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We have been using Google Docs with our students for over a year now and I have spent some time writing about our experiences so far. One of the key questions that I have been exploring for a while now is “How do you mark and manage student work in Google Docs?” but this simple question is applicable to most other online office tools. In this post I explore a facet of this type of assessment that I would call “unobtrusive collaboration”.
On a number of occasions in the last year I have taken the opportunity to conduct a “live marking” session with the children in my class. They are working on a piece of work that is shared with me – I open it at the same time and add comments and marking to the piece of work. I would often also back these comments up by talking to the children involved, going over to them to reinforce what I had commented on – actively engaging them in the collaboration.
In some of these instances I would just nip into the doc and take a quick look around to check the progress, leave a comment if appropriate and leave them to it. I think this is an interesting type of quiet monitoring as the children are working. In the online document I can mark, highlight and leave comments without intruding on the flow of work that is taking place.
With paper based tasks or work that does not allow synchronous editing I would have to interrupt what the children are working on to inspect their work more closely. I might have to ask them to scroll to different sections or simply to move their writing hand so I can see what they have done over their shoulder!
Of course we must always find time to talk to our children face to face about the progress of their work, and I am not disputing the value of this, but often it does intrude on the flow of work. This sense of passive collaboration offers us the opportunity to access all of the children’s work very quickly and to quietly monitor progress and to add our comments.
I think that this sort of unobtrusive marking or monitoring is especially useful when my children are working in a small group or a pair. They are often busy talking about what they are doing or about to move onto and I do not want to stop that communication, or break their train of thought. Last Wednesday I quietly added comments and thoughts to my class as they were busy working in pairs on an activity in Religious Education. They picked up on those comments, adjusted their work, responded if they needed to, but it essentially did not halt the immediate process – it was a tacit collaboration.
What experiences have you had of marking and managing the ongoing assessment of work in Google Docs or other online office tools with your students?
There are so many online resources available nowadays to support literacy and spelling, but which are the true gems in the bunch. Which do we use in the classroom? Which are favourites with my class? Which have the flexibility, depth and longevity to make it into my Top 5 Spelling resources?
This has proven to be a highly valuable resource. You are able to save spelling lists for the children to access beyond school. It comes into it’s own as each list is used in a variety of different games to help the children learn them. Each word that you add to the list is automagically linked to a snippet of audio pronouncing the word and there is even audio of the word used in a sentence.
Lists can be downloaded, printed and there is even a handwriting sheet that you can print off for your spelling list. There has been a big take up by KS2 teachers in my school and Spelling City is a firm favourite of my class. My only grumble is that some words are difficult to understand in the audio as the pronounciation is American.
No problem in TutPup with the English pronunciation of the words as the lady who has done the audio, I am told, did the announcements for the London Underground system! TutPup provides a social competitive edge to the children’s practice which they really enjoy.
The main bulk of games are maths based but the audio quiz for spelling is excellent too. The children listen to a word and type in the spelling, they are of course paired with another user from somewhere in the world giving it that competitive fun. Why not finish your session with a look at Google Earth and map where the competitors were from.
I am pleased to note that since I began using TutPup last year they have added a link to the word lists used for the different levels so you can point the kids at the right one.
There are a whole bunch of these resources but the best in my opinion is the Crickweb version.
You can add your own 10 words, practice using the look, say, cover, write and check method and there is even facility to print paper based resource cards and review and assess progress. Simple and very effective.
A lovely interactive site for the simple practice of common key words. Children can choose from a range of different word topics such as “In and around the home” and “Animal Kingdom”. The children then are presented with a big wheel in the centre of the screen with all of the letters on it. They choose a little image from the many that populate the rest of the screen and they hear audio of that word and then have to spell it using the dial.
You can select to have the words chosen randomly and they can reveal and hear the word again as they are working. Again the American pronunciation can cause some confusion but otherwise it is worthy of a spot in my top 5 spelling resources.
A bit of fun for number five – this resource will help children to see their spellings in a different way.
GeoGreeting finds satellite images of buildings and other objects from around the world that resemble the letters in your words. Great to get the kids using them to see the words in an alternative visual way.
These are my top 5, but I know that there are a huge variety of online games and interactive resources that can be used. What do you think of my list? What would make it into your top 5 online spelling resources? I hope you have found something useful here to use with your class.
When I visited the Scottish Learning Festival last week I was very fortunate to be met from the plane by David Noble of the extremely popular Booruch podcast. David and I have been online working colleagues for a long time now and he was in fact the very first person to bookmark this blog in delicious. At the TeachMeet event David presented in the breakout sessions about his thesis project which he is looking for support. He has always been very generous and supportive to me and so I would urge you to help David if you can with his project, which he himself explains about below.
I would like to invite you to participate in the edonis project which commences at the start of November. edonis (educators online impact study) will run for at least three years, identifying, for example:
Trends in educators’ use of online communication
impact on teaching and learning, and professional development
good practice
implications for the learning sector and government.
Your involvement would centre on:
Replying to a brief fortnightly emailed question
monthly; completion of a brief online survey
termly; responding to stimulus eg image, video, comment
yearly; participating in a one-hour online discussion relating to the findings of the study
a one-to-one interview with myself during the period of research.
There is a ‘community of practice’ running alongside my research (at http://edonis.ning.com), which is intended to facilitate participants’ learning through: regular reporting and sharing of data and findings; opportunities to network with fellow educations and participate in focused discussions; and access to the final version of the thesis.
The study will form part of my doctoral thesis, provisionally titled, “Educators’ use of the social web to support teaching and learning, and professional development”. Your participation will be recognised within the published thesis and with a yearly Professional Development (CPD/PD) certificate. At each stage of the study, you will be able to choose to annonymise your contribution.
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 fewarticles 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.
This week we used Google Forms to collect and share preference data about fruit. We spent Wednesday afternoon’s design and technology session learning about different fruit as a precursor to creating a healthy fruit smoothie.
The children had the opportunity to taste about 15 different types of fruit and record their thoughts and preferences. I used a Google Form to collect this data into a spreadsheet so that the children could use this information to help inform them of their peers’ preferences. That is why this was so useful, the form acted as a simple data entry point to contribute to a wider pool of data. This larger set provides the children an insight into the a wider range of preferences which we will use to help plan the ingredients for their smoothies.
We are working in Google Apps for Education and there are a number of ways to share both the form and the spreadsheet, in the screenshots below I explain some of them because there are a few different options.
I used this feature when I shared the fruit form with my class. They accessed it from their email and the form was included in the message. However be aware that when the children completed the form and clicked submit from the email message ironically the Google toolbar blocked the pop-up that opens as conformation. The form data is not submitted.
In order to sidestep this quickly during the lesson without having to ask the children to edit pop-up settings I asked them to access the form via the link that is included in the email. In the future I will just send the link to the kids and get them to access it outside of their email.
Remember that the form and the spreadsheet can be shared separately – once we have collated all of the data we need, I will be sharing the children into the document so they can access the results. I displayed the spreadsheet data on the IWB so the children could see what was happening I highlighted the live update of the data as forms were submitted.
This final option to share the form will allow children access to it from their documents home screen. We had great fun sharing the fruit preferences we had by using Google Forms and we will soon be all set to average out the data to help with our smoothie recipes.
With a week passing since we began using our docs accounts the kids have experienced the use of sharing and working on documents, forms and spreadsheets – on Friday the children worked in pairs on a piece of work in RE, shared with each other as the pair were co-owners and then handed into me by sharing too. I showed the children how I star the documents that I need to mark and how to filter their docs home view in different ways. It is still enjoyable to see children sharing Google Docs to hand work in, it is just so simple and effective.
Important to note the pop-up problem if you share the form embedded in an email – next time I will probably use option 3 rather than email.
On a number of occasions in the last year I have taken the opportunity to conduct a “live marking” session with the children in my class. They are working on a piece of work that is shared with me – I open it at the same time and add comments and marking to the piece of work. I would often also back these comments up by talking to the children involved, going over to them to reinforce what I had commented on – actively engaging them in the collaboration.
