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!!

Children are the future

My daughter wanted to be a fashion designer; she has loads of really good ideas for dresses, tops, skirts and trousers. But she’s a little bit too much like me – she loves computers.

Over the past few months she’s been looking at some of the work that I do and has been quite complimentary in her feedback. So I started to teach her a few things.

Firstly I scanned in some shapes that could be used as clothes and converted them into brushes in Photoshop. Then I showed her how to use them in “anger”, using layer styles to add patterns, effects and gradients. She became quite proficient but she soon tired of it as she ran out of brushes and combinations.

I’ve had her create a short (20secs) stop motion animation in MS Movie Maker that she planned and animated herself with her camera. But she seemed to bore of the repetitive nature of the task. She is like me: she hates monotony.

So I showed her Fireworks. I love Fireworks because it allows for a more structured creative experience. Vectors are much easier to manipulate and alter and the styles are easier to apply and reorder. Admittedly for image editing it does not have all the features of it’s big brother but then… it isn’t trying to be. So she got to grips with it and began to produce some good stuff.

Now she has moved back to Photoshop. She still uses Fireworks but now it is very much a tool and not an outlet. It is a means to an end. She is taking the concepts that she has learned and applying them to her Photoshop work, learning from me as she goes. I have no doubt that in time she will be an excellent designer.

The point that I am trying to make, albeit somewhat circuitously, is that we have to give our children, students and colleagues chance to grow and develop as individuals. With a little nurturing and encouragement they are a thing of beauty.

But for now I’ll let her work speak for itself:

Her sister

A gift

First commission!! :D

Experimenting with HSL and Layers

Fun with a name

Homework

More home work!