Blogging, tweeting and being a #PGCE student

This post forms part of a blogging carnival organised by Danny Nicholson. I haven’t taken part in a blog carnival, but I really liked the idea (and seems a good way to thank Danny for the inspiration I get from his whiteboard blog).

I am a primary PGCE student. Before I started my transformation into a teacher, I worked in educational technology, particularly the field of plagiarism detection. I started blogging for my EdTech work and due to the reflective nature of teacher training seemed natural to carry on. I had thought I would put my weekly course reflections here, but in fact I’ve discovered that much of my reflection as a trainee feels distinctly personal and so I’ve been selective in what I have shared publicly. My experiences as a learner (see the perils of electronic note taking as an example) have had quite an effect on me. The course has made me consider the nature of learning and how uncomfortable it can be to recognise that you don’t understand something.

My personal learning network is massively important to the way I learn. The people I follow provide support, inspiration, encouragement and challenge me to reflect on my learning. Serendipitous discovery through twitter is an amazing way to find out things you didn’t know you needed to know (like this fabulous list of blog post prompts for teachers from Alec Couros @courosa). My PLN give me feedback on my understanding and interpretation of everything from teaching theorists to assessment for learning. I have shared reliance on twitter with my fellow students.  I am organising a TeachMeet  with Josie Fraser, which I never would have dreamt was possible whilst I was still a PGCE student.

scoopit

I’ve been thinking about using different online tools with children in my next teaching placement. One idea is a to use Scoop.it! as way of curating sources of information and posing questions for children to hunt for the answers from the links. I’ve started with some ideas for the Terrible Tudors, I’d love to hear how other people are using Scoop.it! in the classroom.

Google Teacher Academy UK #GTAUK application – how is this for starters?

When I was making the decision to become a teacher, I started to follow some teachers on twitter. Several that inspired me went on to be the first UK Google Certified Teachers, and following their tweets during and after the event was amazing. It wasn’t necessarily the incredible amount of ground they seemed to cover in the sessions, or the innovative approaches to teaching they presented (though of course they were amazing), but watching the community around #GTA form that for me was the key of the event. Here, a group of teachers were given the tools to collaborate and an experience to bind them together which has resulted in a strong core to the UK twitter teacher community that has driven dissemination and innovation nationwide.

So, when the chance to apply for the second Google Teacher Academy in the UK came up, I started working on how I could show that I was worthy of joining a group of educators passionate about working with children and other teachers with technology. I am still a trainee teacher, but I know that being part of the GTA will enhance my professional practice to another level that I could not achieve alone.

The application is in two parts, a written submission (in progress!) and a one minute video which can be about ‘Classroom innovation‘ or ‘Motivation and Learning‘. I chose classroom innovation. This was appropriate for me as a trainee, as I know I will be expected to bring fresh ideas to the profession.

Seeking feedback from my peers and reflecting and acting on their advice has always been an important part of any work that I have done. I would therefore really value any comments or suggestions you might have on my application before I submit it (I may need to re-record the audio, I’ve realised some of my words are not very clear and I think I sound rather boring!).

Trip to Heath Primary School

Doug aranged for us to visit Heath Primary School in Derbyshire on Friday 20 January. We were warmly welcomed to the school and shown around by two of their ICT Accreditation Team (two very able girls from year 4). We saw a wide range of technology being used through out the school:

• talk buttons in reception (on a table with a log and five frogs – when pressed, the button said ’5 little speckled frogs’, recorded by a child)
• Story phones throughout KS1
• interactive whiteboards (at child appropriate height) being used by the children
• sensory room in Nursery unit (all painted white with oil lamps, fibre optic cables, mirrors, sound)
• flip cams
• thin client PCs (at lest 4 in every classroom) with a common deployment of software across the school – I noticed Textease (of course!) and Open Office, I’m sure there were others
• use of video for lessons – Carol Vordeman’s times tables songs
• video creation – each class creates at least one video a term. One is shown at an Oscars night in the summer, with VIP guests (year 6 leavers) in prom outfits, and a mobile TV station to provide live coverage of the event (by the children)
• VLE – RM platform, areas for each year, subject and for parents.
• one to one use of eeepcs  netbooks in KS2
• a large screen TV/ monitor with touchscreen facility and laptop attached on a cunning device that could move the whole system up and down to the right height for the child.
• bee bots

In every lesson we saw children using technology independently, as just another tool. The children were confident, articulate and self-assured in their use of technology. The atmosphere in the school was one of joyful learning, with enthusiastic and committed teachers nurturing the best from each child. It was wonderful to behold

 

 

SEN Tech: The Critical Agenda debate with Sal Cooke, John Galloway and Bev Evans new at SEN TeachMeet #tmsen12

Our SEN themed TeachMeet follows the traditional format – practitioners sign up to come along, or ideally – to talk and demo practice that works, in 7 minute micro presentations or 2 minute nano presentations. These are short to encourage a wide range and diversity of contribution, to make sure as many people attending as possible get the opportunity to share, and to make joining in more accessible and less scary for people who have never spoken at an event before.

Additionally, we will be hosting a strategic level debate. We are excited to announce the confirmed speakers for our SEN Tech: The Critical Agenda debate session:

Sal Cooke is Director of JISC Techdis, one of the leading UK advisory services on technologies for inclusion. Sal has overall responsibility for the strategic focus and direction of JISC Techdis as guided by funders and stakeholders, ensuring it continues to be the pragmatic voice of inclusion and accessibility and promotes the innovative use of technologies, to support users within education, business and community sectors across the UK

John Galloway is an ICT/SEN Advisor in Tower Hamlets, a consultant to a number of special schools going through BSF across London and Essex, and a freelance writer with several books and many articles to his name. He has been using computers with learners with a broad range of special needs since the mid-1980s and still gets excited by what technology can enable them to do.

Bev Evans (@bevevans22/@TES_SEN) is the new Subject Leader of SEN Resources at TES – and spends time sourcing and creating resources and guidance to help support teachers, who have pupils with SEN, within the classroom. Bev previously worked as an ICT Leader, who worked across age groups to develop the use of ICT in the classroom, and as part of a specialist team: using sign language, communication aids and inclusive technology within the classroom to help promote an inclusive environment.

She runs the resource website www.communication4all.co.uk in her spare time and also has a blog for sharing ideas in ICT http://technostories.wordpress.com

Our panelists will be setting the agenda for technologies for inclusion, and presenting and defending the issues and areas they have identified as current national priorities.

There is still time to sign up – please do consider speaking or attending. We will be finalising numbers for lunch this Friday - so please register sooner rather than later if you’d like to take part in what looks like being an excellent event

Tickets are available here.

 

Possible tools and techniques for my ICT project @orunner

Now that I know which school I will be going to on my second teaching placement, I’ve been thinking about what tools I might want to use with the year 4 class I’ll be teaching. I could use any of these to support the teaching I’m doing, the trick will be finding one that I can develop into a research question. Given that Action Research involves:”Emphasising the individual nature of action research, Jack Whitehead (1985) puts forward a simple representation of how the process feels: 1. I experience a problem when some of my educational values are negated in my practice; 2. I imagine a solution to my problem; 3. I act in the direction of the solution; 4. I evaluate the outcomes of my actions; 5. I modify my problems, ideas and actions in the light of my evaluations.” from Whitehead, J. (1985) An Analysis of an Individual’s Educational Development: the basis for personally oriented action research, in: Shipman, M. (ed.) Educational Research: principles, policies and practices, Lewes, Falmer. See http://www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/actionresearch/arhome.htm#INTRODUCTION I need to look at what practices are currently in use in the classroom before I can choose one to change and monitor the impact. Exciting times

From Evernote:

Possible tools and techniques

Resources I could use for the ICT project (or for any teaching on TE2):

• ScoopIt http://www.scoop.it/ to collate resources, or provide pre-filtered links for research online (start one for the Tudors or other topic work?)
• Toontastic on iPad http://launchpadtoys.com/toontastic/ for creating cartoons, in particular effective sequencing and story boarding using the scenes and settings.
• Spelling city http://www.spellingcity.com/ as an alternative way to test spellings (could compare before and after, levels of use at home)
• Using voice recording (clicker software if school have it, or voice memos or speech recognition software?) to get ch to look at drafting and redrafting? Textease for re-reading writing.
• myebook http://www.myebook.com/ to promote writing, including sound, online.
• collecting and presenting information – scoopit, bookmarking, diigo, google forms, textease
• games: Machinarium to promote problem solving and team working http://machinarium.net/demo/
• exploring patterns : using flickr to look for images? symmetrical patterns on iPad using Sym Lab Basic
• using wall wisher or primary pad to collate feedback or ideas during a lesson, compare to other methods of feedback?
• blogging with the feb 29th leap year day http://feb29th.net/keyboarding exercises – BBC dancemat – check out blog with them all on for typing games or use 3×3 links for IT start up  or at home (like Simon Haughton’s links?)

Taking note: Notability, Evernote, Dropbox and Remember the Milk on iPad #pgce

As I am trying to think about my second PGCE assignment, and what topic I will use for an action research project on my second teaching placement, the ideal displacement activity is blogging about my reading and note taking methods that I use

Taking notes in class

I use my iPad every day, I bought it instead of a laptop for my PGCE course and it hasn’t let me down. For day to day notes in lectures and seminars, I use Notability (which is on sale at the moment and well worth several times its current price of 69p). I like the pretty colours for organising notes into categories, it is easy to use and has lots of great features. I can :

• quickly add and annotate photos (so I usually photograph the paper handouts we are given)
• handwrite directly on the page – I use this a lot for maths, much quicker than trying to type equations or numbers on the iPad
• draw figures – the new version supports handwriting on the page, so I find I am using this option less than I used to, but it is still useful for the pre-formatted shapes (circles, rectangles etc)
• insert webclips – very useful to bung in a bookmarked screenshot of sites we discuss, or YouTube videos we are shown in class
• easy pre-set formatting – you can add pre-set formats (e.g. size 20, blue, bold) to the tool bar to quickly make headings.
• copy and paste – useful for getting text from slides if they are uploaded to Blackboard before the lecture, or I sometimes screenshot the slides from Dropbox and insert them into the text
• taking photos of all the fun stuff we make or the activities we do

I export my notes as PDFs to Dropbox so I can refer to them on my desktop Mac if needed, or look them up on the iPod touch. I was concerned initially about not being able to produce nicely formatted editable text documents (notability exports as RTF or another RTF format which is only readable on a Mac) but I’ve found that the sort of notes I take are usually just for reference, and I can always strip out the text from a PDF if I really need it. The PDF ensures that the notes look as nice as they do when I write them, with all the photos and handwriting in place as I intended it.

Reading papers and taking notes

For my last assignment, I read a mix of books, journal articles and PDFs of book chapters given to us through the chapter digitisation system available from the library for courses. I got into a system of taking notes like this:

• upload chapter to Dropbox in a ‘reading folder’
• use ‘send link’ option in Dropbox (on iPad) to email link to Remember the Milk using the Smart Add in the email subject line to tag it for PGCE list/reading/Dropbox (useful because the filename of the PDF is often just a code if downloaded from a journal, so easy to forget what on earth it is in a file list)
• when I am ready to read, I open GoodReader (for iPad £2.99) and sync to Dropbox folder
• find the read and annotate, mostly using highlight/ pop up notes
• email as PDF with summary to Evernote via email upload
• tag and put uploaded notes into a single Evernote notebook

I found searching back through notes in Evernote really useful when I came to writing up, I could search for quotations, authors, terms and topics. It gave me an easy way to cross reference between different authors who were discussing similar subjects.

As Stuart would say, that was a boring post, but I hope it may be useful to someone

Gearing up for TeachMeet SEN 2012 #TMSEN12

I’m back at University tomorrow, so getting organised for the new term. Josie Fraser and I are also getting organised for a TeachMeet with a national focus on Special Educational Needs (SEN), here in Leicester on 28 January 2012.

As Josie says:

What’s different about TMSEN12?

1. This is a Special Education Needs (SEN) focused TeachMeet. Learners with SEN are a significant and diverse group, and we expect the first SEN focused TeachMeet to be an exciting one – reflecting the creativity, enthusiasm and the wide range of knowledge and approaches of practitioners.

2. This is the first face-to-face SEN focused TeachMeet. There was an online TeachMeet for Additional Support Needs/Special Education Needs back in April 2009. We are very proud to be continuing the tradition.

3. We recognise that parents and carers play an important role in supporting children and young peoples education, and that while parent and carer partnership with schools are always important, parents and carers sometimes play a particularly critical role in supporting learners with SEN. Because of this, we are also inviting parents and carers who would like to share effective practice to come along.

Is TMSEN12 just for SENCos and people who work at SEN Schools?

No! Every school supports learners with SEN.

What kind of thing do people talk about/demo at TeachMeet?

All sorts of things! You might speak about a really useful app, web tool or site; a technique that supports listening or speaking; an interesting and successful project; how you capture or share achievement; a simple, little change that has made all the difference to your learners; something you’ve created or a resource someone else has shared.

I think TeachMeet SEN is a great idea! How can I support it?

Excellent! Here are 7 ways you can help us: 

1. Sign up to present your ingenious and effective practice. Come along and share.

Get your free ticket here, and then head over to the wiki to tell us what you will be presenting on.

2. Sign up to encourage and support. Get your free ticket here.

3. Tell people and organisation who need to know about TMSEN12 – send them a link, encourage them to sign up to speak. We really appreciate it!

4. Tag your favorite blog posts, resources and ideas: Use #TMSEN12 on Twitter, TMSEN12 on Delicious. Let us know what and where else you tag resources. We will curate and share!

5. Watch the live stream and join in the debate on Twitter. The link will magically appear here and across the web nearer the time.

6. Sponsor TMSEN12! Help towards the event costs/resource for sponsor credit. Get in touch to find out more.

7. Suggest other ways you/people can support and celebrate TMSEN12. Share your ideas!

So come along and join us!

Assignments take a long time to write….

Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 : toastytreat87

We have only two assessed pieces of written work on the PGCE (2 x 30 credits at M level), the rest of our credits come from gradings of our teaching placements and our personal development portfolios (2 x 30 credits at H level). It has been a long time since I’ve written an assignment, but I have regularly written peer and non-peer reviewed papers over the last few years, of equivalent length so I wasn’t too worried about tackling a 5,000 word case study. However, I’ve been amazed at just how long it has taken me. I added it up today and estimate it to be:

• background reading prior to and during placement: 20 hrs
• re-reading the literature in light of evidence gather: 14 hrs
• drafting (writing main findings to be edited down): 14.5 hrs
• editing: 7.5 hrs
• final proofing, printing, submission online: 4 hrs

total: 60 hours

The assignment also represents a synthesis of everything we have learned on the taught section of the course so far, which has been 9 weeks of mostly 9.15-4.15 contact time (approximately 270 hours). In relation to the contact time we have had, my 60 hours ‘self-study’ on the assignment doesn’t seem so bad. Perhaps I should have done more ? Then again, it is Christmas, and I have a family to look after, so I’ve done the best I can whilst still giving some time to them.

I found the Student Development Service guides on editing, critical reading and writing really useful. Editing for specific foci each time definitely helped me to be more structured in my approach and gave me a purpose to editing rather than just going over and over the same material. I don’t think I have managed a particularly critical approach, since writing in the first person is still very difficult for m and passing comment or evaluating academic work in a field that I am still not familiar with does not come easily. I guess I know how to be critical in science and it has made me realise how difficult it is to get to know the literature in another field. I longed for the equivalent of forward mapping of citations that you can use in PubMed to move forward from classic works to modern journal articles that cite them (perhaps this does exist – if it does please let me know before I start my next assignment!).

Is special needs education your passion? Then come and share your ideas with other at TeachMeet SEN! #TMSEN12

I’m delighted to announce, after a rather long gestation, the launch of TeachMeet SEN (Special Needs Education) which will take place on Saturday 28 January, 2012 in Leicester. Following an inspirational TeachMeet East Midlands earlier this year, Josie Fraser and I hatched a plan for a special needs focused teach meet on our journey back to Leicester. Josie has done a great job securing an amazing venue (Phoenix Square) and we are really looking forward to getting the new year started with a bang with TeachMeet SEN.

TeachMeet SEN will focus on engaging, amazing and effective examples of practice from school leaders, teachers and learning support staff working with children and young people with Special Educational Needs (SEN). Learners with SEN are a significant and diverse group, and we expect the first SEN focused TeachMeet to be an exciting one – reflecting the creativity, enthusiasm and the wide range of knowledge and approaches of practitioners.  Come along – learn something new, share your successes, and meet professionals who share your passion and interests. The event is open to people from all sectors with an interest in this area. Practitioners are invited to sign up to contribute either a micro (7 minute) or nano (2 minute) presentation – and share with us the ideas, tools, techs and practices that have made a real difference to learners with SEN.

TeachMeet SEN  offers brilliant opportunity to start the year with a bang – present your practice, tips, favorite tools & resources and network with colleagues.

TeachMeet is an informal, free meeting, providing space and structure for educators to share practice, innovation, insight and approaches. Participants are all encouraged to think about what they could bring to the event, and to volunteer to share practice that works. Everyone is welcome to sign up to contribute either a micro (7 minute) or nano (2 minute) presentation – and share with us the ideas, tools, techs and practices that have made a real difference to learners with SEN.

Full details, FREE registration and sign up to give a micro or nano presentation.

Having fun with magnetism @orunner

This morning, our poor ICT tutor was suffering from the lurgy, so he left us to work on magnetism all alone. This is a carousel of sessions, covering two days, so it will be interesting to see what happens over the next two days and we were the first group to try it. I was really impressed by the way that our groups knuckled down and produced some amazing videos. Not everyone made videos, some people went and did some self-study on magnetism to improve their subject knowledge. Here we all are working away:

I worked with Rachel and Jenny and we had great fun using a set of plastic coated ball bearings and a couple of magnets to make a football game. I recorded the video on the iPad2 then edited it in the  iMovie app. The editing process was really simple and we just used the standard themes and settings to publish this video within 45 minutes of starting the lesson. I would have sent it to YouTube, but I’ve forgotten my password!! D’oh!  So instead I exported it to the camera roll and emailed it to posterous.

Click on the photo to go to the video on posterous

Jenny and Rachel went on to make a magnet maze:

click on the photo to go to the posterous video

Several things about this session have struck me so far:

1. Despite it being 2 days away from the end of term, with a bunch of other pressures on us, we all took the opportunity to work on this task and not disappear to do other stuff.
2. Self- formed groups got on together quickly, decided on what to video and had all started shooting something within the fist 20 minutes of the lesson
3. There was an awful lot of laughter in the room.
4. The groups were really creative in the topics they chose, how they presented them and put them together.

Application in the classroom:

1. Adding video and photo recording into the mix gave the activity a purpose and a fun creative stimulus to the way we all worked.
2. An external audience (we were asked to email our results to Doug, and I hope that people will share them between the groups online via Facebook, or on their blogs) motivated us in the absence of Doug’s actual presence.
3. Explaining a topic to someone else via video made people think carefully about their own subject knowledge and how to engage kids in the same way.