james-greenwood.com » resources

Some Rights Reserved: Unit 1 model assignment update

James — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:13:48 +0000

Back in September I released my OCR Nationals unit 1 course, solely on the website. Over the course of this year, my department and I have been putting additional resources together to plug the gaps in the initial release.

These resources are now being released on a Moodle course in my new resources area as well as for download (link below), and like everything else released on this site it’s completely free to use, share & modify. Now included in the materials:

Guideline presentation files for each assessment objective
Video files from the Some Rights website to avoid filtering issues
AO6: Database resources are now present on both the Moodle course and the website
A typo in the AO5 worksheet has been corrected
The teacher’s handbook has been updated
Video tutorials for several functions (creating a query in Access, animating in PowerPoint) have been added

Unit 23 resources

James — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:29:29 +0000

Created to map to the OCR Nationals Level 2 framework for unit 23, these video editing resources are currently in-use in my school to great effect. Students take on the role of advertisers/VJs, creating an advert/music video to advertise a Some Rights Reserved concert aimed at promoting free music. As well as teaching aids for completing the assessment objectives set out in the unit handbook (video review worksheets, storyboard proforma, testing table, etc), 380mb of Creative Commons-licensed music, images and video are available to save directly to a networked drive for students to access.

Check out the Moodle course by logging in as a guest, or download the resources for use on your own VLE. (NB: This address is different from the first originally published due to a Moodle error)

Downloads

Assets (zip archive) 379.4Mb
Moodle course backup (zip archive) 88.9Mb

Link roundup: March

James — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:37:35 +0000

Our World: Cracking Walls

The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

Link roundup: September

A return to your (semi) regular programming…

James — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:04:59 +0000

In the second leg of my plan to come up for air after a manic few months, I’m hoping to kickstart the blog back into action, after my recent return to Twitter. I now have the time to focus on the things I’ve had to neglect for a few months, so here’s a brief taster of what’s incoming:

A major update to the content of Some Rights Reserved is incoming over Easter, now improved with the hindsight of a year’s use in my school. The assignment has gone down extraordinarily well, and we’re seeing significantly higher grades coming through when assessing work. If you’re looking for a well-resourced, refined model assignment for unit 1 of the OCR Nationals, have a look.
I was reliably informed by our web developer that my unit 8 (innovation & e-commerce) Moodle course was by far the biggest drain on the web server a couple of months back. I’ve been having a blast teaching this open-ended jaunt into the theory side of ICT that I felt I’d been neglecting, and have masses of resources to share. I’m hoping to host some of them separately in order to make them available for download, but until then feel free to have a look on my school’s VLE by logging in as a guest.
And in the final dose of what some might consider OCR Nationals overload, I’ve redesigned our materials for unit 23 (video editing), and intend to share them once I’ve had the chance to polish them off over the Easter holidays.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with the ~300 hits per day this site has been getting, considering no new content has been posted since September, but it’s time to blow off the cobwebs and get back down to the stuff I’m here for.

Free scheme of work for OCR Nationals unit 1

James — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:46:53 +0000

Updated: click here for details

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.

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)

OCR Nationals markbooks: updated

James — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:07:25 +0000

A while back I posted a Google Spreadsheet markbook for OCR Nationals level 2 ICT’s oh-so-exciting unit 1. Since posting this as a resource, I’ve updated it to plug a couple of holes (the original markbook was missing multiple recipients as a pass criteria for AO2) and created markbooks for the other units we teach. See below for links. You need to have a Google Docs account in order to save a copy of the spreadsheets in order to enter your data.

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.

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.

The impact of ICT: Facebook hits 200 million users

James — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:42:43 +0000

I’m toying with the idea of making a website devoted to resources specifically geared towards developing thinking skills, and awareness of the wider world… I try as far as I can to avoid the “trivial pursuits” Jamie McKenzie argued so eloquently against. Hell, it’s not as if I work hard enough (cough).

Anyhow, thought I’d share my latest effort comparing Facebook users to populations, which I am well aware is like comparing apples with legwarmers, but a fun factlet nonetheless.

Download full-size A3 version here.