Technoteaching

Class Dojo – putting the emphasis on positive behaviour

January 4th, 2012 2 Comments

Class Dojo calls itself “Real-time Behaviour Management Software” and that’s pretty much what it is. In short it is a free online tool which allows the class teacher to manage and record behaviour and provide instant feedback to the class. Class Dojo encourages learners to take responsibility for their own behaviour, and puts the focus on positive instead of negative behaviour.

I first set up Class Dojo about 4 months ago and it has quickly become one of my favourite and most used classroom resources. Classes can be set up in under a minute – just copy and paste an electronic list of pupil names and you are good to go. Class Dojo produces an avatar for each pupil, and Dojo points can be awarded for positive (or negative) behaviour by clicking the avatar and deciding on the criteria for the award.

Once we were up and running I was impressed by the positive reaction from my classes. They are always looking to do positive things in class to gain a Dojo point, whether that is helping me, helping their peers, producing good work or just behaving in a positive manner. I have found that Class Dojo firmly shifts the emphasis and ethos from negative to positive behaviour.

Below are a list of some of the ways in which I use Class Dojo:

Reward good work and positive behaviour regularly

One of the areas where Class Dojo wins over other positive behaviour programs such as stamps or stickers is that it can be acessed quickly. I often keep the Dojo window up on my IWB throughout the lesson and the key to its success is the regular award of Dojo points for good work and positive behaviour.

Reward pupils remotely

Class Dojo has a mobile site (with an app currently in production) and so by using a smart phone I can award Dojo points while moving around my classroom. These still register in real time on the IWB (which pupils love to see).

Award whole class points

When a class is working well, or has worked well, I award all who are present a Dojo point. The simple interface makes it easy to select the entire class and/or individual pupils.

Double Dojo Friday

This is a concept one of my classes came up with where Dojo points are doubled on a Friday.

Pupils give themselves Dojos

Keeping Class Dojo up on the IWB makes it possible for pupils to award themselves and others Dojo points. For example, at the start of the lesson, pupils note the learning intentions in their jotter and then come out to the IWB and award themselves a positive Dojo point. Alternatively, if a pupil feels that one of their peers has really helped them in class, they can come out and award their peer a Dojo point.

At the end of each term I give the pupils in each class with the most Dojo points a small prize and send home a positive award postcard. All class Dojo points are then reset ready for the next term.

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Active Assessment – Catch Me If You Can

November 16th, 2011 No Comments

Catch Me If You Can is an active assessment for Mathematics: Speed, Distance and Time. Specifically it covers Curriculum for Excellence Third and Fourth Levels (MNU 3-10a / MNU 4-10a). Learners try to work out if Agent Doyle can get from his penthouse flat in Stoneburn to Stanchester Airport in time to prevent Ben Black, one of the world’s most wanted criminals from leaving the country with £25 million in uncut diamonds.

Please feel free to download, adapt, comment or suggest changes.

Third Level

Pupil resource

Teacher materials

Supporting presentation

Fourth level

Pupil resource

Teacher materials

Supporting presentation:

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How to make paper resources digital using a mobile phone

November 5th, 2011 No Comments

Schools are awash with paper. Booklets, worksheets, assessments, admin documents…the list goes on and on. Often a paper resource needs to be changed, or shared online but the original electronic version can’t be sourced. Here are 3 easy steps to convert a paper-based resource to a digital document ready for editing and uploading.

1. Use your mobile to take a photograph of the document. It may seem obvious, but good lighting and a steady hand are important.

2. Upload the image to your DropBox folder. DropBox is available on Android and iPhone and should be installed on both your phone and computer.

3. Use a free online OCR reader. I find New OCR pretty reliable although there are plenty of others out there. Upload the image from your Dropbox folder on your computer to the OCR reader. It should only take a minute to be converted to text, and with New OCR it’s a simply a question of copying and pasting the content to your new document.

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At last, the time is right for 1:1

October 30th, 2011 No Comments

This week I attended a meeting in our authority where details of the new ICT refresh were finally announced. I knew this was coming having been part of the initial consultation group, but I was still delighted to hear that the infrastructure and budget have now been agreed.

However, the most significant news was not the hardware refresh which will bring 9000 new computers to the estate, and which will mean that the 20 Apple Mac Minis in my own classroom which are over 5 years old can finally be replaced. The most important announcement was the fact that ubiquitous wifi will now be available in all of the authority schools. For me this means that we can finally start to consider putting in place a strategy to ensure that every young person has access to a computer at all times – in other words a ratio of a computer for every child or 1:1.

The notion of 1:1 is not new. I recall that maybe 10 years ago our authority were considering the possibility of purchasing a laptop for every student. In the end this didn’t happen, and although it was disappointing news at the time, I realise now that it would have been a mistake. My feeling is that these laptops would have become little more than glorified Word Processors at that time. Furthermore, I suspect that there would have been major challenges in finding the funding to refresh such a large number of computers, especially given the recent financial climate.

More recently, a number of schools in the UK and the US have deployed tablets in order to achieve a device ratio of 1:1. This can only work in conjunction with wireless Internet access. Giving someone an iPad without the Internet is akin to giving them a car but only allowing them to drive in first gear. Without wireless access, this has never been a realistic option for our school.

Now that we are moving toward ubiquitous wireless access in our schools however, the time is right to aim for 1:1. In the current financial climate it is clear that funding will not come from our local authorities. Instead I believe the only realistic way to move towards 1:1 is to ask parents to provide the necessary device for their child or children to bring to school – in other words “bring your own device” (BYOD). Many young people already own their own laptop, netbook or tablet. We need to fill in the gaps by providing the opportunity for all young people to purchase a suitable device. Schools and local authorities have the ability to coordinate the bulk purchase of equipment on behalf of parents, thus negotiating a discounted price.

Within this strategy there are still many questions which need to be answered, but there will be a solution to every issue. For example:

How will parents be able to afford to purchase a device for their child?
At around £250-300 for a good quality tablet, the cost is little more than a school residential trip.
Leasing agreements can be set up to spread the cost over 2 or 3 years, with contributions just a couple of pounds per week.
There may also be ways to help subsidise those families who require financial assistance.

What about filtering?
In our authority we already have web filtering in place, and while the system can still be improved it does provide secure internet access.

With a range of devices coming to schools, there is a danger of device envy?
We need to agree a minimum specification of device, and this should help to reduce the problem.

What about theft / damage?
Devices can be insured.
All students will be coming to school with broadly the same technology, so theft should be less of a concern
Young people already come to school every day with mobile phones which are often worth far more than a tablet or netbook, so are used to looking after valuable technology

There are of course many other questions of this nature which we will need to find the answer to. However, the single biggest challenge we will face with 1:1 BYOD is not how we implement the technology, but how we utilise it to impact on and improve learning and teaching throughout the school. That is an entirely different discussion…

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JellyCam – the easy way to make stop motion animation

October 18th, 2011 No Comments

Stop motion animation is the process of taking a sequence of photographs, making minor changes between each shot and then sequencing all images into an animated film. Traditionally stop motion animation involved clay / plasticine figures being moved just a fraction of a millimetre for each shot. Famous examples of stop frame animation include Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video, Take Hart’s Morph and Wallace and Gromit. However stop motion animations can be made using a all kinds of different resources e.g. Lego figures, Post-It Notes or just bits of paper.

All that’s required to make a stop motion animation is

stop motion animation software
a digital camera / webcam
a good creative idea
some patience

This post focuses on the stop motion software JellyCam which is ideal for use in schools for two reasons:

It is free (although there is an option to make a PayPal donation).
It is extremely simple to use.

The main JellyCam screen is split into three components:

Webcam
Option to link to a webcam, and switch on onion skinning
Film
Option to set a frame rate and play the current movie
Frames
Option to delete any unsuitable frames

And that’s it – that’s all that’s required to make a stop motion animation.

JellyCam can export the finished movie as a .FLV file and even offers a single step process to upload to YouTube.

To prove how simple JellyCam is to use, I asked Lucy [aged 8] to produce her own stop motion movie. The resulting short animation took just 15 minutes to make:

The only real omission from the program is the ability to add a soundtrack, but from the JellyCam blog it would appear that feature is coming in the next release.

As author Chris Dennett says on the JellyCam website: “I have just started playing around with stop motion. I found taking the pics speedy and fun, but turning the pics into a movie was dull and tedious. I made Jellycam to do the boring bits.”

Perfect for education!

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15 steps to developing a school website using WordPress

October 8th, 2011 No Comments

Introduction

I have recently revamped our school web site, replacing the old static HTML site with a new CMS website. The final result can be seen here: http://forresterhighschool.org.uk/. This post lists the 15 steps I took to produce a school web site using WordPress.

Objectives

For me, a school website needs to meet a number of requirements:

Be a live document, constantly updated with news and content to keep parents and pupils coming back
Separate content from design
Be easy to update, and can be updated by SMT, teachers and school admin staff alike
Have a stylish design and intuitive interface
Use social media to link with parents and pupils

A school’s website is seen as the public face of the school. A poorly designed site which is not regularly updated does not give a good impression of the school.

Why WordPress?

When I started on this project, I was contacted by my local authority and asked to pilot their newly acquired content management system Jadu Galaxies. I have worked with a number of CMS’s in my time, but Galaxies is not one I would recommend. After 6 months (albeit only working the odd couple of hours per week), we had a site which had very little functionality or content and we were still nowhere near to going live.

I have been using WordPress for my own blog for a while, and I’d seen a number of fully blown websites developed using WordPress, so I thought I’d see how quickly I could knock up a test site using WordPress. In one evening I was able to produce more with WordPress than I had managed in 6 months using Jadu Galaxies. WordPress is free. It also supported by hundreds of plugins which can be freely downloaded and installed to extend the functionality of a website.

Note that I am using the self-hosted WordPress downloaded from wordpress.org and not the hosted version at wordpress.com which is much more limited.

As a starting point, I found the following video an excellent introduction to developing a website using WordPress.

15 steps to developing a school website with WordPress

Looking back at the implementation of our site, it can be broken into 15 relatively straightforward steps:

Get a freelance graphic artist
Get a freelance graphic artist. (Yes, this is the same as step 1). This is vital – way too many school websites are designed by ICT people who have limited or no graphic skills and the end result is a website which looks like it was designed in the 1980′s. Hiring a freelance graphic artist needn’t be expensive. WordPress is a content management system which separates design and content, and so the graphic artist needs only to design a theme for the school and then hand it over. We worked with Kristian Koren (@kkoren) who runs Loon Design, a former colleague of mine who has years of experience working in education. I cannot recommend Kristian highly enough to schools who are thinking about designing a new website.
Buy a domain name. We purchased forresterhighschool.org.uk from CS New Media. The cost was £9 for 2 years.
Pay a company to host your site. Again, we use CS New Media and pay £89.50 per year.
Download and install WordPress from wordpress.org. Many web hosts build the WordPress installer into their site manager, so often a single click is all that’s required to install and setup.
Decide on your basic site layout. How will the home page look? How many columns? In our case we went with a 3 column layout for the home page. The left hand column displays a featured article, the middle column is used for a blog listing of news articles, and the right hand column is used for widgets (calendar, links, social media, recent news etc.). The right hand widget column appears consistently throughout the site.
Create the site’s main menu structure. This article explains how to use menus in WordPress and this is the official WordPress support page for custom menus.
Install the relevant plugins which you want to use. Some of the plugins we used at http://forresterhighschool.org.uk are detailed at the foot of this post.
Work with your graphic artist to design and install a theme for the site.
Create content – posts and pages. We produce pages for anything that’s fairly static e.g. Welcome, About, Department Pages etc. We use posts to deliver live content e.g. News items
Add links to social media. I believe that this is the key to engage parents in the site. Parents are far more likely to want content pushed to them via Facebook, Twitter or their RSS reader than they are to visit the site. These social media links can be used to drive parents to the site. Regularly update Facebook / Twitter with relevant abbreviated stories linking to the site to keep followers in touch with what’s happening.
Use department or teacher blogs to keep readers up-to-date with what’s going on, and link to these from the site. Parents will be more interested to read informal department posts about a project than to read the school’s policy documents.
Use wikis to share learning materials with parents and learners.
Accept that a school web site is a live working document and will / should never be considered finished.
Don’t wait for every single piece of content to be finalised before launching or the site will never go live. Our site was launched with only 65%-70% of the content in place, but we are adding new content every week.

Plugins

Below is a summary of some of the free WordPress plugins I found most useful:

Content Slide – outs images into a slideshow, we used for rolling header images
Easy Contact – create a simple contact page
JetPack – site stats
Maintenance Mode – manage and test the site while displaying a maintenance mode page to the outside world
My Calendar – set up an easy-to-manage calendar widget
MyEasyBackUp – back up the site
NextGEN Gallery – create and display image galleries
Role Scoper – allows different access permissions to be set across the site. We have not implemented this yet, but the plan would be to give out different department logins with permissions only to update only that department’s pages
Subscribe / Connect / Follow – create links to social media sites

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Multiplying integers – some great resources

August 27th, 2011 No Comments

This is a summary of a recent lesson I taught on multiplying integers, with a focus on the technology used.

Starter

The excellent Ten Quick Questions is a really simple program which does exactly as it says on the tin. The teacher configures the category of Maths questions required, sets the required time between each question, and that’s it.

Ten Quick Questions has a fairly unremarkable interface, but it’s still a great free tool which is easy to use and which comes with a wide range of question topics available. For this lesson it was used to generate 10 integer addition / subtraction questions to reinforce concepts from the previous lesson.

Integer multiplication rules – via YouTube

Ever seen a ninja singing integer multiplication rules backed by country music? Neither had my class, but after a couple of runs through they were on their feet belting it out complete with actions. One learner was heard to comment “I can’t get the song out of my head”. Exactly!

I didn’t manage to video the results, but it was pretty much like this.

Practice

Integer Warp from Arcademic Skills Builders is a great game for practising multiplying integers either individually or as a class using the IWB.

For this lesson I used Integer Warp as a homework activity, with the challenge to return next week with the best time (mobile phone photo or screenshot as evidence).

Extension

Integers Multiplication Blocks from XP Math is a really neat online puzzle where learners are given a target product and they need to select integers which can be multiplied to make that product.

I’m sure there are stacks of other great resources which can be used for teaching integer multiplication – if you have any recommendations then please let me know.

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Image Resizing with PIXResizer

June 2nd, 2011 No Comments

There are often occasions when our learners want to be able to quickly resize images, but they don’t want to get lost in a feature rich image editing package.

PIXResizer is a simple app which does exactly what it says on the tin. Whilst there are a handful of resizing options available, including different output file types, it’s really simple resource to use. The program handily renames the exported file with the new resolution appended to the filename. PIXResizer also has the facility to batch resize image files.

PIXResizer is a freeware resource and is available for Windows only. The program can be downloaded here.

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Introducing spreadsheets with Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games

May 1st, 2011 2 Comments

Traditionally we have taught the basics of spreadsheeting in S1 by providing learners with lists of products and prices (e.g. Star Bar, cost £0.42, sales 50) and having them use a formula to calculate the total sales revenue of each product. Dull!

This year we decided that rather than superficially manufacture data, our students would generate their own data by playing Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.

The initial one hour lesson was all about playing the game. We focused on 2 events: the long jump, and the 100m sprint.

The class took it in turns to compete against each other. (Note that 4 players can compete simultaneously in each event). Each player is is allocated a “data logger” whose job it is to note the long jump distance, 100m time and position of their partner e.g.

Player Name: Danny

100m time: 10:04s

100m position: 5

Long jump distance: 5.45m

Long jump position: 2

For a class of 20, this takes pretty much an hour to complete.

Subsequent lesson(s)

Learners are handed out the data sheets from previous week. Their task is then to create a spreadsheet and use it to log the results.

There are a range of spreadsheet functions which can be explored:

basic data entry
formatting fonts / styles
formatting number (time/distance to x decimal places)
sorting (fastest time, longest jump)
using formula (to calculate total points… = 9 – 100m position + 9 – long jump position)
charting
etc.

In summary, learners are (obviously) more engaged because using the Wii to generate data is great fun. But just as importantly they are engaged because they have ownership of the data and it has meaning for them. And this is where the Wii works so well in the classroom – it offers an effective and engaging way of generating personalised data (or numbers) for use in learning.

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Reinforcing Maths Concepts Using GoAnimate

January 9th, 2011 No Comments

GoAnimate is a a free online animation tool that I have recently been using with my S1 ICT class, but which I am now looking at as a resource that can support learning in the Maths department.

One approach would be to use GoAnimate to reinforce / revise mathematical concepts which pupils have been learning. The idea would be for pupils to script and create a short animation to explain a mathematical concept, possibly with one character “teaching” the idea to a second character.

I have created a simple example below to show how this might work in algebra – collecting like terms.

The animation could be produced as an individual or paired project. There are then plenty of peer assessment and review opportunities once the class’s animations are complete.

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Class Dojo – putting the emphasis on positive behaviour