I Should Be Marking

A colleague of mine has been using this since last year, although I hadn’t had more than a 2 minute look to see what all the fuss was about.

Today, with the collapse of my Lego CAD lesson plan (more on that later), I improvised a quick intro to Sketchup after a quick brief from said colleague.

An hour later and I had a group of particularly unmotivated Y9 students designing lawns, hedge mazes, swimming pools - one student even recreated the mansion from GTA:Vice City (complete with helipad, helicopter and a garage with a motorbike inside)!

You could also run competitions to draw real buildings and they can be published to GoogleEarth.

It’s incredibly easy to create models quickly and simply - and of course it’s both free to download and cross-platform!

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!

As the school is getting a site licence for Quark Xpress I decided to teach myself how to use it. The end result? 15 posters giving a brief rundown of the tasks. skill and qualifications needed for 15 different IT based careers. Details are taken from Learndirect and the images from Stock Xchange (royalty free).

I actually did them a good while ago but have been posting them to Senduit (or is it USendIt?) and putting the link on the TES forums. Hopefully this will stop me having to update the thread every couple of weeks.

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.

Hugin is yet another free and cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) application, this time used for stitching images together. That means you can take a number of photos of a view, even a full panorama, and then stitch them together to make one complete image. You can stretch and distort the images where you need to and it all looks fairly impressive.

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.

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.

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.