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.

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.

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…

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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.