Computers in Classrooms 3 April
2009
ISSN 1470-552403 April 2009
Practical advice for colleagues who use,
teach, lead or manage information and communication technology (ICT) in
schools.
This newsletter is © 2009 Terry
Freedman. Contributors own the copyright of their own
articles.
Home Page: http://www.ictineducation.orgUpdated virtually daily.
Email:terry@ictineducation.org
This is a
shortish newsletter; the next one, which I am aiming to publish after
the Easter break, will be much bigger. There's plenty in that to look
forward to, as described further on. It has a social networking focus.
If you'd like to contribute to that, there is still time.
In this issue...
Adventures in Podcasting
-- venturing out no more
Shawn
Wheeler, the voice behind the weekly Adventures in Podcasting,
has just recorded his last one. Having clocked up an astounding 128
episodes over the last three years, Shawn has taken on a new role at
Safari Montage , a video library company.
Shawn
is one of the educational technology pioneers of podcasting.
Driven by his motto "if it's worth hearing, it's worth hearing again",
Shawn used the medium to encourage other educators, especially in the
Pretoria District in Arizona, to dip their toes in the water and try it
out. Always keen to celebrate small successes, Shawn never decries
anyone for not having done a 'real' podcast when all they've done is
uploaded an audio file for download. Everyone has to start somewhere,
and you don't encourage them to go further by belittling their first
efforts.
Also, Adventures in Podcasting
had a clearly defined structure, covering local news, new software and
hardware, and other items worth mentioning. The latter two sections are
still likely to be of interest as there are lots of nice little gems
there. The archive of Adventures in Podcasting
may be found here . We
wish Shawn all the best in his new venture.
Forthcoming
issues
In
forthcoming newsletters we look at social networking in April, reading
in May; professional development in June; and games in education in
September. There are already three contributors working on articles for
that one. See below for more details.
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31 ways
of making a
contribution
Not everyone likes writing. If that applies to you or your
pupils or students, there are lots of ways in which
you – and they – can
contribute:
Write an article.
Write a poem.
Write a special type of poem, like a limerick or a haiku.
Write a song.
Write a special type of
song, like a rap song or a blues song.
- Write a play (but not a
full-length one please!).
- Write a special type of
play, like a play for one person.
Draw a picture.
Draw a special type of picture, like a cartoon.
Design a quiz.
Design a special type of
quiz, like a word search or a crossword.
Create a presentation in
SlideShare. The beauty of having an online newsletter is that your
presentation can be linked to, or even embedded.
- Create a video.
- Create a special kind of
video, like a 12 second one
.
- Make a podcast.
- Make a special kind of
podcast, like an interview with someone who uses technology in
interesting ways.
Review a book.
Review a website.
Review a podcast.
Review a SlideShare presentation.
Review a software application.
Review an item of equipment.
Review a service.
- Write a case study of
practice you know about.
- Write a report on
something you've tried out in your classroom.
- Write a report on
something you're thinking of trying out in your
classroom.
- Write a lesson plan.
- Write a lesson resource.
- Write a how-to crib sheet.
- If you're representing
an organisation, take out an advertisement in the newsletter.
- If you're representing
an organisation, place a sponsored article in the newsletter.
I'm sure you can think of many more! If you have an idea
for a contribution, and it doesn't fit into any of these categories,
suggest it to me anyway.
The special focus idea doesn't preclude articles and news
on other topics of interest, so if you have a burning desire to write
about something and it isn't a special focus topic, don't worry. As
long as it's related to educational technology your idea will be
considered.
Prize draw: Good news
for educational games-creators
enthusiasts
I'm a great
believer in using games and simulations as a means of teaching children
and young people. They can learn a lot from a well-crafted games, as,
of course, can adults.
But quite
often it's in the creation of something that people
really start to understand the ins and outs of what they're trying to
model. The same is true of games. Creating a game requires knowledge of
the subject you're trying to base the game on, and sequencing skills.
Note that I did not say you need technical skills.
A lot of games-creation applications now let you create games using
drag and drop methods rather than programming code, at least in the
first instance.
I'm
delighted to be able to tell you that The Game Creators has made
available three games-creation programs: Dark Basic Professional, FPS
Creator, and 3DGamecreator. Site
licences for these will be given away in a prize draw of subscribers to
this newsletter. Please note that the competition is open to UK
subscribers only. The draw takes place on 1st
May at 12:00 noon GMT. More details in the next issue of Computers in
Classrooms.
How to make
exercises more interesting
One of the
things that I never see talked about is how to make the exercises that
we set our pupils and students more interesting. This is not quite the
same thing as using exciting and interesting applications: even work
involving the currently much-maligned trio of spreadsheet, database and
word processor can be made more interesting by a more innovative
approach.
John
Davitt'sLearning Ideas Generator
is a useful tool in this context. Taking a randomly-selected
topic together with a randomly-selected method, it comes up with
suggestions which, if nothing else, have the sort of shock value that
is likely to get the mental juices flowing.
For example, I just generated:
Do the plot of Hamlet as an abstract
impressionist painting.
However,
for a particular subject area, this is unlikely to prove entirely
useful because the topics come from right across the curriculum. But it
is definitely worth running the LIG a few times in
order to see the sorts of methods it contains. I'll tell you in a
moment or two what to do with them.
First,
though, does this sort of approach actually work, in the sense of
getting youngsters to remember concepts?
From my
experience, it does. When I was teaching economics, I wrote two blues
songs to help the students understand the key differences between the
monetarist approach to curing unemployment, and the Keynesian approach.
Each song summarised, in three verses, what the textbooks took a whole
chapter (and a lot of mathematics) to explain. A year later, my
students could still recall what the theories were and how they
differed from each other.
Now
obviously a blues song or two is not going to be a real substitute for
the detailed treatment in the textbook in the long run: it's hardly the
sort of thing you could quote in an examination paper. However, as a
means of creating an awareness of the essence of what the topic is
about, and of providing a hook on which the pupil or student can hang
the more detailed concepts, this kind of approach works very
well.
It's also a
good idea to get the students themselves to do the work, which in this
case was writing a blues song. If you think about it, a blues song has
a very defined and rigid format. Yes, there are variations, but
basically it consists of a few verses with the following
characteristics:
Rhyming format:
Line 1
Line 1 repeated
Line 3 rhymes with Lines 1 and 2
Situation:
The singer
is usually complaining about some awful things that have happened,
usually pretty extreme or several things at once. For example, they may
have just been fired from their job, had their partner walk out on
them, been arrested for something or other, and been evicted because of
the money owed to the landlord.
Now, the
rigid format means that you can't afford to waste words. You have to
get the nub of the idea across very quickly. To do that, you need to
have a very firm grasp of what the idea actually
is.
I know it's
unlikely that many young people listen to blues these days, but just to
take this example to a conclusion, how might you use the blues format
to explain concepts like evaluating information for plausibility or
accuracy? How could you use the format to explain why backing up your
work is rather important?
What I've
said in the context of the blues idiom applies in other contexts too.
Writing a haiku is difficult:17 syllables in 3 lines. Can your pupils
explain the concept of sequencing in a haiku? Can they describe their
experiences in the form of a haiku? Or a limerick? Can they make a
podcast about it?
On the
subject of context, I've never really understood why many teachers use
a one-size fits all approach when it comes to setting exercises. Let's
take the sort of thing that could easily be boring: a set of
spreadsheet-based tasks.
The usual
approach is to get the students to type in or copy/paste the data
(either of which I regard as a waste of time unless they had to do
research to obtain the data first – in which case that's not
a spreadsheet exercise anyway).
The data is
usually something to do with sports or prices. Yawn. Why not produce
several versions of the exercise and give pupils a choice? It's the
concepts that you're trying to teach, so the scenario itself is
unimportant, surely?
For
example, let's suppose you want to teach them how to use look-up tables
– not because that's a topic in the curriculum, but because
it's a good example of how you can design a spreadsheet model to be
efficient.
In case
you're not familiar with it, the look-up table is a device for coping
with what is, in effect, a bundle of IF statements. For example, you
might grade exam papers according to their marks along the lines of
grade A for 70% or above, grade B for a mark of 60 to 69% and so on.
You could set this all out in a look-up table and then assign the grade
with a formula that says, in effect:
Look up this number (the percentage
mark awarded) in the look-up table, and give me the corresponding
grade.
Clearly,
you can use such a table in lots of contexts, such
as:
- Sports, to work out which league the
team should be placed in;
- Business, to work out whether more stock
should be ordered;
- Science fiction: is there enough fuel to get back to earth safely?
OK, I said
earlier that I would tell you what to do with all the ideas for
exercises that you and your colleagues come up with. My suggestion is
to put them in a text file, and copy and paste the text file into the
fruit machine random
generator . Then select the exercise randomly. Maybe this
could be used for setting homework as well. It would be difficult to
use this approach all the time, but if done every week, say for the
Friday homework or the first lesson of the week, it could be quite fun,
not to mention a good way of keeping everyone on their
toes!
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Getting through to
parents
For
schools and local authorities, it's always a challenge trying to keep
parents informed and educated about technology in schools and e-safety
in particular. Even if you think you have a winning formula, how do you
find the time, given that most things these days have to be associated
with an income stream.
A quick win here would be
to place a link on your website to Tanya Byron's Oh, Nothing Much blog at Next Generation
Learning. Author of the Tanya Byron
Review into e-safety and video games, Byron gives
easy-to-digest information without resorting to jargon. With posts
about how to keep your child safe online, and what technology their
children will be using in schools at different ages, Byron writes in a
reassuring tone without being patronising.
In
many respects this reminds me of the Carol Vorderman-fronted
campaign, Computers Don't Byte, of around ten years ago. It's not
earth-shattering reading, but then it wasn't intended for the expert. I
think the tone is pitched just right myself.
The
blog ties in well with the Next Generation Learning facility for parents to check whether their
local schools have the ICT Mark, and there is a tab for that on the
blog. So, if you're in a local authority, linking to the blog may be a
way of raising awareness of the ICT Mark amongst schools. Bear in mind
that there are now more stages to achieving the ICT Mark, including
the very basic first step of declaring a commitment to 'Next Generation
Learning'. (It's a bit late now, but it is such a shame about that
name: it's catchy, but what this generation?!)
So, take a look at Tanya Byron's blog and think about
linking to it.
The social networking
issue
The next
issue of Computers in Classrooms will focus on social networking. I've
regarded the idea of social networking in a very broad way. I've learnt
from my studies in economics that the definition of money –
money is as money does – can be applied much more widely.
What the
expression means is that anything which is used as money and therefore
behaves as if it is money, is money. In the same
way, perhaps instead of thinking of social networking as Facebook and
MySpace and so on
we should take the view that if an application lets you network
socially with other people then it must be a social networking
application.
In the
special focus issue we have a great article by Miller Singleton, a 14
year old high school student living in the USA. Miller explains what
social networking is and how it proved useful for an international
educational project. It's really nicely written, and by the end of the
article you'll have a really good idea of what a 'digiteen'
is, and why social networks are not necessarily dark and terrifying
places for youngsters!
But just in
case you're still concerned about the e-safety aspects of online
communication, Dughall McCormick
describes the approach adopted in Kirklees, in the
north of England, to make very young children realise that you cannot
always be sure who you're taking to online. The nice thing is, no child
was frightened in the process.
Another
kind of social networking, in my opinion, is Twitter. Tom Barrett
describes how he has has been using Twitter in his primary (elementary)
classroom to get the children to both use real data and at the same
time connect with other people from all over the
world.
Privacy is
always a concern, especially the minefield that is Facebook
privacy. Scott N Wright takes us through the steps needed to keep your
personal data private on Facebook.
There are
also some book reviews, including Don Tapscott's
Growing Up Digital, Stephanie D Sandifer'sWikified
Schools, Julio Ojeda-Zapata's
Twitter Means Business, and Vanessa Van Petten's
The Dirt e-Secrets of an Internet Kid. Other articles include Neil
Howie's review of the recent World Maths Day, and a review by David
Luke on the presentation that Miles
Berry and I gave recently on the subject of What Are Your Kids Learning While You're Not
Looking? . So, I do hope you'll enjoy reading the next issue
of Computers in Classrooms. And if you'd like to contribute an article
you feel is missing, there is still time: just get in
touch.
The games
issue
Just a
quick word about the September issue, which focuses on using games in
the classroom. If you're interested in contributing to that, or getting
your class to contribute, either contact me directly or put your ideas
and name on the wiki I set up for this purpose.
The Game-Based Learning Conference
2009
I
attended this recently, and it was very inspiring indeed. Taking place
over two days in the City of London, the conference was a very
inspiring affair which brought together enthusiasts from industry and
education. There were a number of sessions to choose from on the first
day, and on the whole I was pleased with my
selection.
For the first half of the first afternoon I attended a
strand called PechaKucha.
This a form of presentation in which each speaker has no more than 20
slides, and can spend no more than 20 seconds on each. It's a good
idea, because it means you get the nub of the matter without having to
listen to lots of extraneous waffle. The only downside is that the
slide at the end of each presentation, ie the one on which the
speaker enters all his or her contact details, flies by too quickly. It
would be better if the last slide could be exempted from the 20 second
rule.
There were some good presentations in this session, the
best one for me being the work being done on serious games at the Press
Association.
However, I did not return to this
session after the coffee break for one simple reason: the temperature
control in the room seemed to be, erm, out of control.
It ranged from so low as to induce the beginnings of hypothermia, to so
high that I started to nod off! A pity really.
I very much enjoyed the
presentations in the strand called Game-based learning in Practice, in
which real teachers told us what they've been doing. There are some
truly great things going on in classrooms in the UK, and especially in
Scotland.
The next day saw a series of keynote speakers, most of
whom were very good: inspiring, yet down to earth. One of the most
passionate was Tom Watson, a Labour Member of Parliament, whilst
another was Sean Dromgoole,
CEO of Some Research. Anyone who can make a highly statistical
presentation at the end of a conference last thing on a Friday
afternoon both riveting and humorous is good! The session also included
a talk by Derek Robertson, of Learning and Teaching Scotland, who has
done a tremendous amount of work promoting the benefits of games in
education and encouraging teachers to experiment with the
approach.
The most disappointing talks were by Terry Deary, author
of the Horrible History books, and Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and
father of the video games industry. Each used the occasion to talk
about things which, whilst they feel passionate about them, had nothing
to do with game-based learning as far as I could tell.
The conference organisation was good, and the food was
excellent. The venue, The Brewery, is very good on the whole. Kudos to
Graham Brown-Martin, founder of Learning
Without Frontiers ,
who created the conference. The next
one is in the planning stage, but you can pre-register
your interest now. I will be writing about some of the sessions in more
detail in due course, but in the meantime you can see many of them for
yourself by going here
.
Should ICT be taught as a discrete
subject?
In my
review
of The Cambridge Review's
thoughts on ICT in the curriculum, I said:
One of the interesting things about having been in an
educational career for >30 years is that you see the same ideas
being trotted out every 10 or so years. One of these ideas is that ICT
should be a cross-curricular area, not a subject in its own right. I
see the thinking behind such visions, but in practice it never works.
No, let me correct that: it can work, with a lot of effort, commitment and all sorts of
conditions being satisfied, which I don't have the time to go into
now.
I was contacted by one of the
Review's
co-writers, and invited to expand on my views. I thought I'd publish
them here as well. Here they are. Challenge me.
And that
about wraps it up for this newsletter. Have a nice Easter
break!
What others have said about my
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http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/pressroom/doc_page7.html.
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