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.

Getting this iPhone has got me thinking about how we could use it as a tool for letting parents know what has happened in the classroom that day. Since I downloaded the wordpress application this now has become a real possibility!

So I set up a class blog to see if this could really work. I’ve only done it for one day but I’m totally convinced that it’s the way forward!

There are several reasons why.
•It’s easy children can borrow my phone to type quick articles.
•It’s instant. The children can see their work online straight away.
•It’s visual. You can take pictures of the activities on the iPhone and publish them straight away brilliant!
•It gives the children the feeling that they are able to reach a global audience.

It also made me realize just how much you get through inn any one day – it’s exhausting.

Please have a look at the blog and leave them an encouraging comment www.charlestown.edublogs.org

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.