ICT and Computing in Education
Today I attended the Blackboard Users’ conference at Durham University. Although it is aimed at FE & HE staff that use Blackboard, it’s not intended to be entirely about Blackboard. It’s also worth mentioning that this was the second day of the 2-day conference (the first of which I did not attend).
Having braved the weather to get there I felt very well looked after by a multitude of people, although I was highly amused at being rebranded alternately as ‘Mike Clarkson’ on my name badge and as ‘Mark Clarke’ in the delegates list. Added to previous mistakes at conferences I can now legitimately claim to be Mike Clarke, Assistant Head 
The first session of the day was a 90 minute Blackboard sales pitch presentation. This was largely irrelevant to me, but I am looking at one trick they have used for bugtracking that could be a way to add student voice to our VLE. And I planned out 2 programming SoW :p
After that we split into three groups and chose which presentation to go to. I chose my own which was worryingly in the cavernous main lecture theatre – but as only about 15 people turned up to watch that wasn’t too much of a problem. In fairness, my limited audience were very nice, asked some good questions and almost all came to see me personally later on to tell me how much they enjoyed it and appreciated my approach.
After that, @anthonymcneill took us through his trials and tribulations trying to get 18 final year English Literature students to use Twitter as a learning tool. It was really interesting, and even though the Q&A session afterwards ran 15 minutes into lunch, everyone in the room was still paying rapt attention.
The afternoon featured a presentation about using mobile phones and branched trees to run a real-time simulation of a flooding disaster, with students making decisions that will save (or doom) the local population. Although the topic was really interesting, the presentation swayed a bit too much towards the academic and ‘paradigmy’, and less on the practical – but then that’s just me all over. I’ve certainly got a page full of notes to work through and some ideas for how to make use of the project myself.
Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable day out, some brilliant ideas to think through and a number of faces put to names and new people to follow.
Having been contacted by the lovely people at @LearnTechDurham to speak at their BlackBoard User’s Conference I’ve planned a very practical demonstration of some of the non-VLE related online tools I’ve been using over the past year or two.
Being a belt & braces kind of person though, I’ve also created a Prezi presentation to use just in case everything else fails. I doubt I’ll get through all of the content here in 25 minutes (+ 20 min Q&A) and I know I’ve left some good tools off, but they’re all tools that I’ve at least tried and have some faith in.
The latest issue of my Techy Tips newsletter is now online at Scribd.
Aimed at teachers of all subjects and all levels of technical ability, this issue focuses on using mindmapping tools and alternative ways to create and present… presentations.
Techy Tips 06
http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=24674143&access_key=key-paa4zoyfrc0gyillnxy&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list
Mukoku is a Japanese word, meaning ‘out of resources’. I thought it was the perfect name for a Moodle site I’ve been wanting to set up for a while – a place where I can stick resources I want to share with the world. The plan is not to stick to ICT specific topics, but to post a whole range of resources; including presentations and suggestions I’ve made for conferences, my Techy Tips newsletters and a whole range of cross-curricular ideas – in addition to some ICT specific resources as well.
Previously I’ve used mwclarkson.co.uk and also stuck stuff on a webserver and posted links to it when requested. This way there is a permanent place and I can format things more carefully and with a lot more space than I could with the old website.
Dan Humphreys (@MoodleDan) has kindly given me the url mukoku.vl3.co.uk and in time, it would be nice to have other people contributing things as well. So let me know what you think, subscribe to the RSS feed and feel free to point others in my general direction 
Image courtesy of photographer padawan *(xava du)
When I first started teaching, I quickly realised that the academic procedure of draft, redraft and produce a finished, polished document is rarely achievable in the real world. Nowadays most documents I create are draft, scan through and move on – there simply isn’t time to do everything.
That was fine for the first 5 years of teaching; producing resources, writing student reports, documenting evidence for performance management. Alongside my extra-curricular clubs and CPD I seemed to be managing OK.
The problem I have now is that I’m being pulled in several directions. Through my iMedia and animation work I’m being pulled down the creative route. Through my experience and passion for coding I’m being pulled down the Computing route. Through my desire to get students confident and proficient with everyday tasks I’m pulled down the tradition ICT route. Through my desire to support other teachers in their use of ICT I’m pulled down the ICT champion route.
The problem I find myself facing, is do I continue to try and carry out all of my roles without specialising, or do I choose 1 or 2 to put a heavy focus on? As I get drawn into organising TeachMeets, setting up a portable TV studio, pushing hard through the general curricular stuff, trying to implement a new Computing GCSE, writing up ‘Techy Tips’ newsletters, sharing resources online and much more I find myself increasingly struggling to get it all done. And report writing season hasn’t started yet!
Looking back to the first paragraph, I can’t cut out any drafts in order to speed things up. I either specialise and sacrifice some of my work in other directions, or continue treading water and struggle to find the time to commit. Neither of which I’m entirely happy with…
If you want to see practical examples of the above tools, there are loads of links at my Delicious account.
Run Run Shaw Room @ Bafta
Ah… Another day, another conference (or that’s how it feels – although they always seem to come in pairs!). I had the privilege of speaking at the SSAT Future Schools event at BAFTA earlier today and I have to say I think it went quite well.
I had a last minute panic on the way down and decided to rewrite half of the presentation – but ultimately for the better I think. While I continued with my basic premise of small scale, bottom-up innovation vs large scale, top-down innovation but added in some practical examples of use as a counterpoint to the theory and strategy talk.(1)
Some of the other presentations were also very interesting. @dtester talked at length about parent engagement and how his college is using the Frog learning platform to create a parent portal – something we are all required to do in some form or other in the immediate future.
Mark Richardson demonstrated how simple it is to get students recording, editing and producing videos, both in school and out – and to great education effect (Paraphrasing: “In order to make a video about something, you have to think about it” – instantly engaged learners!)
Bill How also talked about the new i(nformal) CPD resources planned by the SSAT. Some of this looks quite interesting, although I think it was pitched more at SMT (not least because I was the only teacher I could find who wasn’t in the command chain). But it’s definitely something worth watching.
As an added bonus, Paul Hynes did some Augmented Reality demos and the Future Schools team is releasing 10 pre-built models (skeletons and muscles for Biology, solar system for Physics, interacting molecules for Chemistry, etc…). Apparently they’re being built by custom developers using FLAtools
All in all, I had a great time, in a fantastic setting (the Run Run Shaw room was packed out for both of my sessions). I’m not quite ready to post the entire presentation online (the train wifi isn’t ideal for uploading content and investigating hyperlinks) but it’ll be up shortly – I’ve just promised 50 senior leaders!
(1) I like to think that one of the reasons I was asked back by the SSAT was because my previous talk was very practical in approach and focused on providing simple opportunities.
So, last night was the inaugural Teachmeet EdTechRoundUp and quite possibly the first online only Teachmeet (if you missed it, you can watch a replay of the whole thing or there are links to individual blog posts and presentations).
I had the privilege of being amongst the contributors for the evening and saw what was going on behind the scenes, from the weeks-long build up to the technical gubbins during the evening itself.
Dai Barnes and Doug Belshaw did most of the hard work, with Doug’s machine broadcasting a live feed of the events through Justin.tv and the pair of them doing a grand impersonation of Ant and Dec – filling where necessary and being managing the segues between presentations as well as the feedback via Twitter.
I could see upwards of 75 people watching live in the Justin.tv channel as well as 15 or so contributors in the Flashmeeting plus lots of Twitter feedback this morning suggesting many more are catching up after the event – making it one of the largest Teachmeets so far (I believe).
I’ve been to one ‘IRL’ flashmeeting before now and enjoyed it immensely, not just for the presentations (although they were brill) but also for the opportunity actually meet people face to face – some of whom I know from Twitter and many of whom I had never heard of. So while this Teachmeet was very successful and did give me a lot of good ideas, I don’t think it will ever replace the conventional unconference (if that’s not an oxymoron). Variety in all things is a pretty good maxim, and I’m already looking forward to the next one. I’ll just have to remember not to upload my presentation to Vimeo and to find my stuffed camel beforehand…
Teachmeet is an incredible movement, whereby teachers meet up (in case that much wasn’t clear) in their own time to discuss ideas, practices, experiences and disasters. Presentations are limited to 7 minutes (micro presentation) or 2 minutes (nano presentation).
The first ever online Teachmeet is occurring this Sunday (6th December 2009) and you can catch the whole thing live from 7 – 9 GMT or watch any and all of the presentations at a later date if you need to.
My presentation is all about using Google Sketchup no matter what subject you teach, and if you think you can find a subject where you *couldn’t* use Sketchup then drop me a line and I’ll do my best to prove you a liar
Google Sketchup FTW from Mark Clarkson on Vimeo.
Edit: James Greenwood sent me this link with a whole host of Sketchup related resources, so check them out.
Back in September, the school found out there was some funding available via an organisation called LSIS for a project to raise achievement at KS5. One of my English colleagues approached me and proposed a more engaging VLE-type experience as his students sometimes find Moodle a little dry and institutional.
We’ve now got the go ahead, and some funding, to implement something. Having had a sit down with my visionary colleague, he’d like the students to see a classroom with, say, a bookshelf where all of the books link to resources and the posters link to activities, etc.
Options? I could create a simple HTML or Flash front-end that would point to Moodle activities or resources. This would be pretty obvious and I think the students would see through it fairly quickly.
At the other end, I could code my own CMS from scratch. By mid-January. In my spare time *fnarr*.
Somewhere in the middle I could choose a simple CMS and skin it to hell, or maybe even try with Moodle. Necessary features would be:
I also considered Edmodo, which would meet some or all of the criteria above – but isn’t customisable in terms of appearance and therefore doesn’t provide the GUI that is required.
Thoughts? Ideas? Opinions?
