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By Rob, January 11, 2010 3:29 pm

A few years ago I wrote a course for teaching assistants who supported students in (secondary) science lessons.  The course was widely attended by colleagues from across our local authority.  With the recent bad weather we decided to run a refresher course inhouse for our our own staff, since we have had quite a few new teaching assistants join our school in that time. The materials have also been modified slightly to give them a more generic slant rather than being science specific.

The presentation embedded below shows some of the strategies that teaching assistants can use with students in lessons, and the toolkit is a set of templates that can be used to support these strategies.

Feel free to download the toolkit/presentation and use them in your own establishment (whilst respecting our copyright of course).  I hope you find them useful.

The presentation


Download the Teaching Assistant’s Toolkit

The materials can also be downloaded from my resources site if you prefer.

Comments

By Rob, October 2, 2009 2:01 pm

As a special education teacher, I teach groups who have very poor social skills.  One of my responsibilities as a science teacher is to get pupils to work together, both to improve these social skills and their science skills.  Problems I face at the start of the lessons include pupils sorting themselves into inappropriate groupings, or pupils moaning “I’m not working with him/her”.  I stumbled across this piece of software and decided to give it a go.

The software is freeware and available from here.  Installing is a breeze (assuming you have administrative privileges on your computer).

First you enter the names of your groups.  You can save lists to reuse at a later date, or temporarily delete names from your list for absent pupils.

The shuffle button is good fun, students can see their names being mixed up, and hitting it again stops the process.

All you have to do then is click on the hat to select names from the list.  The dropdown arrow next to the hat gives you the option to select individuals or pick pairs.
 
The hat comes up and you see (complete with drum roll) names popping out of the hat.  The pupils know that these groups are randomly selected and are more accepting of the outcomes.

One of the groups I use the hat with asks at the start of every lesson “Are we picking names from the hat today?”  What an excellent way of getting pupils to work together – and it actually works!

Comments

By Rob, June 10, 2009 9:02 pm

I bought an Avermedia CP130 visualiser to use in my science lessons, hoping it would extend the range of activities that I use the whiteboard for.  I already have digital camera, microscope and flip video so this seemed like a logical extension.

My first impression when I unboxed the camera was the wobbliness of the neck.  Like a big black rubbery swan, the visualiser sat on my desk with curved neck, but fortunately a smaller footprint than a real swan!  When in use there was some wobble of the image when I knocked the desk, but this was only minor – however I’d recommend seating the visualiser on a firm surface.

The visualiser comes with manuals, a selection of cables, a mains adaptor (on a cable of reasonable length) and a CD containing software for PC and Mac.   Installation of the software was relatively straight forward on stand-alone laptops but our technician ran into problems when installing on our networked desktops (hopefully he’ll have success on the later version that we downloaded from Avermedia’s support site).

The software was quite straight forward, with the ability to operate the main features of the visualiser from both the software and the unit itself.  Pupils were impressed by the ability to switch between colour and black & white (handy for looking at monochrome text) although the negative mode freaked them out a little!  Capturing a still image from the camera takes only a mouse click, although saving them is much less intuitive (or perhaps I was limited by the resolution of my desktop – the control panel of the software starts up by default off the edge of the screen).  Video recording/time lapse is supported, as are basic annotation functions, mimicking some of the simpler functions of an IWB.  An interesting feature is the ability to broadcast the image over the network, for other PCs (with the software installed) to receive.  Whilst this sounds useful, there was significant lag between images being put under the camera, the screen updating and then networked satellite PCs being updated making it less useful than first impressions would suggest.

As you can see the images were crisp. quality good and the colours well balanced when viewing on the PC screen.  The image updated quickly on screen and zooms were good, although the software was unable to save a zoomed image, instead it reverted back to the full image.  Capturing the windows worked well, although it is possible that future versions of the software will make this process easier.

I didn’t use the VGA pass though cables supplied, which are more suited to the visualiser used as part of a permanent installation.  Instead I connected it up using the composite output (phono plug).  It took me a while to locate the tiny RGB/TV switch which needed to the flicked, but then the image appeared a glorious 72” wide.  It soon became apparent that the quality of the picture through the composite output was not as good as that captured at full resolution over USB.  Whilst this is probably due to the limitation of the composite video format, it is worth bearing in mind as connection to a PC gives a crisper picture with much brighter clearer colours.  Hopefully the picture below gives you a better idea of how the image differs from the composite output.

I haven’t had much of a chance to use the visualiser yet.  The software isn’t installed on my whiteboard PC, limiting me to using the composite video output.  When I tried the hardware out with my year 11 class it was very useful being able to project a worksheet on screen (I hadn’t got a digital copy of the one I was using) and then being able to show the pupils’ work on the screen was a huge motivator.  (With the software installed I would have been able to easily highlight the flaw in the plug wiring above, which is not as obvious in the bottom picture).

I look forward to using the Avermedia visualiser more in future as I become more accustomed to the hardware. 

Have you got a visualiser?  How do you use yours in lesson?  Do you have any ideas how I could use mine better?

Feel free to post comments and suggestions below.

Comments

By Rob, May 4, 2009 7:30 pm

Looking back on my blog it’s been a while since I wrote anything.  The first of the topics I have been meaning to write about is how we followed the “Leading in Learning” strategy to teach Thinking Skills to our pupils.
I’ve embedded a power point here which was the presentation I used when I launched the strategy at our school.  I had been piloting the materials with my own pupils and had identified the strategies most useful to our pupils (all which are statemented as we are a special school).

Although the strategies are familiar, it is worth plugging the metacognitive plenary – the part of the lesson at the end where you talk about the ‘thinking’ involved.  Also gives a chance for the teaching to model and the pupils to evaluate their work.

For the collective memory I used science diagrams showing pollution (I have also used the same pictures with pupils.  The EM spectrum diagram works very well for this purpose).  For the reading images I lifted a picture from an Anthony Browne books – these are excellent for reading images (hard to make sense of single picture without text for cues).

As well as the strategies mentioned in the presentation we looked at fortune lines (and living graphs) which involved a group sticking ambiguous statements onto a graph/fortune line.  The answers are ambiguous so that there can be several right answers/no wrong answers.  Pupils work on their reasoning skills and the ability to justify their answers.

One of the main problems we encountered was pupils not being able to work in a group, and having poor communication skills.  I spoke to our speech and language therapist who recommended this book.  I use one of the activities at the start of every science lesson as a starter.  Not only are the pupils starting to develop their thinking/communication skills but they are alert & engaged for the rest of the lesson (and with much better retention too!)

It’s hard to sum up all the work we’ve done in a short blog post. Fill in the contact me form at the top of the page if you want to ask me any questions about what we’ve been doing.