teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

Although I said in this post that I was going to start using Twitter with my Year 10 (now Year 11) students, I never actually got round to doing it. Now that they’re finishing off their last taught module before their final piece of coursework, I’m thinking about revision.

I remember ten years ago when I was doing the same course – with limited Internet access and no Wikipedia, granted – being stuck with fairly simple questions during revision and having nowhere to quickly turn. Yes, I could have gone downstairs and dusted off the huge atlases and maps to find out, but this would take a long time. By the time I’d clarified a simple point, the kitchen (and more importantly, the fridge) was beckoning. You know how it is for teenagers… ;)

Or, if that doesn’t strike a chord, how about this: I (and I expect you) know of very few teenagers who don’t have a mobile phone. Sometimes other people are using the family computer. And if they’re not, can take time to turn on, login to email, send the email, etc. Then you have to wait by the computer for a reply (if it’s urgent). Using a mobile phone is a much better way of doing things as you can be working wherever you want whilst you wait for that update.

Which brings me to Twitter. You can get SMS notifications of when your ‘friends’ update their Twitter accounts. You can also send messages to Twitter directly via SMS. In both cases, the mobile phone number is not shown. This makes it ideal in an educational environment where teachers want to make themselves available, but not give out their contact details!

Here’s how it works:

Students will first of all need to set up an account and choose to follow the Twitter username of their teacher. The teacher can then follow them in return if it is to be used solely for educational purposes.

By putting d username and then inputting the (max. 140-character) message, the details will only be sent to the intended recipient instead of being sent so that everyone can see via the public timeline. Depending on the notifications the recipient has set up (instant messaging, online, SMS, email) they will be alerted that they have a new message. They can then respond to this in a similar fashion. The best way to learn things like this is through practice – try setting up your own account and sending a message beginning d mrbelshaw (i.e. to me!)

There’s more on getting things set up on the Twitter website here.

The problem with Scenario 1 is that it depends on a teacher being ‘on-call’ virtually 24-7. Whilst we’re all committed professionals, there’s a limit to how far you want your students to intrude into your private life. You can turn off mobile phone updates by sending an SMS to Twitter saying OFF. You can then turn them back on again by sending a message saying ON.

A better solution is to encourage students to become their own learning network – similar to the connectivism theory espoused by George Siemens. Here’s how it works:

Unlike a direct message which can only be seen by the recipient, placing @username directs the ‘tweet’ (Twitter update) at the intended recipient whilst allowing everyone to also see it. This facilitates virtual ‘classroom discussion’. Anytime someone responds to you using the @ symbol, it is logged in the ‘replies’ section of your personal Twitter page. Have a look at mine for example: http://twitter.com/mrbelshaw

Having a network of learners is all well-and-good, but there’s no real reason to limit to those who participate in lessons your physical classroom. As with the personal learning network (PLN) facilitated by Twitter in the edublogosphere (usually through the TwitterFox plugin for Firefox), students can also ask questions of those they only know online. This is how such a scenario would work:

The great thing with this model is that, as with the edublogosphere PLN, there are times when some are teaching, some are at home, and some are just waking up. Thus, there’s always something going on! If there was a similarly worldwide student PLN then common targets and projects could be worked upon. At any given time, some students worldwide would be at school, some at home, some asleep and some just waking up. Together with individual blogs, Google Apps for Education and collaborative wikis, the sky is the limit!

Further reading

Help:

• List of Twitter commands
• Twitter knowledge base (FAQ)
• Twitter lexicon

Blog posts (some for, some against):

• Web 2.0 Teaching Tools – Twitter Tweets for Higher Education
• Terry Freedman – Twitter: an evaluation
• Creating Passionate Users – The Asymptotic Twitter Curve
• Cool Cat Teacher – The Edublogosphere is being criticized for twittering
• Christopher D. Sessums – Twitter Me This: Brainstorming Potential Educational Uses For Twitter
• Bashing Education – Twitter as a model of learning
• A Difference – Twitter: Ephemeral Learning Tool
• 2 Cents Worth – Twitter in the Classroom?

Other:

• Twitter ‘cheat sheet’ (US-centric)
• Twitter fan wiki (lists of applications, etc.)
• TwitterGram (add small MP3 files to Twitter updates)

For those of you who have your own Wordpress-powered blog, it’s time to upgrade again! New features (including native tagging support) are listed here. Up until today I used Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) to ‘tag’ my posts and create the tag cloud you can see in the sidebar. If you use this too, you’ll need to check out this guide to importing your tags from UTW into Wordpress 2.3 and then this guide on how to display tag clouds. :D

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that this week Google added a ‘presentations’ feature to its Google Apps – and more specifically Google Docs – range of products. As I described over at edte.ch, some have dismissed Google Presentations as merely a poor imitation of fully-fledged desktop applications such as Powerpoint and Keynote. Others, however, have realised the potential for collaborative presentation creation – including myself.

Vicki Davis, someone who’s always on the cutting edge, created a Google Presentation about Google Presentations. She invited edubloggers and people she knew to collaborate. Within 24 hours, over 40 people had made 500 edits to the presentation, according to her post And the Walls Came Down. Yes, I was one of them (mostly stylistic changes and tidying up). :D

Here’s the presentation

The great thing is that any of the Google Apps allow you to go back, like a wiki, and change things back to how they were. You do this through the ‘revisions’ feature, the RSS feed of which you can also subscribe to. This means you can keep track of changes your colleagues or students make to a presentation.

It’s also included with Google Apps for Education, if you’ve already got that set up or plan to in future. I’ve got it set up on my mrbelshaw.co.uk domain and so used it with some of my students for the first time this week. It was a Year 8 (12-13 year-old) Set 4 Geography class and, although it took them 20 minutes or so to get used to it, they were soon collaborating away. They were amazed that what they changed in their presentation on one screen would then show up very soon on another. We didn’t get everything finished – they’re completing it for homework – but I’ll be interested to see the results.

Apart from collaborating with colleagues both local and at distance, I think Google Presentations is going to be an extremely useful tool. I’ll be using it with my Year 11s (15-16 year-olds) next week as an interim review/recap of what they’ve learned on their GCSE History course since coming back after the summer holidays. All they need to do is to remember to ‘invite’ me when setting up the presentation and they’re off!

One potentially useful thing is that, when presenting, there is a chat window which produces a transcript via Google Talk. If your students are collaborating with students in another school, this would be an amazing feature to use!

I shall report back on progress… :p

If it were up to me I’d live in a log cabin (or a fortified house with a turret like Montaigne) and read books. It’s about the only way I will ever get a chance to read all the books I’d like to. I’d never get to put theory into practice, however, so perhaps not… Kim Cofino’s added to my reading list with some that she’d like to read as a result of the Learning 2.0 conference and some that were already on her bookcase. Teachers TV are currently running a Great Books vote for the best education-related books. There’s some great ones there! :)

Three items in my RSS reader stood up in a row for me to see the links between them. The first is a 1993 New York Times article linked to by lifehack.org entitled For Best Results, Forget the Bonus. It talks about the need to develop intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation – something we should be doing in schools. How do we do this? Through students engaging in their learning! Take ‘Now I see the teacher’s point of view’ in the EducationGuardian this week: students should be encouraged to reflect on their learning, behaviour and life in general. And if you manage to pull this off in your classroom, you should have no problem with students rating you on various websites (see Let students rate their teachers). :D

The Independent reveals that a recent OECD report has ranked the UK 23rd out of 30 regarding class sizes in primary schools. More disturbingly, the gap between private schools (10.7 pupils per class) and state schools in the UK (25.8 pupils per class) is the largest. In fact, the gap is twice as large as the country with the second largest difference – Poland (12 vs. 20.6 pupils per class). I find this a worrying trend – not only in terms of the amount of attention each pupil receives in the state sector, but on the growing difference between rich and poor and class differences. :(

I love 19th century history. In fact, stories by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Lermontov and Tolstoy which evoke Russia in that period are my absolute favourite; I can’t get enough of them. At that time, Russia was one vast bureaucracy with a strictly deliniated table of ranks. Being a ‘titular councillor’ in one of Gogol’s stories, for example, is to be virtually a nobody – somebody who works within a vast bureacracy churning out meaningless statistics.

I see my life as a teacher as being a million miles away from this. If I’ve done my job properly, my students should be engaged, informed and leave my classroom with a desire to learn more. To do this, learning has to be ‘personalised’. There are a number of ways in which this can be the case (I’m sure you can think of more):

1. Understand the ins and outs of every single individual in the classroom – emotionally, academically, etc.
2. Know the different types of students you have within your classroom – how they learn best, their ability, level/grade towards which they’re working, and social standings.
3. Be aware of the CAT scores and previous academic performances of the young people in front of you.

In a primary school classroom a teacher can begin to personalise learning in the first way. Howver, although they may understand each individual, they need to have the resources at their disposal to be able act upon this. I would argue that dealing with 30 simultaneously means that the teacher is, in all but the most dedicated of cases, unable to translate their understanding into meaningful action.

This leaves the majority of primary school teachers – those who have pupils every lesson, every day for at least a year – at the second level of personalising learning. This is one step removed from where they should be. The problem is not intention or understanding, but time and money. I heard of one pupil today who has entered Year 7 at our school without being able to read or write. How can this happen when we’re supposed to be personalising learning?

Given that secondary school teachers interact with probably at least ten times as many pupils as their primary counterparts, the second level of personalisation of learning is an acceptable target. Given, you may get to know your form class a lot better, or individuals within certain classes you teach but, on the whole, my getting to know the 375+ pupils I teach in the first way is unrealistic.

But we certainly shouldn’t be happy with the third way of ‘personalising learning’. That’s just Personalisation by Bureaucracy. 19th-century Russians would be proud of us, as would Frederick Taylor. That complex ball of human emotions, aspirations and thoughts is reduced to numbers on a page. Whilst these are necessary for target setting for ‘Type 2′ personalisation, they should not be the be-all and end-all. They should inform rather than direct. How often do we just manipulate data for reports and target-setting rather than actually use it to personalise learning in a meaningful way?

Type 1 personalisation is unrealistic at the moment given the staff/pupil ratio in secondary schools, although I wish it were different (like this model, perhaps?). To ensure at least Type 2 personalisation starts with getting to know every pupil’s name as early on as possible, but ends with finding out as much as possible what makes them ‘tick’ – what fires their imagination, how they learn best, and with whom they learn best.

Perhaps I should add that as a second short-term goal! :D

Google have added presentations to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It’s got great collaborative features! More over at edte.ch… :)

Damian Bariexca has challenged me to reflect on my first week of teaching. It’s actually been a week and a half, but I’ll ignore that. As someone who’s always in favour of a spot of reflection, I’ll take up the challenge and keep the questions as the same as Damian used from Todd’s original post.

What went well? Did you do anything this year that you keep telling yourself you should do?

I’ve (theoretically) no longer got a ‘front’ to my classroom. My interactive whiteboard (IWB) is on one wall, my standard whiteboard on another wall, my classroom next to the wall opposite the IWB, and my desks arranged in ‘islands’. I like it! :D

Did you start off with the right tone? Is there anything you’re not happy with? Did you do that thing again that you keep telling yourself not to do?

I started off a bit ‘harder’ and ‘meaner’ than normal. Especially on Year 7. I feel a bit sorry for them sometimes, but it’s for their own good. Their first homework was simply to cover their exercise books. A number forgot to do it. Given that their school planners haven’t arrived, I can kind of see how that could happen (despite my website). I still put them in detention though.

I’m a lot better planned with my Year 11s and with the photocopying situation. I’m worried, however, that standardisation might be at the cost of creativity…

I’m still not happy with the school network. The Internet has gone down in the middle of lessons twice already. I’ve been told that to guarantee uptime would cost a lot of money which isn’t going to be spent when a new build could be just around the corner. I’m also not over the moon that my new IWB has been installed at a height where I have to stretch to reach the top (I’m around 6′ 1”). What if I want my Year 7s to use it?

How are your classes looking, just from your brief introduction?

Some of my Year 11s seem a lot more mature and have recognised this is an important year. I’ve some Set 4 classes which in any other school would be difficult to teach. At my current school that’s not a problem: it’s an ability rather than a behaviour issue. Overall, I can’t complain. :)

I’ve noticed a huge range in ability with the ICT classes I teach. Upon further (brief) investigation this seems to be due to a lack of a computer at home. I’m concerned, therefore, of the emergence of a ‘digital divide’ and it becoming a political/class/access issue.

Short-term goal

To get all of my History and Geography classes signed up for a Google Apps for Education account via mrbelshaw.co.uk. I’ve already shown my Year 11s how to get reminder text messages sent to their mobile phones about homework, coursework deadlines, etc. and last year they used Google Docs for their coursework. Next I want to try Using Google Docs as an assessment for learning tool.

How’s your first few days/weeks been?

There’s a post on Slashdot which links to an article about how (university-level) students are ‘digital natives’ who are forcing their lecturers to change their pedagogy. It made me laugh – especially some of the pithy comments made by the Slashdot regulars. I’m against using pigeon-holing terms such as ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ – try reading my previous posts On the false dichotomy of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ and Digital Natives, Mountain Men and Pioneers… :p