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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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

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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!

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When I started blogging the Blogroll in the sidebar was a vital part of building a blog community. I’d add bloggers who became friends or I’d found interesting and hope that people reading my blog would find it useful for discovering new blogs to read. I’d trawl through other people’s blog rolls for the same reason. If someone made a comment it seemed only polite to add them to my blog roll and hope that they’d do the same for you. If you used one service to produce your blog roll you could even see when friends had updated their blogs. I like the personal touch of adding and the feeling of sharing favourites. I used to have my ‘furl’ (or del.icio.us) there too so I could share what I’d found as well.

Recently people have been suggesting it’s best to ‘de-clutter’ your sidebar, reduce your blog roll, worry less about building reciprocal links, or providing a ‘discovery’ service to your readers, and more about search engine optimisation. I’m slightly seduced by this. In practice I discovered from my stats not that many visitors use the blogroll as an exit point on this blog. The feelings of community that it used to engender seem to have been a bit of an illusion. The only really strong thing about it is that it is a hand-picked set of links. I made these choices, these are blogs that I think it’s important to connect to but they are all in my RSS reader so it’s not so vital to me have them here too. In the end it’s a sort of courtesy to leave the links there.

My BlogLog is also in my sidebar and it’s quite different. These are the readers of the blog, or at least, those that belong to MyBlogLog. I didn’t choose them - they chose me. I have no control over them and they may or may not have blogs with relevent content that other readers might find useful. Mostly, I think, the widget in the sidebar is for my benefit. It lets me see who is looking at the blog and sometimes I do find new blogs that way. Unlike Andy, I don’t think much of the stats it produces and find Statcounter much more useful.

BlogRush is a new blog promotion widget for the sidebar that just started yesterday. You can scroll down and have a look at mine. You’ll see that it displays 5 headlines from other ‘related’ blogs. I’m having a few problems with this. Firstly you ascribe a category to your blog, I chose ‘education’ . The headlines that appear in the widget should be from other blogs that also categorise themselves as ‘education’. A quick glance at the first results showed mostly blogs trying to sell software, loans or ‘other things’ to students. I quickly went back to the control panel of Blogrush and added some keywords to filter out. This sort of worked, some of the more obvious spammy sites went but it didn’t filter out the word ‘loans’. Hmm.

This could be a nice ‘discovery’ tool but there are other problems, not just its roots in marketting. It’s got an inbuilt bias towards already popular blogs. Everyone who signs up via a link in your blog like this one BlogRush adds points to your blog and it is by earning these points that you end up in the widget on other people’s blogs. It seems likely that this will just exagerate the power curve and the big blogs will just get even more traffic. Early adopters are in with a chance and might do well at increasing their targetted traffic at first, though, because of the viral nature of the thing as it spreads through the blogosphere.
Anyway, I’m trying it out for one month from today so if you do have any thoughts on the matter perhaps you’d let me know in the comments.

Sign up for Blogrush to try it out yourself.

Via Andy

Update - checking all the blogs currently in the widget not one has the widget code enabled in their sidebar!! Which is another way to use it I guess!

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Via Primary Teacher Blog
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Office printers ‘are health risk’

An investigation of a range of printer models showed that almost a third emit potentially dangerous levels of toner into the air.

The Queensland University of Technology scientists have called on ministers to regulate these kinds of emissions.

They say some printers should come with a health warning.

The researchers carried out tests on more than 60 machines.

Almost one-third were found to emit ultra-tiny particles of toner-like material, so small that they can infiltrate the lungs and cause a range of health problems from respiratory irritation to more chronic illnesses.

And yet - there they sit in many ICT suites in Primary schools in the UK. The health risk may be minimised for the children who are only there for one or two lessons a week. The same can’t be said for technicians or other staff members who spend much longer in there. Photocopiers are a recognised hazard and are often placed in a well ventilated part of the school or have an extractor. Laser printers are usually in the ICT suite, often a quiet poorly ventilated room.
So there you go - another good reason for minimising how much of children’s work you actually print out and persuading staff that saving work in an e-portfolio means they don’t need 3 copies of everything, all in colour, to take back to the classroom with them.

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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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