Learning, Teaching and ICT

This is a very quick post to try out audiopal .  I’ve just seen it mentioned in twitter by someone I follow (he also happens to be a colleague at work – thanks Malcolm!)

What a great find! The audio below was made by Marlene – the Depute Head at Carronshore Primary (where I’m seconded from). She’s talking about her first experience at a TeachMeet event.

I made a small change to the embed code to increase the size of the widget – but it worked fine the way it was.

Have a listen – it took minutes to upload the mp3 file and receive the embed code via email.

At the beginning of this session, I submitted a number of CPD ‘twighlight’ courses that I planned to present to teachers here who were willing to give up two hours of their own time after a day at school. This is quite a responsibility, I think, because I didn’t want teachers to go away believing that:

“ Well that was ok –  but I could probably have spent that time doing something more productive”

I know that I’ve attended quite a few of those sort of CPD sessions in my time

I wanted to hear the, ” Thanks for that – I feel that I could use some of these ideas tomorrow in my class” type of comment. I was delighted, therefore, that this was exactly the reaction I got from the last two sessions I provided. The first session was on Digital Storytelling. I’ve included a slideshare version of the handouts I provided for the session. 

Producing something like this before a CPD session helps me to focus on what it is I’m trying to portray – the theory behind the practice sort of research. Being seconded, however, means that I usually have practical examples to show. The short ’story’ below, for instance, was made by the primary 7 children after a class trip. They were faced with a number of potentially dangerous scenarios and this helped them to become more aware of  water safety, fire safety, first aid, safety with animals, food safety, etc.  When we returned to school they were asked to use the pictures taken during the day as prompts to remind them of what was learned. A digital story resulted …. well it wasn’t what we called it at the time – but it almost fits the definition??

Untitled from Education Services on Vimeo.

 This was just one of the examples I was able to show. There are lots more on our class blog ….perhaps another good reason for keeping a blog – a record of what has been covered / learned etc. in class

One of the things that surprised me during the CPD session, however, was the interest in my wordle pic I’d used on one of the powerpoint slides:

 We spent a fair amount of time exploring http://www.wordle.net/ and looking and the great possibilities for interesting ways of using it in class.

Because of the interest shown, I made sure that ‘wordle’ was included in the next CPD session on ‘motivating learners through the use of freely available online tools’. I decided to focus on just a few so that they wouldn’t be too overwhelmed.

 The handout for that session is included here.

I sensed that the teachers were interested in what I was saying and, as a result, I went off on a tangent (once more!) and introduced them to a number of other tools. At the time, I worried that I was going too fast too quickly and had possibly bombarded them with too much information – I even pointed them in the direction of  http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/ . I think this is a fantastic resource, but can find it overwhelming sometimes

At the end of the CPD session I was  pleasantly surprised again, though, by the feedback – especially the verbal comments as people were leaving. A few of them stopped to thank me, and the impression I got was that, although they felt a bit ’snowed under’  they valued the many practical examples of how I’d used most of the tools mentioned in my own practice.

Last week, Ollie Bray came to Falkirk to talk to a small group about Internet Safety and Responsible Use. I really enjoyed listening to what Ollie had to say, especially his views on raising awareness on how the web works (with teachers and parents/carers, as well as students) and about taking responsibility to protect reputations online.

We discussed how children as young as Primary 4/5 stages are now using social network sites like Bebo and MySpace. These sites are not accessible to children in our Local Authority. Staff members, however, can access the sites after bypassing a warning message that they can proceed to the website at their own discretion. Although twitter was also mentioned, it was more in a ‘while we’re on the subject’ sort of sideways conversation. 

When I came home, however, I was surprised to read Anna’s new post about twitter  and her thoughts about how ” it’s becoming the new bebo,myspace etc“. I’ve since been followed on my own twitter account by seven of my ex Carronshore bloggers and this has got me thinking about social networks in general.

When I received Anna’s request to follow me on twitter (my account was locked for a short time – but that’s another story), I thought long and hard about the ethics and whether or not this was acceptable. I remember creating a Bebo account in the past to allow me to keep tracks on my No.3 son while he roamed about Canada on a gap year. At the time some Primary 7 girls must have tracked me down on there and I noticed the requests. I (tactfully?) explained to the girls that this would not be appropriate …. so why the change of heart now that the same thing has happened on twitter?

I’ll try to analyse my thinking here:

• My Bebo site was set up for personal reasons and I was a bit taken aback when the girls (very innocently) requested to follow me. We had shared exchanges online before via the class blog and their individual blogs, as well as this blog, but crossing that line to a ’social network’ site was  definate ‘no no’ at the time. The very thought of us exchanging correspondence out of the public eye just seemed instinctively wrong to me. Actually, it wouldn’t  have made a difference if the sites were public – I would still have felt uncomfortable.
• My twitter site, on the other hand, was set up initially for CPD purposes. A quick look back at my twitter account origin reveals that the people I first followed were already authors of educational blogs. I was a regular reader of  John’s, David’s, Neil’s, David’s and Ewan’s among others and they were all twitter users, so I thought I’d give it a go.
• I was amazed at the CPD opportunities that twitter offered and blogged about it on a number of occasions on here. And it may even have been similar CPD prospects that helped me decide (not lightly, I might add!) to allow the ex Carronshore bloggers to follow me – and why I feel comfortable following them back.
•   I feel that I know these students well. When I received the ‘follow’ invites from Anna, Nina, Bethany, Rhiann,  Jaydean, Marc and Ryan I remembered the Blog posts and wiki stories we shared. I’ve blogged on a number of occasions about the change in the classroom climate that was brought about by this sharing. There was a level of trust involved in the set up – but the advantages outweighed any risks
•  A significant difference between bebo, etc and twitter is that twitter is somehow more accepted in educational circles. Twitter is less likely to be blocked by Local Education Authorities…. and even the CPD Scotland Team encourage its use :-)

Anyway, it seems that Anna has started an ’ex Carronshore students’  blogging trend …. I hope it continues. It would be great to read more posts from them

 I’m now three quarters of the way through my secondment as an ICT Curriculum Support Teacher (the title has been changed to ’support teacher’ from ’support officer’ recently – I think I prefer the new one). During this second half of the secondment, I’ve felt much more confident addressing adults during CPD sessions. This was one of the biggest challenges in the early days.

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that I feel more comfortable in this role now is because I have more ownership over the courses and activities on offer. Although I was able to introduce some new CPD courses during the first year of the secondment (almost all of these were a direct result of being introduced to new websites and ideas via twitter, by the way!), many of the courses were inherited. This was mainly due to the timing of the interview, as it was necessary to have some courses in place before a candidate for the post was chosen. In fact, apart from the job of supporting staff in developing their school website and maintaining the Virtual Teacher Centre (both the pupil and the staff side), everything else has been designed by me – and I’ve really appreciated opportunity!

 As well as offering CPD courses on setting up and sustaining class blogs and raising awareness of free online tools to enhance learning and teaching, I’ve been involved in a number of interesting projects. One of these is an on-going pilot project with a group of children in a local primary school. I’ve set up ePortfolios for them, and in February I have a meeting with the Art Department in their feeder High School to discuss the possibility of developing this in to something that might help the primary/secondary transition stage. Hopefully, other departments will get involved as well. It’s very early days, but the eportfolios also have great potential for formative assessment, as well as self and peer assessment opportunities. Difficulties of setting up effective Personal Learning Plans may also be addressed. I do realise that, for this to work properly, it needs to be an Authority wide initiative. A long term strategy is required …. but it’s a start

Off On A Tangent!

….. just because it’s my blog and I can

It still amazes me that I’d scarcely heard of a blog until just over three years ago. I’ve written on here before about how I set off on a journey that would change my approach to learning and teaching. The journey also gave me the confidence to allow children to take more of a lead in their own learning. I’ve copied this brief summary from elsewhere on here:

• First I created a Class Blog so that I could give the pupils an audience for their work
• Very soon after creating the class blog, I realised that it was important to allow access to the children’s own work so I created a wikispace for the class to post their writing
• This didn’t work well, because if we all logged on and edited the space at the same time, problems occured (a “someone else is editing this space” message)
• I later discovered that Wikispaces will set up separate username and passwords for students if you email them the information required
• Soon I wanted the children to have their own blogs, but still have control over how they were used. I learned that East Lothian could help me set up individual blogs .
• The next session, I managed to safely set up individual blogs on my own ……  I found out about the ‘Gmail+’ trick. For example, If you have a ‘yourname@gmail.com’ account, it’s possible to create lots of new blogs using that same e-mail address. You can do this by creating new blogs with a ‘yourname+student1@gmail’ , ‘yourname+student2@gmail’ etc.
• One advantage is that, although the pupils have admin rights, the teacher can also login to the blogs at any time.
• Another advantage is that any comments appear in the teacher’s gmail account – even although the children can moderate them, the teacher has a record of what has appeared
• It’s quite easy to keep track of what is being posted on the children’s blogs by using ‘google reader’, or something similar

One thing I miss while on secondment is the relationships that are built up with children in your own class. So I was delighted, recently, when Anna contacted me on ths blog by leaving a comment on my last post. She’s now in second year at High School, and has decided that she would like to start using her blog again. It was a simple enough task to transfer it over to primaryblogger (where there’s loads of space and a guarantee of no ads). I’m really glad that she wants to do this, and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting one of my favourite blog posts. Anna wrote this in primary 7 (two years go) and it still makes me smile ….. and she kept her promise of writing her ‘thought of the day’ posts regularly. She also inspired others in the class (including me!) to keep their blogs going at the time: 

 ”Well basically I’ve decided that I would like to have a future in blogging! I think that blogs are interesting and fun to write things on rather than writing something on paper. My thoughts for today are that blogs are a great way to learn, they are more interesting than doing something on  paper. When I’m older I think that I might do something to do with computers. I’m going to be starting a thing on my blog called thought of the day! Thought of the day is when I write a post about something I have realised, thought or discovered on that day.”

So thanks to Anna’s decision to take up blogging again, she has inspired me (just like before) to write a blog post. It always feels like work at the time, but it certainly helps – me anyway – to stay focussed