Hopefully it’s useful, mind you!

I’d love to be in a position of power, regarding the SG Computing curriculum. While there are great uses of technology in my subject (podcasting, blogging, moodly stuff, etc) , at the end of the day the course is a 2 year concept assault only punctuated by monotonous assessments on the most exciting of packages such as spreadsheets and databases. The cool guys at the SQA have thrown some presentation/graphics assessments in there for street cred, but they all begin with such sentences as “Maryvale High School publishes a bi-monthly newsletter. Jake has been asked to design a new logo.”.

What often strikes me about these assessments in the exactness of the requirements - like somehow, by mentioning that the school has the made-up name of Maryvale, students are instantly going to identify with the problem. Why can’t we have an assessment that is simply put, such as:

• Find out how to create a website that lets you and your friends write pages about your hobbies.
• Create the website so that the pages link together and so that it can be updated easily.
• Write instructions for someone that wants to edit the website.
• Send news of this website to twenty people, electronically.

Maybe I’m missing something?

I suppose such things are a mini version of one of education’s enduring problems - I’ll teach you how to create something, but you’ll need to do it my way, and create what I say. Otherwise you won’t pass.

I’ve been v. busy as am doing some extra stuff in school at the moment. The games design class is going swimmingly and I’ll write about that soon. This week’s concentration is on the S4 prelims - how to set up a Moodle that can really help the niggly last weeks of revision?

My plan is to make a one page prelim revision section on my moodle site, and start with a series of linked up study plans. So there’ll be links to glossaries for each unit followed by links to the quiz section for the unit, then a link to a printable set of exam-style questions for that unit. I’ve got the first two done, and will do some of the last one tonight.

I have also being using the games at revise computing  to help spur on some of my pupils - they really enjoy it, and I hope it’s helping. According to Inquizitor, such activities do help learning, especially in lower ability pupils. But the pressure is on the get good, written answers for prelims, so I am a bit worried about using this too much.

Anyway, best get going with the boring stuff, for now, as I’m sure that helps too!

Ironically, I have a copy of “How to Get Things Done”

Have I found time to read it yet?

No I have not.

Going to try a bit of design through line-rider. Get pupils to try out levels and then talk about what works, what doesn’t, and what makes a good game.

Might be another way to look at good design!

(I had embedded a video here but it wrecked the layout somehow! oh well!)

Curriculum is changing everywhere. Everyone is working on developing curriculum, but no one is getting it completely correct.

Curriculum for Excellence - a good approach, but is it enough?

Common futures, different pasts.

Countries come from different places, with different political, ideological pasts.

We are all part of a global economy - and global security is important anywhere.

More students are studing to a higher level, and from the same schools.

Knowledge society
The globalised curriculum - we have misused some global education projects for own interests. PISA has meant people chasing the carrot rather than effecting change.

“Knowledge Society” an important phrase. This means the system must be flexible at a global level or a school level. Do we have this at a school level? Is our curriculum prescribing what is done?

Flexibility is a precondition for creativity. Is a school a creative place to work and learn?

Classroom has to have space for taking risks. Ingenuity must be a part of the process. Ideas must be used to solve practical/technical/social problems.

Education Policies

Currently:

Achievement targets are important. Test scores are important too.

This leads to curricular uniformity.

What is happening?

GERM - promotion by international institutions and bilateral donors - Global Education Reform Movement.

- an orthodoxy of curriculum round the world.

Higher standards have led to a centralised curriculum. A need for emphasising literacy but geared towards passing tests.

ICT in schools has been a huge investment but some countries fall behind.

Consequential accountability is still v. important.

Trust is disappearing - teachers don’t trust the system because it does not trust them.

In England, of those who enter Oxbridge, half come from 200 schools. Two tier education system (business class and economy class).

The high quality public education is essential in creating the things that we need in a knowledge economy.

The Craziness.

Curriculum as product - programmes, studies and courses.

Or, Curriculum as process - content less imporant, more how things are done.

Or Curriculum a Framework - state framework.

Or Curriculum as Outcomes

Or Curriculum as standard - documented standards.

Testing and curriculum

Interesting cases for this from USA -

Content - less or more for testing

Control?

Effects of high-stakes testing on curriculum. (Wayne Au, 2007)

Qualatitive research studies - 69% courses contracted, 29% expanded subject matter.

Knowledge form - 49% fractured, 29% integrated.

Pedagogy- 66% teacher centred, 12% student centred.

Assessment and accountability affected heavily by tests.

“We are all pressured by SATs and I guess that group work does not fit into preparing the children well for tests”

Curriculum and change

Is aCfE bringing anything new or just an improvement?

Will more of the same make a difference?

“If the horse you are riding dies, get off”

battery going so this is all for now!

Scribble is the social networking part of Scran.

Background- tap into the social networking vibe

Used edublogs model - for licensed scran users.

All users log in and can store “my stuff”. Pupils, staff and home users can use it.

Communities can be formed within SCRAN.

Safety and responsibility - scribble checked every day for inappropriate content.

using scribble is an opportunity to explain being a responsible blogger!

Screenshot shows blogs, users, random photos.

Lindsay _____ - teacher at Gilmerton Primary.

Working with students in P7 using scribble/scran.

Website exactly as in screenshots. Blogging since April. Encouraging detailed discussion between student.s

Shared movies, posters, photos, music.

But no comments or interactivity!

As soon as people can have an audience things get more interesting! (Heard that earlier from The Heppell).

How was scribble approached?

- Parental permission

- used same logins as superclubs plus cheme

- Started with a Gilmerton group, then added friends.

http://scribble.scran.ac.uk/user32081/weblog/1625.html

- easy to set up and use. Members instantly become easy to get in contact with from each other’s blogs.

Using scribble

- who can see or read?

- what personal information should be used?

- added clustrmap and web links to outlink the site.

- browser gives you access to other communities.

- Tags used to find similar stuff on the site.

Personalisation

Adding pictures from internet/photobooth etc

Restrictions to make it safe

Only visible to gated community and some parts Private default.

Starting to blog

(battery running out so will need to get in a bit just now)

varied between poorer chat based and focused, interesting and well commented on ‘discussions’

better posts - 24 comments

basic, chat based posts - 0 posts

school blog to tie things together

developed faster. more insterest, easier to find topics.

Cluster map - pupils really liked this.

Questioning section used to encourage questions to go into one are of the site.

Then a showcase blog for school.

Then a what you can do blog, storing games, slideshows, music!

SCRAN focusing on feedback such as ditinguishing between opinions and facts.

E.g. Heelys as opinion and fact. - 65 comments!

If you were to do blogging (advice)

Look at other school’s blogs (mentioning John’s blog)

Get other staff involved.

Get one or two blogs from each class per day.

Upload as much as you can!

Senior students own blog pages?

Discuss fact/opinion before blogs.

Hopes..

Continue with whole school,

encourage classroom use

Talk to other schools and comment!

Good comments from children on blogging!

Good talk - good to see another version of blogging in action!

A few hundred glow mentors here!

Why is online learning so imporant?

Historical look at online communities - prestel

A basic system like prestel was popular. Technology was very seductive to pupils and staff.

94 to 97: Schools online: Who’s online feature very popular

1998-00: Tesco SchoolNet (TSN2K) - the largest Internet Learning Project. £7 million - but system started with no content, however, contributions began to pour in.
1995 - University for Industry online learning network. Adults swapping ideas and experiences. Used ideas like “the broken train” to encourage people to share ideas.

1998-99: codename scoop (prototype for think.com). Prime Ministerial promise to have an email for every child. Sense of audience is hugely motivating.

1999- Ideas Board, a phone based ocmpany centric system. Using phones to post texts/pictures/etc. Orange use this tech internally to put up ideas.

1999- Inclusion Trust’s notschool.net - invent what you study (for childen excluded from school). Digital resource for self-help and peer to peer support. Again very motivating.

JellyOS - community operating system.

What was discovered?

Online learning communities are:

collaborative, transcultural, 24/7, global, inclusive, mixed age, seductive and engaging, project based, cross subject domain, transformed by technological opportunities.

Building schools now that engage learners in the same effective way as online

Glow is prototyping learning in 10 years time.

1000 people asked about learning experiences.

- actually doing something, not watching

- having support from teacher/coach/parent

- doing it with others

- having an audience for the learning - “people around here don’t know how good we are”
- sense of having learned

- a sense that the task was tough

- having some sense of personal progress

- some passion about the whole activity (from teacher etc)

- some eccentricity (from teacher etc) - it’s ok to be a bit mad!

Where is that in physical schools and online spaces?

It’s more present in online spaces.

(Questions now)
New Learning Spaces - not-school children that benefit from online communities. 98% back on track within 18 months. First graduate in 2002!

Hurdles in online communities: Genuine nervousness.

Showing youtube video that shows how to multiply using lines.

Nervousness of magnitude is one of biggest holdbacks.

Don’t try and proceed by best practice - instead effective practice.

Another Question: What’s the minimum number of participants?

Depends on the task. For instance, head teachers are busy so start with 1000. But two or three children can deal with a task also. Me, We, and See. Who is the greater community in Glow?

Getting the thing going needs a lot of attention - like running a great party.

New Questions: how do you overcome the challenge of where to take the community?

Teachers know how to make things exciting - but within the limits of the system. Same with online community but the limits aren’t as fierce. The setup etc is easier now - it is normal for the cool places to be.

Glow is the glue to join up things.

Showing speed stacking video! Great to see how poppular. But comments are something else - uncensored and can be dangerous.

Glow is the glue to keep interesting things together. And it has an audit trail of identification!

You can never keep up with trends but you can benefit from them.

Glow can keep evolving along with other technologies.

Kids are used to temporary nature of online communities.

New Q: What would you change?

A better expression of time - if Glow is here to stay, then show people’s progress through system. Older documents faded a bit. Just to show what is oldest. Represent time in Glow.

Australian school with open plan

How quick can you use open space?

Day one: build a classroom in the space

Day three: more organic, small conversations and learning experiences not in each class.

- this is a model of online spaces - a world of venn diagrams - all about overlap.

- schools are fantastic powerhouses of intellect! Policy limits what teachers can do. No policy for online yet so invent the future.

New Q: We have a freedom but there are constraints - assessment system constrains, and focuses us on improving grades. Adequately measuring educational achievement - how?

People still justifying themselves because achievements not fully recognised. Build a model of recognition which sits on top of accreditation. Workplace learning degrees - ability to narrate learning transcends grades - e.g. doctor’s facets, not grades.

Repuation online through peer to peer exchange and validation is very important. In the end, Glow will become a reputation engine

Glow is opening the door to embracing online networks and advantages.

That’s it! Excellent talk I think. I think he summed up well the connection between glow and online communities. Off to have another wander before games education talk (13:40 in Learning Teaching Scotland zone, if you’re interested.)

Please come. Saw another game maker’s presentation today and it was great. Hopefully mine will be ok!

So far I have spent a lovely four hours at the scottish learning festival. I’m home again now as I decided to come and drop off all the millions of leaflets and stuff I got. Here’s my highlights so far:

Talk by Janette Thomson on Game Maker in the classroom. Janette admits to being a technophobe but has done amazing things with Game Maker so far. The class used Game maker to make a game based around three characters. They sources all the images and then they used the material to make booklets for younger pupils in the school. Sounds great!

Introduction to Glow - was nice to see a fully functioning glow on screen and see what was being done. General comments from other audience members were that it looked really good but that it couldn’t be easily explained through a presentation. Talking to various people at various stands, there is still quite a bit of scepticism about Glow making it out to the public successfully.
General stand banter - met a few interesting characters. The Inquisitor people were most helpful and very insightful into the place of online assessment stuff and how it might fit into Glow. Saw some cool stereoscopic stuff but the kit costs.. wait for it.. £17,000 per set. hmm.

Time to get packed up and head back in for glow meeting then a bit of teachmeet.

Bye!

I started pupils off with Neverwinter Nights today by asking them what makes a good game. We talked about what was good and what was rubbish in games today. We talked about what kinds of things you get in fantasy games (wizards and castles etc). Then we went on the computers.

I treated the learning at this point like an administrative task. I gave the pupils enough knowledge to get them to create worlds with creatures and objects and different terrain, and asked them to experiment. I set up a question board using a wee bit of php, which allowed pupils to post up a question onto a projected screen. The questions will be used to build the next lesson - pupil directed learning, I think, is the best way. Why teach them how to make different levels of spells, or use keys, if they first want to do so many other things (mainly involving fire, pits, death and blood!)

It worked out well, I think. Some examples of what pupils have made so far include:

• A big dark foggy pit with a rope bridge
• An army of dragons/seagulls/chickens
• A forest fire
• Teams of dragons that fight

And they came up with doing stuff like this next week:

• Get the creatures to talk to us
• Go inside houses
• Be able to attack people and not just get killed by dragons
• How to make dragons your pet
• How to have a family in your game
• Changing the colours of the characters
• Picking stuff up

These are, I’d say, all important in creating good games. Pupils had a go at each other’s games and showed each other how to do stuff.

I’m very impressed with their work, two hours into the course! Well done S1! It’s great to see the class enjoying something like that and feeling free to take it in the direction they see fit to.
I’ll be giving a demonstration of some of the Neverwinter nights stuff at the Scottish Learning Festival in a few weeks, if anyone wants to see! Hopefully we’ll have videos of our games or maybe some demonstrators!

More on this and other things later.

Start with for learning

Blogging as a revision and progress monitoring tool should be encouraged. Pupils could be given challenges that they respond to on their blog, as well as being encouraged to ask questions and answer comments. Encouraging pupils to post up their resources such as quizzes they have created, or presentations, could be helpful too.

Choose the best style

Pupils could choose to blog in text or in audio - whatever is best for the pupil.

Start to collaborate

Organising a collaborative project could move pupils to the next level in regards to study. Instead of having a set of class notes, pupils could add their own study notes to a large, structured site.

Pupils could summarise concepts on their blogs and recieve feedback on their explanations from teachers and pupils.

Either a wiki or a feature like Moodle’s glossary could be used to allow pupils to log multiple definitions of concepts. Comments and ratings could be used to pick the most popular definitions.

Take the work to the next level

Pupils have access to CC images. They could use these to improve their entries, illustrating their examples or could create their own diagrams.

Multimedia versions

Pupils could use podcasts, quizzes, video, animations, comic strips, games or presentations to explain their points.

Old media versions

As well as sharing and improving resources online, it would be easy for pupils to select their favourite definitions and explanations, formatting the work as they choose, for a printable set of notes. It’s  even possible for them to create their own book of notes instantly and in high quality. Having a personalised but full set of notes for their subject can only be a positive step.

Teachers and pupils together

I can provide notes for my pupils and my pupils can provide notes for me. The understanding of the concepts is shared, and improved upon.

I’m urging you to use your vote for my team, from St. Columba’s High. They tried really hard and came up with a wee show about anti-social behaviour. They rerecorded the show in XFM studios in Glasgow and a good day was had by all. They are desperate to win so please vote for them if you like their show! (And if not, vote anyway?)

You can read more at the schoolwave site or go directly to the voting area

And if you really want to help, highlight the competition in your blogs - get the blogosphere listening to Scottish schools and help raise the profile of our excellently achieving kids higher!