You mean there’s a plan???

It is often said that people fail to plan, but never plan to fail. So for a while now I have had a loose collection of thoughts that I have kept in my head about the way that I see my role in our organization progressing in order to achieve the goals that we would like to see accomplished. It sounds a bit woolly and vague I know, but there is a need for flexibility in all things innovative.

So, to know where we’re going you really need to know where we’ve come from. If you’ve read my blog from the beginning then you’ll know that we’re clawing our way out of the dark ages (didactic PowerPoint) into pastures new, full of the green grass of Evidence Based Teaching growing from the fertile soil of technology. In order to understand this analogy you need to understand that our students are the sheep (I like sheep ) gaining sustenance (knowledge) from the grass (our teaching) which is aided in its growth by the fertile soil (technology).

But we have a problem… only a few of our staff (the farmers) know how to use these new techniques and even less know how to use the technology. Therefore it is imperative that we invest in our staff time, money (resources) and personal commitment so that they are empowered in these areas.

So we need a team to teach the teachers, but who teaches the teachers’ teachers? That would be me when it comes to technology!!

I’ve come up with some loose objectives to try and achieve, they’re relatively simple. They are:

1. Teach how to use the technology to create resources
2. Demonstrate how to use the technology within a classroom

Like I said vague, but there are some other things that I am going to throw in as personal objectives:

3. Raise the standard of course resources.
4. Allow the teachers to be more creative
5. Encourage a culture of sharing and collaboration

So how am I going to do this?

Well, I intend to use our Moodle VLE as the medium for pretty much all of our lessons. From this I was asked if I intended to use e-learning packages to teach and the simple answer is no. From my check list above I would meet objective 1, partially objective 2 and 3 but would barely touch on 4 and would not encourage 5 at all.

What I am going to do is to use the other activities within Moodle, wiki’s, databases and forums within lessons. So, some examples:

Using a wiki + choice activity:

First get the class in to pairs. This is done through the use of a choice activity. Students select a number from 1 to 5 (there is at most 10 in a class) with the maximum limit of 2 for each choice. The students cannot see who has picked which number until after they have chosen, therefore guaranteeing that the pairs are random.

Then we get on to the actual exercise: comparing the design of four websites against a list of suggested criteria that they will be learning about in the rest of the lesson. To do this the assignment is presented as the first page in a wiki, with 5 sub pages already primed, but not created, for each of the pairs. One person uses their PC to access a web page, while the other accesses that pairs page and begins to take notes on the aesthetics. To ensure that they both use the wiki they are required to swap roles for each web page.

At the end of the allotted time, about 10-15 minutes, the class is called on to look down the front and the thoughts of each pair are shared with the rest of the class. Common traits are picked up on and good design principles are emphasised. These are then bought out in the topics that follow.

This hits all 5 of my personal check list items and more.

1. The teachers are using the technology to create a learning resource: the wiki pages
2. The teachers are using the technology within an actual lesson.
3. The teachers are learning good design principles through what they themselves like and, more importantly the collective thoughts of the group reinforced by myself.
4. The teachers are exposed to sources of inspiration and are allowed to format their wiki page however they wish.
5. By working in pairs, and ultimately as a group of 10 within a single wiki they are sharing information with each other and working collaboratively.
6. The teachers are gaining an advance knowledge of the principles they will be learning about later, this helps them to retain future information.
7. The teachers can relate what they learn about with what they have seen.
8. The teachers are already thinking about design principles when the actual teaching occurs.

In short this is a highly engaging activity which forms a strong foundation for the rest of this subject area.

Using a database activity as a consolidation exercise:

A simple database is created which has two fields, a file upload field and a description text area. There are to be no student names attributed to any of the views of the database or any of the files uploaded. Comments are enabled for each database entry.

Following the “basic design” lesson students are asked to design a two slide PowerPoint presentation, consisting of a title slide and a simple content slide. They then upload this to to the database and are asked to look through the other slide shows that are uploaded. They are asked to make written notes on each entry.

After the allotted time (10-15 minutes creation and 10-15 minutes browsing) the class discuss each of the slide shows in turn, the teacher emphasised the anonymity of the owner by asking everybody providing two points of positive and negative feedback. A brief class consensus is drawn up and a member of the class is called upon to enter this as a comment on the database.

The students are told that if they like the resources then they are free to use them but to comment if they do so.

What this achieves:

1. The teachers are using the technology to create a learning resource: both the PowerPoint slide shows which can be used as a template by others and the commented database.
2. The teachers are using the technology within an actual lesson.
3. The teachers are employing good design principles through what they have produced.
4. The teachers are actively encouraged to try new things.
5. By uploading their slide shows and providing feedback they are both sharing and collaborating.
6. The teachers are using what they have learned in a practical manner, meaning that they are more likely to do it again in the future.
7. The teachers comment when they reuse a resource, this means that the person that has generated that resource gains recognition for their efforts

The most important thing though in a both of these examples is the way that they are created: there is a great deal of weight placed on active participation by all involved with no option for a student to sit back and do nothing.

The use of peer review, pairs work and whole class discussion ensures that sharing and collaboration occurs. More importantly it allows people to be honest without feeling the intimidation of acting as an individual. Even in the slide show exercise when students are asked individually for feedback to the group: no-one knows who produced the slide show so that honest feedback can be given by all.

The final point that I am going to make is that this way of teaching is then passed on to the other teachers. Hopefully they will enjoy the level of interaction and collaboration that occurs in the lessons and be more inclined to be less didactic in their own approach.

Only time will tell…

Smartphone Technology for Learning

I’m a newcomer to smart phones… my students have had them for years, but I’ve never had a reason to get one. So when we changed broadband providers I took up their offer of a mobile and invested in a little smart-phone… WOW!!! I have hardly used my PC in two weeks hence no blogs!

So once I’d got over Angry Birds I started looking at other stuff it could do, although technically I’m not over Angry Birds, I’m officially in rehab!!

The first thing I did was use the web browsing functionality to get into our works Moodle site. Which worked! I then managed to take a photo and upload it to one of the course image galleries. The importance of this cannot be overstated: now our students have a way of capturing a whiteboard or piece of paper and having it accessible to them outside of the classroom, outside of the building. Even potentially outside of the country!!

It also enables them to share it with the rest of their course. This enables groups to work on separate topics and projects and have a “mixing pot” where they can gain opinions and feedback which is stored online for them to refer to at a later date,

But that wasn’t the end of it as I needed  to download some MS Office files and my phone didn’t support them. So I downloaded an app called ThinkFree Office Mobile which allowed me to view them. Then I found that my phone manufacturer (HTC) had an Office viewer/editor app online called QuickOffice so I eventually settled for this. I found it less cumbersome to use.

I was then able to download and view Word, Powerpoint and pdf documents held on the site. I then started thinking about our course notes… if our students could view them on their phones then fantastic, but how can we make them more accessible, so that they can get to exactly the document they need.

I did a little research and stumbled upon QR codes, you might have seen these on products or in magazines.

This is one:

You can create these by going to a website such as http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ and within this complex pattern is a URL – a hyper-link to a website or file to download. They can be read by apps: I use QRdroid which can both read and generate these images but they don’t just have to hold URLs they can hold text, business card details… lots of stuff.

Now what we can do is to put these at the beginning of our presentations and our students can download their training notes, activity sheets, videos, even the slide-show that you are presenting and have it to hand on their mobile. You could use them to set homework or give a starting point for research. But the beauty is that once students understand what they are, you can place them on posters all around the place and they can choose to learn more. You could even have a kind of treasure hunt around the school as an orientation exercise linking to several web pages each providing information and a clue as to where to go for the next one.

The other thing that students can do with QR codes is to use them to share information. For example a student finds a particularly useful website – they can use a reader like QRdroid to generate a QR code from a URL and display it on the screen or save it as an image. This can then be uploaded to Moodle or scanned by another smart-phone and the recipient now has access to the same information.

Suddenly you start to enable mobile learning, mobile collaboration and you can begin to engender a 24hr learning culture. But I know what some people are thinking: what about those people who do not, or choose not to have a smart-phone. Well like I said earlier, up until two weeks ago I was one of those people. I can honestly say that now I will never be without one! But I do hear what you are saying.

The argument boils down to this; education should be totally inclusive, should have no barriers, it should be a level playing field.

Well I do agree with you, to some extent. But we must also understand the reality of those that we are teaching. We need to understand that teenagers nowadays use this technology as we used to read comics, magazines or listen to Sony Walkman’s (for those too young to know what these were they were the things before the things before MP3 players – they played tapes!). Culture shifts and if we do not embrace these changes we marginalize our students and byt virtue of this ourselves.

So how do I see this fitting in? Well believe it or not pretty much all of our students now have phones that can run these applications. So their use will take off, however some of our more die hard teachers will struggle to understand the benefits. More importantly some aspects of our organization actively prohibits their use on security grounds. So what do we do???

Well we do what we do with everything else. We don’t stop using electricity because it is dangerous we teach people how to use it properly, we educate them about the dangers and give them a safe environment to learn how to use it properly before letting them out in the real world to work on it. With smart-phones we teach them about the dangers of releasing sensitive information, of EMF hazards and where and when it is inappropriate to use them. We then give them the opportunity to demonstrate that they know how to use them in a safe training environment and react accordingly when things go awry.

By doing this you empower your students to learn, to socialize and to be more active in their learning. You can teach responsibility and self discipline along with a whole host of other secondary skills.

By not allowing the students to use their technology you not only lose the advantages of mobile learning, you remove the additional opportunity for a better rounded education and ultimately build resentment by removing what students see as a window to their world. We have seen this in our student population and we are beginning to take steps to change it.

Just one last thing. Follow the code!!

Style over substance?

This one will hopefully set the cat among the pigeons or even put some Piranhas in the tank as one of my friends says.

There is a common misconception that content is paramount to style. That what you say is far more important than how it looks. That if your content is sufficiently well worded or factually accurate then any style will be superfluous.

I hate to say this… I totally disagree.

Personally I see “Style over substance” as a phrase that some people use to be lazy, or to conform. Both are bad in my opinion. The other that I hear a lot of the time is that we must consider those with Specific Learning Differences like dyslexia, dyscalculia or dyspraxia. Again I feel that this is wrong, not because I discriminate against those with SpLD’s but because I feel that there are far better ways of doing things that make everybody’s life easier.

What we end up with in my teaching establishment is something along the lines of:

Yellow text in comic sans on a bright blue background

As someone interested in design this makes me feel physically sick!! Now imagine that you are a student who is having to sit through 7 hours of this a day… over as long as twelve months. At some point you have to ask yourself: WHY????

The answers that you get back are the two that I cited above: what about SpLD’s and my content is that good that it stands alone.

Well to dispel each of these in turn. Firstly it is true that high contrast between fonts and  backgrounds make reading easier for SOME people suffering with SpLD’s However, anyone that knows anything about scotopic sensitivity knows that each person is slightly different and that if you get the colours wrong then you make things worse. Therefore the opinion that we will be serving most people with SpLD’s better is, in my opinion, balderdash. We can serve everyone better by using the software properly, making the presentations available and teaching our students how to alter the colour schemes for themselves. In doing so we teach our students coping strategies that will enable them to move forwards and not be left abandoned when they leave.

The second point is that content stands alone. Hmmmm…. if that were true then there would be little work out there for web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, advertisers, movie directors, animators… you get the gist.

We need to make our content appealing to maintain interest – at the very least so that it does not put people off. But if we try hard we can make presentations that actually grip the attention of those listening. By not cramming them with information we create key points which the students can focus on, even better would be to use a single slide with a model map or another graphic organizer!

The simple truth is that we can work both smarter and more creatively to achieve more… in actual fact, a lot more.

There is a feature within PowerPoint (our tool of choice) that allows us to create a template by which all slides conform to. This is the Master Slide and you can find it under the View menu. The reason that this is so important is that if you design your master first and use it as a template for all the other slides then you can make a change on the master and it automatically updates every other slide. This reduces the amount of work that you need to do to produce the slide show initially but more importantly it makes your design infinitely more flexible.

Now you can design to your heart’s content, and should one of your students have trouble with your slide you can quickly tailor the slide-show to their needs. Even better than that:

They can download the slide-show from Moodle and alter it themselves so that it fits their needs exactly!

Now that you have done that, you can break free of the monotony of yellow on blue and begin to get creative. Have a faint picture as a backdrop or a smart gradient fill. Try other fonts, but choose Sans Serif fonts (without the squiggles on the letters) so that they are clear to read. And remember it is always best to get your presentation previewed on the medium that it will be used on, for example an interactive white board or a screen to make sure that the colours work. It is often best to get some help with this as a second opinion can bring in useful feedback and some brilliant ideas.

Most importantly TRY!!! If it doesn’t work the first time then try something different: colours, gradient direction, font, placement, images, borders, animation, transitions. Just remember that a slide must only be as complicated as it needs to be: a single word does not need lots of animation, an explanation of a circuit diagram may need more.

The way that I see things is that style adds to content. It helps to create the narrative and ethos of your lessons. The students see how much effort and care you have taken with your media, whatever it may be, and they will respond accordingly. More to the point, when you produce good work, you show it off to the best of your ability.

Good style coupled with good content produces an excellent backdrop for learning.

In the meantime, here’s some points to think about.

The way things are

Gradient fills

Adding contrast can add coherence

Too many styles loses coherence

Be Bold, Be Brave

dy/dx

If I had drawn a graph of progress up until a week ago it would look something like this: —————

At least that is against my own personal goals for what I am trying to achieve.  Things have changed.

I have got my development suite that I have been asking for for ages!!!

Well when I say got, it should be here by the end of the week!!!. When I say ages I’m talking over a year. It seems like a silly statement but this has been really important to me as it will help me achieve a number of goals, from the creation of complex content using Adobe Flash through to the ability to generate proper podcasts using Adobe After Effects and Premier.

But the biggest reason for my suite, for me at least, is that I want to get all the staff in our establishment trained up in all the new technologies that we are trying to introduce. I’m a firm believer in positive intent, that if you act positively and honestly then others will to. I know that there are always some who will take advantage, however the others will see this and generally either make them feel bad or to just disown them. I’ve seen both happen and the latter is not pretty but they haven’t done it again.

My theory is that if we invest in our staff then they will pay us back in at least a small way subconsciously. Even if it is just a slight shift in attitude then it is still an improvement on what we had before. I am to achieve this by teaching our teachers how to use technology creatively so that they can create better media and supporting materials for their lessons. The theory is that if you have built it then you will want to see it succeed. And I want to give people lots of reasons to succeed.

So here’s my plan:

1. Get everyone trained up on Moodle, how to use it and how to build with it.
2. Get people being more creative with their lesson materials, give them ownership and fun.
3. Get people making more interactive media for student support away from the classroom.
4. Get people teaching each other how to do good stuff in all of the above. This is really important!!!!

The reason why number 4 is so important is simple. If I tell you that something is good then you might or might not believe me. But if your friend was to tell you exactly the same thing, then you would believe them more than me. The other reason behind 4 is to encourage the spread of best practice. We want our teachers to feel that being creative, innovative and fresh is good.

By encouraging the fun aspects of the new technology the acceptance of it will grow. By getting more and more people on board, the inclusion of it within lessons will grow. By better supporting our students they will grow and the instructors will gain better results.

The benefits to all really do outweigh the costs. I just hope I can get enough people through the doors.

History

How do I kick this off???

Well I thought that the first thing to do would be to give you a brief synopsis of the past year: where I’ve come, from what I do and where I am intending to go.

Well… I’m a “happily married” father of four who used to work in the UK Armed Forces. I left after completing 12 years working with IT, communications kit and students. When I left I got a job as a teacher with my current employer and haven’t looked back. Cutting the “shackles” of Forces life has given me a new lease of life: I am embracing my creative side both from a design and a management perspective.

The role that I was employed to carry out has changed. I am now managing and developing the technology with which our establishment delivers it’s training. I am creating the concept that hopefully others will see, like and take on board. It may not be new to some employers, but to mine it the equivalent of moving from gas lighting to electricity, and that change is hard for some.

In short I am trying to move my place of work away from endless Powerpoints to a more interactive and enriching learning experience for our students. I am trying to do this using Moodle as a delivery platform as this meets a number of business needs while allowing us the freedom to provide both gradual change and easy integration.

But that is not my only role. I also develop proofs of concept: showing teaching staff what they can achieve and how they can use it. This ranges from developing Computer Based Training Packages, through to wiki’s, forums, online testing, online student feedback and much much more.

I am also the lead developer for my organization: responsible for producing deliverables that can be used in lessons. This  ranges from templates for Powerpoint through to video and web editing: if it involves creative tech then it comes to me. In fact if it involves teaching and tech then it comes to me.

So where am I going…

My aim is simple – to provide ubiquitous access to interactive and engaging learning materials to our students. Sounds posh but all it really means is that I want our students to be in charge of learning that they enjoy.

Can I do it??

As I keep telling my colleagues: anything is possible!

You just wait and see!!