ICT and Computing in Education
Whisper
Originally uploaded by daniel_pfund
I had a tutorial lesson today. Or maybe citizenship. Or PHSE. You get the jist…
The aim of the lesson was for the students to understand the concept of budgetting. In addition to the central aim I wanted them to appreciate what their finances might be like in the future and to compare their expectations with harsh reality.
So, printing off a semi-random budgetting sheet found on letting agent’s website we proceeded to fill it in as a class. It took the full hour.
We discussed the cost of renting vs buying, shopping at different types of supermarkets, repayments on loans for different standards of car and, with some degree of shock for the students, the difference between gross and net salaries!
At the end of it we packed up, threw the paper in the bin and went to lunch. I didn’t formally assess their work, they didn’t produce evidence of having completed tasks or showing progression in their knowledge and understanding. I would have been graded as Requires Improvement, or probably Inadequate.
And yet, I’m absolutely certain that EVERY student in that class learned something. They might not remember the figures, but they were surprised by how inaccurate their preconceptions about incomes and expenditures were, and they bought into the lesson really well.
I could have built in more activities – learning checkpoints, scaffolding, differentiated resources and mini-plenaries. And in many cases those tools are incredibly useful. But every once in a while I like to just spend the full lesson exploring something and not necessarily weighing the pig every 10 minutes to see if it’s gotten fatter.
But I’m in the middle of my appraisal, so sssh… it’s a secret! 
Originally uploaded by AGoK
They say that the best things in life are free, and yet people regularly pay £200-£400 for a one day course on a variety of topics. Heck, I’ve been lucky enough to charge for running CPD sessions myself, so I’m not writing here to complain!
This last Friday, though, the decision in school was that for our staff development PD day, where previously we have had outside speakers come in and run session on whole-school issues, we would take advantage on some of the that already exists within school. Part of it is that there are pockets of expertise in one particular area and part of it is that some teachers are (naturally) better at some things than others.
Heads of department signed their staff up to 3 sessions a week before the day and the idea was to spread staff around the sessions so we can all feed back in the next departmental twilight (this week).
I signed myself up for ‘Planning for Outstanding’ delivered by a local assistant head, ‘Starters and plenaries’ jointly run by an HE and a science specialist, and ‘Building Challenge to Support Pupil Progress’ by one of our assistant heads.
Feel free to skip a section or two if you like, but as you might have guessed by the title, the day was really, really useful and productive. It did that thing that happens at Teachmeets, the CAS Conference and other events that I would class as the very best I’ve been to – left me enthused and convinced that I have the tools to be a better classroom practicioner.
I ‘decided’ before the day that it was going to be a good one and that I wasn’t going to be cynical about being told how to teach by my fellow teachers. While I mean that, it also tells you something because I initially had to decide not to be cynical. I can safely say that no conscious descision was involved in deciding that it was a genuinely powerful and incredibly worthwhile day.
Right then, gushing over, here is a breakdown of the 3 sessions (which I summarise largely for my own reflection, but also with the hope that others can steal the same ideas for themselves).
In this session we looked at how we can use our in-house lesson plan to plan effectively for learning and progress. This sounds a bit dry, and it’s hard for it not to be, but after the talk about Ofsted and standards and what Ofsted expect to see and how we can make sure we plan for it, the best thing to come out of the session was a really interesting version of a lesson plan that the kids get to see.
The idea is that you produce an A4 or A3 document that looks like a lesson plan but that lasts for a whole topic of work. You have aims and objectives, key words and a place for pupil and teacher comments at key stages (say three times over the course of the unit). This allows an opportunity for providng (and, perhaps mildly cynically) evidencing AfL and students’ responses to AfL. I say mildly cynically as it saddens me that we have to produce evidence for Ofsted. That said, I think that overall it leads to a positive result as this kind of back and forth can only, really, be useful for the students.
The really intriguing section, though, is the bottom half of the page. Here you have a 3 x 10 grid (assuming a 10 week topic, adjust as necessary). For each lesson there is a satisfactory, good and outstanding description of the lesson outcome (e.g. I can create a 3D drawing of a house, I can create a 3D drawing of a house and use textures to make it look realistic, I can create a 3D drawing of a house with a range of extra features such as a garden, fence, hedge and swimming pool). You could rename these as All, Most, Some; you could use grades A-B, C-D, E-F; you could use levels 4c/4b, 4a/5c, 5b/5a.
Each student gets one to stick in their books (I know, I know, ICT, I’ll come to that) and this is their primary document throughout the project. Now it’ll take some time to prepare and you need to allow some freedom for course correction along the way, but it’s basically a whole SoW mapped out from the pupils’ perspective. I’m very, very seriously considering giving it a go.
This was a really, really fun session. It wasn’t run by anyone above me in the food chain (which always takes the politics out of the equation) and we more or less had a load of ideas thrown at us and we got to have a go at them. Nothing makes a session like this greater than having practical things to do and much fun was had. Here is a run down of some of the ideas we tried out:
Stand Up Sit Down – Students have 4 cards pinned together on a keyring, lettered A B C and D. Stick 15 questions on a slideshow and everyone has to show a letter. Get it wrong and you’re out (but still have to play). Be still standing at the end and get a merit, sticker, sweet or some other reward.
What’s The Image? – Print a picture, get it laminated, cut it into odd shaped pieces and instant jigsaw. Starter is to assemble the picture and deduce the topic of the lesson or kick off a discussion.
Loop Cards – A bit like dominoes with a question on the right and an answer on the left. The cards go round in a circle so read your question, whoever has the answer asks the next. Time two teams or pit whole classes against each other in a time trial.
10 Questions – One volunteer (or victim) has to answer 10 questions asked by the teacher. The class don’t comment but give a tick if they think the answer is right and write their own answer if they think it’s wrong. Discuss the answers but it takes some of the pressure off the need to be right all the time.
Mystery Bag – get a cloth bag or even a box. Put objects inside that relate to a topic and students have to feel their way around and either guess the linking theme or suggest 5 more items that could be added.
Guess The Logo – Pretty simple idea, get osme logos related to the topic and remove enough detail to make them less obvious.
Question Answer Question – Write out a list of 10 questions. The students have to first answer the question, then write a new question that leads to that answer (which you can’t do if you don’t understand the topic).
Artist’s Easel – Provide a paragraph of prose explaining a method or process (e.g. how an email gets form one computer to another). Students draw a diagram to represent the process, highlight (say) 9 key words and finally perform a diamond rank or similar.
Memory Board – Put 10 or so words on the board. Give students 20 seconds to remember them then hide them. Students have to explain all of the key words on paper or whiteboards.
Weakest Link – Odd one out game, stick 4 pictures on a slide and get students to identify and justify the odd one out. Especially good if you make the answer ambiguous.
You Say We Pay – Slideshow of images related to a topic with obvious names written underneath. One (or two if you want some competition) pupils sit with their back to the screen and have to guess the object. Those giving clues aren’t allowed to use any of the words on the board.
What’s In My Head? – At the end of a lesson have a picture of a head with some key words behind it (unseen). Pupils list the keywords they think you will have included and then you can reveal the answers or get students to elaborate on their suggestions.
What’s The Question? – Based on jeopardy, have a series of answers on the whiteboard and students have to work out the questions.
Guess Who – Just like the Churchill advert (Am I…. Genghis Khan?). Laminate some A3 paper, cut into strips and apply velcro to make a headband. Laminate some people, objects or ideas and away you go.
True/False – Write some HARD true/false questions. Two teams have a go at guessing the answers – teams because this encourages debate and discussion about WHY the answer is true or false. They’re tough questions so there’s no shame in getting it wrong and even if guessing you have a 50/50 chance.
Scrambled Letters (this was my favourite) – laminate 3 copies of the alphabet per group (groups of 3 work well). Each person should have one copy of every letter. Set a question and the winners are the first group to spell out the whole answer. Teachers (at leasT) get HUGELY competetive. And it hits the literacy agenda too.
Dominoes – Produce domino cards with words relating to the topic in hand. Students have to play the cards however they want as long as they can justify the links in the context of the topic.
Diamond Rank – Produce 9 cards or key words. Students (preferably in groups) organise these into 1 most important, 2 very important, 3 important, 2 less important and 1 least important.
Missing Object – Create a slide with 15 or 20 objects. Then a blank slide, then the same slide with 1 object missing. It’s surprisingly difficult to spot the missing object.
As well as those, check out ContentGenerator, Quiz Busters and Triptico for loads more white-board based ideas
This was another great session, with a good mix of theory and practical ideas. Initially expecting it to be about G&T students I actually found myself being given a whole range of strategies that fit in well with my minimally invasive strategy. They’re mutually exclusive in the sense that I have to be invasive enough to set specific tasks, but the principle of encouraging students to think and learn for themselves is on the same wavelength. The workshop leader even started with the same sat-nav metaphor I used with my Y8s last week.
The theory stuff included why we need challenge (e.g. top football teams raising their game against their closest rivals) and what happens if we don’t have it (no sense of achievement, slow progress). We looked at the fixed vs growth mindsets and examined questioning strategies (which I have always found to be a weakness of mine). The Pit is an idea whereby if you draw a graph of clarity vs time you start just positive (concept), dip way down (conflict), start to turn a corner (construct) and shoot out higher than ever (consider). The idea is that by tackling tricky concepts without being spoon fed you get confused, but then work your way back up and ultimately understand the topic far better. All of the practical tasks below are designed to support this pattern.
The practical stuff that supported this could largely fit into the previous session as well, although some tasks were too long to be thought of as plenaries and starters. not all, though, by a long shot.
Tarsia – Google it and you’ll find a website that lets you input key words and spits out triangles that fit together by linking two things together. Like a domino but with more complexity and more thinking involved.
Concept Mapping – Something that many of probably come across, but I hadn’t. List key words randomly around a piece of sugar paper then draw lines to connect some of them. On the lines write (in prose) about the links and explain them. After a few minutes, swap with another group and you can’t make any new connections, but have to expand on the previous ones. Perhaps repeat once more and then go back to see what has happened to your original map.
Which Wordle Words? – Use Wordle or Tagxedo to create a uniform word cloud and have students select just 5 of the most important. Then make them rank them or use them in a sentence. Tagxedo has the added benefit that you can mouse over the words and they will pop out on the screen so you can highlight them interactively.
Thinking Tube Line – Grab a screenshot of a train line (preferably with a branch somewhere) and remove the station names. Have one concept at one end (e.g. freedom) and one at the other (Internet). Students then have to fill in the station getting from one to the other. It may end up as a journey or a continuum, or something else. Surprisingly tricky to do and if you do get a high flier finished early then add a thir word at the end of the branch (safety) and get them to think a bit deeper.
Folded Opinion Line – A twist on a classic. Have ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ on the back wall and students stand according to their opinion. Get the left-hand half to step forward, turn around and shuffle to the far end – the most extreme on the right is facing the most central, and the other most central is facing the furthest on the left. Each side must talk for 30 seconds without pause or interuption about why they chose to stand where they did and at the end they decide on a (potentially) new place to stand.
Challenge Cards – Rather than rewarding quick finishers with more work at the same level, give them a card with a question. A really tough question. Maybe give KS3 students a GCSE question, or GCSE students an A Level question. How does the Internet work? When is it OK to ignore copyright? What is the definition of a computer?
6×6 – Produce a 6×6 placemat of pictures or key words (or both). Students roll a die to select the row and the column, ultimately collecting two pictures. They then have to explain the link between them in the context of the topic at hand. Surprisingly engaging and more-ish.
What If? – What if the Internet broke tomorrow? Students consider the question and suggest 3 things. Now ask which is th emost likely, the most appealing, the most concerning?
Bloom’s Taxonomy Planner – There are a few versions of this around. Print one out and stick it near your desk or wherever you plan. You could devise questions for your lesson plan or make them up on the hoof, but by having the starting points at your fingertips you can tailor the level of challenge to the progress of the students. Struggling? Ask some basic knowledge questions. Doing well? What about some application or analysis? High fliers? Jump straight to synthesis and evaluation.
Thinking Dice (URL)- This wasn’t actually included in the session but following a brilliant session by Steve Bunce at the Optimus Education ICT2012 conference last week the whole department are getting some thinking dice. 6 brightly coloured dice with question starters ranked by their level according to Bloom. Get the students to come up with the questions for you. Weaker students can start with the red – the most able with the blue and purple. At £10 a throw (no finaincial gain for me, I promise) I think they look pretty good.
Matching Words – Start with an unrelated topic (e.g. cars). Individuals (in teams of 4) have 60 seconds to write down as many words as possible. The team captain then reads out their list and ONLY gets a point if EVERYONE in the group has that word. Repeat for a related topic and add the scores. In theory, all teams should do better on the second attempt, and they are surprisingly reluctant to cheat.
So there you have it. 34 ideas by my reckoning. That’s even more than you get at an average teachmeet, for an entire staff and at a total cost of £0. Easily the best value CPD I’ve had this week.
Business Plans Don’t Suck – Mind Games Do
Originally uploaded by pinkpurse
I woke up this morning and came across two Telegraph articles via @schoolduggery that, at first, look like teacher bashing.
In the first, we have some quotes from Michael Gove on the day before tougher Ofsted rules come into force with sound bites like “zero tolerance of poor teachers” and comments such about how Ofsted “will even assess how well teachers ‘articulate and mouth’ the sounds of letters” and “check payrolls to ensure the salaries of weak teachers reflects their performance”.
In another article we are told that “Those admirable goals have earned him the undying hatred of organisations and individuals who put the interests of inadequate teachers above the interests of children who need, and are entitled to expect, a decent education.”, with several comments about the introduction of performance related pay for teachers.
What worries me is not that teachers are being measured against a high standard, or that the dreaded ‘O’ (who are expected to come knocking any day) will be taking a tough stance. What worries me is all the talk of those teachers who are judged to be ‘not good enough’ being sacked or (effectively) fined. It’s the punitive aspect that scares me the most. If we were to translate that into the classroom then we would be giving punishments to students who are underachieving. We could expel those working towards an E or an F within a term instead of a year*. As it is, I find that shouting at, restricting the free time of or otherwise punishing students who aren’t flying high doesn’t have a particularly good effect. Giving them support, encouragement, engaging them, differentiating resources, etc, etc, etc. all seems to have a much more significant effect.
It is particularly worrying when you see schools drop from Good to Unsatisfactory in the course of a single Ofsted inspection, when you see an ‘Outstanding’ teacher three years on the trot suddenly labelled as ‘Satisfactory’ on the grounds of a single observation. Measuring the ‘performance’ of teachers is not as simple as timing a race or counting the profits, and in such a subjective environment we find observations and appraisals can appear more as an ordeal to be survived rather than the positive, constructive activities they are meant to be.
I’m not saying that there are no teachers out there who are sitting back and not giving the best for our students. What I am saying is that creating an atmosphere of collegiate support and positive help for those who might need it is likely to have a much more powerful and lasting effect than threatening teachers with frozen salaries or a P45.
* Just to clarify, this is a response to a comment in the first article (“Heads and governors will be able to sack the worst-performing staff in just a term – rather than a year – under new “capability” procedures.”). It is not the case that any school will expel a pupil for achieving poor grades.
Originally uploaded by dcolson5201
Let me take you on a short journey.
Around Easter time I wanted my Y8s to try web design using WordPress instead of Dreamweaver. Not an IT expert? I wanted them to use a new piece of software they hadn’t used before. So, I prepared some supporting resources and did my ‘teaching’ bit – standing at the front of the room, demonstrating how to do various things.
The result, perhaps predictably, was that the students got bored pretty quickly, didn’t really pay attention, I got cross and little progress was made – both in terms of the physical outcome (a website) and in terms of student understanding.
I realised that the students weren’t paying close attention because they didn’t need to know that bit of information at that time. I knew they would in about 3 minutes, but they didn’t. And so I showed everyone at once, no-one really cared, and then I had to do it again, 20 times over, as each person got to the point where they *did* want to know. But by then, I was grumpy and that only put the students off wanting to ask.
My immediate solution was to produce a quiz based around the software (What button do you press to do this? How many different themes are there to choose from? Etc…). The next lesson I got the students in groups, handed out the quiz and explicitly refused to help the students to get the answers. The result this time was students that wanted to know the answers and were engaged in trying to figure out the software and also helping each other. Resilience, peer support, all that (pedagogical) jazz.
That wasn’t a big pedagogical realisation for me, it was just part of the day-to-day continual reflection and readjustment that forms part of my job.
A month or two later I went to the Computing At School conference in Birmingham, and there I was fortunate enough to choose a session run by James Franklin entitled “The productive teacher”. There, I learned about Sugata Mitra, an Indian professor who has done pioneering work in the field of Minimally Invasive Education. The theory is quite simple – take away the teachers and rigidity, provide an environment in which people have the tools and resources required to learn, then just let them get on with it.
I realise now that this is exactly what I did with that pesky Y8 class. I provided the tools (computers and software) and the framework (quiz) to allow the students to learn. I then took myself out of the equation. The concepts were simple enough, the software relatively intuitive and the students now had a reason to want to learn. It’s a small experiment, and hardly conclusive, but I think there’s something in this idea.
Jumping ahead to the last two weeks of term and I’m trying a (slightly) longer experiment. Those same Y8s (2 classes of) have been given the CodeAvengers URL and been told that most of the rules no longer apply. They can talk to each other, they can move around the room at will, and I won’t be answering any questions. “Can we use a calculator?”, I’m not answering any questions. “How do I do this bit?”, I’m not answering any questions.
So far both of my Y8 classes have had a 1 hour lesson. The atmosphere has been massively more positive and there’s been a genuine sense of energy. The fact that students are walking around the room adds to that sense of energy and hasn’t detracted from the sense of purpose. The students are talking about their progress, how far they’ve got and what they can do to help each other. I did have some reservations about the idea, and here are the kinds of questions I would ask if this was someone else’s blog post:
What about the student who chooses not to engage or do the work?
I know this student. I’ve had a full year to know which student it is. And I’ve watched him (and her) like a hawk. This students chooses not to engage in ‘normal’ lessons. They typically find the work hard and find the option of not trying easier than having to apply effort and probably failing. In both lessons this student worked harder, and for longer, than they have in any other lesson this year. This student is not suddenly top of the class, but he/she has made significantly more progress in this lesson than in previous lessons. The momentum in the classroom pulls everyone along.
What about the student who finds it really hard and doesn’t want to look stupid in front of friends or the loner?
While there are loners in secondary schools, there are no hermits (that I’ve met). Even the student who hates working in groups and would much rather do his own thing has ended up engaging with others – far more than they would if they were forced to work in a group. One of my quietest and weakest students spent most of the lesson out of her seat. She made middling progress over the lesson, but having been shown how to solve one problem, she went on to help about half the class solve the same problem. This from a student who never speaks and is totally overwhelmed during group work.
How do you measure progress?
Measure, shmeasure. you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it every day. That said, you do need to measure progress, rightly or wrongly. Observation is good, and if I was going to make this a longer term strategy (which I am), then there would need to be some assessed tasks. But that comes *after* the learning, not during. Formative assessment can be informal and can be as simple as giving out a couple of stickers, or an occasional “well done”. It’s important to stil be there and to offer encouragement – just not ‘teaching’.
How do you make sure that the work is the students’ own?
If I give a student a series of 4 buttons to click on to achieve the outcome, and they do the clicking, whose work is it? Them because they did the mouse work, or me because I’m the only one who understands which buttons to click and why? Most good learners that I know *want* to learn. If they get stuck and they end up getting help then they have a burning desire to know *why* this answer is better than theirs. Now, yes, some of these students are not the most effective learners, but they do still want to know – especially when it’s from a peer. Me, I just *know stuff*, or I know loads of stuff, or I do this all the time (this is what the kids have told me). Peers are on an equal footing. It is to be expected that the sage on the stage will just know everything. If little Johnny in the next seat understands it, then why the heck shouldn’t I?
And those challenges, and my responses, are the reason why I think this idea might just be a huge one, for me at least.
Next year I plan to do a lot more MIE (or ‘sitting on my backside’, as it probably appears), and over prolonged periods. We (the students and I, together and separately) need to do some reflection on what we’ve learned, how we’ve learned it, why we’ve learned it, and whether this new (to me) strategy is a good one. I suspect it’ll require quite a bit of setting up in terms of preparing resources that the students can access independently and in a non-linear fashion, but I think the rewards might well be worth it.
I’m writing this post on the train home from the amazing CAS Conference 2012 (#casconf2012).
I tried ot tweet as much as possible during the two days, but between a limited battery life and (more importantly) getting actively involved in many of the sessions there is much I haven’t talked about.
As always, my blogging is almost entirely selfish and my main priority is to start to reflect on what I’ve learned over the last two days. It’s all very ‘gut reaction’ stuff before I forget the details.
Thursday – Bring & Brag
The evening before the main conference is traditionally a ‘bring & brag’ unconference style event. Meet up, eat nibbles, drink wine, then a series of short presentations .This year the whole thing felt tight and slick, with quick turnarounds, short presentations and little reliance on slideshows. Being partly involved in the running of the B&B session I didn’t really get chance to make many notes, but Alan O’Donohue (@teknoteacher) was as energetic as ever, Ben Gristwood (@Mr_G_ICT) talked about some really interesting work with Digital Leaders and someone (I forget who!) talked about a 6th form student who built a gaming PC for their A2 extended project – something I want my Y7s to get involved in this term!
Thankfully Leon Cych (@eyebeams) was there capturing everything – video, audio and stills – and I should have the audio from each mini-talk to post on the CAS Rounup Podcast over the next few weeks.
Friday – Plenaries – CAS LAndscape & Future and Centres of Excellence
Partly housekeeping and partly letting everyone know where everything is going, Simon Peyton-Jones (chair of CAS) and Bill Mitchell (Director of BCS Academoy of Computing) talked about the many, many events that have occured over the last 12 months, including the Royal Society Report, the official withdrawal of the ICT PoS and, vitally, the fact this isn’t the government saying ‘we don’t value ICT’ but TPTB offering us the opportunity to decide what WE think is important. Bill also talked about the CAS/BCS Network of Excellence. The hope was to get 200 schools and a couple of universities involved int he first year, with maybe 30 universities and lots of schools by 2020. So far there have been over 500 school applications and over 20 universities have expressed an interest, so the motiviation is there and next year should be a very exciting one.
Keynote – Replacing City Traders With Robots – Dave Cliff
Keynotes are funny things. Sometimes they’re fascinating and engorssing, sometimes they’re practical and involving, sometimes they’re dull and seem t go on for ever. This one was definitely the first. Giving a bit of context (horses and pigeons being the early information and communication technology used by the very first stock market traders) we looked at how automated systems have developed to the point where they are involved in 95% of all stock market transactions – many with no human involvements at all. Then we looked at how humans have managed to screw up complex technology on a grand scale. The scariest topic was ‘normalisation of deviance’ – the idea that something outside of acceptable parameters doesn’t immediately end in failure, so we accept it as ‘normal’. This is ultimately what led to the Challenger disaster and demonstrates nicely why relying on technology can be a risky business. Bring the two topics together and you have an almost entirely automated multi-national economic system written by software engineers that has repeatedly shown in recent years that it is working outside the bounds of safety (an IPO going from $15 per share to $0.00002 per share in less than 1.5 seconds, quicker than the CEO can hit the off switch, with no rational explanation from any financial authority is just one of many scary examples given). This might not sound like the most fascinating of topics, and it might not be the most obvious way to start a conference about teaching computer science in schools, but Dave did a fantastic job of demonstrating not how, but WHY computer science is so important.
Workshop 1 – Arduino: If seeing is beliving, what is touching? – Chris Martin
I’ve been hearing people talk about Arduinos for a while now. I even tried to buy a kit a few years ago but the company, for some reason, decided not to process my order and I never did get round to chasing it up. With a simple programming interface (there are only two buttons you need and a space for some syntax), a USB lead and any manner of ‘bits’ you can program a physical device. Starting with making an LED flash on and off we were quickly controlling the speed of the flashing using potentiometers, using light sensors to turn motors and using acoustic proximity sensors to set off explosions (because, and I quote, “it’s not just chemists that get to blow s**t up”). The kits are around £40 with everything you need to get started, and with paired or small group programming you could get away with 4 or 5 for a class. As a workshop should, this was hands on from the start and while some students naturally engage with on-screen programming, the idea that you can do something with a physical output in seconds is undoubtedly engaging for many. I think half a dozen Arduino kits half just become my top priority with any spare budget, even more so than the Kinect I was after.
Workshop 2 – Algorithmic Problem Solving – Joao Ferrerrira
I’ve mentioned more than once that while my GCSE Computing students have really engaged with computer programming and have enjoyed getting to grips with the discrete elements (assignment, selection, iteration, file handling, etc.) my big bugbear is that most are not good at problem solving, decomposition and abstraction. That is to say, ask them to write a for loop to display the first 20 square numbers and you’re sorted, but give them a problem (like how many trips it will take to get a load of vampires and maidens to a hotel bar) and they just don’t know how to start breaking th eproblem down into manageable chunks. Joao presented some really interesting approaches to generating algorithms without a computer. Some of it was quite heavy (Hoare triples and state change diagrams, for those who know about such things) but I really do think there’s scope here to investigate better ways of helping students to start thinking computationally, which is an essential part of computing as a discipline.
As an added bonus, it turns out Joao lives less than 3 miles from my school and is running his undergraduate course on algorithmic problem solving in September at my nearest university. Suffice to say I’ve made sure he’ll be presenting at a hub meeting before veyr much longer!
Lunch
Now I’m not normally one to go into *so* much detail, and this isn;t about the food (delicious though it was). The point here is I actually 5 minutes (maybe as much as 10) to catch my breath. Those 3 sessions were all genuinely inspiring and packed with brilliant ideas and stuff that I wanted to think about. The cogs were whirring and had that been the end of the day then I would have happily set out for home with a spring in my step and feeling that I’d got a heck of a lot of value. As it was, there was still much more to come!
Workshop 3 – The productive teacher – James Franklin
James wanted to talk about a pedagogical approach called Minimally Invasive Education, pioneered by Sugata Mitra. His argument is that in the absence of a teacher, learners will teach themselves. If you provide them with the resources and the encouragement then they can learn at least as effectively without direct intervention as they would with it. To this extent James showed his Y7 class a series of manipulated images and gave them 6 lessons to teach themselves and each other the skills required to replicate them. He actively refused to do any teaching or answer questions and removed any rules in order that they shouldn’t be barriers to learning. Want to text your Dad to help solve that problem? Fine. Want to use your phone to wathc a video tutorial on YouTube? Fine. Want to tie your tie around your head like Rambo? Well… only if you can justify it pedagogically.
A very similar technique apparently worked well for spreadsheet modelling too and feedback form the students was overwhelmingly positive. James’ GCSE cohort didn’t do quite as well, however. While they learned a heck of a lot about databases and could explain why forms were useful in terms of your ability to add macros, action buttons and user-friendly interface elements, they scored very poorly on practice papers because they weren’t hitting the rote answer expected by the exam board.
Maybe this says something about the way in which we assess students, and maybe this approach is better suited to skills-based topics rather than knowledge-based. James admitted himself that he would be very wary of using this technique to teach programming from scratch as it is too easy for students to waste a lot of time exploring the wrong avenue when a simple array would save them all the hassle.
Overall it’s a brave approach, and one that would almost certianly fail an inspection on the grounds that not eveyr student can demonstrate progress over one lesson (in fact, the fact that they can sometimes make no progress in a lesson is actually the point!). That said, if we want independent learners who can solve problems, communicate, work collaboratively and don’t sit around waiting to be spoon fed then this might be just what the doctor ordered.
Workshop 4 – Sensing the world (with Scratch)
My final workshop of the day was spent playing with picoboards, a £40 sensor board that plugs in via USB and talks directly to Scratch. With nothing more than a simple driver install I was playing the trombone by blowing into the microphone and moving a slider bar, and then managed to quickly write a working game with a variety of controls including light sensing, buttons and more. Much simpler than an Arduino and much more focused on physical input that a Raspberry Pi, I can see why these engage students so well and they’re going second on my shopping list after the Arduino kits mentioned earlier.
Plenaries – How Google can help you & Raspberry Pi
I have to admit, I was totally exhausted by this point and somewhat overwhelmed. Andrew Eland and Alan Mycroft both spoke eloquently and engagingly about their respective topics and Google is very keen to support computing as a discipline. Particularly as their UK recruitment of software engineers is doubling every 18 months (a trend that shows no sign of letting up in the near future). I *still* have yet to get my hands on a Pi, and even when I do, I think I might just be too busy playing with Arduino kits and sense boards to get much done.
Summary
In summary? Best. Day. Ever. Last year was great, the year before was fantastic. This was simply awe inspiring. All the things I haven’t mentioned – chatting with Susan Robson, catching up with frineds from the CAS Working Group, shared conversations in the atrium over sandwiches (or a pint, last night). They were a huge part of it all and I’m heading back and JUST the right time of year, all set to plan the most kick-ass curriculum you’ve ever seen.
Originally uploaded by theirhistory
I’ve been kicking around an idea for a few months now.
Actually, no, that’s a lie. I’ve been following some other people kicking around an idea for a few months now and I’ve been feeling like this has the makings of a very good idea. Possibly.
Chris Allen (@infernaldepart) and Brian Sharland (@sharland) keep posting messages about Digital Badges, and a blog post by Dave Stacey (@davestacey) has really filled me with enthusiasm (and a bit of awe at the scope of his pedagogical vision). The basic principle is quite simple; instead of assessing each piece of work as Level 4a, Level 5c or whatever you use the Scouting model of awarding badges as a way of recognising achievement.
This has a real advantage for me that it’s not about me looking at each piece of work and grading it at one of several levels, it’s not about hawkishly passing judgement on the student every time. The emphasis is instead focused on rewarding work, and specifically in rewarding progress.
At Beaver Scouts, my daughter recently earned her ’1 night away’ badge. Does this represent any learning objectives? No. Does it represent an achievement? Absolutely. It won’t be long before she earns her ’5 nights away’ badge, then 10, 20… I think my son should be approaching 50 by now. Progress, achievement and rewards.
And actually, it’s not entirely dissimilar to the real world. When I have to write a particular document it is ultimately pass/fail. My SEF either comes back needing amendment or it is accepted, I get to keep my ‘administrative paperwork’ badge and everything else that comes along with it.
All this is helped by Mozilla’s Open Badges framework. The idea is that people can complete tasks and be awarded a digital badge for their efforts. They even have a virtual backpack on which you can proudly display your badges. And being open source (hence the Open Badges name), anyone can create their own badge, or set of badges.
There are two issues I still need to overcome, however, if this is going to work.
One, I need a way to embed the badges in the student mindset. They need to be displayed somewhere in a way that is “automagic and omnipresent”. It’s no use asking them to sew them on their jumpers and I don’t like the idea of students having to go to a third party website just to check their badges and to see the badges of others. One idea I’m looking at is a login script that will display the student’s badges on their desktop. I’m also hearing rumours of a potential plugin for with Edmodo and/or Moodle.
The second one is that in order for this to work, it needs to be consistent across the department, approved by SLT and mapped to levels so that we can still report using the existing systems. None of that is necessarily insurmountable, I just hope that my departmental colleagues are willing to give it a go.
I genuinely think that there is an opportunity here to provide feedback, offer recognition and to motivate students in a fundamentally different way.
Originally uploaded by sunflowerdave (professional loungist)
This post is about Teachmeet North East 2012
As I said a post or two ago, we need to recognise (well, I need to reassure myself) that we can’t all do everything. And after a bit of a crappy first half of the week I wasn’t 100% certain I would pay my £12 rail fare and give up my Thursday evening to go up to Newcastle and talk shop for the evening, albeit in the function room of a really nice pub.
But, as with every Teachmeet I’ve ever been to, I’m really, really glad I did just that.
For those not familiar with the format, a load of teachers organise via a wiki to meet up somewhere for 3 hours or so, and a number of them agree to do either a short 7 minute talk, or an even shorter 2 minute talk on some aspect of classroom practice. A tool, a tip, a technique – anything at all.
It helps if you can get someone like Vital or Northern Grid to chip in a few quid to hire a room and provide some nibbles.
And what you get is a load of teachers who are startlingly passionate about education, and about learning, and about being better at what we do.
It takes a bit of nerve to stand up in front of other teachers, but actually it’s a very positive atmosphere. If the topic doesn’t interest you, it’s only 7 minutes. And in the many Teachmeets I’ve attended, I can count on one hand the topics that didn’t grab me. I have to take my socks off to count all the ideas I’ve nicked.
As one friend of mine said just last night, “This can’t be CPD. I enjoy it.” And he’s got a point. While I’ve taken positives from some of the INSET work in school and some of the courses I’ve been on, I’ve never had as much fun OR learned as much OR been inspired as much OR been as engaged as much as happens at Teachmeets.
Over the next week or so I’ll be commenting on a few of the specific presentations that have given me pause for thought, but for now, take this as a massive plug to find your nearest Teachmeet (there are loads of them) and get yourself some first rate CPD.
Originally uploaded by Michael of Scott
Do you ever have one of those days where nothing seems to go right? Nothing goes terribly wrong, it’s not been a disaster of day, it just feels so terribly… devoid of success.
Yesterday started off like one of those, and it left me pretty glum. It’s taken me a while to unravel it all, but I feel a bit more hopeful about it now and thought I would share.
My Y9s that morning were supposed to be creating forms in Access for a simple relational database to record high scores. I’ve run this SoW a few times in the past, though usually with a flat-file (they play the Helicopter Game, Bop-It and compete to find out whether boys are better than girls, see what effect eye colour has etc.). They ended up getting quite frustrated with the lesson, but they were actually pretty good about what was ultimately a boring and pointless hour. The flaw was, it was a lesson where I was trying to get them to learn how to perform some function in some program, which is a pretty poor lesson objective.
The students don’t ‘get’ relational databases yet. In most of the Y11 classes I’ve taught, about half the class has failed to ‘get’ relational databases – this despite typically 20-30 hours of lessons on the topic. I’ve got a class of kids 2 years younger and I’ve spent the sum total of one hour trying to teach them about relational databases (as well as reminding them about fields, records, primary keys…). What I *should* have done was to try to teach them about the purpose and function of a database. Why we store data electronically, how we store data electronically, how we can take advantage of a database to make life simpler, easier and take away some of the boring, repetitive nature of tasks – like looking up responses to questions.
Next came my Year 8s. The lesson was an introduction to modelling, following last week’s revision of Y7 spreadsheet skills. The main resource is a multi-page spreadsheet file with a variety of activities to help pupils investigate models. And again, the kids just didn’t seem to get it. They were working out the answers on a calculator at times, instead of using a formula. They couldn’t seem to get to grips with using a fill handle to replicate a pattern (so what start 2, 4, 6 would end up 7, 8, 9). The Formula 1 model where students try to work out the best the strategy (hard tyres, with longer life but slower laps vs the soft tyres with faster laps but more pitstops) was an unmitigated, and ultimately unfinished, disaster.
This one has a more involved problem underlying it. I have one Y8 class early in the week who respond really poorly to any kind of discussion work or any opportunity to become the centre of attention. Give them a task to get on with, even one that involves actually reading the instructions, and they’re fine. Try to explain what you’re trying to achieve verbally and the lesson descends into anarchy. Inevitably, I’ve been gearing my lessons towards independent work with as little class discussion as I think I get away with. And that’s changed the way I treat this Year 8 class, later in the week. This lot clearly found it more challenging to read instructions and try and solve the problems themselves, preferring the group discussion and teacher explanation type stuff. My flaw was to try to use the same technique with very, very different classes.
Another key point was that one pupil (as always happens when we’re using spreadsheets), decided to find out how many rows there are. As always, my stock reaction is to tell said pupil that it goes down to 65,536. And now they know that they can get on with the work. Said pupil’s neighbour then asked why that number, and how do I know? I replied that it’s a power of 2 (2^16 as it happens) and then directed the students back to their task. What I briefly considered doing, and what I know I would have done a few years ago, is to stop the lesson and go and explore some binary. It’s fun, it’s geeky, it’s something I’m passionate about, something I enjoy and it would have allowed the pupils to exert some influence over what we did in the lesson.
We would have failed to meet the original objectives, but I’m pretty sure we did that anyway. And I think that’s why the day really knocked me so much. I stuck to a lesson plan twice in a row that was not working and was not helping the students to learn, to make progress, to achieve. I need to remember to be more flexible and adaptable in my lessons. This makes lessons more interesting, more useful and more fun!
On the plus side, since I didn’t get paid for working yesterday, at least I didn’t adversely affect the school’s value for money 
Originally uploaded by Juan R. Martos
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we get students to complete tasks.
Specifically I’ve been thinking about it in an IT context, but it applies to English and potentially Art, Music, Drama and other creative subjects as well.
If I want to create a spreadsheet model I’ll fire up Excel (other spreadsheet packages are available) and start fleshing out a suitable layout. But if I want students to do this they often struggle. “I don’t know where to start”, “What do I do first?” and other comments will appear. The students often lack the ability that I seem to have – to start putting things down and come up with a suitable layout. Equally, if I want the students to write a letter to a client in response to a brief, they’ll say “How do I start it?” – even if we’ve done a load of prep work.
Sometimes I think that scaffolding and frameworks are very effective. I subscribe to the idea that when starting to program, I write something that will do what I want and then selectively remove bits, adding hints for the students. Students find an empty page daunting – whether it be web design, programming, spreadsheets – even DTP and slideshows. Heck, even I will prefer to use a DTP template and adjust it rather than start from nothing.
I wonder, though, if that’s doing students a disservice. I said at the start that, with a spreadsheet model for example, I just start hashing it out. I’ve built plenty of websites and written plenty of programs without someone setting it all up for me. Am I about to send hundreds of students out into the world without the skills that I, myself, have to use day in and day out?
I think it would be too simplistic to say “give them a scaffold” at KS3 but “make them do it from scratch” at KS4. I don’t see how I can expect some switch to flick sometime between taking options and the summer holidays at which point students can suddenly be expected to do this for themselves.
What’s the answer? Well, I’m pretty sure it varies depending on the topic, and the student. I happily still use scaffolding for programming at KS5 (as does the exam), but I’m not going to give my Y7s a writing frame in PowerPoint.
If anyone does have the answer then please do share it, because I really don’t…
jjpacres
Literacy is a big word at the minute. Not just because it has 4 syllables (depending on how you pronounce it), but because they-who-must-not-be-named* have released a new framework that mentions literacy specifically across all subjects.
One of my biggest problems, and I said this to my Headteacher, is that I have never been taught how to prepare students for essays and exams. I’ve never been taught how to teach for literacy. Until now. That’s one of the reasons for this (extremely lengthy) post.
Many tweeps** have been posting and asking for advice as they have suddenly had it thrust upon them to write a departmental literacy policy or to provide some other form of paperwork to their SMT. That’s the other reason for this (extremely lengthy) post.
I’m hoping I can be of some help to those people, but this article (which has been coming for a while) should also help me distill some of my own thoughts on the issue. The main reason is not that I’m cleverer or more specialist in literacy strategies, but because my SMT started us down this track before the summer break and we’ve already done a lot to push things on.
One of the most important things we did was to ask Geoff Barton to come and do a whole day of INSET with the entire staff. I had intended to post straight after that PD day but real life took over and I never seemed to manage the time. Suffice to say that my cynicism before the day that some bloke was going to come and tell me how to do my job properly was completely unfounded and it was one of the best and most productive INSET experiences I’ve had.
The main thrust of his argument is that literacy is not some plug-in or bolt-on that you stick into a lesson plan, it’s actually just about good teaching and learning. There were many bits of information I’ve taken with me (for example, a key indicator of academic success is that by 5 years old you can manage to have a conversation with an adult; preferably over a dinner table) and the striking difference between the word-rich and the word-poor has definitely remained in the back of my mind throughout the last few months.
So that’s all well and good – I’ve had a lovely time getting some training to do with literacy. Lets try working that into some practical ideas:
1. VCOP
Many primary teachers will be familiar with VCOP already, but it was totally new to me and has really been a revelation. It stands for Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation. There are loads of resources out there ripe for pinching and adapting, but as most will be aimed at primary pupils you need to take a little care in terms of pitch.
Very simply, we present the students with a question and the first thing they do (after decomposing the question) is to suggest and write down some key vocabulary. So if we’re talking data security we could start with hacker, firewall, virus, anti-virus, etc…
Continuing from this we move on to connectives, which are the words used to join bits of sentences together; for example using a phrase like ‘for example’. Alternatively you could use a contrasting connective (do you see what I’m doing here?) and so you start to think about how to go from “this AND that AND the other AND the next bit” to a proper sentence structure.
Obviously the next section is for openers, and here you get the students to write the first few words of each paragraph. Again, with the topic of data security I could have one sentence opening the discussion: “Data security is increasingly important in the digital age because…”. The following paragraph could be about viruses: “One of the most common risks to data security is the computer virus…”. Next: “Hackers are people who try to…”. Maybe a couple more before we get to “In conclusion,…”. So already we have a structure to the work and we have planned what issues we are going to talk about in the essay itself and we’re less likely to forget to include something or, worse, to get sidetracked with a minor issue.
Personally I found the last step to be the hardest to work with, and that’s punctuation. The idea here is that you think about whether you’re going to use commas to separate list items, full stops to differentiate between sentences, semi-colons to join related sentences together, etc. I find this stuff comes fairly naturally and, perhaps it’s a flaw of mine, but I generally gloss over this bit.
And there we have our essay! The first time you do this it takes a good hour or so, but with practice you can easily give students 10 minutes for VCOP planning and then however much time you think is appropriate for the essay.
So, who is this for? The very weak? Those in Year 7 and 8 who need the most basic literacy support? Well so far we’ve been using it with the Y11s, who did badly in the essay question at the end of the WJEC Unit 1 exam in summer, and the 6th formers, who need to write significantly long essays as part of their Edexcel Applied Unit 1 coursework. And it’s been an overwhelming success. The students are able to quickly plan and structure their answers, the essays coming in are significantly improved in both readability and content, and I’ve even had students asking their English teachers if they can use VCOP in those lessons too.
2. Writing for an audience
Those who teach ICT will be familiar with the phrase ‘Audience and Purpose’. It underpins almost everything in the ICT curriculum and I’m forever trying to stop girls making everything pink and trying to stop boys putting guns in every piece of workª. But I was amazed to find out (purely because a meeting happened to be in an English room) that a key phrase in the English curriculum is ‘Audience, Context and Purpose’.
Actually, I shouldn’t have been surprised – of course it is. English is often about writing for an audience in the same way that ICT is often about preparing work for an audience. So when my Y9s are trying to sell the houses they designed in Sketchup, we spend a whole lesson writing the copy for the flyers, brochures and websites. We ask them to list 3 adjectives to describe their house; we compare their adjectives with an estate agent’s website; we talk about the use of language to persuade and exaggerate; they write copy that is amazingly detailed, descriptive and often even poetic. And we’ve been doing that lesson for 2 years now.
There are loads of examples similar to this that I can pick out, and I suspect that most ICT teachers can do the same. We’re already talking about appropriate language, we just need to recognise that this is about literacy as well as about ICT. I also think it does the pupils no harm at all to see that this ICT stuff on appropriate language is exactly the same as the principles they are learning about in English. Pupils have an amazing knack of denying the obvious links between subjects.
3. Reading for meaning
Again, something we’ve been doing implicitly for a while, we often set students off with project briefs. They have to take a letter or a document, read it, understand it and churn out a simple plan. This might be a bullet point list of tasks with a rough guess on how long each one might take, or a gantt chart at KS5 (we don’t bother in KS3, although we used to). We give them highlighters and get them to mark key phrases. We get them working in pairs to support each other (ideally matching a word-rich student with a word-poor student). All of this stuff relates to literacy because it involves reading, and processing, the information in order to understand and do something with it.
4. Marking policies
Marking policies are a difficult one for me. We have a whole school marking policy that now includes standard symbols for highlighting spelling, grammatical or punctuation errors – but in my department we tend to mark things online and adding those types of comments are tricky. My own policy is to flag up mistakes in the feedback, but not inline. The alternative would be to print the work out to annotate it or to have to open it in a particular package that allows annotation and probably have to use a graphics tablet to do it. A good idea if that’s what you want to do, but probably not all that practical.
5. Dictionaries in every room
Another new whole-school policy is to have a dictionary and thesaurus in every room. Easy with ICT – we generally have 20+ computers that are all connected to the Internet. Stick a dictionary website and a thesaurus website in the bookmarks on the standard student profile and every pupil has almost instant access. I think it’s also sensible to have a paper copy of each too, but it’s a simple one if you’re trying to show your SMT that you are taking literacy seriously.
6. Simplify and repeat
When I talk about audience, I say “the audience, the people who are going to read this, are going to want…” or something similar. Every timeªª. The idea is to explain what a word means as you use it, so the kids understand it – and to do it a lot. I’m sure I heard somewhere that you have to tell a pupil something 10 times before they’ll definitely learn it, so tell it often. Viruses, small programs that harm your computer, can be picked up really easily when you go on dodgy websites. Parenthetical commas all the way.
And that’ll about do for now.
I dare say that if I were to wrack my brain a bit harder then something else might fall out, but the point is that with the exception of VCOP, this stuff is just what we’ve been doing anyway, we’ve simply made it a bit more explicit. We’ve talked about it, had 2 days of INSET to put things in place and to get some training in it and we’re making progress with it.
Hopefully that’s of some use to some of you. I’m convinced it’s been of much use to me, and to my students.
* I won’t name the organisation, but if you’re still not sure, it starts with an O.
** I dislike that word, but I have to admit that it works.
ª Yes, there are times when those two things would be appropriate, but it’s trying to get in that there are times when they aren’t that seems to be the challenge.
ªª OK, not every time, but I’m trying
