Teaching with Technology

Today provided me with one of those – ‘blimey things are going to be different from now on’ moments.   After a staff meeting about guided writing with children last night, I put two and two together and realised that a tool called Etherpad could be a match made in heaven.

I came across Etherpad through a tweet from my Twitter network.   It is a collaborative online text authoring tool.   The nice thing about it is that it lets up to eight people author the same work in real time.  This is a significant advantage to Google Docs collaborative element as this does tend to be rather sticky.

Each person has a different colour highlight and it’s really easy to invite others through the url.  

 I tested it with the class today by showing the class this video of Batman the Animated Series (thanks to Dawn Robertson for the idea.)

Then I split them up into groups and assigned them each a few seconds of video to describe as a narrative, trying to focus on powerful words, pace etc.   I shared the url with each group and we all watched each other developing the narrative together.

What was really powerful was that we could see the writing in real time and children were editing ‘live’.   The different colours also gave me as a teacher a really clear visual representation of how I was modelling the writing and in fact which aspects of the writing needed to be focused on next time.

The Results:

I have to say that it was one of the most exciting developments in my classroom over the last year – and there have been quite a few.  I can’t wait to set up another activity for tomorrow and see what come of it!

This week I tried to use wordle as an assessment tool in literacy. Children were shown a stimulus image of a man looking over the edge of a well and were then asked to write 100 words of character description. We then took everyone’s writing and put it into wordle.

The results were great! What became very clear was that the children were using phrases like “he looked like…” and hadn’t really used powerful descriptive words.

The great thing was that we could actually see the frequency of the words used by the size of the words in wordle.

Next week we’ll do some guided writing and repeat the process which should hopefully show a real difference.

I really liked this as an assessment method and would recommend that people tried this in their own classes.

A week or so ago I posted about a site called Lulu which allowed you to publish children’s work.   I recieved the results yesterday and I have to say that I was very impressed with the results.

The whole process from ordering to the books arriving took just over a week and the quality of the printing and binding was excellent.   The children were absolutely extatic when they saw the results.   As mentioned in the previous post I think that this is now a real alternative to buying a traditional book for the children to record work in.

In September I’m going to try and do all my children’s History in this way and see where we get to.   I’ll be giving the children different aspects of the Victorian period to research to bring together in this way.

The question is will the quality of the work match the quality of the end product – I’m sure it will.

AIM: To give the children an open ended task without constraint and see what they produced.

To record the skill that I observed and that were being developed.

To have some fun!

WHY:   After yesterday’s post about the massive change I believe needs to take place in education, I decided that I needed to put my money where my mouth is and actually give the children the freedom to explore ideas and create something.   I decided to use a site I’d come across called Comiqs.

blogpost from mrkp on Comiqs

The task that I set the children was as open ended as it could be.   Simply I showed them the site and told them that their task was to create a comic of their own.   The subject was entirely up to them and there would be no time limit.   I told them that they could use anywhere in school to take photographs and that I would allow them to use any props that they could find.   I provided them with paper to sketch out a very rough storyboard and ‘trained’ some ‘comic engineers’ on how to use the digital cameras and the Comiqs site.   Other than that I sat back, facilitated and watched events unfold.

For the benefit of this post I’ll put the skills that I saw chronologically in bold capitals.

The first thing that was interesting was the discussion that went on.   Some of the ideas that the children came up with were incredible, if a little zany and at times gory.   CREATIVE THOUGHT.  

They were all different and really creative.  What quickly became clear to the children was that they were going to struggle to take photographs of these particular tales, so the discussion moved onto how ‘crazy’ a story they could tell within the limits of the school environment.   ANALYSING INFORMATION AND REASONED DECISION MAKING.

The groups then spent a long time discussing / arguing about the finer points of the story lines and trying to storyboard their ideas.   This was I think the hardest part of the process for the children, but the most constructive.   Most children found the transition from an idea in their head to an idea on paper very difficult.   The fact that they had to ‘think visually’ was very new to them.   They are after all used to writing stories in a traditional way.    However, once they realised that the pictures could be set up to show detail and add to the story development the really took off.   STORY PLANNING, CONCEPTALISATION AND DISCUSSION.

At this point I was really shocked at just how much thinking needed to go into the planning of the stories in terms of deciding exactly how a picture would / wouldn’t help the story.   Discussion moved onto close-ups, long shots etc.   MEDIA LITERACY

When children finally started to take the photographs to insert into the site it was hilarious!   Everyone was laughing and the atmosphere in the classroom was brilliant.   It was a definate ‘moment’ in teaching kids.

The Comiqs site is really intuitive to use.  The children picked it up really quickly once they had been shown the basics.

The comics have not yet been finished, it has taken us all day, but all the children have been totally engrossed, engaged and on task.   When you think about the skills that they are developing I think you have to say that its been a very successful day.   We’ve not even started the ’proper’ writing on the comics yet!   When the children have finished I’ll post some examples and put my final lessons learnt.

I have to say I’ve not looked forward to a Monday morning like this for a very very long time! 

 AIM: To write a collaborative play script using Google Docs

WHY: Writing using Google Docs should allow the teachers and children to work on the script in their own time without having to be together.

Using the Forms should allow all the children to contribute their ideas to the script.

The children should have a greater ownership of the script if they have contributed to it in a meaningful way.

Teaching the final year of primary / elementary school is a stressful job at the best of times.   There’s the pressure of SAT’s, the emotional strain of the children leaving and then there’s the dreaded ‘Leaver’s Production.’   As time has gone on in my own school this has become a grander and grander affair that consumes the final three weeks of the year.   The results on stage are always outstanding, however the toll on my body / sanity usually less favourable.   This year I decided that I would do something different and try to engage the children a little more in the whole writing aspect.   That’s where Google Docs came in.

The first thing that I decided to do was to get the children’s ideas together and distill the best elements into a script.   I did this by setting up a form that was sent out to all the children to fill in.   I asked them the types of songs they would like to sing, the teachers they would like to embarrass, the theme we should use etc.    

The principle of this was great, the ideas all flooded back into my spreadsheet .   Unfortunately the ideas themselves were to be frank pretty useless.   This, I hasten to add, was due to my own lack of discussion prior to sending the form and not due to the form itself.   In fact I think that this could be a great way of gathering ideas in the future as long as the children get the right input beforehand.   So I was forced to carry on with only my year group partner to help.

What has subsequently occured has been a bit of a revalation.   After our initial meeting to sort out the overall structure of the script we went our seperate ways and worked on individual aspects of the script.

This worked brilliantly, we were able to work on the script in our own time and see the changes that we had each produced.   As a result the script was written more quickly and efficiently than we could have imagined.  

It was extremely helpful to decide beforehand the areas that we would each work on.   This gave us a much clearer focus and stopped any unnecessary ‘creative differences’.   We also used the document as a shared ‘To Do’ list which helped us keep a track of where we were up to organising props etc.   The fact that we didn’t have to be in the same room at the same time was fantastic and made the whole writing of the script a lots less stressful.

One unexpected yet welcome development happened when we published the page to show the children where we were up to.   Once the children have the web address they read the script at home and we were daily inundated with e-mails suggesting plot changes, huge action set pieces etc.   The script became the talk of the playground and generated a huge amount of constructive conversation between the children.   It was with great regret that we had to sideline many of the larger more extravagant ideas, however in terms of the children’s contribution to the script and gaining ownership of the production, it was a fantastic to see. 

  From a starting position of no ideas the children now were debating the relative merits of different ideas.

Further advantages to using Google docs for this script were that the children didn’t all have to have a full copy of the script.   We were able to print them the relevant part, saving a great deal of money on photocopying for the school.   This doesen’t sound like a lot, but in my school every penny counts.  If children wanted to see the whole script they just went online.  Once more using Google Docs ment that if they lost their script they could simply go online and print it off.   No more hassling me a lunchtime for extra scripts!   This fact alone massively reduced my stress levels as the cry of ‘I’ve lost my script’ is one that every teacher dreads.

The curtain has yet to open on the production, but already expectations and excitement levels are high.   One thing is absolutely clear in my mind, allowing children to be part of the organic development of the script has already made it a far better prioduction than it would have been.   The ownership the children have over the script has brought us all closer together as a class.   Now they just have to remember their lines!

LESSONS LEARNT

• Writing the script using Google Docs did make the whole task more managable.
• The use of Forms to gather ideas would have been sucessful if I had put more time into explaining to the children exactly what I had wanted from them.
• Publishing the document even in it’s initial stages allowed the children to watch the script develop and gave them the opportunity to suggest additional ideas. (I don’t think in this case giving editing rights to the children would have maintained the unified ‘feel’ of the script – I could be wrong though.)
• Publishing also allowed the sharing of the script in a simple way that saved resources and money.

This is one that I’ll be doing again.

Here’s a word cloud that I made using all the comments left by children on our school website.   I think it makes interesting reading.

 It also occurred to me that this could be a really useful tool for looking at the quality of vocabulary that children were using in their writing, for example if your lesson was on character description and using powerful adjectives etc you could get the children to paste their initial descriptions into a shared doc, then generate a word cloud.   Then at the end of the lessons do the same activity and compare the differences between the two word clouds.   Hopefully there would be some interesting discussion generated and some clear development!

After the excitement of yesterday and the progress that I made (further enhanced with some collaboration with Tom Barrett)  I decided to have a go at an idea that was buzzing around my head.

AIM: To see if the forms in Google docs can be used to bring pupil’s work together in one place raise standards, speed up pupil’s work and how practical is this for the teacher.

WHY:

• One of the biggest wastes of my time is getting the book, turning to the page, marking (usually writing similar things) would this make the process quicker?
• Pupils often have no way of comparing their own work and work rate to their peers, would seeing others in real time encourage them?
• To find out if allowing the children to collaborate meant a rise in the standard of answers, or simple copying.

This idea was based on the work that Tom has been doing on video with his class and I would encourage you to check out his excellent blog.   First of all I set up a spreadsheet in Google docs and organised a form with questions that related to a video we were watching.   I then showed the children the video and told them that they could make notes as they went along if they wished.   When the video was over I gave the 20min to answer the questions on the form.   Then they submitted it.

Most of the children had got nowhere near finishing the form, so I invited them to share the doc.   This had the advantage then that they could see what they had written compared to their peers and they could also use the ‘discuss’ and IM options.   This I encouraged.   I asked them to then all complete their answers on the shared sheet.

What was really interesting was the ammount of discussion that went on via IM.   I was really suprised, once the children realised that they could shared information the quality of the discussion was raised considerably with children really discussing the finer points.   I was greatly encoulraged by this as it was the first time that we had used this sort of thing.   The most interesting thing was that the children only really asked me questions when there was a point of debate that needed to be settled!

During the hour and a half that we we doing the activity you could have heard a pin drop in the room.   That was not due to lack of conversation via IM though!   Children also started to offer suggestions to each other as to how they could improve their answers.   I also found it interesting to show the children the differences between the informal language of IM and the formal language of the answers that they were being asked to give.

 When the session was over I was left with a spread sheet of all the children’s answers which I could then leave comments on at the end.  This was easy too and really forced me to think about what I was writing.

(Click this to read in detail.)

LESSONS LEARNT:

• I think that this type of exercise is excellent to get children really thinking about the quality of thir answers inrelation to their peers.
• I don’t think that this is something you would do all the time, but is something that really should be used as a different way of engaging children in discussion.
• It did’nt lead to copying, it led to quality debate and disucssion as children had so much informatio to copy from they had to evaluate the best to use in their own way!
• It was good forsome of the ‘lazier’ members of the class to really see just how little they were doing in comparison to thers.
• It made me as a teacher engage with more pupils directly through the discussion and my points were being spread to the whole class not just one or two individuals.
• When marking I had to think really carefully about the work and my comments.

Although it didn’t save me time as such I really feel that the quality that was produced (remember this was the first time we have done it) was impressive.   I also really feel that it provided a different access to comprehension and I’ll definately be doing more of this in the future.