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Google Apps in School – Week 1

TomGoogle, Google DocsMay 3, 200811 Comments

It is great to finally get some of the Google Apps tools in the hands of the children in my year group. I have been thinking about their deployment to support docs spreadsheets my teaching and learning for a very long time. In this post I reflect on our first full week of use and explore some of the issues that were raised.

We are using the Google Apps Education Edition installed on a domain that I picked up during the sign up process. I have decided to focus the children’s efforts on the tools that I consider to be the most important, so we introduced them to Google Docs and GMail. The other Google Apps tools, such as Calendar, iGoogle and Sites will have their place and will come in time, but for now Docs are king.

Below I have recorded my thoughts and Google Apps related actions that occurred throughout the week.

Monday – 28/4/08

Created a CSV file in Excel of both classes username, firstname, surname, password.
Generated accounts for domain using “create multiple users” tool.
Shared my excitement with all 60 year 5s!
20 minute introduction to Google Docs and Gmail for all Year 5s.
Brief look at Docs homepage and looked at each individual tool – looked at similarities with MS Office.
Explored Sharing facility in Docs.
Talked about when we should share and when we shouldn’t.
Discussed the importance of security and appropriate use.
Talked about measures if there were any inappropriate behaviour.
Explained that we would work together to form some rules/advice to make the most of G Apps.
Emphasised the importance of Gmail as a way to communicate the sharing of docs.
Children had no problems with Gmail – the rhetoric of email is very familiar to them.
Explored what spam is and how we have to deal with it if we use email.
Set challenge of sending an email and creating and sharing of a doc.
Explained that we will have a Google Break Tuesday lunchtime 12.30pm to 1.00pm to give children who cannot access internet at home chance to use the laptops in class.
Shared teacher email addresses and pupil usernames and passwords.
Children made a note of these on info sheets to take home.

Tuesday – 29/4/08

Responded to children who had already -approx 8- logged in and shared a document with me / or emailed.
Provided children with 30 mins in the morning to login and offered appropriate support.
Congratulated those who had independently accessed G Apps at home.
Had a Google Break at the children’s lunchtime when the children from both Year 5 classes could choose to work on a laptop and access their G Apps account. A very successful session with more than 16 children accessing their G Apps acc.
Observed how children are very good at discovering new features not yet explained. Within the 30 minutes children were accessing Google Chat and nattering away to each other. When they are working together as a group, on an individual laptop, and they make a new discovery they are quick to explain to their peers what to do and how to get to the same discovery.
There was lots of excitement about using Docs and the majority of the children were keen to tell me that they had either worked on it the previous night or were planning on doing so very soon.
During a Geography session about the location of India the children were given a choice about how to present a piece of work and it was great to see the range tools that they turned to: SMART Notebook, MS PPT, MS Word, MS Excel, Google Docs. Many of the children chose to use Google Earth as a way to support their learning. They are making better and better tech choices.

Thursday – 1/5/08

Had a conversation with teaching colleague in Year 5 about his concerns and thoughts about using G Apps.
Discussed the issue of managing 30 docs that are shared with him. I talked about RSS feeds for doc changes but it seems that Apps Edu Edition does not currently support it. Boo. We talked about making folders in Docs home and I talked him through the process. We made a First Attempts folder to collate initial docs shared with us in this early stage.
Marking and assessment of work is an important issue and we discussed the realistic merit of typing a document, pros and cons. We felt that if the children could record an idea for a sentence in audio form and have that embedded within a document adjacent to their typed effort there would be great benefit for review, support and editing. Unfortunately GDocs does not allow embedded media at present. Perhaps Presentations will soon as it allows video.
We explored how we could assess the children’s writing if they have used GDocs. We discussed the grammar and spell check indicators in MS Word and I explained that these were not present in the GDocs so the children’s mistakes would not be flagged up to them as they work. This is a good thing when doing an assessed piece. They could use the spell checker but we could ask them to bypass this so the work is a true reflection of their writing ability.
Time is a key issue when thinking about how children work when typing. They cannot produce as much as if they were handwriting the piece due to their slow typing speeds – I explained that perhaps we need to just give the children more time.
I explored our next literacy unit from the Primary Framework based on the compilation of poetry “Sensational“. Throughout the unit the children add to a poetry journal. I discussed with my teaching partner the possibility of everyone creating a GDoc for this instead of a paper copy. I want the children to engage with GDocs in a structured way ASAP within the frame of a subject or topic. This is a good opportunity to do so. Taking it from exploration and an immersed approach with free reigns to a structured application of the technology to support the curriculum.
I produced 2 documents that form part of activities within the first week of poetry unit. One of them needs to be a shared doc so that everyone can contribute to the same space – looking at alternative titles for a poem. The other needs to be a doc that each child can have a copy of and work on individually or in a pair. The solution for the first doc is easy as I can share with everyone in the year group. I think to distribute a copy for everyone for the second doc can be done by emailing it as an attachment. The children would then see the email attachment and open it as a GDoc. I need to check this.
The ability to share a doc with a peer is also a useful way to share ownership of work. So even though when the children are working in a pair – if you only have access to 1:2 laptops, or the activity was to work with a partner, then the final step of the work would be to share it with the child who did not start the doc.
I discussed with my colleague the use of email contacts to create sharing groups. This can be done in two ways. The first is in GMail contacts and then creating a group by adding email addresses, but you cannot see a list of who you have in your contacts so you have to go down a class list and make sure you have added everyone. The other way is when you share a Doc with someone you get the option to choose from your contacts. You tick them off and then there is an option to create a group from that bunch.
We have created different email groups for whole year group, whole class, differentiated literacy and numeracy groups. This way we have lots of flexibility to share different documents with appropriate groups.

Friday – 2/5/08

Checked against class list those who had not completed the challenge of sending an email and creating and sharing of a doc.
Directed those who needed time to get online to use the 30 mins in the morning.
Asked those more confident in G Apps (often those who had logged in at home independently) to offer support for those who needed it.
Explained to these children that when you provide support not to take over but to carefully direct. Could we have some children to be Google Experts?
Discussed guidelines with whole year group for sharing docs and created a simple set of positive statements to help children know when it is best to share a doc with the teacher.
Created and shared a doc about sharing guidelines with all children and encouraged them to add to it if they thought of any new statements.
Explored with the year group avatars and online identities and why it is sensible and safe to use something other than a photograph.
We used the Simpsons Movie website to create an avatar and save the icon to their network folder. Some children in my class had already made theirs and emailed it to me after a brief chat with them the previous day. One child had preferred to use a Star Wars avatar – some of them had already worked ot how to upload the avatar image to their GMail profile 🙂
We uploaded avatars to their GMail account profiles, the children worked really well together to help each other with this. Learning together.

Overall reflections on Week 1

The children’s attitude towards the introduction to Google Apps has been the most positive aspect this week. I was excited to see them engaged with these tools and their enthusiasm throughout the week has been great to be caught up in. It is clear that the procedures for distributing documents and work in a primary classroom needs refining and exploring, I am sure there is much to learn about what is best. We have spent 5 days in an immersed state, the children have been sharing their docs with me without any boundaries. On Friday we discussed guidelines for when it is best to share docs with us. I wanted the children to have freedom and space to practice the process of sharing docs without restriction. Now they are familiar I want them to think more carefully about what is shared.

It has been very interesting looking at the units of literacy we are yet to teach and planning for the implementation of Google Docs in a structured way to support our work. Many of the Tweets I received this week about GApps use in school has centred on the question of email and whether the children have it or not. From my own experience the sharing and notification of documents is driven by the power of GMail and so it is important for the children to also understand this. I look forward to having a better appreciation for the practicalities of working in GDocs from our work next week.

Transforming Learning – Responding to an image

TomLaptops, Literacy, VoicethreadApril 21, 2008April 22, 201914 Comments

This academic year has been different for me due to the (ongoing) development of a permanent laptop resource in my classroom. We currently have 8 machines available to us and when we double up from both Year 5 classes we have a possible 16 machines that we can use. On the not too distant horizon these numbers will be doubled by the procurement of a second batch of laptops for school. With this second step towards a 1:1 model in the upper junior classrooms I am thinking more and more about the pedagogical impact of a greater technology choice.

An activity that has become one of the mainstays of our literacy work has been to respond to an image resource. In our current unit we are reading Street Child by Berlie Doherty, set in Victorian London it tells the story of a boy called Jim who, after a series of misfortunes, spends time in the workhouse as a child labourer and lives on the streets. The exemplar planning for this unit explains an opportunity to respond to an image:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

This is a commonly used strategy to engage the children and elicit a response from a visual resource – such an activity occurs fairly regularly in primary literacy work and I daresay other subjects and age ranges. It takes a failsafe, traditional form – of paper and pen. In this post I explore ways that this simple activity can be transformed with the use of technology. And transformative learning is what I am looking for, because replication offers no benefit to a teacher – all it produces is ostensibly a better presented piece of work and more of a headache to setup. The technology has to offer a whole new level of interaction with the image that cannot be gained from the traditional method explained above.

The learning activity has to be transformed into something that provides a greater depth of learning and interaction. There has to be a pedagogical shift.

Down to the practical stuff. This activity is something that I will be doing very regularly, so finding the easiest to use option for the kids and something that offers a new type of interaction are both key criteria. Other important questions included:

Why is it better than using paper and pen?
Do you need an account to use it?
How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?
Easy to navigate?
Can we share our responses?
Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

For some time now I have explored this notion of visual annotation and due to its ubiquitous nature in the primary classroom I have taken a long look at a few options. They include: using the notes tool in Flickr to annotate certain parts of the image; TwitPic – an application that combines the brevity of Twitter and image captioning/commenting and even such conferencing tools as Twiddla that offer a quick way in to sharing annotations. However none of them are like Voicethread.

As a primary teacher Voicethread is exactly the tool I need for this purpose. (Watch out switching to analogy mode) You may well be able to eat your cornflakes with a knife, although messily, but why not use the spoon that is in the draw. Voicethread is that perfect match – it functions as a media commenting tool. As they describe it on the site:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish.

Now many colleagues have been using Voicethread in all manner of ways in the classroom and I know that I am not revealing some great secret. But what I would hope to reveal is a how such a tool can transform learning, and especially in the climate of a primary classroom. For it is just such an activity that peppers the new literacy framework, but how would this learning task look in a shifted school, a learning environment that offers a 1:1 choice for all that belong there? Can every activity of this sort be transformed? It only needs the right cutlery in the draw…

Needless to say I used Voicethread to transform our work on responding to an image for our Street Child work (as described above).

Do you need an account to use it?

Yes. Voicethread requires you to have an account. So there is some setup time here but well worth it – a specific benefit for a teacher is that you can setup members of your class as sort of sub-users. So one sign in, but everyone in the class has a working identity they can switch to which tags their work. Really useful and easy to setup. Voicethread has an dedicated education community now as well.

How quickly can I setup 16 laptops?

I just showed 2 children from my class how to load the site, login to our class account and fire up our Street Child resource. With me helping it took us just over five minutes to setup. The site was responsive and loaded quickly.

Easy to navigate?

With the very briefest of introduction my Year 5 class had no problems with navigating around Voicethread. One aspect to note is that when you load a Voicethread it will begin playing the various images straight away and it took a few minutes for the children to take control. My children found the overview screen – giving thumbnails of all of the screens really useful.

Can we share our responses?

This is where the true transformation of learning emerges very strongly in my opinion. The last short sentence of the Literacy strategy document is:

Share these as a class.

This is clearly meant to be some form of plenary activity or summary to the session. With Voicethread the children can see everyone else’s comments being added in real time. As soon as they have been saved they can be viewed by everyone in the class. My class were not just sharing their ideas for 5-10 minutes at the end of the session but were interacting, exploring, reflecting upon and sharing the work of their peers for the whole of the session. It is very difficult to be specific but from my observations this shared experience helped to support, encourage and inspire children to contribute further thoughts.

Publish? Embed? What can I do with the result?

A completed Voicethread can be effectively presented in situ, but it has some impressive options to embed in other online locations – the simplest is perhaps a class blog warranting further comments and reflections on the activity. You then have a great opportunity to take sharing beyond the classroom.

Why is it better than using paper and pen?

In my experience using Voicethread to annotate images online is the ideal tool. It offers such a broad range of ways to transform the learning activity – children can record a spoken comment bringing in other literacy strands, a video response takes that on that extra step. A major benefit for mobile learning is that Voicethread is a flash based site and so seems to pressurise the wireless access point less, it performed really well for us and so reliability=big tick.

Not only does the final product look that much better but the options to then seamlessly share that product, not just with our Year 5 class, but with a wider global community of educators is the clincher. And in my opinion the sharing that occurs during a whole class task is the most important transformation that goes on. Children picking up on and reading others work not just writing their own ideas down.

How would I rewrite the activity from the Primary Strategy for Literacy? How should such an activity be explained to a classroom that has taken that pedagogical leap, a school that is shifting to a 1:1 choice?

Here is their version again:

Organise the children into groups of three or four and give each group an illustration showing a scene of life in the workhouse, stuck onto a large sheet of paper. See resources for images of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their groups about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to make notes around the image on the paper. Share these as a class.

Here is my version:

Organise the children into their laptop buddies (pairs) and ask each pair to take a look at the Voicethread showing scenes of life in the workhouse. Ask the children to talk in their pairs about what they can see in the image or how it makes them feel and then ask them to add a text, video or audio comment to the appropriate image – remembering to take advantage of the onscreen doodling to help clarify what they refer to. Encourage children to take a few moments to read and explore the work of their peers as it appears. Do they have similar thoughts? Are they thinking anything different to you? Embed the completed Voicethread on the class blog.

Does it sound transformed? I don’t know…

This for me is the nuts and bolts of what we do in the classroom and it is in this very act of transforming one small activity that I think I will uncover what this pedagogical shift will be like in my school. Perhaps the quilted tapestry of these smaller shifted learning activities will reveal a bigger picture. What do you think? I think Voicethread is a good example of how learning can be transformed with the correct tool, but what else is there that needs to be explored? What other daily activities in the primary classroom can be transformed? I know that not everything can be 2.0ed but what will form part of that shifted tapestry?

(Unfortunately for us the audio and video options for commenting are blocked due to our proxy settings, it is a bit of a pain as I want to be making the most of this resource – Voicethread did promise a little while back “We’ll be developing a more comprehensive networking guide.” but nothing yet. Any help for fixing this would be most useful? I have run the http tests and most of them don’t work!)

Twitter – A Teaching and Learning Tool

TomNetworks, TwitterMarch 29, 2008April 22, 2019101 Comments

I think I have found the perfect place to reflect on the way a network, and specifically how Twitter, can impact on what goes on in the classroom. No mains gas, no telephones, no mobile signal, no internet connection, no possible way to interact with my personal learning network (PLN). Tucked away in the Cornish countryside the location of the cottage we are staying in provokes vocabulary such as: isolated, severed, detached and remote. But similar rhetoric could also be applied to the lack of connection I have with my network. I am removed from the network I want to reflect upon and away from the classroom that it can impact. This perspective is welcome as it offers me clarity of thought, as I write, that I have not had for a long time. In this post I hope to unpick what my Twitter network means to me in terms of my classroom practise and explore the best ways that you can utilise it in your own classroom.

Twitter: a communication tool

In my experience, and in the short time that I have used it, Twitter has grown quickly to play a major part in the way that I interact with fellow colleagues and professionals from around the world. In my classroom and with the children I teach it has been an exciting tool to utilise and support learning. However it is one of many tools that we have at our disposal. I do not see it replacing any of the others we use nor do I see the positive impact upon learning being exclusive to Twitter.

This diagram is a simplistic representation of my network in terms of numbers. It does not reflect that many individuals in your network will be linking up with you using different tools. For example, someone may be your contact on Skype, Twitter and perhaps subscribes to your blog. This would not be uncommon as each tool plays a different role for you and your network. However what we can conclude from the numbers is that I have been able to connect with a large number of people using Twitter. It forms a large part of my current PLN, but has been the tool I have come to last of all. This should be encouraging for most teachers looking to use Twitter, as with careful consideration and some small effort your Twitter network can expand quickly.

Unique communication

Twitter is primarily a communication tool and has often been described as filling the gap between email and instant messaging (IM). It is interesting that it occupies this middle ground. I believe it is important to understand how this communication functions in order to make the most of it in your classroom. IM is all about synchronous communication, relying upon people being online at the same moment. Asynchronous communication characterised by email (and blog commenting) is slightly more time consuming but does not rely upon people being online at the same time.

Twitter communication can be in both of these two different camps. It is a platform that can fluidly handle both synchronous and asynchronous messaging. However each exchange or interaction you have with your network can be more or less synchronous; no two will be the same. This is important because it allows a teacher the best of both forms of communication and the ability to utilise the power of them using just one application. So you could request information the night/day/week before and then return to those responses after some time. On the other hand you could activate your network to help on the spot, in that moment or current time frame when you need it. When you are planning to use Twitter as part of a lesson or to support learning the asynchronous facet of Twitter communication is perhaps the most useful. You can gather responses to a tweet over a short period of time and return to explore them with your class when you are ready. However you still have the opportunity to foster responses from your network in real time that can have an impact on learning. Here is a simple, theoretical timeline of a planned Twitter activity that can be easily adapted to suit your needs, and one that I know from experience works well.

The timeframe that A-D occurs in is flexible enough for it to work within hours or just minutes between. The repeat request (B) is optional depending on the sorts of responses you get from your initial interaction. If you are to take advantage of live feedback then it is a good idea to repeat your request (C) just prior to working with the children on the activity (D).

The information torrent/stream/river/brook/flood

My favourite metaphor for how we use Twitter is the idea that it is a river that is constantly flowing. And that when we open up the Twitter site in our browser or start up Twhirl we are at the banks looking on. Some of us stay on the banks, roll out our picnic rug or unfold that favourite chair and settle in to watch the information stream pass by. Others quietly observe from the banks for a short time but have their trunks on underneath their clothes, and were always going to jump in and contribute. However we choose to interact with this ever moving and changing flow of information, whenever we move away from the current we no longer see the flow – it passes us by, it carries on downstream. We can still hear the ripples and froths of the information eddying and ebbing along (or is that Twhirl alerts) but we no longer see it or interact with it directly. Understanding this distinct current is vital to make the most of Twitter in the classroom. I could ask for some contribution to a lesson, but those people momentarily away from the riverbanks could easily miss this request. My network may well return but the request will already be bobbing downstream out of sight.

I hope that you do not mind me indulging so deeply in such a metaphor – it helps me to appreciate the nuances of the tool.

Depending on how many people you follow will depend on how quickly the information flows. If you have only a small network of people that you follow then the brook will flow more slowly, those people are more likely to pick up upon your information request. Those following a large group of people will experience a much faster flow of Twitter updates and so when you throw your own into the torrent it can very quickly be washed downstream and out of sight. Armed with this knowledge I have begun retweeting requests so as to give people the opportunity to respond if they can. From the timeline diagram above you can see I have included just such a repeated request. This is particularly important if you are looking for a good number of responses to work with or if you send out a Tweet days before the event.

Manageable networks

Every user of Twitter has a different take on what sort of size your network should be to be manageable. In my opinion I do not think much of it matters. I currently follow over 500 people, I receive their updates, and I hear what is going on in their world. However they do not all tell me at the same time! I do not see this number being particularly difficult to manage, what is there to manage? I visit the information flow when I want and take what I wish from it. I know that when I am not engaged with it the river continues to flow. That does not bother me, I know that my PLN is wider than Twitter and anything important I need to know about will reach me through another tributary. I also appreciate some factors that will allow my network’s information to remain valuable even when it is greater than 500.

How many people actually update every 5 minutes? According to my Twitter Karma only 236 contacts have updated in the last 24 hours. That is less than 50 percent.
The global aspect means there will always be people asleep and inactive when I am engaged with Twitter.
I know the times when my network updates the most.
I also appreciate who updates most frequently.
In my opinion the greater number of people I follow the richer the tapestry.

A global network

As any network grows it soon begins to encompass professionals from different parts of the world and this can dictate the levels of asynchronous and synchronous communication that goes on. When you plan to use Twitter in the classroom it is important to be aware of the time differences for different parts of your network. For example when I asked for some responses for a maths lesson at 9.30am GMT, Australian responses dominated the replies. I knew this was going to occur so I repeated the request later in the morning and at 1.00pm to take into account those waking up to the west. With this planned repeat of the request, members of my network in the US, Canada and South America were able to respond and contribute their small part to our lesson.

Who is in your network?

Although the numbers in the PLN diagram above are clearly dominated by those in my Twitter network I am more than aware that it is more to do with the “who” than the “how many”. In a previous post I explored a metaphor for interacting with your Twitter network. I wrote that asking if there was a doctor on board a plane would be much better if doing so on a large passenger jet, you surely have a greater chance of getting a response. When I wrote that, I was reminded of a story of a gentleman who, suffering from a severe heart attack aboard a small domestic flight, was saved by a whole team of cardiac surgeons, doctors and registrars who were all travelling to a conference on the same flight! I could not verify whether this was true or not and clearly there is a healthy slice of luck involved – but it does extend the metaphor in an important direction. A carefully constructed network of valued colleagues, all with a an ethos of sharing at the heart of what they do, may well be more valuable to you then a random mixture of hundreds of people. From my experience the vast majority of education professionals using Twitter have a fairly tight control over who they follow, I am no different. It is often when I receive an email notification of someone adding me to their network that I will think about these simple steps.

1) Explore their Twitter profile, scan who they follow.

2) Look for the language of education in the profile – teacher, tech coordinator, K12 etc

3) Explore their online work, blog, wiki or school website link.

4) Skim read recent Twitter updates.

5) If they are clearly involved in education I will follow back.

The very fact that someone has chosen to add me to their network is strong incentive for me to “follow” them back. I firmly believe in that approach to using this tool. I consider it to be a compliment every time someone clicks the “follow” button for similar reasons as I would. I try to thank people for adding me to their network with a direct message and I am always hopeful that in this new exchange there is a new possibility for learning for both parties.

Talking and listening

You have no control over the choices other people make in terms of adding you to their network. Just because you have added them does not mean it will be reciprocated. It is important to appreciate that Twitter in fact has two networks working alongside each other. To help better understand this below I have republished some graphics that I have used in the past to help explain this dichotomy.

Building your network

I do not profess to have all of the answers in terms of building a network using Twitter but below I have included some simple steps that I hope will support you in building your own. I have deliberately chosen to use the word “building” as I believe that you have to take some specific steps in order to lay the foundations for a successfully and appropriately populated Twitter network.

Make it your own: the P in PLN is for personal, so take steps to follow people that interest you both professionally and personally if you so wish. There is no right way to do it. Consider how you want to use Twitter. In the classroom?
Hit the ground running: if you are new to Twitter then explore other people’s networks and follow a bunch of people you would like to listen to, it will get the ball rolling.
Go global: use Twitter mashups to explore possible colleagues in other countries – you will soon begin to appreciate a better sense of network geography.
Friend of a friend of a friend: again use network visualising tools, like Twitter Blocks, to help you explore who is following members of your network. Take a couple of further steps and you may see many more possible connections.
Your own rules: it is a good idea to establish what you will do when someone follows you, how will you check them out? Do they have to be a teacher? On what grounds will you decide not to follow someone?
Reciprocate: try to follow back fellow education professionals when they add you. Your network widens and so does theirs.
Balanced or unbalanced, does it really matter?: It is your choice how many people you follow and there is no Twitter police frowning upon us. If you want to follow 1000 teachers then go ahead!
Participate: when it is right for you jump into the stream and get involved, there is no better way to characterise your profile then making contributions. When you want responses from your network, for your own lessons, your own participation may help to yield a reciprocated involvement.
Respond: When other professionals ask for help/information or interaction via Twitter (and it is relevant to you) respond. Simple acts of 140 characters or less maintain a sharing ethos amongst your network. Others are ostensibly more likely to respond to your own requests later on.
Search: Use Tweetscan to find out about discussions on Twitter. Search for keywords that are relevant to you – so a SMARTBoard or IWB scan may uncover a new network contact.
Momentum: The behaviour of my network has changed since I began using Twitter. Momentum has been built in the numbers of followers I have and I would say that at around 400-450 followers I began to receive followers daily. That is network momentum.

Different types of questions to ask your Twitter network

When you plan to involve your network in teaching and learning in your classroom it is basically inviting individuals to offer their voice to what you do. Twitter is all about communication, so when thinking of what you will get from Twitter for your lessons – conversation is the currency. Below I have outlined some general categories for types of questions or requests you can make to your network, plus some examples for each. Anytime I would ask my Twitter PLN to be involved with the class with their responses I would always precede my response with, “I am working with my class…” or something similar indicating to all that it is directly for teaching and/or learning. I think that this helps persuade fellow professionals to contribute.

Creative

Involve your network in the creation of something new – perhaps in decisions during shared writing with a class, or a piece of music.

We have written this so far…what word would you use to describe the event/character/scene/action?
Can you help us to think of synonyms for “help”?
Here is what we have written so far (insert URL) Should the character in our story be A or B – and tell us why you made that decision.

Data

A Twitter PLN provides a large group of teachers available to contribute all manner of data to a historical or mathematical investigation. Twitter would allow you to collect data easily but only superficially, but if you were to direct readers to an online form or poll then the data could be more in depth.

What is the temperature where you are today?
How far do you have to travel to work?
How old is your school? What year was it built?

Opinion

This type of question could be incorporated into many different types of curriculum areas. What you are looking for here is the addition of another facet to the class debate and Twitter gives you that very easily, you can extend your discussions via feedback and insight from others. I would always recommend an age stamp clearly on these sorts of posts to signal what level of discussion, feedback or opinion would be most appropriate. (Twitpic is an excellent resource to share and discuss images using Twitter)

Here is an image of Queen Elizabeth I what does it tell you about her?
Here is what we have written so far (insert URL) Which of these sentences continues the report in the most persuasive manner?
We have written some class rules what do you think of them so far?

Information

Instead of gathering data from all of your contacts, with these types of questions particular information could be teased from your network. These could ideally be used to help provide a global perspective about school life for children. Further steps in the conversation could be taken to find out more about a particular school etc.

What is it like to work in an international school?
Does the weather effect you at school? What do the children/staff do to tackle the high temperatures during the day?
Most of the children in our class walk to school because so many live nearby, what is the most popular form of transport in your class and why?

Location

This is pretty simple – a request to find out where people are. I have used this to inspire a Google Earth introduction. Lots of potential for finding out about different locations and having a teacher there to guide you a little. Imagine having a teacher for your class to talk to in every city in the world?!

We are exploring world time differences, it is nearly lunchtime for us what are you doing and what time is it?
What is the weather like where you are?
We are looking at the differences between the UK and Australia, is there anyone who can help us?

Challenge

Ask your network to pose challenges and questions for your class. Again this type of response could be planned for and incorporated into many different lessons.

Challenge my class to find you using Google Earth, please provide us with just a small amount of information where you are?
My class is revising the human body. Please give us a challenging question to answer. Grade 5.
Challenge us to find a landmark or building that has a distinct shape?

There are many, many types of questions and requests you could make to your network but I think it is important that for every one you make there is a clear thankyou to those who have taken the time to contribute. After the lesson make a point of sitting down and tweeting to all of the individuals who helped. Another little tip that became very clear from the comments to a recent post is about the follow up. Where possible a blog post explaining how Twitter was used helps those who contributed get the bigger picture. Their 140 character contribution may have been a small piece of a larger tapestry – and it is useful to help other teachers realise that.

Reliable response

One of the most important questions when planning for a Twitter activity is: will I be able to get a response from my network? This is valid. You have to feel completely comfortable with the network you have built and the reliability of response you will receive. This reliability is very important if you are to plan for using Twitter as a teaching and learning tool, after all you do not want 0 responses. How can you get guaranteed responses? I think that this is impossible as you have no influence over the people that follow your updates. However there are two aspects that, in my opinion, can increase the reliability of response. Firstly it is important to build a network as described above. If you have network members that are more willing to share and contribute then a response may be more favourable. Secondly the sheer number of followers will statistically increase your chances of getting a response from the network.

The latter point is worth considering as you plan to incorporate Twitter in your lessons. If you have only just started out with the tool, then waiting for the number of followers to grow to reach a sort of “tipping point” is crucial. I explore the idea of a “tipping point” in this post. Only you can decide when this is, for me it was around 80-100 people and was proven in light of a particular interaction that went well.

Summary

In my opinion there is great potential in the use of Twitter to support teaching and learning. It is unique in this role because it is all about conversation on a larger scale. Not just instant messaging with one or two contacts or including a Skype call in your lesson, but speaking to a wider network of fellow professionals. Currently most users consider Twitter to be just a networking tool, this opinion was confirmed when I recently asked if it could be a teaching and learning tool. To make the transition into the classroom and having a direct influence on learning will take more people planning to use it and a growing weight of examples and successes to explore.

I look forward to seeing the different ways that I can use Twitter as a teaching and learning tool in the future with my class and I hope you will do to. Unfortunately the peace of the Cornish countryside is miles away as I finish this post. I have returned to the ever-connected world we work in and I can’t help but feel a mixture of reactions about that. Anyway I had better get Twhirl fired up and visit that river…

Using the "Discuss" tool in Google spreadsheets

TomGoogle DocsMarch 19, 2008April 22, 20198 Comments

We have been using spreadsheets from Google quite considerably this year. The main strength over Excel is the ability to share the data that is generated and benefit from a pooling of efforts and results. One of the most recent uses in my Year 5/Grade 4 class was during a History lesson, in which we were exploring why the River Nile is so important to Egypt. I posed the question quite openly and asked the children to explore some climate data about different world cities in order to refer it against some of the major sities in Egypt. I have embedded the spreadsheet below.

Each child was given a few different cities to explore and using our class laptop resource they independently investigated average rainfall, temperature etc. They added the results into the correct sheet and as we all worked we were able to see the other results popping up.

At the end of the session I posed the main enquiry once again, “Why was/is the River Nile so important to Egypt?” I asked the children to use the “Discuss” tab (top right, next to “Share” and “Publish”) and to write their answers in the instant messaging tool. Once they had added their response I asked them to join me in front of the SMARTBoard to finish the session.

The “Discuss” tool allowed me to quickly collate all of the children’s thoughts into one place and display them on the IWB to discuss. It proved to be a good focused activity to finish the independent session and it generated some interesting points to discuss in the plenary. Here is the unedited transcript of what they responded with.

year5tb: because it dosen’t rain much.

me: the river nile

year5tb: so they can drink beacuse they can drink and stay healthy. So they can drink from in it. ? Hi J.C!

Because they don’t realy have much precipitation to live on.

They hardly have any precipitatoin and the River Nile is the only water they have

year5tb: because theres no fresh water to help there land stay moist. Becues it is the most hotist and driay and that is the only warter. Because it’s the only river in eygit. That the only river. We think that the river Nile is important because the weather is so dry and hot. It is the only wet river they have.

Why is the river niel inportent becuase the river is dray and it is not so wet. So they can keep fresh.

me: Because they hardly have eny rain fall

year5tb: Because its hot and dose’nt rain much.

So egypt can have water from the river and then take it back to there village.

As you can see in the text there is plenty to discuss with the children and we referred back to the spreadsheet as we talked and justified some of the ideas. It brought all of their thoughts into one place and became a clear focal point for closing the lesson. I think that the idea of a simple message board service / tool would be really useful for a laptop session whether in GDocs or not – perhaps something to explore, it would have to be something light, with no login so children can just get in and add their response.

(If I were to ask the children do something similar in the future I will ask them to add an initial to the post so that it becomes more useful for assessment purposes.)

iFrame Goodness: Embedding Google presentations

TomGoogle Docs, Google EarthMarch 17, 20083 Comments

I was pleased to discover that Edublogs now has the functionality to embed iframe, javacript and most object code into blog posts and sidebars. Below I have embedded the two different Google presentations on sharing good practice in Google Earth and using the IWB.

If you would like to contribute to the ongoing development of these two presentations just let me know you have a tip to share.

In order to embed a Google presentation into a post, like I have done above, just follow the screenshots.

If you have any other ways you have used javascript, iframes code etc in your Edublogs let James and the rest of the community know.