Posts tagged classroom
The Philips Entertaible in our School
Sep 27th
Last Wednesday evening I attended my first TeachMeet event held in the Forth Room at the SECC. Typically I was first out of the hat to do a seven minute talk and kick the evening off – I was very nervous and my careful plans seemed to evaporate as I walked up to the stage. This post is what I would have liked to have said – but I think people got the general idea. It is the story of how a simple email led to a series of events that saw a prototype multi-touch interactive device used in our school.
In 2006 I was exploring the possibility of a second interactive device in our reception classes. I wanted to look at the alternatives to IWBs and came across a whole heap of plasma displays etc. I also happened to stumble upon a few articles from Philips about a research product called the Entertaible. The device was shown as having electronic board gaming at it’s heart but i saw much more than that – I saw it in a classroom with children working together on it.
“ The intuitive nature of Entertaible means multiple users can interact with digital data and programs in a simple yet physical, ‘hands-on’ manner. ” Gerard Hollemans, Philips Research
The original Philips press release seems to have been removed from their site but at the foot of it was an email address for the team in charge. I sent them a message basically asking if they had considered the use of the device in the classroom and that I had some ideas for it. Now when you throw a little stone like that at a big organisation like Philips you do not expect it to make a dent or even a mark. But sure enough they replied and we arranged to have, what turned out to be, a series of telephone conversations about the prospects of the device in education. I was staggered really and amazed at how open they were to my ideas.
After being in touch for a short while, Gerard and Maurice from the Philips team invited me to Eindhoven to see the interactive device in action. I asked my headteacher who was hugely supportive of the idea and incredibly in the summer of 2006 I visited the research labs of Philips on their High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. In the meeting I was shown the table and the amazing functionality it had. The Entertaible is a project from the Philips Incubator, the name given to their research department – where new ideas are brought into this world.
After exploring the device first hand I talked with the team about the use of the IWB in our school and the potential that a multi-touch device could have in the classroom. It was wonderful to see the birth place to these sorts of technologies and great credit must go to my headteacher who didn’t even flinch when I asked about the trip and even covered the costs of travel so I could go. It could so easily have been the end of the story – a few emails and phone calls and that’s all – but through his vision it was only the start.
The visit only heightened my interest and curiosity in terms of what the device could do in a classroom. We stayed in touch for a few months afterwards but it wasn’t until November/December 2006 that I got to use the device again in London at a workshop for the Philips team as they explored various markets. I attended the education day and represented the primary sector – it was great to talk about some of my ideas for the table whilst sat at it and meet with further members of the Philips research team.
My headteacher had always said that if you do not speculate sometimes nothing will happen – he was so correct as in late 2006 we were asked if we would like to host the first worldwide school trial of the Philips Entertaible. If you do not knock on the door nobody will ever open it.
Gerard from Philips then asked me to help develop a series of applications that could be produced in the short time he had. I spent a day with a colleague from school who is an AST Reception teacher, in putting the planning together for a range of applications. It was fantastic to be in at the deep end, rethinking traditional activities in light of the collaborative and multi-touch capacity of the device. We had decided that the table would be best trialled in the early years and plans were set out to have it in one of our reception classes for a week.
In February 2007 the only table in the world of its sort arrived at school along with members of the Philips team – the applications were finally in the hands of the most important people, the children. Throughout the course of the week children in the reception class used the device as part of their normal day. In my opinion the table seemed well suited to the classroom environment and the children natural went to it with curiosity and intrigue. The reception teacher and her class had a great week exploring the new technology and worked on counting, position and letter shape activities.
The letter shape activity allowed 4 children to work on the screen at the same time, each on their own quarter. They would touch the screen to activate it and a large letter would be shown with a glowing circle indicating where to begin tracing its shape. When it detects an object or fingertip on that point the glowing circle begins tracing the shape of the letter. If the children are able to accurately trace and follow the guide it will complete the letter and a round of applause will sound from the speakers. However if they stray from the path shown then the whole letter will flash and the glowing circle will return to begin again. You can see it in action in these two videos.
If you are having trouble seeing the videos from Flickr you can see the full set of images and film here.
Children from every class in the school came and used the table throughout the week. The table had variable height so we raised it for the older children and they stood around it when they were working together. The week’s trial was a wonderful experience for all the children and teachers involved.
It was more than a year ago that we had the device in school and about two years from when I first discovered the device online and yet truly open multi-touch technology is yet to be seen in classrooms on any major scale. I know it will not be long and from this experience I realise how much time it takes to develop such a product. Durham University have also been working on the interactive desk idea and since my first contact with Philips Microsoft have developed the Surface, so momentum is growing.
I feel privileged that we had the opportunity to play our part, to represent education in the way that we did, putting new technology in the hands of our learners and hopefully help foster a new age of classroom based interactive devices.
All it took was one email, one knock on the door – I hope it encourages you to do the same.
11 Google Apps Improvements for the Classroom
Sep 1st
I have been thinking and writing about the use of Google tools within the classroom for a while and so I thought I would record some ideas for improvements that have been buzzing around in my head. Although I use the tools personally, the improvements are to do with the use Docs and Apps in general within the classroom, how they affect a teacher’s organisation, the ways that children interact with the tools, missing tools and other possibilities.
- Ad-free Blogger accounts as a service within Ed Apps – a blogging platform as part of the overall Ed Apps services would provide an easy way to generate blogging accounts. It would allow children to use just a single login to access docs, gmail and their blog. Along with this the children should be able to click publish to blog from within a doc – sending their work to their own blog.
- Integration of Google Notebook in Ed Apps – one of the most powerful tools Google has developed. It certainly has a great deal of unexplored potential within the classroom and is notable by it’s absence. If I were to ask children to research together online this is the tool I would use as a first step, not Docs – they would export their notes to Docs and not work there until research has been gathered. Why use Docs when you can work in an application fit for purpose? Some previous thoughts on Google Notebook and it being missing from Ed Apps.
- Grab a copy / Templates - a simple link for each Doc that allows you to get your own copy without the collaborators. The ability to create a template out of any Doc. In the past when I want a whole class of children to work on a certain document and for them to have their own copy I would use a MS Word Template. The children would open it and they would have their own copy – the process is trickier in Docs because it often leads to duplicated documents everywhere when the children click “Include the Collaborators”! Imagine this times 30! 60! Templates are already in use and soo we will be able to make our own, and I hope to be taking advantage of this new feature to hand out work soon.
- Audio support for docs – marking work could be very different if a teacher could add a simple audio comment. Along with the different ways to mark text a simple audio file would surmount to a much greater personal style of marking. Children could respond in kind regarding the comments you have made via audio. We would not just be repeating what we do on paper but changing it, challenging it, reinventing it.
- View Filter signal - a way to signal to a user the different type of filter currently being used in the Docs home page. Many children think that they have lost documents because they are unaware of the current view. They may have clicked on a folder or on a type of doc filter, without it being made very clear – perhaps something next to the More Actions button on the top bar in the Docs home.
- Not just “Shared With” but “Shared By” - when the children hand me a document, a piece of work that they have completed they share it with me and it appears in my Docs home list. It would be very useful to be able to filter the Docs owned by different children in my class. I could then compare a variety of Docs from the same child, perhaps a series of pieces of work or a collection for a single unit. Even better, for portfolios, would be the ability to then export multiple docs at once – two clicks and you have exported all of the child’s docs.
- Remove the flicker – when you are working with someone else’s document and it autosaves your screen flicks up to the top. Annoying and the children found it a little off putting when in the midst of writing.
- Add chat feature into Docs – it’s there in Spreadsheets and when you view a Presentation – children are very motivated by IM and it would prove a useful feature within Docs.
- Archiveable chat – a great feature currently available in Spreadsheets and Presentations but nothing can be archived – it would be useful if this was tied into Google Chat/Email chat (archived their) the chat could be archived for the owner of the document. As a teacher I would like to be able to export it into a Doc as a permanent record of the discourse. We have used it here and here to good effect to support learning going on in the classroom, its just a shame we currently cannot archive it.
- Export Form data to different Docs – we can get a simple summary of the form data and I am aware that this will soon have a wider range of features including different graph and chart types, but it would be very useful to also be able to export some or all of the summary to a new doc/presentation/ssheet. After all once data has been collected we want to analyse, discuss and present that information.
- Gears as a local backup for Docs – in an ideal world my students should be able to access their Google Docs on a local level even if the internet has gone down, just as you can with Google Gears on a private account. No internet = no Google Docs, and although we had only about 2 days of troubles last year with our internet connection it would be useful to have our eggs in more than one basket.
In my opinion the two most important changes would be the inclusion of Google Notebook as it is a lovely little research application and the support of audio within Document commenting. (And of course a platform for blogging as part of the Ed Apps package would also be great)
What do you think of the list? What would you like to see altered, changed, developed or improved that would make a difference in the classroom?
Plan, Tweet, Teach, Tweet, Learn, Smile
Mar 7th
Buckleys mate
That was the first reply from @deangroom to my Twitter request in support of a maths lesson earlier this week. I had asked my network to explain to my class of Year 5s / 4th graders what the probability of snow was for the following day. In my planning I had included this activity as a plenary to my maths lesson on probability. The children were exploring a range of statements and deciding what the likelihood was. The conclusion of the session was planned as follows:
Explore with the children the language that they have used in the session. Ask: Is the same vocabulary used in other countries? Ask Twitter network to respond to: “What is the probability that it will snow where you are?” Explore the responses and discuss the reasons for any differences.
“Buckleys mate” threw me a little though, I shared it with the children and after a little searching we discovered that it is an Australian slang term meaning “No chance” – so we figured out what @deangroom meant!
Time Aware
One of the most important things that I have learned from successfully using Twitter to impact on my lessons, teaching and ultimately the children’s learning is that you have to be time aware. I sent out this tweet, as you can see, at just after 9.15 GMT.
I did not need the responses for a further hour but allowing your network time to respond is very important. By the time that I was sitting with the class to finish the session we had approximately 20 responses to explore, and more was rolling into twhirl as we were working. I simply displayed the “Replies” view so the children could see specific responses to us.
I was also very aware that America was still tucked up in bed and only those very early risers, insomniacs and those burning the midnight oil would be responding at the time from the US. The morning session worked out that we continued our maths on until lunch so I retweeted 2 hours later and then again around 1.00pm. This may seem like you are pestering your network but single tweets can get lost in the torrent for many of your network – some may not respond because they simply may not have seen the request. I knew that the 1pm tweet would nudge those in the US and many added their responses to the stack of examples we had to discuss with the kids.
Shaping the learning experience
As you can see from my planning and the request I sent out the focus was on the language that other people would naturally use to describe an event’s probability. And the coincidental geographic information that justified such a likelihood helped our discussion. We were able to establish from the early responses that they were mainly from Australia and the children were amazed to read the responses:
This naturally lead to a discussion about why residents of this country would give this sort of response, we discussed their climate and the ostensibly long history of no snow days and how this leads people to believe more fully that it is highly unlikely. Then came a response from closer to home.
I swooped upon the language that @jonesieboy had used in his tweet and saw it as a good teaching point. I focused the children’s attention upon his use of “1 in 4 chance” and we explored how this could be rephrased as a a quarter and that led us naturally to the equivalent percentage – 25%.
The children had been using 5 words to describe their own statements in the main part of the lesson. Certain, probable, possible, unlikely, impossible. After reminding them about this I asked them to position “1 in 4″ or 25% on their own scale and to give a word that best describes the chances of snow in East Lothian. It is amazing what a single tweet can do to a lesson.
Creating a learning experience
In a similar way to how our Geotweets lesson proved successful the quality and quantity of responses from my network offered me an opportunity to create a new learning activity. The initial plenary was really successful, we discussed the tweets we had received at that point and the language differences it presented. I decided to continue with the maths lesson for the rest of the morning and spent 10 minutes, whilst the children were outside for breaktime, creating two additional SMART Notebook pages that incorporated the Twitter responses.
The main focus was of course the language individuals used and although we concluded many people, when asked about probability, responded with a figure/percentage, I challenged the children to juxtapose the responses onto our original scale.
The second notebook page was an additional bonus, but the geographical information is very important to explore with the children when reviewing any responses in Twitter. In the case of this maths lesson the probability could be justified by geotagging the tweet. I used a rudimentary map and we discussed the location of the respondees and how this affected their responses. I could have looked at a map+Twitter mashup but this would not challenge the children’s geography knowledge, rather it would just display the locations.
To create these pages in SMART Notebook I simply used the screen capture tool to snip the individual tweets from Twhirl. You have to ensure that the inactive opacity is set to 100 as Twhirl becomes inactive when you switch to the SMART screen capture tool. You can download the notebook file with these two pages in here.
I was delighted to use this networking technology in this way and it was great to finally execute what I had long conceived to be possible in my head. The lesson was so much richer for the carefully planned introduction of Twitter responses. The two SMART Notebook pages supplemented the original nbk resource and the discussion in the plenary. The parallel Y5 class was able to benefit from the depth and quality of responses as they also located the tweets and scaled the responses using the notebook. In terms of my own teacher assessment of the lesson I think that the children had a truly global picture of what this question meant to real people and a far greater understanding of the variety of vocabulary used to describe probability. For some people who responded the possibility of snow was almost far fetched and for others it seemed they were having to literally defrost the very keyboard they were frostily typing on! When I look back at the short paragraph of planning I had written it’s brevity does not reflect the depth of opportunity it actually produced. I move on from this lesson knowing that when you invite responses from your network to expect much more and to be flexible enough to make the most of the learning opportunities it readily presents.
With a careful, planned approach I think I have proven (in this instance) that Twitter can be used to impact on the children’s learning. That may be a very narrow impact in terms of a wider curriculum but it is an impact nonetheless.
Make it work in your classroom
- Think carefully about what topic to support – the simplest questions are the best.
- Phrase your 140 characters with great care. Get as much in as you can. I must have taken a good 5 minutes redrafting the original tweet.
- Be time aware. Think carefully about who will see your tweet when you send it out. Send your request for information prior to the time you actually need it, to allow the network time to respond.
- Don’t be afraid of retweeting a request so that people who have just logged in can pick it up.
- Request a location from your network as this can form some excellent points for discussion.
- Display the responses using the Replies view in a Twitter client like Twhirl or Snitter, this way you will not be distracted by the other conversations passing by.
- Share with the children the language of Twitter and what it all means, one of my children heard the alert sound of a reply and said “That means someone has tweeted us!”
- Be flexible and prepared for the direction that the tweets can take you.
- Save an image of your replies for future reference – you can see all of the replies we received for this lesson here.
Many thanks to all of you who responded to our question – thankyou for contributing to our maths work this week.
