Category Archives: Technology in Education

Posts relating to use of technology in education

The end of our school science blog – student blogging didn’t work for us.

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SEN wiki logoSome time ago I set up a science blog to use with my students.  We decided just to post up examples of good work and photographs from experiments (as a school wary of the internet we wouldn’t be including any media with students faces).

With only one blog (with access controlled by the teacher), articles were written as a group effort, or simply in the last few minutes of the lesson as the plenary drew to a close.  More often than not this ended up being a photograph with a couple of lines of explanation.

The novelty of seeing their own work on the internet soon wore off and the blog stopped having a motivating effect on students.  As students lost interest in the blog, postings dried up and it became little more than a list of links sharing a space with stale content.

With less than 2 hits per day the effort of maintaining the blog didn’t seem worth the effort.  Content was transferred to my science blog several weeks ago (which seems like a more natural place to host the type of content we were generating) and search engines barred from indexing the site.  My school science blog has now been deleted and traffic redirected to point to this blog (at least until the domain name expires later this year).

So what did I learn from this foray into the world of student blogging?

  • Students have to have ownership of the material to keep them motivated – this means students generating content.
  • Think about purpose of the blog. Is it another writing medium? to showcase student work? to act as a newsletter or information to parents?
  • There has to be an audience or purpose to the blogging – commenting on each others blogs, and feedback from the teacher meets this purpose.
  • Embed using the blog into routines.  Completing a blog entry could be a homework or a regular plenary slot in lessons.
  • Think about access to the blog.  Having one single blog limits interactivity and makes needs a teacher to manage the password.
  • If you only want to host links then a Wiki is more appropriate (a wiki can also be a better tool for distilling and developing ideas as a group)
  • A managed blog (or multiple blogs built on a single hosting installation) will save admin time in keeping the software up to date.

Have you tried blogging with students? I’d be interested to hear if you have any advice to add to mine for teachers wanting to try blogging in the classroom.

Learning online – what can we learn from online conferencing?

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I’d signed up to do an Edexcel training event online (because I had no intention of driving for hours for a two hour event).  Although I’d used Skype for conversations and Flash Meeting for video meetings I’d not had experience of any professional CPD being delivered virtually.

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The training was delivered using a piece of conferencing software called Saba.  The session itself was very slick (despite the presenter not being fully familiar with the software) but not as interactive as a face-to-face session.  With yes/no buttons to signal our understanding (and laughter/applause buttons to convey some emotion) the presentation flowed quickly, with participants clicking on the raise hand button if they had a question (and they were duly ‘handed’ the microphone).

Saba

I found the session enjoyable, useful and was glad that I hadn’t needed to travel, but I began to wonder if a system like this could have any value in the classroom (or even replace the classroom).

Reasons for

Reasons against
  • A new approach is likely to motivate and interest students
  • Sessions are recordable for evidence
  • Chance to involve a wider audience or range of participants
  • Live audio commentary to accompany pictures helps hold interest and lower literacy requirements
  • Can record feedback and feed it straight into a spreadsheet (like a voting system)
  • Learning curve involved in using technology
  • Need good quality technical support and functional hardware (some participants didn’t have a working headset)
  • Need to establish etiquette
  • How do you check on your participants’ learning?
  • Only suitable for groups that ‘want to learn’
  • No body language to interpret in either direction.
  • requires a significant investment in hardware and network infrastructure
  • how do you encourage students with low self-esteem to speak up? (or do you build them up using the text chat & yes/no buttons?)
  • How about lessons that don’t revolve around a presentation?
  • How do you get students to interact and discuss with each other?

Whilst online conferencing (video and audio) is suited to dissemination of information and CPD events, it isn’t ready for teaching or replacing the classroom yet.  Technology will have to evolve significantly before the job of the teacher is under threat.  Online conferencing made me realise the importance of face to face contact with your learners, their interaction with each other and how different teaching strategies contribute to learning in the classroom.

Have you used online conferencing with learners? What software did you use and how did it go?  I’d be interested to read your comments.

Using PowerPoint with students who have special needs (PowerPoint is not just for presentations!)

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We’ve all seen PowerPoint used where students are asked to prepare a presentation on a topic.  More often than not this turns into a cut-and-paste-athon and students can’t always be said to be engaging with the content of the lesson.  There is also the time one spends playing with the fonts and animations (and I’ve seen adults guilty of some pretty bad presentations on this score too!).

I looked for some other ways that PowerPoint (and possibly its Open Office equivalent Impress) could be used as a teaching tool with students who have special needs or perform below national expectations.

Sequencing

Give students a presentation in which the slides are in the wrong order.  Tell them to put the steps in the right order and then give a presentation based on the new order.  It is a good idea to use pictures/slides in which the order is ambiguous or where there could be more than one correct answer.  For extremely weak students this could involve sequencing photographs from a previous lesson e.g. ones taken during an experiment.

Example: Year 7 students (Wikid Science – Forensics) are asked to solve the mystery and explain how the forensic investigator came to be in hospital covered in burns.  Students have to solve the mystery and put the slides in the right order.  They then present their ideas to the group where they receive peer assessment/feedback.

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Audio (or video) annotation

Give students a presentation with information to be interpreted on each slide.  Pupils must record an audio or video clip for each slide with an explanation.  Play back to group, possibly with some peer assessment.  Can also be exported as a video clip.

Example: Year 7 students (Wikid Science – Extinction) are asked to interpret the graphs and say what they mean.

Completing presentations

Using a partially completed presentation you would ask students to complete it.  This could include adding suitable graphics to text already created (or vice versa) or adding existing information to a scaffold.

Example: In this writing frame I would ask students to add information to each slide from planning through to conclusions and present it.  Students can add extra information and peer assessment information about the content.  To differentiate the activity, add more detail to the scaffold (e.g. sub-steps).  Students then present to another group or the whole class.

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Story telling

Ask students to prepare the narration and present to a pre-created presentation.  This is similar to adding narration but is simpler to organise and doesn’t require microphones.

Example: In this presentation on the water cycle (from the TES resources site) students have to explain what is happening and present to another group of pupils (or the whole group depending on numbers)

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Multiple choice questions

Just as it sounds – using a presentation with a quiz, let pupils answer the questions individually at computers, or on the IWB in a group.  If you search Google you can find pre-created templates, or you could make your own.

Example: Multiple choice quiz on plant classification.  Plays a different sound for right and wrong answers.

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I hope you found some of these ideas useful.  Please leave a comment below (or via the contact me form at the top of the page) if you did, or if you have any questions.

Outlook Web access (OWA) vs. Google Mail for teacher use – I’ve #goneGoogle

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I’m issued with an email account with Outlook Web Access (OWA) for my school email address (hosted by EMBC).  I don’t actually use it much – I prefer to use my Google Apps Gmail account as a client for my work address in preference to Outlook (which I just can’t make myself like) or the Outlook web interface.

I’d only recently noticed that the interface you get depends on the web browser you use.  If like me you use Firefox as your primary browser at work, a huge chunk of functionality is missing already (gee thanks Microsoft!).  The screen grabs below give an idea of the differences.

OWA3 OWA4

 

Straight away I’m using a clunky interface that looks like something from the Nineties to manage my email.  Compare that to Google mail which looks the same in IE, Firefox or Chrome (and I have all 3 browsers installed on all my laptops!).

I was going to write a comparison of the two platforms but it’s hard to find an aspect that OWA excels at.  Contact management is a joke, the PIM functions make me want to stab myself with a biro in frustration and anyone who has used Google mail knows the advantages of tagging mail versus folders.

Most teachers work as much from home as they do from work, if not more.  I know I do.  I like to have access to my emails from home and when I visit other schools.  All of my email that is, not the last two or three in my inbox.  I never take my laptop home – who’d want to use that piece of junk in preference to my own modern machine – which means I need access to email in the cloud.   Look at the generous mail allocation I get from work versus Google Apps email – I can search through archived emails and contacts with ease using the Google interface, without having to fire up a desktop mail client to achieve the same result.  It might help if EMBC gave you a reasonable amount of space – 100Mb is nothing, I’ve sent more email than that in a day!

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(Compare that to the standard space allocation provided with Gmail and you see a world of difference.)OWA2

Fortunately Google Mail will retrieve emails from my work address, and send replies that look as though they have come from my work address, so I don’t have to soil my hands with Outlook Web Access (or a desktop client).

Until Microsoft comes up with a better interface that works well with Firefox, and EMBC can give us sufficient storage, I’ll continue to use the Google mail interface as my primary mail client.  What’s your email client of choice and why?