The end of a great data project using Google Docs and Moodle

Each year for the last 4 years I’ve taught surveys and databases to my year 7 class.We used to start off by creating a spreadsheet with columns for name, age, favourite food and send all the students wandering around the classrooms to collect details from their friends.Next we went on to make a survey on paper, create a hypothesis, hand the surveys to friends to fill in, collect and type up results into a spreadsheet and then create graphs and a presentation about what they found out…It was a pretty good series of lessons that students enjoyed; but this year we kicked things up a notch with a bit of techology. Here’s how:

  1. We ditched the paper surveys for online surveys using Google Docs. Students created their surveys using the forms part of Google Docs. (We use the free Google Apps Education Edition via our own domain).
  2. Students posted the links to their surveys on a forum on our VLE. This was one of the trickier parts as most students hadn’t done this before. They could then complete their friends’ surveys. It also gave us an opportunity to discuss what makes a good or bad question or survey.
  3. Students analysed results – some downloaded their Google Spreadsheet to Excel while others did them on online. They all had to create a graph from their data.
  4. Students created a presentation to show their findings – most did this using Powerpoint though some used Google Presentations. All presentations had embedded graphs.
  5. Students uploaded their presentation to a Moodle Database and then had to view and comment on their friends’ presentations.

Students seemed to enjoy the work and interacting with their friends. Some parts had a steep learning curve but for most students it was the first time they had done anything like this before.  From a teacher’s point of view it was hard work and for a less able class I would certainly break the tasks up into smaller tasks but if you like the sound of it give it a go and let me know how it goes.

If Cinemas were like schools…

Thanks to Paul Bogush for inspiring this blog post. In fact credit where it’s due all I’ve done is copied and pasted the original, translated it into the UK English and edited and added a little with some UK cultural references. Paul also referenced some other great blogs in his post including this one comparing theme parks to schools

Although I though the original post was very funny it also makes some superb points about education and education systems and really got my brain thinking. Please do add more ideas in the comments.

If Cinemas were like schools…

Everyone would sit in alphabetical order.

If you talked during the film it would stop until you were quiet.

If you carried on talking during the film you would get sent out for 5 minutes but then come in again.

Some films would make you watch in silence while others would let you talk.

If you laughed at the car crash you would have to leave and talk to a counsellor.

There would be IEPs in place for the guys so that they could sit through an entire chick flick.

There would be no sweets or fizzy drinks allowed.

Popcorn could be served at the interval but neither salt nor sugar could be added.

If a cinema wasn’t pulling in the punters it would be reopened with private money in a plush new building as an Academy cinema.

Films would be differentiated to appeal to a range of styles of students.

Films would clearly display the objectives of the film at the start and summarise them at the end.

Directors would have to cross reference their films to the national curriculum.

If you showed up to the movie late you would be given a detention.

If you tried to leave early the manager would haul you back in.

If your mobile phone goes off the staff will confiscate it.

You would have to pause the movie and write in your book about what you had seen so far.

You would have to enter and exit the cinema in two straight lines.

The films you watched would be chosen for you.

Once a month you would have to watch a film about a culture other than your own.

Everyday you would have to watch action films first, then drama, then romances, then horror.  There would be no films allowed that crossed genre lines like romantic dramas.

Any movie over 50 minutes long would be completed the next day

Can’t watch trailers of what is upcoming until movie is over.

If you need the toilet during the film you need to raise your hand to ask permission.

Any B movie would have to be re-made until it is a hit.

If no one spoke for the entire film you would get a merit.

The opening sequence of rules would be 2 hours long.

You can’t leave the cinema with a friend to go to their house unless you have a note from your mother.

If you are sick and can’t watch a film the next day you have to watch twice as many films.

There would be no bad language in the films.

They would take out the air conditioning and install two small fans.

There would be five screens but only two projectors.

A register would be taken at the start of the film.

When the projectors break you would have to role play the characters in the movie.

If a projectionist is away a cover supervisor would run the film.

People behaving badly during a film would be sent to an isolation room with a manager of the cinema supervising them until the day is over.

The ushers would have to be certified, have 30 hours of credits, pass two tests, and practice ushering with another usher who sat through a 6 hour workshop on how to teach ushering before being hired.

People would be bused across town because watching the film with a diverse audience will bring more peace and harmony.

Every cinema in the city would be playing the same movie at the same time.

There would be no comedies shown.

You could watch movies, but not create movies.

Ushers would have PD on how to check and see if the audience is watching the movie, but none on making movies.

You are not allowed to boo, only cheer for movies.

If the males didn’t like watching movies when they get older it IS NOT because they had to learn how to watch movies by watching Beaches, An Officer and a Gentleman, Dirty Dancing, Ice Castles, and Flashdance.

TeachMeet Midlands

Teachmeet Midlands is just starting. I’ve put my name down to speak about google apps but I’m much more excited to see what everyone else has to offer. This is probably the swishest teachmeet venue I’ve been to (NCSL) . If you’re around come along – we’ve a few tables free still!

 On my table is Doug Belshaw, Laura Walker, Dughall McCormack, Toby Barkworth-Night & Stuart Rideout – I’ll link to their blogs and twitters soon!

 Anyway I got picked first and talked a little about google sites and docs. I shall blog some more about it here in the week.

VLEs, costs, features and why I’ve fallen for Moodle

Although the market is more developed than when I started looking at and learning about VLEs about 3 years ago it’s still very confusing. In the UK there are approximately 10 Becta approved learning platforms (note that’s learning platforms rather than VLEs). There’s also probably another 10 or so out there that I’ve looked at and probably many more I’ve never heard of. If you want to compare features and costs you need to invest a considerable amount of time phoning round or getting in demos as these things aren’t always clearly published.

The wonderful community at Edtechroundup are compiling a table of VLE features and costs and Andy Kemp has written an excellent summary of different systems he’s experienced.
Ivan Langton jumped into the debate with his blog post “Is Moodle the Volvo of VLEs” which has a pop at Moodle’s old fashioned and blocky design. This debate is great and important but I feel a couple of important points have been missed.

1. Most schools do not know what they want!

Some of us now have a bit of experience using VLEs but I doubt there are many of us who have seen a school with a fully integrated VLE (I reckon 2 more years and I’ll be close!)  Even those of us who know VLEs and who use VLEs probably haven’t used all the features or worked out how every subject can or should integrate them into lessons. For those schools who have less experience a table of features is likely to mean even less. Looking at features and costs can be misleading. Schools need to look at what they have and what they need. Here’s a few commonly mentioned features that I’ll try and put a contrary view on.
MIS Integration: What are you going to use it for? Does your MIS system need to know how a student has done in a VLE quiz? Do you need to see attendance records from your VLE? I decided not to worry about this as the cost wasn’t worth the benefits for us and we already have web access to the MIS without a VLE.

Single Sign On: How many systems do you use in school? Can you combine them all? If you get single sign on working how many other systems won’t work with it? I wanted single sign on but it wasn’t realistic to start with. We also have so many web systems staff and students use that 100% single sign on would be impossible. Right now I’m prepared to wait until a better system comes around that’s more comprehensive.

Creating User Accounts/Class Groups Automatically: This kind of falls into the above two categories. How will you create user accounts? Will they come from the MIS or from a single sign on system? We created manually in the end which took a technician a small amount of time to extract the data from the MIS.

Online Markbook: Is this essential? How many staff will use it?

Included Resources: Some commercial VLEs come with resources such as Brittanica (that I’ve heard great things about). Do you need these included resources? Would you prefer to spend the money on just the ones you want?

Curriculum Mapping: Some VLEs allow you to map or tag your resources to parts of the National Curriculum – are your staff going to want to do this?

Features and Tools: Eg Wikis, Forums, Blogs etc. Are there better online tools to do the job that staff are already using? Does a specific VLE offer an implementation that is so good that it stands out? Is this really what is going to be your deciding factor? Probably not!

In summary most staff will only use parts of a VLE. The expert staff who you may expect to use more may prefer to use other tools such as a blog on blogger, a google sites website or a wiki on wetpaint.

2. The Main Cost isn’t the hosting and technical expertise but the time for training and creation of content.

Many people comment that Moodle can be expensive in terms of setup. I believe this time for setup is the same for any VLE. For £500 a year my school has fully hosted, functional and supported Moodle installation from ECognition . We needed to create user accounts, courses and resources. This is the same for any VLE. Your commercial package may include setting up servers, single sign on and user accounts – but this will surely also need time from people in your school, such as you or your network manager. The real cost though is in creating materials, courses and training staff. It doesn’t matter what VLE you have, creating courses and resources takes time – teachers don’t have much time.

So why have I fallen for Moodle?
1. You can spend money on the bits you want to spend it on rather than on software licenses. It may be in house training and taking teachers off timetable. It may be getting external trainers in. It may be paying someone to integrate your moodle with your MIS. It may be buying laptops to use the VLE in school. It may be buying resources to add to the VLE and many more options.

2. You can start small and grow organically. If you spend £30,000 on a VLE there’s some real pressure to use it even when it isn’t the best solution to your problem. Forcing people to use a VLE can cause resentment both amongst pupils and staff. With a smaller investment in Moodle I am equally happy when staff use other web tools or our Google Apps  installation to do things how they want.

Bigger costs require bigger benefits and create bigger pressures

Flexibility breeds creativity.

Revision Songs – simple to do

This was presented at Teachmeet Havering 2009…

Every Summer before GCSE exams you get a couple of weeks when you need to be revising. Students minds are not filled with thoughts of exam preparation but thoughts of leaving school (some for good) and the days get longer and warmer. It can be a very hard time for lessons to be productive even though it’s arguably the most important time of year. Last year one of my year 11 classes had a number of students blessed with musical talent. The idea of creating revision songs popped into my head. I asked a couple of students to bring in their guitars next lesson and I brought in some lyrics (see Data Capture song below). 20 minutes later two guys Aden and Sean put together a tune – we got our cheap microphone headset up, loaded up audacity and recorded this…

Data Capture Song


Data Capture Song Lyrics (pdf)

You could use any programme to record but we used Audicity which is free and simple. Jose Picardo gives a great introduction to podcasting and audacity here, I’ve used his explanation for staff training.

As I said we didn’t use any special hardware – just a £1 headset microphone and PC. After this I had a request from the students for a revision song that fitted to Fields of Gold . I sat down at home and wrote the following lyrics which the 2 guys then recorded.

Fields of Data

Fields of Data Lyrics (pdf)

It’s easy, fun, and a great way to revise. Of course you could use songs for all ages and subjects not just for revision. If you’ve any good examples do leave them in the comments.

Finally in my enthusiasm I bought www.revisionsongs.com but haven’t had time to do anything with it. If anyone would like to collaborate or take it over for a good cause let me know – it would be amazing to have a youtube style website of revision songs for students.

Addendum: Thanks to Anthony Evans from Redbridge who has posted a video of my presentation on his blog – you can watch it below.

Teachmeet Havering – questions raised and top 4 highlights

Teachmeet North East London was different from any other teachmeet I’d been to but still invigorating, educational and fun!

A short blog post from me about 3 interesting issues raised. I also wanted to share what I thought were the outstanding presentations I heard.

But first a bit of self publicity – I presented on using Audacity to record revision songs – you can read about it on this separate post.

3 Issues Raised from Presentations:

  1. How do people use delicious in school? (Or other similar sites) I just don’t get how people set it up or use it. I use delicious but the power for me is the in browser tag button. Please share your tips! (This was mentioned by Tom Barrett in his talk as his school has delicious set as their homepage)
  2. Using Instant Messenger in the classroom. Undoubtedly a fun, attractive and powerful tool but how do you get students to use it without being silly and offensive. Is it just a matter of waiting until the novelty wears off or is it careful training?(Again brought up by Tom’s talk)
  3. Making school ICT lessons and use more exciting. Student Edith spoke about how she learns stuff in ICT lessons that she already knows how to do. I very much agree that much is uninspiring but many of my students are not as advanced and savvy as the rest and even the most savvy don’t know how to do an IF statement in a spreadsheet until I show them. What is the right balance? Is there a set of core skills students need in ICT? Is the attractive stuff all bells and whistles or is there as much substance.

Oh and the top 4 presentations… In no order, Tom Barrett was great as always, Ollie Bray showed me some amazing new stuff, Edith’s presentation was superb (though last years on how students get round security in schools was possibly even better!) and the new stars that I hadn’t seen before were Anjum Razaq and Simon White of Cleveland Junior School who presented their school blog and social space for students.

Well done to all who organised TeachmeetNEL09 it was just what the Doctor ordered.

Teachmeet North East London

I’m looking forward to Teachmeet North East London tonight . Well partly looking forward and partly wondering how I’m going to keep my eyes open after another “one of those weeks and weekends”!

If you don’t know about Teachmeet you can read about it on their website or in my previous blog posts…

 … I ran out of time to write anything more and I’m now at Teach Meet listening to Drew Buddy speak!

I’m planning on presenting tonight on creating revision songs using Audacity (or any other sound recording programme). I’ll post more here this weekend.

If you’ve not been to a Teachmeet before go! If there isn’t one near you then make your own.

VLEs, Cyberbullying and year 7 – part 2: The Good

Sorry there is no part 3: The ugly but do take a look at part one of this story here

Welcome to part 2. In part one I described the frustrations of trying to build up a course on our VLE on e-safety. Here’s how my course ended up looking course

Before we got to the course we did two other activities. I got students to design their own logo using MS Publisher. They learnt to group items and save as a JPG. Students were then taught how to log in to our VLE Rickypedia, to change their password, to update their profile and to add an avatar. The logo they made at the start of the lesson became their avatar. I’ve written two previous posts on avatars and profile fields. These activities took about 30 minutes of the lesson to complete. Next students moved onto the films.

The first film was linked from here . The second film embedded from teachertube. Students watched the films (all our PCs have headphones plugged in now) and did so very attentively. I next put a discussion forum in for students to write about the films. This was the prompting I gave them

forum instructionsStudents then posted their replies. I’ve picked a few random posts below. Some posts led to some great online discussions.  Most students didn’t get beyond making and reading these posts. Over the next two lessons I plan on covering other e-safety related issues. I’ll keep you posted as to how they go. (Nb to see the images below in better quality click or right click and open in a new window)

discussion1 discussion2discussion3discussion4discussion5discussion6

VLEs, Cyberbullying and year 7 – part 1: The Bad

Welcome to the first of a 2 part post – the good and the bad. What do you want first, the bad news or the good news? I’m going with the bad.

This is the story of a lesson or series of lessons introducing our VLE to new year 7 pupils as well as starting to address issues of e-safety.

As I’ve said in previous posts part of my plan to introduce the VLE Rickypedia this year is to train up year 7 pupils to use the tools sensibly and safely so they can do so throughout their time in schools. I’ve been looking at a way of doing this and to integrate it with a current unit that we are teaching this year in ICT lessons (this scheme of work from teach-ict is a great example) . In real life unlike the A-Team plans don’t always come together exactly as you want them. A nasty cold cut down my already haphazard organisation and planning and I ended up one Wednesday morning with a nasty cold, an hour to plan and two year 7 classes rapidly approaching.

Sorry to spoil the suspense but there is a happy ending to the story but here’s what happened in between…

1. I looked through my e-safety bookmarks and came across the thinkuknow and digizen resources – both great resources!

2. I looked at the teacher resources on thinkuknow.co.uk (it doesn’t click to open on firefox so click here)

3. The videos are available to download – rather annoying as I wanted to just embed or link to them for students to watch. Let’s just have a look to see if they are up anywhere else so I don’t have to download them and then place on our network or VLE…

4. Yes I found the videos! But they’re on youtube – like most schools we can’t use youtube – ironically it’s not deemed safe enough – okay then I’ll download them…

5. Okay I need to log in first to download – I’ll just register quickly…

6. Ah – I have to wait for them to validate my registration… in reality this meant I applied on 27th and my registration was validated on 3rd February… okay no videos for me…

7. Just to rub it in it tells me that once my registration is accepted I’ll be able to access some lesson plans and resources but others are not available until I complete half a day training course at one of their venues.

8. I move to other video sharing websites such as teachertube to see what I can find… a couple of okayish American videos which aren’t so relevant to my students.

Oh dear. By now I’m rather frustrated… 30 minutes left to get something sorted. Why if you want kids to stay safe online and teachers to teach pupils to stay safe do you make your resources so hard to access. Okay to be fair there’s some great resources still on the website but I wanted a video… you’ll see why in post two. Then of course with youtube and most other video sharing websites blocked by the Hertfordshire web filter it makes finding resources that much harder.

So onto step 9…

9. Visit digizen – also a great website though centred on social networking and cyberbullying. Rediscover the great film let’s fight it together  – guess what it won’t play on school computers, I’ve no idea why.

10.  One google search later and I find another copy of the video on truetube that works in school.

Why oh why is this so hard. If I wasn’t an ICT teacher on a mission I would have given up long ago and not wasted 40 minutes or so on the steps above. Do carry on to post two to find out what happened in the lesson and how it all went… there is a happy ending!

VLE Staff Training

In the world of Educational ICT money is often spent at hardware and software without thinking about training and time. It doesn’t matter how amazing technology is or what change it can facilitate, if teachers don’t understand how to use it or don’t have time to use it it won’t get used! There are many reports and articles that back up this argument but I think to most of us in the edtech world who aren’t salespeople (and to the honest and good salespeople of which I’m sure there are many) this is a given.

So the challenges of implementing our VLE are pretty much what I’ve expected. The jobs that are being done or need doing are: Finding time to create examplar resources, setting up a sensible look and feel for the system, setting up sensible navigation for the system, the admin part of uploading users, training pupils and training staff.

I’m going to have to just get stuck in and tackle as many of these things as possible simultaneously but right now my priority is to get the training off the ground.

We started with our inset in the first week of term where I spent an hour with the whole staff introducing the concept of a VLE and did a tutorial on how to login, change profiles, add a course and add items to a course. There’s only so much you can do with 80 people or so in an hour with only a handful of laptops. Nevertheless it was a good start and taster for everyone and at least gave people an idea of what was now available for them to use. A friend at a North London school who uses their VLE extensively across the school told me that every one of their whole school insets has to have a VLE related part, maybe that’s something to aspire to.

The next step is organising extra training sessions. I’m going to aim for sessions to have a maximum of 10 people in each and try to schedule them either during the day (taking staff off timetable for an hour) or after school. My plan is to offer staff the option of beginners, intermediate and advanced sessions at either time. I am also offering departments the option to take their training in departments.

We’ll see how it goes this term. I’d be quite happy to get a few groups of enthusiasts wanting to come back for more training rather than a large number of people with knowledge but less desire. I’m also wary of overstretching myself in terms of giving the training, but I’ll worry about that when I get there.

A quick question to you all to finish? How do you train the staff in your school or institution and what model works best?