Learning, Teaching and ICT

 I’ve been writing …. and tweeting …… and talking for a while now about ePortfolios!

 I initially set them up for a few primary 6 stage children at Carronshore. Since then these children have helped some Primary 6s at Nethermains to set up one, too. The Nethermains group and their teacher are coming along to Carronshore tomorrow so that they can find out how easy it is to embed a Voki and Photopeach slideshow into their ePortfolio.

 I’ve also been sharing the idea with the teachers from the Art Department at the local High School and I’ve helped a small group of 4th year students to begin working on their own ePortfolio.

 When I mention this to others in my own Local Authority – and to others outwith the Authority – the first question I’m typically asked is : “So … what is an ePortfolio?”

I find the answer to this question difficult. I think it’s because when I first heard about the idea, I was so attracted to it that I began reading any available relevant literature. This led me to writing a blog post about what I understood about the concept … but I can’t regurgitate all the bullet points in that that post every time someone asks me to explain in a few sentences what I mean by an ePortfolio, so I’ve tried to reduce them again to get the main points (as I see them) across. 

1. What is an ePortfolio?:

• It’s a collection of student work that tells the story of the student’s efforts, progress, or achievements 

2. What should they look like?

• There should be evidence of self-reflection

3. What’s the teacher’s role?

• They need to plan carefully to provide clearly defined criteria 
• Effective feedback should be given to students, to encourage them to observe their own learning journey

4. What about the pupils?

• Comments should go beyond “I think I did OK” or ” I think I have more to learn.”
• Pupils should be monitoring their own learning so that they can adjust what they do when they perceive they are not understanding.

The next question that I need to prepare for is: ” How do you manage something like that?”

Whilst on secondment, I’ve only been able to ’play around’ with the idea and I’m looking forward to trialling it ‘for real’ when I return to the classroom in August. I’ve been very encouraged, however, by the motivation shown by the children I’ve helped set one up for so far. Because I set up the wikispace eportfolios, I receive an email every time a change is made to one of them.

Once you create an account, you can create more spaces with their own unique URLs. You can then invite others to become members of that new space by sending them an email.

One way to keep control over the new wikispaces you create, is to invite users using the ‘gmail trick’ method by adding a ‘+ name’ the first part of the email address.

The instructions in the slideshow below show the steps involved and describe how the same method can be used to create multiple  accounts in a variety of online tools.

 I only have a few ‘secondment’ months left. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and I’ve learned loads from it, too - once I found my feet -:)

Although my remit is to provide ICT support to all stages, it’s been mainly primary schools that have approached me directly. As I come from the primary sector anyway, this didn’t really surprise me. I’ve always been keen, though, to become more involved with high schools. I think this may be because of the interest I have in the transition stages between the two sectors.

I’ve tended to teach children in the upper stages of primary and in the past have set up individual blogs for the children. Although these were well used at the time, they tended to disappear in to the ether when the children moved on to high school

When I wrote a blog post about  ePortfolios, a comment by Ray Tolley helped me understand what had happened to the various online spaces I had set up for children in the past.

Ray commented:

“Perhaps one important point missed so far is about longevity. Having taken the trouble to help pupils build up an e-Portfolio, what happens if there is no ‘portability’ to the Secondary school or beyond? I doubt that promises of ‘interoperability’ will really materialise in the next 10-15 years! I think that it is very important to invest in a system that is future-proofed. I feel that children will get very frustrated if they have to start from scratch all over again when they move on to another school.”

Since then, I’ve been toying around with an eportfolio experiment  and last week the children who are taking part went along to Nethermains Primary school to explain the concept to some peer primary 6s.

Yesterday I asked the Carronshore children if I could record some of their thoughts about their eportfolio experience so far:

Now that I’ve set up the ePortfolios for the P6 group at Nethermains primary, they are really enthusiastic. I’ve also met with their class teacher who seems very willing to take things forward. The children and their teacher are coming along to Carronshore next week so that they can learn some more ‘first hand tips from the original ‘guinea pigs’

I’m also really pleased that I’m going along to the local High School tomorrow to meet with some S4 students who are interested in setting up their own eportfolios to reflect on their Art work.

I introduced the concept to the teachers in the Art department recently and just today one of them (Mrs C)  left a comment on the Carronshore Blog :

Hi Carronshore!

Just a quick comment to say well done on creating the fantastic artwork for the exhibition.  I think it looks fantastic and really like the tartan designs.

I teach Art and Design at Larbert HIgh School and we are really keen to start a blog with our Art classes.  I will continue to visit and encourage our pupils to have a look at your wonderful work also!

Keep up the good work!

She also left a comment on a post I’d written on the Carronshore blog about the eportfolio experiment :

 The pupils (and teachers!!) are really looking forward to Mrs Vass visiting us on Friday to hopefully help us set up  ePortfolios with some of our pupils.  I really enjoyed reading that so many pupils at Carronshore enjoy Art and we can’t wait to meet you when you move up to HIgh school!

I’m really looking forward to going along to the High School tomorrow to introduce the S4s to eportfolios – I’ll blog about it

A year ago I attended the Participation and Learning Seminar in Edinburgh.

The seminar was planned as part of the work of the Participation and Learning Network being facilitated by Learning and Teaching Scotland.

I enjoyed the day, and was really inspired by Alison Peacock, Headteacher of the Wroxham School, Hertfordshire. At the time, I jotted down some notes as Alison talked about practical ideas she’d tried out in her own school by creating an atmosphere of inclusion and trust. I shared some of her ideas in a blog post at the time.

 When I heard that Alison was one of the speakers at the ‘Accountability, Assessment and Education for Citizenship’ HMIeseminar on the 12th of March, I was eager to go along and hear what other ideas she was willing to share. She talked about accountability. This time, though, I didn’t take notes. This was probably because those who attended the seminar were given her latest paper to read beforehand and most of what she said was illustrating the points she’d written about.

Once again, I was captivated by what she had to say and mentioned this on twitter. One of my followers asked me for more information and I offered to email Alison’s latest paper so that he could have a look. Niggling in the back of my mind, however, was the memory of the ‘chair person’ saying that the paper was still in draft form and not yet officially published. I’m not knowledgeable enough about the protocol of sharing such things, so I contacted Alison directly … and I now have her permission to share her paper on this blog – an honour, indeed

When I first read the paper, however, one small section jumped out at me – I’ve copied and pasted it here: 

“……..Almost on a daily basis, we are reminded of the need to prove our worth and to enact models of leadership that hold others to account.  Depressingly, this ‘top down’ model leads many teachers to pressurise their class of children in the name of ‘standards’.  Parents and carers seek additional tuition outside school; all around us is the worry of test performance and ranking.  Even when we self evaluate school performance, too often the measures that we use are dominated by pupil performance within the core curriculum areas of maths and English. This has led to a culture of fear in many schools where measurable outcomes, in terms of test results, dominate the primary curriculum. School league tables, safeguarding regulations and the constant prospect of a phone call from Ofsted, are enough to send a shiver down the spine of the bravest school leader.”

HMIe visits have been the topic of some of my fellow ’twitterers’ lately. Neil Winton’s school was recently inspected and he wrote this blog post before the inspection where he briefly describes distant memories of a previous visit that did not go well for him personally. This was  followed up with  another post that was much more optimistic about the pending inspection, but I’m afraid I still hold the ‘shiver down the spine’ viewpoint. This may be because the primary school that I’m seconded from is about to be inspected. I tend to be made less than welcome there at the moment - they’re finding it hard to forgive me for managing to escape the pre-inspection panic

I wonder what difference it would make if the word ‘inspector’ was replaced by the word ‘mentor’ … or anything else less intimidating!

Anyway – I seem to have gone off on a tangent (yet again) when writing this blog post. Here’s Alison Peacock’s paper. It is really very readable. Listening to her talking is also very much recommended, too

Alison Peacock

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.