i see tea

Moodle training morning

Three hours of an INSET day. Simple training morning to raise awareness of those who have not yet got to grips with the interactive VLE tool set.

100+ teachers.

09:00 – meet in hall for quick intro, see some teachers present their Moodle tools and break out into departments and ICT rooms across the school.

09:30 – sign into Moodle and access the staff training course built for the day with sample glossary, online assignments and hot potatoes quizzes for them to do as pupils. Content is general knowledge, favourite foods etc.

10:30 – break for coffee

10:50 – reconvene to choose and build one of the tools they tried out earlier. Paper guides will be provided but staff will be encouraged to use them online (Google presentation slides) and toggle between screens. [Guides: quizzes; glossaries; assignments]

12:00 – end

In the afternoon, teachers are being provided with 90 minutes to formally make the transition from ActivStudio to ActivInspire IWB software. The former stops being supported by Promethean in April and so will be uninstalled from our network. A good proportion of teachers have had a go already but I think it is important to give them some directed time to make this transition. This will hopefully be the case when we migrate to Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 over the summer. Transition resources are provided of course.

In the afternoon, teachers will be able to opt for a Moodle intermediates session whilst others are on the IWBs in their classrooms.

In the morning session, I will encourage teachers to try the quiz. USP is that it takes 30 minutes to create a self-marking quiz but an hour to mark a class set of the same quiz on paper (well after you’ve done it a couple of times anyway).

I am a big believer in allowing teachers to choose when they use technology in their teaching and learning. This session aims to secure their understanding of how simple it can be to use three tools. They are under no pressure to use them in the classroom. At the very least, everyone should be in a more informed position as to what technology can help them achieve.

If you have any thoughts on how to improve this model for the day please let me know. One thing I am concerned about is I have not included any HTML editor training and mastering the editor plays a significant part in loving online learning (images, videos, embeds). What do you think?

Teach Meet BETT 2011

TeachMeet BETT 2011 #tmbett2011

I was very disappointed to be unable to attend due to family illness.

I watched online. The stream was decent (thanks to @eyebeams) and you got a flavour of the atmosphere as well as banter in the ustream chat and links on twitter. I did my best to tweet each presenters blogs or sites as they presented. 50 retweets indicates it is worth getting someone to feed the back channel during a teach meet. Helps everyone to connect and bookmark items for more detailed consumption later.

Highlights for me were @dughall as sonic. Very funny self-confessed teachmeet-a-holic enthused about snow day pupil and teacher blogging across his Local Authority. @bevevans22 talked about her application of audacity in the classroom demonstrating the value of TeachMeets whereby it is not just the tool we are shown but the teacher’s ideas to use that tool in the classroom being applied.

My love of TeachMeets is born from exactly that. There are a thousand tools out there. But you do not often see them being used with pupils. That opportunity (the glimpse of practice) is the catalyst that inspires another teacher to use that tool.

A great night of professional development by teachers for teachers. Many thanks to @iusher, @ianaddison @tomhenzley and @digitalmaverick for organising the event.

Don’t forget @ewanmacintosh‘s rallying call to use the hashtag #tm5 to make a birthday event for TeachMeet 24/05/2011. What can you do? What can I do?

1. Set up a teach meet type event in my school or local area. Local pub with an appropriate room, sympathetic landlord/lady and wifi.

2. Arrange a social event for any teachmeet enthusiasts in your area.

3. Write a blog post with links to your favourite teach meet videos.

4. Send an email to the teachers in your school saying why you like teach meets.

Any other ideas?

Transforming learning? Moodle peer review assignment

Whilst reading this, think about transforming learning, or going from good to outstanding.

This post is to support my presentation at TeachMeet South West London 2011 (#SWLTM).

Note to all: this was an experiment with 112 pupils rather the polished use of a tried and tested tool.

After unsuccessfully attempting to use the Moodle workshop module to do a peer review assignment, I tweeted about it and received a recommendation from Gideon Williams to try the peer review assignment and received advice from his colleague Helen Bound. She had experienced a lot of niggles using workshop and had installed this plugin assignment from Moodle.org (link to peer review on moodle). Once installed it is available through the activities menu:

It wasn’t as hard to set up as workshop. It is restricted to two peers. They must submit before being allowed to review. It operates on a minimum of five submissions before reviewing can begin.

The pupil sees a screen a bit like this when they have to submit (this is actually how it looks after submission):

You can see I set the criteria for marking. Pupils check each box they think applies. I set 2 marks per criterion. They receive 10 points per review. You must consider the weighting in relation to this.

Pupils will see their files to review in a similar way to above, one at a time. I had them submit links to their domo.goanimate movies they were making.

The submission appears in a new window. Moodle cleverly displays the embed and the link from simply pasting the link into the submission (a text editor window). Pops up like this:

If you thought you might be getting off the marking part, then (like me) you are sadly mistaken. You have to confirm marks before pupils receive notification of final grades. Also, when the peer reviewers have disagreed, you (as the teacher) need to resolve the conflict before a final grade can be allocated. The info is presented like this:

When you click on the review button you are presented with the reviews given by the peers and the tools required to resolve conflicts etc. It looks like this:

You amend the checked boxes on the left, enter a comment if you would like to, and save. (NB: names are hidden at all times to the pupils, but not to me)

Done.

Pupil will be pinged via email of their final grade and comments.

More info is available via the earlier Moodle link.

So, what do you think? Transforming learning? A tool to take learning from good to outstanding? Please feedback in the comments.

AudioNote Files: audio note test

Everything underneath this text has come from the audio note app I
bought on the iPad. Testing to see how it transfers onto Posterous.

Title: audio note test
Location: Home
Created: 5 January 2011 18:57:49
Modified: 5 January 2011 19:00:15

If the .caf file does not play in your music player of choice, try
Quicktime: http://www.apple.com/quicktime

If multiple attachments are not visible within your email client, try
saving them to disk.

Download now or preview on posterous

audio_note_test.pdf (9 KB)

Click here to download:

audio_note_test.html (42 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

audio_note_test.txt (0 KB)

  
Download now or listen on posterous

audio_note_test.caf (805 KB)

Posted via email from daibarnes’s posterous

Roll Up Roll Up… TeachMeet BETT 2011 is open

Teachers interested in teaching are a fabulous breed of professionals.

TeachMeet BETT 2011 is on Friday Jan 14th 18:30 – 21:00 at the Apex rooms in Olympia, Kensington. It will bring together educators wanting to do something different in the classroom; ready to share their stuff in the mutual appreciation. There is no silver bullet to solve everyone’s school problems. There is energy, buzz and enthusiasm to harness and it will be there in bucket loads on the 14th.

What rocks the kids in your classroom? Can you share it with others in seven or two minutes? We’ll give you a mic, a computer and a big round of applause (as well as a free drink to raise the spirits!).

I guarantee you will be pleased you took the time to go to this TeachMeet. If not, I’ll buy your pizza at the TeachEat in Pizza Express downstairs afterwards. So, check the links below, sign up to eventbrite and to the wiki. If you’re not sure how, email me on: daibarnes [at] gmail [dot] com.

Wiki: http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/w/page/33799374/Teachmeet-@BETT-2011

Eventbrite tickets: http://tmbett2011.eventbrite.com/

Ian Usher’s blog post setting out the plan.