Teachmeet 09 at BETT

Another year another BETT another Teachmeet

As Lisa Stevens said in her teachmeet talk it’s amazing how much you can learn in a year. Last year at Teachmeet the only person I vaguely knew was Drew Buddie. He introduced me to a couple of people and a few weeks later when we met again he told me to join twitter and start a blog. This year at Teachmeet I was down on the list to present, had been volunteered to run the flashmeeting and be cameraman and finally met 10-20 people that I had met online via twitter but never in person. It really is amazing how much of a network you can build up and how much you can learn in a year!

My talk didn’t get picked by the random name picker at teachmeet this year so I thought I’d write up here what I might have done.

First of all I wasn’t sure what to offer to present so I created a twitter poll on polldaddy and asked my twitter network to choose, you can see the results here

I won’t explain them all so here’s a selection that I’ll try and sum up in a few sentences each.

1. Using google sites: This is already written up on a previous post which you can read about here

2. Using audacity to make revision songs:  GCSE ICT class coming up to exams. I had a lot of musical students in the class so we wrote a couple of revision songs, got a guitar and recorded using audacity. One song was made up, the other we re-wrote the words of “fields of gold” to talk about databases! For advice on using audacity check out Jose Picardo’s blog. Nb. Audacity is a free open source audio recording and editing application.

3. Running a teachmeet style inset at school: In our January inset I organised a one hour long teachmeet style inset (Rickrolling Reflections). 10 staff members volunteered to speak and gave presentations on all kinds of things such as using drama games in class and techniques for questioning with students. We had prizes for the top 3 presentations. Despite the hall being an icy 14C it was a great hour or so.

4. China Masterclass using digital video and VLE for communication and collaboration: This is written up at length in a previous blog post here.

5. Creating cartoon strips with digital cameras: Get a class to draw a storyboard for a cartoon. Take them outside with digital cameras and get them to photograph each other acting out the scenes from the storyboard. Back in classroom take photos, put in powerpoint or other software, add speech bubbles, modify or edit photos where necessary. For extension work record audio to go with cartoon!

6. Teaching kids to fill out forms for nectar cards: I had a lesson on ICT in supermarkets and loyalty cards with a tricky year 8 class (aged 12/13). Two boys just weren’t interested and I couldn’t get them to complete any of the work. Instead I took them to the Nectar card website and got them to find out about Nectar cards. They both applied for one and in the process learnt to fill in an online form. I just assumed this would be easy but it took a while with questions like “Sir what do we put in the title box?” We also discussed who it was safe to share this information with and whether to tick the boxes allowing them to send you further mail. Both boys learn a very useful life skill. Once they had applied they learnt how the card worked, how to collect points and how much shopping they’d need to buy to get a free computer game. Great numeracy skills! I’m not sure I’d get a whole class to do this especially as you’re supposed to be 18 to get a Nectar card, but I guess that’s another life skill.

Introducing VLEs to students – sensible use, effective use

What’s the best way to introduce students to using a VLE? Students may be digital natives but my experience is that they don’t automatically know how to use digital tools effectively. They also don’t always know how to use digital tools sensibly. Children learn from an early age how to behave in a classroom and learn that different behaviours are acceptable in a classroom than are acceptable at home or in the playground with friends. In online spaces fewer students see these boundaries. For many students the internet is their playground and social space where they can say what they want to their friends using their own language and without having to worry about interference from parents and teachers. This in fact is one of the many reasons we are trying to combine the internet and teaching, many VLEs promise to make education available at home to students to use in their own time. I have seen many examples of students exhibiting what I would deem unnacceptable behaviour using VLEs and online tools. Examples are bad language, silly comments, use of offensive images, unconstructive criticisms of fellow students and just general sillyness. The vast majority of this is not done with malice but with good intentions or just for fun. When students use, for example, an online forum or chat, they are used to posting fun jokey messages to friends. Most wouldn’t dare do the same thing in an execise book, they would use formal language and no silly comments, the jokey messages to friends would probably be passed around bits of paper or in their personal planners.

So what is the answer? I believe students need good training as to how to use online tools sensibly so they can learn a difference between the classroom space and the playground space. If this is started young it should become second nature as students progress through school. A clear set of rules and consequences are also needed. These needn’t be overbearing or restricting. I asked some of my 6th formers to help come up with some simple rules for use of our VLE – this is what we’ve got to so far…

1. No swearing
2. No innapropriate images/video
3. No offensive behaviour
4. Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say to anyone’s face
5. All images/videos posted must have permission from people involved
6. If any of the above rules are broken the user may be blocked or face further punishment.

Certainly not perfect but simple. We’ll see how they go.

There is a worry that by separating the classroom online space from the playgroung online space and by training pupils in a more formal style of communication we will put them off using online tools for learning. But looking at it from another angle if we train pupils to use online tools sensibly and effectively it may change the way they use them socially for the better.

E-tools e-learning and e-communication for e-veryone – summary

We started with Flashmeeting where Lisa and Mary said hi and told us about twitter and flashmeeting. (You can view the replay of the flashmeeting here). This is a summary and doesn’t include the great discussion and explanation we had at the same time.

Flashmeeting is available to UK schools though if you ask them nicely for a worthy cause they may allow you to use it. Other options are available – if you know of any do comment below.

Lisa mentioned a tool called voki and a few other tools were mentioned.

Next we looked at Twitter. www.twitter.com used by both Lisa (@lisibo) and Mary (@moodlehotpotato). I’m also on twitter as @nstone.

Next was blogging – we looked at www.posterous.com www.wordpress.com and spoke about www.blogger.com

Next wikis – we looked at www.pbwiki.com and www.wetpaint.com and mentioned sites.google.com

We had a quick run through google docs for creating documents and form docs.google.com

We finished off with a quick look at two virtual environments, First Class (commercial paid for service) and Moodle. For anyone wanting to try out moodle ninehubs.com offers free basic moodle pages.

We had a chat about what is best to create a basic webpage and wikis and blogs both came up as simple solutions.

Finally we watched the shift happens video!

Thanks for all the wonderful contributions both online and in the room – please keep contributing and let us know what you’ve tried, succeeded and even failed with!
Good luck.

E-tools e-learning and e-communication for everyone – share!

A bit of a cheeky blog post or just making the most of my online network?

In about 6 hours from now I’m running a session described in our conference book as

e-Tools, e-Learning, and e-Communication for e-veryone

The presenter will show some amazing and free e-tools that you can use for learning, teaching, networking, community building and communicating in your life, shuls, schools and organisations. If you’ve examples to show off please bring them along to share. Laptops welcome but optional. All levels welcome.

Continue reading “E-tools e-learning and e-communication for everyone – share!”

E-learning ideas for Limmud Conference

Below is a summary of the session of 28th December from Limmud Conference

Participants:

1x school e-learning person

1x organiser of business e-learning systems

1x open university professor using e-learning

1x enthusiastic user

1x English teacher in Israel

1x Director of Jerusalem cultural institute

 

Presentation of Ideas to get started

On limmud:

Streaming sessions live internationally

Resources from sessions (eg powerpoints)

Pre-session reading/resources

After Limmud:

Specific online discussions following on from sessions

Recorded (video or audio) sessions online

Year Round:

Online one off sessions video (webinars) or chat based

Series of online classes

Online chavruta discussion

taste of limmud discussions

Online Conference:

E-limmud one or two day worldwide online conference. Could be available in a range of time zones big or small.

 

Comments:

people don’t have to travel and it can be interactive

infrastructure – could be expensive and complicated but commercial stuff is available

copyright and licensing issues? Need presenters permission.

Lots of religious stuff online – not so much secular – limmud could fit in the non-religious side

Why do it? Need clear rationales and objectives.

People pick and choose different things – having a range of unexpected things online would be good recreating the limmud experience – interaction, creating a community.

Extending current online groups

building into what already exists – feeding limmud experiences in currently available networks

extending Limmud not competing

 

you go to great sessions on limmud and for an hour create a community, then at the end of the session your community ends and that’s it- a way of continuing what is going on.

 

Using a system of blogs, updating blogs before a session for “pre-reading” and then after the session on a blog.

 

Need to make sure it’s adapted to everyone. Keep it simple where possible.

 

Monthly online event. Webinar one off to try it out.

 

Website is very static – alpine plant website is more interesting as it’s updated regularly!

 

environmentally friendly

 

a series of milestones needed:

 

Situation in Israel would be of interest to many

 

Open university short course template – takes time but create something simple could be used.

 

Accessibility – print button available

 

  • webinars – what are the best presenters. What would they be willing to do online.

  • Taste of limmud

– discussion about this limmud

– Improvements to website to make it more interactive – blog online

  • Online community

 

rolling guest bloggers to allow for commenting.

Open University may be interested in collaborating long term but there is a way to go before Limmud is ready!

Limmud Conference 2008

This post is a little out of sync to the rest of my blog but I hope it may be of interest to regular readers. I’m off from Sunday to Thursday to the annual Limmud conference. It’s quite hard to explain Limmud conference, I’ll try but I recommend reading this recent article from the Guardian education supplement. Limmud is a Jewish conference attended by over 2000 people each year. Though every session in the day is timetabled it’s not all that formal. Anyone can go to any session they choose and anyone can apply to run a session on pretty much anything they want. At the busiest times of day, in one hour, there can be a choice of 30 sessions to go to on anything from Jewish texts to a masterclass with a musician. See here for a random example from this year’s programme. What’s amazing is not just the diversity of learning opportunities and experiences but also the diversity of participants and of course the fact that it is almost entirely organised, every year, by teams of volunteers. The model has now caught on and has been replicated in over 40 communities worldwide. It is also constantly evolving and improving.

My involvement with Limmud each year has been slightly different. This year I’ve volunteered to give a number of sessions. One on e-tools for education and community, one aimed at building an international network of people to work on e-learning for Limmud conference, one on Israeli politics for beginners (a little side interest of mine) and two networking/support sessions for Jewish teachers.

Overall it’s going to be a busy and I hope fun week. I’ll be linking to some of my session resources here. Apologies for regular readers (if there are any!) looking for articles about e-learning in school. I’ll be categorising the short Limmud posts under the category Limmud so feel free to set your RSS readers to ignore them!

Using Google Sites in School

We’ve recently created accounts for every student at Google apps for education. We registered a new domain for this at www.rickyschool.com . This provides e-mail, google docs, google start page, google calendar and google sites for all users. I’m still not 100% sure what it will be used for long term but I am convinced there are so many potential applications. Tom Barrett’s blog gives many of his examples of use and I’m sure few of these were thought of by the developers or even by Tom when he first started.

My first week with google sites has been rather inspiring. It’s a nifty and simple tool for building websites. It’s so easy to use and it’s got loads of features built in. It has plenty of great, pretty, ready made templates (all fully customisable). It also makes it really easy to embed google docs, youtube videos and loads of other widgets. Apart from ease of use it’s also collaborative. If you have a school wide google apps setup, pages are by default editable by all users (though it’s very easy to turn this off). There are four great ways I can envision google sites being used for schools.

  1. For students to create great looking websites for school projects.

  2. For students to work collaboratively on school projects.

  3. For students to create their own personal online spaces.

  4. For students to have online eportfolios of work.

Though google sites is a potentially great and simple solution to creating eportfolios (there is a ready made template available when a new page is created called “filing cabinet” for placing files in) I am most excited about number 3. It’s my ‘dream’ to have a VLE that is customisable and editable by students. Sadly this is very hard to achieve as most VLEs are teacher run and allowing students to run their own personal spaces individually can be very tricky to set up. (Though I have seen some commercial VLEs that allow this although not without problems). Google sites let students create sites about whatever they want and when a site is created a user can label the page with one or more categories. When users view a list of all sites they see a list of all categories and can choose ones they are interested in. Though we’ll have to train students to use sites sensibly and monitor any problems this could be the online student space I have been looking for.

Google sites, lots of potential for teaching and learning but even more potential for students creating their own content and personal space.

To see a little more about google sites take a look at this short screencast introduction I made earlier.

Update: Thanks for the comments- Lisa Thumann put a link to this useful presentation

 

Top software and hardware for creating great VLE resources? Any tips?

Thanks to choosing Moodle as our VLE our school has a VLE budget to spend on training, hardware and resources. Okay we didn’t get quotes from every supplier out there but the first one we had in quoted around £30,000 for their “package”. Our current budget is more modest (I won’t put the figure online but feel free to twitter or e-mail if you’re curious).

So now with a little money in the kitty to spend I’d like to ask three questions.

1. What hardware or devices should we buy to make best use of our VLE?

2. What software should we buy to make best use of our VLE?

3. What content should we buy to make best use of our VLE?

Open source suggestions are of course welcome but here’s what I’m looking for and here’s where I’m thinking right now.

Software or hardware needs to be easy for teacher or pupils to use. It need to be easy to install (for hardware preferably it won’t need installing). Content needs to be good! For software I’m looking for software that will help teachers and I hope pupils create engaging content for the VLE.

This is what my three answers look like so far.

1. Hardware:
A handful of bluetooth adaptors for students to get photos, audio and video from mobile phones.
A digital voice recorder that records straight to MP3.
A simple to use camcorder that produces footage in a format that can be uploaded straight to VLE
A laptop with useful software, editing software and webcam that can be loaned out to staff for developing resources.

2. Software
Screencapture/screencasting software.
Simple Audio, Video and Image editing software.

3. Content
The only subject specific content I’ve found is by birchfield or boardworks which look expensive. Any other suggestions for any subject would be welcome.
Our librarian is keen to get an Encyclopaedia Britannica subscription for 6th form (age 16-18) research.

I hope to get lots of ideas and recommendations from people. Please do provide hyperlinks or reasons. If you have a product that you make or market I’ll happily share it if it’s good! I will write up all suggestions as a new post to share. Just to clarify I’m not looking to provide a concise list of everything but a shortlist (very short) of items that are quality, easy to use and I hope value for money (or free!). Many thanks in advance.

Setting up VLE staff accounts, permissions and roles

Starting things up again, like a new VLE, takes time. More time than even a pessimist like me expected! So here’s a little summary of what we’ve done over the last few weeks and what we plan to do. I’m not sure this will be exciting reading but it may be of use to other people doing something similar and of course I’d love to hear any ideas of things we’re doing wrong or could be doing better. When I say we – I’m talking about Julie one of our network technicians (who got the short straw of helping with the VLE 🙂 and myself.

Before half term we backed up all the useful courses from our old Rickypedia moodle some with user IDs some without. I’m a bit of a hoarder so probably took too much but I wanted some examples to show staff when they are creating new courses and resources.

Over half term I got the domains www.rickypedia.org and www.rickyschool.com pointing to the right places.  (Our new empty Moodle and our new google apps for education sites).

This past week has been about getting accounts and usernames sorted. We weren’t able to sort out any automatic authentication so have been creating spreadsheets with details for user accounts. We’re about 3 sign ons away from single sign on at school (we have different usernames for staff e-mail, network and MIS online portal). Luckily for us we were able to pull a list staff usernames and passwords from one of the existing systems. Although the VLE and google usernames won’t be synched with the existing system staff won’t have to learn a new set of usernames and passwords. If you don’t know anything about Moodle roles and are running a Moodle you need to! They basically set the permissions for areas of the site or the site as a whole and define what each user can see or do. We’ve set all staff as sitewide non-editing teachers. This means by default all teachers can see inside all courses. There’s a blog post here from Our Lady’s Catholic High School in Preston. It explains why you shouldn’t edit system roles. I am ignoring this advice for now as I want teachers to be able to see and explore how other staff are using the VLE and I hope the benefits will overcome any problems with privacy.

Another small thing we have done is to restore the courses backed up from the old VLE – these have started life in an archive category but may find themselves in new places soon.

To do next week:

1. We have already started adding areas for each subject. Each member of staff will be manually assigned the role of course creator in their subject area. This means they will be able to create and edit courses in their own subject area.

2. Creating student accounts. We will be giving students the same username as they have for the school network but will have to give them new passwords initially. Working out passwords that will be usable by students but not easily guessable by other students is something we hope we have sorted out.

3. Starting to play with the look and feel of the site. I’ve previously written about how customised profile fields can make a VLE more personal and social. Our theme and graphics also need updating.

4. Creating a 6th form group of experts. 6th form VLE club is starting this week. I’m hoping these students will in time take on a number of roles. Helping work out a VLE AUP (acceptable use policy) that is relevant and simple to understand. Helping to create content to help younger students stay safe online and to help students search and use information effectively. Helping to create graphics and themes for the site. Helping to run and moderate student areas of the site. And I hope soon, helping to train teachers to use the VLE. That’s a lot and we’ll see on Monday who turns up and what we get done.

Wish us luck and please share your comments or advice.