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

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.

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

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.”

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.

Flipcharting on a Samsung Q1 UMPC

A Q1 is an ‘ultra mobile PC’ – basically a tablet PC that is slightly smaller and that runs a full version of Windows XP…

With a battery life of around 2 hours it has not quite got the stamina for a whole day out of the class – but for a focussed hour or two it is perfect.

Because the Q1 runs a full version of Windows that means it can run the full version of Activstudio and Activprimary – creating what is perhaps the ultimate PC based student creativity tool imaginable for your Activclassroom. Better still, everything the kids make is completely compatible with your class based setup and ready for sharing with the class as soon as you get back – saving hours in managing files and file formats to make a class display.

Here’s what we did – we created a ‘digital worksheet’ as a group activity on the Activboard for our field trip to the River Lune.

Task 1) We used Google maps and the Activstudio camera tool to snap an aerial view of the bridge where we would be starting our trip into the flipchart. A quick note asked the children to draw the bridge using Activstudio’s pens and drawing tools and mark the location where they made the drawing on the map.

Task 2) Invited the children to explore the use of the Activstudio sound recorder and digital camera (the Q1 does not have a camera – but pics were easily bluetoothed to it from a mobile phone and a Fujitsu Siemens EDA) to describe what they found at the riverbank.

Task 3) Involved visiting Ruskin’s view in Kirkby Lonsdale and reading the plaque there. Acting in role – they had to pretend to be John Ruskin, declaring, at the end of the 19th Century the view to be “the greatest in England – and therefore the world!” using the information on the plaque to add detail to the characterisation.

Finally the children were asked to list what they liked about taking the mobile computer on the fieldtrip… It was clear that the full range of tools and multimedia organisation features of the Activ software made a big difference to the speed and range that work could be done – the simple to use sound recorder being particularly noted but one final comment was – “Paper has no batteries to run out!”

Highly recommended… and extremely motivating for the children. Their capability with the technology is astounding.

If you can use Activstudio – then this is an easy way to get kids working independently with mobile learning technology. It only takes a few minutes to mark up flipchart pages with tasks and ideas on the Activboard and transfer them (using Bluetooth, a VLE a USB stick or something like RedHalo) to the Q1s

Activboard Tips on iTunes….

Want to have a neat way of getting ideas for using the Activboard! Get the tips and tricks as a podcast!

If you have iTunes installed – you can simply click this link and it will open and go straight to right place!

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=260527899

EDAs and ‘Beaming’ files in class… blending personalised and group learning

I have been having a great few weeks since my last post…

We have immersed ourselves in the ‘mobile learning’ agenda over the Summer break – and armed with two Fujitsu-Siemens EDAs, and a mobile phone with a camera we set out to see what approaches and ideas we could discover that we could apply with the Activboard for when term time came round.

In a previous post we had been discovering ideas for student phones.. but these EDAs really take it to a different level.Some of things we have been doing…

• Setting a series of tasks to do ‘in the field’ – the kids tick ‘em off as they complete them (they loved this and have not tired of it yet!) – and it beats a clipboard and soggy, ripped photocopy sheet anytime in the coolness stakes.
• Interviewing people (audio or video).. default 30 second time limits really focussed the conversation
• Photographing specific things in ‘photo scavenger hunts’,
• Drawing maps and diagrams of ‘real things’!,
• Setting waypoints and points of interest using GPS then estimating and working out distances between places,
• If we were near home or a WiFi hotspot – getting online to use Google maps or to answer questions as they arise… (we now know that Quinine comes from the bark of a tree – courtesy of Wikipedia – as we sat in a restaurant pondering what was it in tonic water that apparently had something to do with preventing malaria and my son says – why not find out now!)

All I would add though – is that the device itself does not magically make them start thinking of things to do with it… It was clear that without guidance and set tasks – kids see little use other than playing ‘Bubble Breaker’… The role of the teacher is most definitely safe! But what was surprising though was how often they were the ones who prompted us when we should use it to solve problems and questions as they arose as we travelled around…. ‘Why not use Google maps’ (when I got lost in the car), ‘why not go online’ – when we were intrigued by a rather bright and colourful caterpillar we found (apparently it was a tussock moth) – The kids were thinking ‘mobile connectivity’ as the norm – I was still having to remind myself!

So back to the Activboard – armed with a memory card full of stuff!

Wow… Bluetooth rocks… if used appropriately!

I have used a Bluetooth slate in the past and was pretty unimpressed with the performance in the classroom - it would suddenly decide to stop working or would have seconds where it would just go really sloooooowwwwww – but clearly the real benefit with Bluetooth is quickly and easily transferring files between devices. Pairing the EDAs to the laptop connected to the activboard was effortless.. and a simple click would see a file beaming its way to the screen.

What really made this so great was sending the incoming files straight to the Promethean Collections folders… When an incoming beam was detected – you are prompted to choose a location – just choose the Documents > Promethean > Activstudio3 > Shared Collections – and everything beamed to the PC can be found in the AS resource library for instant use in flipcharts – neat! The pocket painter app was particularly powerful – kids can create their own drawings, images, concept maps, etc. and simply beam them to the board as images… ready to drag and drop into the lesson.

Of course – with the Activboard working with devices that allows kids to contribute content – a whole new pedagogy is revealed… by beaming work to the board – THEIR work becomes the focus of discussion, group tasks such as making a flipchart magazine become easy – EDAs can get all the image and text work done independently and a few minutes beaming files – and you can organise all the content in a flipchart!

All those Export options in Activstudio suddently come into their own too… save the flipcharts as a powerpoint or PDF and you can view it in alls its glory on the EDA.. Go to Google Maps and focus on an area for a fieldtrip.. annotate a path on it using the activpen in desktop mode and save the combined page as an image – beam it – and on the EDA the kids have a simple map to follow!

The future is not personalised learning, with no class or group work – it has to be a clever blend of these amazing technologies!

Bluetooth headphones… get high quality recordings with Activ software

Just had to post again… After discovering the power of bluetooth for moving multimedia files around it seems obvious that we can easily use other Bluetooth devices in novel ways.

Connect your bluetooth headset to the PC or MAC connected to the Activboard and you can use it as a microphone when using the Video or Sound recorder functions of the software. No more hovering near the laptop or voice projection tricks.

If you are serious about using sound then something like a sound field system from Audio Enhancements can really sort things.

Mobile Phones – multimedia power in every student’s hand!

I got a new Nokia mobile phone recently – nothing fancy – just a standard model. After years of owning one I had simply got in the habit of thinking that its only pupose was for making calls and the very occasional text message (communication for people who do not really want to talk to someone!) and that all the rest was ‘fancy extras’ that were bundled in with no real thought or design other than make me pay more!

After actually reading the manual… I was amazed to find in my hand a device that can capture high quality images at a perfectly reasonable and instantly usable 1-Megapixel resolution, a video recorder and a sound recorder that ALL save in formats that can embed straight into an Activprimary or Activstudio software. JPEGS, WAV and AVI…

Then to discover that the in-built Bluetooth capability meant that I could transfer the files to the computer connected to the Activboard for NOTHING!!!!! – well – my mind was spinning!

Virtually all the ‘digital natives‘ we teach are surgically attached to their mobiles – yet we are bent on banning them in schools. Perhaps if teachers respected the kids mastery of their devices and showed that there were more creative uses of a video recorder than ‘happy slapping‘ then we can perhaps help bridge the divide between modern educators and modern learners who are all challenged in their own way with keeping on top of new and emerging technology.

Getting going:

1. Set up a bluetooth connection between the phone and the PC or MAC… This was effortless on my MAC. Just switch on Bluetooth on the Phone and MAC and ask the MAc to find the device. That was it.
2. Take your pictures and videos then choose ‘Send’ (that is what the Nokia says) then choose ‘Via Bluetooth’ – a pop up appears on the MAC to let you accept the file – and moments later it is in the documents folder ready for use on the Activboard. Amazing!

I now have at my disposal:

• a Star Trek tricorder device that I can use for a Science Fiction themed lesson…
• a personal multimedia contribution system for the Activclassroom – ‘you have all got to do a 10 second ‘TV news style’ video report on a topical issue of your choice and Bluetooth it to the Activboard…’
• a data recording tool we can take out into the field to engage every child in capturing digital images, audio and video to use in their own flipcharts

First stop though – revisit the rule about mobiles not being allowed in school!