I am in charge of flexible learning days at our school. We are halfway through year 1, but am already trying to plan out Y2 and address issues from Y1. Due to a desire from staff to have more time with their option groups at KS4/5, I need some ideas for themed based days for KS3. So have ‘borrowed’ the Curriculum Catalyst idea from Tom Barrett and used google moderator as a way of geting ideas. So if yo have any suggestions please click here and add them to the list.
Today the very popular website wordle, was not available. Some bloke decided that using the name was a copyright infringement see freetech4teachers , #savewordle and pheinblog: Wordle is in Trouble to see the back story. Now, I like using wordle, it has created some excellent posters for my class. However, the world of twitter seems very quick to react to events now rather than reflect. I remember a ‘reaction’ a while ago about the injustice of a chap who got arrested for handing in a gun to the police that he had ‘found’. Twitter was in uproar, tweets were flying all over the place about how ridiculous that was… eventually the full facts came out and they weren’t as they were first portrayed. The same, albeit less dramatic happened with wordle. As you can see from the #savewordle link people (even now – 21.20) are tweeting about saving wordle, when if you click on this link you’ll see it is back up and running.
Now don’t get me wrong, I applaud the support that has been given to Jonathan Feinberg in supporting wordle, but aren’t we in danger of jumping on bandwagons too quickly without a bit of reflection first. Twitter, is very instantaneous, and when you have tweeted, it is very difficult to ‘untweet’. Maybe its just me, but a little reflection is probably worth it in the long run.
This link (ICT Strategy) is my quick thoughts on what Moodle, Mahara and SLG gives our school. This is stage 1 of sorting out a strategy to present to SLT to try and get the ball rolling again. If you have a look at it and think there are any obvious mistakes, omissions or you have any thing else to add, please do so via comments. Many thanks in advance.
Have spent the morning creating a simple(ish) tutorial, showing the basics of Mahara. Have used wink, because it is easy to use. Still not 100% happy with result, but think it will suffice for now. Found out a few interesting things whilst making the tutorial. The main one being that you need to be careful in the type of group you create. The one I created for the iMedia course was open access. This meant that anyone who joined the group had the ability to edit and delete the views I had created….ouch. So have now changed it so that I have to add the users to the group. This gives me to great features:
1. The students can only ‘view’ the content
2. They can submit their own views to the group for assessment.
The second option is great, although I now have to work out how work will be assessed. Do I continue to use moodle or change to mahara? I think I am more likely to stick with moodle for assessing key components of their coursework and get them (students) to submit ‘views’ of completed pieces of coursework. This work would be the final piece of work, after it had been assessed in moodle. Students would also be able to showcase key pieces of work as well.
We are currently about finishing Unit 1 and Unit 20 with our first cohort of students on the OCR Nationals L2 ICT course. As it is our first full year through we have been a bit traditional and all their work is being printed out and to be honest I am shocked at the amount of paper we are getting through. So with a new scheme of learning created for the current Y9 and Y10 I am hoping to do away with paper versions of their work and instead create e-portfolios. My original idea was to do this using Mediator. It is a fantastic bit of software and all the kids can use it quite easily. However, storage is an issue at our school and the kids are forever running out of space. So I wanted a ‘cloud’ option. I thought Mahara would be an excellent option, but we are still having teething problems with getting it networked. All their work is currently being uploaded to moodle, where we can easily assess it but it’s not really an ‘e-portfolio’. So I am now at cunning plan number 3…Prezi.
Prezi has become available free for all educational establishments. It is a fun and unique way of doing presentations. But what it also does is allow you to upload work in the form of pdfs, images and videos(flv). Now I have a means for all the students to create funky , individual e-portfolios which are stored online, but which can also be downloaded as a flash presentation when completed.
The issues:
All students work needs to be converted to pdf. Not a problem if you have office 2007.
All videos need to be converted to flv. Youconvertit seems to work wonders
A 30 slide presentation on internet research takes a while to arrange in prezi.
Using the path tool in prezi to create a journey through the work is also time consuming
Here is an example of a Unit 1 e-portfolio prezi.
As you can see, it takes a while to go through all the evidence. However, I think I have a cunning plan for that as well…use something like wink to record the evidence rather than loads of screenshots. This can then be converted to an FLV and then uploaded. This way, the Prezi e-portfolio solution could be used for a variety of different units. So far I have managed to get my Y10 class to create the layout and design for their e-portfolios. Once all their work has been signed off and they are happy, I hope to get all of their work uploaded.
A recent phenomenon has been sweeping the teaching twitter community – #movemeon. This is a concept created by Doug Belshaw to allow teachers to pass on hints, tips and advice via twitter, with the hastag movemeon as a way of consolidating the info. More info can be found at Doug’s Blog. The results are fantastic and visible tweets shows them off really well.
I was thinking that #revisontips might be another great way of sharing hints and tips, but this time aimed at our pupils. If we use it in the same way as the #movemeon tag, and have the same response….our pupils will obtain a fantastic resource.
A while back we had the pleasure of Jason Bangbala for INSET. He is an ‘expert’ in behavior management, although he wisely states that nobody can actually claim that status.
His delivery style is pretty much stand up comedian, with lots of anecdotal stories. The best thing about the whole day was that you didn’t feel like you were being preached too, but instead given a refresher course on behavior management and common sense.
If you decided to take on board his strategies it was easy to see how they could have an impact. Some of his statements were obviously going to make some staff feel uncomfortable.
For me the most powerful message he gave is below.
“The zone of influence are all those you can influence to have a positive impact on pupil performance like having positive relationships, establishing ground rules, having clear instructions, making lessons interesting and engaging, being assertive, praising, rewarding etc.
The zone of control are those things beyond your control that you have no influence on such as class sizes, time of the lessons, where they live, what their diet they eat, how long you have been teaching them, whether they have learning difficulties, what their family background is etc.
The most effective staff will focus on the zone of influence and look at things they can do to make an impact.
The least effective staff will look at the zone of concern as they will make excuses that the reason why pupils perform the way they do is beyond their control and has nothing to do with their attitude and skills.
For me the zone of influence is the key because in the vast majority of cases the same pupils with the same baggage will significantly perform differently from one member of staff to another. It is therefore our competence that is the biggest factor in pupil performance. This is where the quote of the teacher as the decisive element is the basis of everything.”
However, some of his other hints and tips are also powerful tools in dealing with behaviour management…
Praise, praise, praise and more praise. Do not underestimate the power of praise. Praise has a massive impact on behaviour management and pupil self esteem. You cannot praise too much. For some reason the British psyche is set up to be critical first….this is a shame. If your Head of Dept or Head teacher told you how well you were doing, would you like that? would you want it to occur infrequently?…its the same with our kids. Use postcards, stamps, tell them… but back it up. Kids aren’t stupid, make sure your praise has meaning and purpose
“What should you be doing?” – use this instead of “what are you doing?”..the second statement will probably get an honest answer rather than the pupil going back on task. I have used this lots and it works everytime
Maybe…but. Pupils making silly statements… Maybe that’s true, BUT I’d like you to get on with your work…
There are lots more..I will probably add them in time, but to be honest I do not do Jason justice. Your best bet is to get him into your school. It is one of the most influential INSETS I have attended. If you want more info go to his website.
Twitter is fantastic. Today, one of my Yr 12 students asked if I knew where he could get some Royalty free music for his iMedia coursework. Normally, I would have gone to google and done the usual searches, or told him to do the same. This time I tried twitter. One simple request and over the next few hours I gathered a few very good websites. The results I have posted below.
These are all fantastic websites where you can either access free material or purchase large quantities of Royalty free music which can then be stored locally. The only downside I have is that because most of these sites offer a download as an MP3 our Internet Provider (SWGFL) filters the download. So pupils have to access it from home and then bring it in. This is irritating.
Can I once again thank all the people/companies that responded to my quest. As a weird side effect to the request, I have had a few new followers, all music related. :)
I have been using Moodle at our school for about 2 years now. I like it and have spent a lot of time learning how to use it. However I am finding it difficult to get the rest of the staff on board. I realise that time for training is an issue, but I also think that some of the functionality isn’t instinctive. The video below sort of sums up moodle at the moment (apologies for bad language at the beginning).
I have also just read the excellent article on different VLEs by @andykemp which can be found here . It raises some interesting questions regarding the VLE options as well as how best to integrate them into schools.
We went for Moodle, because we like to have control of the server, host locally and therefore be in control when or if it goes wrong. This has meant that one technician and I have had to learn shed loads to make sure it all runs smoothly. This is fine as long as neither of us goes…
I am also seeing lots of other VLE options appearing that look at lot more user friendly and give a lot of tech support. This will obviously come at a cost. But if staff can adopt it more easily and use it then it might well be worth it.
I didn’t manage to get the Moodlemoot09, so am so far unaware of the changes being developed for Moodle 2.0. I am hoping that it is going to be extremely user friendly and less ‘boxy’. When you have a VLE like edu2.0 saying ‘edu2.0 is like a Mac, Moodle is like a PC’ you have to wonder why. There are also other great VLE options that are easy and simple to use. I quite like edmodo and if I was a Primary school teacher I would defintely consider using it.
Frog, seems to be becoming the next big comercial VLE that people are talking about. I haven’t seen a demo, but the website looks fantastic and once again it look easy to use and can be hosted locally. So do you pay a technician to run moodle or pay Frog to run their VLE????
As a school we also use SLG to enable staff acess to SIMs. This will also be used as our parent and student gateway. I know that SLG has the potential to be a VLE. This may be a tad clunky, but at least the pupil info will seemlessly link with SIMs. Our Moodle is not yet linked with SIMs annd our MIS coordinator would rather it did. So would I. It would be great to assign sets to different course and if a pupil changed sets, it would be automatically picked up. Can moodle do this? Will Moodle do this?
So I am sort of sitting on a VLE fence. Should I stick with Moodle now and persevere with staff training and induction or go for an alternate option like frog or SLG?
