Specificity

 

Source:Morgue Photo

 

At the recent NSW PDHPE Teacher’s Association conference, apart from an inspiring keynote from Ben Jones (@benpaddlejones on Twitter) on 21st Century opportunities in PE, amongst other brain snapping concepts, the rest of the workshops dealt with technology solutions I was pretty much familiar with. Still, it was good to have my knowledge and understanding in these areas expanded.  Ben and I also ran a little “unmeeting”, promoting Twitter as a powerful PLN option, and I think the message was heard. This was the second exciting moment for me at the conference.

What I also saw at the conference was the look in many people’s eyes, and I heard the comments that they made when the were  introduced to new technology approaches. They were saying  “this is big, very big..I want to get into it…but where do I start?

The information overload issue is a big one.

Spread yourself too thin,  try to do too many things, and you don’t do anything REALLY well. The danger of burn out becomes a real possibility.

I’ve been guilty of that in the past, and don’t want to feel that sense of drowning again.

Just like in sport training, I’m beginning to think specificity in using technology is a crucial component of successful technology integration.

So after a productive NSW PDHPE Teacher’s Association conference , I’ve decided on some specific goals as far as technology in my teaching goes.

1. Know Moodle much better. My school has committed to Moodle, so to make work like it should, I have to be as one with it.

2. Blogging – I’m going to use the BlogEd tool given to me by the DET and focus on building reflective writing skills in my students.

3. Mobile devices – using both Moodle and blogging, I’m aiming to weave mobile LEARNING devices through what I do. Up to now, I’ve postulated about what might be done with ubiquitous mobile technology, and collected lots of ideas. Now is the time to act.

Specificity – specific actions designed to produced specific results. Time to aim up for gold.

The light bulb came on

A couple of light bulb moments have marked my first week back at work after travelling overseas on leave with my family.

Before we went to Italy, I set up a blog to record our adventures. When I say our, I was more interested in how my boys would use it. They were a kind of experiment I guess, because blogging for kids is an area I want to develop in my work with students, but so far my attempts at getting kids interested had not met with too much success. This ended up being an exercise in illumination for me, not so much in working out how to get my sons to blog, but in the other part of the process, that being the importance of the comments and feedback that they got. They were inspired to write when they knew their friends and family were reading, and commenting on their posts. The Topic/Blog/Feedback process became automatic when all three conditions were present. You could write about anything really, and as long as readers contribute to a discussion, the motivation to keep writing is there.

LIGHTBULB #1 – Feedback drives the blogging process for our social network driven kids.

Before I left, I created a quiz with Wondershare Quiz Creator The beauty of the software is that I can then pack up the final version of the quiz into a SCORM package and upload it to my school’s Moodle site. Once deployed, the quiz is available 24/7, it has a closing date and time and, best of all, the quiz self marks. The marks are then collected by Moodle and put into the course gradebook.

The quiz I created had stimulus material like video for some questions, a time limit and I included a feature that scrambled the order of the questions, and the answers within the questions to foil any cheating by kids as they took the test over the 2 days it was open.

The feedback from staff and students was interesting. Beside some log on issues, the staff were positive about the ease of administering the quiz. They were very impressed with not having to mark 130+ papers! The students I spoke to described the experience in positive terms, but by far and away the greatest impact they reported was the use of powerful stimuli like video, sound and image in the questions. For example, the students watched an advertisement used in Australia to highlight the effect of alcohol on driving. Some students (all boys!) commented that they hadn’t paid much attention to the ad on television before they saw it in the quiz. The question in the quiz suddenly showed them its meaning.

LIGHTBULB #2 Even exams can be transformed into powerful learning experiences by using appropriate technology.

Last one. So far my teaching with technology has been a hybrid affair, as it is for many people I suspect. Syllabus requirements, public expectations based on a traditional view of schooling and external exams of all pursuasions mean that many teacher’s classroom practice tend to be traditional, rather than innovative and edgy. Technology for me has been a way to engage students, but still seems to be additional to my practice, rather than integral to it. Browsing my feed of educator blogs, I came across this from Shelly Blake-Plock (AKA @TeachPaperless). This literally turned on a lightbulb for me, notably the casual ease with which he uses technology and the exciting possibilities for the classroom that this clever teacher discusses.  I think it’s charted a course for my future use of technology in my classes.

LIGHTBULB #3   Ask the kids, and keep it simple.

What lightbulbs have lit up for you lately?  Make sure you share the light.

Going paperless

One of my dreams, right from the start of my journey with technology, is that one day I could eliminate paper entirely from my job. Pipedream….perhaps, and up to now I’d never quite cracked a method that would allow the dream to become reality.

Recently, I was helping out at a Moodle workshop and I was shown a method that may head me closer toward the paperless classroom. It includes using Moodle, a photocopier that can scan documents into PDF format, and Microsoft OneNote. It’s funny how all these conditions suddenly coalesced one day, not only in my thinking, but also in reality.

One of the biggest spends at my school is the printing of coursework booklets for students. Just about every faculty prints booklets that contain “learning” activities. I could spend a whole blog post discussing the merits (or otherwise) of these booklets, but that’s for another day. A guestimate from my boss was that we spend $20K+ on printing costs each year! Imagine what you could spend that sort of cash on, rather than on “one use” booklets that inevitably get tossed away at the end of each semester.

So what if we could make the use of these booklets electronic in nature? The obvious question was how do you make the electronic version editable to the extent that students could submit work, without having to print out pages, write on them and hand them in? That would just defeat the purpose of trying to go paperless.

So, in a wonderful combination of serendipity and old fashioned professional networking I have a potentially workable solution to play with. I have to thank Pam from Newcastle High for her insights in showing it to me.

Firstly, my target group. In my case, the participants will by our Year 10 (2010) students, who will have their DERvices (netbooks) and will hopefully, by then, will be skilled in the use of them. These netbooks have Adobe PDF readers and creators and OneNote preinstalled, making the whole process possible.

OK..here’s how it works.

Take your paper version of your booklet. Stick it through your photocopier, so it produces a complete PDF copy (in my case 40 pages). Upload the PDF booklet to your Moodle course, and make it available as a resource file. At the same time, create an “Upload one file” assignment activity that is named after the worksheet, or whatever, and put it in the same area as the booklet PDF.

Now, in class, when you want to use a resource or activity that is in the booklet, the kids can open the PDF booklet to the required page. Select the page for printing, but instead of printing it to paper, in the print dialogue window, select “Print to OneNote”. The page selected will now appear in a OneNote notebook. For those that know OneNote well, you know you can click and type anywhere on the page. In this case, the kids can click and type anywhere on the selected page imported from the PDF booklet. The kids can now do their work on the page, and when they finish, save it as a PDF file on their PC.

They head to Moodle, and upload their work as a PDF to the assignment activity. The teacher can open the file, grade the work and feedback to the kids….without touching one piece of paper! Samples of student work can be collected and presented electronically as an ePortfolio, without carting folders, books or paper to your Head Teacher or Principal.

Sure there will probably be limitations that don’t suit everyone’s workplace, but I my humble opinion, it’s a right step in an exciting direction.

Moodle, Glogster and Runkeeper

This week I’ve played with a few things that might come in handy as far as student engagement goes in the next few months.
As the roll out date for our DER laptops draws nearer (11 days and counting), I tried some things that I can lead my faculty through as simple but quality engagement resources.
Glogster is something I’d heard about in many professional learning (PL) sessions, but never really explored. Setting up an education account with enough room (200 friends) for present and future students, I launched into my first Glog. Using this as a bench mark, I started my Year 10 Outdoor Recreation class on a PIP (Personal Interest Project), using Glogster as the medium for producing their work. They genuinely seemed interested and engaged in the set task. We’ll see how it goes in the future weeks!
Thanks to MrRobbo, I’ve started playing with Run Keeper, an iPhone app that records an exercise session, then uploads it to you online account. Whilst the opportunity for kids to contribute will initially be low (not many, if any, have iPhones), I can definitely see the use for the final product that I produce to be used as a stimulus for analysis. Who knows, kids might get iPhones for Christmas and then the whole landscape will change.
On a more egocentric note, apparently my work with our Moodle team at school has resulted in me being given the opportunity to share my experience at a Regional level in the next few weeks. I’m a bit excited about that – because it is a chance for me to be granted the respect I’ve so waited so long for (LOL). No – I am genuinely excited because I can’t really remember the last time I’ve been asked to contribute my knowledge on a work related issue that will help others with something that I have a genuine passion for. I’m pretty jazzed about that!

Video of the week – one of my favourite songs at the moment.

Liven up your Moodle Front Page

Rather than having a plain list of courses or categories, why not try to liven up your Moodle front page by having clickable icons that link you to your courses?

Once you know how, its pretty easy.

Go to the Site Admin menu, click on Front Page and then Front Page settings. Find the check box for “Include a topic section” and check it. Save your changes and then go to your front page. Turn editing on, and you’ll see the edit icon at the top of the page, which allows you to creat a topic label, just like on a course page. Click the edit icon, and you’ll see your regular editing options. From the tool bar, find the Table button and create a table. This is where you can insert text and images in a table. Insert your images (they have to be uploaded to your Moodle site first) into one row of the table, and in a row underneath I’d suggest you type in a label for each image. Now you need to link the image to the course page using the hyperlink button. I’d suggest you copy and paste each course address to a Word document, and then cut and paste into the hyperlink box when prompted. Once you have your links working, center your pictures and text labels so they look neater, and there you go! Have a look at my school front page (http://www.hccweb2.org/erina/) as an example.

eLearning with eXe

I was researching SCORM modules for Moodle (ie. what are they? How do you use them? How do you create them?) when I came across eXe. This free source program allows you to make simple eLearning modules that can then be uploaded to something like Moodle. Have a look – download is about 25Mb, and it comes with tutorials.

Moodle questions and answers

The great thing about my PLN (Personal Learning Network) on Twitter is that I not only find out lots of things, but I also get to answer questions for other people, which also increases my own knowledge by having to find an answer.

One person from my PLN asked if I knew how to make course creation on Moodle easier. Being a course creator on a Moodle site means you can (obviously) create new courses, but for whatever reason Moodle has made the process tricky. To create a new course, the creator has to follow a less defined path through their already created courses to find a button that says “Create new course”

Are you still following?

So they asked “How can I make it so that the course creator can find the “Create a new course” button more easily?”

I did some research in the Moodle forums, and discovered how to do it!

Moodle is arranged in hierachical fashion. Categories are ways to help people find courses more easily. The default setting for categories in Moodle is Miscellaneous. What most people seem to do is create their courses inside this category. When the course creation permission is given to people, the problem I mentioned before occurs (ie. the difficulty in finding the course creation button)
One solution is to create new categories. In a school categories may be things like “Maths”, “English”, “Science” and other subject areas. Then, give the course creators permissions for the categories (not the courses). When these people then log in, and go to the category that they work in, they will see the “Create new course” button at the bottom of the category page. Simple!
They only issue I found was they are allowed to create and work on courses in all categories, but as these people would most likely be trusted and reliable people, you could assume they would probably only work in their intended category anyway. Who knows, it may produce cross curricular collaboration!
If, like me, you already created courses under Miscellaneous, you can still go ahead and create your new categories, and then move your existing courses into them without any problems. Just go through the “Add/Edit courses” menu on the Site Administration area, then look for Categories. Click on Miscellaneous and you’ll see all your courses. Look for the “Move selected courses” menu box. Select the courses that need to be moved, and then select their new destination.

Video of the week – very clever, and a great song

Moodle for the PE teacher

In that sea on Web 2.0 stuff that I’m drifting in at the moment, one really cool application that I’ve started using consistently is Moodle. While it’s not exactly Web 2.0 (its been around for a while), I’m using it as a vehicle for delivering Web 2.0 learning tools to my students from one convenient (and safe) location.
Being a PE teacher, the application of technology in the classroom has a different focus to that of a teacher in a room in front of a IWB all day, or with access to PCs/laptops/Internet/desks when they want them, and that might be the subject of another post another day.
When I do get a chance to work on theoretical concepts for my course, I want it to be snappy, engaging and to honour some of the key skills of my subject, which is communication, collaboration and evaluation.
Moodle has given me the chance to do all this. I know there are other CMS (Classroom Management Systems) out there, but once I looked at and played with Moodle, I didn’t need to look anywhere else.

While its a work in progress, check out my school’s Moodle site here . It’s a combination of filing cabinet for resources, as well as links to sites that are the basis of lessons. Best of all, it’s available 24/7 to staff, students and parents.

In particular look at the “School to work PDHPE Assessment Task”.  It’s an example of the simple things that can be done.

We don’t have total control over the site at the moment, so it might look a bit clunky, but we have big redevelopment plans in the near future when we get to host it ourselves.

In the meantime, this is probably the best video explaining what Moodle can do.

No sleep for the wicked

I went to sleep on the lounge in front of Law and Order, and now I can’t get sleepy again. May as well blog.

My week in dot points:

• Went to school
• Explored DER laptop – found that webcam, that is supposed to be enable with Lenovo Easyshare, can’t be enabled with Lenovo Easyshare, because…….Lenovo Easyshare wasn’t rolled out with the laptop. DER indeed!
• Found that the webcam can be used with Adobe Premiere Elements, and something called Quickmark (must look into what that is)
• Moodle has taken off at Erina. Every man and his dog wants in.
• Ran PDHPE stall at Stage 6 Information evening. Ran a dodgy scrolling powerpoint and made the technonewbes amongst the staff nervous. No one wanted to be next to my stall because mine was too techno!
• Twitter stopped working tonight (or late last night, now). Amazing how I missed it!
• Twitter responsible for late night, the night before. Red Remover and Totem Destroyer , as introduced by another Tweeter, put me way past my bedtime. Both addictive (and fun)

Time to sleep