Blank Mind

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…

Your Vote Your Choice

Originally uploaded by alternatePhotography

A little over 2 years ago I managed to get my department onto the OCR GCSE Computing Pilot. Now, our first cohort is coming out the other side and with all the ‘kerfuffle’, a flood of exam boards (well, 2) have suddenly gone from saying “there’s no demand, it’s not worth it” to rushing out GCSE Computing specifications for first teaching from 2012.

My default position is to stick to what I know. I’ve spent 2 years creating resources and learning about how OCR wants me to tackle the specification, and how it wants the students to tackle it. But on the other hand, I don’t want to sit here out of habit and miss a better opportunity.

This morning I’ve had a good read through what AQA and Edexcel have to offer. And I think I’ll stick where I am. Not least because for an exam board to go from ‘no spec’ to a spec ready for submission to the DfE or Ofqual or whoever is doing the QCA’s job these days within a couple of months is a little bit rushed for my liking.

AQA

The AQA spec looks broadly similar, although the theory topics skip a lot of the software and binary representation stuff in favour of prototyping and testing and there are two programming controlled assessments which is a little more… up front than the OCR approach (in which the practical investigation has really turned into a programming task – although they were bullied into that by the (then) QCDA and I like that at least it’s something a bit different.

A key point for me is that in the summary marking criteria for the programming unit, the programming techniques used section gets 36 of the 63 marks – the next largest component being just 9 marks. Sounds ideal!

Until you read the detailed mark scheme, where you get those 36 marks for “discussion of most of the programming techniques” – death by writeup…

You actually get 9 marks for producing the code itself.

Edexcel

What can you say about Edexcel? In fairness, I moaned that AQA had probably rushed their specification out. Edexcel haven’t – because there isn’t even a draft to look at yet. There are some outline details – a 40% written exam, 35% practical exam and a 25% controlled assessment.

I must admit, I’m a fan of practical exams. They’re logistically more difficult, but they provide a more accurate reflection of a student’s ability than coursework and the focus switches to teaching and learning rather than doing and redoing.

That said, with options evening tomorrow, I don’t feel compelled to jump to a spec I haven’t read and I’ve not been a huge fan of Edexcel’s output in recent years (although I know many that have).

So at the moment I don’t feel that spoilt for choice. Competition is a good thing, and for centres coming at GCSE Computing for the first time either in 2012 or 2013 then perhaps the route is a little less cut and dried. For me, though. It’ll be another year at least with OCR.

Caverlaverock Castle with Trebuchet

Originally uploaded by jarek69 & evelyn

I’ve not been blogging much lately, and while I’m not overly keen on meta-posts I’ve been thinking a lot the last couple of days about why that is.

Partly, it’s because I’ve been flipping busy. But writing a post doesn’t take long, so that’s no excuse.

More significantly it’s because a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about, and even started to write on occasion, have been less than positive. And I don’t want to be whinging and moaning – partly because it reinforces the negativity, partly because it makes me look bad and partly because I’ll end up saying something that will get me in bother.

So why the negativity? I’m not 100% certain, but here’s an interesting fact.

In the four days alone I’ve seen news reports telling me that:

Teachers who say things like “I’m not a teacher on here. I’m just like anyone else, I drink, swear… but don’t tell anyone.” can find themselves reprimanded by the GTC and hauled through the press. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-16929442)

Schools who are judged as outstanding will be free from routine inspections by OFSTED, except those whose exam results drop (so no pressure there then).

Even those schools judged as outstanding will be subject to departmental inspections, particularly focussing on those subjects trying to get themselves into the EBacc (staff meeting).

Those schools judged as outstanding in every area, but merely very good in terms of teaching (based on a 2-day snapshot) will no be allowed to be outstanding.

Schools that are currently satisfactory actually require improvement. OK, I can just about accept that, but it means that all schools will either be unsatisfactory, requires improvement, good or outstanding. That sounds to me like an F, a D, a C and an A*. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16579644)

It seems to me that there are lots of students in my Y11 classes who are doing better than scraping a C, but are not up to A* standard. It feels like someone is saying “unless you are truly amazing [which, after all, is what outstanding means, at least as I understand it] then you’re just not good enough”.

You see, and now this has turned into a negative rant. Which isn’t what I want. And inspection is a necessary evil. There are some schools and some teachers who don’t work hard enough, or don’t work right. There aren’t many of them, but we do need to ensure that standards are high. Fine, I accept that. I just feel as though the entire profession is under siege at the minute.

We’re lazy (we should have fewer holidays and longer working days), we’re overpaid (hence the pay freeze), we’re greedy over pensions (which is why I’ll be losing £100 a month on top of that pay freeze), we’re rubbish (hence all the OFSTED stuff) and we’re not allowed to have any kind of public or personal life (see any news story relating to teachers and social networking – including my HT telling me that any teacher with a Facebook account is being silly).

So maybe that’s got something to do with the lack of posts lately, despite lots of good stuff going on. I think I need to start focussing on that, really.

Balancing act

Originally uploaded by Brother O’Mara

Two students of mine missed a week of school to go on an army course. Which is fine.

The next lesson, they were due to catch up the filming work the rest of the class had done in their absence. Taking advantage of the opportunity to work unsupervised (as I was with the rest of the class), they mucked about, achieved literally nothing and damaged some expensive equipment.

They both had a session booked after school today to complete the filming under supervision. Neither bothered to turn up.

The only punishment I can realistically offer is to organise the equipment and the supervision for another night. Net loss to pupils – nothing. I can’t allow them to fail and I have to rise above any petulant desire to vent my frustration.

And so I find myself quietly seething, almost 5 hours after the end of my working day.

What balance?

Collar-label making process

Originally uploaded by Stephanie Booth

I have a new idea for organising my classes.

They’re currently mixed ability, which means I sometime have very bright students mixed in with less able students, and this makes things confusing, so I propose putting them into 4 groups.

I’ll have one group on the Outstanding table, where the best, the brightest (and the well dressed) can be quickly identified. I’ll also make sure I put a big sign on the table, so all the other students know who they need to emulate.

On the next table will be the Good students. Those who are doing pretty well, but could do better. If they work hard, they might move up to the Outstanding table, but I’ll have to lay down the law and threaten them with possible relegation to the Satisfactory table.

Actually, no. We’ll call it the Requires Improvement table. If I judge they’re not up to snuff, they’ll be plonked here and given a good going over. They’ll be told in no uncertain terms that if they’re stuck on this table for more than two cycles then that’s it – we’ll be looking to throw them straight down to the Unsatisfactory table (otherwise we’ll run out of room to put all those kids from the Good table who are coasting!).

Finally we have the unsatisfactory table. I don’t care if their social background is an issue, I don’t care if previous students have left their table in a mess – if they’re not sorting themselves out good and quick then it’s out on their ear and we’ll have to hire a whole new cohort of students to see if they can do better!

You see it’s all about choice, really. If I’m asking a question, I want to make sure I’m well informed as to who is who. I wouldn’t want to ask the wrong kind of kid!

Wait… what? What do you mean there’s a free table over there where the kids can pick their own curriculum and choose their own school hours?

Oh, I give up…

Jr Network Geek…

Originally uploaded by Cassey

http://www.youtube.com/user/mwclarkson <– Useful AS Computing resources

I have 3 (count them, three) AS Computing students. Due to timetabling constraints I teach them for 1 hour a week during school hours and 2 hours a week after school.

Due to other commitments, one student misses every other 1 hour session and a different student misses virtually all of the 2 hour sessions (so he’s essentially doing a full AS on one hour a week).

In order to provide some more assistance I’ve started creating some simple videos. Production value is nil (a cheap camcorder, a tripod and a mini whiteboard), editing is limited to adding a few titles at either end and the script is made up as I go along.

Hopefully they might be of some use to others too, and if you do spot any glaring errors, then do let me know…

http://www.youtube.com/user/mwclarkson

don’t panic towel

Originally uploaded by norrix

Well, by now you really ought to be aware that the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, has had quite a lot to say this morning on the topic of ICT and Computing provision in schools.

I’m not actually going to say too much about the speech specifically, but more about the consequences.

What I will say is that the rhetoric and soundbites in the media outlets* had me pretty disheartened first thing – but reading the detail in many of those reports and the speech itself I think everything’s going to be fine (and if you disagree, just go to make-everything-ok.com).

I’ve seen forum threads, tweets and comments all day from teachers in turns ecstatic, perturbed and distraught at the future prospects for careers, subject areas and the academic future of our students.

ICT provision at KS1, 2, 3 and 4 is still compulsory. And so it should be. Students need to know how to use computers to complete tasks – modelling, presenting information, research. This may be delivered in a cross-curricular format, at least at KS2 and 4. It may be taught as a discrete subject.

Maybe this will give SLTs and HoDs the push they need to look at which elements really should be taught in a cross-curricular format. Maybe Science and Maths will be given some formal responsibility for delivering some of the above. All schools now formally have the freedom to choose the most appropriate method. I would more than happily let my Maths colleagues deliver spreadsheet skills and modelling techniques. I’m not suggesting that cross-curricular is the only way to go, but I spend so much of my time making up scenarios to give the skills a context that it does seem there’s an opportunity there.

And what of the Computing side of the curriculum? I’ve been teaching Computing topics at KS3 for years. Initially just when ‘no-one was looking’ (especially the kids), but increasingly explicitly as the years have gone on. And I’m hardly alone. Gove has been quoted suggesting that in the near future our 11 year olds could be creating 2D animations. I started delivering Scratch lessons to my Y7s in 2006 I think…

At KS4, those studying a GCSE or other Level 2 course in ICT can continue to do so and I’m equally certain that ICT qualifications will be around for a long time. With the expansion of Computing topics lower down, there should be more opportunities for Computing to be popular as a formal qualification, and this is a good thing. It’s about choice and exposure.

Some are clearly concerned that Computing is for a niche, or at best a minority. I wouldn’t go that far, but History, Geography, Music, Drama, Art… they’re none of them for everyone at KS4. And again, nor should they be. But now, hopefully, all schools will have Computing at KS3 so that students can make an informed choice, and all schools should be able to offer Computing as a qualification so that students have an opportunity.

What changed today? For me, actually, very little. I had a great discussion with my Y9s about their options (as planned), practiced search techniques with my Y8s (as planned), created radio adverts with one Year 11 group (as planned), had a go at coding a theatre booking system with my Y11 Computing group (as planned) and looked at the TCP/IP stack and common protocols with my Y12s (as planned). Tomorrow will be similar. Y7s creating a database, Y13 creating an interactive Flash product, Y10 video editing, Y12 practising working with arrays – a broad and balanced curriculum made up of essential application skills, creative use of computers and the study of how to make computers work for us.

The future is not what a politician tells us it will be, the future is what we do with what we’ve got.

* BBC News – “The current information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum in England’s schools is a “mess” and must be radically revamped”

Telegraph – “‘Dull’ technology school lessons to be replaced”

ZDNet – “‘Boring’ IT classes face being axed”

I could go on…

I’d like my students, especially at KS3 and KS4, to have more opportunities to explore Computing as a discipline (this should not be news to anyone who has rea this blog before), but I don’t have time to run a club.

One idea that’s quite popular is to run a small competition, so here is me thinking out loud about it:

It needs to be quite simple. I applied to have a crack at the British Informatics Society’s Informatics Olympiad late last year which promised to be a fascinating computing competition backed by Lionhead Studios. It turned out to involve a 3 hour exam and was quite complex.

The competition needs to be easy to get into. It needs to present a student with something they think they have a reasonable chance of succeeding at. I don’t want to pitch it too low, but pitching too high will simply leave me with no competitors.

The competition should be language independent. I know some Y10s who have taught themselves VB, some Y8s who have taught themselves Java, etc. while it’s true that once you understand the basic principles, transferring them to a new syntax is usually fairly straightforward for simple programs, it’s another barrier.

I need to be able to see what is genuinely the students’ work and what is the work of parents, forums or plain copying and pasting. Comments will help but I might need to go so far as to interview each entrant! (Or at least a shortlist).

Students don’t like being given a blank piece of paper (often). giving them a skeleton to hang things on makes getting going much easier.

Here’s my main idea right now – I write a simple cipher program that shifts the characters 3 spaces to encode and -3 spaces to decode. Make sure it uses a loop (for the menu), an if statement (for the menu) and methods/functions/procedures to do the work. I write it in Python, Java and VB (6? .net?) with a few comments and provide lots of links to tutorials (codingbat, codeacademy, etc…).

The students have a short list of suggested improvements, but they are encouraged to expand as they see fit. Some example extensions might be to let the user choose the number of shifts, to use a more complicated algorithm, or even generate a cipher using a passcode.

I’m no cryptography expert so I’m not looking for SSL or PGP standard stuff, but I think that a keen Y8 pupil ought to be able to do something with it…

And winners would receive a Raspberry Pi (I could find £50 in the budget for a KS3 and a KS4 winner…).

Thoughts?

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

With 6th Form recruitment and Year 9 options seasons looming large on the horizon, the time seemed right to step up my advertising campaign. With that in mind I’ve spent part of the day putting 10 posters together. Simple, plain and hopefully intriguing, each one uses a quote from ilearnedtoprogram.com along with an appropriate image from StockXchng.

Opinions and suggestions would be most welcome – and you can see all 10 here.

The posters at the minute have the school logo on, but if people think they’re any good, and once I fix any little errors or issues (I’m not happy with the BlueJ logo text) I’ll happily remove the badge and release under a CC license.