THIS BLOG IS MOVING!!!!

Soon we will be moving this blog onto another domain and onto our own servers so we can enjoy all the other features and benefits of wordpress…. polls, more multimedia, podcasting, etc.

You can get a preview of the work in progress and update your blogrolls and feeds at: http://blog.prometheanplanet.com

Can I use more than one pen at the same time?

There has been very little written about this concept, and I wrote this, at the end of last year, by way of an article to support a product which is to be released by Promethean in early 2009.

Cooperative learning encourages children’s interpersonal skills which can be especially helpful in enhancing children’s cognitive development.  Asking children to actively exchange ideas and to share different points of view is likely to be most effective when the right environment/platform is offered. Collaboration skills are not inherent in children and the skills needed to work together in pairs or small groups are quite distinct from working alone.Situations such as these are not easy to set up and to be able to add an element of technology will be an engaging catalyst to these objectives.

During early childhood, children often act first and discuss later, a teacher can play a vital role by helping them clarify their goal before they attempt to solve the problem. The sharing of ideas amongst group members is the underlying premise of collaborative learning in contrast to competition in which individuals are driven to win.  The level of interaction is helpful to children in developing their social abilities and developing mutual respect for each other.

Collaborative learning has been proven to increase children’s engagement and offering children the opportunity to use two pens simultaneously opens up a whole new world of interaction.  Not only can the children work together on a problem, they can also respond immediately without having to take turns or impact on their partners’ interaction. Very young children often work along side each other, needing to feel accompanied in their activity but still needing to feel in control of their own actions.  Collaboration is something which children need to explore to enable them to develop their social skills and appreciate the value of a friend’s opinion.Using more than one pen at the same time, means that spur-of-the-moment opportunities present themselves allowing for adult intervention when required to ensure that the opportunity is maximised.  Encouraging this type of activity can be planned for or can be part of independent activity where children can access the board throughout the school day.By providing an interactive ‘Arena’, where pupils can collaborate more easily, learners are encouraged to interact with each other, not just the whiteboard.

Working together on tasks has been shown to improve children’s understanding and retention of knowledge. In addition, there are social benefits – collaboration encourages development of communication skills and enables students to take a more active part in their learning.  

Voting a gimmick or a voice?

How can a teacher engage children? 

In a world where technology abounds, is it the equipment or its implementation which will engage pupils in their own learning?

Each child is an individual and every child does matter, but how can a teacher treat every single child individually and continue to meet the needs of the rest of the class as well as meeting the day to day learning objectives? 

A child’s future is being personalised by today’s experiences.  Research has shown that children do benefit from formal feedback, but verbal discussion will have more impact than a written comment. Using Voting or a Learner Response System (LRS) for pupil self-review allows a degree of ownership and commitment to target setting.  If children are to evaluate their own progress they should be involved in the target setting.  A range of techniques should be adopted to promote self assessment.  

Let us consider the combination of iwbs and LRS and recognise their potential impact on Personalised Learning. One of the strongest features of the way in which LRS can be used is to generate discussion opportunities. To gather pupil opinions and establish children’s understanding of right and wrong is paramount to their developing into responsible citizens of the future. The ability of LRS to engage pupils in discussion on a range of topics, can also begin to help meet the needs of a variety of learning styles.  The graphical images and concrete examples necessary in any lesson together with the opportunity to give every learner a voice means that children can begin to own some of their classroom experience in a way which was rarely apparent in the past. 

Effective questionning is key in establishing children’s understanding and offering an opportunity for all of the children to respond and therefore be included in any discussion is vital. When a class of children are asked a question, there will always be those who know the answer and put up their hand, there will also be those who don’t know the answer and put up their hand and then there are those who passively observe or opt out.  Why ask one child when you can have the whole class responding and offering an opinion. Nobody likes getting the answer wrong, but we all know that it is precisely this experience which has the most impact when visiting a concept for the first time or learning a new method of doing something.

Giving the opportunity to check an answer is an ideal way of raising confidence.  To be able to offer immediate feedback will undoubtedly assist the learner in his own understanding, but more importantly raise self esteem for those less confident pupils who may struggle to ask.  If Personalised learning is about offering learners a voice and communicating their feelings about a particular topic then we need to ensure that they feel comfortable doing so.  Using scenarios which allow children to identify with a character is a safe way of inviting opinion and encouraging discussion.  I am always amazed at how apparently relaxed children are when engaging in a debate from behind a mask.  This apparent anonymity eases even the most hesitant forward into the speaking arena.  I think if this aspect of children’s development is addressed early enough it will give them the confidence to cope with what we are increasingly expecting of them within the Personalised Learning Arena.

This is an edited adaptation of an article originally written for a NAACE publication during 2007.

Schools and Creativity

Professor Ken Robinson writes about creativity and learning and his keynote from the TED Conference has started to acquire cult status among the creative community. His story will resonate with many of the musical or artisic ilk – and it is hard to not be touched by his final message about a young dancer.

While some may disagree with his views of schools, special needs and behaviour – it is well worth the 20 mins to see what he has to say:

Teachertube – ideas for using your Activclassroom

TeacherTube is just like the popular video site YouTube but the content is meant for teachers and students.

Check this out – loads of free lesson ideas in quick to digest 30-45 second clips!

Activprimary:
http://www.teachertube.com/gvideos.php?gid=460

Activstudio:
http://www.teachertube.com/gvideos.php?gid=500

Google Earth and Google Maps; Ultimate education resources?

Google Earth continues to expand in power and usefulness and is awesome on the Activboard.

The latest version is now supported by an increasing number of immensely useful features, many organised under a section called “Geographic Web” – when photographs and wikipedia articles relating to the places you are flying over can be accessed with a simple click. Special links to video clips from sources such as the National Geographic or Discovery mean that the experience is completely multimedia.

Many 3rd party “layers” can also be downloaded – and these can overlay Google Earth with live weather information. historical features or create virtual tours charting the life and travels of famous individuals.

If you have Google Earth installed. here is a great example – a tour of the ancient sites of Rome.

Another impressive feature of the web based Google Maps is ‘Street View’ – once you find a city (currently US) – you can transform into a pedestrian and enter a virtual world where you can travel along streets in a fully photographic way. With full image panning and zooming – it is true virtual reality…. walk along the streets of New York to visit Times Square or any of the many historic places – and shift between, map, image and street views to fully reinforce the understanding of maps. Awesome! Why not visit Disney!

On my one visit to San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge was shrouded in thick mist – now I can see what I missed!

Are these tools the new ‘digital atlases’ that children need to be using in the age of GPS and anytime, anywhere connectivity?

Teaching Programming with Alice on an Activboard

If you want to teach computer science principles to kids – do try and check this out…

http://www.alice.org

From here you can download a free program from Carnegie Mellon Uni. that lets you create and control objects and characters in 3D worlds.

It is clearly very powerful for teaching the fundamental basics of computer programming (if you do not know about geeky, programmer type things like classes, events, properties, variables, parameters, functions and methods – you will after an hour or so with Alice). Being completely visual it helps make complete sense of the basics of programming – and is stunning on the Activboard – it really make kids want to jump up, interact with it and make it all work….

For example, in one scenario there are characters such as a Pharoah (such an object is called a Class) and in that class are all the bits that make him up – e.g. Head, Body Limbs, Crown, etc. With a combination of drag and drop and pull down menus, all operated easily on the Promethean Activboard we could program the Pharoah to do almost anything…

There are even special ‘methods’ such as ‘think’ or ‘talk’… so that it can be used to create an interactive storyboard like a movie.

Within minutes, seven year olds had mastered the basics and created their first adventure. The software even lets you save your work as a webpage so others can see it and see the code that was used. Here is the first attempt (for some reason the speech and thought bubbles are not working as we expected online – but they will in your class). You can also see the programming used on the web page

http://www.zen57329.zen.co.uk/Pyramid_Adventure/Pyramid_Adventure.html

You may need some extra plugins to download to view it, but the webpage has all the details and they are fairly straightforward.

Interesting use of Activboard, Activslate and Activote in HE Art and Design

Leeds College or Art and Design (where Damian Hirst first threw a dead sheep off the roof in the name of Art!) has taken on Activclassroom technology and found a range of very interesting ways of using it in a HE context.

Already a leader in innovative use of learning technology – the college have their own Private Second Life learning island – they have innovated in their deployment of the Promethean technology and looked at how the technologies can work together. They have even developed a “Virtual Activboard” and response system that has proven immensely popular among the many educational institutions using Second Life as a collaborative Learning Environment.

A key idea has been in making the Activboard part of the student’s “creative toolkit” – providing focus groups and teams with a “shared digital surface” to brainstorm ideas on to storyboard ideas. Critiques and peer review of student work – a key element of the learning process – is greatly enhanced with Activboard’s 96″ Widescreen display and great use is made of the screen recorder and annotation tools to capture feedback from the group and lecturers live and make them available online for on iPods for student review minutes later.

Much of their work is blogged online and  there is a great example of an Activboard being used to control an immersive 3D environment using the pen and students describing the design decisions they made at the DDM Collective blog.

Annabeth Robinson at LCAD highlights the value of “authentic feedback” – She says; “The screen recorder makes for a clear capture of the whole critique – everything from the voices, demonstrations and questions is captured so that students have a far richer report on which to base their responses. A paper critique is open for subsequent interpretation and misinterpretation. Capturing the group discussing the work live, digitally is a massive benefit for learners.”

Be Very Afraid

The Be Very Afraid event was held at BAFTA in Picadilly on Monday 22nd October.

It really showcases the amazing talent of youngsters and the title is very apt… “Be Very Afraid….” – if a primary child has trained themselves to edit a video, program a robot and make a podcast today… Who need to be afraid? – Them or the education system?

I’ll post some pics later…  Be inspired by Be Very Afraid.

Handheld Learning 2007

One of the key events of recent years has been the Handheld Learning event. Focusing on mobile learning with devices and the opportunities presented by ubiquitous access to the internet, it raises and explores many issues that educators will have to deal with in coming years.

I was lucky to be able to present at this event with a Promethean colleague and we ran a workshop that covered all the ways that the Promethean Activboard could work with devices. Many of the ideas in the blog made it to the presentation – using images from phones to using the Activsoftware on Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs)

As well as the technical tricks and techniques some other interesting Promethean technology was presented – incuding the ‘VR’ versions of Activote – basically Activate that floats on the screen of a laptop, PC, UMPC or Nova5000 student computer.