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?
We had a full day inset on Curriculum for Excellence on Tuesday. I was dreading the prospect of a full day sitting in our school hall listening to someone from down south lecture us about the changes that are coming. As it happened, my vision of what our session would involve couldn’t have been further from the reality. There was no guest speaker and we didn’t have to sit all day in the hall.
What we had instead was a day with quite short whole school presentations/videos by the head teacher followed by more in-depth departmental/faculty breakout sessions where the implication of CfE for our own curricular areas were discussed in detail. I was quite pleased with this unexpected opportunity to discuss the implementation of CfE within Science, as the ongoing administrative side of department meetings often means we never look much further ahead than the current reporting cycle.
Despite having participated in a week-long curriculum planning event last winter, I have remained sceptical about the draft outcomes for Science due to their woolly wording and lack of clarity. I think I had a lightbulb moment on Tuesday when, in between all the chatter, I realised that it was the pupils’ experiences that counted, not some summative assessment grade or STACs. When the penny dropped (collectively, I might add) you could feel the relief around the room and the renewed willingness to engage with the challenge. Questions raised changed from confrontational sentiments such as “How are you supposed to do that?”, “That’s not covered until Higher!” and “We shouldn’t have to rewrite all this!” to more proactive questions like “How could we make this outcome more practical?” and “Can we throw away the S1 textbooks?”
I feel a lot more comfortable now that we have started the discussion, although I don’t know where it will lead us.
I’m nervous about the first day of term (this coming Monday) because I have been asked to give an INSET session on how I make best use of ICT in my classroom. It all came about from an open evening for the school’s Parent Forum AGM, where several members of staff were approached to show their rooms and resources used in day-to-day lessons. The feedback we received was pretty positive and resulted in a request for us to run an ICT session for the entire staff at the next inset day.
My plan right now is to break the sessions (about 30 minutes each) into the following steps;
show my classroom blog and the different resources I have made available online for pupils – another colleague will also discuss blogs but, having shared our experiences, it is clear that we use them for different things
short focused introduction to the latest tool I have used, screencasting, taking my colleagues through a quick and simple example using the windows software they already have on their classroom pcs and discussing scenarios where this could be used across the curriculum
a look at the video project I produced with my S2 class towards the end of last session, highlighting how open-ended activities such as this could fit into the CfE draft outcomes for Science
I had thought about a short introductory session on Glow, now that we are likely to be switched on in the New Year, but my Glow account has just been activated and looks pretty empty at present.
It might sound daft to be so nervous about talking to colleagues about what I do every day. In principle, I think it is good that the school recognises the need to share good practice. The problem here is that I can’t see there being very much interest in it. Feedback already received from colleagues suggests they don’t want to know about things that would mean spending more time doing school stuff. From my own perspective, I would have preferred to have a willing audience, rather than an audience who are there through compulsion.
Have you found yourself in a similar situation in the past? How did you approach the problem and how was your presentation received?
I had a surprise on the last day of term. I knew it would be hard to have a double period of my vocational electronics class. Soldering can work wonders for focusing the mind and keeping everyone on task but prototyping circuits in reusable breadboards is a different matter. Add a few pupils who have already completed their practical unit and you have the ingredients for a difficult last day before the holidays.
One of the outcomes I had set at the start of the week was for everyone in the class to know how to use a resistor colour code chart to determine the value of a resistor without having to make a measurement. I had pinned a snappy poster on to the classroom wall close to where the resistors are kept and, over the course of the week, I noticed that pupils had become more independent – choosing to refer to the poster instead of asking me to tell them the value of the resistor they had picked from the tray.
At the start of the second period, two boys asked if they could do revision for the NAB they would be sitting after the holidays. Could they also make up some revision questions on a sheet of paper? I was surprised and delighted that they had come up with the idea, these things just don’t happen in this cohort. Their quiz comprised 10 general questions on electronic components and their uses, followed by another 10 questions where the a given colour combination had to be converted into a resistance.
It was easy to ask the first half of the quiz to the class but what about the colour band questions? Well, I loaded up The Gimp for mac (Windows version available here) and created a “blank resistor” template for the boys to modify on the IWB. They quickly drew in the colour bands by hand and saved each as a new page in the Notebook software. Their willingness to produce drawings was unexpected and I captured each one as a gif file to keep for use again. A cartoon I saw yesterday reminded me of Friday’s events and I pulled the images into Keynote and exported the presentation as a Quicktime movie.
Try the quiz yourself. Each resistor appears twice. The first slide shows the bands, the next displays the resistor and it’s value so don’t click through too quickly. You’ll need a colour code chart.
I’m not posting this because of the ICT being used. I’m trying to convey that, when you least expect it, even a bunch of boys treading water until they can apply for apprenticeships can surprise you. Perhaps they thought they were having a “skive” on the last day of term. Whatever their motivation, I saw them take control of their learning, make excellent use of ICT and assess their peer group. All this within two hours of the October fortnight.
Now that I am geting settled into my new room, I thought I would try to practise using the Smartboard. It’s been playing up since I moved in, the internal walls of the building are plastic-covered sheets of steel and they seem to have caused an earthing problem inside the Smartboard 660 model that was fitted in my room, The room next door has a 580 version and it is unaffected as it hangs from a bar rather than screwing to the wall.
Yesterday afternoon, I got the all clear to start using the IWB and I set about trying to make a screencast of a worked solution to this week’s Higher Phsyics homework. I found that the files generated by the SMART recorder were enormous (>40MB for a 3 minute clip) and so I set about working on ways to reduce the file size.
First of all, I reduced the capture rate to 1 frame per second. That seems slow but I find the response of the board quite slow when I am writing anyway. Then I set the recorder to “no audio” and drew a capture area on the board rather than having the entire workspace captured. All of these changes brought the files down to around 5MB each, a much more reasonable figure.
I was going to send the video to Voicethread.com so that both myself and pupils could add a commentary but the site didn’t want to accept the file. Instead, I imported the .mov files into Apple’s Garageband to dub a commentary over the top. GB lets you do this as long as you agree to ditch the default podcast track at the top of the screen that is used to sync still images to podcasts. Then it was a simple case of recording commentary as I watched the clips playing through before exporting them to the hard drive and uploading to youtube.
I’m pleased with the results. Whether this is a justification of the costs in another matter. I suspect that the same result can be achieved with a more portable resource such as a tablet. Here is a sample screencast.
I took my Higher Physics class to a strange venue for their lesson today. We have been looking at apparent weight and had been trying to jump off desks while holding a spring balance to see the change in weight displayed while falling towards the ground.
Textbooks and teachers often use the example of a lift moving between floors/starting to move upwards/starting to move downwards but it’s rarely more than a thought experiment really since they can’t be followed up with a tangible, practical illustration.
Since our school has been made more accessible by the recent addition of a lift at reception, I spoke to our Head Teacher and, with a bemused look, she agreed that I could use the lift for a whole period to do experiments.
We worked in pairs, taking turns at moving up and down between floors, looking for any signs of movement on the spring balance. We successfully confirmed our “thought experiment” and some sharp pupils spotted evidence for Newton’s 2nd Law and shared their findings with the rest of us. Pupils finding links to other aspects of the course without prompting was the icing on the cake!
I stole this title from a post earlier today by Tom Barrett. Tom has set out his stall, having identified the technology he will be using with his class over the new school year.
What about me? All I know right now is that I need to up my game in terms of classroom technology this year. Unlike Tom, we’ve been back to school for 2 weeks now. I’m moving into a new classroom next week (photos to follow) and will have an interactive whiteboard for the very first time. One of the challenges I will face is how to integrate this new tool into my predominantly senior school timetable without patronising the 16+ age group. No doubt I will be drawing heavily on the IWB tips that Tom and others have compiled.
Add to that the new Intermediate 1 Electronics course, where I am having to get up to speed with packages such as Crocodile Technology 3D to teach circuit design & simulation before letting this class loose on their SQA projects.
That’s a steep enough ICT learning curve for this term.
I’ve been trying to clear out the hard drive on my laptop. I cleared it back in May but it seems to have filled up again. Lots of video podcasts have been transferred over to the science folder on the school server, photos transferred on to a portable hard drive, hundreds of old email attachments have been binned and I have been ruthless in reviewing my iTunes subscriptions.
Then I found something half an hour ago. It’s a folder that takes up a whopping 15GB on my mac. Inside, there is an iMove file for a video I started with a S2 science class back in April. I was half way through the editing process when we changed timetable and I must have forgotten to finish the editing job for them after they moved on into S3. It was a great plan to have non-stop practical work, building light-proof plant propagators, assembling different coloured light sources (see the blue light source below) and all to see if plants responded differently to red, yellow and blue light. I liked it because it allowed me to combine biology and physics – we don’t get to do that very often!
What should I do? Finish the editing or just leave it on a hard drive somewhere? It’s going to be hard to find the enthusiasm when the pupils involved are no longer in my classroom.
While the meeting lacked sufficient focus to put it out as a podcast, we felt it was important to allow the views of Mike Jones from Talmos to be heard and so the link to the recording of the flashmeeting has been made available to anyone who would like to watch and listen to what he had to say. In making the server recording of the meeting available, EdTechRoundUp has provided an unedited account of the meeting.
Personally, I would encourage you to follow the text chat of the meeting as the video replay proceeds- do this by clicking on the chat tab in top right of the replay window. This will give you a fuller picture of the views of participants. If you do follow through to the replay, please come back and leave a comment with your thoughts on the issues covered, thanks.
We had a full day inset on 
