learning – Page 18 – JAMES MICHIE

TeachMeet Moodle

Today I gave a presentation to fellow Moodlers at the first ever TeachMeet Moodle which was organised by Dan Humpherson (@MoodleDan) and was hosted at Heythrop College in Kensington, London. The Meet kicked off at 11:00 with speed “dating” networking followed by a series of excellent and varied presentations.

The Twitter hash tag for the event is: #TMMoodle.and you can see a complete archive of the tweets here. All the details about the Meet can be found here, including a list of attendees, presentation titles and discussion topics.

Below is the recording of my presentation: Blended Learning: How Moodle changes the learning inside and outside of my classroom. Thanks to Leon Cych (@eyebeams) for recording all of the presentations.

[Update]: The video of the presentation is no longer available.

And here are the slides I used in the presentation. I did overrun a little but I don’t think anyone was too upset by that! 🙂

During my presentation I briefly discussed my belief that Moodle brings the ‘learning spaces’ of the campfire, watering hole and cave into one place, blending them together. My understanding of these concepts represent my response to reading David D. Thornburg Ph.D.‘s ‘Campfires in Cyberspace’. You can read it here and see an extensive mind map that I created exploring the ideas put forward by Thornburg here.

Presentations of note:

After dealing with a few technical issues, Gideon Williams (@gideonwilliams) used Prezi to show a wide variety of plugins that help improve the functionality and interactivity of Moodle. This really hit home as I am always looking to improve the way that I use Moodle. (See the video here.)

The other presentation that struck a chord was delivered by Dai Barnes (@daibarnes) who showed off some fab moodling at St Benedict’s School. Their VLE looks great and is used really well by a member of their Music department. Great results from a teacher being encouraged to experiment with Moodle. (See the video here.)

Honourable mentions also go to Miles Berry (@mberry) for his presentation about using Moodle to teach teachers about e-learning (and for being a really nice guy); Daniel Needlestone (@nstone) who kept it light-hearted with his ‘Mallards and Moodle’ presentation; and Helen Morgan (@nellmog) who made a strong case for form being as important as functionallity within a Moodle course. You can see their presentations (and the rest) here.

I would like to say thanks to everyone involved. It was my first TeachMeet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Anticipating and looking forward to the next one.

Boo #2: Shipping, Gifts & Email

This is a recording of a blog post published earlier this month. You can read the original post here where you will find all of the links to people, books and concepts that I mention in the recording.

You can find all of my Boos here.

And you can subscribe to my Boos direct via iTunes or RSS.

Shipping, Giving Gifts & Combating the Email Onslaught

I finished reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin a few weeks ago and while I found it to be an interesting read, the main thesis of the text was nothing I didn’t already practise. I strive every day to “ship” and “give gifts” and I can’t evangelise enough on how important both of these concepts are as a teacher.

You have to “ship” because your day is filled with deadlines: lessons to be planned and taught, data to be input, reports to be written and homework to be marked. If you want the learning inside and outside of your classroom to be any good you have to “ship” on all of these tasks. Also, you have to “give gifts” because it’s good to be generous. Share what you do, not to get noticed and win promotion but to help make sure that every student gets the best possible education they can. I love to “ship”. I love to “give gifts”. Why? Because I care about learning. In fact, I love learning; it’s the reason I’m a teacher.

Shipping is fraught with risk and danger.

(Fear of shipping, Godin, 2010)

It’s easy to be afraid of “shipping” and “giving gifts” because many teachers are perfectionists and many teachers are protective about what they do.

What if every part of your lesson has not been meticulously planned?
What if you didn’t mark every essay in minute detail?
If you share an idea or a resource what if someone steals it and presents it as their own?
What if no one thinks what you are doing in your classroom is of any value?

To questions like these, I say remember it’s the students in your classroom that matter, so get smart. Digitise everything you do/use and back it up. Reuse and improve should become your personal mantra from day one. The better you get at this the more time you will have for the marking and data analysis which is (honestly) more important than much of the planning that you spend your time doing. What’s more, good formative assessment and understanding your students’ potential will ultimately lead to better planning any way. They inform each other and will lead to better teaching and better learning.

One of the keys for me, in ensuring that I “ship” on time is the way I deal with email. I, like many of you, work at a school where email has become the number one method of communication. However, the reality of this is that your inbox can have a stranglehold on your productivity as a teacher and certainly get in the way of the learning by impinging on the time you should be spending marking, planning and experimenting.

To combat the email onslaught I religiously use the following approach to email set out by Merlin Mann in Inbox Zero. Implement this into your work day when checking your email and your productivity will improve significantly, leaving more time for the marking, planning and most importantly the learning.

As for “giving gifts”: blog. Blog what you do, get a creative commons license and don’t let someone else show your ideas off. Do it yourself! Deliver CPD, sign up to present at a TeachMeet, build sessions into department meetings to share your ideas and encourage colleagues share what they are doing. If you take control of your gift giving you will find that you can (and will want to) share selflessly. Others will benefit but so will you.

To close, I will give a gift and allow Seth to have the last word:

A life spent curled in a ball, hiding in the corner might seem less risky, but in fact it’s certain to lead to ennui and eventually failure.

(Fear of shipping, Godin, 2010)

“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.