james-greenwood.com » collaboration

Housekeeping, subscribing & collaborating

James — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:28:31 +0000

I’m pretty much done with tweaking the new look of the site, though I would still appreciate feedback if you find any issues – can’t be sure I’ve got them all!

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.

Well, I’ve done it now…

Moral issues in ICT: handout resource

James — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:20:30 +0000

This is an event – the first resource to be posted born of collaboration! Debbie Jones – @teach_ict – of Teach-ICT fame very kindly put together two of the handouts in this set covering the moral issues in ICT.

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)

Well, I’ve done it now…

James — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:14:37 +0000

I suppose I’ve tried it two or three times since blogging became a craze a few years ago, but always with very little idea of why, and even less conviction to do a decent job of it. Recently, though, my involvement with Twitter has introduced me to a growing community of professionals interested in technology & education, and I’ve become acutely aware of how beneficial sharing ideas with these people can be.

I’m very fortunate to work in a school where new technologies are embraced, and that we have a core group of people from different backgrounds, teaching different subjects, eager to share ideas. Compared to many schools, we have regular informal meetings where we would try to collaborate on some activity or other.

Working on things like this – a project, a club, a link between departments – offers the opportunity to expand your field of vision beyond the limitations of your subject as well as giving the opportunity to reflect on your own teaching, but as with so many things in teaching the biggest obstacle is time.

Inter-departmental projects are often rewarding, but finding the time to put one together can be far more difficult than it would seem at first glance. Recently, our leaders of learning (lol) and senior leadership team (sadly there’s no way to turn that into rofl) decided there should be themed homework projects across departments for next year’s year 7 cohort. Topics included “who am I?”, plots and protests, the world about us, etc – nothing too restrictive, yet some kind of over arcing theme.

I took on plots and protests, deciding to make a project based on cryptography. I started with some historical information about the Babington plot to oust Elizabeth I by using coded messages shuttled back and forth between Anthony Babington & the prison where Mary, Queen of Scots was being held in the cork of a beer barrel for some good historical background. I then moved on to introduce simple substitution (Caesar) cyphers using the excellent Cryptoclub website, and ended with a choice of research questions:

Describe how important encryption of information is on the Internet, or
Describe how complex the maths behind cryptography can get once you apply the power of computers.

Lovely. I sat back and marveled at what had turned out to be four hours of (thoroughly interesting) work to put together one-and-a-quarter-A4-pages-that-I-knew-I’d-be-told-to-cut-down-to-one-page-but-didn’t-have-a-clue-how.

Then I remembered… it was for year 7s. Alright, I wasn’t asking for them to crack 128-bit encryption, I was asking for an explanation of why the process was difficult, but yeah… kind of silly, really.

Back to the point of this post, taking me out of my comfort zone of spreadsheets, databases and Photoshoppery, I put on a history teacher’s deerstalker for an afternoon and learnt a hell of a lot. Several web-based resources made that process much easier; the excellent resources section of the Bletchley Park website, the Cryptoclub website mentioned earlier, Simon Singh’s Cracking Code Book, and – most importantly – a handful of people on Twitter, including the head of Humanities at my own school.

Good advice, and a couple of hours later, I had my homework project complete, ready for the little cherubs come January. The point I’m trying (a little too hard, maybe) to make is that the biggest part of CPD is reflection. Through something as simple as planning a homework activity a little outside my comfort zone, with the help of other teachers, I spent an afternoon doing little else.

While I’m not sure exactly whether, or how, I’d integrate Twitter into my classroom in a major way, the potential for sharing good practice and getting help from a large and still growing community of professionals worldwide is huge. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, do.

“So why aren’t you saying this there, you wordy bastard?” you ask… well, I’m on 653 words so far. Try get that into 140 characters, I dare you.