I Should Be Marking

Well, today was the day of the much anticipated (by me, at any rate) Achievement Show 2009. An early start, a reasonable train journey (2.5 hours) and a brisk walk (the recommended Tube station bringing me out at exactly the opposite side of the stadium to the only available entrance) and I was in.

Having never been to this type of conference before I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There were 10 or so exhibitors’ stalls, a round room made of cardboard with no roof for the smaller and more frequent talks and 10 other ‘zones’ (rooms) for larger and longer talks.

I watched a couple in the round room and was relieved that it was a relatively small room with around 50 chairs, but the noise level was awful. The first speaker had to get half way through his talk before being provided with a radio mic and the sound stopped dead halfway through the room as the only speakers were at the very front.

I bumped into a couple of twitterers (@mikeherrity and @gideonwilliams, in strictly chronological order of meetings) and delivered my presentation at around 14:20 (so only 20 minutes behind schedule). The presentation went well and was packed out (standing room only by the end), if rushed (although I think that suited the style of the presentation anyway and I certainly can talk!). I saw quite a few people scribbling like mad as I romped through the tools in the presentation and hope that a few people caught my website address and email at the end.

Overall I have to say I was a little disappointed by the rest of the show. There were a couple of talks that made me think (using e-book readers, annotation and authoring packages, Learning Platforms, creating podcasts/videos for revision) but nothing really new and a lot of the talks were clearly sales pitches (am hoping that Thursday night’s TeachMeetNE will be quite different). Also, the ‘Speaker’s Corner’ to which we were apparently to retire could not have been further from where we were talking without being outside the stadium.

A lot of the more major talks were centered on leadership, Maths, English, Science or Diplomas – none of which are immediately relevant to me.

I did talk to some nice people from Channel 4 Learning who were trying to sell a subscription to their service (just £5k for the first year!) and must get around to FINALLY trying the Yenka sequencing application. And I did get a day off timetable.

I think that (without wanting to sound arrogant) I am spending a lot of my time talking to innovative people trying lots of exciting things, and as such, the topics that make it to conferences like that seem a little stale in comparison. I’m not in SLT, I don’t use Sharepoint and I don’t want to spend several thousands on a whole school resource (I do think that a significant proportion of those there were Assistant or Deputy Heads).

Or maybe I’m just a miserable git.

I did enjoy myself though

A few months ago we installed Mahara, an open-source ePortfolio platform that integrates extremely well with Moodle (colloquially known as Mahoodle – and yes, we are quite sad).

I’ve had a bit of a play and found it initially a little hard to grasp. I looked at it and thought “now what?”. But with a bit of time to see how it works it is actually very, very useful. The trick, IMO, is to introduce it steadily, one area at a time.

So, my Year 8 students have been working through a series of graphics tutorials and the plan was to put them somewhere public (within school) for some peer review before moving on to their asessed task. The approach I took was this:

• Files and folders
  Login, go into the filing system within Mahara, create a folder and upload the graphics work completed. So we were starting with something fairly familiar – a filing system. Students always find it frustrating that you can’t simply drag and drop files in the same way you can with most operating systems, and it is a chore to have to upload your files. But such is life – at least the task is easy to comprehend. It also brought up the issue of tags, and tagging data. Although I haven’t gone into great detail about the semantic web, it’s still a useful talking point.
• Create a view
  This waqs the part I was most concerned about. I can describe and even demonstrate how to do this, but it requires a little bit of thought and common sense – something that Year 8 students are not always renowned for! We stuck with the defaulot 3 column view and just added the images we had uploaded, adding a title and setting the width to 250 pixels. Those who picked it up quickly could then experiment with using different widths to create a more dynamic layout and adding text boxes to describe how their work was completed (leading to discussions about how the ‘Description’ field for each image would be a more efficient way of us achieving this.
• Setting view access
  This is a fairly straightforward task and I simply set up group names before the lesson and had students share their work with a specific group. Then they had to go and join that group so that they could see others’ work.
• Feedback
  This, inevitably, was the bit the students found most engaging – and rightly so! The ability to leave comments and feedback, and then go and see what has been said about your work really had the classes enthused. One thing that would be nice is a front page notification of comments, much as you get in blog systems. I’ll have to investigate that one!

By guiding the students through one step at a time they found it quite manageable and now seem to understand what the system is for. Some described it as ‘a bit like Facebook’ and I had to agree in part. We talked about the social network aspects of it and I told students that I wasn’t going to be pushing that aspect in lessons (as making it compulsory negates the point IMO), but that they were free to use any aspect of the software that they came across. Take-up across the school has been positive, considering we simply put a rather cryptic link up on the Moodle homepage and just left the system open for the early adopters.

Overall, I had a good time, and can see a lot of benefit to Mahara – especially once the next version comes out with better exporting capabilities.

A couple of months ago, Andy Field shared a course on his school’s VLE entitled ‘Wouldn’t It Be Great‘, in which students had to investigate the future of technology and make a creative and interesting presentation (a literal presentation, in front of the class) using whatever technology they liked.

I thought it was a marvellous idea and promptly stole it for use with one of my own classes.

I was so proud of the results, I created a Wiki to show off their work (not the actual presentations, sadly, but the media files they used during them). I’d be grateful if you could have a look and maybe comment on one or two pages as a I know the students would get a kick out of that.

Looking at the feedback I think the students enjoyed themselves, and I know I did.

Wouldn’t It Be Great Wiki

Addendum:

Those of you who follow Andy on Twitter will know that his daughter recently had cochlear implants and can now hear, thanks to the wonders of modern technology. If that’s what we can do now, then yes, I think the future will be great.

Prompted by comments in this thread on the TES forums, I’ve been challenged to come up with “10 indispensible/extraodinarily useful piece of information that you gleaned from your CPD time on twitter (please not just a list of sites) but things/ideas that have transformed your ( an will transform our) teaching.”

First of all, I wouldn’t say that any one tool or communication method has transformed my teaching – but Twitter has enhanced it. A tool doesn’t have to lead to a renaissance in order to be valuable, and this is as much an exercise in reflection as it is anything else.

So here are 10 semi-random¹ things I can think of that have been beneficial to me (as I’m my primary conern when evaluating my use of any CPD resource).

1. EdTechRoundup – I suspect many on the TES forum wouldn’t be impressed at this, but through using Twitter I discovered ETRU; a weekly FlashMeeting of teachers and educators interested in using technology. Discussion topics have included Copyright (leading me to set up a Wiki on the topic with Theo Kuechel (@theokk)), relative merits of different (indeed, any) VLE, semantic web search engines (e.g. Google Squared) and much, much more besides.

2. Assessing Pupil Progress – I have been involved in a number of discussions about APP and how to improve the way we assess, record and feedback progress to students with the likes of Toby Holman (@tobyholman) and James Greenwood (@jpgreenwood). As I result I have found a couple of Moodle Blocks (Progress and Criteria Reference) that need a little tweaking but will help to make it simple for staff to flag passed criteria and feedback will be automatic, allowing students to better understand where they are – and why.

3. Wouldn’t It Be Great? – Thanks to Andy Field (@andyfield) I discovered a fantastic idea that I could steal and have just today finished a 6-week unit of work researching ideas on how technology will affect our lives in the future and then using different tools to present their ideas to the rest of the class.

4. Google Docs – Through Twitter I have met people like Mark Warner (@markw29) and Tom Barrett (@tombarrett) who have started off collaborative Google Docs presentations – and idea that I’ve borrowed as a way of collecting ideas in a sensible place, and in a nice format. Equally, I have met people like Drew Buddie (@digitalmaverick) who did something similar with a Wiki listing dozens of online tools. You can see some of the presentations at Ideas To Inspire and some at my website (mwclarkson.co.uk).

5. Checking policy – I have had a lot of discussions in which I have been forced to defend my standpoint, notably with Karl Goddard (@karl_goddard) about the use of Macs in schools. It is good to have our ideas challenged and although I didn’t change Karl’s mind, I went away from that discussion with more confidence that I’m doing the right thing.

6. Supporting others – I really enjoy sharing resources, websites, links and ideas with colleagues in other departments. I made the decision to produce a monthly newsletter to distribute amongst staff and thanks to Mark Berry (@markbezza) I managed to get more ideas and a better sense of audience as his magazine ideas were much better than mine.

7. Gifted and Talented – Thanks to an idea I got from a video shared on Twitter (I forget precisely who) I am in the process of setting up an after-school Digital Media club, the first project for which will be to interview people in the local community from ages 1 to 100 and present the data in meaningful ways. There are possiblities for citizenship, data handling parts of ICT and much more besides. In addition, Andy Wallis (@andywallis), a teacher on the isle of Islay, is planning on running an identical scheme. This should be a nice opportunity to compare results and see how our communities are both similar and different.

8. Everyday advice – This one is a little harder to quantify, but I get ideas, inspiration, feedback, suggestions and much more every day. I get to find out what ideas other teachers have come up with, what they’re doing in their lessons, what their students are particularly proud of and much more. And I like to think I give the same back in return.

9. Resources – I’ve discovered a multitude of websites, online tools, software and much more. I now use Celtx for all of my media pre-production (scripting, storyboarding, etc.) for example. A tool I had never heard of until someone mentioned it on Twitter. The same could be said for dozens of applications that have not revolutionised my teaching, but have provided me with better, more efficient and more engaging options.

10. Support – Of course I have only met a fraction of the 500-odd people I follow in person, but they are people I recognise and have what might be considered a friendship with. I’m looking forward to attending a TeachMeet next Thursday (guess how I discovered that was going on!) at which I will be meeting two more Twitterers I have been conversing with (Helena Butterfield (@langwitch) and Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw)). If I’m in a bad mood or have had a crap day then I know I can talk to these people about it. I know that if one of them has had a bad day then I will return the favour. I’m not claiming to have this relationship with all of the people I talk to, or even many. But there are enough and it feels nice to have the support of people in similar situations – who have bad lessons occasionally, frustrating students, annoying filtering policies and more besides.

11. Feedback for students – When my students produce a piece of work that is publically accessible online then I’ll sometimes post a link on Twitter and look for feedback. My Y7s thought this was marvellous just before half term and it kicked off some really good discussions. Their argument that we should allow IM during lessons so that they could improve their writing skills was soon shot down when one of my followers questioned the value of that given the txt speak used in that medium. So a Y7 student in Teesside got involved (indirectly) in a conversation with a Science teacher from Surrey and agreed that he needs a better justification if he wants to have access to those kinds of tools during the school day.

Should everybody reading this rush out, sign up and feel compelled to stay online for 18 hours a day? Of course not. But the question was asked, can I justify my high opinion of twitter as a CPD tool with 10 practical uses. I feel I can – at least to myself. And that’ll do for me.

¹ Semi-random because my memory is appalling and I’m not prepared to look back through all of my previous messages for ideas and benefits that don’t spring to mind immediately.

When I first learned to create a web page, back in 1996, I used Notepad and hand-coded the HTML. When I first started teaching back in 2004 I fervently believed that we should start out teaching web design by hand-coding (or at least editing) HTML.

In the last year or so I have accepted that, at KS3 at least, a very minimal knowledge of HTML for the most interested is actually sufficient – although CSS (another form of code, note) would really be better.

And yet I create a lot of online content (including discussion) using a WYSIWYG editor in Moodle, a blog (like this or in comments on others’), a Google Profile, using Twitter, using Facebook…

Now actually I have recently created my own static website (gasp!) and using an iFrame (urgh!) which has to be hand-coded (or at least it does in Dreamweaver). And anyone doing any web development, or even customising their blog or CMS significantly will need to do a bit of tweaking somewhere – so where does that leave us?

Should I be teaching HTML, CSS, AJAX, setting up a CMS, writing widgets, PHP, WYSIWYG, RSS…? What students need is a balance of skills that are likely to be directly useful to all plus the understanding to allow them to explore further in the future. I’m tempted to stick to WYSIWYG static sites at KS3 with a splash of HTML and eventually CSS (once I get to learning it myself!) and covering the use of wikis/blogs/CMS as alternatives. I’m not 100% I’m right to do that though.

Any thoughts?

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It looks like I’m still not quite meeting my quota of one a week – but in this case I feel justified. After a marathon marking session I’ve sent all of my GCSE and A-Level coursework off and felt I deserved a week with a bit less work related goings on. So there!

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So, to the point. I’ve liked the idea of screencasts for a while. If you’re not sure what that means, it’s usually a video recording of your screen with a bit of narration and possibly on-screen text designed to demonstrate something useful.

I’ve tried using screencasts with classes several times, but rarely with great success. If it’s a class I’m teaching then it seems strange to play a video of me talking when I can just, well, talk! I have tried using short screencasts so that pupils can quickly revisit individual aspects, but in a classroom environment it just seems to lead to too much distraction.

Using screencasts for distance learning could be useful – but then you’re relying on sufficient connection speed and the relevant piece of software being at home. I try to keep homework relatively simple in order to avoid all the excuses (and if the homework is a bit more challenging, then it may become more than just an excuse) and so I’m not entirely convinced there is enough benefit using that model.

Where screencasts really seem to come into their own is with teaching staff. I’ve started work on a series of tutorials for colleagues at my school called Super Moodles and most recently recorded a very off-the-cuff screencast following a discussion about Google Sketchup at EdTechRoundup. Now at the time of writing it’s only had 29 views, but the feedback has been positive and there should now hopefully be at least 2 or 3 teachers who feel confident to use the software with a little direction and can then take the software further and start introducing it to classes. Job done!

If anhyone HAS used screencasts effectively in the classroom then I’d love to hear about it – and see what I’m doing wrong!

About all I can manage right now, but I made it a personal goal to blog at least once a week and it’s not like I have nothing to say.

Coursework deadlines, coursework marking, more coursework deadlines, chasing pupils who don’t meet coursework deadlines, taking on a lot of (too much?) collaborative stuff, writing reports, planning curriculum/SoW updates.

No time for blogging right now, but I did have fun with a video camera, a whiteboard, a Y7 class and the internal components of some old PCs we had knocking around. Not sure how much the kids really got but it was a different lesson and good fun.

Right, to bed. G’night all.

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!

Want to look at filming techniques? Camera angles? Dialogue?

Xtranormal is a really useful site. You choose your characters, type your dialogue, set your camera angles and movement and away you go. It renders in seconds and works really well.

I had a couple of minor issues this morning when I first used it in anger, mostly due to my own mistakes – but the staff are incredibly quick to offer support via both Twitter and email and I’m looking forward to some promising developments due in the near future.

I was, quite happily getting on with the usual Saturday morning work (reports to write, courseowrk to mark, but I’m spending all my time checking on forums, Facebook and Twitter) when I see a tweet from @mbarrow about a group of people doing something on some website – and there was a URL.

So I clicked away, and sure enough @teachernz has started a document on Etherpad for a number of teachers to explore (also present were @mrs_banjer & @scratchie). I described it as a streamlined wiki on speed. You only get one page and you can’t embed anything, but you get up to 8 people editing a live document simultaneously. No refusing to save because someone else is editing – you see what is happening live; each user having their own colourscheme so you can see who is adding/deleting/improving what.

I see huge potential for collaborative group work and the whole thing just seems to work very well.

It’s not perfect for a classroom situation – small group size, the ability to deface others’ work with ease, the lack of accountability as you can have the same colours as someone else, no logging in so someone could use a false name, etc. – but to solve those issues you would have to compromise somewhere else and you end up with a Wiki. Which is great for when you need one. And this is great when you need something else!

Edit: Clearly one of the issues is the lack of clarity over exactly who said what, to whom and when. As a result of which I now believe that @mbarrow started the document and not @teachernz. Either way, a great little web app and one I shall be returning to often, I feel.