Update: The Classroom Displays Blog and usefulwiki.com are back on line

Happy Holidays to all

Share This

The first thing I heard on the radio this morning was the announcement that 30 new adventure play grounds were to be created. I instantly thought of an old friend, currently languishing as a OFSTED inspector, who really has to be part of this. My second thought was something like …”Hmm, they are going to need lots of trained play-workers again”

Comment is free: Getting serious about play
It should fund improvements in every local authority, alongside the creation of 30 new staffed adventure playgrounds, innovative approaches in 30 “pathfinder” areas, and high quality training for 4,000 playworkers.

I learned my first really valuable lessons about informal learning long ago as a play worker. We didn’t ever get an adventure playground, we just had the basement of an old library and a big playing field. It was great!

We did all sorts: art activities; cooking; helped with health issues and personal problems; got tied to trees and had buckets of water thrown over us. We all learned to play New Games where “nobody wins, nobody looses and everyone has fun”. We borrowed circus equipment and then had to chase people on unicycles all round the estate. Who knew they’d find them so easy to ride? We painted up old band stands, helped organise free Rock in the Park concerts. We went on coach trips to May Day Play Days in far flung places, like Skelmersdale. Played with giant earth balls and took the kids to A&E when the inevitable sometimes happened. I never worked so hard, or so long and it was all so real, vibrant and filled with learning.

Now lots of new people are going to learn play working skills. I’m not sure anyone will give them as much freedom or let them take the kinds of risk that we did, but still, I might be interested in getting involved the training.

Share This

Dy/dan fell in love with the design aesthetics of this hand written worksheet and started to question our obsession with the word processor:

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Careful now.

I saw this in a pile of forgotten masters while walking by the copier. It was love.

Check out the clear hierarchy. The single, legible font. The single style for emphasis. Margins tightly aligned. The second lines indenting just as they should. Spacing is evenly distributed. The kids know exactly where to look, where to go for their next question, and where to find important information.

Somewhere, until quite recently I still had all my hand written masters for worksheets. They were done in the far off days of the banda machine. Everything came out blue, very dark bluey/purple if you were lucky or, almost unreadable, light blue, if the ink was running out. Your hand writing had to be clear otherwise there was no chance of the children reading it. You had to use weight, bullet points and underlining to make things stand out.

Pupils were used to reading cursive script and they loved worksheets. It was so much easier than squinting, copying notes off a blackboard. We were taught at Teacher Training College that using blackboards full of notes (as many of the teachers in our TP schools did) was very poor practice and the banda worksheet was the way forward. I think the word ‘personalisation’ might even have been used!

I looked through those old worksheets before I threw them away and realised they were from a time that shared many ideas with where we are now in schools. The tasks they set were differentiated by “must, should and could”. They often sought personal responses and gave scope for extended writing. They even included some line drawings and diagrams or asked for a pictorial response ( my subjects were Middle School English and Comparative Religion - does anyone still teach that?) They were then my very best attempt at helping my pupils to learn and I was still proud of my 20 year old self for having made a good job of them. But I binned them anyway.

Now I question the value of worksheets, how ever well designed. After all, as Adrian says

* In years to come will you be stopped in the street by an ex-student and they will bow down before you and thank you for all the exciting worksheets they gave? I don’t think so!
* Please challenge your students and teach them to think.
* Please give your students a 21st Century Literacy skillset.
* Please hang this poster next to your school’s photocopier.

Share This

This scriptlet can display not only a flickr photo in a web pages or blog articles, but also the notes.This means you can embed a flickr photo with its notes in your own website. Just mouse over the image to reveal the note.

There’s a handy bookmarklet to pop on your toolbar. This means you can just generate the code whilst you are looking at images in Flickr & then nip into the blog, switch to code view & paste it in. Cool or what?
Don’t forget to only use Creative Commons images though or you might run into copyright issues.

See a more detailed use over on Classroom Displays

Share This

POP Quiz-Text Version
POP Quiz 1
Do you know the true art of questioning? (If Students Wrote the Quiz)

Can you answer “NO” to all 5 questions?

* Do you put our names at the BEGINNING of directed questions? If you put names at the beginning of a question, the rest of us will tend to ignore your question, since you have already chosen who will do the answering for you! Wouldn’t you, too?

I can mostly answer No to this one, but it’s good to be reminded

* Do you ask “whole group” questions like, “Does everyone understand the difference between…?” Hope not, because it is simply an invitation for a chorus of “yes” responses and the 2 or 3 of us who do not understand probably would not let you know because, “everyone must have understood it but us!” Instead, ask, “Who would like for me to repeat those directions?”

Oh - yeah, I knew that but I’ve still caught myself doing it a couple of times

* Do you repeat student answers? If you do, then you’re teaching us not to listen to each other, because we know the answer will be repeated by you! Instead, try other responses such as “Tell us more,” or “Someone else?”

Ouch! Guilty as charged Need to watch this one!

* Are you always the “answer-giver” in class? If you turn our questions back to us, you will encourage us to do our own thinking and learn to answer our own questions. For example ask, “That is a good question. What do you think?” After giving us a chance to state an opinion, the question can then be directed to the class for discussion. At that point you can add your comments to ours.

Ok I get an A+ for this one, I’m smiling again:-)

* Do you practice less “wait time” for the slower students than you do for the smarter ones? Researchers have clearly demonstrated that teachers typically wait less than one second after asking a question before calling on a student, answer the question themselves, or make an additional comment! Increasing wait time results in dramatic improvements in the overall quality of class discussions.

I’ve been working on this one, counting up to twenty elephants in my head. Adults need thinking time too especially when English is their second language.

There’s lots more good stuff on this site.

What aids do you use to reflect on your teaching?

Share This

I’ve been thinking today, in between lots of other bits of work, about the need to widen my network. I want to start to link up with other bloggers working in Further Education, particularly in the UK. Most of the people I already read are classroom teachers or edubloggers whose main concerns are the teaching of children. I won’t stop reading them of course but I’d like to find some new contacts who are working with adults. Trouble is I’m a bit baffled as to how to do it.

My network of people I read and sometimes interact more directly with grew up dynamically over the last 3 or 4 years. I must have gone looking for people at the start but mostly I just found them from other people’s blogrolls. It’s the same with Twitter. I just added people I saw other people following who looked interesting.

So where to start? Technorati seems like an obvious place. They’ve got a search button and they use lots of tagging. But what to search for? I tried “informal learning uk” as a starting point - I’m not too hopeful, might just link here lol!

Ah - well there’s Ewan of course And quite a few KM (Knowledge Management) bloggers but nothing obviously relevant.

So I tried GNVQ - none

Erm - Further Education UK?

• eew an Official Microsoft blog which hasn’t updated for 88 days. I suppose I ought to subscribe, I do have to use windoze at work
• Going through the Phases might be interesting, not a tutor though. More ICT stuff probably isn’t what I need. Might be fun though.
• EducationState - Promises:

  An alternative and critical view of UK education news, policy and issues and a fly-on-the-wall insight into the day-to-day running of educational institutions.

  But it has a baffling theme, still I won’t notice that in my rss reader and the posts look controversial & interesting I’m starting to feel better!

• AoC NILTA Aha - Josie Fraser, she’s usually worth reading Oh, Josie is listed as one of the authors in Technorati but she doesn’t appear on the “Who we are” page. The writing looks a bit dull but I’ll put it in my ‘on probation’ folder & subscribe anyway.

Everything else is either dead or totally corporate Where am I going to find ordinary FE tutors who love blogging and want to use Web2.0 with their students to read?

Share This

Paul at Nue-Thinking is dealing with marking. I’m marking some work from my first batch of adult students and I like his suggestion:

The week that was
For the comments I stuck to the rule of:

Specific Positive Remark +Improvement Point = Good Feedback

So they were something like this:

“Some excellent comments about the copyright of the logos. To improve this explain whether you think they are good logos, and why.”

This took quite a long time, but seeing as I was marking 3 consecutive weeks of homework, I was able to complete each group in 2 hours. Then I printed the comments on coloured paper and attached to the homeworks. This was a long winded process, and I am not sure I could sustain it for a large number of classes.

I like the idea of 1 positive + one improvement, for my adult group I might add one target as well. Still, Paul has a point it could be quite a time consuming process.
Dave suggested automating the comments:

create a bank of them in excel, then use drop down lists to select ones for each pupil. A quick mail merge takes care of the formatting, print them onto coloured paper, or stickers and you’re away (make sure you set the merge to pull in the pupils name as well. Made that mistake once, never again!)

I’m less thrilled with this idea.I’ve been on the receiving end of the cut and paste comments method & I have to say once student start comparing them it severely damages the tutor’s credibility! I suppose it might be more sustainable but if you are going to do it that way be honest with them from the outset and then they won’t feel cheated. I was deeply shocked when someone shared their feedback and what I had assumed was a well thought out reaction to something I’d worked hard on turned out to be a generic reply. Not good

On the other hand, how do you deal with lots and lots of marking? Suggestions welcome!

Share This