Points
- How to do more marking as I go along rather than just say thats ok. I need to be getting in to the nitty gritty of is it a 3 or 4 earlier and letting the students know. Our current Y10s are uploading work into Moodle which speeds up tracking & marking, but I decided to give ABC grades instead of numeric grades because the survey and database work are the big Y10 tasks and its good to give students easy to understand feedback. Although now I feel that to build up their understanding of the mark scheme earlier would be worth the effort even if that means saying “good db work thats 2 marks”
- How to transition into numerical marks whilst staying with Moodle.
- Planning we continue to do badly with. Students are awful about writing comments in their plan. Why not have another go at a separate project diary in Word (or blog if students wish). Angela says at her school if students are missing comments in their diary they get detentions so they learn to do that quickly.

Their latest news is that they are going to have an app store for learning contents on the platform. This sounds interesting as decent content is always what is missing on any learning platform and finding, trying, paying for and installing new content is always too complicated.

So will Edmodo turn out to be a free VLE on which you can run your school? First thought – the grade book allows a numeric grade only ie, no A, B C or 5a, 5b, 5c. Second thought. Material and assignments are published in reverse chronological order ie in the conversation stream. There is no structure for courses.

So far I would say its not replacing a full VLE yet.

• geo-caching: I finally got a chance to have a go and found questions with QR coded answers. Although getting kids to use their phones isn’t their yet. C:Geo didn’t work for me.
• Lego We do. Yes I’d like to but there are more important things to spend the money on (£70 per motor kit with usb, £160 for software site licence
• Edmodo: Free VLE plus social networking platform. This could be big.
• Programming: Small Basic, CodeAcademy.com and mobile apps (below)
• Building up links with local business (a reminder)
• BTEC Information & Creative technology level 2&3 might be interesting.

Some great links to mobile App creation

• RedFoundry see video Add modules eg. Menus, Modules (Flickr, twitter)
• Live Code (£££) long Video
• AppMakr
• Stencylworks (free software) great Video. Scratch type interface. Find and share resorces in market place. Sell your game
• App Inventor (was run by Google Labs) for Android Scratch type interface – looks good
• XCode (Mac only) see video
• Apple SDK need to register
• YouSRC.com pc & mac great video Webbased simulator program. With android player. Apps can be shared with others. Source code available.

A few years ago I heard that SIMS was to be forced to allow others to access the data contained within it, thereby opening the way for smaller agile companies to innovate and provide new solutions to provide important new functionality. So the search continued this year at BETT. It’s a great opportunity to get around a lot of solutions in a short time.

And this year – at last! – I found a stunning solution  - Go4schools – which also happened to win a BETT award (not necessarily a recommendation in my view based on previous evidence). Classroom Monitor I also found interesting and will investigate further for the English and maybe (my) ICT dept.

Go4Schools.com

Allows heads of department to set  the departmental tracking points for each term and to check they have been completed – with work flow that reminds teachers. There is nice granular permissions that allow people that need to see the data. And then, the holy grail, all vital statistics are visible in a dashboard in real time (rather than just 4 times a year). Statistics include:

• Performance against target (whole year, each class, each teacher, by vulnerable group, individual student). This makes the Ofsted requirement of tracking vulnerable groups trivial.
• Nationwide Residuals (as above)
• Tracking of interventions is based on live data. Allows year heads, tutors and subject teachers to ‘be on the same page.

Then the killer punch is that reports can be provided to parents digitally with work flow that manages a 2 stage reviewing process (by teaching colleague, then Head of Dept) and statement banks that improve quality and saves teachers time. Reporting cycles can be reduced from Weeks to days.

So not only can you get a world class assement module, it will pay for itself. You can more than offset the 4-£5000 cost (large secondary school) by saving £thousands on  admin and printing costs.

On a personal level I met with Paula Benchly,  a deputy at Neale Wade School, who’s husband John developed the initial solution for her when she was up to her eyeball in shared spreadsheets and trying to pull aggregated data from them. So it was nice to discuss the vision and development as she has been through what I have been struggling with the past few years.

Classroom monitor

If Go4school.com is about what to do with assessment (data). Classroom monitor is about better, more transparent assessment. APP grids or exam board leveling criteria are preloaded (but customisable) and there is a sophisticated interface that allows you to select a student (or group using a mouse) and mark their progress in relation to the criteria (Met, Almost, Not or Targeted – meaning awaiting evidence). Aggregated statistics are produced.

The cost would start at around £400 per department ( there may be customisation fees). So this could really help an English Department implement APP but I felt perhaps not a whole school solution.

I wonder if Classroom Monitor could be linked to Go4Schools so once the assessment is done (CM) the data flows into the school wide  system (G4S).

We are to get a 3D projector so Sally and I went to a seminar With Anne Bamford reporting the results of an academic study that was pretty bullish on the use of 3D for Science. Students understand more from seeing a 3D beating heart than a 2D beating heart. Interestingly its preferred to looking at a 3d Plastic model of the chest and to dissecting a real sheep’s heart (because they don’t move?). Students recall more and ask more and better questions.

To use 3D projection in science we are going to need more than one projector, fortunately that might prove to be more affordable than we first thought.

• Most projectors coming out now are 3D enabled – costs less than £800
• New projectors use long-lasting LEDs instead of bulbs which means they pay for themselves in about 3 years.
• Active 3D is the only option native option in projectors. This requires you to buy 30 sets of expensive (£25) glasses. The consumer market drives projector sales. Most consumers only need to buy 2-4 sets of glasses.
• Cinemas use passive 3D which allows you to use cheaper (£2.50) glasses.
• HURRAH There is a solution(Volfoni.com) that allows you to add a device to a project make it produce a passive 3D image. So students can use cheaper more disposible glasses – they might even have their own from their last cinema trip. See the Smart Crystal Pro for around 500 Euro.

PRINTING

We waste a lot of paper and toner on printing. The last time I moaned that we needed software to control and monitor printing credits I was told it was too expensive. It seems now that they are giving this software away for free. Not only that (RUBBING MY EYES) they will replace all your printers with colour printers for free just to have the privilege of you buying toner from them. Sounds too good to be true, I will have to investigate further. Surely there must be a minimum spend.??

http://www.printersforschools.co.uk

I met with one of the directors of the company.

Jolicloud has been the most successful OS on my cheap Acer Aspire One netbook. However the first update from 1.0 to 1.1 stopped Skype working on the Internal Microphone and the recent switch from 1.1 to 1.2 stopped Flash working in the browser. Other people have had these problems but there doen’t seem to be enough of a community to get solutions for obscure bits of hardware. I’m going back to version 1.0 but in the end if it doesn’t work, I’ll be looking some where else.

I have tried many replacements for the originally installed version of Linux, Linpus Lite. My Girlfriend who uses the machine most would have preferred Windows XP and I even went as far as buying a version off ebay with serial number but it didn’t work past the months trial period  (if only I had paid the extra to have XP preinstalled.)  She didn’t like the ultra lite Linux’s like Crunchbang nor Ubuntu netbook remix. Jolicloud has been the one that has stopped the cries for XP to be fixed.

Jolicloud is fast with a Chromium browswer, Spotify and Skype – our key applications around the house.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/3205277810/

Summer holidays are time for thinking. Teachers need to learn. But how long to think before producing something? (eg. blog posts, emails). I’ve been thinking about democratic schools and have actually found something similar in Brighton, the South Downs Learning Centre. The Self Managed Learning (SML) technique it seems was also trialled in some East Sussex schools in 2005/6 but of course they couldn’t let go of the curriculum so it didn’t get anywhere.

I’ve discovered that youtube on a large TV is an amazing resource as I have watched testimonies of students from democratic schools discuss their experiences as is Google books (See Daniel Greenberg’s “Free at last” especially the chapter on fishing.

Given the bombardment of rhetoric from the establishment its good to realise that its critics have been around for a long time. I’ve been looking at books from Myles Horton & Paulo Freire (thanks Kata), Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society) and John Dewey.

This is a part of learning, the beginning of a cycle… just taking time following intuition. This post is nothing more than a collection of links to stuff that I might (I do hope) to get back to.

http://www1.edexcel.org.uk/D201_0909/html/SPB201Leaflet.htm

Planning/scoping on paper is good but some kids prefer to design directly onto the machine.  I reckon there are 4 things to go in a poster like this:

• Slogan (or title)
• Layout
• Image
• Top Tips (4-6?)

We know it would be quicker to get the Top Tips down first but could a students produce a good poster having thought up the top tips at the end of the process? Probably yes.

So how can you give students the independence to go it alone but not turn out with something of poor quality (or unfinished) at the end?  Take a step back. let them design their success criteria (a peer assessment sheet) and let them go?

My thought for today

Had some good chats with

• Chris Filkins at Priory
• Russell Prodger at Rattan
• Tom at Rye

All official resources are linked here

Also I liked

filmsforlearning.org

Where’s Klaus

Serif Web Plus

Crazy Talk Facial Animator ($69)

Comic Life ($24)

I don’t read self improvement books as a rule but this struck me as interesting. .. for school leaders

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic as a Personality Ethic and a Character Ethic. (note the sub title) Covey  reviewed American self-improvement literature back to 1776…

I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial [focused in a Personality Ethic]. It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes–with social bandaids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.

 He then goes on to distinguish the Character Ethic as follows:

In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the Character Ethic as the foundation of success–things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man’s effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.