I Should Be Marking

Back in September, the school found out there was some funding available via an organisation called LSIS for a project to raise achievement at KS5. One of my English colleagues approached me and proposed a more engaging VLE-type experience as his students sometimes find Moodle a little dry and institutional.

We’ve now got the go ahead, and some funding, to implement something. Having had a sit down with my visionary colleague, he’d like the students to see a classroom with, say, a bookshelf where all of the books link to resources and the posters link to activities, etc.

Options? I could create a simple HTML or Flash front-end that would point to Moodle activities or resources. This would be pretty obvious and I think the students would see through it fairly quickly.

At the other end, I could code my own CMS from scratch. By mid-January. In my spare time *fnarr*.

Somewhere in the middle I could choose a simple CMS and skin it to hell, or maybe even try with Moodle. Necessary features would be:

• Login (for tracking use)
• Resource hosting (textual & multimedia)
• Student communication (either a forum, IMs or both)
• Web conferencing capabilities (almost certainly linked to a 3rd party, maybe DimDim)
• Setting and Uploading work, ideally with the capability to provide feedback

I also considered Edmodo, which would meet some or all of the criteria above – but isn’t customisable in terms of appearance and therefore doesn’t provide the GUI that is required.

Thoughts? Ideas? Opinions?

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 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.

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?

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…

Here’s a new one. The kid who nearly fainted at the prospect of giving a paired talk to 20 other pupils back in Year 10 (not helped when I dropped my cue cards and picked them up in the wrong order – and my partner had a pronounced stammer) not only got into a career where he has to stand up at talk in front of dozens (hundreds, during assemblies) of people every day – now he’s gone and booked himself a gig taking a 15 minute conference session!

Oh. Dear. God. What have I done? Actually, I know perfectly well what I have done – I said yes before I had time to seriously consider it, it was the only way.

Now I’ve never been to a conference, not even as a delegate. So I’ve never seen a 15 minute session before. What the hell do I do? Watching TED Talks hasn’t helped, I now want to curl up in a foetal ball until the world goes away as I’ll never live up to that standard!

The topic is ‘collaboration’ and I think I’ll start with Google Docs (showing my ‘Techy Tips…‘ presentation) and having seen this amazing piece of work, I think I might go on to VoiceThread.

There are also blogs, wikis, etherpad, twiddla, collaborative mind maps, posterous, delicious, diigo, collaboration for students, collaboration for teachers… – but I only have 15 minutes and don’t want to overwhelm people.

Maybe I should get some students to make a ‘collaboration in plain english’ video

Anyways – ideas, help, support, platitudes, cliches and offers of rehabilitation after the event would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime I feel the need for a good lie down.

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!

AUPs are signed, accounts set up and students are now posting at the Egglescliffe Student Blogs site. Only two posts so far, one of which was held back until personal blogs start going live after Easter, but a little over a dozen students are poised and ready to report on the latest goings on.

Why run around trying to get the latest gossip from individual departments when you can get the puils to do it for you!?!

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.