Learning, Teaching and ICT

Three primary 6 stage children from Nethermains visited Carronshore just before the Easter break. They wanted to know how to add a  Voki and Photopeach slideshow to their new eportfolios. The picture here shows them concentrating as their ‘peer mentors’ demonstrated how to use the websites and then embed the completed efforts into their eportfolio. The class teacher had brought them along to see this for themselves. I’d already visited their school with a small group of Carronshore children to introduce them to the concept of eportfolios.

On both occasions I was struck by the genuine feeling of willingness to share and to listen (I think this picture and the ones below illustrate this?)

 Here’s a picture taken when the Primary 6s from Carronshore explained the process involved when adding a voki to an eportfolios home page.  I can’t remember which one was was displayed on the screen, but I think it was Jaimey’s .

The Nethermains group only had an hour with us, so it was a bit of a rush to help them to create their voki character and upload a personalised message to the site before embedding it into their new eportfolio.

These eportfolios are very much a ‘work in progress’ and won’t come to much without a lot of input from all involved. I know that when I return to class in August, the school management team will give me the freedom to set up an eportfolio experiment with my own class …. and this secondment has given me the opportunity to play around with the potential of reaching out to others in the authority.

On reflection, setting up these eportfolios is the result of a journey that started with a class blog – which then led to me giving children in my class their own online spaces (and voices) .  

I hope I’ll be adding some more to ‘The Story of the Carronshore Blog’  soon …..

 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

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