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February 16, 2009
In eLearning
2 comments

Maths & Moodle #2

So where are we now?

I have opened negotiations/a dialogue with the HOD Maths in my school to discuss how we might use moodle to enhance what his department already offers. This HOD runs a tight ship and he and his teachers work very hard so he is understandably cautious before signing them up to anything that might take time to develop.

Currently they all use IWB software very well and share some of the resources (flipcharts) they make with other teachers, mostly new teachers because they all like to work in a particular way.

The ideas at the moment are to make skeletal moodle courses that position the learning with HW expectations and such through a series of lessons laid out on the moodle course. These would have direct reference to the text books and resources currently being used. The course would be tagged by topic so it would remain relevant to different year groups, e.g. Y9 top set doing some GCSE stuff.

My first post outlined an idea for students making screencasts with audio to model high-end A Level Maths work for younger students, maybe those that are struggling or new to the course. The Maths Department run a succession of surgeries for younger years to attend which are run by 6th Form. I am going to get the 6th Formers working on making these screencasts. I have in store an A4 grapgics tablet (awaiting arrival of Art computers). I thought this might be a good tool to create ther screencasts with. A group of three or four students sit round a table and solve a problem in calculas or mechanics. They discuss as they go each step by step action including mistakes. The pen would be passed from hand-to-hand to demonstrate the individual step by the person who suggested it. Microphone on the table too to record what the students are discussing as the problem develops. Possibly use an ActivSlate to do this too. The software might well be ActivStudio as it has the drawing potential but could easily be any graphics application.

I intend to trial this approach in March.

Any thoughts on how to improve it or other tools to use are welcomed as always.

February 9, 2009
In eLearning
3 comments

Bridging the Gap between Technicians and Teachers

After school today I saw a tweet discussing technology staff development and clicked the link. It took me to a live blog where technology was being discussed by a group of USA teachers who seem to work for the same district.

The gist of their discussion was about bridging the gap between technicians and teachers. The discussion proved interesting as contributors fed their stories of programmes to entice teachers and techs into online networks, blogs, summer camps, overtime etc. My suggestion was a teachmeet, the unconference lubricated with drinks and nibbles. This seemed to be dismissed as a ‘techmeet’ and some attendees weren’t convinced by the alcohol approach. Obviously this is a new concept to America, or at least to this forum.

I think it is necessary to bridge this gap between technicians and teachers. As a middle man listening to the woes of both sides (but with authority over neither) I think it would be interesting to have them follow the same working agenda – TO KNOW WHAT THE OTHER IS DOING!

Why can’t technicians blog about the work they’re doing? Or better still use a twitter-like service, yammer for example. It might be helpful to know what technicians are doing through the day, or they could send messaqges when they are repairing some hardware, installing software, fixing this or that or researching something else. In turn it would be good for the technicians to hear about teachers using tech in the classroom; things that go right and, of course, wrong.

Connecting these bodies of personnel might help quite a lot in developing the use of technology in the classroom. I’m sure this idea is riddled with flaws but I like the spirit of it; I feel the potential it has for bringing these disparate workers together.

Thanks to Kristin Hokanson for sending out the invite to the live blog

February 1, 2009
In ICT, Moodle
2 comments

Reading & Moodle

Having read @mwesch blogpost in his digital ethnography blog I started to wonder if I could adapt the idea in moodle. Initial thoughts are below in a response to his post. Original post:

How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class

My response:

This is a great idea because it is for higher end learning. In 6th Form in UK (I think G12/13 in USA) I need tools that very established and successful academic teachers can use (Medieval History for example) who have been using a didactic style for 30/40 years.

I think I could create something similar to this via moodle with students using their blogs (not a great moodle tool as there is no comment facility) with a specific tag for the project they’re working on and then other tags may be included in the work as they see fit. Searching the blogs via the tag will collate all student entries into one list effectively creating the database similar to the zoho database generated in this blogpost.

This might be a difficult model to kick off in ICT as the subject doesn’t require much reading. The best approach maybe to pick a well talked about ICT article/topic and get students to research it via computer journals, newspapers, TV articles and blogs.