Original source Courosa

I was always the one playing with the cardboard box, wonder what that says about me?

It’s a serious point though. I used to get annoyed by learning facilitators saying:

“That’s an interesting site (and/or) application - how could we use it for education?”

Now I find myself wondering the same thing, rather than just getting on and using whatever it is.

I’ve just discovered a paradox though. Although new things come and go, I’m pretty faithful to my chosen tool set :

• Flickr (I’m soooo Old Skool!) I’ve had an account since Sept 2004
• Blog - I’ve had blogs on Blogdrive, Edublogs and here. I’ve blogged continuously since Nov 2003 (eek that’s a long time!)
• NetNewsWire Lite- my RSS reader of choice since 2004
• BlogLines - RSS reader for when I’m away from the mac - since 2003
• VoodooPad - my choice for a personal off-line wiki since March 2004
• Furl - social bookmarking since Nov 2003 (I use del.icio.us more now but furl is still where most of my bookmarks are as it saves a copy)
• gmail - for my email since July 2004
• MediaWiki - for my teaching resources for usefulwiki.com since Feb 2007

Starting to think I’m a dinosaur except for the most recent addition:

Twitter - microblogging since March 2007

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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.

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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.

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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?

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I am about to embark on a new venture. I will be teaching NCFE level 2 with a group of teaching assistants for a few hours a week. It’s exciting and daunting at the same time. It’s an opportunity to put into practice all my constructivist ideals and my commitment to web 2.0 but it’s going to be a challenge. I’m putting all my teaching materials online in the Teaching Assistants area of usefulwiki and I hope to attract other UK based TA trainers and students to get involved.

Like the web head I am the first thing I did was ask round in the TA forums for people’s impressions and experiences of the course. I got lots of helpful advice and encouragement and a great book list! However one of the main thing that they agreed on was that sometimes the tutors ‘waffle on’ about things that don’t seem very relevant to the evidence based assessment criteria. This instantly rang bells for me. I could be wrong but this may be a case of surface versus deep learning. The TAs want their ‘bit of paper’ and as stressed, busy people, they want to achieve it by doing ‘just enough’ work to get them through. The tutors though have other objectives, they want to produce rounded, competent TAs who are reflective about their work, apply theory to their practice etc. Is this starting to sound familiar to any one? Especially people at Ultraversity?

I have no idea how to resolve this at the moment but I think the key is in carefully structured assessment assignments that encourage a reflective attitude without overburdening the students. Oh, and finding a variety of ways of providing evidence for meeting the assessment criteria. Time to put the money where the mouth is! Watch out for a batch of blogging TAs!

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This podcast is a great introduction to Action Research in the school setting. (It made me quite nostalgic about my old learning community!).
Rachel has a great podcast on her blog all about her ICT cluster’s collaborative action research project:

Our ICT Cluster, Nelson City Schools, consists of nine city and rural schools; eight of which are primary and one which is an intermediate. We are in the first year of a three year professional development contract with the Ministry of Education.

Last week I interviewed our Cluster’s Director (and also my school Principal), Paul Potaka, and made a podcast on the action research process, reflection and development our ICT cluster has/is undergoing.

Paul’s contribution to the Time4Reflection Seminar is embedded below in podcast form… Sorry but I cannot locate the process diagrams that he references but it is still a very interesting interview in which you can see the journey our cluster has been on
…. oh, and you can also hear me struggling to produce my best “teacher voice” even though I have a cold!!!

Click here to get your own player.

I like the tools they’ve chosen to use to judge their success. Now I’d quite like them to start looking at children’s voice as well as student achievement. That feels like the riskiest thing to do but it’s also often the most powerful.

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I’ve added a new tag line to the blog:

Informal learning, Internet technology and Action research

This is taken from my degree title, of course, but as ever with the degree adapted to my own context! These are the main topics I blog about here so it seemed logical. I am also slowly, slowly, writing an About page like Andy Roberts and John at Sandaig. I can’t believe how quickly they’ve done it. Still, I’ve been busy writing an article so I might let myself off!

I’m currently updating the blog’s design so things might be a bit lumpy for a few days. In return for some research work Andy upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.2 for me. This is a huge improvement and means I can start to use some of the techniques I’m used to having over at Classroom Displays Blog.

Still in order to make full use of the update I’ve had to change my blog design. After much swithering I think I’ve settled on MooPoint. It is very plain and functional which is what I want at the moment. I’m kind of tired of fussy blog designs. I suppose it might be a reaction to all the dark colours I was considering in my last post!

Having said that I will try to get a few more visual elements into the design, but I’m not sure how yet. I’m just enjoying the purity of the clean lines (lol - there speaks the daughter of a modernist architect!)

It would be great if people let me know what they think of the new design and any suggestions for improvements.

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Yesterday I came across Blackle for the first time. I wasn’t sure if it was a hoax or a real attempt to get people thinking taking tiny steps to reduce energy consumption. Google must be on people’s screens for huge amounts of time.
What if there could be a tiny energy reduction every time it was accessed?
As they say:

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: “Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time”.

White or other bright colours on black was a web design that I used to find very appealing. Even now, as a dyslexic, I find it easier to read sites with either a darker background or at least a colour other than white.
To return to the energy saving theme Piers over at monkeymagic found this from the US department of energy. It suggests there could be considerable energy savings if everyone set their desk top, and presumably web site backgrounds, to one of these colours:

I’m setting up a couple of new blogs (details later) and thinking of redesigning this one so this has come at a good moment for me. Food for thought….. What do others think?
Up Date: Loopzilla via email sent me this from the Numbers Guy

On LCD displays, color may confer no benefit at all. In response to my inquiry, Steve Ryan, program manager for Energy Star’s power-management program, asked consulting firm Cadmus Group to run a quick test by loading Blackle, Google and the Web site of the New York Times (which is, like Google, mostly white on-screen) on two monitors — one CRT, one LCD — and connecting a power meter to both. “We found that the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor,” said David Korn, principal at Cadmus, which specializes in energy and environment, and does work for the government. The changes were so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter.

Plus Andy scoffed at the whole notion of tiny actions making a difference but refused to take the bait and add a comment here!
So there you go - if you’ve got an LCD screen you can have any colour you like. As you were.

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Engineers without Fears responds to Andy’s post about creative thought and chimed quite nicely with my own thoughts about reading.

And another thing: more on social creativity
I listen to others perform & I also read their work (reading is a paradoxically private and social activity)

Reading often feels like the ultimate asynchronous conversation. By reading a book I can engage with a long dead author yet in my mind I hear his (her) voice and have my emotions touched by their words. They can make laugh, cry or shiver. I find myself debating with them, sometimes impressed by the power of their argument, sometimes enraged by it.
The same is often true of the blogs I read but there’s a subtle yet huge difference. I now have an audible voice. I can argue back or tell them how much I agree. I can thank them for their insights or rebuke them for their lack. And, just sometimes, I can enter into a longer conversation with them.
I came across this lovely quote yesterday in the Charles Lamb pub in Islington (celebrating Bastile Day but that’s another story)

What is reading, but silent conversation?
Charles Lamb

Spot on Charles, even if you said it at least 150 years ago

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Andy blogged My Blog Story today and it set me off on a bit of a wander through my blogging history. I didn’t want to do a straight post about the how and why of my blog. I did that quite recently anyway. Instead I decided trawl back through my early days of blogging and see what’s really there. Here’s what I found:
My Blogging Time Line
2003
Nov 15 - My first blog created on Blogdrive chosen because it allowed comments without the person having to have a blog themselves, unlike Blogger.
Nov 16th - First blog comment from Andy puts me off using it! When I try to reply on his blog he has comments switched off Blog abandoned.
2004
Feb 11th- First post, not to really make a blog but to provide a space where I can talk to the people I’ve lost contact with because of the way the course software has been set up.
Feb 12th - from little acorns…

I’ve been asked to record all the displays in school (which I was doing anyway) with a view to putting them on a cd & using them as screensavers all over school. Sounds like a nice idea doesn’t it?

Feb 16th - first comment from any learning facilitator (LF) (Martin)
Feb 22- the blog gets its first comment from my own LF
Feb 25th - I realise the blog is turning into a learning journal

This blog has by accident become a place that I use for my general thoughts about what’s going on

March 1st - begging someone to leave a comment, offering virtual tea and shortbread, feeling like a dotty person talking to her cat. Mo takes pity on me.
March 3rd - seriously thinking of giving up the blog after a comment from Andy (is this a pattern?)
March 5th - lots of blogs:

Blogs everywhere
So many blogs in Ultralab now! And some of them really interesting. I loved Gina’s blog, really colourful. It made me think of her as a person rather than just as someone else’s LF. Shirley’s is good too but quite different. It’s interesting to see how people personalise their on-line spaces.

March 6th - mixing work and play

“I bought some real organic cider from the supermarket next to the train station in Windermere. I’ve never had anything quite like it before. Dry & rather tanniny, but really, really good:) I’m going to put the broadband off in a minute & watch a dvd of “Hideous Kinky”.”

march 9th - assimilated into the Ultralab borg by Tom with Shirley’s help. This predates the blog of blogs and had LFs, the MA students and e-fellows in it too but only 2 researchers, myself and Andy.
And so it continues through the rest of my first and second year. There are several entries a week and lots of comments. Contacts are made and friendships grow. The blog slowly changes into a Meta-Learning Journal where I write about my learning, reflections and double loops all jumbled up with personal and fun stuff. It’s a lively, vibrant blog. I keep trying to hive the personal stuff off into other spaces, including another blog but it never works.
2005
Oct 20th - First entry in Acting to Improve - my serious Year 3 research journal on Andy’s Darnet domain, partly because I can access it from school and partly because it seems the right place for it as my topic is a form of distributed action research.
Dec 11th - first entry in Classroom Displays Blog on edublogs where I hope there will be a supportive community.
2006
July - I get the degree. With 193 entries in my main blog I move over to only blogging in Acting to Improve.
2007
April - moved Classroom Displays to our own domain on usefulwiki
July - 74 entries in Classroom Displays,
88 entries in Acting to Improve
I’ll think about what all of this might mean tomorrow

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