teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

You have, as they say, got to have a system. And I hadn’t got one to check homework completion. Pupils began to realise this and took advantage – that is until I came up with the Homework Checker!

This is a very useful tool if you’ve got a projector/interactive whiteboard. Pupils can see at a glance that you’re keeping track of what they’ve done and which pieces of homework they need to catch up on. Basically, green means done and in on time, red means not handed in yet (or submitted incomplete), and yellow means completed but handed in late. Pupils names go down the left-hand side of the spreadsheet and the title of the homework goes along the top. You enter y if it’s been done, n if it hasn’t and l if it’s late. This automatically changes the cell colour to green, red or yellow once you move away from that cell. See below for a step-by-step guide on how to set one of these up for yourself!

(If you want to skip the instructions below and try out a pre-formatted example, click here)

1. Set up a basic spreadsheet with the names of the pupils in the class down the side. Put each homework as it comes in the columns with the title at the top (hint: you can rotate the text direction by going to Format/Cells/Alignment). After selecting which cells you want to apply the conditional formatting to, you need to go to Format/Conditional Formatting (pictured)

2. Conditional Formatting in Excel is a simple ‘If, Then’ logic operation with a limit of 3 operators. (hint: click ‘Add’ to get more operators) You want to tell Excel to replace text with a colour. Change it so that it looks like it looks like the picture below (y=homework done, n=homework not completed yet, l=handed in late). You can change the colours and/or letters you use, but make sure you change the cell background colour and the font colour so that you don’t get a black y on a green background, for example…

3. Now, when you enter y, n or l into your spreadsheet and move the cursor you should find that the cell turns the appropriate colour!

4. In the picture below a y was entered in the top cell, an n in the second and an l in the third. Once a pupil has completed a homework you can change it from red to yellow by simply entering an l on top of the red cell.

5. Below is the grid from an actual class. If a pupil is absent I leave the cell white (expecting that they will hand it in next lesson). If they were absent when it was set, I enter abs.

Once you get into a routine this can be a really effective way of getting pupils to hand their homework in regularly, especially if followed up with memos to form tutors/calls to parents/detentions, etc. I tend to have this on my laptop and on the projector at the same time and ask pupils if they have their homework once they have started the main activity. They know I’m going to check so there’s no point in lying, and they also know that 3 reds (anywhere on ‘their row’) = an after-school detention!

In 1999 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked into how to provide high-quality distance learning/e-learning courses. They decided that, consistent with their mission (to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century) they should make their courses freely available to all via the Internet. This has matured and developed over the last six years to become an impressive resource for teachers and students alike.

There are a great number of courses available, from Aeronautics to Writing Studies, some of which have audio and video to accompany the readings. It’s a great way of extending your knowledge in a given area – for example my two main subjects (History and Philosophy) are fairly well represented and I used the site to start my more in-depth research of the Russian Revolution last summer.

Other universities and educational institutions have jumped on the bandwagon, including Utah State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative. A handy search function of all OCW sites is available at opencontent.org/ocwfinder!

Max Hastings, the historian, offers a quite inspired defence of traditional British schooling in the Guardian. A sceptic of multiculturalism, he criticises the attempted ‘distortion of the western experience’ by attempting to give an equal role to societies and peoples who have not shaped the past 500 years of history. As he says,

…the world’s development in the past 500 years has been dominated, for good or ill, by what westerners have thought and done. Other societies, again no matter whether for good or ill, have been losers whose power to determine their own destinies, never mind anyone else’s, has been small.

I am all for integrating studies of women’s history, black history, etc. within the teaching of History (and other subjects) but I think there can be a danger of distortion. Comparing Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale’s relative contribution to 19th century medicine is fine, for example, but throwing in a couple of examples of minority groups in your teaching for ‘balance’ is hardly the right way to go about it. Multiculturalism should be about celebrating the best aspects of each culture within a nation, not needlessly asserting that everyone is equal whilst attempting to use the curriculum (and distorted examples from the past) to ‘prove’ this.

Hastings goes on to bemoan the increasing focus of education as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself: 

British education is increasingly perceived as a utilitarian process: all disciplines seeking to rouse the enthusiasm of pupils as if they were fugitive birds, to be tempted out of trees with nuts. The logical outcome of this policy is that children will eventually learn only how to handle computers, change the wheels of cars and submit applications for credit cards.

This echoes what I mentioned in an earlier post about the difference between education and training. It is not important that absolutely everything pupils learn is directly related to their future life or allows them to learn some ’skill’. Education, as Hastings asserts, is ‘about learning to think’ and also about developing a sense of identity whilst understanding one’s place in the grand scheme of things.

I think an update of the Chinese fishing proverb is needed:

Train a child and he will learn how to perform a specific task; educate a child and he can approach tasks by himself.

Let’s say you’ve spent most of your disposable income this Christmas and so have no money to buy books that you’d like for reference purposes. But you still want to find that elusive piece of teaching advice in a horrendously expensive book, so what are you going to do? You could try and find it by using Amazon’s ‘Search inside the book’ function, but there’s a better way…

Over at the Micro Persuasion blog, Steve Rubel shows you how to use Google Book Search to find exactly what you’re looking for. He uses the example of computer-related books and travel guides, but it works equally well for teaching and learning-related titles! Basically, you search for a book at Google Book Search (e.g. Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education). Once you’ve found it, look at the index page or contents page. Find the title of the section you’re interested in and add that to your search (e.g. “Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, 1896-1934″) The section you’re interested in should come up and you can use the buttons at the bottom to go back and forth between pages.

Theoretically, you should come to a limit to the number of pages you can view. However, if you simply press the ‘back’ button in your browser to return to the index page it would seem that you can do this indefinitely. An invaluable piece of advice (until Google fix it…)

Update (16/01/06): Well, it looks like Google have plugged the hole – viewing any page in the book other than the contents or index pages requires you to log into your Google Account. Oh well… :(

Two brief ones seeing as I’ve only just returned from a gruelling 7-hour post-Christmas drive home…

1. Even if you consider yourself to be an ‘advanced googler’ you should try this page for the low-down on search operators available for use with Google. I should imagine most people know that typing in define: [word] comes up with a list of definitions for that word from various sites around the Internet, and that adding filetype:jpg would return only JPEG images. Here are three that I didn’t know about:

phone: - Searches for anything that looks like a phone number.

cache: – If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.subnixus.com web] will show the cached content with the word “web” highlighted.

info: - The query [info:] will present some information that Google has about that web page. For instance, [info:www.google.com] will show information about the Google homepage.

2. Those people who want to follow what a number of others have done with their students and set up your own blog, might want to read this article (‘Why YOU should blog’). It’s not just related to educational sites but does make interesting reading. I agree with one of the points he makes, for example, that it makes for greater self-reflection and keeping up with the news. In other words it keeps you ‘fresh’ – always on the lookout for new content!

You’ll not be surprised to learn that this isn’t the only education-related blog on the Internet. There are a multitude of other blogs – most, admittedly, HE-focused – which give much pause for thought. Here’s some I’ve come across recently (as well as some tangential ones):

Eide Neurolearning blog has a post on Task-Switching, Emotional Motivation, and Reward which links to a PDF of a research paper. The main thrust is that poor task-switching ability shouldn’t necessarily be lumped in the ADHD/ADD bracket; poor task-switchers instead may have poor emtional and/or social motivation. Worth a look.

The blog over at A VC has a post on The Looming Attention Crisis. The argument is one based on Herbert Simon’s work (Wikipedia link) and makes the (fairly obvious) statement that ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’ This is worth thinking about, especially in a school (and even a per-lesson) context, when pupils have to take in a lot of information with only a finite amount of attention.

The rather amusing (albeit bizarre) OLE! Tango blog has a post on Orchestrating a Learning Ecology which links to an elearnspace article on Learning Ecologies, Communities, and Networks. The best summary comes from the latter article itself:

An ecology is an environment that fosters and supports the creation of communities. The definition applied to gardening applies well to learning communities: "“Ecological gardening is about gardening with nature, not against it.” A learning ecology is an environment that is consistent with (not antagonistic to) how learners learn.

Blogsavvy has two complementary posts on How you SHOULD use blogs in education and  How NOT to use blogs in education. The overview is simple: use blogs for what they’re good for and don’t expect miracles!

To some, Powerpoints are the spawn of Satan. They’re getting that way for me having sat through a fair few ‘let’s-distract-people’s-attention- away-from-my- rubbish-presentation-by-putting-a- few-bullet-points-up-and-reading- from-the-screen’ type Powerpoint. If you’re one of those people, shame on you! Fortunately, help is at hand over at Presentation Zen. I shall say no more other than check out The Lessig Method…

Finally, there’s a rather fine service at Writely.com. Their free service allows you to ‘publish’ documents by uploading them to a shared folder and allowing others read-only privileges. I’m sure that could come in handy for something! :-)

There’s a new way to distribute files on the Internet called Bittorrent. This isn’t a description of the technology involved (see here if you want that) but suffice to say the way it works is that the more people download a file, the faster it is for everyone else to download it! It’s a great way of distributing large files such as TV Documentaries, etc.

The guide below demonstrates how to get going using a Bittorrent client called utorrent. This one doesn’t need to be installed and doesn’t have too much of an impact on system resources (unlike Azureus, the other popular client…)

1. Visit utorrent.com…

2. Click on the Download tab…

3. Click on the linked file and download it…

4. You don’t have to install utorrent, so keep it somewhere handy (I keep it on the desktop)

5. Double-click on the utorrent icon to open it and you should be presented with a window that looks not unlike the one below (except yours won’t have any files uploading!)

6. Now you need something to download! Find yourself a torrent file (see end of this article for sites) and download it. The torrent file is a very small file that tells your Bittorrent client where the larger files that you’d like to download are located.

7. Save it with a sensible name somewhere you’ll remember it. (you could simply open the file and it will be automatically imported into utorrent. Trouble is, if something goes wrong, you’ll have to remember where to get the torrent file again!)

8. In utorrent, click on File / Add Torrent…

…and then browse to where you saved your torrent file. Open it.

 10. Your torrent should now be added to the queue. Utorrent will attempt to connect to the ‘tracker’ (the computer that co-ordinates everybody’s downloads and uploads) and your download should begin. One thing to remember is that, with Bittorrent, the faster you upload the faster your download will be. It’s a very fair system!

11. You could stop there. But I’m sure you want a bit more control over your Internet connection and downloads than that! Click on Options / Preferences…

12. …and then on ‘Folder Options’. Tick all of the boxes and fill in the relevant details (you can click on the ‘…’ box to browse to a directory). Basically, you are telling utorrent to do some things automatically for you. If you have all the boxes you can specify that if you put a torrent file in a particular directory (‘torrent files’) it will automatically be added to utorrent and downloaded into another particular directory (‘incoming files’). Once it has finished downloading, it is then moved to another folder (‘completed’). As you can see, I have these three folders as sub-directories of my overall ‘Torrent’ directory. It’s up to you how you want to configure it, however…

13. Clicking on ‘Network Options’ gives you options like the ones below. Ignore the ‘port’ settings for the moment, apart from making sure ‘Enable UPnP port mapping’ is enabled if you’re running Windows XP. Most broadband users have an upstream capability of 256Kbps. I’m not going to go into technicalities, but basically its best if you put your ‘Global maximum upload rate’ to be around 20kb/ps. (there’s a different between a kilobyte and kilobit – lets not get into that now…) You can actually set your upload rate too high for your connection which will result in slower downloads.

So now you know how to download via Bittorrent, you’ll want some place to download from. Try these for size:

• UKNova (you need to become a member and they limit membership – but keep checking back)
• MVgroup 
• Torrent Searcher 

Just to lend some festive cheer to teachers this Christmas, the Independent reports that:

The Government’s exams watchdog issues a damning indictment today of how core national curriculum subjects are taught in the classroom.

My subject, History, is criticized for having ‘too much concentration on slavery and post-war immigration painting a negative picture of what [black people] have contributed to the UK.’ Geography is said to be the worst-taught subject on the timetable and to be stuck in a ‘vicious cycle of decline’. The only subject which comes in for the faintest of praise is the political football, Citizenship, of which is said:

This is the fastest growing GCSE subject with 38,000 entries this summer – a sign schools are taking seriously the exhortation from ministers to instil a sense of civic responsibility into tomorrow’s young adults.

No comment on how well it is being taught – just that some schools are doing it at GCSE!

The exhortation from above is that, as teachers, we need to motivate pupils using praise, interesting lessons and rigorous teaching and learning techniques to raise standards. How we ourselves are motivated to do this by such negative reports  in the public domain is beyond me. There’s no mention, for example, of the fact that History is routinely singled out as being one of the best-taught and most rigorous subjects with a significant take-up at GCSE. 

I think it’s time those in the upper echelons of teaching stopped doing the equivalent of teaching their grandmother to suck eggs. Stop telling teachers how to teach and leave them alone to do what they’re best at. Their job is to make sure teachers are motivated to do their job properly – and the best way to do that is through support, promoting good practice and introducing a pay structure that isn’t intent solely on saving money. 

This was going to be a guide (as suggested by Johannes Ahrenfelt) as to how to set up a Wordpress-powered blog. However, just as I was about to put fingers-to-keyboard I got word that the release candidate of Wordpress version 2.0 had just been released. That means that in the next few weeks the final version of Wordpress 2.0 will be released for general consumption, making my (potential) Wordpress 1.5 guide obsolete. Consequently, I’ve decided to point readers in the direction of blogs which take care of the hosting for you, rather than ones that you host on your own server. I will produce a guide for Wordpress once version 2.0 is established and has a few useful plugins.

So then, a roundup of the likeliest suspects for non-installable. I’ve discounted Typepad because it’s a paid-for service, but it certainly gets good reviews – so you might want to check it out…

MSN Spaces

We begin with a service which I use to host my (sporadically-updated) personal blog. It has random thoughts, links and family pictures on there. It’s has an insanely easy-to-use interface allowing simple image uploads and ties in rather nicely with MSN Messenger (if you use that, as I do). For an education-based blog, however, it may not be so ideal. It’s basically setup for the purpose for which I use it – a personal website. Default links to ‘Photo album’, ‘Music’, ‘Favourite Links’ etc. aren’t ideal for blogs that you’ll be using with pupils.

That’s not to say it can’t be configured to do that job, however. It’s just that it wasn’t designed for that purpose! The ‘Lists’ function could be used as a reading list or recommended websites for pupils, and the photo album could be used as a repository of course-related images, for example.

There is a moderate amount of advertising at the top of each MSN Spaces-based blog. However, this being family-friendly Microsoft, the raciest content is a link to a dating site. There are no links to other blogs unless you create them, meaning that pupils are less likely to randomly drift off from the site…

In conclusion, I’d recommend MSN Spaces to be used for the purposes of an education-related blog for novices who use computers mainly at work and for the odd email. It’s really easy to setup, can be tinkered with to an extent, and serves a purpose. Just don’t expect high degrees of customability or for your blog to look any different from any other MSN Spaces blog!

Blogger

Now a subsidiary of Google, Blogger’s friendly interface allows easy blogging from anywhere in the world – even from mobile phones! The main problem with Blogger let me point out straight away – it’s these two little ‘features’ at the top-left and top-right of each blog:

There’s the potential for very strange young person’s mind-warping things to be on Blogger-powered blogs and one click from your blog is all it takes for someone to get there. You’d be guilty by association!

That said, the chances of this happening are fairly small, and Blogger certainly has a lot going for it. There’s scope to create some very colourful and individual blogs with genuinely useful and relevant features (e.g. Don Cumming’s History Heaven, Ed Podesta’s Cold War blog and Dafydd Humphrey’s History@StanleyTech blog)

I used to use Blogger for my personal blog but found that image uploading, whilst not exactly taxing, a whole lot simpler with MSN Spaces. We are focusing on blogs for educational purposes here, however, so this is not an issue.

Going back to my Blogger account for the purposes of this guide, I was pleasantly surprised with the continuing improvements that are evident. There’s plenty of control over access and syndication settings for your blog (much more so than MSN Spaces), there’s plenty of templates to choose from (the HTML and CSS of which you can modify), and you can even earn money through Google Adsense intergration and post to your blog from Microsoft Word!

Blogger, then, is my recommendation for the intermediate user. For those who know what an RSS feed is and what settings such as ‘Enable Comment Moderation?’ mean, this is the blog to use!

Yahoo 360°

I intended to include a brief overview of Yahoo’s new Yahoo 360° service (currently in beta), but despite taking me through the registration process it prevented me from actually accessing my blog. So I find Yahoo’s offering impossible to comment upon at the present moment in time…

Livejournal

If Livejournal was a footballer it would a veteran experienced midfielder rather than a flashy new striker from overseas. It’s very much focused on content over style being the most mature of the blogs on review here. The basic options rather than the more visually-attractive ones are enabled by default. Although free, Livejournal allows you to purchase upgrades such as the ability to upload pictures. Given the need to upgrade your account to enable even this basic functionality, along with the unintuitive navigation within the control panel, I wouldn’t recommend Livejournal’s service.

Wordpress.com

And finally… you can actually have an installation of Wordpress hosted for you, and automatically upgraded when the latest stable version comes out! That means that as soon as version 2.0 is released your blog will be instantly up-to-date. I created a test blog for the purposes of this guide which seems to be already running version 2.0 (very nice!) That means Word-like formatting of posts, easy uploading of files (including images) and customization of themes (no messing about with HTML here!)

Although you can’t add in extra functionality through the use of plugins, it rivals Blogger for ease of use and visual appeal. That, along with the zero advertising, advanced options, and AJAX technology makes Wordpress.com my choice for all potential bloggers – from novices to the more advanced – who don’t want to set up a blog using their own web space. Check it out at wordpress.com!

As ever, however, don’t just rely on my word – have a look at the following before you make up your mind:

• ZDnet has a brief overview of some offerings
• The Wall Street Journal has a rather wordy review of Blogger, Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces
• A review at Tulsa Computer Society (!) has a image-rich review of several services
• This website has a matrix comparing all the major blog software

Whichever service you decide upon, make sure you add a comment here so others can find your blog!

In the 19th century a debate raged between such luminaries as Matthew Arnold, T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer as to the purpose of education. The debate surrounded the issue of whether a ‘liberal education’ was sufficient for a man of the world in the post-Darwinian era. Huxley and Spencer argued that it wasn’t, Huxley famously denouncing Arnold’s idea of ‘culture’ in a speech given on the opening of a technical college.

Whilst there was somewhat of a dichotomy at this time between the old and new schools of thought, something that both parties agreed upon was the importance of a balance between ‘training’ and ‘education’. Training was the passing on of necessary skills so that a particular function could be performed. Education, on the other hand, was a good in and of itself, important for enobling the mind. Whilst those arguing for the inclusion of a more scientific curriculum wanted a greater element of ‘training’, this was not to the exclusion of traditional ‘education’. 

The Guardian reports that a recent survey of employers has found that they believe schools are, ‘failing to equip young people with the practical skills they need for work.’

Andy Powell, Chief Executive of Edge (the practical learning foundation) stated that:

Employers are frustrated that young people of all abilities are finding it harder to cope in their early years at work because they have been stifled in the classroom and textbook learning rather than seeing and experiencing how they learn is applied in the world outside.

Whilst I suppose this is an oblique reference to the lack of extra-curricular learning that takes place nowadays for fear of litigation, it does bring up the issue of the purpose of education. Is it simply to prepare pupils for the world of work? I hope not, just as I hope young people don’t go to university simply for the job they hope to get at the end of their studies.

I doubt, as is mentioned in the Guardian’s article, that it is schools that are responsible for the current crop’s lack of skills in the areas of ‘team working, communication and time keeping.’  If anything, teaching is becoming more interactive and more pupil-centred. I hope we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon academic rigour for work-related ‘training’. I think, as people on both sides of the debate realised at the end of the 19th century, we need to strike a healthy balance…