Big Bag, Shiny Shoes

My daughter has just started year 6 and is already getting worried about 'big school' next year. As I've already explained to her, year 7s are easily spotted as they have big bags and shiny shoes. They are also always getting lost. Trouble is all this could have described me at the beginning of September as I started at a new school for the first time in my career. I never escaped my second PGCE placement school becoming an NQT at the school only a few weeks after qualifying as a teacher. While the first day was still nerve-racking, having to stand up and introduce myself, I already had friends to sit with at the Inset day and knew my way round the school. This year I've not only started at a school where I know nobody but I've also started as subject leader. Scary stuff.


I started this post two weeks into term hoping to jot down my initial thoughts on the new role and the challenges I faced. Then the challenges started to mount ( including OFSTED last week ) and this post got put on one side while I tried to get to grips with all the urgent issues that needed my attention. So finally, with half term now rapidly approaching, I need to take time to take stock and review progress so far.


I think it's fair to say that my new school is quite a bit more challenging than my previous school. Attainment of students on entry is lower than average, our results are similarly below average and behaviour of some students is an issue. On the plus side we have just moved into a brand new building with impressive facilities and there are a large number of committed teachers who believe in the school. 


The ICT department has had a chequered history with less than impressive results and in common with many schools has followed the path from GCSEs to DiDA to OCR Nationals. Thankfully it has not gone down the Diploma route for ICT although there a small number of students taking Diplomas at partner schools who therefore need to pass IT functional skills. In year 7 and year 8 ICT is taught as part of a cross-curricular iLearn SOW. This has the advantage of providing a context for the ICT and allows me to see the same group for 6 hours a fortnight with 3 of those in an ICT room. However it means that most year 7 and year 8 students are taught by non-specialists. This coupled with year 9 starting OCR Nationals at the start of year means that I currently have concerns about covering the KS3 curriculum, particularly the higher APP levels. 


One of my first successes with KS3 was the agreement to sign up to Rafi-ki, an online learning community with schools from over a 100 countries. The community allows students to communicate safely ( it is a fully moderated site ) with other students all over the world and collaborate on projects with them. I've used Rafi-ki at my previous school and it went down very well with the students. However I never managed to break it out of the ICT ghetto and have it adopted across the curriculum. This looks much more promising at the new school, particularly as I am teaching the iLearn curriculum. We have already started to explore setting up links with schools in Napal, Uganda and Ghana as well as being invited to join a Comenius project with a school near Canterbury involving schools from Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany and Turkey. The students have just started to create their home pages which gives me the opportunity to bring in some e-safety messages about what is appropriate and safe to have on a social networking home page.


I've also set up google sites for both year 7 and year 8 and incorporated the iLearn lessons as well as the ICT lessons:-


https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodilearnyear7/


https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodilearnyear8/


My main challenge with KS3 is the lack of student school emails. I'd started to take emails for granted at my previous school and it is only now I'm starting to realised how much I need the students to have an email address to sign up for various web 2.0 applications. Until our VLE ( Frog ) is up and running I'm shut out of igoogle and google docs unless I go down the google apps route. With the new VLE in the pipeline google apps is probably not the way forward at the moment as I think it would lead to more confusion. 


At KS4 all year 9 and year 10 are taking OCR Nationals along with the year 11 Option group. The year 10 Option group were doing additional units for OCR Nationals but I felt it did not give them a sufficiently in depth ICT course and have switched them to the BTEC First Extended Certificate. My aim is to offer two pathways for the BTEC, one software / application based e.g. websites, databases, possibly games programming and the other a hardware option, including units such as hardware installation and troubleshooting. The latter option is dependent on funding for the necessary kit. Again I've set up google sites for each of the courses:-


https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodocrnationals/


https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodocrnationalsnewspce/


https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodbteclevel2/


My main concern with KS4 is the lack of progress many seem to have made in the first year of their course. Both year 10 and year 11 are significantly behind where they should be and there is a lot of work ahead to get them back on track. The new specification for OCR Nationals is also causing problems. Year 10 started the course in year 9 and so were registered for the old spec. However we have had several students join the school in year 10 this year and they will need to be registered for the new specification - this means they will need to complete 3 units rather than the 2 the old spec required. Under the current curriculum model there is no provision for core ICT in year 11. This is something I'm hoping can be changed as the new specification has 100 guided learning hours and it will not be possible to complete the course in one hour a week for 2 years.


There is also a gap in our provision re a level 1 course for KS4. There are a fair number of students for whom a level 2 course, even one as straightforward as OCR Nationals, is not appropriate. I need to review the options and look to introduce a course more suited to their needs. 


Year 12 is looking brighter. We have 13 students taking the Edexcel Applied ICT AS and I am really enjoying teaching the first unit - The Information Age. The unit covers the impact of ICT on society and gives the students a broad scope to research different aspects. Lots of my links and videos picked up from Twitter and elsewhere are coming in handy:-


https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodedexcelappliedict/


Going forward I would like to offer BTEC level 3 in addition to the AS to broaden the provision on offer and also offer BTEC level 2 at post 16 if staffing allows.


Finally there are 3 wider school issues which I need to spend some time on, namely our filtering policy, e-safety and staff CPD. I'm getting very frustrated that YouTube is blocked in school, even for teachers. I use it extensively in my lessons and am currently having to use Zamzar to download videos I want to use. I am also having problems with a prevailing culture amongst students that ICT lessons = playing on games unless repeatedly caught by the teacher. While the current filtering system blocks YouTube it cannot provide me with an audit trail so I can identify the students using internet access inappropriately. With amazingly good timing this post floated past me on the Twitter stream:-


http://www.mrstucke.com/2010/10/08/a-progressive-approach-to-the-internet-in-school/#comments


An excellent AUP, a great strategy and a pointer towards a filtering system that seems to answer all my issues.


To help with my review of e-safety I'm going to be working my way through the  SWGfL 360 degree e-safety review


http://360safe.org.uk/


This is the first stage of working towards the ICT mark accreditation.


I delivered my first e-learning workshops at our recent INSET and they went down well. Unlike my previous school there has not been much work done on e-learning and the workshops gave me an opportunity to revisit some old favourites of mine such as Wordle, Edmodo and Piratepad 


So lots to do. It's been a busy and very tiring five weeks but I can already see some progress and ( apart from the OFSTED visit ) I'm enjoying the new challenges. Now lets see if I can get back into keeping this blog updated regularly, if only so I can organise my thoughts. 

Better Days

I've written two very negative posts this weekend. End of marking exhaustion maybe or the realisation that time is slipping away in my current role and I'm running out steam to keep battling against things I want to change. Whatever, if I don't write something more positive soon I'll have to rename this blog Grumpy Old Teacher. Time for some optimism and a review of things that have been going well.

First a sentence that, when I was a student teacher and an NQT, I never thought I'd write. This year I have really enjoyed teaching my year 9 groups. I remember being reduced to tears by one year 9 group when I was an NQT and I dreaded every lesson with them. The timetable negotiations always revolve around each teacher trying to reduce the number of hours spent teaching year 9 to an absolute minimum. Student disengagement and behaviour issues have been at the root of this reluctance to teach this year group. ICT is an optional subject at my school and particularly once the options forms have gone in the students tend to have the attitude that they don't have to do any work as it doesn't matter anymore. Last year, which was my first year as the KS3 co-ordinator, we tried introducing OCR Nationals as a way of focusing students and giving them a purpose to the ICT lessons. This failed, partly due to being introduced half way through the year ( no decision being made until we had a new HoD ) and partly due to not having any core curriculum time in KS4 so most students would be unable to complete the course.

During this time I began to think more deeply about what I wanted to achieve with the KS3 curriculum and became convinced that cutting KS3 to yr7 and yr8 was counter to my instincts about what ICT could offer re higher order thinking skills and equipping students with digital literacy skills that would support learning across the curriculum. As a result I have spent this year rewriting the year 9 SOW to make it more engaging and relevant. We started the year looking at the impact of Social Media on society, including introducing Edmodo, Etherpad, Delicious and Google Docs. This took the curriculum completely away from the Microsoft Office dominated lessons and succeeded in drawing in some of the less engaged students. It also lead to plenty of discussions with individual students and evidence of students actually thinking about the issues. Key comment from one girl was 'miss I didn't know I was good at ICT until this year'. Result!

The Digital Literacy project that I've blogged about previously also went went well and really engaged the students. It also had some great spin-offs. When a colleague who ran the library left, some of my students set up a wiki to collect farewell messages for her. Other students have set up their own google sites for themselves and their families, including a Lady GaGa fan site that seems to be getting a lot of hits.

We are just finishing a Scratch game programming project which have proved very popular and again seems to be lighting some fires rather than just filling buckets. One thing that has come out it was the opportunity to model how to learn new skills. I used to be a programmer so am aware of programming principals but did not always know how to achieve something in Scratch. I therefore sat with students and went through figuring it out with them. Hopefully what I have shown them that it is not as important to know how to do everything as it is to have strategies to work it out. Mind you, in answer to a review question about what have you learnt about programming games I did get the response 'so far we have learnt to leave game-making to the professionals'.

I now look forward to my year 9 lessons and will really miss the students when I leave. Here's the SOW we have been working through:-

https://sites.google.com/site/sblictyear9/

Another thing I've been really pleased about this year is the progress with staff e-learning CPD. Several colleagues have started to write their own google sites, many are using Google Docs, Wordle and Wallwisher and one colleague has started her own blog. With gain time kicking in soon I hope to build on this and prepare colleagues for the introduction of netbooks in September.

And finally I've secured myself a new job as HoD ICT in a school in Bristol. I'm very excited about this and can hardly wait to start again with a new challenge. I have also started discussing ICT curriculum development with like minded teachers across the country via Twitter and the #ictcurric hashtag and website. See - my optimism levels are returning - maybe I can keep the Web 2.0 Optimist blog title a little longer.

RIP ICT?

I've been mulling over this post for a few weeks now but coursework marking hell  prevented me from getting my thoughts into any sort of order. I believe ICT as a subject is at a crossroads. On the one hand there are brilliant opportunities to use ICT  to support higher order thinking skills across the curriculum and provide students with the digital literacy skills needed to function effectively in the digital age. On the other there is the pressure to 'process' students through the coursework mill to prop up school league tables. This second option is proving even more invasive with the introduction of ICT Functional Skills as a requirement for passing any Diploma. 


Steve Wheeler's 'Stop Calling it ICT' post challenges both the name and the purpose of ICT lessons. Is the name appropriate with it's focus on technology rather than learning. Do we need ICT as a discrete subject or should it be embedded across the curriculum? 


James Greenwood's article on Assessing Pupil Progress in ICT also gave me food for thought. I have been rewriting the KS3 SOWs this year to incorporate the new APP levels with it's three strands:-

• AF1 planning, developing and evaluating
• AF2 handling data, sequencing instructions and modelling
• AF3 finding, using and communicating information

APP has proved to be a good framework for developing a curriculum which is not dominated by teaching students which buttons to press in various Microsoft  Office Applications. Like James I have been moving towards projects which incorporate various learning objectives and higher order thinking skills rather than the 'now we will do spreadsheets' mentality which seemed to underpin the old National Strategy lessons. 

So for instance year 7 are currently working on a project about dream holidays. This involves the following activities:-

• Creating a questionnaire using Google forms. 
• Analysing the data collected using google forms and Microsoft Excel 
• Comparing spreadsheet applications 
• Planning a holiday route using Google maps 
• Use internet research to find out how much a holiday would cost 
• Using a spreadsheet application to produce a model to calculate the cost of a holiday and answer 'what if' questions. 
• Using a desktop publishing application to publicise the holiday package 

Yes this incorporates the AF2 data handling elements but also covers the AF1 concepts of planning out the project at the start and evaluating the outcome and the AF3 themes of finding and using information.

This approach stills needs more work as my starting point was introducing the use of spreadsheets followed by how can I incorporate other ideas and thinking skills. I need to turn this process round to a more Challenge Based Learning model:-

But can this approach work in a discrete ICT lesson? Surely it needs a bigger focus and more curriculum time to be successful. I recently visited Brunel Academy in Bristol which has has 80% of the year 7 and year 8 curriculum devoted to project based learning. Maybe the end point of the way my curriculum ideas are heading is agreeing that ICT as a discrete subject is dead. Alternatively this could be a takeover of the entire curriculum by technology enabled learning. Time will tell.

The other strand in this post is the increasing pull in the opposite direction, back to a Microsoft Application training model of ICT lessons that I'd hoped had been consigned to the past. ICT departments have long been under pressure to be a cash cow for results. Courses such as GNVQs and now OCR Nationals which are based on 100% coursework and which can turn out 4 GCSEs per student have propped up many schools in results league tables. This pressure has led to many schools compressing the ICT KS3 curriculum into yr7 and yr8 with the coursework production line firing up in yr9. The prevailing attitude in my school appears to be that any student can be given sufficient support to achieve an ICT qualification. These courses do however have a range of options enabling teachers to put together an engaging curriculum.

Into the mix now comes Functional Skills. At my school ICT is an optional subject at KS4. Suddenly from being in a sleepy back water ICT has been thrust into the limelight. 90% of the students now take a Diploma and all of them have to pass ICT Functional Skills in order to gain their Diploma. Late in the day the school is realising that this qualification needs to have significant time on the timetable following disastrous results for cohort after cohort given at most 20 hours ( GLH 45 hours ) study time. Some students are now taking the exam for the 4th time and are in real danger of failing their Diploma.

As a result the department is now under pressure to spend the whole of year 9 preparing students to take Functional Skills. To do this we would have to strip out all the digital literacy and thinking skills elements of the current SOW together with the game programming in Scratch and go back to Excel, Access and Publisher training. Pressure with year 11 has also seen a return to teaching spreadsheets as databases as a way of getting the students through. Fortunately as KS3 co-ordinator I have not been involved in Functional skills this year and I am moving to a new school in September which has not embraced Diplomas. However if this is the new vision for ICT then the sooner discrete ICT is put out of it's misery and consigned to the history books the better.

Netbook CPD Project

I've mentioned in a couple of post the netbooks CPD project I'm working on. The school is introducing netbooks to all Year 7 and year 12 students in September ( plus year 10 if funds allow ). The aim of the project is to focus on the pedagogical approach to the introduction of the netbooks rather than the usual pattern for the introduction of technology which seems to be focusing solely on the technology itself. It is also looking at the CPD requirements of staff to ensure that they are able to effectively use the technology in the classroom to support learning.


We have been fortunate to secure some funding from Vital, a DCSF backed Open University organisation which aims to support school in making the best use of ICT. This funding will enable us to organise workshops and time off timetable to work on a strategy for the implementation, including a CPD program to run in the summer term to enable staff to embed e-learning into the curriculum.


We have been making some progress re e-learning prior to the start of this project. Each member of the teaching staff has one hour a fortnight e-learning training and the use of web 2.0 technologies in the classroom is increasing. What the implementation of the netbooks will enable is the opportunity to transform the way e-learning is used across the curriculum.


This Edutopia post identifies 4 stages of adoption of technological advances:-

• Dabbling.
• Doing old things in old ways.
• Doing old things in new ways.
• Doing new things in new ways

At a BECTA 21st Century Teaching conference on Wednesday they had a similar  model of levels of transformation:-

Without time to plan and effective CPD we will not get beyond the Dabbling / Exchange stage.

Just before sitting down to write this post I came across this post on going 1:1 in schools by Kim Cofino:-

http://kimcofino.com/blog/2010/03/06/going-11-top-5-insights-from-asb-unplugged/

Lots to think about here. Particularly liked some of the student quotes:-

• 1:1 is an advantage b/c: “Teachers don’t need to be a source of raw information anymore & they can finally actually teach”
• “It’s always possible to get distracted – the tech office can try to block things for a little while, but we always find a way. In the real world, there are always distractions, having a laptop teaches you how to be productive in that environment”
• Students are not ready to go paperless, yet. They like the tactile experience and no boot-up time of working with paper and pencil when relevant.

Given the concerns re the robustness of netbooks and attrition rates I also liked this idea:-

• Students really take responsibility for their laptop through the Eggcellent Project: Each student is given a drained egg to take care of for two weeks, along with a special case. If anything happens to the egg, they have to go to the tech office to sign an insurance form.

Lots of sound advice as well about engaging all stakeholders and the importance of Project Based Learning. As part of the research for the project I visited Bristol Brunel Academy last week. They have netbooks for all year 7 and year 8 and 80% of the curriculum is project based learning. We have a Personal Development Curriculum which is a cross curricular model but not nearly as extensive.

So next steps. We have a workshop on Tuesday with representatives from most curriculum areas to complete a SWOT analysis and plan a way forward. I need to compile a survey of all staff ( using a google form ). This will be an attitudinal survey as well as a skills audit to gauge what CPD training will be required. We also need to brainstorm ideas that can be incorporated across the curriculum. This wiki by Suzie Vesper could be a good starting point.

The key message that we need to get across is that this is not about focusing on the gadgets. At the moment, if a teacher books an ICT suite the lesson is dominated by the technology and the whole lesson revolves around the kit. With 1:1 netbooks technology becomes another tool to be used to aid learning.

Student Blogging - Bright Sparks

During my trip to BETT back in January I attended a really interesting seminar on student blogging to promote reflective learning. Myers Grove School in Sheffield have been using Bright Sparks from Life Beyond School encourage students to reflect on their learning and to build up a portfolio of evidence against various competencies. I am currently involved in a project to introduce netbooks to all students in year 7 from September and I thought that this might be a useful tool for students to use in tutor time as a sort of extended plenary on their learning for the day. I therefore jumped at the chance to visit Myers Grove School last week to find out more about the system.


Bright Sparks is an online blogging tool which allows you to classify entries against a set of competencies. Numerous frameworks are possible e.g. SEAL or PLTS or any in-house frameworks. These can be mapped against each other so that evidence collected against one framework can be translated into a different one.


Myers Grove have developed a set of 12 enterprise skills:-

• Leadership and Team Working
• Decision Making
• Negotiating and Influencing 
• Risk Management
• Positive Attitude
• Initiative
• Creativity and Innovation
• Organisation Planning and Evaluation
• Effective communication
• Economic and Ethical Issues
• Financial Capability
• Product or Service Design and Development

Students keep a Digital Diary classifying each entry against one of these 12 skills. Evidence is collected in paper format throughout the day and then entered onto the system at the end of the day. The entries take the format of a short post explaining what the activity was. Documents, images, podcasts and videos can be uploaded to support the post. If the student feels that an activity evidenced more than one competency they would need to create an entry for each competency. This was a deliberate design decision to ensure that students didn't allocate an activity to multiple competencies. The data from the entries is displayed in the form of a wheel:-

( taken from Bright Sparks webpage )


As evidence is entered for each competency the wheel is filled in. Once a segment is filled in Bronze it starts again in Silver and then Gold ). This gives the student a snapshot of their progress and also highlights competencies that they have not covered.


The school has a different focus each half term to highlight where students have been using each of these competencies. Discussions are held during lesson plenary to help students identify which skills they have been using. Reports are being developed on the Bright Sparks system to show which subjects students are logging their evidence against to ensure that the competencies are being embedded across the curriculum. 


Once students move into KS4 they start to log their evidence against PLTS so that they are building up evidence for e.g. their Diploma studies. As the Enterprise Skills framework has been mapped against PLTS both frameworks can be turned on at the same time to aid transition and all evidence collected for the Enterprise Skills framework can be re-displayed as PLTS competencies. Similarly in Post 16 the competencies can be translated into evidence for personal statements. There is also a CV tool as part of the system. This mapping of competencies against each other ( via an underlying set of skills ) means that KS2/3 transition is also possible e.g. SEAL Framework to the Enterprise Framework. Temporary Frameworks can also be added e.g. a field trip or a sports event. This is currently being utilised in a sports project funded by the Olympics Fund. There is also a staff version which has the TDA Frameworks and Myers Grove are also looking at a parent portal which would allow parents to build up a CV. 


Apart from getting students to reflect on their learning it also supports them in understanding what is meant by the terms e.g. initiative and helps them to identifying when they are using various skills. 


I feel that this tool would fit really well into the use of the netbooks and enable tutor time to be used effectively to reflect on the day's learning. It would also help to facilitate mentoring sessions as it would be a good vehicle for reviewing progress and setting future targets. 

Digital Literacy in Action

I've been running the Digital Literacy project for a couple of weeks now and have been really encouraged by the level of engagement from the year 9 students. As usual it has not all been plain sailing but I think both the students and I have learnt plenty from it.

As per my previous post I have written a group project around the theme of Swine Flu. The Pigs Didn't Start the Swine Flu YouTube video ( with many apologies to Billy Joel ) had the desired effect of grabbing the student's attention. I went through the project and explained that I was introducing tools and skills that they would need to complete their Personal Project for the Diploma in year 10.

I decided to split the class into 4 large groups - these were randomly selected and then tweeked to make sure that I did not have any very weak groups. I allocated students to a group and their group Etherpad via a Word document and logged onto each of the Etherpads so I could monitor what was happening online. For my first class I gave them a blank Etherpad with the instructions to read through the tasks themselves and answer the following questions:

• Who your team leader is going to be

• How you are going to divide up the work

• How you are going to plan your time

• What your success criteria for the project are

• How you are going to make sure that everyone contributes to the project

• How you are going to communicate with each other

• How you are going to document and organise your findings

• How you are going to present your findings

I had created a Google Site to support the project

https://sites.google.com/site/sblictyear9/home/digital-literacy/the-project

The blank Etherpad however proved to be too great a challenge and the chat side of Etherpad was seeing much more traffic - much of it non work related. They also seemed to have difficulty establishing what tasks needed to be allocated.

For my second group I made a couple of refinements. Students spent the first half of the lesson working on their own creating mind maps on Bubbl.us or Mindmeister so that they understood all the topics to be covered. For the second half of the lesson they worked in their teams on Etherpad but this time I put the questions on the Etherpad for them. This helped them to structure their discussions and they were much more productive. Google Sites had also just released templates, including a project wiki which was ideal for the students to create a collaborative website

Each team allocated a person to set up the wiki and invite the rest. The room went quiet as they concentrated on communicating online. I was talking to one student about the wiki and he said 'I'll have to ask the team leader on Etherpad if I can set the wiki up'.

Both groups have worked well on the project. However they have struggled to allocate work among themselves. With both groups I have had to get the groups together at the front of the class to go through who was going to do what. I think is was important for them to go through the process of trying to organise themselves even it it was not successful this time. If students don't get the opportunity to try they will never acquire the skills they need to work collaboratively. Once roles had been allocated they were able to organise themselves on the task and monitor progress. Here's an example of one the Etherpads

 

Here's a screenshot of one of the wiki sites ( still work in progress )

We have not finished the project yet but it has proved a good vehicle for teaching a wide range of skills such as effective internet searching, checking sources, summarising information and presenting the information. The next focus will be on making sure that all sources have been referenced ( the group are using Delicious to keep track of the sites they have used ) and that the information has not been copied and pasted. It's a challenge to the students not to just take information from the first site that answers their questions and think that they have finished.

I had my last lesson before Christmas with one of the groups yesterday and had intended to allow the students the second half of the lesson to do some Christmassy animation on Scratch. However I looked up and there was only five minutes left of the lesson. The students ( and I ) had been so engrossed in what we were doing the lesson was almost over. Yes there had been some students wandering round the room but when I checked they were talking about the work to other students in their group and helping each other. Apart from one incident when a team got sidetracked picking avatar pictures for their profiles on the wiki they were self motivating and fully engaged on the task. I even had students calling me over to show me the work they had done. If I can get the same level of engagement with my other group next week I will be a happy woman going into the Christmas break.

Developing Digital Literacy

I've been working for a while on a scheme of work for year 9 to improve their digital literacy. This was prompted by a conversation with a drama teacher at school who was concerned that year 10 Diploma students seemed to have very little idea about how to research effectively or present their results. As the ICT KS3 co-ordinator this concerned me as we were obviously not equipping students with the ICT skills they needed for KS4 study.


Looking round for ideas to structure a series of lessons round I came across this video:-




The DISCOVER model seemed ideal for what I had in mind:-

• Define
• Inquire
• Search
• Collect
• Organise
• Verify
• Express
• Reflect

I needed a project that I could build round these steps. Last term I tried a group project based around students researching where in the UK their family could move to. They had to look at jobs, schools, house prices and recreational facilities. My hope was that given a large amount of information to find, process and present they would have the opportunity to work in a team and try out the tools and techniques I was showing them. The results were very mixed to say the least. Analysing what problems had been several issues were evident:-

- The topic - moving house - was not impersonal enough for the students. Rather than seeing it as a research project they looked on it as deciding where they wanted to live and included criteria such as where their grandparents lived or where they had been on holiday
- They soon got bogged down in details - looking at individual houses to live in rather than researching areas and general housing markets
- I had allowed them to choose their own groups and this had resulted in fairly small groups and some very low ability groups who were unable to access the project without considerable support.
- I ran the project in the summer term when students' motivation and engagement tends to wane.

So over the summer holiday I had a rethink. I needed a different research topic, one that students would be interested in but which would not have the same level of personal involvement as the moving house topic. Then I came across this site from Google:-

Google Resources Centre

A whole set of lessons and resources focusing on researching swine flu and similar outbreaks. Topical and loads of different aspects which could be researched. On materials covering research techniques I came across another gem from Google - an excellent resources with a series of presentation on search techniques:-

Web Searching

This video was an attention grabbing starter:-

This time I have decided to select the groups myself and have divided the class into four mixed ability groups of 7 or 8 students. 


In line with other year groups and courses this year I have set up a Google site for year 9 and have added this scheme of work to it. Still work in progress but it's starting to take shape.


Year 9 Google Site



The unit has also been given an added focus as this year I am part of a team delivering the Personal Project element of the Diplomas which requires each student to complete an independent research project. The unit will give students the opportunity to develop the skills they will need to complete this project successfully.


I will be documenting how the unit progresses and develops over the next few weeks.

Web 2.0 v VLEs part 2

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Web 2.0 and VLES prompted by a detailed comment posted by Nick Sharratt.

First a couple of caveats – the views expressed here are purely my own views and not those of the school that I work at – we still have a VLE and it is the official platform for delivering resources and submitting work online. My blog is deliberately anecdotal – I am a classroom teacher and my blog records what is happening in my teaching practice.

As someone who was until 5 years ago a project manager for a major retail bank I have had plenty of experience of the requirements of the data protection act and also of dealing with ‘business critical’ systems. The eighth principal of the data protection act, for instance, is not a blanket ban on holding personal data outside the EU, rather a requirement that countries outside the EU have adequate protection for individual’s personal data ( it being assumed that those within the EU already do so – not sure with RIPA this is actually the case in the UK anymore ). Thus when I was working for the bank I was part of a team moving data processing to sites in India.  Banks took the approach of making acceptance of overseas data processing a requirement of opening an account. This is also the case with regards to Web 2.0 applications where the terms and conditions ( which I know everyone reads in detail ) will contain a clause to cover the service provider. The argument with students under the age of 18 is whether they are in the position to give informed consent to this.

The approach that we have taken is that students give only the most limited personal data to web 2.0 application providers. Many of the applications we use do not require any sign-up ( and hence any transfer of personal data ) e.g. Etherpad, Solvr. Others require name and email address – for which we insist on students using their school email address e.g. iGoogle, Bubbl-us, Mind Meister. For reasons of e-safety students are not allowed to add identifiable personal data to any of the sites we use.

Use of web 2.0 is limited to disposable documents. If the document needs to be kept it is downloaded and stored locally. This also applies to the submission of coursework. Where work has been submitted e.g. on Edmodo it has been draft versions for feedback and refinement. Final versions have to be printed off as exam boards still require hard copies. There is therefore no reliance on these tools for business critical processes. This contrasts with the use of VLEs to submit work. Had I been relying on our VLE when it was taken down without warning over Easter all of my coursework would have been inaccessible at a critical assessment time. Furthermore our VLE provider attempted to end our contract earlier this term. Again this would have resulted in my losing coursework and resources. Yes it is possible that a web 2.0 site is taken offline but from my experience so far it is far less likely that google will cease to do business than that my VLE provider will pull the plug.

In my previous role I was often in the position of rolling out new systems and liaising with users re development requirements. Had I treated people with the indifference that has been shown by our VLE provider I would have been sacked. You cannot develop a system with a take it or leave attitude towards the user. My experience so far has been that VLE development has been driven by what the provider wants to develop rather than what the user needs, a situation which would not be tolerated in a business environment. I would say that in my experience of researching alternative VLEs the Frog VLE has proved the exception to this – from all reports they appear to be very responsive to their users needs.

Your point re a lot of the issues being management issues is correct. However these issues have not been resolved in six years – longer than many of our students have been at the school – this is not acceptable.

However my main objection to VLEs is this gated community attitude to online access. We need to prepare students for life outside school. The minute students leave school they lose access to the VLE and all the associated tools. Web 2.0 tools are for life, not just for schooltime. 

With regards to the amount of time required to get to grips with the Web 2,0 applications either the application is intuitive to use or I don't bother - I just move onto another application - I am not tied financially or contractually to trying to make something work. Hence two years ago I did not use google sites because it was not easy to use - now it has been developed further I am using it with relish. Yes I may be naive and rogue but I poured my energy and enthusiasm into the VLE for 2 years with very little to show for it. Now I feel I am finally getting somewhere and a making a real difference to my students learning.

Web 2.0 v VLEs

I've tried a couple of titles for this post. It sounds rather confrontational which isn't what I want but in the end it summed up the post. I was originally just going to talk about google sites and the breakthrough they have proved to be for me this year. But I kept coming back to the reasons I have ended up using google sites and thought that was the more interesting story.

Right from when I first started teaching, getting on for 5 years ago now ( where does the time go ), I was very keen to use a VLE to deliver my resources, set assignments and utilise functions such as discussion boards and quizzes. If I'm honest it appealed to the geek in me. This was the shiny new future and that  was what I wanted to use.

My first experience of a VLE was very positive. I was on placement at City Academy, Bristol, a wonderful place and very inspiring - yes this was why I wanted to be a teacher. They were using a VLE called Angel which I found very intuitive to use. As a student teacher I was able to post resources and do all those things that I'd read about. I was also helped greatly by Chris Macintosh who showed me the possibilities and opportunities of the VLE and provided me with endless inspiration.

So I went to my second placement as a convert - VLEs were the one true religion - anything else was heresy. Only I wasn't allowed to post to the VLE as a student and most of the experienced teachers were less than enthusiastic about our platform ( which will remain nameless for professional reasons ). I was puzzled - why would anyone not want to use a VLE? Anyway I ended up staying at the school as an NQT and was fully committed to getting stuck into developing all my resources on the VLE.

Reality started to bite fairly early - class lists were not transferred from SIMs until over a month after the start of the Autumn term. I was only able to see my own classes so when a colleague was off I couldn't post resources for  her class ( this became more of an issue when I became the KS3 co-ordinator - how was I supposed to post resources for all the KS3 classes? ). The interface for building resources was very clunky, it was built on blocks of text and there was no way of inserting images. A year in and suddenly you could insert images and the resources started to look a little better. I threw myself into producing resources a new course preparing year 9 students for Diplomas. The year group was split into 9 groups and 3 learning strands so there were two other teachers teaching my strand. The VLE seemed the best way to share resources and initially it worked well. I made sure I had all 9 groups on my profile so I could post work for the current 3 groups and start to prepare resources for the next 3. Then we swapped to the next groups and all the resources disappeared. The VLE could not cope with groups changing and it took quite a while to retrieve submitted work and resources.

Numerous other problems ensued but I continued to battle away. The final straw came  at Easter when the system was taken down for the whole of the school holiday without warning. I was furious as I had a large amount of work to complete in time for the start of term. When the system was finally restored all my existing resources had been corrupted - all images distorted and line spacing all over the place. I couldn't even repair the resources as the rich text editor had disappeared. When I complained the company were totally indifferent and even suggested that I had training issues. They lost me then and I haven't used the VLE with my classes since.

But I still needed something to deliver resources and communicate with my students. I found Edmodo ( see previous post ) which gave me the communication tools but not the means to deliver the resources. I had looked at google sites a couple of years ago but it seemed complicated to use - and to find! This summer I had to start writing course material for BTEC Level 3 ICT and thought I'd have another look at google sites. The application has changed out of all recognition and was now exactly the tool that I had wanted the VLE to be. I could embed presentations and videos. I could link in a calendar and use all the gadgets from iGoogle. In less than 3 days I had a complete unit online and this time included gaining an understanding what the unit content entailed. Here is the end result ( unit 1 ):-

https://sites.google.com/site/sblbtec3/

Bouyed up by this success I have transferred all my resources to google sites. The rest of the department has followed suite and we are now working together to get all department resources online. This week I even used the sites to add pages to support cover lessons.

Our VLE has just been relaunched and I'm sure it is much better than when I was struggling with it a year or so ago. However I now find that I am ideologically opposed to the concept of VLEs in general. The idea of a 'gated community' has never appealed, whether it be rich people or old people and the idea of having an enclosed space within which students interact online does not make sense to me. When they leave school they lose access to the VLE and all the associated tools. Surely it is better to give them experience of tools that they will be able to continue using outside the school gates - social bookmarking, collaborative tools such as Etherpad, Edmodo, Bubbl-us etc, google sites to create their own websites and hopefully, if I can get it unblocked, Blogger or some other blogging tool to enable them communicate with a wider audience. The only remaining advantage I see for a VLE is the reporting to parents - but this is not something that we are using anyway at the moment.

If it was just that a VLE is a neutral entity that you can either choose to use or not I would not feel so strongly about the subject. The problem is that it is not neutral - it takes up enormous resources in terms of money and time that could be better used elsewhere. It also colours people's perception of e-learning so that they equate e-learning with this cumbersome, clunky application that does not meet their needs. I am doing a lot of staff training at the moment and am having to 'rehabilitate' the term e-learning after 6 years of the school struggling with a failing VLE. Such a waste of potential and enthusiasm.

Steve Wheeler has written a couple of excellent posts about VLEs:-

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/08/two-fingered-salute.html

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/11/vle-sucks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/cYWZ+(Learning+with+'e's)

Not much more I can add to them

Experiments with Edmodo

I came across Edmodo about 6 months ago. It was described as an educational Twitter site which is a little misleading. Yes you have the ability to post messages but there is much more to it than that. It is getting close to a VLE but without all the baggage. You can set assignments, have discussion threads, set up RSS feeds, post links and conduct polls. You can set up groups for each of your classes and entry to the class is via  class code. This gets over the issue I have encountered with some VLEs which link to SIMs where students can only access the materials if they are on the classlist.


I trialled Edmodo first with our IT lab - a small group of students who test out web 2.0 applications after school. Feedback was positive - for a start it was not blocked by our filters and the students liked using the application. Now I needed a context in which to introduce it.


The opportunity came with a project for year 9 which focused on Social Media and how it is changing such things as how companies interact with their customers, how news is reported and how governments control information. I had a series of case studies and questions for the students to think about. Edmodo seemed a good way of getting all the class to contribute to the discussion. 


I started by setting up some questions and polls and soon realised that I would have to post them in reverse order as most students would start at the top of the page not the bottom. I am a firm believer in allowing students to use back channels providing they are also working on the task set so set the ground rules that students could post one comment to the whole group but should use direct messaging after that to communicate with individuals. However I soon realised that students do not have the option of direct messaging. All communication was to the whole group. I soon had trouble tracking the posts I had asked students to respond to as they all posted comments to each other and there was not an option to filter on my posts. The images they were choosing as avatars was also causing concern. It was proving difficult to control the physical class in front of me at the same time as the virtual class online. I also discovered that while I could post comments to individual students the students could only post to the whole group.


However when I struggled through the smog of chatter I was getting some good work. I used this story as a case study lost phone ( as detailed in Clay Shirky's book - Here comes everybody ). Here are some of the responses:-

The poll function also proved useful

A quick refinement - post your questions as alerts - you can filter on them and find the responses easily. More fundamental refinement - I set an end of unit assessment as a google form - one of the questions I set was what ground rules should there be for using Edmodo in class. Fairly honest and sensible rules proposed:-

Only use it for the work set not as a messenger.

no swearing or bad words.

I think there should be the rule that you should use it for working not just for havin a random chat not about work

dont be silly

I think that the chat should be sensible, nothing rude or Inappropriate and must have something to do with the work in class.

Only go on it when told, and be given a topic to talk about to save friends from usin it as a catch up lesson on gossip!

People shouldn't be able to be mean to people on it.

not say it if u cant say it to the person face

Use it for work purposes and dont bully another student, dont chat too much.

The last post is probably closest to my own feelings. I do not see the point in using Web 2.0 / social media technologies and trying to ban students totally from using it as they would if they were not at school. I use Google chat at school to gossip - not in lessons but sometimes in meetings - it keeps me sane. It is unrealistic to expect them only to use these tool to stay on task - some back channel is inevitable and not unacceptable.

So today my daughter was off school sick and I had to stay home to look after her. I had 3 hours of year 13 working on OCR Applied ICT units 9 and 14 - project management and web design, two hours of year 11 BTEC Certificate and two hours of after school - a mix of year 10 and year 11 BTEC ICT.

Here was an opportunity to test out Edmodo as a means of communicating with students remotely. The year 13 group were started by my HoD and quickly logged on. Positive communcation:-

They were totally at ease with the communication channel and were soon using Edmodo to clarify tasks :-

I even caught students not returning to class on time after break:-

All in all it worked well as the poll showed:-

So buoyed but by this success I sat there waiting for my year 11 group to log on...... and waited ......and waited......

After half an hour I phoned the office - help - why was nobody logging on? A colleague kindly popped round to my class to find out what was happening. My carefully written and planned cover lesson had been communicated as 'get on with your course work'. Once the students had been told what they had to do I got a sudden flood of posts and queries:-

This was a far bigger group - 26 as opposed to 6 for year 13. Also a younger groups so more behaviour issues:-

More mixed than year 13 but overall a positive experience - the poll highlighted the advantages and the pitfalls - with all the posts on the site I missed someone's posts:-

So conclusions:-

• Set some ground rules but don't make them too prescriptive
• Don't expect all students to behave like angels - doesn't happen - or alternatively I'm a crap teacher and can't control my class
• Be pleasantly surprised by what students are prepared to reveal when they are typing online rather than putting their hand up in class - we have had students who have jumped from level 4 to level 6 - partly subject matter but also being freed by the medium.

I've been at home with my sick daughter but this has been a good teaching day.