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Your Advice Needed On Mixed Age Classes
Aug 13th
In September I will be teaching a mixed age class of Year 5/6 children. This will be first time that I have had the unique challenge of working with a year group comprised of two different ages. Your advice and expertise about some of the questions I have would be most welcome.
Much of my concern relates to the content of the curriculum and how best to plan to suit the needs of such a broad range of children. No doubt this is just the same as any classes we have, however a Y5/6 class has the added dimension of (possibly) doing SATs in 2011.
My class will be made up of children from 3 separate classes: a Year 4/5 class (who followed the Y5 curriculum), a straight Year 4 class and a straight Year 5 class. This mixture means that they have had a mixture of curriculum content too. Some have had the usual Year 5 curriculum whereas others have not.
We will be able to provide the older children with TA support to booster them nearer the time for SATs and also ensure that the coverage is in place for Literacy and Numeracy. Another challenge with such a class.
We’ll need to consider any impact on the Year 6 curriculum as there will be children moving into Year 6 next year.
It has been established that we will be using the Year 5 curriculum as a platform to build from and I will be working closely with the other Year 5 teacher (not the Year 6 teacher). Much of the content of the curriculum (especially topic based work) will have to be brand new, as there is the possibility of patchy repetition from the other classes.
Importantly we need to continue to engage and inspire this group of learners, no matter how old they are and I want to provide them a time that they will remember.
Faced with such an intricate challenge in terms of curriculum design I would greatly appreciate your help, advice and expertise.
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Pic: Sabotage #4: Mixing noodles with rice by Stéfan
Reflections on Being A Foundation Teacher
May 30th
I have spent the last half term as a Foundation 2 (4 and 5 year olds) classteacher in my new school. Combined with a multitude of other factors, including finding my feet as a Deputy Headteacher, it has been the most challenging and intense seven weeks of my teaching career.
I thought I would take some time to reflect on what it was like to go from teaching Year 5 (9 and 10 year olds) to Foundation 2.
Pitch
One of the biggest challenges was adjusting the pitch of what I was teaching. This applied at every level, from what I was planning to my expectations for the children. I suppose this would be natural as I was teaching children 5 years older for so long. I have a much better appreciation for the ways I can adjust what I am teaching to suit different needs, including the way I use my voice or how long we spend working together.
Care
This is central to what occurs in the Foundation stage. What school should be about – I perhaps lost sight of this working with the older children. Finding things, tieing laces, scraped knees, getting changed, toilet trouble, tired children, family news – the care for children at this age is much more important than anything else. It is a care that gives them boundaries and helps to develop their independence and confidence. However this is energy sapping – I know from having a 4 year old at home – but times that by 30 and you quickly realise at the end of the day that you are emotionally drained as much as anything else.
Starting School
Foundation 2 is the first time they begin to experience elements of school as it will be for the next 5 years or so. It is an important time for the children as they have to adapt to new expectations and ways of working. I have learned so much about where the children are when they enter school, what sort of level they are working at and even the broad range of abilities that are evident even at this age.
Organisation and Preparation
Above anything else I have learned how important it is to be super organised and prepared for anything at this age group. You can lose the focus of a little group in seconds if you don’t have want you need to hand. The classroom needs to reflect this level of organisation and done well will facilitate the independent learning going on.
Sometimes you have to respond to something unexpected and it takes all of your attention – a nasty scraped knee, a nosebleed or a toilet problem. You have to just go with it.
Every Second Counts
A big lesson I have learned is that you have to take every opportunity for learning. Counting the children for register, counting the milk cartons, counting the fruit, counting the letters we are using, counting the people in a picture…
Specialist
The role of a Foundation teacher is such a specialist position. The level of care that is required and the expectations for teaching and learning make it such a unique role in school. My time in Foundation has shown me every facet of the role. I think part of the specialism is being able to cope with the energy sapping days and to remain focused on the myriad of ways children are learning. I have a much firmer respect and appreciation for the role of teachers in Foundation and the crucial part they play in helping children start school.
Comfort Zone
There have been some real lows over the last seven weeks, admittedly I have found it a serious struggle at times. But I have learned from it all. I have had a comfort zone and in the last half term I have been as far from it as I can remember. You learn to find comfort in other things, I have adapted to each new challenge as best I could.
I took one day at a time and as Dai Barnes pointed out to me when I was finding it tough:
“Life is many days. This must end.”
“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”
James Joyce – Ulysses
Cross curricular
I would like to see a whole school curriculum approach to learning in the same connected way as it is done in Foundation. A small number of areas of learning that just make sense and approaching contexts for learning in a holistic manner. There is the balance between child initiated learning and teacher directed work. I think my time working in this way will have a big influence on the way we re-develop our curriculum in the future.
Technology
By the time I was finishing my time I was hitting my stride a little better, so to speak, and was considering the role technology has to play in this early stage of school. One thing was how aware the children were of technology in their everyday life, clearly this is mainly from the exposure to mobile and online technologies at home.
Whilst we were working on some phonics activities for the “er” phoneme, I had a picture of an envelope for the children to think of “letter“. But one little girl said email when she saw it. Perhaps an isolated instance but nonetheless indicative of the need (and importance) for a clearly thought out strategy for technology at this stage of school. I will keep this firmly in my thoughts as I spend more time next half term on how my new school is using technology.
Another thing I noted was the need for technology to enhance and support the role of record keeping and evidence gathering in the Foundation stage. Learning happens and occurs at such a fierce pace, sometimes unexpected, sometimes planned – a strong tech solution for gathering, tagging and recording these occurrences would be ideal.
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After my tumultuous first week I wrote that it had been the most testing few days of my career and I would go on to say that the whole seven weeks have stuck to that template. At times I have felt like a student again, learning pieces of a bigger puzzle, at times I have started to think like a Foundation teacher – linking up learning opportunities and seeing connections.
A very capable young teacher is taking over the reins after half term and I will be working from the sidelines to support his first teaching role. I know that I have learned so much and on reflection I feel I have become a better classroom teacher because of it.
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Pics: My Life by pattyequalsawesome / A Crossroads by thorinside
I am a Reception Teacher
Mar 25th
Tomorrow is my last day at Priestsic Primary School where I have spent the last seven years. After Easter I take up my role as Deputy Head Teacher at John Davies Primary School.
I am excited and nervous all rolled into one. This is a major crossroads in my career and I am keen to make a start.
For the first 4 weeks I will be the classteacher in the Foundation 2 or Reception class (4/5 year olds). I am really excited about this as I will be returning to an age group that inspired me to teach in the first place. I have worked in upper key stage 2 for many years now and so it will be a big change.
Some people may see this as a challenge, I see it as an opportunity. Winston Churchill would have called me an optimist:
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
I join an outstanding Early Years team and my aim is to soak it all up, to learn as much as I can from those around me and to remind myself everyday why I chose this amazing profession.
Pic: Perception by Frazzled Jen - Attribution License
Marmite: Love it or Hate it? – Using Google Forms and Twitter
Mar 15th
Over the next two weeks in our year 5 class we will be exploring data investigation and the tools with which we can use to undertake them. The first three days of this week we will be looking at some technology that can enhance data handling and make our life easier. In today’s session we learned about Google Forms and I demonstrated how they work with the help of my Twitter network.
We wanted to achieve three things from our maths session today
- Make a short survey using a Google Form.
- Complete other people’s surveys and get a feel for the process.
- Review the data added to our own and explore some of the ways it is represented.
After placing the lesson in the context you see in the first paragraph, I began the session by explaining that I was going to use my Twitter network to help demonstrate how we can use Google Forms to collect data.
I spent some time with the class going through the process of creating a Form from the Google Docs home screen and then adding my questions and running through the different types of questions you can use. We talked a lot about how this type of data collection is only good for some occasions and a pencil and paper method can still be the best way. It is a matter of choosing the most appropriate.
The class would be making a simple favourites or preference type survey and so our shared one was similar. You can see it embedded in the post below.
Once complete, I sent out the link to this to my Twitter network (Look at the bottom of the Form edit page for the link – I used bit.ly to shorten it for Twitter, more on that later!) I did this because I wanted the children to see data being added, I wanted to demonstrate the moment of data submission from the Google Form. This also helps the children see how a spreadsheet is linked to the form. (15 minutes)
We switched to the spreadsheet and the children thought it was rather magical as the responses started to drop into the cells as we watched. I reminded them that as soon as someone clicks SUBMIT we were seeing the result.
The children then worked in groups of three with a single laptop (2 groups per table) – one of the children signed into their Google Docs (part of Google Apps for Education) account and created their own “Favourites” Google Form. To keep the children focused I asked them to only give 5 choices for their questions otherwise they tend to get longwinded and only create one or two questions. (15 minutes)
One of the useful things about writing up lesson experiences on my blog is that it is wonderful to go back and look at what I learned and make adjustments to lessons. With some of these things in mind, once the groups had made their Forms, rather than share via email etc (this just adds a complication) we clicked on the Live Form link at the foot of the page.
So everyone had on their laptop screens their form and I asked them to simply change places with those on their table and complete each others’ surveys. They then moved around the classroom adding their responses to other forms from other groups. Although it is nice to share via email, in my experience of working with Google Forms and lots of children it is much easier to move the children rather than share the Form. The children certainly got more responses this way and contributed more, there was less in the way.
After each child had submitted their responses they clicked on the Go Back to the form link which reset the form for the next child – this worked out really well. (15 minutes)
Up to this point the children were able to appreciate how Google Forms is a great way to gather information and how it organises it for us in the spreadsheet.
Back at their own Google Form the children spent some time exploring the results Summary page to look at how their data can be represented. (5 minutes)
As a class we returned to our Edu Favourites survey of educators in my Twitter network. By the end of my second session we had over 125 responses and it was a great pool of data to explore. Real data from real people that we literally witnessed being entered. I was able to ask children lots of questions from how it was represented. It proved to be a great plenary. Here are the results from the survey, there are currently 170 responses – thankyou if you were one of them. (5 minutes)
As a final exploration of this whole process you could explore the link data. I used bit.ly to shorten the long Google Form URL. bit.ly provides traffic data, with a free account, and you can show the class where the people clicking on the form are from. Currently there have been 269 clicks on the Edu Favourites form link and here is where everyone is from.
You could even do some work on how many didn’t fill in the form and compare it to those who did.
Thankyou for taking the time to help with our maths lesson today, I am always so grateful for your contributions – and some of you have even gone away wondering what Marmite is – life will never be the same again. By the way I hate it too!
#TBlesson Using Twitter to Explore the Language of Probability
Feb 26th
Two years ago I had the idea of using replies from my Twitter network to gather responses about the probability of snow. What was planned as a plenary to a session ended up being expanded into a full hour long lesson. This week I taught the same maths topic and this post outlines the approach I took this year to my lesson.
Context
![P260210_15.49[03]](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4009/4389979401_89532f5496_b.jpg)
This was the second lesson in the week – the first was a basic introduction to some of terminology in basic probability of events. We talked about the ways we would describe events such as a deer jumping through the window or a cat wandering into the classroom. We then looked at a load of different statements and positioned them on the scale: IMPOSSIBLE – UNLIKELY- POSSIBLE – PROBABLE – CERTAIN. The Twitter lesson would extend this understanding of the language used by exploring the tweets from my network.
Set-up
One of the things I have written about before is the planned tweets that should take place before a lesson if you want to do this type of lesson. You can elicit responses on the spot, live, but you have much more control over how you use the responses if you allow yourself some time to do so. I tweeted this the day before and encouraged as many responses as I could:
With a good handle on the sort of responses I was getting I could plan to make the tweets into any sort of resource I wanted. Another reason to tweet early is to encourage members of your network in other countries to participate. This was crucial to the probability question I was posing.
As the lesson was beginning I repeated my request which bolstered the responses that were coming in live, indeed it gave some people the chance to adjust their snow estimates from the previous day.
Hashtag
At the end of the tweet you can see that I have asked people to respond using the hashtag #TBlesson. In terms of organisation this allowed me to easily copy and paste from a Twitter search page into a Google Doc. If you leave it to your replies you will have to edit out all of the odds and ends that are not relevant to your lesson which is time consuming.
Resources
- I decided that this time I wanted the tweets to be something the children could hold. I turned the digital into analogue and printed the tweets off. They were laminated and cut into individual cards. We made 3 sets for the different activities in the lesson.
- For the location activity we had 2 floor maps of the UK and Europe. I also had a SMART Notebook file from previous years that had tweets and a world map to work with.
- Finally I cleared some of the tables away and used masking tape to make a great big probability scale on the floor. I printed off some labels using the language from the previous day and placed them accordingly.
- 5 or 6 laptops for the location activity.
- The children’s maths books and pencil crayons.
Introduction
Using the #TBlesson hashtag I displayed a Visible Tweets presentation as the children were coming in from playtime. They were soon enthralled as the responses span and twisted their way onto the IWB display. I listened as the children began pointing out something to a friend or spotting a particular country.
I began by talking about my network on Twitter and how I had used it to find out about the chances of snow across the world. We spent some time watching the random display of tweets from the search and we talked about the language we discussed in the previous day and if we could see any examples of people using it.
I think Visible Tweets is an excellent way to display Twitter replies and I would highly recommend it if you are doing the same. This is another reason to use a hashtag when gathering responses as it is much easier and more controlled if you are displaying a specific search term.
In the image you can see a Tweetdeck column – this is another useful tip. I deleted all of the other Twitter columns and I was left with the #TBlesson hashtag search I had running. A simple and easy way to focus your classroom display on just what you need to show.
Listen to me introducing the session to my class. “Twitter Lesson Audio“
Activities
The children were put into mixed ability pairs and we had 5 pairs on each of the three carousel stations. After a 10 minute introduction I rotated these groups every 15 minutes which would allow some time for a short conclusion too.
Location
I wanted the children to begin to explore the location of the responses and to think about the climate of different parts of the world. The children had two floor maps of the UK and Europe to place a set of the tweet cards on (I filtered the cards appropriately). There was also the IWB which had a world map and a bunch of tweets from previous years.
I put out half a dozen laptops for the children to use to help them locate some of the places mentioned in the tweets. All of the children decided to use Google Earth to help them find the places and they then placed the cards on the floor maps.
The children had the option to use the technology to support them if they wanted and were confident enough to know the correct tool to help them. This is a good example of children independently choosing a technology to support their learning.
Probability Scale
There were many fascinating mathematical discussions in this group about the best place to put the different cards on the large scale. The children were having to interpret the plethora of terminology in the tweets and match them to the commonly used language on the scale.
This was a good challenge and the children worked in pairs to support each other in positioning the different statements. All three groups put the statements neatly above and below each other along the scale, even though many were the same. I extended their thinking by inviting them to place them alongside each other if they were equivalent.
A further step was to get pairs to check a small section for accuracy and to look closely at the ordering. I was able to direct different pairs or individuals to review the position of specific tweets that I knew would challenge them appropriately. (For example someone used 0.05)
Language Examples
![P260210_15.43[02]](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4057/4390748466_32d73fcc7d_b.jpg)
In the third activity the children simply gathered examples of the language used, writing these out in their books. This would eventually lead us to a major conclusion we made as a class in the plenary.
This fairly straight forward task meant the children were really engaging with the variety of terms used and their records helped them to see the breadth of it.
They recorded fractions, decimals and percentages as well as slang and local phrases used for likelihood.
Reviewing the lesson and the language used
As a whole group we finished the lesson by discussing the different language that we had encountered during the session and shared some of the ways people were using it. We briefly explored the climate differences between locations and heard some examples of places that had an impossible chance of snow.
We concluded that the majority of people used percentages rather than words to describe the likelihood of an event. This lead us to think about the important mathematical link between a number and a word and how even though words are easier to understand they are less precise than giving a numeric value.
The children enjoyed the lesson and the carousel style of activities. After another quick tweet to my network we were able to enjoy some #snowpics to show it really was 100% certain some people were going to get snow!
Lesson Outcomes
The range of activities and the chance to explore the nuances of probability language gave the children a great opportunity to:
- consolidate what they had learned about basic probability language
- experience the full range and variety of terminology used
- begin to understand the link between a lexical and numeric representation of probability
Since my lesson on Tuesday I have already seen two other examples of teachers looking for responses from their Twitter network for specific lessons. Even 2 years on from when I first did this lesson I still think that the opportunity to use your Twitter network to provide insight, responses, input, challenge and data is overlooked by many. What makes it so manageable for us to contribute is that only 140 characters is needed.
A big thankyou to everyone who helped by making a contribution it is really appreciated. Hopefully this post shows you how your 140 characters fit into the bigger picture.
Why not have a look at what you are teaching in the next few weeks and consider making a request for your network to make a contribution. I hope this lesson has given you some ideas and real methods for how this can work and making the most of it in the classroom.
3 Educational Web Applications I’d Like to Make
Feb 19th
I am sure you have had moments when you discover your inner inventor too. Here are three web based applications I have much pondered and if I had more time, money, expertise would probably have made by now.
The old Story – A2 by h.koppdelaney
Attribution-NoDerivs License
StoryBook Earth
Inspired by my work on storytelling using Google Earth and WeTellStories, StoryBook Earth would be a place to share, develop and create geotagged stories. When we write or tell stories we are picturing a location, a setting. In combining the imagery of Google Earth, the ability to add text, audio and even further media to specific places, you have a powerful storytelling form.
StoryBook Earth would develop the idea of “story” and “narrative” and to connect students in different parts of the world. It would also be an attempt to explore how the local becomes the global: to provide an appreciation of students in other parts of the world. It would provide an alternative way of “seeing” and “reading” the world, and possibly introduce students to young people who have experienced:
- Very different lives and personal circumstances
- Conflict
- Natural hazards
- Different climates and natural environments
- Alternative cultures and traditions
I remember watching a 9 year old in my class tell a story to a friend whilst looking at his street in Google Earth, there is something very immediate about such narratives – similar in part to historical walks that explain a story in the places they occurred.
In partnership with the Geographical Association, StoryBook Earth was entered into the Google GeoChallenge grant application process but unfortunately was rejected.
(Thanks to Alan Parkinson at the GA for all his help developing this idea.)
On the platform, reading by moriza
Attribution License
My Reading Diary
In our school the children use little paper reading diaries, similar I am sure to many other primary schools. In it they record the books they are reading, their progress and there is a place for pupils, teachers and parents to make written comments too
So for this one think: Shelfari for kids. A learner centred online tool that would allow children to do all they could with a paper diary – without the worry of losing it! But it would also have a database behind it that would allow children to tap into further reading recommendations. Children could read reviews from other users and discover new genres or books they may not normally.
I would imagine that My Reading Diary would have the potential to integrate with library management systems, so children could read a review or see a recommendation and immediately know if it is in school – and if it is available to read or someone else has it out already!
A further unique feature of My Reading Diary would be as a reading portfolio for children as they progress through school. With simple book profiling it would allow teachers and parents to see the types of books any child is reading and make future suggestions.
I think there is huge potential in this to not only provide a manageable online system to track reading progress throughout school but to also engage children with reading and a social, smart, personalised reading diary.
This idea was sadly rejected by Channel 4’s 4iP which is an innovation fund to stimulate public service digital media (beyond television) across the UK.
Firespeed by kwerfeldein
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Connect Collaborate Content
I don’t know what I would call this application but I think it could be very important in the way teachers work in the next 5-10 years.
I would propose a single online place for teachers to find curriculum resources and ideas, connect with colleagues teaching the same topics and a platform for collaboration.
Ian Yorston quite rightly said that this place is the web. It perhaps is a matter of pulling streams of different information together, but I just don’t think there has been a purpose built online space that does all of these.
I am doing some work on the Victorians next half term – with my proposed web idea I want to be able to do a single search for “Victorians” and see a multitude of things that we regularly look for and seek out in further web queries elsewhere.
- Resources - planning, images, video, notebook files, PPTs, worksheets, that sort of thing.
- Ideas - the resources found on the web do not often come with the narrative behind it, I want to be able to read blog posts and summaries of experiences from those who have taught my topic already. My search results would draw in comments from Twitter and other platforms too.
- Connections - so many schools, teachers and pupils are working on the same topics, I want to know who is actively doing them too.
- Collaborate - once I have discovered that XYZ are doing the same topic, I want to have the means to collaborate and work with them.
We have a myriad of educational blogs to cover the ideas, places like Gareth Pitchford’s Primary Resources, Classroom 2.0 that does much to connect teachers and then there is simple tools like Teachers Connecting from Ben Hazzard that is a platform to connect and work together.
But we need one place to do all of this from a single search query, that would be the unique feature. You enter a single topic key word and your search results provide everything.
Another aspect that is important is what happens as we share our current classroom work. From blogging about my topics at school this year, for the first time my network has brought resources and ideas to me. Not as a result of me asking, but because they “read a post a few weeks back that I was doing sealife”. If we are all more aware of what topics colleagues are doing in their classes our sharing of ideas and resources can be more purposeful.
It will be intriguing to see what develops with mycurriculum.com from the QCDA and whether it will be able to build the critical mass of users to make it truly worthwhile – and also if it is smart enough to do some of the things I have outlined.
It has been an interesting process getting these ideas down in a post – let me know what you think of them and if they would have value in the educational world we work in. The ideas are there, feel free to go ahead and make them, just let me know you have so I can use them.
Blocked For Me, Open For You
Feb 7th
pay heed by most uncool
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Children in my class cannot use YouTube at school, but as soon as they leave at the end of the day, they will.
Since the exponential growth of the online video giant I have never once used a video directly from YouTube in my classroom. It is exempt from my teaching routine. On reflection I find this fairly incredible.
In England each local authority can choose which sites are open to use in the classroom. YouTube is blocked by many due to inappropriate content, which includes the comments accompanying the footage. However I have never been shown, read or offered an explanation by my local authority about their reasoning.
At the end of school children will go home and use the website, open to the inappropriate content we block in school. Not only is YouTube exempt from my teaching, I am exempt from helping children better understand, process and find value amidst a mass of video content. I am exempt from demonstrating and educating the children in my class to appreciate the power of such an information source. Apparently that is a good thing.
In my opinion it comes down to some hard decisions. The longer, more protracted path of educating young primary school children in dealing with open content on the web (including YouTube) is too hard a path for some to consider. The easy route is to block it. And that is what has happened.
It is hard to fully appreciate the effect this will have on years and years of children not being given guidance about open content, from the very people who are best placed to provide it.
I consider YouTube an unprecedented source of information in the form of videos. Does the blocking of access to this information infringe on our rights? According to Kimberley Curtis,
Article 19(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights holds that freedom of expression includes the right to information. Specifically, it states that
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
It goes on to admit that governments can place certain restrictions on these rights, but only if necessary. This has long been understood to cover access to government information, such as rights covered by the Freedom of Information Act in the US. But increasingly some are starting to include access to knowledge, particularly in regards to the internet, in this rubric as well.
No hands ma! by OLD! (NEW! http://flickr.com/codooautin)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
I take it then that governments have given school’s local authorities the freedom to choose what to block “if necessary” and YouTube falls into this category and the easy short-term decision is easy. So what would I want to see? What would I do with an unblocked, unfiltered web? I would invest the money from filtering in high quality guidance, training and materials to provide teachers the ability to properly guide young learners in the web they use at home anyway. Bringing some parts of our teaching force up to speed with the internet their students are using, and equip them with the basic principles for teaching and using an open web.
Having complete access to knowledge will after all benefit an economy in the long run, right? The Every Child Matters aims and objectives state that whatever their background or their circumstances, every child should have the support they need to:
- be healthy
- stay safe
- enjoy and achieve
- make a positive contribution
- achieve economic well-being.
With a filtered version of the internet are we providing children the best possible chances to feel they can make a positive contribution to society? Is their protracted exclusion from a growing information source such as YouTube actually detrimental to their chances of achieving economic well-being? Would an unfiltered web make children more or less safe?
Jack Balkin from Yale University explains,
Access to knowledge means that the right policies for information and knowledge production can increase both the total production of information and knowledge goods, and can distribute them in a more equitable fashion. The goal is first, promoting economic efficiency and development, and second, widespread distribution of those knowledge and informational goods necessary to human flourishing in our particular historical moment– the global networked information economy.
I repeat: It’s not just a trade off between equity and efficiency. We are not simply fighting about how to divide up a pie. Access to knowledge is about making a larger pie and distributing it more fairly. Or, at the risk of extending this pie metaphor well beyond its appropriate scope, access to knowledge means giving everyone the skills to make their own pies and share them widely with others.
(“How to make a pie” returned 23,500 results on YouTube.)
Beyond the filtering of YouTube there is massive inconsistency across UK schools about which sites are blocked and which are open. I work in Nottinghamshire, for some reason many of the sites that I use for educational purposes are open to me in school. For many of my colleagues across the UK it is different. Would my development of learning technology use have been completely different if I was 30 miles further North, South, East or West? Of course it would.
Similarly children in one school will be able to use different learning tools in the classroom than another. As someone said to me recently this is a sort of “learning technology postcode lottery.” Inevitably those teachers that consider certain web based tools crucial to their teaching will think twice about a post in those local authorities most effected.
I want to hold a lens up to the inconsistency between local authorities in England. I have started a Google Spreadsheet with a list of 80+ web based tools used in the classroom and the opportunity to state OPEN or BLOCKED for your local authority.
Web Tools in English Schools > Blocked or Open?
Ollie Bray has been working on something similar for Scottish authorities – perhaps when both documents have reached a critical mass they could be amalgamated to create a full picture of web filtering in schools in the UK.
I would be grateful if you would complete the spreadsheet for your own location (unless Google Docs is blocked of course!) and help encourage others to do the same, this way we will build up a complete picture.
Five things I am hopeful for:
- This will continue to keep the issue of open web access on educator’s agenda.
- Local authorities will look at the list and question their own decisions. “Why has Nottinghamshire left Wordle open and we have not?”
- I would like to see teachers who are using these tools become part of the process of deciding upon filtering.
- Explanations why sites are blocked are provided to teachers and not some random category. We have reasons we want to use them in a positive way, LAs ostensibly have reasons why they are blocking them – that debate needs to be had.
- More consistency for what the web looks like for teachers and for students.
SSAT Primary National Conference – Connected Classrooms
Jan 28th
Today I attended the 4th Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Primary National Conference. I was invited to run some seminars for the delegates. Situated in one of the conference suites of the Emirates stadium, the home of Arsenal football club, the event accommodation was spacious and well equipped.
I ran my hour long session twice during the day, it was titled ”Connected Classrooms“. I based my practical ideas on 4 different connections.
- Student – Student (same class)
- Students – Students (different classes, countries, cultures)
- Teacher – Student – Learning (connecting with our curriculum)
- Teacher – Teacher (using Twitter for CPD)
I tried to keep my presentation simple and coherent, with a clear message about the ways we can use technology to engage learners.
We used the Nintendo Wii and I spent some time playing Endless Ocean and talking about the ways we have used it in our recent topic. I highlighted classroom blogging as a simple means to establish meaningful connections with other classes around the world.
Drawing upon my experiences of Twitter I spoke about why it is the most important CPD I have had. The most important connection we need to facilitate is between students in our own classes. I went into detail about how Voicethread can do this, the ways we have used it in a recent sequence of writing work and why it is one of my classroom cornerstones.
I think technology has the potential to both perpetuate traditional notions of classwork and to in fact smudge the definitions of what independent work means.
If you were one of those attending the sessions, thankyou for joining me and please feel free to leave me a comment about your reactions. I really value your feedback.
