Month: October 2011

#ukedchat Assessment Special

Assessment, TwitterPublished on1 Comment on #ukedchat Assessment Special

ukedchat logoI am delighted to finally have the opportunity to take the moderator’s hotseat for this week’s #ukedchat – in which we will be running a special discussion all about assessment.

UKedchat is a Twitter based discussion group that meet every Thursday evening between 8-9pm GMT. It is a fantastic example of narrowing the use of Twitter to allow educators to discuss a specific topic, and I am excited to be moderating this week’s session.

If you have never taken part in a discussion, no fear! Just take a look at this handy information about how to get involved. Everyone is welcome. Explore some of the previous discussion sessions on the summary blog.

Assessment is such a broad issue that I grappled and struggled to come to terms with as a teacher, in this week’s conversation I hope that you will join me in exploring this rich topic.

We will be looking at the wider pressures of an ageing assessment agenda; how summative assessment may blinker our understanding of success; why failing is good and also tips and ideas for implementing formative assessment in the classroom.

So join me @tombarrett on Twitter for the #ukedchat Assessment Special on Thursday 20th October 2011, 8-9pm GMT.

BBC Dimensions: exploring the human scale of events and places in history

Data, Mapping, Maths, Social MediaPublished on5 Comments on BBC Dimensions: exploring the human scale of events and places in history

Dimensions is an experimental project from the BBC that allows you to compare the scale of different types of events with something that we can all recognise. There are two parts of the project “How many really?” and “How big really?“

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“How many really?” is all about the numbers of people that were involved in a whole range of different events throughout history. The tool allows you to either add in your own numbers, for example 30, the number of children in your class, connect with Facebook or Twitter and compare your networks or even the number of people who can board a double decker bus or a Boeing 747.

You are then shown a visual comparison with the number of people involved in the event that you have chosen. The events fall into the following categories:

  • Battles
  • Civilisations
  • Current Affairs
  • Disasters
  • Diseases
  • Entertainment
  • Modern Society
  • Religion
  • Slavery
  • War

“How big really?” is all about getting a better understanding for the scale of different historical events and locations compared to our own map location.

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We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street?

Dimensions simply juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view of where you live. Certain “Dimensions” can be transformed into short walks, so you can get a physical appreciation of the distances involved.

The tool provides a range of example categories to explore including:

  • The War on Terror
  • Space
  • Depths
  • Ancient Worlds
  • Environmental Disasters
  • Festivals and Spectacles
  • WW2 – Battle of Britain
  • The Industrial Age
  • Cities in History

From the Ancient Worlds category you can place all sorts of significant monuments, like the Colosseum, on top of your own location. It gives you a true understanding of the scale of these structures. This would be great for classes to begin to really appreciate these huge monuments. What would be even better would be seeing a 3D model – as in Google Earth or Maps – on your location and then being able to pan and zoom around it.

The Dimensions tools would be interesting to use within a history class but also within maths to help children and classes get a better appreciation of different sizes. It will eventually be integrated into the online history resources at the BBC depending on user feedback.

Why I turned my back on teaching

Leadership, My classPublished onUpdated on35 Comments on Why I turned my back on teaching

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It has now been 6 months since I left the classroom as a Year 5/6 teacher and turned away from my role as Deputy Headteacher which I had only started a year before.

I have never really spent time writing about my decision on this blog and so thought it was about time, after all many of you helped in a small way to me actually getting the Deputy post in the first place and have been there to provide encouragement and support.

The last 6 months have flown by and I have enjoyed every minute!

I decided to leave teaching because of a variety of things, but the elephant in the room which was nagging me for months, was my desire to work with teachers and student beyond one school. Thankfully I rubbed my eyes and embraced the elephant, so to speak!

I chose to apply for a Deputy Head post not out of any deep desire to run my own school or be a headteacher, it was simply that I needed to change my circumstance and needed to feel I was contributing more to the running of a school.

I don’t regret my decision, but I think the specific challenges of the position and school went a long way to dampen my enthusiasm and zeal for school leadership. Sadly it led to some of the lowest times I have ever had in my teaching career.

It all seemed to come down to compromise. Due to my time being unnecessarily stretched compared to other Deputies I knew, I was making compromises with the quality of my teaching, the quality of my admin and the quality of my preparation. I had never really had to deal with such forced compromise in the past, on reflection that unsettled me deeply and is certainly something I never want to see again.

In my first week as a Deputy I wrote that, “No other 5 day stretch has ever examined and pressurised my professional facets as those just gone.” Well those 5 days continued on and the remainder of the year proved even more challenging than that tumultuous first week.

So what has changed?

The most notable things are a better quality of time with my family, variety through project work and being able to work with more schools and teachers.

I never really got to a stage that I was comfortably balancing work and life during my year as a deputy and so the quality of time with my family was hugely affected. There was always something nagging in my mind that hadn’t quite been completed or needed doing. I was never 100% focused on the here and now, and time was lost with the family.

This contributed to an unhealthy cumulative pressure I hadn’t experienced, both physically and emotionally – needless to say I am now glad to see the back of it.

The variety of work we have at NoTosh has been such a brilliant foil to the trudging monotony of the last few years. No week is the same – we will be wading in the deepest of intense research one week and design thinking with teachers the next. We are are also working with lots of schools and supporting teachers so I am never far from the classroom.

I have also enjoyed the ebb and flow of project work which allows you to see things to a natural completion in the relatively short term. At school the long term completion of a poject would feel most satisfying at the end of terms or the end of a year.

This “shipping” as Seth Godin would put it generates motivation and your energy levels rise as you move on to the next project. I am enjoying this way of working and although I have really felt I have had to adjust over the last few months, success and completeness is always in sight, something markedly lacking from my experience as a deputy headteacher.

One thing I realised, from those closest to me, was that things are not set in stone ad infinitum, even a job as all consuming as a deputy headteacher, and when things don’t work out you have to plan and actively choose to get yourself out of it. Linchpin by Seth Godin proved to be an important read for me in those difficult times and which underlined the importance of action.

All of that said I know that perhaps given a different set of circumstances I would have had a completely different experience as a new deputy and I have not discounted that maybe one day I will give it another go. But not right now 🙂

—

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Neil Hopkin, his kindness and generosity helped me steady the ship and find the elephant again in the darkened room. And also thanks to my good friend Ewan McIntosh for giving me hope and believing in me, even when I didn’t!

Thank you for your support over the last year and half, things took a wrong turn for a while back there but I am now doing a job I love (again), the future is bright.

—

Pic the winds of skagit. by heanster

TEDx Talk: What we learned from 5 million books

Data, Google, MathsPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on TEDx Talk: What we learned from 5 million books

I discovered the Google Ngram Viewer from this TED Talk by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel who are both fellows at Harvard University and Visiting Faculty at Google. They created the tool to analyse the millions of books being digitised by Google to allow them to search for cultural trends.

Using the Ngram Viewer would certainly be an interesting data handling lesson for children!

A History of Teaching and Learning from 500 Billion Words

Data, GooglePublished onUpdated on2 Comments on A History of Teaching and Learning from 500 Billion Words

 

learning v teaching

 

By analysing over 500 billion words the Google Books Ngram Viewer allows you to compare the history of terminology and language from approximately 5 million digitised books.

The graph above shows my search for the terms “teaching” and “learning” in publications between the years 1500 and 2010.

What fascinates me is how the popularity or usage of the different terms climbed and fell throughout this period. The term “Teaching” has been used more frequently since the turn of the 18th century, somewhat settling into a plateau in the last 60 years. In comparison the term “learning” seems to have more of a rollercoaster frequency in the last 500 years.

References to “learning” from 1800 fell notably in the following 100 years, to a point where “teaching” was referenced more. And then began a 75 year period where “teaching” was clearly more frequently used or referred to in published literature. Why would there have been such a decline or change in frequencies?

If you look at the references to “learning’ there seems to be some peak and trough pattern amidst an upward trend. I wonder why this was the case? Similarly why did references to “learning” fall away at the turn of the 19th century only to climb steadily again in the last 100 years? What perceptions of “learning” or cultural differences were there between the 1700s (“learning” references increase) and the 1800s (“learning” references decrease.)?

I am no historian and I am sure many of you reading this will be able to explain the information better than me – needless to say it would be interesting to explore any broad reasons or background that might effect such results.