I Should Be Marking

Yesterday I attended an iMedia training day, mostly aimed at those planning to deliver the course form next year. As we’re halfway through the year with our first cohort we thought it might be sensible to get some training and so we spent some time with the Chief Moderator, Kevin Wells, as well as Alison Pearce, the head honcho.

It was my first formal training course for a specific qualification but I got the impression it was somewhat unusual. We got to ask direct questions to the two most important people, and were given direct responses. It seems that they have gone out of their way to make the course easy to manage without being a pain to assess or adminsiter (administrate?).

Most importantly, it seems that we’re delivering the course more or less right, but I thought some of you might appreciate a brief rundown of the topics covered. As such I’m going to take the unprecendented step of using the ‘more’ tag. If the world as we know ceases to exist, I most humbly apologise.

(more…)

Anybody out there heard of Creative Partnerships?

We have an ongoing relationship with them at school. They give us some money every year and we fund creativity in two ways. One is through one-off projects . This is what, apparently, most schools do with it. We also (and primarily) fund one year promoted posts. As previously mentioned, mine is related to getting pupils blogging, whilst others are promoting creativity in maths with low achievers, working on P4C (big questions), promoting competitive creativity online and encouraging creative writing.

Our big project for the year is the refugee bus. A trailer which aims to demonstrate to the pupils what it is like to arrive in a foreign country, not speaking the language and having to go through customs. The aim is for the kids to appreciate how traumatic the experience can be as well as learning about the difference between migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. We have a lot of prejudice bubbling under the surface I suspect, not helped by the national media.

My part in this was to take my Y8 bloggers who will be going through the experience next week and simply asking them “What is a refugee?”. The answers were fascinating. “Someone who travels around the world but has no identity”. “Someone who had to leave their country because of war”. “They’re a bit like a tramp, but the government gives them a house”.

I refused to tell them anything. Whether they were right in their assumptions, whether this person would be male or female, whether they would speak English, where they were from… Instead I told them to make up the details. They had to invent a refugee and describe who they were, and who they are now. As I said earlier, the results were fascinating.

One of the first pupils to name their refugee called him Mowglai. Another wanted to call her refugee Lloyd, because he didn’t have to be foreign. Two thirds went for male refugees, and two thirds went for non-European. One pupil had a refugee with a private jet who flies around the world staying in posh hotels. All very interesting.

Next week they’ll be posting about what they found out in the ‘bus’, with a further, conclusive post a week or two later. Fascinating stuff and it really makes me want to do more of this stuff where we challenge the way kids think rather than just teaching them how to make PowerPoints about theme parks.

To visit the blogs themselves (and PLEASE leave some comments), go to egglescliffeblogs.org.uk 

So, I’m now the resident blogging Tsar in school and as such I really ought to be getting pupils blogging. Just before we broke up for Christmas I got two of my Y7 classes to write an introductory blog post, having watched “Blogs in Plain English”. This week I also got a Year 8 class to do the same.

In order to help those with weaker literacy skills, and to improve the general structure of the blog entries I’ve come up with a very basic writing frame:

• What the post is about - a one sentence introduction
• What happened - a description of the events
• Why it mattered - how it made you feel, what it made you think, how your view/opinion/attitude changed

Has anyone come up with a better/more comprehensive guide or writing frame?

I’ve held everything in moderation for the time being so we can examine the quality and structure first, but the resulting posts will appear at the Blogs @ Egglescliffe site shortly and I hope you’ll offer comments and encouragement to the pupils.

Well, it made me laugh anyway…

[slideshare id=194611&doc=mount-grace-priory-1196970055611422-4&w425 width=318 height=270]

Today my Head of Department and I took a group of 17 iMedia students out to a local English Heritage site (Mount Grace Priory) to take some photographs for the Level 2 Unit 1 (digital images).

I’m not really involved in that unit as I’m focussing on Unit 6 (digital video) but as I understand it they’ve been examining the Passionate People, Passionate Places documentsand have been runnning through some tutorials in order to emulate the. Using the photos we took today they’re hoping to create a designset of documents to advertise the site.

The pupils were excellently behaved and took some really great photos. Sadly, due to a lack of foresight on my part, we ran low on batteries and the slideshow above was taken using my VGA cameraphone.

Expect to see the finished results on the iMedia blog in the near future.

As part of my new officially snactioned blogging spree I’ve created yet another blog - similar in ways to my Thunks blog but with a slightly different emphasis.

Where Thunks are about considering the world we live in and the ways in which we can ask questions, Deep Thought is more introspective and is aimed at investigating how we feel about the world we live in.

My first entry is a video about the Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of Earth taken from a distance of approximately 4 billion miles. Does it make us feel insignificant? Hopeful? Useless? Guilty?

Why?

To add your thoughts or to read the thoughts of others, follow this link. And please take part - as always.

I found this on Alex Savage’s blog (CommunICTy) and thought it was wonderful:
[slideshare id=85551&doc=death-by-powerpoint4344&w=425]

I can see me using that with my Y8 class tomorrow…

So, having played with a iPod Touch (far too media based, sadly - but very cool!) and an iPhone (I actually thought it was another iPod Touch at first) I’m definitely steering away from Apple.

So it came down to either a Nokia N800 (not a phone, Linux (Debian based) OS and around £175 ex. VAT) or an HTC P3450 Touch (’tis a phone, runs Windows Mobile 6 and is around £208 ex. Vat). It was a tough decision and I’m still not sure I shouldn’t have gone for a traditional Axim-like PDA but in the long term I can see SMT using VoIP as a cheap method of internal communication - maybe even IM’ing each other during tedious meetings!

Ultimately the HTC uses a tried and tested OS for which I know I can get the applications I need, plus I can use it as a phone when the need arises. I know it’ll work with Excel and Word and I know my existing PocketPC apps should install easily. The lack of knowledge about what software I can definitely get for the Nokia worries me enough to over-rule my idealism of running an open-source operating system.

So, assuming the order goes through, I’ll let you know how things work out.

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’ve been thinking a bit more about PDAs and thought I would share/reflect for a bit. Apologies if this rambles - I’m in that sort of a mood today.

Registers - At the moment I need to either ferry my laptop across the school twice a day for registration, or try and commit it to memory AND remember to submit the details electornically later. Suffice to say I’m not the most popular member of staff with the front office right now. A wifi enabled PDA would definitely help.

AfL - A colleague of mine makes quick notes in his planner during lessons (it could be a simple traffic light for effort or attainment in a specific area). I’ve tried taking a more batch-like approach at the end of each day but this takes up a minimum of 20-30 minutes and means I can’t grab those members of staff who slope off fairly quickly and it means I have to try and remember the events of the day for hours at a time. With a PDA would it be easier to make a quick note as I walk round? Easier than picking up my paper-based planner? Maybe…

Contact - I read one blog (which I now, of course, cannot find) which described the process of setting up a number of smartphones to be given to SMT/SLT which could be used to help them keep in contact throughout the day. This is far beyond the scope of what I can do with one handset but it’s an interesting idea

Style - If I was to go for this idea, then what style of PDA would I want? One that looks like a phone (e.g. Nokia N95), on that looks like a ‘traditional’ PDA (e.g. iPhone, XDA, MDA, iPaq, etc.) or more of a blackberry style? I have to say I’d prefer the ‘traditional’ look with a large slab of touchscreen and very little else.

Blogging - How could I use this device to aid my new blogging/creative teacher post? Well, I could blog from anywhere - but I’m very rarely away from a desktop or laptop anyway. I could prowl the corridors, looking for unsuspecting pupils to be coerced into writng something - but almost all rooms have a computer in them anyway and expecting a child to quickly formulate reflective, insightful thoughts AND get to grips with either an onscreen keyboard or handwriting recognition simultaneously would be pushing it I think. And getting somehting with a built in keyboard would mean either a blackberry styled device or somehting with a slideout/clip-on qwerty keyboard.

Would I want it to be a phone or is that unimportant? Well, originally it was the phone/PDA combination that kicked the whole idea off, and it would save on having to find another phone and carry another device. I don’t think I can justify making it a requirement though, especially if it’s not coming from my own budget. And SIM-free phones are much harder/more expensive to come by.

Lots of thoughts, but no decision as yet. On major sticking point is the price of these things. I’m too polite to ask for a budget but the £4-500 devices are surely well out of the question, especially as I’m due a new MacBook next year as well.

The contemplation continues…