I Should Be Marking

Well, it’s that time of year again. Coursework gone, exam classes all but finished and thoughts turn to KS3 next year. It’s about time we made sure we covered the basics of Flash, I’d like to do some more targeted graphics work in conjunction with the art department and in Year 9 we’re replacing the Theme Park project with a Grand Designs project.Design three houses in Google Sketchup, build a spreadsheet model to look at costs and present an interactive brochure in Flash.  Should be a challenge, but more interesting and relevant for where we want pupils to go. By far the hardest thing is fitting everything into the time available and trying to balance moving forward with the inevitable gaps created by shuffling a unit from Year 8 to Year 7 (effectively missing an entire cohort). Still, anything beats marking coursework!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the school, working with Creative Partnerships, has arranged for a refugee bus to turn up. It’s a trailer which is used as a stimulus for discussion about the various types of people that come to the country, the labels we give them, the impressions people have of them and the reasons they came here in the first place.

Being in a fairly affluent area we have a lot of ‘Daily Mail’ parents and a lot of low-level intolerance. We have very few problems of overt racial abuse but a lot of people with quiet prejudices bubbling away.

As part of the project I had a Year 8 class blog about what they thought a refugee was, and then again once they had been through the trailer to see how their impressions had changed. It was interesting to see that most of the pupils took to the whole project very well and I think some valuable learning has come out of it. Equally interesting were posts like this one which perhaps demonstrated slightly less in terms of long term improvements to the images people have.

Overall I think it’s been a very worthwhile project and I’ll certainly be looking to expand the range of ‘global’ topics I cover in ICT.

Anybody out there heard of Creative Partnerships?

We have an ongoing relationship with them at school. They give us some money every year and we fund creativity in two ways. One is through one-off projects . This is what, apparently, most schools do with it. We also (and primarily) fund one year promoted posts. As previously mentioned, mine is related to getting pupils blogging, whilst others are promoting creativity in maths with low achievers, working on P4C (big questions), promoting competitive creativity online and encouraging creative writing.

Our big project for the year is the refugee bus. A trailer which aims to demonstrate to the pupils what it is like to arrive in a foreign country, not speaking the language and having to go through customs. The aim is for the kids to appreciate how traumatic the experience can be as well as learning about the difference between migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. We have a lot of prejudice bubbling under the surface I suspect, not helped by the national media.

My part in this was to take my Y8 bloggers who will be going through the experience next week and simply asking them “What is a refugee?”. The answers were fascinating. “Someone who travels around the world but has no identity”. “Someone who had to leave their country because of war”. “They’re a bit like a tramp, but the government gives them a house”.

I refused to tell them anything. Whether they were right in their assumptions, whether this person would be male or female, whether they would speak English, where they were from… Instead I told them to make up the details. They had to invent a refugee and describe who they were, and who they are now. As I said earlier, the results were fascinating.

One of the first pupils to name their refugee called him Mowglai. Another wanted to call her refugee Lloyd, because he didn’t have to be foreign. Two thirds went for male refugees, and two thirds went for non-European. One pupil had a refugee with a private jet who flies around the world staying in posh hotels. All very interesting.

Next week they’ll be posting about what they found out in the ‘bus’, with a further, conclusive post a week or two later. Fascinating stuff and it really makes me want to do more of this stuff where we challenge the way kids think rather than just teaching them how to make PowerPoints about theme parks.

To visit the blogs themselves (and PLEASE leave some comments), go to egglescliffeblogs.org.uk 

As part of my new officially snactioned blogging spree I’ve created yet another blog - similar in ways to my Thunks blog but with a slightly different emphasis.

Where Thunks are about considering the world we live in and the ways in which we can ask questions, Deep Thought is more introspective and is aimed at investigating how we feel about the world we live in.

My first entry is a video about the Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of Earth taken from a distance of approximately 4 billion miles. Does it make us feel insignificant? Hopeful? Useless? Guilty?

Why?

To add your thoughts or to read the thoughts of others, follow this link. And please take part - as always.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about PDAs and thought I would share/reflect for a bit. Apologies if this rambles - I’m in that sort of a mood today.

Registers - At the moment I need to either ferry my laptop across the school twice a day for registration, or try and commit it to memory AND remember to submit the details electornically later. Suffice to say I’m not the most popular member of staff with the front office right now. A wifi enabled PDA would definitely help.

AfL - A colleague of mine makes quick notes in his planner during lessons (it could be a simple traffic light for effort or attainment in a specific area). I’ve tried taking a more batch-like approach at the end of each day but this takes up a minimum of 20-30 minutes and means I can’t grab those members of staff who slope off fairly quickly and it means I have to try and remember the events of the day for hours at a time. With a PDA would it be easier to make a quick note as I walk round? Easier than picking up my paper-based planner? Maybe…

Contact - I read one blog (which I now, of course, cannot find) which described the process of setting up a number of smartphones to be given to SMT/SLT which could be used to help them keep in contact throughout the day. This is far beyond the scope of what I can do with one handset but it’s an interesting idea

Style - If I was to go for this idea, then what style of PDA would I want? One that looks like a phone (e.g. Nokia N95), on that looks like a ‘traditional’ PDA (e.g. iPhone, XDA, MDA, iPaq, etc.) or more of a blackberry style? I have to say I’d prefer the ‘traditional’ look with a large slab of touchscreen and very little else.

Blogging - How could I use this device to aid my new blogging/creative teacher post? Well, I could blog from anywhere - but I’m very rarely away from a desktop or laptop anyway. I could prowl the corridors, looking for unsuspecting pupils to be coerced into writng something - but almost all rooms have a computer in them anyway and expecting a child to quickly formulate reflective, insightful thoughts AND get to grips with either an onscreen keyboard or handwriting recognition simultaneously would be pushing it I think. And getting somehting with a built in keyboard would mean either a blackberry styled device or somehting with a slideout/clip-on qwerty keyboard.

Would I want it to be a phone or is that unimportant? Well, originally it was the phone/PDA combination that kicked the whole idea off, and it would save on having to find another phone and carry another device. I don’t think I can justify making it a requirement though, especially if it’s not coming from my own budget. And SIM-free phones are much harder/more expensive to come by.

Lots of thoughts, but no decision as yet. On major sticking point is the price of these things. I’m too polite to ask for a budget but the £4-500 devices are surely well out of the question, especially as I’m due a new MacBook next year as well.

The contemplation continues…

I applied for a promoted post recently and am now officially a ‘Lead Creative Teacher’. Today was the induction meeting and I am now employed to bring blogging to the masses - within the department, to at least one colleague outside the department and eventually to the whole school.

Other colleagues are looking at creative peer review using our VLE, creativity with G&T pupils in English, creativity with the lower sets in maths and P4C/Community of Enquiry.

I guess that means I’d better keep flexing my blogging muscles so expect regular updates and plugs over the coming months.

For the first time we’re running iMedia Level 2, and I’m currently in charge of putting 18 students through Unit 6 - Digital Video (with enormous help from the head of Drama and Media who is teaching me all sorts about framing, filming and timing).

Being me, I’ve set up a blog to showcase some of their work. And I think I’ll be adding to it pretty frequently as well.

I’m really impressed with the effort and enthusiasm they’ve shown. I was seriously concerned over the summer that the whole subject would be seen as an opportunity to mess around. I couldn’t have been more wrong and so I want to show what they’ve done to the world.

For this activity I gave them 2 hours, 5 pieces of music to choose from, a 60 second time limit and access to BBC Motion Gallery.

As always, please leave comments on their blog in the first instance - I’m sure they’ll get a kick out of it.

The full RL is http://egglescliffeblogs.org.uk/imedia 

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before on here (I suspect not), but Yacapaca is great.

It’s an online assessment/quiz tool, totally free, run by Chalkface. You can import pupils quickly by simply copying and pasting lists from CSV, Word or Excel files and group them easily enough. You then set them a test or quiz (either from the huge list already available for many subject areas or a creation of your own), print a list of passwords and away they go.

A group of very clever people have devised a suite of KS3 questions aimed at assessing levels (from L2-L7) and you can get a class full of pupils to run through each test twice (with random questions so they won’t just get all the same questions again) inside an hour and then the really impressive bit begins.

You can track their results in real time and there is a wealth of analysis available. The screen I use most shows the % score for each test and a final level but you can also look at each pupils’ answer or analyse the answers for each question in order to look for common misconceptions or weaknesses.

It’s interesting to see pupils come from primary school with L4 or 5 and then score L2 or 3 and it’s certainly not a standalone solution (what is?) but it’s a useful way to baseline at pupils at the start of a KS. I’ve got a few more classes to run through and then I’m going to compare the data ot the English, Science and Maths baselines done by colleagues and I’m also hoping to compare (anonymous) data with some other schools - so if anyone else is using Yacapaca to baseline their Y7s then please let me know!

Freeware versions available for both Mac and Windows.

Scratch is a relatively new piece of software developed by MIT. It’s designed to introduce younger children to some of the fundamentals of computer programming and control using graphical commands that you can drag around.

The interface is somewhat reminiscent of Alice, for those that have tried it. Pupils simply drag in a command (handily organised into subcategories of Motion, Sound, Control [for loops, conditional statements, etc.] and so on) and double click to see what it does. There’s a great PDF on the site to get you started and I printed, cut out and laminated a load of Scratch Cards with quick instructions for different techniques for my Year 7s - who really seemed to love it.

For those who fancy a more cross-curricular bent it’s relatively straightforward for pupils to put together an animation to show a heart pumping, a river creating deeper S bends, an electric circuit switching on and off, etc…

There’s a comprehenisve gallery of existing projects on the website, so have a look and see what you think.

I’m very proud of myself today

Not only did I get through a whole class load of GCSE coursework marking, not only did my Y9’s run through Yacapaca reveal them to be dolts barely worthy of a level 3 but my Y8s put their BSL work to good use.

Last week we had a look at 3 or 4 British Sign Language websites with a view to some online tuition. Today we discussed a scenario (new, deaf pupil joining the school), thought up some appropriate and helpful phrases and then recorded them. I’ve spent an hour editing, adding titles, a soundtrack etc. and have a 2 minute video all ready to go. I’m just waiting on parental permission to allow one pupil’s image to be shown online and it’ll be up on the Showcase blog. Expect another one next week as well as I have a fortnightly Y8 class in just before the end of term.

Some days I really love my job.