edtech – Page 6 – JAMES MICHIE

Lino It – Online Stickies

A brief post to document a new online tool called ‘Lino It’ which I made use of earlier in the week to complete an “assessment for learning” based lesson with my Year 10 Creative Media Diploma students.

‘Lino It’ is a powerful tool for online collaboration, brainstorming and sharing of information through sticky notes which can include text, hyperlinks, images and video. To some of you this will be sounding very familiar, and you would be right in thinking that it sounds like I am describing Wallwisher; a similar and somewhat better known “sticky notes” tool. However, I feel that ‘Lino It’ is much richer, in part due to the way that it handles video and images, but more to do with what it offers behind the canvas. After signing up (for free) you are taken to your dashboard in which you can create, edit and organise your canvases. You can store favourite canvases, create groups between users and also schedule events (within stickies) that can be linked with your Google calendar.

Most importantly ‘Lino It’ is exceptionally user intuitive. My Creative Media Diploma students’ figured out more about the tool than I had in less than 15 minutes. Letting the students sign up was a great decision as it gave them ownership of their canvas and they were the able to arrange and control the “stickies” that were being added. My most recent discovery (while working on this post) is that you can embed your canvases in to your blog, website or Moodle course. They look fabulous and would make an excellent addition to a blog recording a student’s development of a project or as part of an online portfolio.

Some example canvases:

The canvas I used as a starter activity for the “assessment for learning lesson:

An example student canvas from the same lesson:

You can try ‘Lino It’ for free or sign up to get started straight away.

Connecting With Parents Online (Part Three)

Moving Forwards

After the success of last night’s online meeting with parents, my line manager, Greg (@greghodgson) asked me to consider how we (CCC) should move forward with this process. He asked me two questions: 1. How do we push this out across all departments? 2. How do we convince a majority of parents to access it?

Below is my initial response to these questions:

1. How do we push this out across all departments?

So far only English, Media Studies, Maths and Science have delivered online meetings with parents. To get more departments involved I think we need to make the value of the meetings as clear as possible. They offer improved (mass) communication with parents. The parents feel more informed and they really like that they did not have to come all the way to school. Students benefit from improved support from home.

A simple and engaging document that explains the methodology and pedagogy behind the meetings needs to be made available. It is imperative that we market the meetings in the right way therefore I would include quotes from parents giving positive feedback. This could be handed out in either a staff meeting or in a CPD session. Alongside the document we must capture their interest by allowing them to view a meeting – either a recording or ideally to join in with a live event to get a realistic understanding of how they work.

(We could perhaps be more direct; making it a requirement for all departments to complete at least one online meeting with parents during the next academic year. However, I feel that the quality of the meetings would suffer if this is forced upon departments/teachers.)

2. How do we convince a majority of parents to access it?

The number of parents joining the meetings has been encouraging but moderate. We would like a majority to attend. I personally feel that we need to get better at utilising parent power. (A satisfied customer is the strongest advocate you can have.) We need to get a few of the parents who have attended the meetings to make contact with other parents and share their experiences. Also, we could get the PTA involved in helping to promote them.

We need one brand (maybe a postcard) that can be used for all meetings of this kind that can be quickly and easily produced. I know e-mail works but I do wonder how many parents either did not read the e-mail or read it and forgot about it. Some times paper still is the best way. We also need to get parents past the fear of it being online (and we need to get teachers past this fear to). Accessing email, clicking on links is daunting for some parents and teachers.

One good question leads to another:

As usual when asked a series of questions I always come back with many more. Here are a few:

Is this the solution to improving all parental contact?
Could parents evenings be done this way? What would the implications be if they were?
Are these meetings for mass communication only, leaving 1-2-1 communication to remain in the domain of parents evenings, telephone conversations and email?
Should tutors be making use of it to introduce themselves to parents at the start of the year?
Is Adobe Connect the best solution for us / for the parents? What about Skype or other web based communication systems?

Food for thought! If you have any questions or thoughts about what we have been doing please email me or tweet me.

You can read my previous two posts on Adobe Connect and online parents meetings here and here.

Image courtesy of yago1.com on Flickr.

Connecting With Parents Online (Part Two)

After the success of our previous online meetings with parents, I decided that the format would be a good way to help the parents of Year 10 GCSE Media Studies students understand what their exam entails and how they should be revising for it.

The Year 10 cohort are the first group studying the new OCR GCSE Media Studies syllabus and it was decided that we would enter the students for the exam in Year 10. This will allow them to focus on coursework (controlled assessment) in Year 11. The coursework element is now worth 60%.

While I can’t show the recording of the presentation due to privacy concerns, below is the PowerPoint that I used. I tried to adopt the Lessig method of presentation, although at times I didn’t manage to be as succinct as I would have liked.

[iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/present/embed?id=ddtck3wr_179ddzzwqjp” frameborder=”0″ width=”410″ height=”342″]

And here is a screen grab of the meeting room. I stick to a standard layout allowing the PowerPoint to be the dominant feature on screen. There is a chat box in the bottom left which was used by the parents to ask questions after I had finished speaking. Above that is a pod which tells me who is participating in the meeting (I have blacked out the names) and in the top left is the Video feed.

Feedback was once again resoundingly positive, with all of the parents who attended the meeting praising us for our innovative approach to keeping them informed. What’s more they echoed the sentiments put across during the previous run of online meetings that it was lovely to be able to receive the information in the comfort of their own homes.

I believe that this form of parent/teacher interaction is highly sustainable and can only see that we will continue to develop its use during the next school year.

The access to and ease of use offered by Adobe Connect (via BucksGfL) has been integral to its success as there is no sign up required by the parents. They only need the link which we send out by email and/or postcards. A link is also placed on the front of the school website.

Like truly effective ICT use, we wish to ensure that this is as easy for parents as possible – we don’t want them to be turned away at the door!

Should you like to know more about the online meetings or our use of Adobe Connect please contact me by email or via Twitter.

“Fin ur txt msgs 4 hmwk; due 14.05.”

I have spent the last five weeks with my Year 11 top set English class immersed in revision. They planned their revision timetable themselves deciding what they thought their weaknesses were and which parts of the syllabus they were not as confident about. Since then we have steadily worked on each area and this past week’s focus was Cluster 1 from the Poetry from Different Cultures section of the AQA Anthology.

In an attempt to challenge the class and mix things up a bit I decided to get them to do an activity where by they compared two poems over four paragraphs – explaining the ways in which they are connected. However the catch would be that they could only use 160 characters per paragraph; the same length as a text message! When asked: “…if that included spaces?” The answer of course was: “Yes.” The students then set to work with the usual aplomb that I have become accustomed to.

I felt that using the restrictive rules of text message lengths would focus, challenge and improve my students’ ability to revise effectively. They had to think very carefully about what they wanted to say which was then reinforcing their learning. Also, it meant that they were “reducing” – a concept that I spend a lot of time drilling into my students during this time of the year. It is my beleif that effective revision works best if you can reduce the amount you need to read over time – turning a whole folder of notes into A3 posters; then into A4 sheets; then words and phrases on flash cards. Eventually, just individual words and symbols become enough for a student to remember quotes and complex ideas.

The activity also challenged them to communicate concisely – something top set English students don’t seem to be able to do very well. It was great fun and the students really enjoyed but they found it very difficult. Some even suggesting that I had taught them too well and that they did not know enough text language as they hardly ever use it. This I found hard to beieve but more and more came forward saying that they write their messages as fully as possible – some even said that when friends used text language or spelt things wrong they get really aggravated. So, perhaps there is hope? Civilisation will not come to an end yet!

I, on the other hand, had made a classic school boy error! I had presumed too much…thinking that my students being 15/16 years old would all be expert texters. I see them everyday with their mobile phones literally glued to their hands and ears. I assumed they held within their brilliant young minds an encyclopaedic knowledge of text language and therefore this activity would be a breeze for them. What occurred in the classroom was quite the contrary. They were flummoxed, some so used to being able to do the work that they looked completely dismayed. Conclusion: Not all teenagers like to text!

We did not give up though! Eventually the students and I started to see results, that was, after I demonstrated my own skill at using text language or should I say “txt lang”. What I was really showing them was “tweet language” as I don’t really use my mobile phone but I tweet – a lot! Having become quite effective at truncating my sentences to fit the 140 character limit it became apparent that I was the expert and demonstrated a variety of ways to reduce the length of words.

The students began to get the hang of it and some of the results were very effective and students started texting each other their messages about their poems. This is what I had hoped for! They were sharing ideas and knowledge with each other that was concise, useful and they could take it away with them. Perhaps when they are looking through their texts they will look at them and revise when they were least expecting to? Several of the students did not manage to complete all 4 text messages so they asked to finish them for homework to which I said of course they could and wrote the following on the board:

“Fin ur txt msgs 4 hmwk; due 14.05.”

As well as revising poetry and having fun doing it my class also learned an important lesson about context. As they tried to abbreviate, reduce and find the best ways of communicating their ideas in the text message format they realised that should their texts be read out of the context of the room in which they were sitting they would probably not make much sense at all. For example within the context of our classroom the students would probably figure out that:

“L+NC r sim. bcuz both exp. imp. of whit cult on blk cult”

…was a shortened version of:

“Limbo and Nothings Changed are similar because they both explore the impact of white culture on black culture”

It would be very unlikely that someone reading the text outside of our classroom would understand it. This was not the intended learning outcome of the lesson but a useful by product none the less!

If I had been in a computer room I think I would have done this with Twitter as I would have had a record of all of the messages which could have then been reused. Although, adding a hash tag would have made the activity even more challenging! This activity was a great success, my class told their friends about it and I was soon asked by some of my colleagues about it.

Mobile phones and Twitter have a place in my classroom (along with many websites, apps and other technological devices). Their place is to enhance the learning of my students. Embracing a 21st century education through the use of technology is not always easy but I would encourage you to go for it. The results may not always be spectacular but they will be useful and like anything new, need to be tested, refined and improved upon. I will certainly do this activity again but I have already thought of several ways to make it better… As usual, should you have any questions please mail me or tweet me!

Image courtesy of mastrobiggo on Flickr.

Vale a pena ficar de olho nesse blog!

“Vale a pena ficar de olho nesse blog!” or to those of us who speak English: “It’s worth taking a look at this blog!” Thank you to Jan Webb for including me in her list of 10 blogs that are worth taking a look at.

If you are included below and wish to take part in the project; simply copy the image from above and the title of this post. Make a new post on your own blog; including them, and your list of the 10 blogs you think others should take a look at.

Okay. On with my list:

Doug Belshaw is an inspiration to many of us who marvel at his insane levels of productivity! His blog is always insightful, always useful and being someone who loves clean aesthetic design, his blog is beautiful to look at/read. Doug and his blog were one of the final catalysts that led to me writing my own blog and I have tried to borrow some of those design aesthetics in putting together my blog.

Richard Byrne seems to be a man on a mission to catalogue and provide his PLN with an entire library of educational tools, apps, software and websites; keeping them innovating in the classroom until the end of time. He is the most prolific blogger in my Google Reader. Simply awesome!

Tom Barrett quickly became one of my heroes when I joined Twitter. He will retweet you, recommend you and help you get your PLN off the ground. His posts centre around educational technology posting about great apps and tools. However, as a leader in the edtech community, the true worth in Tom’s blog comes from his ideas and thoughts about edtech itself and the pedagogy involved. To see what I mean check out this post called “Whispering Change”.

James Clay‘s blog is another great edtech read, particularly his series of posts titled “100 ways to use a VLE”. As an avid user of my schools VLE (Moodle) I find these posts exceptionally useful whether they introduce a new idea, reinforce something I have already been doing or remind of something I had forgotten about. This brings me nicely to the next two blogs which are also Moodle related.

Ian Usher is Buckinghamshire’s eLearning co-ordinator and helped set up our VLE. He is a “Moodle” afficinadao and his blog tends to centre around this – exploring the use of Moodle across a series of schools which he has worked. He also blogs on other edtech related ideas, pedagogy and tools. And as an added bonus, if you subscribe to his blog feed you will also get regular updates from his delicious links.

Kristian Still is someone I have gotten to know recently; he, being directly involved in this years Moodle Moot. (You can read his guest posts featured on Moodle Monthly about the #mootuk10 here: Day 1 and here: Day 2) Kristain posts regularly on a wide variety of education related areas including edtech, leadership and 21st Century Learning – a topic that is if great personal interest to me as it has been at the forefront of my thinking and classroom practice for the last few years. His writing style serves him well, creating clear and informative posts with a personal conversational tone.

David Mitchell‘s blog is really interesting as he is simply not afraid to try out new and innovative ideas inside and outside of the classroom. Search back through the posts to see how he is getting on with using mobile technology in the classroom, Cover It Live, Voicethread for peer assessment, Twitter and class blogging amongst other things. Reading about his methodology and his sheer willingness to give it a go serves as a constant reminder that you must not stay stagnant as an educator. You must keep looking for ways to improve the learning for your students.

Dai Barnes writes on edtech, pedagogy and innovation. His posts are always stimulating and, like several of the other educators I have included in this list, he is leading the way in thinking about 21st Century Education. His blog is well structured to allow you to find information on key areas of interest including Moodle, eLearning and mobile technology.

Chickensaltash is a great educator who waxes lyrical on day to day learning, edtech and the 21st Century Classroom. His posts regularly end up in my Instapaper account to read later as the guy can write and write and write! Therefore, I often need to save them till I have more time to read them and digest the ideas within.

I have included the Instapaper Blog in this list as Instapaper is my favourite web app of all time. It is integral to both my web work flow and personal productivity. It was the second web app that I used Fluid to turn into a desktop based app and the excellent, regularly updated iPhone app has become my most used app on my iPod touch. You can read my post about creating desktop apps with Fluid (including Instapaper) here. Their recent posts have included many updates on the development of their iPad app which looks stunning…check out the pics in this post. If you love design simplicity like I do you will love the way this app looks!

And that’s it; 10 blogs I think you should take a look at. Please leave comments if you wish and as always you can contact me on Twitter @jamesmichie.