Fizzics

I thought I would say something about my project to place homework and screencast solutions for Higher Physics on iTunes.

This week saw the first submission deadline since homework questions had been made available in the iTunes podcast directory.  My feedburner statistics suggested that just over half of the class had downloaded the homework using iTunes.  Looking at the Podpress data on my own Wordpress dashboard, it looks like the others have downloaded direct from the blog instead.  I was pretty confident this was going to work.

When Wednesday came round, I was disappointed to receive only 11 sets of homework from a class of 19.  I felt fairly miserable about that and obviously my first instinct was to blame the new delivery mechanism for the sudden fall in submissions.  I mentioned it to my faculty head, who uses my room last thing on Wednesdays and he was more upbeat, telling me he’d just had a go at his Higher Biology set for an usually poor homework response and he had heard that the Chemistry dept were also reporting low levels of homework this week.  Clearly this was something bigger than a move to iTunes.  Perhaps we had hit the senior pupils’ party season?

I went ahead and uploaded the screencast solutions.  It had taken quite an effort on my part to prepare these so I was determined to persevere.  Since the solutions have gone online, I have spotted distinct spikes in the downloads.  It looks like my pupils aren’t using the “get all” option in iTunes but are focusing on certain sections of the solutions that have given them difficulty.  This isn’t an observation based solely on this week’s homework either.  A similar uneven distribution of views/downloads exists in the original files that kicked off the project on youtube.  I am wondering if pupils are actively choosing only to see worked solutions to those problems that presented them with difficulty, rather than watching all of the screencasts to reinforce what they have learned in class?

In the past couple of weeks, a few people have expressed an interest in this idea and have posted questions on Twitter.  Joe Rowing has picked up on the idea and is also trialling it.  Interestingly enough, Joe also teaches Physics.

I had a light bulb moment last week.  It followed on from my post about the inset I gave on the first day back after the October break.  I’d been screencasting and uploading narrated worked example to Youtube but I was still relying on pupils actually bothering to go to my site to play the embedded files.  My idea was to highlight valuable resources by adding them as podcast content and have them pull everything on to their home computer and I realised I could use iTunes to do it.

I used Quicktime Pro to export the video in MP4 format.  I selected  the MP4 video format after reading this page which suggested it would be suitable for more than just iPods.  You wouldn’t have to use Quicktime for this, an online file conversion service like Zamzar would also work and save you some cash in the process.

I added the PodPress plugin to my Wordpress-powered classroom blog to handle the media files.  I don’t think you really PodPress but it does provide a neat and automatic icon for the media file in your blog post and it has a widget you can use to add an iTunes subscription button to your blog’s sidebar.  For me, the main piece of magic is the Feedburner feed.  This is a free service that has excellent features such as the smartcast option.

Smartcast is the killer feature.  It allows you to create an enclosure (the thing that iTunes looks for in your blog’s feed) for any rich media file.  This is a blanket term that includes file types such as MP3, MP4 and, more importantly, PDF.

So here’s what I’ve done.  Pupils in the class have subscribed to my podcast in iTunes to download fully commented solutions to their last homework exercise.  This evening, I finished creating their next set of questions and uploaded them to my site as a pdf.  Thanks to feedburner’s smartcast, the pdf quickly appeared in iTunes.  The next time my pupils open up iTunes, they’ll get the homework exercise downloaded automatically on to their computers and the following week they’ll receive the screencast showing the worked solutions as a video podcast.

I have no idea how this will go down with pupils.  When the novelty subsides, will they see it as a creepy tree house?  I don’t know if it’s all that different from having a VLE for school work, although pupils know fine well what to find when they log in there.  Is the delivery of homework by iTunes an invasion of their recreational space?

I mentioned previously that the group of UK teachers behind EdTechRoundUp had released a discussion-based podcast on the use of VLEs. One of the contributors to that show, Doug Belshaw, also blogged about it in a post where he asked the question “What is a VLE?“. He tweeted today to tell us he was called into his school office today to be told that the supplier of one VLE mentioned in the blog post and podcast were demanding that he remove the post and accompanying podcast from the web or face “legal action”.

Core Projects & Technologies (UK) Ltd are the people who sell the TALMOS system. Their approach to Doug is heavy handed. They might not like the fact that he said something negative about their product but that’s life. It speaks volumes about a company that makes a living selling interactive software to react in such a “web 0.5″ way to a single blog entry comparing VLE systems. Incidentally, the link I gave for Doug’s blog shows the version he edited today, possibly an act on his part to appease his employer who should never have been involved in the first place. Here is what Google’s cache told me he said in the original post

“There are other VLEs available - for example Doncaster, where I teach, has gone for FrogTeacher from 2008/9 onwards. Despite the bizarre name, I was quite impressed with it when I had a play with it at the BETT show earlier this year. Up to now we’ve been using TALMOS. Well, not using it, actually, as it’s so difficult to use, cumbersome and singularly un-useful…“

There are lots of questions raised here. Doug himself raises the professional versus personal aspects in a post he made today. I’m concerned by the way in which these people get heavy on his employer when something he does outwith his classroom annoys them. I’ve been googling today and the one thing that I learned from the TES is that Doug is not alone in having few good words to say about the TALMOS VLE. Can I redirect those with a curious mind to the following threads: “poor version of powerpoint“, “does anyone have anything good to say about TALMOS“, “please say something positive” I am sure that you will find more if you dig deeper but the point has been made.

Bottom line? Well, TALMOS may wish they had never called Doug’s school. How long before a standard Google search for TALMOS produces a marketing manager’s worst nightmare. Next time you take issue with a blogger, try getting in touch direct, possibly with a comment on the relevent blog entry, to find out what issues they are having. Maybe that blogger can help you to make your product better.

I’ve heard people talking about “dead time” recently. It’s defined as the time between pupils choosing their course options for the next few years and the end of the current school year. The problem is that you end up with kids in your class who are not going to be taking your subject next year (for whatever reason) and whenever you try to motiviate them to work, they remind you that they don’t need/want to do your subject next year, so why bother?

Well, it bothers me. The way I see it, it makes little difference whether a pupil is taking my subject next year or not. Those who are will start their new course in June, those who are not don’t need to be dragged through what is left in the curriculum, all this does is switch them off to the possibility of picking your subject up again in later years.

Last year, I used the “dead time” to work with my low ability S2 class to produce a series of short films, each showing a small group performing an experiment (they all chose an experiment that went bang!) After filming, editing and producing a compilation DVD, they voted on their favourite script, effect, experiment, camera operator, scientist, etc. and awarded prizes at a “Science Oscars” ceremony.

Being the new boy in our department, I have the bottom S2 science set again this year. I’ve taken my inspiration for this year’s “dead time” from a Curriculum for Excellence meeting I attended back in November - a group of physics teachers and university researchers got together to start work on a set of resources supporting the introduction of optoelectronics in the draft science outcomes. We were looking at cross-curricular opportunities, linking physics outcomes on light into the chemistry/biology outcomes, and someone suggested an investigation into the response of plants to different colours of light. So that’s what my S2 class will be doing this year.

We have propagated some geranium cuttings from the school greenhouse and are getting ready to grow them on under single colours of light. I persuaded my PT to part with some cash and I’ve bought a supply of ultra bright blue, yellow and red LEDs. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to show some of the class how to assemble a circuit on prototyping board before we move on to soldering next week.

One of the things I am really looking forward to is the chance to give the class an opportunity to try soldering. Everything we do with circuits in school is based around the ubiquitous crocodile clip, a component designed to allow teachers to move quickly from one circuit to another with little thought for giving pupils the skills they might need if they decide to follow a career in electronics.

When I asked the teams to develop success criteria for their experiment, they told me it was important to know if the plant had grown. They came up with a range of ideas and settled on three different measurements; plant height, leaf size and “greenness”. While my classroom is fully quipped to deal with height and “size” measurements, I’m not so sure about the determination of colour. The kids came to the rescue with a suggestion to make their own “paint chart” to compare the shades of green, so that’s another task for tomorrow. It’s going to be a busy 50 minutes and that’s before I introduce our new wiki for recording our progress!

There’s a new site tracking edubloggers across the globe, it’s called International Edublogger Directory and it’s run by Patricia Donaghy, ICT co-ordinator at Inchicore College of Further Education in Dublin, Ireland. I like this idea because, apart from ScotEdublogs, I wasn’t aware of anyone collating a directory of bloggers from an eductaion background (note to self: get this site added to ScotEdublogs).

It looks like 38 people applied for a directory listing before I got my act together.

 

I read that Stewart Mader is starting a series targetted at people currently without a wiki. He’s calling the initiative 21 Days of Wiki Adoption and each day of the event will see a new video added to the series.

I’m going to pay attention to what he says. I should have had a wiki by now. I entered the Rolls-Royce Science Prize last year - read my entry here rolls-royce-science-prize.pdf. My idea was to build a wiki resource with S2 pupils to use in Science class, a wiki written by pupils for other pupils and using audio and video to aid accessibility and promote collaboration among lower ability class sets. Unfortunately, the panel of judges didn’t find sufficient merit in my plan and I had to make do with a small shiny plaque for the school library wall.

I bumped into one of the competition manages at the Scottish Learning Festival in September and he told me that the judges felt there was too much ICT and not enough Science in my submission. There I was thinking that the whole point of the exercise was to improve Science teaching, not do more Science. But what do I know? In the meantime, here I am.

A year has passed and the bottom ability S2 Science set feature on my timetable once more. The course is still not meeting their needs and I am still having to drag them kicking and screaming (them and me both) up to the page in the notes that will feature in their exam at the end of this month.

Someone replied to a message I posted on a mailing list for Scottish Physics teachers. I had sent out an appeal for questions to put to the UK Google team about the roll-out of Google Apps for Education. Today’s reply confused me. It seemed to centre on reasons not to use Google Apps but OpenOffice.org instead - something to do with IT people at LA level not liking online collaborative tools.

I responded by saying the purpose of my original post wasn’t to bash M$ products but to highlight the opportunities we now have to stimulate collaboration among pupils. I suggested different tools, including alternatives to Google such as Zoho and wikispaces.

I couldn’t bring myself to add Twitter to that list for one good reason - Twitter spam. I’m not sure if it can really be called spam but I am beginning to pay the price for following people I saw as being influential. It’s not that they’re not influential, it’s just that they can tweet about everyday boring things as frequently as they tweet about interesting things.

I follow someone because I have an expectation of what I will find in the content of their tweets, forgetting of course that they have a personal life that is every bit as tweet-worthy as their professional life. I should probably feel more guilt about reading social stuff, it’s like sneaking a look at someone’s text messages when they leave their phone lying around. But I don’t, I just exhale and ask why on earth they felt the latest 140 character installment was worth tweeting.

Will Richardson sums it up nicely by talking about the signal to noise ratio of Twitter. I might follow his example very soon by actively unfollowing and coping with the guilt that I miss something worthwhile in the process.

Since November, I’ve spent my Sunday evenings talking to other teachers about establishing a blog and podcast to help pass on ideas for bring more ICT into the classroom.  EdTechroundup is a geographically diverse group (Joe Dale is based in the Isle of Wight and I’m in the Highlands of Scotland) but we share a common goal to bring practical advice for those at the chalkface and membership of the group includes primary and secondary practitioners.

Our first show, hosted by David Noble and myself, features an interview with Joe Dale on 5 uses for a classroom blog, an introduction to the resources at classtools.net and a discussion on the problem of web blocking in schools.  The podcast is now available on iTunes and further information is available on our blog.

If you are interested in joining the ETR group, check out the latest information on our wikispaces page for details of our next meeting.

Is the utilisation of social networking in education a good thing? The question forms the basis of a debate at The Economist right now. Ewan McIntosh is standing up for social networking sites and the collaborative peer assessment that they can deliver in the classroom.

As someone who uses a blog in his own classroom, I have to declare a foot in his camp before the first shots were fired. Kids are more likely to share information among themselves and let their friends see their work than hand it to me for comments and feedback. There’s a confidence issue in our classrooms. How many times have I had to cannibalise a jotter so pupils have a piece of paper to draft work so they can prepare a 2nd draft that they are happy for me to see? I’m not even an English teacher and yet kids are reluctant to show me any of their written work when I ask them to write up an experiment.

I am starting to see that launching a class wiki is an inevitable step if I am to succeed in having my pupils improve their report writing and develop a nose for quality. The whole business of social networking in the classroom seems to be a glowing example of social constructivism but Danah Boyd isn’t so sure*. She makes the point that children use social networking sites to stick together with their friends, rather than look beyond the walls of their own circle and truly “network”. I think she is on to something and, if her observation is valid, it suggests that a pupil’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky) may not extend in the absence of a more knowledgeable individual. How do we ensure that any social software we use in our practice keeps pupils engaged while maintaining its functionality as a tool for learning?

*via Will Richardson

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers making comment on Google’s launch of their knowledge service “knol” this week.  There’s a lot of chatter on how move this is an assault on Wikipedia (here, here & here for example) but is it really?    
There are people who love  Wikipedia and there are others who, perhaps rightly, question the accuracy of the information, agenda of the contributors or the authority of the volunteers who do the editing.  With Knol, Google gets away from these arguments by having pages (knols) written by experts in that subject.   
Google has invited people it considers experts to contribute some knols for their beta phase.  These people will receive a 50% cut of advertising revenue from their own pages and a further element of competition exists in that Google anticipates more than one knol on a subject.  It looks as if authors can expect to go head to head with rival experts in terms of page rank, page views and advertising revenue but I’m not sure which of these is the best indicator of quality from our perspective.  Which knol page meets the need that drove us to the web for inforamtion in the first place? 
I have another problem with the knol idea.  In terms of learning it’s a backward step.  A move that I see more as an attack on Encyclopedia Britannica than Wikipedia.  The knol concept takes an expert who delivers content to the reader.  It’s essentially a traditional education model, the very model that Wikipedia is trying to break.  In education-speak, we have knol handing out information to passive learners while Wikipedia encourages active learning and participation - the Holy Grail of current education policy.