the Google Form so that I can collate (and examine the data with my Y9 as part of their database unit).

The other thing is that I’ve started a more school-friendly blog on the local WPMU installation. The aim there is to model an example blog for the pupils and also to share some of the appropriate ICT links and resources I stumble across. So I’m currently actively involved with 3 forums, 2 blogs, Twitter, Facebook and a weekly Flashmeeting with EdTechRoundup. Thank God I don’t have a full time job or kids, otherwise I’d never manage it all!

The Quiz

My school blog