teaching.mrstacey.org.uk

Cool Stuff I did last term – part 2

April 22, 2008 – 8:26 pm

Two things led to this next event. The first is the work that Mr H has been doing with his maths Unprojects. The second was a growing awareness that for all my talk of moving learning on to real enquiry based studies that made the best use of ICT, I still wasn’t walking the walk.

My year 8 History classes were due to study the Spanish Armada as the next topic, but it fell across the Easter Holidays. So I decided to rethink how I taught it. In the last lesson of term I explained that

they were free to work with whoever they wanted, in group sizes that were up to them, but everyone had to participate
they could research into any aspect of the Armada they wanted
they could present their research in any way they wanted (and we talked through some options)

I then handed out all the books, sheets and booklets I could find on the subject and put the excellent ‘Battlefield Britain’ documentary on in one side of the room and let them get on with it. They had one hour to plan what they were going to do, and the finished results had to be shown on the first lesson back after Easter.

I should point out that our year 8 students were the first to come through our SMART programme, and so compared to previous years students are much better equipped to research independently, work as a team and problem solve, but some of the work I had back blew me away. It included

A replica Spanish Galleon, built with Papier Mache
A video of the main events leading up to the Armada being acted out
Several reconstructions of the main events
As well as various posters and word documents.

But I think my favourite thing about the whole process was when one group said, on handing over the memory stick with their video on…

‘Here it is sir. But don’t worry if it doesn’t work, we’ve put it on You-Tube’!!!

Dave Stacey |

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Cool Stuff I did last term – part 1

April 20, 2008 – 8:19 pm

I’ve been meaning to blog about this pretty much since I did it, but other things got in the way. As you’ll already know if you read Damian’s blog, back in February I Skyped in to his Brit Hons class for an hour to talk about Wales and the Welsh language.

For me it was a fantastic experience, both in terms of putting what had been, until that point, a theoretical idea into practice, and in dealing with the excellent questions that the students came up with.

Damian had set up a ‘scratch pad‘ on a page on the course wiki for students to add their questions, and I actually added my first answers to that. This meant that by the time our Skype chat came about the students (and one of the other passing teachers!) were digging into the things that particularly interested them, and asking me to elaborate on the points I’d already made on the wiki. This helped keep the session on focus, and also meant their level of background knowledge before the call was pretty good.

We tested the connection the day before and everything worked really well. Needless to say, things didn’t run quite so smoothly on the day – I booted up the laptop in my room after school, and two of the school bands began practicing in the surrounding rooms! So I grabbed the laptop and ran to our office / cupboard for SMART and did the Skype from there.

I was impressed both with how easily the thing came together, and the impact it had on everyone involved. I’d like to publicly thank Damian for letting me be part of the class, and the students for their excellent questions, both on the wiki and in person. I also really appreciated the card and photo which arrived in the mail a few days later, along with a couple of items for my son, which I’m sure he’ll grow into ;0)

Dave Stacey |

Misc |

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Making e-portfolios work

April 19, 2008 – 8:05 pm

Back in June of last year I reflected on the idea that there must be a better way of reporting student progress to parents than the current system of annual reports and parents evenings, in which parents from pupils in one year group are encouraged to make 5 minute appointments with their son/daughters teachers to discuss their progress.

I’ve also been looking recently at ways in which we as a school start to embed key skills and reflective practice in our pupils, so this piece by Mr H set a few bells off in my head. I love the way in which pupils are being encouraged here to use a wiki to both record and reflect on their work from across the curriculum, and then that is used as the basis for a student led conference.

The challenge for us I suspect is no longer a technical one. It’s now both political and pedagogical -Â how do you add something like this into the curriculum in a way which is both meaningful and valid to students (which requires it to be embedded in the heart of the curriculum, with the involvement of many staff) and manageable, both in terms of time and space to complete it and in not placing inappropriate burdens on subject teachers (which calls for a separate space on the timetable)?

I suspect the solution will come in what the Assembly described in the 14-19 reform document as ‘learning coaches’. But as of yet, I’m yet to hear a good answer on the question of who they’ll be and how the system will change to fit them.

Dave Stacey |

Elsewhere online, Ruminations |

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A pen portrait

April 18, 2008 – 11:57 pm

As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, next Thursday I have to give a presentation to a group of Headteachers from mid Wales on skills based learning, and in particular the work we’ve been doing with SMART. So far, so normal, but I was also asked to provide a ‘pen portrait’ to go in the course pack.

Having never written one before I wasn’t quite sure of the tone. I wanted to be breif and focussed, but also without sounding overly pompous. In the end, this is what I came up with…

After graduating from Aberystwyth University in 2000, Dave spent four years working in Higher Education in a range of jobs focussed around skills training and widening access. Having realised he preferred working with young people to dealing with admin and paperwork in moved to Swansea in 2004 to do his PGCE and join the teaching profession. The irony of this has not escaped him.

He has been teaching at Olchfa since 2005 and was lucky enough to be selected to be part of the team that developed the schools pioneering SMART programme. He now co-ordinates the programme which has so far equipped over 600 students with the skills to get the very best from their education.

He is interested in ways in which schools can provide a more relevant learning experience to their pupils, including focusses on skills and harnessing new technology. He blogs at teaching.mrstacey.org

Thanks to all those on Twitter who advised on the inclusion (or otherwise) of the blog reference. Much appreciated

Dave Stacey |

Misc |

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Taking a strategic view of school ICT

April 18, 2008 – 11:50 pm

We had the first meeting of our schools new strategic ICT group earlier today, which was very positive and seems to be heading in the right direction with a good mix of idealism and realism on board.

Of course, one hour is never enough, and going through the notes from the meetings (on Google Docs, naturally!) I started to think more about what the school needs to do to really get the most from the opportunities offered by ICT. I’ve copied and pasted those thoughts below, in the hope that they might chime with other people in a similar position, or might be useful to someone who finds themselves in the same position in the near future.

1. Perhaps we need to be clear that there are two distinct strands to what we need to do.

One is looking at the effective use of ICT as a teaching / learning tool quite distinct from e-learning. Questions such as do staff know how to make effective use of their projector? Can staff access the internet / printers / learning resources in their rooms? Are they adding an element of interactivity to their lessons using quizzes, games and ideally some kind of wireless device.

The second is to look at e-learning. We need to remember the lessons of Kaleidos – staff are not going to spend time they haven’t got moving resources to a new platform, tagging them, loading them into ‘virtual filing cabinets’ etc, when they can already access them perfectly well through our shared drives system. Need to look at either systems replacing the shared drives (in which case we need to be absolutely sure staff can access them when and where they need them) or focusing simply on the elements offered by Kaleidos / Moodle which aren’t offered by the shared drives. This may be a discussion that it would be pertinent to involve more people in than just this group.

2. As part of the auditing / PMF system, there should be an element of us going to people and asking what they would like to be able to do and then helping them make that happen. That will be a hundred times more powerful than another top down initiative. If we’re moving towards personalised learning for students, we can’t do that by treating all the staff the same.

3. How do we coordinate the ‘community building’ elements that are slowly emerging from the school website? This either needs to be the specific responsibly of one (or several people), or it has to be fitted in to what else is being developed. This would include communication with (not just to) parents, moving prospectuses etc online and would probably also require a change in school / parent culture

4. Student representation on the group?

Dave Stacey |

Practical Ideas, Ruminations |

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Rethinking KS3 ICT: Putting pupils in the driving seat

April 18, 2008 – 12:05 am

Back here I pondered a possible future for a new ICT course at KS4 which attracted some interesting comments. I recently though had a thought about KS3 which I’d like to share.

There seems little argument to the idea that three years of mocked exercises intended to provide pupils with proficiency in using Microsoft Office isn’t sufficient given their often extensive, and sometimes inappropriate use of ICT outside the classroom. But what do you replace them with?

The solution I am proposing is both simple and radical. You let them decide. Platforms like Moodle allow the easy creation of e-learning resources. Parts that would have been delivered by the teacher in a traditional set up can be posted as video or a slideshow with embedded audio. You create a range of courses on a series of topics, both practical and theoretical. Off the top of my head I’d include:

Typing skills
Effective powerpoint for presentations
Using powerpoint for online presentations
How to digital images work? (inc, formats and compression)
Effective online research
HTML
Hacking a theme for Bebo
How does the internet work?
Flash
Scratch
A 30 day version of the 366 day projects on Flickr

And for each these, I’m sure there’s another 5 that could be offered. Pupils could select the topics they wanted to study, in whatever order, with quizzes to test knowledge on the way through, and a final piece of work which could be used to demonstrate the learning from that unit.

ome of the courses could include built in differentiation, others could be offered at several levels. Higher ability pupils towards the end of the Key Stage could be offered the opportunity to work together and with a teacher to produce new courses on topic they feel were missing from the options, and schools could easily share courses between them, or post their backup zips online for sharing. Easily, in this context, obviously refers to technically. Politically would be another issue.

Some topics could be made compulsory. Staying safe online comes to mind straight away. The rest could be taken in any order by pupils and used to build up a portfolio of completed courses. Teachers would increasingly become learning mentors, discussing progress with students and setting targets, as the supporting role traditionally fulfilled moves into an online community.

Rethinking the curriculum this radically is now technically possible, and much better matches the needs of our learners. All that’s missing is the will to do it.

Additional Linkage

CSUnplugged (Thanks to James Hart for the link)Â

Dave Stacey |

Crazy Plans |

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I’m back! (Again)

April 17, 2008 – 11:34 pm

The blogging hiatus continued for longer than expected, partly because I’ve been really busy, but also because I really didn’t have the urge to say anything. I nearly waded in on a couple of debates that raged across the blogs I read, but in the end I was quite happy not to.

That seems to be fading, and over the next few days I’ll be publishing a series of posts, some practical and some reflective, some that have occurred to me today, others I’ve been meaning to post for several weeks.

I’m looking forward to getting back into the conversation

Dave Stacey |

Misc |

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Returning from exile and seeing things anew

March 11, 2008 – 9:21 pm

I’m coming to the end of a period of self-imposed isolation from my online community. This period was initially prompted by the pressing need to finish a series of online resources that I’d been employed to create, but not made much headway on. But when I emerged from the other side, I found my perspective had began to shift a little on a few ideas, so I’ve been breaking myself back in gently in over the last 5 days or so, giving myself a chance to think in a fresh light about some of the things I’d been blogging and twittering about, and some of the things I had believed. This post is really an attempt to pull those various thoughts into one place, partly in an attempt to draw a line in the sand before carrying on.

ICT project
I was employed to produced some electronic resources for a moodle course for the new County VLE on one part of the GCSE History course. It’s currently locked away, but I’ll get copies up on my moodle installation in the next couple of months.

Lessons learned.

There are never enough hours in the day
Creation of new content, especially in video format takes a LONG time
If you’re recording audio, invest in a good microphone
Moodle genuinely allows the creation of resources that people can dip into depending on skill level and preferred learning style. But that takes time, which is the one thing we don’t currently have in the teaching profession

PGCE Students
We’ve got two PGCE students in on placement at the moment, and in my opinion the very best thing about having students is that fact they hold a mirror up to your teaching. And I’ve got rubbish.
In my hurry to embrace technology and find new ways to do things, I’d forgotten some basic rules about pedagogy, and stopped doing the old things well. My room is never going to be silent, but too many learners are getting away with coasting at the moment. My lessons are lacking a big idea to tie them together – the very thing I’ve spent the last couple of years banging on about. Next term things are going to change!

It’s very easy to lose focus in the web 2.0 world.
I’ve culled the number of twitter feeds I follow, because the messages I wanted to hear were getting lost in the chatter, and it was taking me too big an investment of time to pick through them. I thought I would be cutting back on the number of feeds in my feed reader, but actually I found I’ve just become a lot more discerning in the posts I read and the posts I skip over

Some blog posts will never see the light of day.
I’ve got a pile of half finished blog posts, and looking over them, many of them just don’t have enough of a point to make it to the light of day. Posts you’ll probably never read include:

Why we need to teach trainee teachers about learning
Is performance management killing teaching?
Wouldn’t asking ‘what do you want to do this year?’ be the best way of developing / monitoring teachers?
How do we get ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ to work together?

Posts you might still read include:

Why we might need to knock Bloom’s taxonomy over
A progression model for skills – possible? desirable? necessary?

I’m off to fix up some lessons for tomorrow :0)

Dave Stacey |

Ruminations |

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Google talk, and listen

March 11, 2008 – 9:15 pm

No, not another new product from Google. Edtechroundup, (the UK based education podcast / website that I really do need to get back involved with) are posting daily questions and answers from a recent interview with the folks at Google Apps for Education.

The questions came from a global group of educators, connected by Twitter and the blogs of the people involved in Edtechroundup and cover a range of areas. Well worth checking out the answers and getting involved in some of the discussions.

Dave Stacey |

Elsewhere online |

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Spreadsheet forms + Google Apps = problems!

February 18, 2008 – 6:51 pm

I posted here about the newly revealed ability to create a form to capture data straight into your Google Spreadsheet. Over the weekend I set up a spreadsheet and form for a survey of our year 8 pupils to test it and hit a snag. By creating it from within my Google Apps for Education account, the form was only available to people who could log in to that installation of Google Apps. And we haven’t rolled out usernames down to year 8 yet.

In the end, I found a workaround by sharing the spreadsheet with my regular Google account and setting up the form from there. It’s still an annoyance though, as Tom Barrett found out this morning when he hit the same snag while working with one of his classes.

Not happy to sit back and wait for someone to notice I went off to explore the Google Apps help group, and left this message which I hope will lead to this little glitch before too long. While I was there though, I was impressed to see a wiki as part of the Group, including a wishlist for Google Apps (many of the ideas having also been mentioned in the forthcoming EdTechRoundup interview with Google Apps), and several workarounds and ideas for domains. Well worth checking out if you’ve got Google Apps installed on your domain.

And I do have to remind myself that all of this is in Beta. And for free!

Dave Stacey |

Practical Ideas |

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