You’ll find out all about the current project (and future posts) will be here. Still me!

I’ve just e-mailed another tweecher and said that I had so many ideas buzzing around my head that I needed to write them down before my head exploded – and now that I’ve sat down at the laptop to concentrate I find that all those ideas that buzzed around in the early hours of the morning have abandoned me! I am sure that if I had written this at 2am, you would be reading some truly profound ideas but I hope that you will bear with my ramblings as I try to explain why I picked this title for today’s blog (and it wasn’t just so that my weekly wordle barometer would still have learning as the biggest word!)

I am a learner. There – confession time – I am not an expert, not a teacher, just a learner. I say just, but learners are the most important factor in what we do when we stand up/sit down in front of our class. They’re our raison d’etre. What we aim to do is to improve their learning experience, to move their ideas forward, to develop their understanding, to have a bit of fun in the process (after all, it helps us to learn). The way we deliver this learning has evolved – this is my 20th year of teaching and I could hardly begin to explain how differently I do my job now! Quite apart from the fact that teaching chemistry to 11-18 year olds is a completely different ballgame to teaching year 4 primary school children! But the goals, the intentions are the same – that hasn’t changed. Many of the techniques haven’t changed, either. We look to scaffold the children’s learning experiences, to support them through the process, to try and put into practice on a daily basis the ideas of people like Vygotsky, who we learn about in our teacher training but don’t think about for years at a time (or am I the only one!) A fellow tweecher (I’m sorry, I can’t remember who!) suggested a few weeks ago that a book worth reading would be The Teacher’s Toolkit by Paul Ginnis.  It is.  I read it quite a number of years ago and must confess it has sat on my shelf gathering dust - I can’t quite remember which shelf.  What I do remember is that there are some great ideas in it.  BUT there was a song (in the last century when I was growing up!) – I think it was by Bananarama – “It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it …that’s what gets results”. It’s all very well having the ideas, but the proof of the pudding is in the results.  That applies to both technology-based learning and non-technology-based learning.

When I first started using technology in teaching, it was very much for my own benefit – for planning, for research. Then it became a way to motivate the children – getting them involved in software that fitted with what they were learning, e.g. graph drawing packages, word processing, maths programmes, literacy programmes, activities that would enhance teaching on an interactive whiteboard, anything on a CD-rom that you could spend e-learning credits on.  Then it moved from replicating and enhancing our existing ways of teaching and learning. ICT became a communication tool – Simon Haughton got it right in his blog – ICT was becoming CIT! It started to provide tools that weren’t previously available. It started to fulfill the potential that had been predicted in the 90′s by people such as Jonassen, Peck and Wilson.  Now I’m not advocating throwing out the baby with the bathwater – there are so many sound teaching tools that don’t involve technology that it would be right to be sceptical about anyone that says using technology is going to be a panacea, throw away your paper and pencils! But when trying out a new tool we need to think about:

• is it going to be helpful to me as a teacher, make it easier for me to convey my message – will it enhance my teaching?
• is it going to be helpful to the learner, make it easier for them to receive the message – will it enhance their learning?
• could it be done better using a non-technological approach – is it technology for technology’s sake?
• does it enhance the whole teaching/learning process - is it teachnology?
• IS IT FUN/INTERESTING/ENGAGING - as my PGCE tutor used to ask, “Does it have the WOW factor?”

Unfortunately, too often we are restricted by the question:

Is the laptop trolley/ICT suite available?

And the other restriction is frequently the FEAR FACTOR.  Again, there are a few other questions that come into play when we look at this.  Maybe we are a bit wary of trying something new, of maybe making a mistake and getting things wrong  – or maybe our colleagues are experiencinge fear factor.  But what stops us from trying things out? Is it making mistakes? And why don’t we like making mistakes?

• Pride – in the methods that have always worked for us before, in being the expert for our children to learn from (BUT if you always do what you always did, you’ll never get anything new)
• Insecurity – not wanting to look like a complete and utter wally when the technology does something unexpected (BUT we encourage the children to learn from their own mistakes – making a mistake or something going wrong can be incredibly frustrating but a fantastic learning opportunity about problem solving, working around the challenge for those in our class when we talk them through it)
• Stubborness – who keeps flogging a dead horse sometimes rather than admit a mistake? (BUT growing and learning in our role as an educator means being honest with ourselves and others about what works and what doesn’t, as well as being open to being taken out of our comfort zone).

I started writing this blog entry earlier this morning and had a break from writing when I went to church.  I wouldn’t normally blog about these little details, but it actually made me think about how we continue learning as educators.  I am lucky enough to be part of a music group (which wasn’t playing today and which has, incidentally, taken me right out of my comfort zone!).  When leading any sort of singing it can sometimes be quite bizarre – the congregation (especially with a new song/hymn) can sometimes seem to lag a fraction of a beat behind what I am singing.  It’s not much – they are fantastic singers, I hasten to add – but on something new, or fast, there’s an almost imperceptible delay which you wouldn’t notice ordinarily (maybe it’s just the echo in the church). And I was also once told that children find it very hard to keep up with the words in a hymn book when singing unless they are extremely fluent readers.  I was listening to this effect this morning and it just reminded me of how implementing technology in teaching happens.  Some are leading the singing – trying out the new ideas, blazing the trail.  Some are a fraction of a beat behind – perfectly in tune, finding their way with the new ideas, just slightly behind.  And some are struggling to read the words in the hymn book because they aren’t fluent enough – not confident enough in using ICT themselves to try too many new things at a time, but humming along and fitting in the odd word that leaps out from the page.

Does this make sense to you? Are you a trail blazer, an innovator? Or a fraction of a beat behind? Or humming and trying the odd application that doesn’t scare you half to death?

I’ve read a few blogs and tweets over the holidays and was dismayed when a couple have expressed a sentiment along the lines of “join in, or get left behind”.  Whilst I can understand the frustration when we are trying to get less confident colleagues to try things out, I would urge a bit of patience and understanding! We are educators, not just of the children in our classes, but of each other.  Some of us get our CPD from twitter, others get it from a staff meeting or county training, or BETT, or just chatting to the colleague in the next classroom about what they are doing. When on a course, I probably get just as much from chatting to the people next to me on the table as I do from the person presenting – and I know I’m not alone because many of my colleagues say they do too! A good idea kept to ourselves is only ever going to benefit us, but sharing an idea with someone else means they will give their input, maybe you bounce an idea or two off them, and the idea snowballs – with the potential of benefitting even more people. 

The challenges of CIT rather than ICT are that COMMUNICATION is the enormously powerful tool – just look how many people on twitter have been talking about tools such as primry pad, wallwisher, mindmaps, wikis to know that collaborative work is being taken on board with enthusiasm- I know from my own classroom experiences, as well as my own (very short) time on twitter, just how powerful those tools can be. These new communication tools are going to have a potentially huge impact on learning – after all, isn’t it through relationships that we learn? It’s people that inspire us and drive us forward, not the curriculum itself. When we look back at our own education experiences, don’t we remember the person who said something useful, encouraged us, inspired us?

Even with all the technology in the world to support personalised learning, learning in isolation is likely to be a dry and limiting experience.  Even 1:1 access to computers for all pupils will fall down without the benefit of relationship-based learning, without collaboration – one of my new twitter friends, Mark Weston, gave me a link to a paper he co-wrote about this subject and which you will find interesting reading to follow up! I’m with them when they talk about wanting to see cognitive tools being used in classrooms, that accelerate, deepen, differentiate and maximise the learning experience in our classes. And I don’t know about you, but I know I’m going to have to keep trying things out, keep tweaking what I’m doing, keep listening, keep learning, keep sharing ideas with other people in order to be able to do this. L-plates still needed here!!!

So we’ve moved from  the initial paradigms of learning – where children learnt at the knee of adults, where apprenticeships gave life skills – the oral tradition of learning that existed before the industrial revolutions – to the written paradigm that only became the norm over the last two hundred years  for most people – and now our CIT tools are bringing us to a new secondary oral paradigm – where once more, it is relationships, communication and collaboration that will move learning forward, but using technological tools to enable us a far wider circle of people with whom we can communicate and learn.

This is all probably a bit long and a bit heavy for a blog post! I hope you haven’t fallen asleep while you’ve been reading it.  I haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know, just interpreted, applied and re-invented a few wheels! But there are a few main points that I hope you will take:

• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
• Try new things out
• Talk to colleagues, use whatever means you can to communicate and collaborate
• Learning is done through relationships
• Keep learning
• Support colleagues in their learning
• Share ideas, experiences and mistakes – honesty is the best policy!
• Think before using web2.0 tools – use them to enhance learning, deepen understanding, maximise learning
• Evaluate after  using web2.0 tools
• Have fun

Please let me know what you think about these ideas! Add a comment to the blog…. it’s through the feedback that I’ll get better at it!

 It’s all about the learning!

It’s been a very busy few days here at the kitchen table!  There’s been so many ideas floating around for our spring term collaborative project and it is all starting to come together, with e-mails oiling the wheels for what we are going to be doing next week – watch this space for the start of a collaboration that I’m getting really excited about and looking forward to being involved in.  There’s going to be collaboration between schools, a shared wiki, a friendship forum, a taste of primarypad, a bit of glogster, a smidgen of skyping, co-construction, peer support, peer editing…… Well, the skeleton is being built for the children to work on as we speak! All the experimenting with other tweechers paid off yesterday, with Ian Addison (@ianaddison) and James Ashton (@jamesashton20) helping to test the primarypad that had been embedded into the wiki, not to mention the technical support from @johnmclear.  This is a huge testament to how well twitter networks can help us in professional development, as I tweeted a request for people to come and play on primary pad and within a short space of time we were all working together to check it out.

Continuing along the theme of mutual support, I’ve been using Jing for some time now to support colleagues and pupils in school – and there are so many new web2.0 tools out there that I can see support videos being used increasingly as we move into 2010 in order to learn new things/support less confident colleague/refresh our memories when we forget after not using a tool for a while.  Also, as we increasingly use web2.0 or freeware tools, we need to be flexible in how they are used in class and open to new ideas – who knows what will disappear or what better tools may become available in the next few years.  School budgets just couldn’t provide site licenses for a commercially available tools with the vast breadth of those that are  available online for free – by the time we can buy them, there’ll be something better coming along! (Although in the short term (at least) we’ll always need some good staple tools in school.) And I’d probably need every week to be an ICT staff meeting to cover all the new applications if I didn’t have another way of sharing them with staff! 

Some fellow tweechers have started to put some of their “How to” video clips out into the ether so that we can all benefit from them  – many thanks to @primarypete and @ianaddison for starting this current wave of web 2.0 help videos – I’ve added a few clips of my own to their list – links to my jings and Pete and Ian’s videos below (yes, I know some are freeware and one isn’t web2.0 or freeware, just one I know some of my colleagues will want to see!):

How to use Voki by Ian Addison

How to use Primary Pad/Ether Pad by Ian Addison

TimeToast by Peter Richardson

Voicethread by Peter Richardson

Audioboo by Peter Richardson

Wordle by Peter Richardson

Flash Basics and Animation by Peter Richardson

Windows Moviemaker by Peter Richardson

Audacity by Peter Richardson

Photostory 3 by Peter Richardson

2Create-A-Story by Peter Richardson

Bubbl.us by Jan Webb

Wallwisher by Jan Webb

Tweetdeck by Jan Webb

Hope they help a bit!  There’s loads more here - many thanks to Phil Bagge – at www.ictvideohelp.co.uk

It’s by trying out new tools and ideas that we learn ourselves  -  and a good teacher must be a good learner!  And experimenting with new tools keeps us on our toes, can motivate the kids (who always love to know they are the first in the school to try something out!) and makes every day an adventure!

What a great year 2009 has been! I’ll stick with the professional side of it, or the Mum bits will take over.  It started with the learning platform project I had been leading in our local cluster of schools coming to an end, with us taking the resources we had prepared together and trying them out in our classes.  It had been a really interesting 18 months for the project, as we set up our learning platforms together and figured out how to use them.  One of the highlights for me was the opportunity to work with colleagues from other schools in the area and share ideas – a theme which has continued through this year. Having these links has been most useful – during our class animation week, I was fortunate enough to be able to borrow some extra digiblue cameras.  (Incidentally, the best animation week I’ve had with a class yet! Either the kids are getting better at it or I’m getting better at teaching it – I suspect the former.  They made plasticine characters, prepared scenery and used stop-frame animation to prepare scenes from Hansel and Gretel.  After the digiblue software crashed a couple of times, we decided to take photos and put them together on moviemaker instead, putting each scene together at the end to create a whole-class film, which we then published on the learning platform.) 

Some aspects of what we tried in the learning platform project had worked better than others – the “ask the sporting expert” forum was successful, the learning pathways through year 4 science units weren’t (moral of the lesson: don’t spend too long preparing/collecting resources for a learning platform!); a learning pathway for a year 4 pupil needing support for phonics DID work – very well – motivating, encouraging independence and the improvement in reading being very marked.

So now the learning was being put into the learning platform in my classroom, too, which had been my original intention for the project, and it was becoming a matter of routine for us to publish our work, post our homework, use wikis to build groups of words with similar spelling patterns, podcast about what we had been doing in class each week, use forums and the children had all created fantastic homepages. I had been trying out tools like the mark books, the collaborative projects set up by Uniservity, children were taking responsibility for aspects of the platform and staff were now in the routine of  (at least) preparing a new homepage for their class each term.  It was time to start thinking about the next steps in what we were doing…..  And then the dreaded OFSTED phone call came! This where a colleague at another local school helped out again – lending us headphones so we had enough for that week’s ICT project!  Unbelievably, that day also brought the next step in our learning platform use, when an e-mail arrived (that had been sent to all sorts of different schools) looking for anyone who would like to connect with a school in Singapore for a learning platform project.  It sounded rather interesting, my headteacher was quite happy fo r me to try it out and so our international collaboration work developed! After much e-mailing  and support from the Uniservity team, we embarked on a healthy schools project, using a wiki to prepare information pages and a forum to develop friendships, as well as sharing a science experiment.  We then embarked on a project with Hornbill School in Brunei as our topic was rainforests, also using wikis and forums, but developing our use of the discussion tools. Collaboration and co-construction is going to continue in the spring term, with a literacy project based on “The Shirt Machine” starting the new year – using my new favourite tool, wikis.

I then joined a group of teachers in Cheshire who were piloting a new ICT framework, another opportunity for sharing ideas with colleagues from a wider educational community – we had known we needed to develop our ICT curriculum because so much had changed and so this was a great chance to do so!

And then came a few events that I am still absolutely amazed at!  The school won an award from Uniservity for our learning platform, I  joined the Uniservity and Microsoft Innovative teachers forums and had a day in Reading to meet other colleagues using Uniservity learning platforms – more networking, more tools to try out, and then a phone call came on a day I was wearing pyjamas to school – Children in Need Day! Another award won – Microsoft UK innovative teacher this time! I must say, I had never thought of myself as being particularly innovative, I just enjoyed trying out all the different ideas people had told me about to see if they would help the learning in my classroom.  Going down to Birmingham for the forum and presentation was a great treat – more people to talk to, telling people about what we had been doing in our international collaboration projects, more ideas to glean – a most interesting day (though I blame John Davitt, the keynote speaker, for the twitter hashtag for the day which resulted in my recent twitter addiction).  And an exciting day, too, as I found I was going to be one of 4 teachers taking their work to Berlin next March for the European Innovative Teachers forum!  It looks like 2010 is going to be equally interesting! 

I’ve really enjoyed the wider opportunities that this year has brought, including presenting our work at a Uniservity user day in February and to Cheshire headteachers in March. And in the midst of all this I’ve completed two units that will count towards a Masters eventually (hopefully) and started twittering and blogging! I’m also celebrating my 20th year in teaching – having been fortunate enough to teach 11-18, adults, pre-schoolers before finding my way into primary 7 years ago – and next week sees the 25th anniversary of meeting my husband during the first year of uni! 

I’m so glad still to be learning and finding each day interesting – there’s loads more stuff I want to try out in 2010, germs of ideas floating around in my head, lots to consolidate and build on so that it can be rolled out in school, a personal learning network that is growing  (and giving me fresh ideas, insights and challenging my thinking), an exciting adventure in Berlin, working with other schools in the UK and abroad, a new headteacher….  Who knows what else the future will bring?! As my personal reflections on my professional year come to an end, I wish everyone a happy, peaceful and fulfilling 2010. 

Fave new tools tried this year include (in no particular order – and possibly missing some, there’s been so many!):

• Jing
• Wordle
• Bubbl.us
• Pivot stick animator
• Scratch
• Glogster
• Songsmith
• Deepzoom
• Autocollage
• iSpring
• Doppleme
• Cooltext (ok, strictly speaking more than a year!)
• What2Learn
• Hot potatoes
• Block Cad
• Pop Art Studio
• Wallwisher
• Jamstudio
• Primarypad

Just trying out Glogster!  I heard about it on Twitter, when someone posted a link to a wiki homepage that used it.  I was impressed – and thought I could find a use for it on the wiki I’m starting for next term.  However, every time I try to embed the code to the wiki on my learning platform, it isn’t working – I’m just getting doughnuts spinning around.  So is it me? Glogster? the learning platform? In the name of problem solving, I’ve just tried out another on this blog – and it definitely seems to be working, so will need to check out compatibility with  learning platform now! Apologies for the lack of polish in this attempt – looks as though it could do with a bit more effort now I know it works!

The idea of podcasting came after I attended a seminar run by Alan November – in November (!) 2008.  He showed us a video of a class doing a similar podast – I think theirs may have been a video podcast.  But we have a policy of not putting children’s or staff images on the learning platform, so needed to find an alternative way do this. This is where Audacity came in. It’s a free downloadable piece of software that we had already been using in school and had on all our computers – using it has given us an opportunity to let parents know what is going on during the week.  As a mum, I know the answer to the question, “What have you been doing at school today?” is invariably, “Nothing!”

We have a uniservity learning platform and have occasionally used blogs – we’ve been using class podcasts for the just over 12 months now in the same way as some schools use blogs. 4 children are reporters at the beginning of the week- one each for literacy, maths, topic work and school news.  They take notes on what we have been doing which forms the basis of their scripted radio report.  An editor helps them check through towards the end of the week, offering suggestions about what they may have missed out or how to improve the clarity of what they are trying to say.  The sound technician from previous week shows a new sound technician how to use audacity to record and save as a wav file, then we upload to the class resources as RSS. We haven’t done one in the last two weeks as we have been recording our Romans presentations to share with parents instead – these have been recorded on Audacity and uploaded to the learning platform in just the same way – as an RSS.  After first few weeks of term, children take the full responsibility for the weekly podcasting - apart from uploading, which we usually try to do together.

Basically, what we do is the same idea as blogging but an audio version – which means everyone can join in and it isn’t dependent on typing/writing skill/accuracy – the literacy links are powerful even though there is little writing. The children are using note-taking, they are preparing a presentation for a specific audience, they are working collaboratively and cooperatively, speaking skills are being practised.  In the process, they are also verbalising what they have been learning, revisiting and revising ideas from lessons - sometimes in depth, sometimes as “headlines” of the learning objectives or outcomes.  The ownership of the podcast lies with the children – a bit of modelling happened earlier on in the term, but now I just keep an eye on proceedings.   You can catch the podcast here.

Next, I’m hoping to try demos of maths methods using jing or Smart recorder or Easiteach recorder to share with parents using a video clip file next term – watch this space! 

So which is best for enhancing learning? Like most tools, it’s not what it does but the way that you do it that matters most.  If  my learning intention was to develop writing skills, I’d probably get the children to use a blog. But for teamwork, building our sense of being a class, speaking and listening, developing indendence and responsibility, this is an all-inclusive learning application.  

By the way, the children have also been recording other aspects of what we do in class and podcasting in a similar way to showcase their work to parents.  This half term, the children have been researching aspects of Roman engineering and presented them to the rest of the class. Recordings were made and uploaded. We’ve also done it for interviews about school trips and poetry , too.

We are currently piloting a new ICT framework in our school.  It’s the subject of the essay I’ve been doing as part of my CPD – Current Issues in ICT through Edgehill University (an online unit that fits absolutely perfectly for a busy mum of three working full time – not to mention recent twitter addict – hubby made me turn off the volume during dinner tonight so he didn’t have to keep listening to the beeps as new tweets arrived!)

I digress! (Nothing new!) But the #edchat twitter strand that has been going on this week has been very helpful. People have been chatting about assessment – a subject that has been at the forefront of my mind as we have been reviewing the first term of implementation of our new curriculum.  I say new, but actually it just formalises what we have been doing in school – my colleagues are brill and have been teaching ICT in a cross-curricular way since before it became the latest way to do it! Don’t believe any of them who would have you believe they don’t “DO” ICT – believe me, they are doing it well and in a way that moves learning forward in all subjects.  Smartboards were the first step – it made us re-think how we taught – today 2 projector bulbs decided they had had enough and died and we know we need new ones for the beginning of the spring term to be able to teach effectively.  They have just become an integral tool in the teacher’s toolbox for all of us – digital natives and digital immigrants alike !

I think I may be in danger of digressing again.  The whole point is that I have had a very interesting discussion this evening about assessment with a new “friend” (my 14 year old has been checking to see if I know the people I am talking to – good to know I have been teaching her e-safety well!)  I know I have formative assessment materials in place – planning is showing progression and breadth of application of ICT skills throughout the curriculum but I have to admit I have been having concerns about the summative assessment part and finding it difficult to express/identify the best way forward. The formative assessment is the part, I know, that us teachers find useful.  It’s the bit that the children get the best feedback from, the part where we identify the gaps in their knowledge, the part where we can then move their learning on by scaffolding them as they move to the next step in their learning journey. How many of us get summative assessment data from what children have done before, only to make our own judgements within a very short space of time and then only refer to that summative assessment data periodically? It may give us a starting point but has limitations and has high costs in terms of time/energy needed – and “tests” add stress for everyone – staff and pupils alike.  Isn’t our teaching meant to be benefitting the children rather than gathering lots of information to keep in a file?!?!?!

Now I probably tied myself up in knots  about this – trying to explain that we have a new curriculum in place, formative assessment guidance in place but summative assessment is lagging behind. My new friend was showing concern (justifiable!) that we needed to have clear assessment in place – a curriculum needs 3 elements – the curriculum, the formative assessment and the summative assessment.  I must admit I was being much more flexible about the summative assessment, as I think our view of how to assess will develop as we implement the framework.  It’s the formative assessment that is useful to us – but then I read another blog about assessment which followed on from #edchat.  Yes! We are collecting the “portfolio” evidence, pupil reflection opportunities are happening, starters/plenaries with appropriate questioning are going on……  we have all the evidence we need for our summative assessments, without necessarily adding an (artificial?) integrated task.  Learning opportunities ARE integrated throughout the curriculum (as we can evidence in our curriculum, now written to reflect what we actually do). Our methods of assessment need to reflect what is actually helpful to the children, don’t they? So evidence from throughout a unit IS our SUMMATIVE assessment.  Because it is relevant, realistic, shows the gaps, fills the gaps, moves the learning forward.  And isn’t that what we want to do for the children? As teachers, we want our assessment to be HELPFUL for the children, not stressful;  RELEVANT to what they have actually been doing, not contrived; DIAGNOSTIC, not numerical (after all, the numbers don’t help us identify gaps in understanding - two children may get the same mark but don’t understand the same things).   So, actually, we DO have our summative assessment in place – it’s not a test, it’s evidence built up through a unit of pupil activities, reflection and teacher observations.

OK, I’m not saying anything new, but at a time when (throughout the profession) we are recognising that our assessments don’t necessarily fit with what we would like to be teaching, perhaps secondary assessements could learn from criteria-based collection of evidence in primary schools.   Perhaps APP has something to be said for it…..

By the way, this week’s wordle still has CHILDREN and LEARNING and IDEAS as the highlights – am obviously meeting my own goals!

Many thanks to www.wordle.net for the tools to review what is on the blog!

Mrs Webb’s blog wasn’t a particularly inspired name for a blog – especially with a surname like mine that could have so many different possibilities (world wide webb?). I was looking for inspiration, but with only one day of term still to go, my brain was shutting down.  I asked  to hear any suggestions (fit for public consumption)  and found inspiration on Twitter, my new best friend – please comment if you find any of the posts interesting/helpful/useless/anything else I haven’t thought of yet!