Creative ICT News

Recording Teacher Assessment Online

I have been working as a consultant for Incerts pretty much ever since I went independent (full disclosure, I get paid for delivering training, consultancy and signing up new schools), and it's a product I love. It's a web-based teacher assessment recording, pupil tracking and reporting system. All your assessment records are held in the cloud on internet banking security standard servers and as such the data is available anytime anywhere. It tracks pupil progress; levels children to a very fine grained degree (below curriculum sub-level); produces nice progress graphs; sets pupil targets in child-friendly language and produces fully customisable reports based upon teacher assessments. It will also output all your teacher assessment data on customisable Excel spreadsheets for further analysis. 

Because Incerts has always been online, they are in a strong position to move towards Becta's Reporting Online to Parents agenda (download the Becta toolkit here). This is something that you are going to hear a lot about in the coming months as it's all wrapped up in the Next Generation Learning charter that Becta have recently launched. 

To get to the point, I'm running a seminar in Stockport on 9th December (details here). The seminar is aimed at existing users, but if you're interested in finding out about this tool, or want to know more about the Becta initiative, you will be most welcome.

 

World War 2 Topic: more adventures with Honeycomb

A few weeks ago I asked whether I should allow my year 6 classes to undertake independent research on Hitler. I was concerned that the independent nature of the task I had set them could lead them to unsavoury web content which they would be unable to evaluate for themselves. The problem was compounded by the fact that I had over 90 children (3 classes doing the task) making it very difficult to keep a close eye on what everyone was doing. I got plenty of encouragement, but in the end wimped out and set up a fairly extensive list of World War 2 topics for them to research. I did this on Honeycomb.

Some of the ideas were added by children. For example one of the class had met and interviewed a veteran of the French Resistance while on holiday in the summer and she wanted to find out more about the subject.

The children had to produce a webpage in Honeycomb with research in their own words, at least three images that were copyright free (they had to provide a link back to the original image) and at least three useful websites for further reading.

I chose Honeycomb because I have found that the children enjoy using it, and it's sufficiently flexible to allow children of all abilities to produce pages with little intervention from me. The hard part of the atsk was to be the research. It also gave me an opportunity to see what release 2 of the product contained. The main innovation appears to be video and audio commenting, including the ability to narrate audion to objects that you have embedded on your page. They've also added a graphical drawing tool (see RAF roundel doodle on image above) that allows line drawing, shapes, doodling etc; object ordering (i.e. you can move stuff backwards and forwards); a grid to help line up text boxes; and templates for teachers. This last enhancement is very useful as it allows the teacher to set up a basic framework for a page that can then be distributed to your class. I'd have like to have used this for my World War 2 page, but release 2 was just a bit late.

The main area that release 2 hasn't addressed is teacher management, and I'm finding this to be an ever more pressing need. I have 90 children doing this task, how do I know who has updated their page without going round 90 pages? What a waste of teacher time! It's pointless getting the children to leave a comment on my page, because it doesn't link back to their own page. I have made Softease aware of my opinions in this area and hope something is coming down the line fairly soon. 

The children seemed to enjoy their task and some really got their teeth stuck into it: here are a few of their pages (click on the thumbnails):

   

One thing that I'm particularly pleased about is that they really seem to be getting the hang of my incessant preaching about Creative Commons. In most of their pages, not just these three examples, all of the images have been found by either using Compfight to search for copyright free images on Flickr, or by using images from Wikipedia. In most cases, children have managed to include a hyperlink back to the original. Interestingly (I suspect at my behest) Softease have added a little tick box to the media uploader in Honeycomb asking whether the student has the right to upload that resource.

Just one comment here to Softease - whatever happend to child-friendly language? Still it's definitely a step in the right direction and it gets the children asking questions about the issue.

So, release 2 of Honeycomb is definitely a step forward, and I'm going to enjoy exploring the video and audio commenting features. I don't think there is a simpler way of children creating multimedia content online, and it shows in the excellent and very varied work that my year 6 classes have produced. But, with all that flexibility, it really needs a simple set of tools for teachers to keep on top of all the stuff being published. Had I had these tools available to me, I might have been more confident in allowing children to research Hitler.

Manchester Social Media Cafe

I'm at the Northern, a trendy backstreet bar in Manchester's Northern Quarter for the inaugural meeting of the Manchester Social Media Café, a group formed to discuss social media issues of the day. Unsurprisingly, for the first meeting, the topic is, "Is blogging dead?" There is a good crowd - at least fifty and a panel of four taking questions. Hopefully there will be something of interest to educators. Updates throughout.

Discussing LiveJournal at the moment, not a social network I'm familiar with. Do LiveJournal blogs appear in Google searches? Not sure that I've found or read one. Apparently it's very popular in Russia.

What will the effect of the credit crunch be on the blogging genre?

Is blogging a human need? I blog therefore I am. Blogging is a 21st century cave painting. Note: read the Groundswell blog on ratios between bloggers and readers of blogs. (I'm blogging live and will add the links in later).

Has anybody read the Samsung mobile phone project blog? Link please.

Reflections the next morning

The event was an undoubted success - I counted well over fifty people. However, because the discussion was mainly around the genre of blogging and how to compete with professional journalists it was of limited interest to educators. The panel format worked well, but I think a keynote speaker would definitely add to the attraction of the occasion, and with that kind of turnout, I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to atract one. 

I spoke to several people but didn't find another educator there (@mrkp, @mrstucke, where were you in my hour of need?). The one interesting point to come out of it for me was the shock that corporate people registered when I told them that I worked with children blogging in schools. "You mean children can write blogs?!"

Roll on the next one. If you are in the northwest and you fancy getting together with social media types from all walks of life, it's definitely worth a visit.

Manchester Social Media Cafe on Google Groups

What approach should I take?

My year 6 students are about to undertake an independent research project on World War 2 using Honeycomb to produce a series of web pages. They will be required to choose a personality from the period and find useful websites about that person, collect links, write a short biog, find copyright free images etc. They'll then present that information how they want as a web page.

When asking the classes for their ideas about who to research, I got some fairly predictable answers such as Anne frank and Winston Churchill, however, I was really surprised by the number of children who wanted to research Hitler. Clearly they have a perfectly legitimate interest in this person as they have learned some basic information about the Blitz and the Holocaust etc. However, I am worried about letting the children do independent research on him as there is obvioulsy a proliferation of nasty holocaust denial and extreme right wing websites and forums that attempt to rewrite history.

In a previous post I talked about the work that the children did with the Allaboutexplorers website, and it was patently clear that they were accepting the nonsense that was presented. So the choices are these: prescribe who they are allowed to research (suggestions welcomed) and not include Hitler; or, allow them to research Hitler but present them with a list of sources that they are allowed to use.

Creative Commons image by P/\ul on Flickr