I Should Be Marking

Clicky!

Phew! Well, it took two whole lessons to get right, but such is life.

My Year 8s spent half a lesson using the rubber stamp and lasso tools in Fireworks to create ‘Spot the Difference’ pictures. The plan was to spend half a lesson uploading them to the class blog for all the world to see. I’d spent quite a bit of time getting the permissions right on the blog to make sure the kids had access to the files area and had thought everything should be fine. Hmmm.

First of all, the file size limit was too small, so I opened it up.

Secondly, the files were still too big as we had saved the edited versions as PNG files. So do I stop and have a lengthy discussion on the pros and cons of file sizes or rush through a quick export in order to get it done? Well, as I’m being observed I go for the latter in order to reach my objective.

Thirdly I find we can’t upload files with spaces or punctuation in the filename - which is about two thirds of them, so we have to fix that.

Fourthly the software is set up to allow one directory per blog rather than per student, so we need to get them to create their own folder within the files section - using their first name for example.

Three of them are called Michael. At this point I’ve managed to create a nice head-sized dent in the wall.

Brilliant! We’re all uploaded. Now simply write a post and use the ‘Files’ button to add the images in. Except that this opens a new window which doesn’t automagically close once you’ve added the files. And so, Year 8 pupils being Year 8 pupils, they simply click the ‘Add’ button until it realises what they mean and does it right, resulting in half a dozen entries consisting of 24 copies of an image set to 1280×960. Then the bell went.

The next lesson we started from the point where we had done the image editing. I talked a lot about file types, the export process (people kept complaining that when they exported their PNG as a JPG they still had a PNG file on their desktop. Aaarrgghh!!), the upload process, the adding of images to the blog post and the structure of a blog entry (Introduction, Description, Discussion - the last part always being the most difficult to tease out).

So a partial success and a lot of lessons learned. I don’t think blogs are cutting edge, although their use in lessons still is to a large degree - especially in secondary schools where lessons are shorter, classes change more frequently, etc. I certainly feel like I’m on the forefront, but maybe that’s just me!

It’s Friday. It’s almost half past four. I’ve had Year 9 pupils running through KS3 testing, 3 assemblies, 200+ students through my doors, various last minute headaches to solve, Y7 baseline assessments to analyse and ocrrelate against KS2 data and lots more besides.

And now I’m running the animation club. A club that started 3 years ago with lots of anticipation and enthusiasm. But now it’s Friday at the back end of September and the enthusiasm is a little lacking. I’m putting a brave face on, coming up with new ideas and encouragin the kids - but I’m knackered. In my head I’m home with a hot meal, a warm bath and something cool out of the fridge. Instead I’m sitting in my air-conditioned bastion of all things white (benches, Macs, keyboards, mice, ‘boards, paper - it’s like minimalist hell).

Maybe I would have been better picking a night where the occasional cancellation due to a meeting is inevitable - but at least I have more energy.

Ho hum, another lesson learned…

I give up, I really do. At KS4 and 5 there is a scheme called OSCA (I have no idea what it stands for, but the point is that you moderate some sample coursework from the exam board and if your marks are close enough to theirs then you are unlikely to be called for moderation on your own students’ work).

So I’ve spent most of the day (from 7am) looking through exemplar work, moderators’ comments, mark schemes, checklists and eportfolios. I have a blinding headache but I’m done. I’ve written my feedback, totted up the scores, I just need to copy and paste it into the exam board’s system. So I log on to the exam board’s website, or try to, and I see a message that the website shuts down overnight. Every night.

Stop a minute and read that last bit again. I don’t think I’m making this up, but it sounds like it. This website shuts down every night at 10pm prompt. The coursework expects the students to point out the advantages of transactional websites over traditional ‘bricks & mortar’ business models (one of the main advantages, of course, being 24 hour accessibility). Am I the only one to see the irony (or sheer stupidity) of the situation?

Words fail me. I bit my tongue so hard it almost bled in an attempt to not launch my laptop through my kitchen window. Am I alone? Is it normal for websites to do this? I know they occasionally go down for maintenance or what have you, but every single night?

I shouldn’t let it bother me, I have the work done and another 7 days (- server downtime of course) to get the stuff uploaded. Still, it’s the last thing I need after an incredibly stressful weekend.

*Sigh* *Deep breaths*

I Should Be Marking - never have I meant that so literally, but I felt the need to catch with a few thoughts rattling around.

So, to address the title of the post - I can’t figure out what else QCA might stand for.

The reason for this outburst is that it now appears that the Year 9 ICT tests, organised jointly by the QCA and RM, may now become optional or possibly even be scrapped according the BBC. Some are hailing it as a wonderful decision, and a small number of people I’ve spoken to are not so sure that it’s a good thing.

The main thing that seems to have gotten everyone’s back up is that we’ve spent the last 3 years piolting this thing and using countless man (and woman) hours in installing the (buggy) software, filling in forms to describe the state of our current ICT facilities (sometimes in triplicate), dropping shemes of work, designing new schemes of work, preparing students, boring students, drilling students and generally wasting everyone’s time.

My HoD’s first thoughts were that we would have to go back to a teacher assessment which means more workload and a ’sit down, do the test, accept the result’ system was arguably fairer, quicker and more consistent. My personal opinion is that we will gain more flexibility in what and how we teach, we don’t have to spend more time focussing on Office applications (I acknowledge their importance but too often it seems that the whole of secondary ICT is geared towards churning out the next generation of receptionists).

Another problem with the tests is that they cannot possibly hope to assess all of the levelling criteria. The test is geared towards assessing skills, not pupils’ understanding of how ICT impacts on society or how to evaluate their own work. I’m not against online assessment, I just think that it has to be seen for what it is - another assessment tool that should help teachers as they form their professional opinions of how well the pupils are able to work and understand the particular subject.

My biggest caveat of all is that one news report does not necessarily signify the end. It might be that this suggestion is ignored and the tests plow on regardless. I know of a number of teachers who have immediately gone running to SMT with the good news. They’re back planning their SoW, abandoning the software and moving on. I hope they’re not setting themselves up for a fall. I suspect we’ll carry on for this year and see how it goes. Maybe we’ll carry on with the optional test, but only use it as a part of the curriculum and as part of the assessment.

Anyway, I have another 60 collections of coursework to get through this weekend, and I still haven’t managed to get my KS3 levelling done (hmmm, maybe a summative test isn’t such a bad thing :p).

I really can’t tell if I love Christmas or hate it.

In registration this morning I was given a really nicle bottle of red wine by one of the pupils, but then my Y11s are still so busy dragging their heels over coursework I think I’ll need the whole bottle just to get myself back to a state of equilibrium in terms of stress.

My tutor group received the most merits of any Y8 class in the school according to yesterday’s assembly, and yet they can’t get through an hour’s tutorial without 4 breaktime detentions and one chucking out.

I won a bottle of Scotch in the staff raffle and then get a snotty letter from a parent whose daughter has lost her PE kit and so she expects me to sort it out or she’ll have “no choice but to come into school” herself to “sort the matter out once and for all”*.

So am I enjoying Christmas, am I enjoying teaching at the minute? No and yes. On the one hand I have my wife forcing me to climb up ladders that look worryingly hampered by metal fatigue in a force 9 gale being pelted with hail stones knowing full well I’ll be back up there in a fortnight to get the decorations back down again, and on the other I have my animation club posting their car chases and zombie weddings online, Y8s signing at me across the playground and the new Jamie Oliver style school Christmas lunch to look forward to in about 10 minutes.

Yes I moan, yes I’m stressed and yes I’m fed up. Still, it wouldn’t be fun if it was easy

* Of course the PE kit was in lost property, where I told the girl to check 3 weeks ago. In fact it would have been passed to me by default had she bothered to put her name in it. Oh, I did enjoy writing the letter in reply.

I think I’m going to have to add a new category for this blog, ‘Inspired by the TES forums, or something similar. I think fully half of these posts must have started out there and here we go with another…

There was a post late last night from a teacher who was finding it difficult to teach ICT. Pupils assuming they can come into a lesson and play Flash games, check email, etc. I’m sure all ICT teachers have seen that, but I think that for most it isn’t a huge problem (or it hasn’t been allowed to be a huge problem, I should say). Problems holding their attention was another difficulty cited and the first couple of posts (apparently not everyone is up as early as me this morning) talked about the boring nature of the National Strategy. Me, I’ve been up half the night (kids, blech!) and so my response turned into a bit of a rant.

I talked about a lot of the simple ideas I’ve used to make ICT more interesting. Instead of competing with Miniclip and MSN, why not use what the kids are interested in to hold their attention? I don’t mean bribe them with games, not by a long way. I know far too many ICT teachers that do this and it drives up the wall. What I mean is do things that are interesting.

Kids really don’t care about how much it costs to put on a school disco (7.4). I’m hoping they’ll have more fun next term when I have them pricing up sofas, pool tables and PS2s (should that be PS3s?) for a youth club. Still a bit dull on the face of it, but show me a kid who can resist flicking through the Argos catalogue and I’ll show you a kid in need of a big hug.

Instead of making a website about the school (8.2) or a PowerPoint about themselves (7.1), why not get them to make a PowerPoint about wild animals for their Y5 bretheren back at the Primary Schools? Why not get them to make a website for one of their clubs, groups, bands, etc? Why not get them to make a showcase for their Art work - take some still and video cameras up there and get some multimedia content.

Instead of filling in worksheets about communication methods (GNVQ), why not get them to make an advert for a mobile phone company, an office training video or a stop-motion animation?

The list goes on and on, A colleague of mine was desperate to get her Y9 pupils to really understand how attachments work on email in preparation for the QCA tests so they spent an hour drawing silly pictures and emailing them to each other. They had a great time and actually got the idea for how to attach and access files sent along with emails. Something obvious to us but actually quite difficult for a lot of kids.

My point is (and I’m aware I’m preaching to the converted) that we have so many tools at our disposal that it is criminal to allow them to learn Office for 5-7 years and call it ICT. No wonder pupils get bored and fed up with that. Using the Internet to teach yourself sign language is much more fun and probably more educational than making yet another poster in Publisher [spit].

My 6th formers are bored.

I’m not, but there are utterly fed up at the minute. We’re working through the Edexcel GCE in Applied ICT Unit 2 which is all about transactional websites - structure, backoffice, security, databases…

This should be an interesting unit. Not setting the world on fire perhaps but there is plenty of scope in there to actually gain some understanding and insight into how the Internet works and what effects it has. In practice though I briefly run through the necessary bits that apply directly to the coursework mark scheme and set them going. I write step-by-step instructions for importing data into a database because otherwise I’d end up holding twelve different hands. Unfortunately it seems I’m still going to have to do the hand holding as they seem incapable of folling the instructions. We had a week to do this and we haven’t managed it. If I want to teach them how to build a database for themselves I would need more than 2.5 hours to do it and my coursework deadline slips another week.

This isn’t just in AS Applied ICT. I’m suffering exactly the same with my 3 GCSE classes. I’m running through spreadsheets with Year 11s but I don’t feel I’m actually teaching them anything, just getting them through the coursework.

We spend:

• 2 weeks identifying the problem
• 2 weeks analysing the solution
• 3 weeks designing the solution
• 2 weeks building the solution
• 2 weeks documenting the solution
• 2 weeks evaluating the solution

So in a 14 week term we spend 2 weeks actually building a solution and the rest of it writing. There is only 1 week for ’slippage’ so there is constant pressure from the very start. If I thought I would get away with it I would seriously consider providing the majority of the writeup myself and spending the time actually teaching the pupils how to use ICT, discussing whether ICT is actually the best solution, all that crazy crap I believed in before I actually started teaching.

They’ve even taken Year 9 away from me now. I’ve spent the whole of the first term on a revised Theme Park Project aimed at preparing pupils for the QCA Test. There’s no ability for me to do what I want to do, or what the kids will enjoy doing. In Years 7 & 8 I can sneak in comic books, video editing, voice recording and lots of other fun stuff. As soon as we hit Y9 it’s so utterly, utterly dull and uninspired that it hurts. I can try the odd lesson here and there but all I seem to hear from above is statistics, comparisons, FFT data, ALIS data… No wonder I overhear Y12 students advising Y11s not to take ICT because “it’s shit”. No wonder the numbers signing up at KS4 & KS5 are falling. No wonder the Computing course won’t exist next year (2 students at AS just doesn’t justifythe cost of running the course).
Hopefully the new iMedia course we may (but may not) be starting next year will help. Hopefully the budget will allow me to replace some of the ageing iMac G3s and roll out iLife across the whole suite. Hopefully I can find another idea to replace the PPT part of the GCSE course.

And hopefully I can manage to convince at least one pupil that computers are about more than word processing and taking screenshots.

I’m in a bad mood tonight. Actually, make that a stressed mood.

My Y11 GCSE pupils are slipping behind our, admittedly tight, timescale to get Project 3 done before the mock exams. One of them has just left for 2 weeks in the sun, he’ll be back 3 days before the hand-in deadline. He’s only 2 weeks behind (at the moment). Another one sat there for an hour after school, supposedly catching up on the work he should have done 4 weeks ago. After the hour he asked if he could go and was astounded when I said no because he hadn’t actually done anything. It’s unbelievable that when informed he wasn’t going anywhere until the target we agreed was met he did the work in a very literal 5 minutes. Actually it isn’t unbelievable at all, it was a trivial amount of work and the pupil in question is undoubtedly bright enough to be forging ahead with the top of the bunch.

My GNVQ class on the other hand don’t appear to realise that the work they are doing has any actual impact on their final results at all. They’re raving because they got their certificates through this week for their first unit. Lots of them got a distinction and the rest got merits. And yet they’ll turn up, fart around for half an hour, ignore me when I ask them to put their name on their work before they print it out and then carry on their conversations while I turn into Stressed Eric.

I seriously considered just leaving them to it, and collecting the grade they deserve, but would that do any good? They’d blame me for that, for not teaching them properly (technically they’d have a point but I’m in a mood so it doesn’t count). And yet sometimes they follow the subtleties of cause and effect incredibly well. They are quite capable of grasping that when I break tasks down for them and provide written, rather than verbal, feedback it makes life easier and they get better marks. I don’t even need to tell them that, they tell me! And yet lately they seem to be obstinately ignoring that fact. They seem to deliberately wind me up in lessons, which makes me less effective and therefore less helpful. This winds them up further and so the cycle continues. Somehow this cause and effect seems to pass them by.
I tell them that I know the train from London to Oxenholme leaves from London Euston and is a Virgin Train because my family comes from the Lakes and I’m over there all the time. I tell them that they could get the train on a Friday evening and stay over in a hotel rather than setting off at midnight on a GNER from Kings Cross and having a 6 hour layover in Norfolk. And yet I end up with 12 unique, and yet uniformly crap documents. None of which has a name and one of which suggests that the travellers in the scenario who work in London should set off from Newcastle, fly to Bradford and get a taxi to their final (and yet cunningly undisclosed) destination.

Anyway, I have a printer today (for the first time this year!) which means I could get their work printed out. Now, instead of having to spend 5 minutes looking over each pupils’ shoulder at their work and just about getting round the class in a lesson I can spend an hour doing it at home, give them their written feedback and chunked targets. If it means 2 stress reduced hours (one at home, one at school) rather than one stressed and unproductive one then it’s worth it in the long run. I wonder how long it’ll take them to notice…

An ocdcasional Monty Python reference is inevitable I’m afraid, sorry

I am thoroughly fed up with spam at the minute. On this blog I get the occasional spammy trackback, usually one of these cryptic ones where it’s hard to actually see the benefit for the spammer. What really annoys me is that over the last few days I’ve had over 60 spam trackbacks on my pupil blog. And not just common-or-garden spam trackbacks but really nasty gay porn type trackbacks.

Of course I can delete it, and I’m old enough and big enough to filter out the nasty stuff in my own head, but the poor 11 year old kids who log on to write about what their doing only to find that some *£%$ has essentially vandalised their work with obscene references are going to end up traumatised.

I’ve now expanded the blacklist fairly dramatically but I’m actually quite disheartened at the amount of time I’m having to spend going through and deleting 20 spam trackbacks. It seems B2E can only mass-delete comments when they’re from the same domain. I will stick with it though, I must stick with it

#spam, spam, spam, spammety, spammey spam…

Another posts that follows a thread on the TES Forums tonight. Someone was asking for some examples of common misconceptions (GTP assignment, and a fairly standard question). In response I left a list of genuine and slightly more caustic suggestions. Others followed up with some even better suggestions and I have shamelessly stolen those as well. Rather than attributing comments to individuals, assume the best ones are stolen

Happy Hippy’s Pupil Guide to ICT Lessons

The ICT suite is a special place in your school. It is a sanctuary where the normal rules do not apply. As you will see, the ICT suite is a bastion of chaos and a source of never-ending entertainment. With a little care and attention you can make ICT lessons something to look forward to, despite the best intentions of any teachers or other meddling adults. Follow the simple instructions below and you will find that school actually can be fun. Who would have believed it?!

Part 1 - Essential Equipment

The Scouts’ motto is ‘Always Be Prepared’. And possibly something about a Dib-Dab. Two great ideas if you ask me. Planning is essential so you must make sure you have all of your necessary equipment with you. For asuccessful ICT lesson you will need the following items:

• Fizzy drinks, preferably the sticky sugary kind. Coke and Sunny Delight are good examples. Energy drinks such as Red Bull and Kick can be useful too.
• Sweets - a combination of sticky and hard. Lollipops are great for damaging equipment and those little necklace bead thingies make fantastic weapons.
• A USB pen - great for all kinds of mischief. You can load them up before hand with MP3s and flash games in case you get bored, load them up during lessons with other people’s MP3s and flash games or you can even try some really clever stuff to do with ‘boot options’ which I’ll talk about later on (and no, I don;t mean Doctor Martens v Caterpillars).
• A bag, and ideally a big one. Big enough to fit a keyboard in, or even a monitor if you’re feeling lucky. Stick to flatscreens though, the big ones are just too heavy and bulky.
• A mobile phone. Your school may have banned the use of mobile phones under the pretence that you don’t need them , they are a distraction and they can be stolen. Don’t fall for this, it is part of the conspiracy intended to keep you from having any freedom. Teachers want to control things, including you phoning your mate during his Geography lesson, arranging alibis for skiving off by text message and recording teachers when they get really radged. It is therefore essential that your phone can record audio and video. It should also have Bluetooth. One tip though - you can give your phone a name, but don’t name it ‘Paul’s phone’ (well, not if you;re called Paul. If you;re called Georgina or Andrew this might not be such a bad idea. In fact if there is a Paul in your class that you hate then go for it). Some teachers have been known to use Bluetooth on their computers to scan for other devices and using your name is a dead giveaway. More on this later.
• Muddy trainers - you should always have a pair of disgustingly muddy trainers with you at all times. Keep them in your bag, it doesn;t matter if they get mud all over your exercise books, it can actually be used to help hide the fact that you did your homework on the bus into school this morning, resting on that ugly kid’s head. That’s assuming you were daft enough to actually do your homework.

Once you have your equipment you’ll need to know how to use it, so tune in next time for part 2.