03 April 2009
Practical advice for colleagues who use, teach, lead or manage information and communication technology (ICT) in schools.
This newsletter is © 2009 Terry Freedman. Contributors own the copyright of their own articles.
Home Page: http://www.ictineducation.org Updated virtually daily.
Email: terry@ictineducation.org
This is a shortish newsletter; the next one, which I am aiming to publish after the Easter break, will be much bigger. There's plenty in that to look forward to, as described further on. It has a social networking focus. If you'd like to contribute to that, there is still time.
In forthcoming newsletters we look at social networking in April, reading in May; professional development in June; and games in education in September. There are already three contributors working on articles for that one. See below for more details.
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Not everyone likes writing. If that applies to you or your pupils or students, there are lots of ways in which you – and they – can contribute:
Write an article.
Write a poem.
Write a special type of poem, like a limerick or a haiku.
Write a song.
Write a special type of song, like a rap song or a blues song.
Draw a picture.
Draw a special type of picture, like a cartoon.
Design a quiz.
Design a special type of quiz, like a word search or a crossword.
Create a presentation in SlideShare. The beauty of having an online newsletter is that your presentation can be linked to, or even embedded.
Review a book.
Review a website.
Review a podcast.
Review a SlideShare presentation.
Review a software application.
Review an item of equipment.
Review a service.
I'm sure you can think of many more! If you have an idea for a contribution, and it doesn't fit into any of these categories, suggest it to me anyway.
The special focus idea doesn't preclude articles and news on other topics of interest, so if you have a burning desire to write about something and it isn't a special focus topic, don't worry. As long as it's related to educational technology your idea will be considered.
I'm a great believer in using games and simulations as a means of teaching children and young people. They can learn a lot from a well-crafted games, as, of course, can adults.
But quite often it's in the creation of something that people really start to understand the ins and outs of what they're trying to model. The same is true of games. Creating a game requires knowledge of the subject you're trying to base the game on, and sequencing skills. Note that I did not say you need technical skills. A lot of games-creation applications now let you create games using drag and drop methods rather than programming code, at least in the first instance.
I'm delighted to be able to tell you that The Game Creators has made available three games-creation programs: Dark Basic Professional, FPS Creator, and 3DGamecreator. Site licences for these will be given away in a prize draw of subscribers to this newsletter. Please note that the competition is open to UK subscribers only. The draw takes place on 1st May at 12:00 noon GMT. More details in the next issue of Computers in Classrooms.
One of the things that I never see talked about is how to make the exercises that we set our pupils and students more interesting. This is not quite the same thing as using exciting and interesting applications: even work involving the currently much-maligned trio of spreadsheet, database and word processor can be made more interesting by a more innovative approach.
John Davitt's Learning Ideas Generator is a useful tool in this context. Taking a randomly-selected topic together with a randomly-selected method, it comes up with suggestions which, if nothing else, have the sort of shock value that is likely to get the mental juices flowing.
For example, I just generated:
Do the plot of Hamlet as an abstract impressionist painting.
However, for a particular subject area, this is unlikely to prove entirely useful because the topics come from right across the curriculum. But it is definitely worth running the LIG a few times in order to see the sorts of methods it contains. I'll tell you in a moment or two what to do with them.
First, though, does this sort of approach actually work, in the sense of getting youngsters to remember concepts?
From my experience, it does. When I was teaching economics, I wrote two blues songs to help the students understand the key differences between the monetarist approach to curing unemployment, and the Keynesian approach. Each song summarised, in three verses, what the textbooks took a whole chapter (and a lot of mathematics) to explain. A year later, my students could still recall what the theories were and how they differed from each other.
Now obviously a blues song or two is not going to be a real substitute for the detailed treatment in the textbook in the long run: it's hardly the sort of thing you could quote in an examination paper. However, as a means of creating an awareness of the essence of what the topic is about, and of providing a hook on which the pupil or student can hang the more detailed concepts, this kind of approach works very well.
It's also a good idea to get the students themselves to do the work, which in this case was writing a blues song. If you think about it, a blues song has a very defined and rigid format. Yes, there are variations, but basically it consists of a few verses with the following characteristics:
Rhyming format:
Line 1
Line 1 repeated
Line 3 rhymes with Lines 1 and 2
Situation:
The singer is usually complaining about some awful things that have happened, usually pretty extreme or several things at once. For example, they may have just been fired from their job, had their partner walk out on them, been arrested for something or other, and been evicted because of the money owed to the landlord.
Now, the rigid format means that you can't afford to waste words. You have to get the nub of the idea across very quickly. To do that, you need to have a very firm grasp of what the idea actually is.
I know it's unlikely that many young people listen to blues these days, but just to take this example to a conclusion, how might you use the blues format to explain concepts like evaluating information for plausibility or accuracy? How could you use the format to explain why backing up your work is rather important?
What I've said in the context of the blues idiom applies in other contexts too. Writing a haiku is difficult:17 syllables in 3 lines. Can your pupils explain the concept of sequencing in a haiku? Can they describe their experiences in the form of a haiku? Or a limerick? Can they make a podcast about it?
On the subject of context, I've never really understood why many teachers use a one-size fits all approach when it comes to setting exercises. Let's take the sort of thing that could easily be boring: a set of spreadsheet-based tasks.
The usual approach is to get the students to type in or copy/paste the data (either of which I regard as a waste of time unless they had to do research to obtain the data first – in which case that's not a spreadsheet exercise anyway).
The data is usually something to do with sports or prices. Yawn. Why not produce several versions of the exercise and give pupils a choice? It's the concepts that you're trying to teach, so the scenario itself is unimportant, surely?
For example, let's suppose you want to teach them how to use look-up tables – not because that's a topic in the curriculum, but because it's a good example of how you can design a spreadsheet model to be efficient.
In case you're not familiar with it, the look-up table is a device for coping with what is, in effect, a bundle of IF statements. For example, you might grade exam papers according to their marks along the lines of grade A for 70% or above, grade B for a mark of 60 to 69% and so on. You could set this all out in a look-up table and then assign the grade with a formula that says, in effect:
Look up this number (the percentage mark awarded) in the look-up table, and give me the corresponding grade.
Clearly, you can use such a table in lots of contexts, such as:
OK, I said earlier that I would tell you what to do with all the ideas for exercises that you and your colleagues come up with. My suggestion is to put them in a text file, and copy and paste the text file into the fruit machine random generator . Then select the exercise randomly. Maybe this could be used for setting homework as well. It would be difficult to use this approach all the time, but if done every week, say for the Friday homework or the first lesson of the week, it could be quite fun, not to mention a good way of keeping everyone on their toes!
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The next issue of Computers in Classrooms will focus on social networking. I've regarded the idea of social networking in a very broad way. I've learnt from my studies in economics that the definition of money – money is as money does – can be applied much more widely.
What the expression means is that anything which is used as money and therefore behaves as if it is money, is money. In the same way, perhaps instead of thinking of social networking as Facebook and MySpace and so on we should take the view that if an application lets you network socially with other people then it must be a social networking application.
In the special focus issue we have a great article by Miller Singleton, a 14 year old high school student living in the USA. Miller explains what social networking is and how it proved useful for an international educational project. It's really nicely written, and by the end of the article you'll have a really good idea of what a 'digiteen' is, and why social networks are not necessarily dark and terrifying places for youngsters!
But just in case you're still concerned about the e-safety aspects of online communication, Dughall McCormick describes the approach adopted in Kirklees, in the north of England, to make very young children realise that you cannot always be sure who you're taking to online. The nice thing is, no child was frightened in the process.
Another kind of social networking, in my opinion, is Twitter. Tom Barrett describes how he has has been using Twitter in his primary (elementary) classroom to get the children to both use real data and at the same time connect with other people from all over the world.
Privacy is always a concern, especially the minefield that is Facebook privacy. Scott N Wright takes us through the steps needed to keep your personal data private on Facebook.
There are also some book reviews, including Don Tapscott's Growing Up Digital, Stephanie D Sandifer's Wikified Schools, Julio Ojeda-Zapata's Twitter Means Business, and Vanessa Van Petten's The Dirt e-Secrets of an Internet Kid. Other articles include Neil Howie's review of the recent World Maths Day, and a review by David Luke on the presentation that Miles Berry and I gave recently on the subject of What Are Your Kids Learning While You're Not Looking? . So, I do hope you'll enjoy reading the next issue of Computers in Classrooms. And if you'd like to contribute an article you feel is missing, there is still time: just get in touch.
Just a quick word about the September issue, which focuses on using games in the classroom. If you're interested in contributing to that, or getting your class to contribute, either contact me directly or put your ideas and name on the wiki I set up for this purpose.
And that about wraps it up for this newsletter. Have a nice Easter break!
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