Good lord it’s been a long time since I made a post. The reality is that I’ve been working on this for about four months, in and around everything else that’s been going on. It’s now just about ready for release, so here it is.

What is it?

Some Rights Reserved is a resource to be used to complete the OCR Nationals in ICT unit 1 course. The website contains resources to be used to create the required documents, presentations, databases & spreadsheets – all with an intellectual property/Creative Commons twist. The teacher’s handbook provides information on assessment, guidelines for how to complete the assessment objectives & exemplar work.

The project is based around the idea of sharing ideas – the written word, music, video – for free. As such, I’m releasing it for free.

So feel free to visit the website, and the teacher’s area for the handbook.

Related posts:

1. Freebies: OCR Nationals markbooks
2. OCR Nationals markbooks: updated
3. Pupil speak level descriptors

A recent US Department of Education report concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. In the New York Times analysis of the report, Steve Lohr said:

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The study combined data from 99 studies with quantitative comparisons of online and classroom learning. The difference in grades was modest but meaningful enough to draw the conclusion, so many drew the conclusion that online > classroom learning.

I’d caution against this. As I said in a previous post, computer-based learning isn’t intrinsically more motivating, more engaging, or better than any other kind of learning, but that’s not to say that teachers shouldn’t be doing all they can to make online content accessible, engaging & useful.

Last month, I was asked by the Naace to review some online Moodle courses described as ICT Continual Professional Development resources. I realised once I started looking into them that they were essentially compendiums of links to other websites answering questions to general questions like “What is assessment?”

The entire page was set out like this, with 10 sections laid out with a header, a handful of separate pages giving nuggets of information about the topic, then some links to other websites. The overall effect was completely over facing. Yes, these courses were designed for adults, but the principles of good web design revolve around the central mantra of “keep it simple”, regardless of audience.

The standard setup in Moodle is a course broken down by weeks or topics. All resources need structure, but most students using a textbook wouldn’t start flicking through from page one in order to find the subject they’re looking for – they would flip to the index. If you’ve put together a webpage that’s double the height of a standard monitor (~2048 pixels), start your course with an overview, including learning objectives & outcomes – just as you would at the start of a lesson.

Wherever possible, embed information on the page, don’t link to it. Whether this is a paragraph of text, an image or a Youtube video, students might miss it if you hide it away in a link.

This leads me on to my favourite discovery of last year; Adobe Presenter. Every Moodle course I set up now starts with a simple presentation that introduces the subject. Because it’s more attractive than standard text, and comes with an element of interactivity in the forward & back buttons, students are more likely to take the information in.

Embed these presentations by publishing them online and inserting an iframe to a label on your course.

“A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them.”

Pär Almqvist

Softening the edges of a Moodle course takes time. Softening the edges of an entire Moodle installation takes even longer, but the benefits are potentially far greater. My school is in the process of switching from the almost impenetrable course list to departmental landing pages as the main way for students to access information.

5 rules for designing a good elearning course

1. Make it active & thought-provoking

Don’t just use your VLE to present information to students. Put activities on it to encourage them to engage with the content. Hot Potatoes quizzes, Flash-based activities, crosswords, etc.

2. Encourage collaboration

Include activities that require students to collaborate with others. “In 60 seconds, write down all the words you know related to e-safety. When you have done, swap your list with a neighbour and see if there are any words you don’t know. Together write a short definition of each word from both of your lists, using formatting & images to help.”

3. Guide your students with structure

Break Moodle courses into suitable chunks – lessons, topics – using headings, subheadings & indentation to show flow of information.

4. Embed, don’t link

Wherever possible, embed information in the body of your course rather than linking to it. If you have the equivalent of a page of text, link to it, but include anything shorter to improve readability. Having to have a dozen tabs open to read all of the information on a course is not usability in action.

5. Edit your copy

Textbooks rarely contain spelling mistakes. Not so for websites. With the increasing push to electronic media replacing textbooks, it is essential to retain quality & reliability. Read through the text on your courses, check the links, and if possible have someone else do it too.

Further reading

The field of user experience is fascinating, and well-documented. Try these links if you would like to read more:

• Jakob Nielsen: Twitter postings: iterative design – “text is a UI”
• Kyle Sollenberger: 10 User Interface Design fundamentals
• Leona Tomlinson: Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website
• Michael Agger: Lazy Eyes – How we read online
• Sigma Infotech: Website design for your customers – it’s not what you want
• Adobe: Engaging with the new eLearning

No related posts.

I really have to start the first roundup of useful links with the first site that got me really thinking about the role of technology in education. Jamie McKenzie takes a cautionary role, looking for the good in applying technology rather than evangelising. He provides excellent food for thought, and was quoted several times in my dissertation.

Key posts

• Avoiding Second Hand Thinking
• The Slam Dunk Digital Lesson
• The Medium is Not the Literacy
• Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students

Ending the War on Sharing: Richard Stallman

I described Richard Stallman in my famous faces in tech poster series as an “open source evangelist”. Here, he makes an excellent argument against the war on piracy & file sharing.

Stephen Fry on the history of copyright

Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, and talks candidly about his own attitudes to file sharing. An excellent talk on the subject from someone who makes money by virtue of his intellectual property. Downloadable m4a podcast.

News roundup

• New Scientist: Worldwide battle rages for control of the Internet
• The Guardian: Teenage girl is first to be jailed for bullying on Facebook
• Plagiarism: Textiles graduate student caught out
• Wired magazine: BBC launches open-source Digital Revolution
• Social media statistics

No related posts.

I’ve added a new option for people who would rather receive post updates via email. You can subscribe to this blog using the By Email link in the top right of the page, or click here.

Some old posts have had a little tweak to make them more accessible, including the system life cycle poster, level descriptors wall display, and famous faces in tech posters. I have also stopped hosting my posters with Box.net because of bandwidth limitations. The original reason was so as not to put too much stress on this server, but that doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue at the moment.

I’m also going to start running a weekly roundup of interesting websites in education & technology that I plan to use in the classroom. I hope to keep it topical, but may throw in some older sites that I’ve found useful. If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to submit them in the comments.

This draws me nicely on to my final point. I set this blog up effectively as a continuation of the conversation on Twitter – very much a two-way street, yet by the very nature of this being a (relatively) static website, it presents information in a top-down way. I’ve had lots of very favourable comments about how the site is useful, and I’m glad to hear that resources I’ve posted here are being used, but I’d like to set out my stall as someone up for collaboration. By combining Debbie Jones’s knowledge with mine for the moral issues in ICT handouts, the finished resource was better than if either of us had done it alone.

So, you can see what interests me plastered across this site, my Delicious bookmarks & on Twitter. If you’re working on something you’d like to collaborate on, or have an idea for a poster but don’t have the software or time to draw it up, drop me a line.

No related posts.

Please do let me know via a comment or email if you spot anything that I haven’t fixed – the next couple of days will be spent tinkering, tweaking, and (the biggest job) putting together excerpts of each post, again in an effort to make the site more accessible. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

No related posts.

“So what do you teach?”

“ICT.”

“Oh, well at least the kids must find that interesting.”

- Opening to half a dozen conversations I’ve had with non-teachers.

We’re not in the ‘90s anymore, and sitting a kid in front of a computer generates little more excitement than sitting them in front of a toaster. In a society where computers are truly ubiquitous, they can’t be expected to be intrinsically exciting. How impressed would you be to find a TV in a classroom? What if I said it received Ceefax?

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the process of innovation – or the final stage in the hype cycle. New developments only remain interesting for as long as they can be called new developments… technologies older than that (or “the most profound” technologies, as Marc Weiser said) simply disappear into the fabric of our lives and are thereon taken for granted.

From this, the only logical conclusion is that – in the eyes of the only people that matter, students – ICT is no longer a new subject. It’s still treated as such… viewed as a hip and trendy subject by outsiders, or a mealy-mouthed Micky Mouse affair by (some) teachers of other subjects.

So how do we teach ICT in a meaningful way without boring the buggers to tears?

When I watch children playing video games at home or in the arcades, I am impressed with the energy and the enthusiasm they devote to the task. Why can’t we get the same devotion to school lessons as people naturally apply to the things that interest them?

Donald Norman, quoted in Marc Prensky’s Don’t Bother Me Mom – I’m Learning!

Read that quote through. Have you had an “uhm…” moment yet? If not, the problem is with the last sentence. If you’re anything like me, after reading it a couple of times the question becomes “why can’t we get the same devotion to [REALLY BORING] school lessons as people naturally apply to the things that interest them?”

But it’s actually worse than that in that the REALLY BORING goes unsaid, as if it doesn’t need to be said. Kids like doing what interests them… if only we could find some way of introducing that enthusiasm into the classroom.

Maybe try interesting them, Don. I don’t know whether this is an overly tart Brit missing an American attempt at irony, but in my defense Marc Prensky uses the quote in the chapter of his book dedicated to motivation. Classroom-based education & engagement/interest/enthusiasm aren’t mutually exclusive now, and never have been.

Donald Norman was talking obliquely about harnessing interest & enthusiasm in “the classroom”, but I’d like to focus in on the ICT room.

Most kids view the traditional ICT fodder of spreadsheets & databases as being as far removed from their home computer use as reading a poem in English or designing a desk tidy in Tech. There doesn’t seem to be the difference in attitude towards ICT (or IT, back then) that my generation was brought up with – that it’s something new, something different.

Certainly, using functions & formulas in a spreadsheet is no more intrinsically rewarding for students than solving for x. A different way of handling numbers, sure – but no more engaging or exciting an activity because of the presence or use of a computer.

As I said in the opening, this isn’t a bad thing, but how can an activity in an ICT lesson (a subject that by its very nature is applied) be truly engaging when it’s viewed as academic, with little relevance to the students’ world, or the wider world?

I’m not suggesting that spreadsheets & databases shouldn’t form part of the curriculum, but anyone presenting one as a tool for tuck shops to calculate profit & loss, and the other as a tool for a video rental shop to keep track of loans needs to brush up on their meaningful examples. Just ask a fifteen year old where they rent their videos from. Maybe they’ll tell you they use LOVEFiLM, or that they’re looking forward to streaming movies to their Xbox 360 from Netflix like the Americans do.

Keeping current allows teachers to engage students in discussions about the impact of ICT, progress being made, and the march towards utopian/dystopian technocracy, depending on your point of view. Hell, with a little more encouragement you could even nudge the students into forming their own opinions about it.

By invoking my year 8 students’ understanding of the iPhone, they were soon thinking quite deeply about human computer interfaces, and different ways of controlling & using technology.

“How many buttons do we need?”

“We only need a power button. Everything else can be on the touch screen, but that won’t work if it’s switched off so we can’t lose the power button.”

Keeping up to date is remarkably simple in this age of syndication. You don’t have to scour the web for news, read the papers or watch TV to find out what’s going on. You can easily combine RSS feeds from most major websites using a feed reader such as FeedDemon, or integrating them directly into an iGoogle or Netvibes homepage. My homepage looks like this:

Some recommended links:

• BBC Technology news
• Wired Top Stories
• Delicious Popular Bookmarks
• The Register
• PC Pro tech news

Hell, you can even subscribe to this site via RSS if you want to, though I make no promises to update as much as the ones above do.

Or, if you prefer, combine the day’s news from as many feeds as you like into a Tabbloid, a customised PDF newspaper emailed to your inbox as often as you want it:

Either way, let news come to you. Don’t battle your way through it all, just take the time every now and then to dip in and see what’s going on in the world of technology. Like the rest of the world, you’ll probably be surprised.

Related posts:

1. Searching the web & information literacy

The social & moral implications of ICT are something we both have a passion for, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion – I’ll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario. Subjects covered:

• File sharing
• Plagiarism
• Snooping
• Web addiction
• Censorship
• Web medicine

I hope they’re useful – we had fun making them!

Download handouts (PDF – 3mb)

Related posts:

1. Demystifying abstract terms
2. Free scheme of work for OCR Nationals unit 1
3. Well, I’ve done it now…

Update: 10/08/09

My friend Elliot says you’re all fools. So am I, if it makes you feel any better, but still… I was showing off my latest creation and he looked at it askance before saying, “RBS made a profit of $20k and this douchebag earns $700m? Does he live in a mountain somewhere?”

That’s right, folks… Zuckerberg’s net worth isn’t quite $700m. Facebook’s turnover is.

To those of you who have already printed this, I apologise, and Elliot says “hahaaaaa!”

Oh, and yes… I was listening to Marley when I made it.

The blog was misleading!

Download A1-sized poster (30mb)

Related posts:

1. The impact of ICT: Facebook hits 200 million users
2. Demystifying abstract terms

Anyhow, I’ve had a cursory glance around the program I use the most – Word – and the changes are subtle, but potentially good news for ICT teachers. The UI remains pretty much the same; still based around the ribbon (which I like, I know some don’t). In fact, the biggest difference is that the circular Office logo is now the first tab in the ribbon… no big deal:

The first real difference I found was in the Insert menu. There’s now a Screenshot feature that allows the user to insert a screenshot of any open window directly into Word, without the need to to printscreen & paste. Alright, not a huge improvement, but what is is the fact that it will take screenshots of small windows without the need to crop them down. Anyone who’s ever taught GCSE ICT will know the royal pain in the ass that is screenshotting, so this is in my book an excellent addition.

The screenshot menu.

Inserting a screenshot of iTunes.

Inserting a small screenshot of the character menu from Photoshop.

The next new feature I found was the artistic effects menu for formatting pictures. It basically offers the default effects from Photoshop… I can see this becoming the new rainbow coloured WordArt as the bane of my life in KS3 lessons. On the topic of WordArt, though, my year 7s will be pleased to see the new WordArt available in PowerPoint 2007 is now available in Word 2010 – they never quite understood why it wasn’t in Word 2007.

Finally, the File menu now looks completely different, encompassing all the options it used to link to.

The best improvement here is in the print menu, which now combines print preview with the print options menu in a far more user friendly format:

So so far, after half an hour’s play, all seems well. More steps in the right direction when it comes to usability & a polished interface, and I’m not surprised there weren’t more changes as I can’t really think of much else that would be needed. I’m no card-carrying Microsoft fan, but I think they’ve got a lot right with both Windows 7 and what I’ve seen so far of Office 2010. Whether you love them or hate them, better software from the Microsoft camp encourages better software from their competitors, so it can’t be a bad thing.

No related posts.

There’s nothing terribly sophisticated about them, just a combination of conditional formatting, IF statements & Google’s handy “publish as webpage” feature, but they’re a very simple way to represent progress in an easily understandable way, and have helped my students a lot. It also cuts down on the amount of formative feedback necessary, so I can limit my comments to covering quality & content.

I’ve put the short walkthrough of how to use them effectively at the bottom of the post.

Unit 1: Skills for business

Unit 3: Digital imaging

Unit 8: Innovation in ICT & e-commerce

Unit 21: Computer graphics

Unit 23: Creating video

How to use them:

On the first sheet the only things you need to fill in are students’ names and forms – these are then referenced on each subsequent sheet. The front sheet contains conditional formatting in the form field to correspond with my school’s community colours – you may want to remove that.

From here you start marking work – say we start with AO1, you traffic light the bits the student has done by putting 1 for in-progress (yellow) or 2 for complete (green). Traffic lighting means Barry can very quickly see that he’s doing well, while Stanley needs to pull his socks up.

Once you’ve done, you move all the way to the right, and put a number from 1-4 in the penultimate column, 1 being below pass, 2 being pass, 3 being merit, 4 being distinction. The cell to the right of it has an IF statement that shows the grade for the assessment objective, and this is then fed into the front sheet.

I thought about using a lookup to count up the cells ticked to the left, but as much as writing that would be a minor pain in the arse (especially with kids missing a pass criteria but getting merit ones), I’ve found that when a student has completed all of the requirements for a distinction but their evidence is badly formatted, I don’t want them to see “distinction” for it until they’ve sorted it out.

This shows the front, overview sheet again, with the marks for AO1 updated.

Hope they prove useful.

Related posts:

1. Freebies: OCR Nationals markbooks
2. Free scheme of work for OCR Nationals unit 1
3. Pupil speak level descriptors