Socrative

As I have mentioned before. The girls at my school will all be arriving at school in September with iPads in September. I want to make sure that I am utilising them from day one for two reasons. 1) I am interested in seeing how they can impact on my practice and 2) I want to make sure that the iPads are value for money for the families.

I am using explain everything, audio boo, nearpod, iDoceo, QR codes and pinterest. I have had a go at Aurasma and will continue to work on iBooks too, with a view to the new curriculum.

However, another tool I want to utilise is Socrative.

It is a website and app that allows students to answer multiple choice, true & false, and short answer questions.

It is possible to upload an image to the question, which is very useful for science questions. 

In the summer term I trialled this with a few classes using their mobile phones. They did find it hard to find the website and put in the room number to start with and there was some staggering of starts of the quizzes. I would hope to get over this as the students start to get familiar with the site and/or app (if they chose to download it). I also want to look at  using the teacher paced idea to help students keep up and not race ahead. 

I would also suggest that keeping a quiz short will help to reduce the time lag between the fast and slow finishers. I have perhaps made too many questions with 12.

After the quiz it is possible to download the report to see how students have got on. I am interested in doing this and uploading it to evernote and ultimately idoceo to help create better, personalised, feedback in reports and parents evening. 

I have also noticed that it is possible to download the quizzes and hand them out as paper resources. I think this really adds to socrative: It takes a long time to type a multiple choice test, but this means that it will be better to type it into socrative and get a paper or online test. Two birds, one stone. It will also mean I can keep a copy in my teaching file or give a copy to a student who forgets or breaks their iPad.

When I have completed all the work for P1/3/4 from the Gateway science GCSEs suite I will share the resources, including the socrative quiz numbers. 

The Financial Cost of Being a Teacher

During my career I have always used my own money to support my teaching in some way. At first it was buying pens. I could fight and argue with students, I could pick discarded pens up off the floor, but in the end I bought them from ASDA or Tesco every Sunday and gave them out to students, about 30 per week. Praise stickers and stamps were bought and and other prizes like chocolate for use in class.

Towards the end of my second year of teaching I also bought myself an Apple PowerBook, this was a serious investment in my own teaching. Even in 2005 it wasn't common to be permanently connected to the internet so this computer was bought for making presentations and worksheets on as well as storing all my electronic information.

At my second school things got a little more serious. We weren't allowed more than £10 per year of photocopying. That was one set of sheets per class per year. This was because all the photocopying was done the summer before and therefore we wouldn't need anything that wasn't in the scheme of work. But I did. I wasn't going to give my students hand written sheets that were photocopied on an angle so you couldn't see the bottom corner of the sheet. So I bought a printer, laminator, coloured paper, paper cutter etc and set about making my own worksheets and paying for them myself. They were mine, no one got to share them and I took them all away when I left.

As a science teacher I have spent considerable amounts of my own money on things for experiments. We have petty cash in the department and you can get expenses, but it seems trivial to ask for 59p for a pack of strawberry laces or 40p for two packs of spaghetti. If I am honest I don't mind about this. I once bought a class set of hand-held fans for a lesson on air pressure and I did claim for them. I would always expect my technicians to claim for shopping as they do earn significantly less and I would never judge someone who wanted the 20p for spaghetti back.

I also care about my own CPD, I have hundreds (if it doesn't run into thousands) of pounds worth of teaching books, revision gudies and textbooks that I have bought with my own money. I was once told by an SMT member that I should claim this back too, but I didn't because I want to own the books not the department. I spend my own money going to the ASE conference, the ticket as well as the travel and accommodation. I don't think anything of it.

I bought myself an iPad, I use my own camera, I have my own leads for connecting the iPad and my macbook air to the projector. When my partner is challenged by his management about why he leaves school within half an hour of the end of the school day his response is that we have better equipment at home to work on that at school and it is true. We've spent money ensuring that we have the necessary equipment to allow us to do our job.

I pay a membership to the ASE, my union and the IoP. I will probably have to add the college of teaching to that in the future.

I have always just got on with spending my own money. It is part of the teaching culture.

Until now. The next step down this line is into the world of IT. I have bought myself a new iPad mini (as my original iPad doesn't run iOS 7) and I have started buying apps. I didn't really think about this either, I find playing with the apps fun and don't begrudge £2.99 here or £0.69 there. I have a dropbox account with 100GB of storage that costs me $9.99 per month via paypal. I don't even think about the cost of that, I use it to store things for work, but I also use it to back up my photos.

I am considering upgrading to evernote premium (£35 per year), if you want to embed videos into a wordpress account it is $60 per year, and edublogs account which can embed video and manage student accounts is $39.95 per year. Nearpod is $120/year. I can pay a subscription to pocket (sounds really useful actually), I can pay a subscription to feedly. I can pay twitter to remove the adds, I can buy more add-ons in apps like moldiv. Popplet is $30 per year. You can up grade Prezi for $59 per year. Picktochart upgrades are $24 per month.

Where does it stop? How many lots of $9.99 per month can I pay, how much equipment should I be supplying that will allow me to do my job? And why don't I claim it back?

AudioBoo

I have seen audioboo mentioned as a possible medium for students to express their learning. But I hadn't really thought about using it. I don't want to get my students signing up to things, so they end up with a lot of social media accounts that follow them around for the rest of their lives. However, last night I was looking through the app store, saw audioboo and decided to give it a go for myself.

I am glad that I did. You don't have to have an account to see the audioboos someone else has made, so this means I can make short clips and my students can listen to them.

I believe that audioboo gives me a much quicker alternative to explain everything or making an iMovie. I have produced three audioboos today that I feel relatively happy about sharing.

Learning from experience of making videos I made a script of what I wanted to say. Even doing that I re-rewrote it a few times as I spoke the script. Spelling mistakes, bad hand writing and line reruns in odd places made getting the right word out and the best rhythm difficult and meant I re-recorded often. Audioboo allows you to edit your clip by cutting bits. I used that a lot. Leaving big spaces between sections to allow easier clipping.

listen to ‘GCSE physics: stopping distances’ on Audioboo

This post was my first attempt.

https://audioboo.fm/helenrogerson80 This link takes you to my profile, with the list of other boos.

I wait to see what my students think of this and how much use they make of it. Either way I am impressed with audioboo, thanks to all of you who brought it to my attention.

First Attempts at Making a Video using ExplainEverything

I have this vision of being able to use videos to help my students learn. But first I need to practice and become quicker at this.

I have heard a lot of people recommend ExplainEverything, so I gave it a go. My first attempt is not for public consumption, took my hours and I didn't think it looked very professional. Then I searched for some tutorials. Perhaps I should have done this first. http://www.morriscooke.com/?p=134

I learned that you can upload a presentation and each slide in the presentation will be a different slide in the ExplainEverything movie. So I decided that I would create a presentation and use ExplainEverything to talk over the top. It seemed (and it is) much easier to do this in ExplainEverything than in iMoive.

I wanted to make the film look slightly interesting, so I took inspiration from Jamie Clark: jamieleeclark85.wordpress.com/ The resources he makes always look great and I saw no reason why I couldn't use keynote to create attractive slides and make the short film more interesting to the young people who will use it.

By far the worst thing about making a video is doing the voice over. I strong recommend writing a script and reading through it. Even then I make mistakes and change my mind when reading it. I have found the experience of voicing a video very interesting. I don't find it easy to succinctly describe physics phenomena, so I imagine that I babble on in class. Creating the video means that I need to use as few words as possible and get to the main points. Hopefully this makes it clearer what students need to know.

If you watch the video you will see black stripes down the slide. In future I need to realise that I must make the background presentations with 'wide screen'. Which is a possible selection in Keynote. This should eliminate the issue.

I wish that in the video below I had used more features of ExplainEverything to actually move the hand around. (I think it can do this). But I will continue to play and make more resources. Hopefully it will help to engage my students.

At the moment I plan to only make instructional videos for GCSE, as I will teach Key Stage 3 with a more discovery approach and I don't want them to always be told the answer. Plus I have online textbooks and activities bought from OUP for them. A-level is changing in September 2015, so I am going to leave that for now. I hope to make very short videos for GCSE so that they will be useable in the new specifications even if content is shuffled about within the modules.

I am on holiday at the moment and I am concerned whether I will be able to keep up the creative juices when I get back to school, but as twitter colleagues have suggested, students will be able to make the videos too! I look forward to that.

Decisions Decisions; where to start when using ICT

I have said this before, but in September all the students will have 1-2-1 iPads. I have spent two days thinking about this opportunity. I would welcome suggestions and possible pitfalls.

One thing I have realised is that there is too much choice.

Do I use google, showbie, dropbox, onedrive, Evernote or what to share content with students? Do I create a blog? Will what I choose cause confusion if other staff go with something different? I have read about iTunesU, but I don't have permission to 'bind my institution to the terms and conditions'. Which is disappointing. I think that despite the enthusiasm on the internet for this, I will give it a miss for now.

However, after a recommendation from a colleague (who like me didn't get an iPad in the roll out) I have settled on nearpod as a starting point. I only get 50MB storage though, and probably need the gold package. However, as you can link to websites I should be able to link to youtube so won't need to upload videos and therefore manage to keep presentations small.

I do love the way that you can allow students to draw a picture as one of the actives in Nearpod, this means that I can allow students to show their working in physics and maths questions that are hard to type due to all the funny symbols. I might have to ask my students to consider a stylus though.

I think that I will ask my students to get an evernote account too. I feel that evernote is the best way to keep your lesson notes organised. Being able to tag notes will also help as well as being able to add photographs to notes. (Which reminds me, I must help students by adding suggestions for tags to my presentations, especially as you can also add tags in pages on the mac).

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/ipad-workflow-solutions-for-classroom-education.html
Until reading this article, I hadn't really considered the full idea of workflow. I have thought of how to get work from me to them, but not whether I want to get electronic work from them, mark it and send it back to them. At my previous school the Head of Chemistry used moodle to set all homework and loved that he could annotate the work that students did and they could see his comments.

I actually think that I would like my feedback to remain in their notebooks for now. There are a couple of reasons for this, firstly that I think the notebooks will be more ordered (as they will be chronological) than folders on their iPads. I don't want to have to get into how to keep work organised as I want to teach my lessons. I am not sure that I want to check their online folders for organisation, and I am not sure that they'll refer back to them anyway. When the inspectors come in they will want to see exercise books and folders, and I am not sure I can produce electronic resources for every lesson anyway. So even if students take electronic notes, they will likely be answering questions on worksheets. The exercise book also allows me a quick flick back to reference previous targets I have written and their contexts. ISI are due this year, and I suppose in another 5 years when they come back we will have moved on and so will they.

In the past two days I have started to write a list of videos that I would like to make. I wrote a script then I had a quick go with explain everything today, I wasn't happy, but we have to start somewhere. I think that I want to make my own graphics to include, so I need to think about how I will construct them.

I am very keen to look at online testing. Nearpod will allow this, but also socrative and googleforms. I have access for key stage 3 to activate and I hope that this will allow testing and recording of the responses. I had a look at quizlet today and I can really see how useful this would be for MFL. I think that I will borrow a textbook and use the glossary in the back to help populate quizlet for GCSE as this should help some of the girls who struggle with key words. I wish it would allow images.

I know I don't want to just produce resources that may or may not be looked at as part of revision. My GCSE Science and BBC bitesize are already there. Often students look in the revision guide and still need to come to me or have another look at the experiment. This year I found myself saying to students "you don't need to understand why an electric current is produced when a magnet moves relative to a coil, you just need to know that it happens, describe how to make it bigger and why the current would change direction". They wouldn't get that feedback from a video. However, being able to have that kind of conversation because the students have more time to answer questions that draw out their knowledge is appealing to me. I hope that technology will help with this.

I foresee a busy, but creative summer ahead.

Nurture 2014 continued

Highlights and lowlights of the year so far:

• The ASE conference is always a massive highlight to January.
• Richard and I agree to get married, the date is set for 30th August.
• I bought the new laptop that I needed.
• I managed to organise a campsite for the accommodation so we can go to the commonwealth games without having to commute from Edinburgh or something like that!
• A colleague and I took Year 7 to see the Superleague Netball at Bath. They loved it. 
• We had our ASE west teachmeet and it went well.
• March was busy with a Year 5 STEM day, the last as I don't feel that we need the hassle or that the school quite understands the issues around putting such a day on. Throwing my toys out of the pram, certainly.
• We also took (almost) all of Year 7-10 and a few VI formers to the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham. Something that upset the rest of the school. Apparently taking 5 separate trips might have been OK, but taking everyone so that cover is easier to deal with and giving the rest of the staff a free day isn't popular. The kids enjoyed it.
• The science week assembly went down well, it was delivered by the deputy head who received a round of applause at the end.
• I very much enjoyed attending a video-inset by Teachit, where I was inspired to create my own.
• I taught an IT-only lesson. Work needed! 
• After the Easter holidays many staff were given iPads as we move to 1-2-1 iPads for September. Many, many members of staff, but not me. I was very upset to say the least. It was my own fault, as I was asked directly if I could do without as there wasn't enough to go round. I feel very stupid now for saying that I would manage. I imagined that other staff with their own iPads would be asked the same, but this wasn't the case. My original iPad only has iOS5 and I can't even open my own keynote documents that I have created on my phone or laptop. I am very bitter that I have had to buy a new iPad mini (only 16GB and I am already struggling).
• In May I went to school on three Saturdays to help Year 10 revise for their core science exam.
• Richard went out cycling a lot of those weekends too as he keeps up the stamina he developed for LEL in 2013. His aim is to prequalify for PBP in 2015.
• I delivered my first ever assembly.
• I enjoyed the school lecture from the director of Westonbirt Arboretum.
• I have been to ResearchEd West Midlands, Pedagoo South West, and the Education Festival.
• I went to the Cheltenham Science Festival.
• My car had a warning light on, but didn't cost as much money as last year to fix it.
• On the penultimate Friday of this term I had to talk to the Governors about what we had achieved in science and I believe they were impressed.
• I have bought lots of new resources, particularly activate to allow students to access online resources that support their learning on their iPads.
• I have tried a variety of resources and teaching activities this year that I want to embed further next academic year. 

I have made a few resolutions.

• I will use all the appropriate online tests on activate with Year 7 to trial them.
• I want to create videos for instructions key stage 3 practicals.
• I will thoroughly investigate the new A-level courses.
• I will use iMovie and explain everything to create resources to support my learners. 
• I will embed iPad use into my teaching... I need to decide what this will look like.
• I will give my students more opportunities to answer open questions so that I can mark and feedback on their written communication as well as their science knowledge.
• I want to get a team together for the Engineering Education Scheme.
• I want to get the Big Bug Bag Man (Pete) into school next term.

I will also enjoy our wedding, my cousin's wedding, our trip to the commonwealth games and our visit to York for the Yort Tweetup. 

Festival of Education

I was persuaded by @Arakwai to come to the Festival of Education. I have enjoyed the science festival and sessions in the Bristol festival of ideas, so I was keen to go along.

The first session I went to was Andrew Andonis. There was no description of what he was going to talk about in the programme, but I decided I wanted to hear what he had to say about himself anyway. I wasn't disappointed.

I was impressed that Andrew Adonis seemed to speak clearly without notes. I think this is the way that Labour politicians approach speeches these days? Both myself and my OH are teachers and we discuss the state of education under the Tories a lot. He works with students who are 'hard to reach' and is concerned by the pressure on them to go to university as the only route. So when Andrew Adonis talked about the improvement in number and access to apprenticeships as being the next step Labour would have taken I nearly punched the air in agreement.

I also agree with Lord Andonis about teacher training. Separating teacher training from universities isn't going to make the profession more respected or professional.

Due to the number of questions the session over ran and I didn't go to anything in the next slot. Instead I went into the Pearson tent. Interesting, they are using research to influence their products. I was told that the literacy in exploring science: working scientifically was tested in a RCT. I was interested in this, because I feel that as a head of department the resources in the scheme of work have the opportunity to influence the teaching within the department, rather like UpD8 SEGUE has had a massive influence on me. I await to see what Pearson produce.

After a hot chocolate, which was the biggest disappointment of the day (get a Barista Machine Wellington College), we went to a panel discussion about maths. Panel discussions are, for me, what make festivals tick and I found this one disappointing. I did discover that if we improve the maths level of the lowest achievers then we can massively increase GDP. 11% of our young people don't reach PISA's level 1.

Then (fortuitously) a speaker didn't turn up so went to lunch early to avoid the queues. The Paul Rankin burger was lush. Then Arakwai (not her real name) saw via twitter that there was an impromptu panel debate about research and research leads and involving Tom Bennet. So we strode off towards the spiritual room. The session raised more questions about how to turn teaching into a research lead profession. Questions that even the introduction of research leads into schools don't currently answer, but hope to in the future. I can't speak for the wider education community, but it was clear from the room that there is an appetite for teachers to be more involved with research. I was interested in the project Harvard are running to try and make links between teachers/schools and research, but (I might be wrong here, there wasn't much description of the project) it sounded like Harvard were linking with specific schools, what about the rest? How do these small scale projects scale up to a national picture? I was itching to ask a question, but people far more interesting and intellectual than I had their hands up, so I let them speak.

After that I dragged Arakwai to see David Starkey, Keith Vass, Claire Fox and Katie Hopkins in a panel debate. I didn't like Katie Hopkins when she was on The Apprentice and that opinion has not improved. This debate allowed her the opportunity to be extremely vile and make David Starkey sound like the voice of reason. I found some of the opinions of Claire Fox rather unpleasant too. I hope the panel were booked for their entertainment value rather than their expertise? This isn't something I am used to: When attending the science festival I haven't experienced a debate where the panelists attack each other and make statements with so little evidence or experience to back them up. "I don't want my daughter to sit next to someone naughty" and "we shouldn't educate the bottom 20%  intellectually" are not the best informed statements I have heard. If Katie Hopkins has a problem with the education of her children then she should speak to the school, not take education on in the national media.

Second to last we went to another panel debate on whether students should get a say in what they learn. The debate meandered all over the place. I did get the impression the lady from BBC learning didn't know much about education in the classroom as she spouted the corporate lines. Johnny Ball was an interesting addition to the panel, obviously passionate about education. Most interesting was the student from Wellington where students do have some say in what they learn. Not being restricted by doing GCSEs must help an awful lot when it comes to making a creative curriculum that will inspire your students. I was envious for a moment, but then nervous as the straight jacket to GCSEs at least gives me a benchmark.

Final I went to see Richard Dawkins. Everything can be linked to evolution apparently. I think the speech Alice Roberts did to the ASE about humans and education was much better than what Richard Dawkins had to say. But it was good to hear him talk about the scientific method during the questions at the end. He was much calmer than I was when asked silly questions.

I enjoyed being able to go to so many sessions, however I found that 40 minutes wasn't enough. I am used to at least an hour, and often sessions had only just got going when we had to stop.

The idea of an education festival is a good one. I enjoyed being able to listen to debates that were high above my normal pay grade. I like being able to talk about education without feeling guilty that I am not putting something I have heard about into practice on Monday morning. But most if all it was great to be in an beautiful environment, with people who care about education talking and sharing with passion.

I can't wait for the next one.