Tag: productivity

3 things I do every weekend that make me a better teacher

1. Get out and about

What I enjoy most about the weekend is the chance to get out and about in to a non-school environment. This could be as trivial as walking down the road to the local Costa Coffee for a flat white or to the local supermarket to get the groceries. Or it could be something more meaningful such as a short train journey into London to visit a museum or see a play. Whatever it is, I enjoy being able to spend time with my wife; to eat, drink, interact and enjoy myself – free from the day-to-day experience that is my working week. This does not mean that I am completely switched off though. On the contrary, It is out there, in the real world that many of the ideas I have for teaching exercises reveal themselves. You see, if all you walk and talk all week is education with other educators, eventually the conversation becomes stagnant and new ideas dry up. My best ideas come to me usually when I’m nowhere near school; out there, in the real world.

2. Read the newspaper

During the week I am essentially locked in an education bubble. Sunday morning is catch up time. I need to know what is going on in the world, as both an English and Media Studies teacher, news has a significant impact on my teaching. I prefer to read the news on a Sunday as not only are the “really” important stories reflected on and pulled apart but being the weekend I feel I have the time to truly immerse myself into reading the news. I don’t buy a newspaper however. Instead, I read the Observer online via http://guardian.gyford.com. If you have not experienced either the Guardian or Observer newspaper in this way then I suggest that you give it a go. I feel that it offers the perfect balance between an online and paper based reading experience. And, while I don’t own one I am certain that it would work really well on the iPad.

3. Tidy up loose ends

On a Sunday evening I look through my work inbox and todo list and spend 60 minutes clearing as much as possible before Monday. I try to do something similar on a Friday afternoon before I leave work but there are often bits and pieces that just don’t get done. It could be the case that an email needs to be replied to; a handful of assignments need to be marked; a request for some data or other information needs to be submitted. Or it could be the case that the last few days may have simply been very busy and I have a backlog of emails that either need to be archived or deleted. Once the 60 minutes is up, anything that remains in my inbox or todo list is usually too large a task to be completed on a Sunday evening; requires input from a colleague; or I don’t have all the information to hand. This process has become a ritual and helps to ensure that I return to work on Monday morning free of clutter and ready for the challenges ahead.

Lifestream

Exploring South America

I’ve added a lifestream to my blog. I had read about the idea via an article [Working on the web – Joss Winn] that Doug Belshaw shared back in November. However, being particularly busy at the time I was unable to act on it. On Saturday, Doug mentioned the article again explaining that he has added a lifestream to his blog. This prompted me to re-visit the article and I decided that I would follow in Joss’ and Doug’s footsteps. Why? Well, it’s important for me to be able to access my shared information and being able to bring it together into one space (that I have control over) is excellent.

Adding a lifestream to my WordPress blog was very easy as there is a plugin that can be installed from within WordPress itself. I have collated the following feeds:

You can access my lifestream from the links bar below my blog header.

I hope that you will find it as useful as I will.

Image by Stuck In Customs.

MA in Education

I recently began an MA in Education. The MA is delivered by the Westminster Institute of Education; part of Oxford Brookes University. A modular course; it begins with the Postgraduate Certificate in Advanced Educational Practice (CAEP). Made of three modules; accounting for a third of the full MA, the course is delivered part-time with sessions held at my School.

The first module is a School-based Enquiry in which I have chosen to focus on my use of Google docs. As an enthusiast in the use of technology in the classroom; Google docs was one such technology that I believe had a significant impact on my student’s progress last year. It is my intention to try to quantify that by completing research into its impact on an individual class’ progress this academic year.

Building on the work that I did last year and recent improvements made to Google docs I am going to limit my research to one specific use of Google docs: How does it improve the quality of one-to-one assessment for my students? At the moment I am in the latter stages of planning this research. You can view my progress here.

The other modules that I will be undertaking this year are Assessment for Learning and Developing E-Learning.

Ii is my intention to document my progress throughout each module on my blog. To do so, I have created a dedicated page here. I hope, that by documenting it publicly, it will help me keep to a strict schedule while also providing opportunities for wider input and feedback on my research.

To maintain my organisation and productivity I have installed Evernote on my MBP, Android phone and in Google chrome to store and record notes. I have also linked my Oxford Brookes Library account with Google scholar to ease the logging of journal articles and essays. I will be mainly downloading these to read on my Sony eReader allowing me to attach notes. Finally, I will be tagging posts and tweets related to my research with #mainedu.

Share with Delivr

I’m taking a break from writing a post about QR-Codes to share a little HTML and offer my first impressions of Delivr – a new tool that has been making the rounds on Twitter this past week. In a nut shell, Delivr combines the URL shortening/tracking services of a bitly.Pro account with a QR-Code generator such as qrcode.kaywa.com and then adds a couple of extra functions for good measure.

For those of you who have not heard of Delivr or have not tried it yet, here is a brief look at what it offers.

Signing up to Delivr gives you a variety of features including a profile page. However, unlike many other URL shorteners, rather than a simple text based list of the links you have shared, you get a series of thumbnails. I like this a lot as I am a big fan of the visual web. What’s more, it potentially offers a unique opportunity to share a series of links in a quick and visual way. For example you could create an account for a presentation and have all of your links on one page. This could then be shared with everybody in one go by displaying or tweeting a single URL. Others can easily share the links and when you load each one up their is a QR-Code that people can scan. I think this could be a very interesting way to present and with some events coming up early on next year I may give this a go.

Each link that you share also gets a unique page as part of your Delivr account (indicated by an asterisk at the end of the URL). This page is mobile friendly and contains a variety of useful material. In the top left of the page you there is a good sized preview of the link you have shared. In the top right you can see the URL of the link. The link is made up of two parts – your profile name and a Delivr short URL. You can choose to share the whole thing or simply remove your profile name and just share the short URL. For example, both of these URLs work and will take you to the same page: http://jamesmichie.delivr.com/11vfs or http://delivr.com/11vfs.

In the bottom left of the page there is a pannel that allows you to share to multiple places including Twitter and Facebook at the click of a button, meaning you do not need to open a new tab. In the bottom right of the page their is the QR-Code that has been generated. Below it there are a few options as to what you can do with the QR-Code. It is here that Delivr goes a bit further than qrcode.kaywa.com in that the QR-Code features are more extensive. Firstly, you are not as limited in how much text you can embed inside the QR-Code and Delivr also does some funky things with Flickr images, YouTube videos and Google maps.

Here is an example of a YouTube video I have shared with Delivr. Not only can I share the short URL and get a JPG of the QR-Code but I can see a preview of how it will display on mobile devices:

You can also embed the mobile view on a blog or website as a widget and you can print out this handy flyer with the QR-Code featured on it:

Included on the flyer is a still shot from the YouTube video and a description of what the video is. This is great for sharing info at school as the flyer exports as a PDF which can then be embedded on a blog/website, uploaded to a VLE or printed to be displayed in classrooms. I will be definitely making use of this feature in the coming months in both English and Media Studies.

Other features that you get from signing up to Delivr are very similar to those offered by bitly.Pro.

You have access to a dashboard which lists all of the links that you have shared. From here you can manage your shared links with the ability to delete, edit, read comments and access analytical data. Also, there is an RSS feed of your shared links and you can export all of your data stored on Delivr as an excel file.

The analytivcal information is useful giving you a clear picture of how the links have been accessed, shared and if the QR-Code has been scanned. As I begin to explore the use of QR-Codes more readily this information will be very helpful.

Another potentially useful facet of Delivr is that people can follow your account in a very similar way to following someone’s Delicious account, where by you can see an updated list of links that have been shared. Further features include the ability to host your Delivr account under your own domain and to personalise your profile page with extra information and a background image – making the Delivr experience even more personal.

What’s more the web based interface has been extremely well thought through formatting itself perfectly on my HTC Wildfire. I could browse mine and others shared URL’s with ease, follow back friends who had begun following me and re-share links straight to Twitter, via Email or bookmark to Delicious. Once again, as with many apps, it is ease of use that will keep me coming back, particularly as I am using my phone more and more to access the World Wide Web.

Delivr works well via the web based interface but even better via its handy bookmarklet which you can drag to your bookmarks bar in your browser. This allows you to share links directly from the page that you are on while surfing the web.

Having been instantly impressed, I wondered if I could add a button to my blog so that people could use Delivr to share my posts without leaving the post page. I took a look at the code and saw that it was very similar to the code used in the Instapaper Bookmarklet. As I did with Instapaper, I adapted the bookmarklet code and then found an image to act as a button. In this case I used Delivr’s Twitter Logo as the image source reducing it to 32 x 32 pixels. You can see and use the button at the top right of this post. If you would like to add the button to your own blog then grab the following code:

<a href="javascript:%20var%20newscr%20=%20document.createElement('script');%20newscr.setAttribute('language','javascript');newscr.setAttribute('src','http://cdn.delivr.com/js/bookmarklet.js');document.body.appendChild(newscr);%20var%20newcss%20=%20document.createElement('link');%20newcss.setAttribute('type','text/css');newcss.setAttribute('rel','stylesheet');newcss.setAttribute('href','http://cdn.delivr.com/css/bookmarklet.css');document.body.appendChild(newcss);void(0);"><img src="http://jamesmichie.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Delivr.png" alt="Share with Delivr" title="Share with Delivr" /></a>