james-greenwood.com » teaching

Assessing Pupil Progress

James — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:15:41 +0000

One of my department’s big focuses this year has been Assessing Pupil Progress, the new supplementary levelling structure for Key Stage 3. We didn’t have any idea what it was until our LA advisor, Pauline Hargreaves, gave us an excellent introduction to it in the Autumn term.

Key competencies

For those who haven’t yet got to grips with it, APP divides the curriculum into three distinct fields called Assessment Focuses. AF1 is planning, developing and evaluating, AF2 is handling data, sequencing instructions and modelling, and AF3 is finding, using and communicating information. Doing this allows departments to assess students’ ability across a wider range of skill sets, as well as enabling them to review their curriculum to identify any potential weak spots. Without covering each of these fundamental areas in ICT, how can we give a realistic level by the end of the first term of year 7?

The real draw, here, is that it offers a far more robust system of assessment than the old (or, indeed, the new) level descriptors. I always felt slightly uncomfortable when explaining the use of these to new year sevens: “If you do some of these things you’re a level 4c, if you do most you’re a 4b, if you do all of them you’re a 4a.” The sea of blank faces was always more than a little disheartening, especially when we did all we could think of to ensure they were as accessible as possible - 16 foot posters up in each ICT room with the descriptors in as close to pupil speak as we could get them, etc.

The real point of the division of key competencies hit home when I thought back to teaching a mildly autistic boy in a previous school who was a marvel with anything logical. He could intuitively work his way through some fairly complex spreadsheet work (goal seek, pivot tables) on his own, yet when asked to explain it, or design anything creative, you wouldn’t think the work was from the same year group, never mind the same student. He ended KS3 with a high level 6 based on the quality of his work in Excel, Access & Scratch, which of course fed in to KS4 predictions. He was placed in a top middle set which was completing OCR Nationals with a significant emphasis on graphics, which – of course – led to his grades falling like a rock.

Informing personalised learning

ICT is an intrinsically broad subject, but I think the three assessment focuses identified in the APP model cover everything nicely. Some students will excel in one particular area more than the others, and being able to identify that early means we are better able to nurture those skills, and use this data to inform setting & course choices in the current/next key stage.

At my school we currently only offer the OCR Nationals at KS4, and while they have their faults, they do at least offer a breadth of choice lacking in the majority of GCSE courses. I opted to teach (the wonderful) Unit 8: Innovation & e-Commerce to my top sets (1 & 3) for their second year. The course is largely essay-based, with a good deal of crossover with Business Studies, and radically different to everything the students had learnt in ICT thus far. The majority of students in the top set took to it very well, being perfectly well-equipped with the literacy skills to express their opinions on complex topics like legal, moral & ethical issues in ICT, or the impact ICT has had on society. However, several students in set three who had been working consistently to distinction standard in units 1 & 23 started to struggle significantly with the essay assignments.

This might all sound off-topic, but my point is this; students who excel in KS3 at finding, using & communicating information would be logical choices for an essay/report/presentation-based course. Students who excel at sequencing instructions and modelling would be well suited for a data manipulation/programming course, and students who excel at planning, developing and evaluating should be good at handling larger database/spreadsheet projects. Being armed with such information when students arrive in KS4 would better equip teachers & students to choosing the best possible programme of study.

Curriculum review

Without needing to start an in-depth review, I knew our weakest area was AF2, with only a scant look at spreadsheets that goes as far as IF statements (which is further than we’re required to go by the OCR Nationals coursework, incidentally), an introduction to (flat file) databases, and a lacklustre Flash unit. The curriculum was very AF3 heavy, which was no huge surprise as literacy levels are quite low for new arrivals in KS3 – when I wrote the year 7 SoW I wanted to ensure we were discouraging the copy & paste mentality, so spent a good deal of time hammering that home.

One year on, with a reasonably coherent scheme of work for our two-year Key Stage 3 borne out of hard work on the part of the department, I went to a subject leader network meeting where David Luke, the other Kirklees ICT advisor, put forward the idea of changing Key Stage 3 from the approach taken by many (including us) of half-termly topics on “spreadsheets”, “presentations”, “desktop publishing”, etc, that led to year 7 students learning how to use a piece of software, then leaving it behind them for a year until they came back to it in year 8.

Instead, taking a more holistic, project-based view of topics would ensure that students are revisiting key competencies regularly, building up their skills in gradual steps once per half term rather than great leaps once per year, and coming to see that pieces of software shouldn’t be pigeonholed applications that you use on their own, but that the best possible pieces of work combine many different tools. One year 11 student recently gave a truly outstanding presentation on e-commerce in which he hand-crafted icons to represent the key points of his talk in Illustrator and included a short movie – worlds away from bullet point lists & clip art.

Implementation

Once we knew what it was, and agreed that it would be a useful tool, the next question was, “How do we introduce it?” We had advice from two different sides of the same argument. One argued it’s a tool for teachers; to ensure the curriculum was covering all the bases, as well as introducing it as an assessment method, but the students don’t need to see it. The other advised giving the assessment grids to the students as part of the AfL strategy. “Students should be using these to assess their own learning – if it’s just us then nothing has actually changed.”

Information overload. Click for A3 PDF of the assessment criteria.

As a department, we agreed that presenting students with the A3 assessment grids would be over facing, and counterproductive. Our resolution was to take appropriate descriptors directly from the APP grid and set them as success criteria for project work. We maintain the overview of the curriculum, and students are getting the focus throughout their project, but without having to digest the glut of information on the assessment grids.

Teachers would then have short, individual talks with students at the end of a project after assessing the work to discuss how they think they’ve done, as well as setting targets for the next unit.

So what’s next?

I’m champing at the bit to start the overhaul of our curriculum, and now I have the cornerstone. APP is a solid foundation upon which to form a programme of study that can shape what our students learn, and how they learn it from joining the school to leaving. By involving feeder primaries, sixth form colleges and the students themselves, I hope we’ll have the makings of a truly solid scheme of work with the flexibility to keep it relevant & the robustness to ensure it lasts.

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

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.

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.

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)

First look: Word 2010

James — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:52:33 +0000

I installed the Technical Preview of Office 2010 today. Having been impressed with the improvements in 2007 over 2003, I was looking forward to seeing what the new version had to offer. Obviously, one of the big selling points will be the online functionality – I love Google Apps, but there are some shortcomings… restrictions in colours for formatting, not being allowed to use hyperlinks in spreadsheets… nothing huge, but if they were available with Office Online, I would likely move over to using that instead.

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.

Key questioning: don’t skip steps

James — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:47:28 +0000

From firm foundations…

When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled “vocab”. At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan – the kids know the vocab, right?

Early this year, my department ran a survey for all key stage 3 students (11-13 year olds) to find out attitudes and opinions on ICT. I would say I picked the first answer at random, but as the student’s first and second names both began with A I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Regardless, here’s what we saw:

Question one: is ICT important?

Yes. ICT is everywhere so it’s very important to understand it.

Question two: what do the letters ICT stand for?

I’m not sure.

So she knew that ICT was important, yet didn’t know what it was? This student was in year 9, so had been receiving two lessons a week for over two years at my school – not to mention the years she spent studying it at primary school – without covering a simple definition of terms.

Saying that she didn’t know what it was is a little harsh, granted, but after realising this good student didn’t know what the fundamental acronym stood for, in a subject littered with abbreviations, acronyms and a raft of otherwise alien words, that vocab section I derided as a trainee started to make an awful lot of sense.

According to this blog’s stats, the most popular resource on this site (by a considerable way) is the Bloom’s taxonomy document. I have to say that I’m glad about that… posters have their place, sure, but they’ll never have the kind of impact that really thinking about how you teach your subject will.

I was responsible for the year 7 scheme of work this year, which I put together largely over the summer, but after reading this girl’s insight into the role vocab has to play in truly understanding ICT concepts I opened it back up to add a vocab section to every unit. Key words were flagged up with definitions, and time built into the scheme for what some might think was a step backwards: vocab tests.

I went to a grammar school which taught very much as tradition dictated, and out of my three French lessons per week, the first ten minutes of the first lesson was dedicated to a simple, ten question vocab test – completed in the back of our vocab books, mere tantalising pages away from the answers which we’d written in the front. Under the keen eye of either of the stern Mr Wilby or the frankly terrifying Mr Ryder, we would learn our vocab in preparation for the test, do it, swap books with a neighbour, mark them together and by show of hands the teacher would determine… something.

What I didn’t know at the time was what exactly they were determining. Check your taxonomy – they’d just assessed our knowledge. What was next? Comprehension of this vocab (applying different cases & genders) & application (forming into gramatically correct sentences).

I realise I’m way over-egging this particular pudding, but in thinking back to my experience in my formulaic but effective French lessons, I saw what I’d been doing wrong as a trainee. Expecting students to understand the difference between a database and a spreadsheet is more than a little unreasonable when you haven’t provided them with a definition of either. I see this all the time with new students in year 7. “What’s a spreadsheet?” “Microsoft Excel.” “Okay, that’s an example of spreadsheet software, but can you tell me what one is? What does it do?”

I’m not sure whether this is something only I have had to deal with, but sometimes we feel like we’re regressing too far. “These kids have had ICT lessons virtually from the womb… why do they need to start from scratch when they arrive in my room?” was an interesting question from a high school ICT teacher I met at a conference. Just as interesting was the question “Do you have to complete the database task in Access, or can you do it in Excel?” from a qualified ICT teacher.

Students with a firm foundation in vocab and definitions go on to form confident opinions, and apply their understanding. By starting lesson one of spreadsheets with =A1+B1, there’s a hell of a lot that you (I) just missed.

Encouraging higher level thought

Equally important is what comes next. At the end of year 7, all students completed a project in small groups where they came up with a vision of some form of information technology they would expect to see in ten years’ time. Here’s how we broke it down:

What can computers do?

Pick a current example of some kind of ICT – mobile phone, games console, PDA – and list what it does. Everything that it does.

What could computers do ten years ago?

Sticking with the same genre of technology, pick an example from ten years ago. If you chose the PS3, pick the original Playstation. Write down what that could do, and note any differences you see.

So what can you expect in ten years time?

Think about the context you’ve just discovered – think about what’s next. Think about input & output devices. How will you control your invention? How will it relay information back to you?

In three manageable chunks we covered past, present & ideas for future technology, with the likelihood being that they’d only really experienced the present examples. Understanding.

Short assessment tasks were prepared – students had five minute interviews with me as an industry expert (eyes rolled) in which they describe their product and I give feedback. Often the ideas were along the lines of “It’s like an iPhone, but with more memory.” Or “It’s a PS3 that can play Xbox & Wii games.”

With that last example, we got into an interesting discussion about why Playstation, Microsoft & Nintendo would allow their games to be played on one console. We also discussed what the controller would look like – they presented me with a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a games controller – chunks of all three console controllers Photoshopped together, but with a little discussion they agreed it wouldn’t work so moved on to another idea.

While giving current examples, I used the Nintendo Wii (again) as a key example of the kind of change we’ve seen in recent years. I started my lesson with the key question:

Why might it be surprising that Nintendo is having one of its best years on record? And why do you think that is?

As expected, nobody volunteered an answer – those are two difficult questions, and take some thought. So I left it on the board with the promise of a praise slip for anyone who came up with an answer before the end of the lesson. I did this with three separate year 7 classes, and in each one the answer came at around the 30 minute mark.

It’s surprising because we’re in a recession, and they’re making so much money for two reasons. Firstly, the Wii is a lot cheaper than the Xbox or Playstation 3, and secondly it’s a very different interface. You have to be more active to use it, and a lot of the games involve more than one person so parents are buying them to play with their kids.

A question like that digs a little deeper than a vocab test, drawing on awareness of current events as well as understanding the appeal of different consoles to parents – the ones who hold the purse strings. A games console no longer means hours of solitude locked away in a darkened bedroom.

After some thought, these students got that – but it only came after setting those firm foundations in vocabulary & encouraging them to build upon these themselves.

I feel awfully preachy having read this post through, but please don’t imagine me standing atop my soapbox trying to preach to a choir of grandmothers about the virtues of sucking eggs – this is more a description of the issues I had with building competence in my students.

It’s all too easy to fake understanding in ICT lessons: doing doesn’t necessarily mean understanding. By introducing key questions teachers can assess what’s actually being learnt. My resolution for next year is to do more digging in order to assess genuine understanding.

Expectations & user interface design

James — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:15:24 +0000

The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.”

Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now?

For decades, gadgets marginalised people who didn’t understand them. In the 1980s programming your VCR was as much a standing joke as airplane food. In the 1990s, nobody over the age of 20 could send a text message in less than half an hour.

These gadgets didn’t meet our expectations. Tapping dozens of buttons, scrolling through list-based menus or trying to work out what two circles joined by a line at the top aren’t natural ways of interfacing with the world. That’s not to say they weren’t popular, but rather than them being used intuitively their owners had to sit down and learn how to use them. Not quite man-machine synergy.

I am 24 years old, and for 14 of those years I have been the technology expert in my family. My dad, an intelligent, articulate, savvy man, has not only been confused by his gadgetry, but has sometimes been so flummoxed by the thing that he’s been unable to describe the problem.

Why? Because they don’t do what he expects them to do. My nan’s first mobile phone didn’t have predictive texting on it. Her second one, bought after a year of practicing with her first, did – and did by default. She couldn’t work out how to turn it off, so she stopped texting again. Are we born with the innate knowledge that hitting the hash key twice switches from predictive to normal texting? I’m no neuroscientist but I doubt it. Is not understanding the intricacies of these gadgets her fault? No.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s the guy who designed the phone, but we have to bear in mind the limitations imposed on mobile phone designers over the last ten years – size, cost, performance, hardware limitations, battery life… when you really start to think about it, there’s little wonder the things have been such a chore to use.

There is an awful lot that we do innately understand, though. Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this brilliantly in the video below:

Did you know that he was demonstrating the pentatonic scale? Even if you did, did you need to in order to sing along? Thankfully, we’re now at a point where technology has advanced enough to meet us half way in rising to these natural expectations within us all.

The two examples that leap to mind are the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

Give someone an iPhone (even, shock horror, someone over the age of 40) and just through playing with it they will very quickly learn how to use it, initially being impressed by the clever little touches like swiping to scroll, pinching to zoom & twisting to rotate up to typing on the qwerty keyboard & noting the changes in interface when the accelerometer detects it has been tilted. It’s outselling most other phones in most markets, and not just because it’s cute.

The majority of Nintendo Wii games are cute, with oodles of the fuzzy anime-like charm Nintendo does so well, but the real reason behind the blinding success of the console is in its revolutionary, pseudo-real movement-based interface. Demonstrating this with my year 11 top set, I mimed my way through several different games with a Wii controller in my hand (baseball, tennis, shoot ‘em up, golf, etc) while dragging a hapless volunteer to stand beside me and mime the same genre of game using a PS3 controller. Smirks all round, but they got the point. These inventions make sense.

“Who here has a Nintendo Wii?” Hands fly up. “Keep your hand up if you have ever needed to read the manual.” Hands snap back down.

So are we there? Have we truly reached the technological nirvana of seamless human-computer interaction? Not quite, but over the last few years we have seen some considerable steps in the right direction.

“What else do we need?” was the next question for my class. Here’s what they came up with:

Voice recognition & commands: lights on, music, coffee
Gesture recognition: wave, point, stop/go, nod/shake
Further developments of touch technology: integrate with PCs, not just phones
Develop movement recognition: Xbox Project Natal is another step in the right direction
Biometrics: fingerprint, iris scan, DNA recognition

Quite an extensive list, really – I was impressed by the last one. The guy who suggested it had been reading up on the ID cards that have been causing a furore since they were announced several years ago. The idea of biometric integration with technology reminded me of the closing section of an excellent lecture given at Huddersfield University last year by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of the DNA fingerprint.

In the lecture, he described the effect technological progress had had on the process of identifying a sample for DNA fingerprinting – identification of a person, or even a person’s relatives, by using samples of skin, hair or bodily fluids.

When he invented the process in 1984 it took two weeks in a laboratory in order to get a result. In 2008, it took about an hour with a kit that could fit into a briefcase.

And so he revealed his vision for the future; a Britain where nobody would ever worry about losing their keys. A nation of doors without locks or handles – when you get home you wouldn’t have to put your key into the lock. You would spit on the door, it would analyse the DNA contained in the sample and as if by magic open before you.

A utopian vision of the future; millions of homes with phlegm-covered doors.

Yeah.

Key questioning: don’t skip steps

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.