james-greenwood.com » edtech

Accessibility in e-learning

James — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:50:31 +0000

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.

Engagement & ICT

James — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:46:24 +0000

“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:

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.

ICT quotes posters

James — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:06:59 +0000

It’s freebie time again! Inspired by Will Lion’s excellent “mind bites” series of desktop wallpapers, I started putting together a series of A3 size posters for my classroom wall. These posters include quotes, facts & figures relating to the impact of ICT on society so should make for good display fodder in computer suites.

If there is no citation for images, it’s because they’re from licensed stock collections, or they’re mine. The entire collection (of 17 posters at the time of writing) weighs in at around 145mb with each file being 300 DPI A3 size. I haven’t finished yet, and I’m more than happy to hear suggestions for posters you’d like to see – just add them in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Examples:

Download them individually from here, or download the entire collection as a zip file (192mb).

Update (22/08/09): Thanks to Chris who kindly let me know that box.net impose bandwidth restrictions on their free users. The posters are now available to download from james-greenwood.com as well as box.net. I’m uploading a zip file of the entire collection as I write this.

Searching the web & information literacy

James — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:29:59 +0000

One of the big rubs in this brave new world of technology-assisted education is getting students to realise that not everything posted online is true. With young children, even getting them to realise that search engines don’t actually provide you with information – rather, they link to websites that do – is very difficult. This is made easier with the introduction of Wolfram Alpha, which rather than linking to websites that contain the information provides the user with a nicely-formatted cribsheet of information related to the search topic.

I was recently asked with very little prior notice to run a taster lesson for year 6 children who were in school for a taster day. Because we only had 50 minutes, and couldn’t expect anything like skills with graphics packages, etc, I decided to do a lesson on finding information on the Internet. I divided the class up into three groups: group A had to use Ask Jeeves, group B had to use Google, and group C had to use Wolfram Alpha. I told them they would have to answer some fact-finding questions as quickly and as accurately as possible. The first correct answer would get two win/draw slips (our school’s reward system), the second would get one, then we’d come back together as a class and discuss the answers they found.

Question one: what is the capital city of Guatemala?

Start off easy. Most kids got it, with the majority of the early hands up coming from team Google. Some members of Team Wolfram who used the keywords “guatemala capital” found not only the information they were looking for, but additional information including location, population, which they started avidly reading in preparation for question two.

Question two: what is the currency used in Guatemala?

Another easy question, but it allowed us to discuss the differences between the three search engines – Ask presents its information in a similar way to Google, with no discernible improvements, yet the chatter from Team Wolfram had the other two thirds of the room craning their necks over to have a look. One student in Team Wolfram who had used the keyword “guatemala” already had the information on his screen (along with a great deal more) so won the prize for first correct answer within seconds.

Question three: what is the population of Guatemala?

With this question, you see the penny begin to drop. I started writing answers on the board:

12,300,000

13,000,000

14,400,000

68,000,000,000 (not entirely sure what happened there)

13,400,000

Wolfram’s population section.

When I got to ten different numbers I called a stop to the search.

“So which one’s right?”

A couple of unsure hands went up. “Mine,” said one of the more confident boys. “Why?” “Because it looked right.” “What do you mean by looked right?” “I’m not sure. It just did.”

There were another couple of similar answers, but then I asked where they got their information from. Because this isn’t immediately obvious on the Wolfram Alpha search page, I pointed out to the class that it was down at the bottom of the page under the link “Source information”:

I wrote this source information down on the board next to the answers. A handful:

Wikipedia

nationsencyclopedia.com

History Central.com

US State Department

CIA World Factbook

“Okay, now we’re talking – Sam, come cross out one you don’t believe.” He goes for Wikipedia. “Why did you choose that one?” “My mum told me anyone can edit it.” Someone else chips in about how that’s true, but that most things that are wrong get fixed quickly. I tell my story about a cherub in a previous school editing Nikita Kruschev’s page to say “mmmmm, burgers are yummy” a couple of years back, and that it got put back as it was in less than a minute.

“Do you want to change your answer, Sam?” “No, I still think some of the others are more reliable.”

This post is turning into storytime with Mr Greenwood, so I’ll leave it there, but suffice it to say from such a simple start these children who had come from different primary schools, with inconsistent (sometimes insufficient) ICT teaching were very quickly discussing how to be critical of sources on the Internet. The US State department is a better source of information than HistoryCentral.com because State is the department responsible for dealing with other countries. You’d expect them to have their facts right.

In the last ten minutes, we discussed how populations are measured, and I ended the lesson with the promise of five of my finest win/draw slips for the first person to explain to me what a census is when they arrive as year 7s in September.

This is a potentially dry subject – hardly the kind of thing you’d expect young children to get excited about, yet it is a vital component of information literacy. I decided early in the year that yr 11 students explaining that they got the information for their essay “from Google” was unacceptable. Hopefully, through integrating lessons like these into the curriculum, it won’t happen quite so much.

Demystifying abstract terms

James — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:48:49 +0000

One of the problems with a subject like ICT is relating seemingly abstract terms. In a recent discussion about storage & computer memory, I found some of my Key Stage 3 students had little concept of the units of file size. After a little while we established that a kilobyte was bigger than a byte, a megabyte was bigger than a kilobyte, and a gigabyte was bigger than a megabyte, but that was about as far as it went.

As a result, I decided to put together a poster to explain the largest unit of measurement we deal with at the moment, the terabyte. As our school network has 6Tb storage capacity, it’s a nice figure to do some number crunching with.

Using a handful of web-based facts such as Internet traffic in 1993, and my own calculations based on freely available information, I came up with this:

I hope to get this printed out at A1 size using my school’s large format printer and include a dramatic unveiling of the figures in a lesson dedicated to finding the answers to the questions posed. For example, using the Harry Potter point, students would have to:

Find out how many CDs comprise the entire Harry Potter audiobook collection (103 – available from Amazon.co.uk)
How many minutes an audio CD can hold (74 mins)
The minute-to-megabyte ratio of MP3 compression (using 128kbps is roughly 1Mb to 1min)
How many times the entire collection can fit on a 1Tb hard drive (therefore how many gigabytes in a terabyte; how many megabytes in a gigabyte)

Download the 300DPI A1 poster freely here.

System life cycle poster

James — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:47:47 +0000

System life cycle

A1 size, jpeg format – 5000 x 7000 pixels. 5.6mb: click here to download.

Level descriptors wall display

James — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:28:32 +0000

Level descriptors

This is up on my classroom wall printed as 4′ x 16′, printed at 130 DPI. The actual file weighs in at 16.9MB in high quality jpeg format; 29,000 x 3,000 pixels.

Click here for the 300 x 3108 preview, click here for the full-size version. Free for you to use, share & modify however you like. If you’d like a large-scale printed version, we can print them using our uber printer at my school. Tweet me if you’d like one; we can print them for around £45… I’ll get a firmer idea of cost if anyone’s interested.