Category: Voicethread

What my class thought of our Google Docs project

Google Docs, Laptops, My class, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on15 Comments on What my class thought of our Google Docs project

Class comments about GDocs projectAs our summer term Google Docs project drew to a close I asked the children in my class to reflect on what we had done. I asked them to record the one thing they found the biggest challenge about working together with Google Docs and the aspect they enjoyed the most.

No I didn’t set up a Google form with a spreadsheet to pool our thoughts – I just asked them to write them on some paper speech bubbles. Some of their responses formed part of our Geography display.

Below I have transcribed them as they are, which provides a revealing picture about the project.

Biggest Challenge when working together in Google Docs:

  • When everyone gets a laptop and everyone delets stuff.
  • The hardest thing for me is when were in groups and we are all sharing the same document.
  • Delite stuff what we need.
  • My biggest challenge is problems happening on google docs like things what I cants solve for myself.
  • Putting up with arguing with other people.
  • The thing I find hardest is when two or more people are on the same document and are writing in the same space.
  • When we are all not talking and people move stuff and people shout.
  • I find it difficult when the whole group work on the same document.
  • It is hard to work with other people.
  • The biggest challenge is to stop arguing.
  • The thing I find hard would be the working together.
  • When thay move things around.
  • When you are trying concentrate on your work.
  • I think it has bin a tough challenge getting use to working together because you have to talk then work and then talk etc.
  • Probably if somone eles deleats your work.
  • It is a challing when other pepole are writing where you are,

Most enjoyable part:

  • The most thing I enjoy is that we work as a group.
  • What I injoy the most about Google Docs is being able to see what other people are doing.
  • I’ve enjoyed it because I like doing research about india becasue there is a lot of things about india.
  • I like working this way because we can chat on the computer.
  • The best thing is that one person has a laptop.
  • I like the fact that we can chat on google docs.
  • I have enjoyed working in this way because it gives us a chance to use the laptops more and get to work in partners more.
  • I’ve enjoyed it about google dogs like researching and doing a presentation.
  • I enjoy working as a group.
  • That we get to talk and wright on the same doc.
  • I like the chat.
  • We get more ideas down.
  • I enjoy working on google docs and wth other people.

It is very important that these comments help to define what we do with Google Docs in the new academic year.

The children have clearly told me here that the biggest challenge is working as a group. Before we began using Google Docs the class struggled to participate collaboratively in group activities, I knew this. Working on a document at the same time as someone else is new classroom behaviour and in my opinion needs to be modelled. Just as we would model the correct way to use a hacksaw or modelling how to write in a particular style – we can facilitate the group dynamics by modelling collaborative authoring in Google Docs. But the tool is not a magic answer to communication and working in a group as you can see from the children’s comments. When you undertake a Google Docs project, if you are working on a shared doc between a group, communication and talk must be the most important focus – not the tool.

The chat has been a popular part of the work we have done, although it is only in the presentation tool that you can instant message. This did prove a very powerful learning activity and I would recommend a reflective backchannel that collates feedback to be part of future presentation projects. Comments about seeing what other people are doing and getting more ideas down are interesting as children perhaps become more accountable for their contributions in a group – reminding me of the way Voicethread allows you to see the efforts of others.

There have been many positives from this project and I have been really pleased how Google Docs has performed so reliably under classroom conditions (30 laptops 1 wireless access point) and I would strongly recommend the two following elements to focus on if you are undertaking a similar project with your classes.

  1. Model good practices – much of what the children will experience with synchronous document editing is totally new. They may have never done anything like it before and it is a new way to work in the classroom. We found that the children had a better understanding both functionally and socially/collaboratively when we modelled good practice, and gave a commentary about what we were doing as we worked together in Google Docs.
  2. Communication is key – beyond learning about the functionality of Google Docs (which they picked up very quickly) the children need to understand why communicating as a group is so essential. Spend time talking with the children about what to expect and how best to approach different situations. Troubleshoot groups going off track and work as a class to help solve and suggest solutions. I asked my children are you making your work C.L.E.A.R – Communication with your team, Listening to what is going on around you, Eye contact when we are talking, Ask about problems or issues and Review what is going on in the team. (Once again number 1 can apply a great deal here)

I wish you success with your own classroom Google Docs projects and hope that some of these insights help you to better use the tools to impact children’s learning. Please drop me a line to say what you are up to.

Other relevant posts:

Mr Barrett I have got glue on my laptop…

Laptops, My class, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on12 Comments on Mr Barrett I have got glue on my laptop…

Although I may have led you to think that everything in the image is stuck to the laptop, I have to disappoint you! However I really like this image of my classroom because of just that sort of possibility. I want a learning environment for my class that blends the best tools for what we are doing – a blended tools approach. Whether that be a laptop and access to an online application, a headphone mic set or a gluestick. This is a natural picture of my classroom, it is not what you would see everyday, but the children think of the technology as just another tool. Long may the risk of glue on the laptops continue!

What does this image say to you? What sort of challenges do we face as educators in creating an environment that blends the best technology tools for learning and what is considered more traditional?

18th July – I have decided to change the image to a Voicethread, after I posted the image I realised it would be a much more effective way for people to comment on the image – please take a look and add you comments in which ever form you wish.

Creating an environment of personalised technology choice

Laptops, My class, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on16 Comments on Creating an environment of personalised technology choice

The last few days have been pretty important for us at Priestsic Primary School. For the first time we have been able to offer our year 5 kids the opportunity to use their own laptop to work on. It is not a permanent 1:1 solution as yet, but it is an option we have. There are now 16 laptops in the cabinet in my room and this is the same for the other year 5 class across the corridor and for the two year 6 classes. Since we have begun this project both the year 6 teachers and ourselves have taken the opportunity to pool our year group laptop resources to increase the number of machines being used in a session. The children sat down to their geography projects, logged into their Google accounts and did not really notice. For me it was the first time we could organise it in this way.

In this blog post I want to begin to communicate some of my first thoughts about what a 21st Century classroom could look like for a UK primary teacher and my thoughts on creeping ever closer to a full compliment of laptops for every child in my class.

A while ago I decided that it is futile to try and apply some of the structures and practices that US and international schools have in light of their 1:1 personal computing setup. I spent time bookmarking online information about the topic. Most of it is fine in theory but fairly difficult to apply in my primary school. Much of what I read is to do with an older age range and far different environments than our own. The sites included “blueprints to 1:1 computing” and complete “guides” suggesting, just from the rhetoric of the titles, that one size (may) fit all. Although we may learn lessons from what other teachers, schools and districts have been doing it seems we will have to discover our own UK primary version of what a 1:1 classroom looks like.

Choice
Many years ago Dave, my headteacher, and I sat and talked after hosting our first NCSL SLICT training day about the vision we had for ICT. Although we were in the midst of embedding IWB use in teaching and learning, we talked about a personalised technology choice. We have long discussed the idea of creating an environment where technology is on tap if the children want it. Dave always says choosing technology has to be as easy as turning that tap on. We have had this same thought, this same concept as the keystone to our vision ever since. Now that we are beginning to see it slowly materialise a personalised technology choice remains at the heart of what we do. A simple example that has occurred this year would be when we set children a task to plot a journey from the UK to India (with a series of stopovers in different cities) The children chose to complete the task in different ways. Some chose to use technology, Google spreadsheets to calculate the mileages etc Google Earth to investigate the locations along their journey and to measure their path. Whereas some chose to use a paper atlas and a calculator – their was a choice and the outcomes reflected that choice.

But having a choice and knowing which choice is the most appropriate, technology or otherwise, is something different.

Ownership
Our children do no take the laptops home with them, but they feel that the equipment belongs to them and the class. They have taken on huge responsibility to look after and work with the laptops available – their approach to it has been amazing. You have to step back and put the onus on the children after all it is their learning space, you may have to manage and plan for the use of the laptops but the children need to own it. They must feel comfortable, responsible and at ease with it in their learning environment. Our children are 9 or 10 years old and they have full responsibility for setting up laptops and replacing them in the cabinet. We have modelled behaviours and they clearly understand how to ensure the laptops are safe. But owning the laptops has to go beyond “they are part of our classes resources.” The children have to begin to take steps to have ownership over the choices that they make and this is where the previous points crosses over.

Curriculum
The biggest challenge for us this year has been to look at our existing, changing curriculum and understand where the use of technology can best support learning outcomes. I have been fortunate (perhaps due to my own determination to understand what edtech learning tools are available) to be able to harness some powerful tools to support learning this year. But there is a awareness issue. How many teachers really know about Voicethread or Google Docs – I get masses of fliers through the post at school from software publishers, they seem to spend an inordinate amount of money on it. However we never receive mail about free tools. I have realised that with a greater permanent access to technology in the classroom that structured speaking and listening can be easily accomplished. For example a Voicethread as a science assessment on a new unit (we did last Thursday) or a Photostory outcome on a tour of the town (persuasive unit earlier in the year.

I always ask myself, “Is this the most appropriate resource to be using for this learning outcome?” There is so much changing about our curriculum at the moment (in our school) new literacy strategies and skills based work that a 1:1 curriculum may look very different in other schools. We need to know what other tools are available though, tried and tested, that is essential to a better choice after all.

Age range
The level of maturity my children have shown has been crucial to the smooth running of 1:1 operations in my class. They understand the practicalities of working with the laptops and take full responsibility for their use. During any given task they understand that if they have a problem that initially they may be able to solve it themselves and what to do if they cannot. I am not running around troubleshooting. When one of their peers has a technical or procedural problem in an application they help each other out. I have watched the children work so well as a team this year, pulling together, helping their classmates and offering support and advice even when none is requested. Would this be the same with 8, 7, 6 year olds? Most probably not. In my opinion, (and feel free if you have a permanent 1:1 laptop resource in the early years to shoot this down) the adults would spend much much more time then I have done managing the resource and troubleshooting. This view has been supported by early years teachers at work. That is not to say that their is not a laptop solution for younger children – perhaps something mobile, shared between classes.

Balance
There has to be a balance between how much technology use there is in the classroom and just getting out into the world. We spent a whole science session up at the school allotment measuring the broad bean plants the children had germinated, weeding and looking after the other vegetable beds. Before half term we spent a couple of sunny hours playing kwik cricket on the field. The children enjoy using technology but they also enjoy variety and a balance of different activities. Just because the governing body of the school has invested tens of thousands of pounds into the resoure does not mean it has to be “on” all of the time. Sometimes the tap has to turned off. I made every effort to help build an appropriate, judicious IWB use ethos in 2003 when we installed them across the school, helping teachers to appreciate they need to be aware of when it is time to switch it off. The same applies for a laptop resource and in many ways the children’s choice. When we get 30 laptops in our classes we need to remember what was successful without them and approach it as just another tool at our disposal.

I reflect on most of these topics throughout the course of the week just as part of what we are doing day to day. Even though I have been thinking and theorising what a 1:1 class might look like in my school (and in my head) for a long time, much of what you have read are raw thoughts which need further discussion. I hope to continue to reflect on what 1:1 means to us, but whether I can begin to pin down some key elements of what a 21st century (UK) primary classroom is like we shall have to wait and see.

Transforming Learning – Responding to an image

Laptops, Literacy, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on14 Comments on Transforming Learning – Responding to an image

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.

vthread

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.

vthread1

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!)