Last week was the busiest ever for CPD. Some sessions went without a hitch, others were more troublesome! In fact, there were so many disasters at the start of the week that, by the time Thursday’s Go!Animate course came around, I was prepared for every eventuality!

The two pictures above give a flavour of the more successful Go!Animate session.

 The decision to bring along some of the Primary 5 pupils who had been trialling the success of using Go!Animate to improve literacy skills was made after reflecting on the success I experienced when I gave my first CPD course as a class teacher.

I had been asked to do this to introduce other class teachers to the idea of setting up a class blog. I posted my thoughts about the decision to bring along some of my own pupils to give their perspective on things and I’ve revisited those posts, one of which can be found here.

At the time, Maryam reflected in her own blog how weird it felt for her to experience a reversion of roles 🙂

 “Yesterday Me,Anna,Sophie,Darcie,Rebecca and Ainsley had went to this place in Camelon to teach teachers who to use blogs.It was really fun! Though it was a little weird teaching teachers.But anyway it was still fun.

First we had went to the little café place.We had a scone,some biscuits and tea.The scones rocked!We got to put jam on them or butter.The tea was REALLY hot and my tongue went firey red.Aghhh!

Then we had went back upstairs and we waited for all the teachers to come.Then when they had all came we started our presantations.Anna and Sophie went first.Then me and Darcie but we had sort of made a muck up of it!Then after we had went around helping the teachers.

THAT WAS THE WEIRD BIT!

I’ve never helped a teacher and it was a bit emmbarrasing going up to them and saying, ”Do you need any help?”I had helped a few people but the computers there are a bit slow and they keep canceling things so it was a bit hard.Then after the teachers had went back and we got everything back in Mrs Vass’s Car.Mrs Brown had took some people and dropped them off at there homes.Mrs Vass took me,Anna,Rebecca and Darcie.It was really funny!

I can’t wait till next week if we are going back!”

One of the CPD sessions this week was also designed to introduce teachers to Blogging ….. but It did not go well! The internet was VERY slow during the session and everyone soon became discouraged. As well as that, I was torn in all directions, trying to help the 15 or so participants. How I regretted not having brought along some extra Primary School age experts to offer some professional advice 🙂

Other CPD courses during the week had various little glitches, and by the time it came to delivering the Go!Animate one, I had put plans in place to cover all unforseen events! If the internet was to go down, then I had made arrangements for offline viewing of the benefits of using the freely available resource. My invited guests ‘experts’ provided first hand evidence of how it impacted positively on their ability to use direct speech in their writing  (I can’t find the link they used now – typical!). The group who came along produced this animation.

I’m also indebted to Cassie for helping me to make sure that the CPD session went smoothly. She offered to introduce her Primary 5 class to Go!Animate and evaluate its effect.

 If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew that it actually did have a positive impact on children’s motivation to learn, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable ‘selling’ the idea to colleagues 🙂

Here’s a flavour of the successful CPD session!

 

Today and yesterday were our in-service days. For class teachers that usually means two days of some sort of CPD. In my present post, however, it consisted of both attending CPD courses delivered by others – and delivering CPD courses to others.

A CPD course delivered by others – Monday:

The first course I attended was some CPD about CPD  🙂

It was delivered by Con Morris and Katie Barrowman – two people I’ve only known virtually until yesterday. It was a very thought-provoking course, presented in an active and fun way. The chocolate orange was not won by anyone and a member of the Falkirk audience reminded Con that he’d promised to share it with everyone if no-one managed to get 2 correct answers to his question. (I was second last in the semi-circle, and was very pleased that there was a couple of slices left by the time Katie had made her way around the grateful recipients! )

We had all been asked to write down two forms of CPD that we knew of …. the ‘usual’ face to face type of twighlight session was not allowed to be one of them. Con spun the ‘random generator thing’ (I’ve seen Ewan use it in Teachmeet sessions – didn’t know it was from the classtools site), and if you had written that down then that was counted as you being half way to winning the chocolate orange all to yourself.

Although lots of people had managed to get one CPD option correct, no-one managed to get two. The whole exercise just brought it home to people the wide variety of activities that come under the umbrella of CPD.

……. Now for my embarrassing confession – I didn’t write down any of the generated answers!! In my defence, however, I took the ‘face-to-face’ type of CPD ban literally and tried to think of non ‘face-to-face’ activities only. What did I write down? ‘Reading educational blogs’ and ‘more recently, twittering’.

When the ‘generator thing’ came up with ‘other’, and Con asked if anyone had written something under that category, I almost admitted to my choice but was beaten to the post by someone at the other side of the room who admitted to writing down ‘going to the theatre’. Con’s reply was great (can’t remember his words exactly – but in summary it was something like ‘it’s ok to take time out to refresh’).

It was also a great surprise to everyone that Katie (I think she might have been the one who did this?) had taken the time to set us all up with a temporary Glow account and we all got to have a contemplative look at it – although I’m sure that there are more advantages available when you’re a fully paid up member 🙂

A CPD course delivered to others – Tuesday

Today it was my turn to deliver a course.

In the morning, I helped some staff in a school become familiar with their new Schools-Online website.
The afternoon session, however, was the highlight of my day! I was working with some teachers whose job it is to teach French to Primary 6 and 7 stage children. I introduced them to the effect that an audience can have on a class. We visited some schools that are using blogs to motivate children, and we looked at the use of freely available online tools to enrich learning and teaching.

The feedback forms they filled in made it very apparent that they were staggered by the number (and quality) of these tools. It was obvious that one of the main high spots of their CPD course was the delicious link given to me by Shirley via a recent comment on this blog – thank you for sharing, Shirley! You’ve made some teachers in Falkirk very, very happy 🙂

I love the educational potential that GoAnimate offers. It’s not possible (at this time), however, to include animations in edublogs.

Access at work is also very erratic at the moment (hopefully bandwidth issues will be resolved in the future) and this has been quite disturbing as I’ve signed up to present a course on it – next Thursday. No matter where I host it online, the same problems will present themselves as it’s a ‘hit and miss’ situation.

But here’s where Smart Notebook comes in handy. I used the ‘recorder’ tool to capture the animation I made for Neil’s birthday surprise    (I know it’ll look a bit strange to ‘outsiders’ but all the scene backgrounds and the animations had my sons cracking up with laughter – and I had a genuine reason for sitting at the computer for ages getting used to the programme!)

The animation is now safely stored on my desktop and can be viewed offline (thanks to my colleague, Malcolm, for the tip).

Once I had recorded it, it was easy (and very quick) to upload it to a host site. I used this opportunity to compare 2 favourite host sites – photobucket and schooltube. The first video below is hosted on photobucket – the second one on schooltube.

As anyone using an edublogs blog knows, I’ll not be able to preview these videos until I’ve pressed the publish button – here goes 🙂

Or ……

This is just a short post to say what I’ve been up to recently.

I’ve decided that if this is really going to be a CPD blog, then I need to post more frequently in order to reflect on what I’ve been doing. I really want to keep this blog going – but I’m starting to struggle.

This morning, however, I had one of those ‘lightbulb’ moments when checking my weekly calendar.

I realised that since starting my secondment, I tend to put my energy in to planning for the week ahead rather than reflecting on the week that’s just passed.

… So from now on, I’m going to use this blog to try to truly reflect – (and try to learn from my experiences). I’ll include the highlights from each week (don’t think for one minute that I’m not working like a dog for the rest of the week – ‘cause I am!)

Last Week’s Highlights:

• Monday – I had planned to visit a school to help staff to become familiar with the new Think Quest website. I’ve used Think.com in the past with pupils but after stumbling upon the new web 2.0 tools, this resource lost most of its appeal for me …. and for the pupils in my class. As it’s part of my remit, however, I felt obliged to ‘sell it’ as best I could. Prior to my visit, it transpired that there was a problem with the school’s new account with Think Quest, so I thought it best to have something else up my sleeve . I amended the presentation to include the benefits of introducing children to Blogs, wikis and all the new cooltoolsforschools stuff. The staff were blown away by what I had to share, and by the end of the session, everyone of them had set up a new class blog – I’ll keep you posted about the eventual outcome of this (will they keep them going?)

• Thursday – On Thursday I went back to visit Carronshore Primary School. Class teacher, Cassie, had agreed to work with the children on the GoAnimate program after I told her that I was giving an in-service delivery on its benefits. I love this website and the potential it holds for improving literacy skills. I’d played about with it prior to visiting Carronshore and I completed this effort on Saturday …. andthis one earlier this evening ?. The children in Cassie’s class know (like me) that it makes work feel like fun! I helped them make the first scene. They chose friendship groups to work in (2, 3 – 4 children at most in each group). Each group was supplied with an A3 piece of paper divided into 6 sections. After some think/discussion time, they illustrated each scene. I then showed them how to bring their scene one to life using the GoAnimate program. They loved it – I can’t wait to see if they manage to complete scenes 2 to 6 the same way – I’ll let you know! The plan is that they then create a piece of writing based on their group effort – time will tell 🙂

More Lightbulb moments to follow 🙂

 

Well I did it! I finally graduated with a Master’s Degree 🙂

 

 

 

Evelyn W was there too. We’ve both worked very hard over the last five years and we finally we got there!

It was ‘touch and go’ a few times for both of us, but we supported each other through the times of self doubt.

After the ceremony I met up with my sisters …… they obviously know me well!

The bottle of Champagne and the ‘sparkly’ mouse and mousemat present just about sums me up 🙂

This entry is inspired by Kim who commented on my last post :

‘But just think how much you will be learning along the way ‘……….

(thanks also to Pam for her comment!)

One of the items on my long list was to:

• Introduce the use of vodcasts (audacity and windows movie-maker) to assist enterprising education

  I should have felt at ease with this item on my ‘to do’ list because it’s something I’ve done many times with classes.

Presenting to contemporaries, however, is most definitely not within my comfort zone so I was a bit on edge this week when I stepped up to do my bit – just one slot in the 4 hour CPD session on how the use of ICT can benefit enterprising education.

I’d brought with me an Mp3 file made by some children last year when we visited the local Bookbinders (by chance I still had it somewhere on my laptop at home). We listened to this and then I then showed the difference that was made when we added pictures to the voices.

I demonstrated how to export a recording as an Mp3 file using Audacity, and then import it to Window’s movie maker along with some pictures. The ‘audience’ then created their own mini vodcast.

Despite my lack of presentation skills, I was delighted that the feedback was extremely positive. Everyone (almost instantaneously) saw the potential for using this as a tool to improve story writing.

It was definitely the highlight of my week!!

Earlier in the day, I prepared a quick reminder guide for them (I know what they produced isn’t really a vodcast …. but the potential’s there?)

… And next week’s highlights?:
• Wednesday’s Leonard Cohen concert
• Friday’s graduation ceremony :-)!!

These are notes to myself about my ‘booked’ CPD courses (until March 2009) requiring preparation time …. time management is now at the top of my CPD agenda : )

• Supporting Nursery Staff in using the new Schools- Online websites
• Introducing the use of vodcasts (audacity and windows movie-maker) to assist enterprising education
• Supporting SMT in schools to introduce innovative ICT activities to engage pupils and parents (e.g. using flickr tools to share themed photographs of school life)
• Supporting teaching staff to become familiar with the new ‘Think Quest’ facilities – including how to set up and maintain pupils’ sites
• Supporting ancillary staff to use facilities in the new Schools-Online websites such as uploading documents (newsletters, etc.) and to access and use the calendar facility
• Familiarising myself with the benefits of the Go-Animate programme, supporting Cassie in its use, preparing suitable CPD course material to enable staff to use the program creatively to improve literacy at all levels
• Supporting schools in CPD events to improve maths teaching (specifically collaborative problem solving activities ) by making it more active and cross curricular (real life maths). Adapting my own ideas used in class previously and developing a CPD activity for Primary school teachers at all stages.
• Developing up-to date CPD materials to help teaching staff make children aware of steps to take to protect themselves when using on-line environments
• Spending time familiarising myself with Front Page in order to prepare for scheduled CPD activity for staff whose schools are using this type of website
• Preparing CPD material to introduce staff to the concept of ‘Online Storytelling’ by using activities such as windows movie maker and ‘photobucket’ to improve literacy
• Familiarising myself with already prepared CPD material that I’m asked to deliver as a ‘stand in’ for other team members who are unavailable
• Preparing material to deliver a requested ‘sharing of good practice’ CPD event
• Familiarising myself with Smartboard use to improve the teaching of Modern Languages (looking at existing materials and up-date them for 2008/2009 delivery)
• Preparing resources for planned Cpd courses to introduce teachers to freely available online tools (animoto, slideshare, myplick, voki,etc) and to demonstrate how they can be used creatively to improve learning in literacy and in a variety of other curricular areas.

Planned self-study activities consist of:

• Liaising with teaching staff who are already using methods I’m not familiar with – podcasting hosts, the use of hand held games in education, voting tools
• Continuing to work on improving delivery and presentation skills of previously delivered courses (e.g. blogging courses, podcasting courses)
• Attending (when possible) Smartboard courses offered by other team members
• Attending In-service Day course on CPD Find by LTS (to help with vision for VTC!)
• Attending In-service Day course on Comic Life
• Attending the BETT conference and selected presentations – as well as the associated TeachMeet event

I also plan to build in time to enable the upkeep and continued (what I think are) important changes to the Staff Area of the VTC!

This has been put on hold during October / November so that in-school visits to all primary school co-ordinators (50 schools, I think?) can take place.

It has been known to visit 3 schools in one day – a time-consuming, but valuable exercise …..in my opinion 🙂

Phew !!!

It’s official! The Carronshore Blog has received it’s 10,000th visitor!!

It was brought to my attention by Cassie …. who has now provided her Primary 5 class with their own wiki space

In her post, Cassie wrote:

….. I am also hoping that I will begin to see the kind of online community that I witnessed with 7V last year beginning to develop. I know it won’t be the same as they do not have blogs but I’m hoping it creates a community that in turn will be a real audience for their writing.

I’ve been pondering the benefits of giving pupils their own on-line space and have reviseted the Byron Review.

I think that the statements included here, taken from that review, point to giving pupils access to online spaces (Blogs / wikis, etc.) so than they can be educated to use them in a responsible manner under teacher guidance. By doing so, they will be more prepared for eventual exposure to popular teenage sites such as MySpace and Bebo.

• We should empower them to manage risks and make the digital world safer.

• There is a generational digital divide which means that parents do not necessarily feel equipped to help their children in this space

• While children are confident with the technology, they are still developing critical evaluation skills and need our help to make wise decisions.

• Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach.

• This is no different to how we think about managing risks for children in the offline world, where decreasing supervision and monitoring occurs with age as we judge our children to be increasing in their competence to identify and manage risks.

• We cannot make the internet completely safe. Because of this, we must also build children’s resilience to the material to which they may be exposed so that they have the confidence and skills to navigate these new media waters more safely.

Just a thought 🙂

 

To follow on from Yesterday’s Post ……… John commented:

I guess this might be different on a class/group blog, I hope so as I’ve commented on a few. My own class always seem encouraged by adult comments on their class blog, I’d not thought through the difference with personal blogs, but it it is an important point I think. (Liking the new blog look and title, John!)

This has got me thinking about some more issues. I think that when you set up a class blog and then give the children their own space linked to that, you are in fact setting up a mini online community. The children from my own school, the children from AllStars, from Sandaig, from Loirston and from Dingwall … along with their teachers …. automatically became part of our online community.

Very rarely do the children receive comments from outwith that community. If children post to their individual blogs, they are either from our own school, or one of the ones mentioned previously.

John’s comment reminded me of one other incident maybe worth noting.

Last session Darcie received a comment from a teacher who had left our school a year previously. The teacher was interested in setting up a class blog and had found Darcie’s blog and left a comment on a post.

 It can be viewed HERE.

 The children were unexpectedly bewildered by this, and had difficulty coming to terms with how the blogs were discovered by this teacher. Although all the children were aware of search engines, and had personal experience of using them, they still could not quite grasp how this visitor had stumbled upon one of their blogs.

Visiting children, on the other hand, did not surprise them at all.

They appeared to have had no real conception of what it means to publish to the ‘world wide web’. Their perceived audience was themselves and their peers. 

It re-emphasises the views of Stern (2007) who stresses that knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envisage a broad audience for their online works.

(Owen et al, 2006) reveal that there is growing emphasis on the need to support young people, not only to acquire knowledge and information, but also to develop the resources and skills necessary to engage with social and technical change.
 

Today’s RSS blog reads led me to the Danah Boyd at HHL08 presentation on Alan Stewart’s blog.  I enjoyed listening to her talk, but I particularly enjoyed the ‘any questions?’ section at the end. What she said reminded me of my readings for the Literature review section of my dissertation. I’ve included bits and pieces here:

In a study involving young people’s use of blogs, Stern (2007) found that knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envision a broad audience for their online works. Despite their recognition that virtually anyone with Internet access can pore over their sites, most adolescents, by and large, cannot imagine why “some random stranger” would be interested in visiting. Rather, the typical audience that young authors visualize as they deliberate what to post online are those people that they know actually visit their sites and those whom they have directed to visit their sites.

Buckingham (2008) states that recent studies suggest that most young people’s everyday uses of the Internet are characterised, not by spectacular forms of innovation and creativity, but by relatively mundane forms of communication and information retrieval. The technologically empowered “cyberkids” of the popular imagination may indeed exist, but even if they do, they are in a minority and they are untypical of young people as a whole. He argues that there is little evidence that most young people are using the internet to develop global connections, and that in most cases it appears to be used primarily as a means of reinforcing local networks among peers.

In addition, he maintains that in learning with and through these media, young people are also learning how to learn. They are developing particular orientations toward information, particular methods of acquiring new knowledge and skills, and a sense of their own identities as learners. In these domains, they are learning primarily by means of discovery, experimentation, and play, rather than by following external instructions and directions.
 
There is, however, growing concerns about the safety and privacy of young people using these media. Adults worry that, by displaying personal information, young people are putting themselves at risk from predators who may take advantage of the anonymity and unbounded nature of the internet to make contact with young people.  An article in The Times Online (18/1/2008), entitled, ‘Parents Don’t Understand Risks Posed by Internet’, quotes Byron as saying that new technologies have created a generation gap between parents and children:

“Parents are worried about online predators, but children are more concerned about bullying and they don’t differentiate between the real world and online. It starts in the classroom and, when they get home, it’s all over their MySpace page,”

Green and Hannon (2007) found that there are some powerful myths that inform the way people think about youth culture. The main finding from their research was that the use of digital technology has been completely normalised by this generation, and it is now fully integrated into their daily lives. The majority of young people simply use new media as tools to make their lives easier, strengthening their existing friendship networks rather than widening them. Almost all are now also involved in creative production, from uploading and editing photos to building and maintaining websites. The authors argue that the current generation of decision-makers – from politicians to teachers – sees the world from a very different perspective to the generation of young people who do not remember life without the instant answers of the internet. They maintain that schools need to think about how they can prepare young people for the future workplace. They state that, rather than harnessing the technologies that are already fully integrated into young peoples’ daily lives, schools tend to make it clear that these new media tools are unwelcome in the classroom.

Green and Hannon (2007) state that their research suggests that the blanket approach of banning and filtering may not be the most effective safeguard. The children they interviewed were on the whole aware of potential dangers and adept at self-regulating. Where children found it easy to bypass the rules set by schools and parents, they were dependent on their understanding of what constituted inappropriate or risky behaviour.

I think I might have witnessed a bit of what’s been discussed here when I ‘chatted’ to Danni when she was having difficulties getting a Voki to appear on her blog. Danni had already left Carronshore and had no way of contacting me for help apart from leaving a comment on the Carronshore blog. She’d seen that we’d been including Vokis on our edublogs venu, and was having difficulty doing the same on her edubuzz site.

I was able to gatecrash her site, and managed to help her to get the Voki embedded successfully. She left a Thank You post. She received a comment on that post from an ‘unkown adult’  (to her, anyway).

 David Gilmour had been watching the precedings and had left a comment on her blog. When I saw it, I suspected that Danni would have been suspicious that someone outside our circle was leaving comments. It happened on another occasion, too. 

Now, I know that David is a trusted adult – and was able to re-assure Danni the next time we met 🙂

There were other times when adults left comments on the pupils’ blogs. This one was left by the owner of the picture that Andrew had ‘pinched’. Once again (even though I had investigated the comment author) lots of re-assurance was necessary.

It was apparent that comments from strangers were only acceptable on their own personal blogs if they were from children their own age 🙂