Showing posts with label ILT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ILT. Show all posts
Monday, 24 October 2011
Monday, 14 February 2011
Why staff ICT skills matter
Once upon a time a teacher could walk into a classroom with some chalk, a pile of papers and talk. Students would usually listen, take notes with a pen and more paper and the topic would be discussed, examined and, with a bit of luck, eventually passed. Lesson followed lesson, people came and people went, boards were scrawled on, cleaned then covered again. If a student was lucky he’d get the notes down before they disappeared and would remember that evening enough of what had been discussed to complete his homework too.
Now a teacher doesn’t even have to walk into a classroom but for those that do they are confronted by students with an array of computer screens and keyboards, some maybe their own, others standard issue affairs and in place of the blackboard there’s an electronic whiteboard connected to a computer, a projector and maybe other gadgets too. Those that aren’t in a classroom may be in a virtual classroom, staring at a screen where students’ head lurk in little boxes or text files across other little boxes in different colours as they converse with them and each other. They may even just be sitting at home with a laptop with their students sitting at their homes with their laptops sifting through a website for notes and indications of what they should be doing next.
ICT skills are in evidence everywhere in teaching and in learning. At the start it’s all about impressions as students view institution websites and publications to decide where they shall study next. There they witness the design talents on-line of a marketing team offering illustrations and extracts from a curriculum and decide whether that could be the place for them. On the way they may get a glimpse of some tutors at work in a classroom or a video of their students saying how much they like life there. Sometimes they’ll see some sample course content and learning material too which some tutors have supplied after more than a few requests by that pushy girl from Marketing or found themselves being filmed doing something that makes students smile and look interested at the same time.
If staff have managed to escape being dragged in to the marketing campaigns themselves they sure don’t avoid Open Days or Enrolment Events advertised on the backs of buses or the local radio station to such an extent that they enter a hall throbbing with potential candidates for their courses and clasping certificates for whatever they’ve managed to pass to date. Those certificates, those posters, those radio interviews, the letters inviting parents to come along and the lists on the table of what staff are offering this year and how to pay for it – all created with someone’s ICT skills and, increasingly nowadays, with the teaching staff’s ICT skills in evidence.
As students sit a desk and start to chat to their prospective tutor there is a two-way process emerging already. The staff member is eyeing their behaviour, demeanour and wondering how much trouble they’ll cause in class while the other is looking at the documents scattered on the table, the type of laptop the chap’s using, what applications he has open on it, what browser he’s using and wondering why he’s writing things down or impressed that he has a notes app. on his mobile or data in an on-line spreadsheet to inform the discussion in real time.
“See you’ve got Firefox, Sir.” could even be the first words from the student to which there may seem to be a myriad possible responses from the interviewer when it is more likely that there are just four.
Immediately, the student, and perhaps the parent too, gets one of four impressions of the staff member’s ICT knowledge if not skills: from ‘on a part with mine, by the seems of it’, through ‘could be good but spotted a weakness’ and ‘he’s not at home with this stuff’ to ‘this guy hasn’t a clue’. That doesn’t mean that he’s not the best History teacher in the world or won’t fire them through their Health & Social Care National Diploma at a rate of knots with distinctions all round but it will set part of the scene in the mind of many an observer, including, of course, the Staff Development Manager who happens to be listening in at the next desk.
Let’s assume the interview goes well and after a few more communications of various type and quality the student decides to join, is accepted and arrives in September for something called Induction. This is where things really start to matter. The student has made one big decision and is rather set on a track now for probably at least a year if not two or more. There in a room somewhere he’ll be addressed by the person who will be the main player in his academic life for some time. Before he gets to the room, though, he needs to find it. The tutor thought a map and some signs might be useful. All the other tutors did too so there, displayed in abundant clarity on a noticeboard, walls or columns, is a collection of how well a host of staff can put half a dozen words on pieces of A4 paper and manage to add large black arrows.
In the room the multitude gathers and, possibly for one of the few times in their post-school academic lives, they look up and to the front with some interest. They are ready to be impressed. They want to be impressed. They appreciate that they may not be, of course, in all cases and in those instances they’ll be comparing what they know they can do to what the person at the front does in one of the few areas they can assess at this time. ICT skills. They need to go away with some genuine belief that the teachers they’ll be stuck with can handle the basic equipment and, preferably, show some talent and efficiency using ICT to communicate. They’ve got in the car. They need to know they’re not going to crash. Or they will be making some early judgements and mentally noting that this or that teacher is struggling with something that they can fix or do better.
The smartboard eventually becomes visible on a bright early autumn day when someone closes the window blinds. And there’s the presentation. Or is it? Did they have to watch as the teacher laboriously searched his desktop for the PowerPoint icon and then give them a preview of the first few little slides before the full screen view finally emerged? Can they read the text? Is it just the same as what he’s saying or more like wallpaper? Or something in between that keeps them focussed and provides opportunities for learning rather than mere spoon-feeding? Indeed, do they get surprised by a website or a web version of a presentation they can view at their leisure another time should they wish to? Let us hope they don’t get some dreadful PDF that has to be scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and makes them wonder why it wasn’t just handed out in the first place. Or, worse, a Word document that requires things to be installed before it will show anything at all, or is entirely in Arial font or the appalling Comic Sans that primary school teachers used to use in when there were only five different fonts in Windows 3.1. Some students may now even be wishing the teacher had used Courier New which has a kind of retro look and could even be regarded as rebelliously cool in 2011.
Now a good communicator may get away for a while with simply excellent speaking abilities, moving around and holding their attention, questioning, interacting, inspiring and informing with mere words, panache and plenty of expression and body language. But it will only be a while and, sooner or later, the ICT skills will be on show. And ICT skills really are on show – unlike one’s subject knowledge, dress sense or humour how a teacher puts text and images on paper or on screen, how they record and store data, how they manage classroom equipment are all out there, day in, day out, night or day in fact in some instances, for viewing by whoever looks on-line, unscrambles the handout in their pocket, thumbs through the course material, checks their progress or reads the e-mail, text message or letter home.
No teacher today can avoid ICT or hide their abilities to utilise it.
The induction group has started to look around the classroom. What’s on the walls? Where once there might have been acres of that coloured paper that faded after a few days in the sun with a scalped white paper border and individually cut-out letters and shiny photos carefully arranged in the design there is now a mass of A4 white print-outs, all in black print, illustrating what students did last year or posters advertising last year’s dance and trip to Alton Towers which could be in colour. There are prints of digital photos taken at an event. And then there’s the notice that tells them they can’t use their mobile phones, eat or drink and what might happen should they attempt to download something they’re not supposed to. The IT Department notices are generally a good guide to how well the equipment will function and the range of useful software likely to be available on the computers once they get to use them.
The small print A4 sheets in Times New Roman with a heading in a slightly larger font in bold and red are not a good sign. The big bold, fun-looking Check Our VLE for what you can and can’t do! Or We do IT well to help you do it well! Now they’re going to make the students more inclined to have faith in the team of technicians often only slightly older than themselves and, more importantly, their teacher’s ability to deal wit them effectively when the printer gives up the ghost of the last person has left a load of plugs dangling from the back of the staff computer.
It may be tempting to say that the teacher may have been issued with a set of standard documents or materials for Induction but this is their chance to establish in the minds of their cohort where they stand. I’m sorry about the quality of this presentation / document / handout – I did suggest they used x, y or z application or put them on-line for you but... will go along way towards restoring a bit of faith that all is not lost with the fellow they’re with although it does say something about that person’s ability to influence those who produced the rubbish in the first place. That also brings us to managers who often manage to keep away from students until something goes wrong and they need to be disciplined but do, or certainly should, have time to see and comment on drafts of general department materials. They could have a huge influence, both from ensuring that the best skills are used in the process and in setting an excellent example themselves. Unless they have good ICT skills themselves it can be very difficult for managers to comment constructively on items or administrative procedures. They also need to be aware of what is possible even if their own abilities mean they could not do it themselves.
In terms of teaching staff’s ICT skills, however, it is of fundamental importance that managers know not only how confident their staff feel in a range of activities and processes but also how confident they themselves feel – if not in actually implementing those skills but at least in knowing what could and should be done and in leading the way in negotiations to attain higher standards and, of really significant importance, demonstrating to their staff and colleagues by their own good practice.
Most managers have been teachers themselves in the recent past and not having to teach the students now is no excuse for not maintaining their own ICT skills. In similar vein to how students perceive their teachers so too will many teachers view their managers and be influenced by them for better or for worse.
In this area, whilst demonstrating excellent practice is key, there are areas where managers will have more effective input than teachers. This could be in the processes used to record progress, store data or promote their curriculum. How they distribute information to their staff through presentations, reports, e-mail and more – all of this almost daily activity will set a standard by which they will be judged. For better or for worse. The manager who regularly sends out all staff e-mails with a large Word attachment or the spreadsheet that umpteen people have to complete and return is asking for trouble. Sooner or later someone has to tell them that publishing a single document somewhere with which staff can collaborate or to which they can contribute is far more efficient on many levels. That in itself will inspire some staff to use similar techniques when asking their students to share or collaborate on a task or activity. For enrolment data or progress reports substitute an on-line set of data. For last month’s minutes of a meeting substitute the on-line blog of last session’s discussion and you’ll get the idea.
The manager himself may, indeed, have acquired actual management skills as well as teaching skills and therein might lie an ability to utilise project management software to display and share information regarding how well a particular course is progressing and the contributions being made and tasks allocated to various tutors and colleagues. Substitute course, tutor and colleague and insert group assignment, student and other students respectively and there is a tool that could be used in class instead of the office backwaters or boardroom.
Moving back to the Induction session again there will be the essential distribution of timetables. It’s the one piece of paper that students do tend to carry around and stick on their wall at home. The set of 15 to 20 will be a daily reference for many a course tutor or whoever answers his phone on a Monday morning when that student’s mother calls to say they’ll be late. They’re always tables and probably Word tables with a lot of lines and occasionally more than one font. Even if the institution has some ancient software that produces these automatically and managers believe they have ticked a box or two for effective use of ICT in that respect following years of attempting to solve the riddle of rooms, people and times manually the resultant print-outs are seldom examples of clear and wonderful presentation of information. Tutors and students with some semblance of awareness that such items ubiquitous display does relate to how they are themselves perceived will go home that night and produce a much smarter version. Those clear and attractive efforts will get noticed and gradually, even if students’ versions end up in an array of pink and totally inappropriate fonts for their own use, the second generation of official ones posted on boards and left lying around classrooms will look professional and generally give the impression that those staff care enough and have the basic abilities to make a difference. That can only bode well for the future.
The smarter tutors may also have added some formulae to their timetable that indicate how many hours they’re doing and contrasting that to what they’re supposed to be doing. That can be particularly useful when, as is so likely to be the case, the timetable changes every so often during the first month or two.
After Induction the students finally start coming in or, in direct learning instances, opening their handbooks or downloading materials, and get to see just what their teachers can do. There’ll be text in documents galore – handouts, session notes, instructions, forms, surveys, questionnaires, leaflets and manuals that their teacher has prepared.
There’ll be lists of names and numbers, modules and tasks, who’s done which and when. There’ll be pie charts and bar charts and line graphs that even if based on data the teacher hasn’t originated will need to be produced and knowing how to use spreadsheets and manage data can make a big difference to record keeping and progress reporting both to management and students.
Presentations will be here there and everywhere, still seen as the principal component of a staple ILT diet by many which begs another question to be examined later.
A world without images or graphics would be a very tedious one and teachers will be expected to add them to a range of documents at the very least. Finding suitable ones they are allowed to use and managing the size of ever-increasingly high resolution digital camera pictures is becoming necessary if storage areas, VLE or e-mail uploads are not to exceed limits. Some will be taking their own pictures and getting students to do so too.
Whether it’s through Firefox or not, the internet will play a major part of any course and how teachers utilise its vast resources will be seen. Whilst the software used may be standard issue, it will readily be apparent whether staff can search efficiently. The number of staff that I have observed locating websites by searching for Google, finding that site and opening the home page, entering website addresses there and then clicking on the site link is remarkable. All they had to do was enter the address in the address bar. One step as opposed to four. Having said that, students also do this far too often but the fact that they remain unchallenged in this and a myriad other inefficiencies shows a need for training.
Even those who seem proficient in searching start to look amateur when initial terms don’t seem to come up with what they seek and some simple but effective search terms could aid their quest considerable had they been aware of them. Having found a site, do they bookmark it or add to a favourites list in a manner that makes it readily accessible next time for themselves or their students, probably in another room? Can they quickly display the page in a more accessible way for those at the back or with poor sight? Or do they simply apologise and get students to move closer? Everyone copies and pastes text from a web page of some form – some a great deal. Ignoring whether they should or shouldn’t for the moment, do staff do this in a smart and effective manner with the required chunks now neatly displayed in a document or presentation slide, or data nicely set out on a spreadsheet ready to be analysed, sorted or stored? Or does the pasted bit stand out like a sore thumb from their own text and annoy those working with it by insisting on trying to connect to a web page whenever it is accidentally clicked or thumped on a smartboard?
We may not expect all students to be as aware as they should of the reliability of information on the web but teachers certainly should be capable of speaking authoritatively on the subject and being able to recognise elements of a page that may give rise to contention or is there doubt as to what its content meant?
There’ll be e-mail communications to send, receive and manage and teacher’s inboxes will range from the neat and tidy ordered folders to the mass of mail mostly unopened that they must get round to sorting out one day. Are they aware of the abbreviations that students will use or will they panic, thinking someone is sending them Lots Of Love when really they just think something’s funny? Do they know that there are other ways students like to communicate these days and that e-mail amongst the young is rapidly being seen as old-fashioned just as many of those over 40 might now regard sticking stamps on envelopes and posting in a box somewhere as something we only do when dealing with mother?
Although the term podcast seems to have come and gone the business of recording discussions has become simpler with smartphones being able to do so at the touch of an icon. Video has long been both the bane of some teachers’ lives, the black rectangle in the PowerPoint show that worked fine at home but refuses to display in class as well as something, at the other extreme, some students and staff seem to be able to take, store and display in a matter of minutes whenever the mood takes them. In the middle is a vast array of teachers who would often like to capture some moments or share a visual process and may well have the kit to do so but never quite pluck up the courage to do it.
Not many years ago it was only the few geeks or web specialists who published material on-line. Then VLEs arrived and provided a way for staff to do so in a fairly standard and managed style of web page. Now, through blogs, wikis and literally thousands of web tools, anyone prepared to spend a short time experimenting with and becoming familiar with a selection of applications can publish with ease and do so in a stylish, smart, professional or fun way to suit their audience. Social networking tools have transformed the communication routes and interactivity between students at large outside their institutions and many expect to continue in similar vein in the classroom. Some teachers have kept up but many can only stand and stare and worry about something called e-safety the e-word that above all others has contributed to fear and progress in this particular field. It is now possible to publish on-line not only a complete set of course materials, tutor presentations, reference material and but also videos of the tutor’s lessons themselves. There are simply massive sets of resources on almost any topic imaginable from which a tutor could select to assist in delivering teaching. How good are they at locating these, assessing their quality and accessibility, not to mention actually transferring them or linking to them so that they can actually make good use of them?
Do teachers share their successes and failures in their own development and use of new technology? Do they know how? Even if the teacher we met at the start of the whole process has been impressive in his ICT skills to this point the extent to which he has since sat back and thought that he’d learned enough may indicate how useful he could be at inspiring others to move forward or how he will continue to cope as the pace of change in technology and what we can achieve with it moves ever faster forward and trickles yet further down into general family and social life. Out of the teenager’s bedroom and into the living room, lounge and classrooms, ICT and what it can do has become part of daily life now.
Now a teacher doesn’t even have to walk into a classroom but for those that do they are confronted by students with an array of computer screens and keyboards, some maybe their own, others standard issue affairs and in place of the blackboard there’s an electronic whiteboard connected to a computer, a projector and maybe other gadgets too. Those that aren’t in a classroom may be in a virtual classroom, staring at a screen where students’ head lurk in little boxes or text files across other little boxes in different colours as they converse with them and each other. They may even just be sitting at home with a laptop with their students sitting at their homes with their laptops sifting through a website for notes and indications of what they should be doing next.
ICT skills are in evidence everywhere in teaching and in learning. At the start it’s all about impressions as students view institution websites and publications to decide where they shall study next. There they witness the design talents on-line of a marketing team offering illustrations and extracts from a curriculum and decide whether that could be the place for them. On the way they may get a glimpse of some tutors at work in a classroom or a video of their students saying how much they like life there. Sometimes they’ll see some sample course content and learning material too which some tutors have supplied after more than a few requests by that pushy girl from Marketing or found themselves being filmed doing something that makes students smile and look interested at the same time.
If staff have managed to escape being dragged in to the marketing campaigns themselves they sure don’t avoid Open Days or Enrolment Events advertised on the backs of buses or the local radio station to such an extent that they enter a hall throbbing with potential candidates for their courses and clasping certificates for whatever they’ve managed to pass to date. Those certificates, those posters, those radio interviews, the letters inviting parents to come along and the lists on the table of what staff are offering this year and how to pay for it – all created with someone’s ICT skills and, increasingly nowadays, with the teaching staff’s ICT skills in evidence.
As students sit a desk and start to chat to their prospective tutor there is a two-way process emerging already. The staff member is eyeing their behaviour, demeanour and wondering how much trouble they’ll cause in class while the other is looking at the documents scattered on the table, the type of laptop the chap’s using, what applications he has open on it, what browser he’s using and wondering why he’s writing things down or impressed that he has a notes app. on his mobile or data in an on-line spreadsheet to inform the discussion in real time.
“See you’ve got Firefox, Sir.” could even be the first words from the student to which there may seem to be a myriad possible responses from the interviewer when it is more likely that there are just four.
- Yes, I’m trying out version 4.02. Released yesterday. Like the new tabs and it’s fast isn’t it?
- Oh, er, the browser. Yes, well-spotted! Have to use these ruddy forms admin give us. Wouldn’t be so bad if the wireless connection worked but can’t seem to get on-line.
- Have I? Right. Good. Now, how can I help you?
- Glance at parent for a clue.
Immediately, the student, and perhaps the parent too, gets one of four impressions of the staff member’s ICT knowledge if not skills: from ‘on a part with mine, by the seems of it’, through ‘could be good but spotted a weakness’ and ‘he’s not at home with this stuff’ to ‘this guy hasn’t a clue’. That doesn’t mean that he’s not the best History teacher in the world or won’t fire them through their Health & Social Care National Diploma at a rate of knots with distinctions all round but it will set part of the scene in the mind of many an observer, including, of course, the Staff Development Manager who happens to be listening in at the next desk.
Let’s assume the interview goes well and after a few more communications of various type and quality the student decides to join, is accepted and arrives in September for something called Induction. This is where things really start to matter. The student has made one big decision and is rather set on a track now for probably at least a year if not two or more. There in a room somewhere he’ll be addressed by the person who will be the main player in his academic life for some time. Before he gets to the room, though, he needs to find it. The tutor thought a map and some signs might be useful. All the other tutors did too so there, displayed in abundant clarity on a noticeboard, walls or columns, is a collection of how well a host of staff can put half a dozen words on pieces of A4 paper and manage to add large black arrows.
In the room the multitude gathers and, possibly for one of the few times in their post-school academic lives, they look up and to the front with some interest. They are ready to be impressed. They want to be impressed. They appreciate that they may not be, of course, in all cases and in those instances they’ll be comparing what they know they can do to what the person at the front does in one of the few areas they can assess at this time. ICT skills. They need to go away with some genuine belief that the teachers they’ll be stuck with can handle the basic equipment and, preferably, show some talent and efficiency using ICT to communicate. They’ve got in the car. They need to know they’re not going to crash. Or they will be making some early judgements and mentally noting that this or that teacher is struggling with something that they can fix or do better.
The smartboard eventually becomes visible on a bright early autumn day when someone closes the window blinds. And there’s the presentation. Or is it? Did they have to watch as the teacher laboriously searched his desktop for the PowerPoint icon and then give them a preview of the first few little slides before the full screen view finally emerged? Can they read the text? Is it just the same as what he’s saying or more like wallpaper? Or something in between that keeps them focussed and provides opportunities for learning rather than mere spoon-feeding? Indeed, do they get surprised by a website or a web version of a presentation they can view at their leisure another time should they wish to? Let us hope they don’t get some dreadful PDF that has to be scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and makes them wonder why it wasn’t just handed out in the first place. Or, worse, a Word document that requires things to be installed before it will show anything at all, or is entirely in Arial font or the appalling Comic Sans that primary school teachers used to use in when there were only five different fonts in Windows 3.1. Some students may now even be wishing the teacher had used Courier New which has a kind of retro look and could even be regarded as rebelliously cool in 2011.
Now a good communicator may get away for a while with simply excellent speaking abilities, moving around and holding their attention, questioning, interacting, inspiring and informing with mere words, panache and plenty of expression and body language. But it will only be a while and, sooner or later, the ICT skills will be on show. And ICT skills really are on show – unlike one’s subject knowledge, dress sense or humour how a teacher puts text and images on paper or on screen, how they record and store data, how they manage classroom equipment are all out there, day in, day out, night or day in fact in some instances, for viewing by whoever looks on-line, unscrambles the handout in their pocket, thumbs through the course material, checks their progress or reads the e-mail, text message or letter home.
No teacher today can avoid ICT or hide their abilities to utilise it.
The induction group has started to look around the classroom. What’s on the walls? Where once there might have been acres of that coloured paper that faded after a few days in the sun with a scalped white paper border and individually cut-out letters and shiny photos carefully arranged in the design there is now a mass of A4 white print-outs, all in black print, illustrating what students did last year or posters advertising last year’s dance and trip to Alton Towers which could be in colour. There are prints of digital photos taken at an event. And then there’s the notice that tells them they can’t use their mobile phones, eat or drink and what might happen should they attempt to download something they’re not supposed to. The IT Department notices are generally a good guide to how well the equipment will function and the range of useful software likely to be available on the computers once they get to use them.
The small print A4 sheets in Times New Roman with a heading in a slightly larger font in bold and red are not a good sign. The big bold, fun-looking Check Our VLE for what you can and can’t do! Or We do IT well to help you do it well! Now they’re going to make the students more inclined to have faith in the team of technicians often only slightly older than themselves and, more importantly, their teacher’s ability to deal wit them effectively when the printer gives up the ghost of the last person has left a load of plugs dangling from the back of the staff computer.
It may be tempting to say that the teacher may have been issued with a set of standard documents or materials for Induction but this is their chance to establish in the minds of their cohort where they stand. I’m sorry about the quality of this presentation / document / handout – I did suggest they used x, y or z application or put them on-line for you but... will go along way towards restoring a bit of faith that all is not lost with the fellow they’re with although it does say something about that person’s ability to influence those who produced the rubbish in the first place. That also brings us to managers who often manage to keep away from students until something goes wrong and they need to be disciplined but do, or certainly should, have time to see and comment on drafts of general department materials. They could have a huge influence, both from ensuring that the best skills are used in the process and in setting an excellent example themselves. Unless they have good ICT skills themselves it can be very difficult for managers to comment constructively on items or administrative procedures. They also need to be aware of what is possible even if their own abilities mean they could not do it themselves.
In terms of teaching staff’s ICT skills, however, it is of fundamental importance that managers know not only how confident their staff feel in a range of activities and processes but also how confident they themselves feel – if not in actually implementing those skills but at least in knowing what could and should be done and in leading the way in negotiations to attain higher standards and, of really significant importance, demonstrating to their staff and colleagues by their own good practice.
Most managers have been teachers themselves in the recent past and not having to teach the students now is no excuse for not maintaining their own ICT skills. In similar vein to how students perceive their teachers so too will many teachers view their managers and be influenced by them for better or for worse.
In this area, whilst demonstrating excellent practice is key, there are areas where managers will have more effective input than teachers. This could be in the processes used to record progress, store data or promote their curriculum. How they distribute information to their staff through presentations, reports, e-mail and more – all of this almost daily activity will set a standard by which they will be judged. For better or for worse. The manager who regularly sends out all staff e-mails with a large Word attachment or the spreadsheet that umpteen people have to complete and return is asking for trouble. Sooner or later someone has to tell them that publishing a single document somewhere with which staff can collaborate or to which they can contribute is far more efficient on many levels. That in itself will inspire some staff to use similar techniques when asking their students to share or collaborate on a task or activity. For enrolment data or progress reports substitute an on-line set of data. For last month’s minutes of a meeting substitute the on-line blog of last session’s discussion and you’ll get the idea.
The manager himself may, indeed, have acquired actual management skills as well as teaching skills and therein might lie an ability to utilise project management software to display and share information regarding how well a particular course is progressing and the contributions being made and tasks allocated to various tutors and colleagues. Substitute course, tutor and colleague and insert group assignment, student and other students respectively and there is a tool that could be used in class instead of the office backwaters or boardroom.
Moving back to the Induction session again there will be the essential distribution of timetables. It’s the one piece of paper that students do tend to carry around and stick on their wall at home. The set of 15 to 20 will be a daily reference for many a course tutor or whoever answers his phone on a Monday morning when that student’s mother calls to say they’ll be late. They’re always tables and probably Word tables with a lot of lines and occasionally more than one font. Even if the institution has some ancient software that produces these automatically and managers believe they have ticked a box or two for effective use of ICT in that respect following years of attempting to solve the riddle of rooms, people and times manually the resultant print-outs are seldom examples of clear and wonderful presentation of information. Tutors and students with some semblance of awareness that such items ubiquitous display does relate to how they are themselves perceived will go home that night and produce a much smarter version. Those clear and attractive efforts will get noticed and gradually, even if students’ versions end up in an array of pink and totally inappropriate fonts for their own use, the second generation of official ones posted on boards and left lying around classrooms will look professional and generally give the impression that those staff care enough and have the basic abilities to make a difference. That can only bode well for the future.
The smarter tutors may also have added some formulae to their timetable that indicate how many hours they’re doing and contrasting that to what they’re supposed to be doing. That can be particularly useful when, as is so likely to be the case, the timetable changes every so often during the first month or two.
After Induction the students finally start coming in or, in direct learning instances, opening their handbooks or downloading materials, and get to see just what their teachers can do. There’ll be text in documents galore – handouts, session notes, instructions, forms, surveys, questionnaires, leaflets and manuals that their teacher has prepared.
There’ll be lists of names and numbers, modules and tasks, who’s done which and when. There’ll be pie charts and bar charts and line graphs that even if based on data the teacher hasn’t originated will need to be produced and knowing how to use spreadsheets and manage data can make a big difference to record keeping and progress reporting both to management and students.
Presentations will be here there and everywhere, still seen as the principal component of a staple ILT diet by many which begs another question to be examined later.
A world without images or graphics would be a very tedious one and teachers will be expected to add them to a range of documents at the very least. Finding suitable ones they are allowed to use and managing the size of ever-increasingly high resolution digital camera pictures is becoming necessary if storage areas, VLE or e-mail uploads are not to exceed limits. Some will be taking their own pictures and getting students to do so too.
Whether it’s through Firefox or not, the internet will play a major part of any course and how teachers utilise its vast resources will be seen. Whilst the software used may be standard issue, it will readily be apparent whether staff can search efficiently. The number of staff that I have observed locating websites by searching for Google, finding that site and opening the home page, entering website addresses there and then clicking on the site link is remarkable. All they had to do was enter the address in the address bar. One step as opposed to four. Having said that, students also do this far too often but the fact that they remain unchallenged in this and a myriad other inefficiencies shows a need for training.
Even those who seem proficient in searching start to look amateur when initial terms don’t seem to come up with what they seek and some simple but effective search terms could aid their quest considerable had they been aware of them. Having found a site, do they bookmark it or add to a favourites list in a manner that makes it readily accessible next time for themselves or their students, probably in another room? Can they quickly display the page in a more accessible way for those at the back or with poor sight? Or do they simply apologise and get students to move closer? Everyone copies and pastes text from a web page of some form – some a great deal. Ignoring whether they should or shouldn’t for the moment, do staff do this in a smart and effective manner with the required chunks now neatly displayed in a document or presentation slide, or data nicely set out on a spreadsheet ready to be analysed, sorted or stored? Or does the pasted bit stand out like a sore thumb from their own text and annoy those working with it by insisting on trying to connect to a web page whenever it is accidentally clicked or thumped on a smartboard?
We may not expect all students to be as aware as they should of the reliability of information on the web but teachers certainly should be capable of speaking authoritatively on the subject and being able to recognise elements of a page that may give rise to contention or is there doubt as to what its content meant?
There’ll be e-mail communications to send, receive and manage and teacher’s inboxes will range from the neat and tidy ordered folders to the mass of mail mostly unopened that they must get round to sorting out one day. Are they aware of the abbreviations that students will use or will they panic, thinking someone is sending them Lots Of Love when really they just think something’s funny? Do they know that there are other ways students like to communicate these days and that e-mail amongst the young is rapidly being seen as old-fashioned just as many of those over 40 might now regard sticking stamps on envelopes and posting in a box somewhere as something we only do when dealing with mother?
Although the term podcast seems to have come and gone the business of recording discussions has become simpler with smartphones being able to do so at the touch of an icon. Video has long been both the bane of some teachers’ lives, the black rectangle in the PowerPoint show that worked fine at home but refuses to display in class as well as something, at the other extreme, some students and staff seem to be able to take, store and display in a matter of minutes whenever the mood takes them. In the middle is a vast array of teachers who would often like to capture some moments or share a visual process and may well have the kit to do so but never quite pluck up the courage to do it.
Not many years ago it was only the few geeks or web specialists who published material on-line. Then VLEs arrived and provided a way for staff to do so in a fairly standard and managed style of web page. Now, through blogs, wikis and literally thousands of web tools, anyone prepared to spend a short time experimenting with and becoming familiar with a selection of applications can publish with ease and do so in a stylish, smart, professional or fun way to suit their audience. Social networking tools have transformed the communication routes and interactivity between students at large outside their institutions and many expect to continue in similar vein in the classroom. Some teachers have kept up but many can only stand and stare and worry about something called e-safety the e-word that above all others has contributed to fear and progress in this particular field. It is now possible to publish on-line not only a complete set of course materials, tutor presentations, reference material and but also videos of the tutor’s lessons themselves. There are simply massive sets of resources on almost any topic imaginable from which a tutor could select to assist in delivering teaching. How good are they at locating these, assessing their quality and accessibility, not to mention actually transferring them or linking to them so that they can actually make good use of them?
Do teachers share their successes and failures in their own development and use of new technology? Do they know how? Even if the teacher we met at the start of the whole process has been impressive in his ICT skills to this point the extent to which he has since sat back and thought that he’d learned enough may indicate how useful he could be at inspiring others to move forward or how he will continue to cope as the pace of change in technology and what we can achieve with it moves ever faster forward and trickles yet further down into general family and social life. Out of the teenager’s bedroom and into the living room, lounge and classrooms, ICT and what it can do has become part of daily life now.
Saturday, 31 July 2010
BLT! I like that. (The new webtools site).
Once upon a time there was ILT. Then it became e-learning or elearning and now it's . . . well . . . both and yet neither one nor the other. I've always liked information learning technology. It says it all - technology, learning, information. I suppose it could be argued that NLN got it right with their Learning Technology team, of which I was a member for a while. E-learning has always confused people and required us to spend the first 20 minutes defining it at the start of sessions and our colleagues from other parts of the planet think e-learning is distance learning or variations on the theme anyway. Which is fine too but all this hyphenated stuff is very 90s now. If you have to think up a term to describe something then your time's better used thinking up ways to use it. So I'm going back to ILT and good old web tools. Oh, hang on, they're apps now. Back to Square One.
Whatever it's called, we want tutors to use IT. Students expect it. They like accessing notes, tasks and anything they missed and want to look at again in their own home, with a friend or just somewhere other than the classroom at 9am. Or the library where they can't make any noise. Or the IT Workshop where they need the ID card they've forgotten and the computers probably don't have their familiar software, especially browsers, anyway.
All that's needed is to get a baseline of course materials on-line somewhere, make them look attractive, quick to load and simple to find. There are lots of great tools out there to make using learning technology easy for even the least enthusiastic tutor.
I've updated the webtools site and it's now all about what I'm going to call BLT. Brilliant learning technology. What you can do now is amazing and there's not a moodle upload or log-in in sight! The concept's unchanged: office-type, planning, research, media and web design applications listed in categories. All are free and almost all ad free. You are encouraged to review them, make comments and these you can now do using forms on most pages. I've dropped the PBworks wiki pages for this as it was quite hard work adding new pages both there and on the site plus links between them for every new entry. Instead, I'm using Google forms which will publish responses through the site. Good examples people have supplied of apps in action I shall retain and make links to them on the appropriate pages. The wiki will stay but I'll redevelop it as it is one of my favourite BLTs in its own right.
So, go and get your images sorted out and resized, find or even make a video, add them to some cool web pages showing students how to be really smart in their research so they can complete your course for which, of course, you have put everything on-line somewhere, haven't you. Ah, forgot . . you'll need to plan all that but, yes, there'll be a tool for that!
Enjoy the new site!
Whatever it's called, we want tutors to use IT. Students expect it. They like accessing notes, tasks and anything they missed and want to look at again in their own home, with a friend or just somewhere other than the classroom at 9am. Or the library where they can't make any noise. Or the IT Workshop where they need the ID card they've forgotten and the computers probably don't have their familiar software, especially browsers, anyway.
All that's needed is to get a baseline of course materials on-line somewhere, make them look attractive, quick to load and simple to find. There are lots of great tools out there to make using learning technology easy for even the least enthusiastic tutor.
I've updated the webtools site and it's now all about what I'm going to call BLT. Brilliant learning technology. What you can do now is amazing and there's not a moodle upload or log-in in sight! The concept's unchanged: office-type, planning, research, media and web design applications listed in categories. All are free and almost all ad free. You are encouraged to review them, make comments and these you can now do using forms on most pages. I've dropped the PBworks wiki pages for this as it was quite hard work adding new pages both there and on the site plus links between them for every new entry. Instead, I'm using Google forms which will publish responses through the site. Good examples people have supplied of apps in action I shall retain and make links to them on the appropriate pages. The wiki will stay but I'll redevelop it as it is one of my favourite BLTs in its own right.
So, go and get your images sorted out and resized, find or even make a video, add them to some cool web pages showing students how to be really smart in their research so they can complete your course for which, of course, you have put everything on-line somewhere, haven't you. Ah, forgot . . you'll need to plan all that but, yes, there'll be a tool for that!
Enjoy the new site!
Friday, 5 March 2010
When will they ever learn?
You know you're getting older when everyone in the audience appears younger than you are! Still, that helped my theme along a bit as I had an opportunity to get good minds a-thinking at Cambridge Regional College for a VLE Forum earlier today.
A last minute change of agenda meant that I got to speak earlier than expected so it was a relief to find the internet was nice and quick and my sample moodle site opened up reasonably quickly. Not as fast as my own site would have but I couldn't recall where I'd put the link on that one. I started by recalling a visit to Hertfordshire Regional College some weeks ago where the blisteringly fast speeds made web pages sort of snap at you and you seemed only to have to imagine a page and up it appeared.
Back in 2004 or thereabouts I had taken part in an end-of-event show entittled The Good the Bad and The Ugly in which I bemoaned the slow progress in getting some pretty simple ILT and e-learning ideas into the mainstream, especially with people who really should have been setting a good example.
I recalled:
VLE courses that were just lists of links to Word documents in blue text, interspersed with the occasional PowerPoint link, none of which would exactly open in a hurry or without umpteen further decision-making clicks on the way.
Ah, how times have changed, haven't they? Or have they?
Finally getting to the second slide of the presentation the screen changed to reveal a massive list of links to Word documents, so many on a VLE course that the complete list wouldn't fit on the screen print I'd taken. That was a current 2010 course I'd copied from a VLE I had seen. It wasn't at all unusual.
The third screen showed a staff intranet page made by IT Technicians using SharePoint. Another long, long list if tiny blue lines of underlined text, more links to hundreds of Word documents. That was a current 2010 page being used at another institution.
A fourth screen showed my own College e-mail inbox. Top of the list were files with attachments. Yes, things had changed here - the size. Two were over 7MB and several at 3 or 4MB! I recalled how I used to get messages from someone called System Administrator. System would write to tell me that I had exceeded my limit. Another click revealed yesterday's mail which included, yes, you've guessed . . Mr Administrator was still employed and still sending me the same message.
I wailed a bit about this as I tend to do when stuck for words (although I certainly couldn't have been stuck for Words). then, in the spirit of being helpful I went to slide five and illustrated how a VLE page could be a happier place altogether. Adding images would be a good start. There they were. Replacing Office documents with web documents would be a good move too. I showed people both the use of moodle web documents using text simply copied and pasted from Word and the lovely Google documents solution.
I emphasised how several people could be given permission to edit a single document using Google Docs and how the application would retain all the versions and changes and indicate who had done waht. It would be saved automatically and kept safe and sound my the mighty G team.
The multiple spreadsheet file nightmare could be solved by using an on-line spreadsheet too.
Then I showed how a presentation needn't be PowerPoint and how a mini version could be used to display ideas on a VLE, blog or web page. I was, indeed, using a Google Presentation there and then and had arrived with zero materials to plug in or worry about.
The penultimate slide was a recommendation that we should see these types of provision of materials and communication and the new 'basics'. There was nothing particularly complicated about using any of the tools now available and anyone who can find headers and footers on the Office 2007 ribbon in under 10 minutes would be able to do what I had done. The people at the meeting were those who could make a difference and help bring the new ideas to colleagues. Training programmes and staff development sessions on these topics could be fun as well as genuinely useful rather than merely ticking boxes on the latest Government educational 'initiative' compliance list.
But it isn't really our colleagues who need the real help. From what I could tell by observing a range of senior staff at work over the last few years it is the institutional leaders and even some heads of organisations supporting change who need to change the most. Because they haven't had anyone nagging them or insisting they include ILT in their 'lesson plans' for staff development, teacher training, academic board meetings, Startegic Annual reviews, statistics gathering and all the rest, or maybe just because they didn't feel comfortable with new ICT, many have fallen far behind or not moved an inch since the start of the Century.
Just as Government departments and various quangoes are now urging us to help Granny get connected, I suggested that we could do our bit by 'adopting an Executive' or 'supporting a Senior'. If we see something that can be improved by utilising the very same tools tutors are being exhorted to use then we should, as delicately and tactfully as we can, show them how they can demonstrate so much better practice.
Otherwise, now that they don't teach . . . when will they ever learn?
My thanks to JISC RSC Eastern for inviting me to speak at this event and for Cambridge Regional College for hosting such an excellent day, including a wonderful five course lunch! But that's another story.
A last minute change of agenda meant that I got to speak earlier than expected so it was a relief to find the internet was nice and quick and my sample moodle site opened up reasonably quickly. Not as fast as my own site would have but I couldn't recall where I'd put the link on that one. I started by recalling a visit to Hertfordshire Regional College some weeks ago where the blisteringly fast speeds made web pages sort of snap at you and you seemed only to have to imagine a page and up it appeared.
Back in 2004 or thereabouts I had taken part in an end-of-event show entittled The Good the Bad and The Ugly in which I bemoaned the slow progress in getting some pretty simple ILT and e-learning ideas into the mainstream, especially with people who really should have been setting a good example.
I recalled:
VLE courses that were just lists of links to Word documents in blue text, interspersed with the occasional PowerPoint link, none of which would exactly open in a hurry or without umpteen further decision-making clicks on the way.
- SharePoint coming on the scene but only being understood by pretty techy people who produced similarly long lists of blue text links for staff à la form for students' courses on a VLE. What was good enough for students must have been good enough for staff, I mused,
- I recalled inboxes stuffed with huge 1MB attachments and sometimes several Word files attached to All Staff e-mails. Word documents staff were expected to complete and then save and return so that maybe 20 or 30 individual documents could then be combined in some way by some hapless secretary; Excel spreadsheets that tutors were expected to complete and return every month in order to update some central record that must have caused headaches for the ultimate recipient when he or she received 56 files with names like achievement[23].xls, achievement [22].xls and so on.
- There were a few odd geeks like me around in 2004 who were creating web materials for students but not many and we were seen as a bit odd.
- Portfolios were made of something called cardboard. Thick card which folder in such a way that, by placing sheets over two metal pillars stuck inside somehow, papers could be retained. The papers themselves needed to have holes punched in them by gadgets most people had somewhere other than where they looked first.
Ah, how times have changed, haven't they? Or have they?
Finally getting to the second slide of the presentation the screen changed to reveal a massive list of links to Word documents, so many on a VLE course that the complete list wouldn't fit on the screen print I'd taken. That was a current 2010 course I'd copied from a VLE I had seen. It wasn't at all unusual.
The third screen showed a staff intranet page made by IT Technicians using SharePoint. Another long, long list if tiny blue lines of underlined text, more links to hundreds of Word documents. That was a current 2010 page being used at another institution.
A fourth screen showed my own College e-mail inbox. Top of the list were files with attachments. Yes, things had changed here - the size. Two were over 7MB and several at 3 or 4MB! I recalled how I used to get messages from someone called System Administrator. System would write to tell me that I had exceeded my limit. Another click revealed yesterday's mail which included, yes, you've guessed . . Mr Administrator was still employed and still sending me the same message.
I wailed a bit about this as I tend to do when stuck for words (although I certainly couldn't have been stuck for Words). then, in the spirit of being helpful I went to slide five and illustrated how a VLE page could be a happier place altogether. Adding images would be a good start. There they were. Replacing Office documents with web documents would be a good move too. I showed people both the use of moodle web documents using text simply copied and pasted from Word and the lovely Google documents solution.
I emphasised how several people could be given permission to edit a single document using Google Docs and how the application would retain all the versions and changes and indicate who had done waht. It would be saved automatically and kept safe and sound my the mighty G team.
The multiple spreadsheet file nightmare could be solved by using an on-line spreadsheet too.
Then I showed how a presentation needn't be PowerPoint and how a mini version could be used to display ideas on a VLE, blog or web page. I was, indeed, using a Google Presentation there and then and had arrived with zero materials to plug in or worry about.
The penultimate slide was a recommendation that we should see these types of provision of materials and communication and the new 'basics'. There was nothing particularly complicated about using any of the tools now available and anyone who can find headers and footers on the Office 2007 ribbon in under 10 minutes would be able to do what I had done. The people at the meeting were those who could make a difference and help bring the new ideas to colleagues. Training programmes and staff development sessions on these topics could be fun as well as genuinely useful rather than merely ticking boxes on the latest Government educational 'initiative' compliance list.
But it isn't really our colleagues who need the real help. From what I could tell by observing a range of senior staff at work over the last few years it is the institutional leaders and even some heads of organisations supporting change who need to change the most. Because they haven't had anyone nagging them or insisting they include ILT in their 'lesson plans' for staff development, teacher training, academic board meetings, Startegic Annual reviews, statistics gathering and all the rest, or maybe just because they didn't feel comfortable with new ICT, many have fallen far behind or not moved an inch since the start of the Century.
Just as Government departments and various quangoes are now urging us to help Granny get connected, I suggested that we could do our bit by 'adopting an Executive' or 'supporting a Senior'. If we see something that can be improved by utilising the very same tools tutors are being exhorted to use then we should, as delicately and tactfully as we can, show them how they can demonstrate so much better practice.
Otherwise, now that they don't teach . . . when will they ever learn?
My thanks to JISC RSC Eastern for inviting me to speak at this event and for Cambridge Regional College for hosting such an excellent day, including a wonderful five course lunch! But that's another story.
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Until Heads, Principals get it, use it, live it or retire much frustration continues
I have been invited to speak to some nice e-learning people at a JISC RSC forum in a few days and really would like to make an impact. I guess it's not going to change the world but I would like to do a bit more than just talk about web tools. For a while now I've been attending events, listening to students, watching developments at my College and others and seeing staff development activities come and go and I'm amazed at how little seems to have changed since I started looking at this in any detail back in 2003.
Yes, there are more smartboards in classrooms and the PCs seem to work a bit better and more equipment is available in staff rooms and classrooms. But I would have expected that to have happened anyway - as a sort of natural progression - what I can't detect is any significant shift in the enhancement of teaching and learning using the stuff, despite all the money poured in to various government agencies, some of which trickled out to institutions and despite all the effort made by some really talented and well-meaning e-learning advisors, guides, support people et al.
What appears on the smartboards or on the new screens is much as one would have expected from gradual progression too. But that seems to have ground to a halt with Moodle. It's been available for 5 or 6 years now but all students get from the vast majority of courses on the 'VLE' is a long list of links to Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Click on one and you're waiting while the PC configures something or other and after a few minutes there's some tedious-looking Times New Roman or Arial spread across a sheet of A4 that doesn't fit the screen and a bundle of toolbars that are not exactly relevant to the content. Go for the PowerPoint link and hold your breath as the excitement builds - will it be a new window or not? Will it start playing and advance at a rate faster than I can read or will it open with all menus blazing and invite me to skip the first five slides as I can see them to one side and they look uninteresting?
The presentations themselves seem largely to be text only, and far too much of it at that, and many slides appear pretty much as they did when the content was imprinted on a thermal transparency encased in a cardboard frame and displayed on the wall by some overhead projection device.
That really seems to be about it. Where are the images? Where are the web pages that load so much more quickly than Office-ware? Where are the news feeds and illustrated links to interesting support material? Often students simply print out the Office-ware and carry on as before which makes me wonder why on earth the tutor went to all the trouble to upload the stuff in the first place. Oh, statistics. Of course. I forgot. By logging in to the VLE management can get lots of lovely figures about how many students are using it, and how many tutors haven't visited the CPD section since 2007.
I know some well-intentioned managers who have wanted to spruce up the rather sad default display of courses or links to other pages by introducing icons, images related to content etc. and this has improved the visual side of things. The trouble is, it can take a while to set up and is a pain to change should any of the content pages be moved or should new ones be required. It's usually only a few members of staff that can do that sort of thing well anyway as it's not exactly straightforward.
Even if progress by staff generally has been gradual, it has been positively zooming in comparison to that of many senior managers. 'All staff' E-mails still come out with Word documents attached, often several and PDFs a-plenty. The inevitable presentation at a meeting is a PowerPoint, with only the nice new Office2007 backgrounds distinguishing them from years gone by. The handout, though, is still the familiar six-to-a-page sheet of mini slides that sets everyone looking for their glasses. Some more enlightened presenters do put the material on Moodle but, once again, it's the link as I've bemoaned above.
That, indeed, in my view is why so little has really changed in some institutions. Few senior managers, those who should be setting an example to others, who should inspire others, who, damn it, can afford to hire the staff to do so if they can't themselves, so few seem to use technology effectively themselves in either their 'teaching' staff or general communication. If Marketing or PR people haven't something handy then it's unlikely that there'll be any images in the communications. There's very little use of the VLE that staff are constantly being hounded to use. There's virtually zero evidence of any of them having any web presence themselves or being able to contribute to updating web content to share with staff or the world.
I remember, six years ago, showing a Principal's Secretary how using a blog could replace whole piles of minutes and notices and how her boss could use it too. The feed from the blog could have appeared as headlines on a web page or the VLE and people would think 'Wow! If he or she can do it then so can I'. Well a few might, at least. The blog is still live but the last entry was the first.
I remember showing another College manager how Google documents could be utilised in 2006 to allow several people to work together on a document. Instead of umpteen people battling with different versions of a spreadsheet and never knowing whether report[1].xls or report[3].doc was the right file to use, there would be one document on-line which was automatically saved and the latest edit shown. Everyone would know where they were and inboxes would be saved vast amounts of confusing attachments. The guy loved it but nothing ever happened.
Where these events occurred and I was the person trying to make the change then I feel as though I failed. I should have been more firm, insisting that they try the new ideas. I tried to show good examples and where other institutions did seem to move on a little I hoped that would help me implement change. It's funny - I never actually found out why senior staff didn't do it. I have a feeling it was a lack of confidence - having to ask for help may have been embarrassing, a fear of making a silly mistake when using the 'new' technology. They were the bosses, too. They had made it. They didn't need to impress anyone. No-one was going to threaten them. Old, familiar ways sort of worked still and only odd people like me seemed to object out loud. So nothing happened.
Now that they don't teach, will they ever learn?
Yes, there are more smartboards in classrooms and the PCs seem to work a bit better and more equipment is available in staff rooms and classrooms. But I would have expected that to have happened anyway - as a sort of natural progression - what I can't detect is any significant shift in the enhancement of teaching and learning using the stuff, despite all the money poured in to various government agencies, some of which trickled out to institutions and despite all the effort made by some really talented and well-meaning e-learning advisors, guides, support people et al.
What appears on the smartboards or on the new screens is much as one would have expected from gradual progression too. But that seems to have ground to a halt with Moodle. It's been available for 5 or 6 years now but all students get from the vast majority of courses on the 'VLE' is a long list of links to Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Click on one and you're waiting while the PC configures something or other and after a few minutes there's some tedious-looking Times New Roman or Arial spread across a sheet of A4 that doesn't fit the screen and a bundle of toolbars that are not exactly relevant to the content. Go for the PowerPoint link and hold your breath as the excitement builds - will it be a new window or not? Will it start playing and advance at a rate faster than I can read or will it open with all menus blazing and invite me to skip the first five slides as I can see them to one side and they look uninteresting?
The presentations themselves seem largely to be text only, and far too much of it at that, and many slides appear pretty much as they did when the content was imprinted on a thermal transparency encased in a cardboard frame and displayed on the wall by some overhead projection device.
That really seems to be about it. Where are the images? Where are the web pages that load so much more quickly than Office-ware? Where are the news feeds and illustrated links to interesting support material? Often students simply print out the Office-ware and carry on as before which makes me wonder why on earth the tutor went to all the trouble to upload the stuff in the first place. Oh, statistics. Of course. I forgot. By logging in to the VLE management can get lots of lovely figures about how many students are using it, and how many tutors haven't visited the CPD section since 2007.
I know some well-intentioned managers who have wanted to spruce up the rather sad default display of courses or links to other pages by introducing icons, images related to content etc. and this has improved the visual side of things. The trouble is, it can take a while to set up and is a pain to change should any of the content pages be moved or should new ones be required. It's usually only a few members of staff that can do that sort of thing well anyway as it's not exactly straightforward.
Even if progress by staff generally has been gradual, it has been positively zooming in comparison to that of many senior managers. 'All staff' E-mails still come out with Word documents attached, often several and PDFs a-plenty. The inevitable presentation at a meeting is a PowerPoint, with only the nice new Office2007 backgrounds distinguishing them from years gone by. The handout, though, is still the familiar six-to-a-page sheet of mini slides that sets everyone looking for their glasses. Some more enlightened presenters do put the material on Moodle but, once again, it's the link as I've bemoaned above.
That, indeed, in my view is why so little has really changed in some institutions. Few senior managers, those who should be setting an example to others, who should inspire others, who, damn it, can afford to hire the staff to do so if they can't themselves, so few seem to use technology effectively themselves in either their 'teaching' staff or general communication. If Marketing or PR people haven't something handy then it's unlikely that there'll be any images in the communications. There's very little use of the VLE that staff are constantly being hounded to use. There's virtually zero evidence of any of them having any web presence themselves or being able to contribute to updating web content to share with staff or the world.
I remember, six years ago, showing a Principal's Secretary how using a blog could replace whole piles of minutes and notices and how her boss could use it too. The feed from the blog could have appeared as headlines on a web page or the VLE and people would think 'Wow! If he or she can do it then so can I'. Well a few might, at least. The blog is still live but the last entry was the first.
I remember showing another College manager how Google documents could be utilised in 2006 to allow several people to work together on a document. Instead of umpteen people battling with different versions of a spreadsheet and never knowing whether report[1].xls or report[3].doc was the right file to use, there would be one document on-line which was automatically saved and the latest edit shown. Everyone would know where they were and inboxes would be saved vast amounts of confusing attachments. The guy loved it but nothing ever happened.
Where these events occurred and I was the person trying to make the change then I feel as though I failed. I should have been more firm, insisting that they try the new ideas. I tried to show good examples and where other institutions did seem to move on a little I hoped that would help me implement change. It's funny - I never actually found out why senior staff didn't do it. I have a feeling it was a lack of confidence - having to ask for help may have been embarrassing, a fear of making a silly mistake when using the 'new' technology. They were the bosses, too. They had made it. They didn't need to impress anyone. No-one was going to threaten them. Old, familiar ways sort of worked still and only odd people like me seemed to object out loud. So nothing happened.
Now that they don't teach, will they ever learn?
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Friday, 23 October 2009
Less pcs, more comfy chairs and clean carpets
I am beginning to think something quite strange: maybe we should start reducing the number of computers in FE classrooms. This is pretty weird stuff from me, I know. I teach various computing / ICT units for courses at a Further Education college. I've been saying for years that every member of staff should have a computer and my suggestion that we should have a 1:1 ratio for students to pcs was regarded as slightly mad. Yes, staff should all have one but I'm not so sure that I want rooms full of computers for students any more.
A little while ago I visited a college which had had substantial rebuilding and lots of new classrooms. The people showing me round were clearly really proud of the shiny new rooms and all the new equipment. I remember walking into one new classroom and there were rows and rows of black boxes and screens before my eyes. It was awful, even quite threatening. There was precious little space on any desk for anyone to write or place papers, despite the small footprint monitors and pc units. It reminded me of those language labs some schools used to have. It was like the sole purpose of the room was to provide access to a computer screen and keyboard.
I think they'd crammed 45 machines into the room. Then, at another college, I visited a library where gigantic monitors were lined up against each other on desks all over the place. Beautiful screens but, boy, did they dominate the whole environment.
At my own college there has been a gradual replacement of the big beige monitors with the little black (inevitably Dell) screens and there's no doubt that the extra horizontal space is welcome, along with the better speed of new machines. There, by not cramming the place so much there is, at least, still an airy feel to rooms and room to do something else. Not a lot, though, and there are several rooms where I have more students than chairs, never mind computers! That, and chairs with backs that never stay in position and make access to some parts of a classroom quite impossible, is another story.
What has started to happen, though, is that students have started to bring in their own laptops, some netbooks are appearing too and, unable to access the college wireless network, they solve the problem by utilising their own mobile broadband sticks or accessing via mobiles. I am waiting for the smarter ones to work out how to display mobile internet images on the monitors! My feeling is that this is quite a natural move. They are using a familiar pice of equipment. It probably contains all the applications and files they want to access. It's rather like bringing in your own pen and notebook instead of using the standard stuff dished out to those who forget. I see this use of personal equipment escalating. Another interesting observation is that whereas all the monitors are standing near vertical at head height, the laptops and other devices are far more angled and the general position of students appears much more relaxed whilst still attentively so.
I have less trouble seeing students when I don't have to peer across or around all the displays. I get their attention more easily too when I want to talk about something or show them something on the whiteboard or smartboard. It's as if their smaller screens, less intrusive on their immediate visual environment, are easier for them to be diverted from by whatever antics I employ.
So, where does this lead? My first thoughts are that we could clear all but a few of the college machines from most of the rooms I use and reclaim the horizontal space and have a much more pleasant teaching and learning environment. (This would have the immediate benefit of allowing every room in the college to have a few decent machines. Currently other departments struggle to get access to computers and often have the limited choice of the endless rows of 96 black screens in the rigidly disciplined, no talking and pretty unpopular IT Workshop or occupying a computing department room thus leaving computing students with a room with zero equipment).
It's not something that will happen overnight because although nearly all my students do have a laptop, I accept that this may not be the case in other disciplines and it is only a small proportion who have a mobile broadband facility. But it is changing, and fast.
Something that could be considered would be opening our wireless network (or some part of it or a specially created one - sorry, I'm not a network person!) so that the mobile broadband wasn't a necessity. As I have said in a previous article, saving documents in some allocated part of the student network isn't that important these days as there are alternatives.
There will always be a need for a few computers for students to use - for those who don't have suitable equipment or if theirs breaks down. Tutors would need to keep an eye on what was being accessed but no longer would students be needing to spend time getting around net nanny systems or having to use applications that aren't quite what they would naturally use elsewhere. Perhaps the savings in future IT equipment budgets could support the provision of some laptops or netbooks, even broadband subscriptions, for students. Things they can use anywhere rather than fixed items they can only use in one place. No-one need be excluded. Yes, the rich parents may provide kids with top of the range kit which will make others jealous but is that really any different to the range of clothes they wear or their forms of transport in the car park or bike shed?
There will also still be a need for computer labs where units require specific applications to be used which students wouldn't be expected to have on their own equipment and some rooms will inevitably stay fully equipped. But I believe the vast majority could be totally refurbished with decent desks and chairs, blinds and carpets so that the room is attractive, clean and genuinely inviting rather than formal or threatening. We don't need a rebuild, we need a rethink and clean carpets.
[I'm not talking about schools here, just institutions for 16+. Not sure about the provision for younger people. They may need to retain current standard equipment for a bundle of other reasons.]
A little while ago I visited a college which had had substantial rebuilding and lots of new classrooms. The people showing me round were clearly really proud of the shiny new rooms and all the new equipment. I remember walking into one new classroom and there were rows and rows of black boxes and screens before my eyes. It was awful, even quite threatening. There was precious little space on any desk for anyone to write or place papers, despite the small footprint monitors and pc units. It reminded me of those language labs some schools used to have. It was like the sole purpose of the room was to provide access to a computer screen and keyboard.
I think they'd crammed 45 machines into the room. Then, at another college, I visited a library where gigantic monitors were lined up against each other on desks all over the place. Beautiful screens but, boy, did they dominate the whole environment.
At my own college there has been a gradual replacement of the big beige monitors with the little black (inevitably Dell) screens and there's no doubt that the extra horizontal space is welcome, along with the better speed of new machines. There, by not cramming the place so much there is, at least, still an airy feel to rooms and room to do something else. Not a lot, though, and there are several rooms where I have more students than chairs, never mind computers! That, and chairs with backs that never stay in position and make access to some parts of a classroom quite impossible, is another story.
What has started to happen, though, is that students have started to bring in their own laptops, some netbooks are appearing too and, unable to access the college wireless network, they solve the problem by utilising their own mobile broadband sticks or accessing via mobiles. I am waiting for the smarter ones to work out how to display mobile internet images on the monitors! My feeling is that this is quite a natural move. They are using a familiar pice of equipment. It probably contains all the applications and files they want to access. It's rather like bringing in your own pen and notebook instead of using the standard stuff dished out to those who forget. I see this use of personal equipment escalating. Another interesting observation is that whereas all the monitors are standing near vertical at head height, the laptops and other devices are far more angled and the general position of students appears much more relaxed whilst still attentively so.
I have less trouble seeing students when I don't have to peer across or around all the displays. I get their attention more easily too when I want to talk about something or show them something on the whiteboard or smartboard. It's as if their smaller screens, less intrusive on their immediate visual environment, are easier for them to be diverted from by whatever antics I employ.
So, where does this lead? My first thoughts are that we could clear all but a few of the college machines from most of the rooms I use and reclaim the horizontal space and have a much more pleasant teaching and learning environment. (This would have the immediate benefit of allowing every room in the college to have a few decent machines. Currently other departments struggle to get access to computers and often have the limited choice of the endless rows of 96 black screens in the rigidly disciplined, no talking and pretty unpopular IT Workshop or occupying a computing department room thus leaving computing students with a room with zero equipment).
It's not something that will happen overnight because although nearly all my students do have a laptop, I accept that this may not be the case in other disciplines and it is only a small proportion who have a mobile broadband facility. But it is changing, and fast.
Something that could be considered would be opening our wireless network (or some part of it or a specially created one - sorry, I'm not a network person!) so that the mobile broadband wasn't a necessity. As I have said in a previous article, saving documents in some allocated part of the student network isn't that important these days as there are alternatives.
There will always be a need for a few computers for students to use - for those who don't have suitable equipment or if theirs breaks down. Tutors would need to keep an eye on what was being accessed but no longer would students be needing to spend time getting around net nanny systems or having to use applications that aren't quite what they would naturally use elsewhere. Perhaps the savings in future IT equipment budgets could support the provision of some laptops or netbooks, even broadband subscriptions, for students. Things they can use anywhere rather than fixed items they can only use in one place. No-one need be excluded. Yes, the rich parents may provide kids with top of the range kit which will make others jealous but is that really any different to the range of clothes they wear or their forms of transport in the car park or bike shed?
There will also still be a need for computer labs where units require specific applications to be used which students wouldn't be expected to have on their own equipment and some rooms will inevitably stay fully equipped. But I believe the vast majority could be totally refurbished with decent desks and chairs, blinds and carpets so that the room is attractive, clean and genuinely inviting rather than formal or threatening. We don't need a rebuild, we need a rethink and clean carpets.
[I'm not talking about schools here, just institutions for 16+. Not sure about the provision for younger people. They may need to retain current standard equipment for a bundle of other reasons.]
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Live Mesh: it works, and works well
I am very enthusiastic about Microsoft's LiveMesh. It has proved itself genuinely useful twice this week.
Once was with photos. I had taken loads in the snow and downloaded them onto my main PC. Later I wanted to use some of them on my laptop. In the old days I would have had to put them on to a USB stick and move them from one place to another, attach a data cable between the two machines or maybe uploaded them to an on-line album and then downloaded what I required. This time all I had to do was check a folder which I had set to be synchronised between the two and, sure enough, there were all the new pics for me to do what I wanted with.
The second occasion was when I needed a bundle of old files which I knew lurked in the depths of the PC but I was somewhere else with my laptop. I was able to access the desktop of the PC, open folders, open files until I found the ones I wanted. Then I could just copy and paste them to my laptop.
Quite brilliant.
Whilst it won't do staff or students' carbon footprints much good to leave their PCs running at home when they come to College, it will enable them to access and save files and even use home software if they prefer and no longer need 'Sorry, I left it at home' be a valid excuse.
Yes, I know there have been similar applications around for a while that allow remote access but this is free and just works in a familiar way. Microsoft have stolen a march on Google with this. It will interesting to see how Big G respond as, with Live Mesh, Big Blue cannot fail to reclaim users to their other Live products where Google Documents have flourished.
Monday, 2 February 2009
More web tools updates
There's a host of new additions to the web tools site. Here's a quick list - there'll be more information on the updates page of the site or with the individual entries.
Office: drop.io and another plug for e-snips
Images: Zoto, PhotoSynth, animoto, Jing and Camtasia
Research: Shelfari, Timeline, TeacherTube (which you already knew about), Quizlet and Poll Everywhere
Web design: Glogster
Reviews are needed for quite a few entries so don't forget to add some comments either to the wiki or join the studyzone forum, whichever you find easier. Of course you can always just tell me what you think and I'll try and remember.
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Now anyone can start a forum or discussion group
I know moodle has a forum but I'm not so sure it's that easy to use and it certainly isn't very pretty. What is easy to use and is pretty is a super free tool providing free forums by Lefora'I managed to set up a forum from scratch in about 10 minutes. OK, so no-one yet knows about it which will take a bit longer but it needn't be restricted to one course or another and has an interface which students will find more attractive and interesting.
You can set up various categories of discussion and add gadgets, polls and the like very simply. Remarkably, it's completely free, has bags of space, no obvious limites on uploads where people wish to share files, pictures etc., and no adverts that I spotted either.
Unless I've missed something, this has to be one of the best new additions to the webtools collection for a while. Right, now to make another one for The Village to gossip in! Here's a link to the Studyzone forum if you want to see how it looks.
This discovery also came from the brilliant pbwiki educators forum which uses the same software.
You can set up various categories of discussion and add gadgets, polls and the like very simply. Remarkably, it's completely free, has bags of space, no obvious limites on uploads where people wish to share files, pictures etc., and no adverts that I spotted either.
Unless I've missed something, this has to be one of the best new additions to the webtools collection for a while. Right, now to make another one for The Village to gossip in! Here's a link to the Studyzone forum if you want to see how it looks.
This discovery also came from the brilliant pbwiki educators forum which uses the same software.
Friday, 9 May 2008
A laptop for every tutor
There you go. I've said it. Took a bit of nerve but not as much thought as I'd expected. I had to write an E-learning Strategy a few weeks ago and the more I looked at what was happening the more it became clear that a simple, single action could make far more difference to bringing technology's benefits to our students. Give every tutor a laptop.
With a new building looming for 2010 we're now in that phase where it is so easy for any requests for new equipment or changes to rooms to be answered with sentences beginning "Well, when we have the new building . . . " or the slightly better but still unsatisfying "Planning the new building will take that into account . . . " That still means two whole academic years by my calculations and simply isn't acceptable or, more importantly, necessary.
The problem I have to deal with is rooms with no computers coupled with tutors having to share computers in the staff room. So even if a tutor does have a room with some equipment, he often hasn't been able to have sufficient access to a computer (when and where he wants it) to work ILT into his sessions or put materials and things on-line. Or if he is lucky and has a computer to work on, he then is unable to use the lovely stuff in a technology-bare space!
Against my advice several smartboards were slapped up in rooms but are not used particularly effectively as smartboards and the cost of the whole installation comes out at not much under £3000. It was when I realised that that could now buy 10 laptops that I began to formulate the new policy.
With 100 staff, the maximum cost would be £30,000 but a good number already have a computer and where there are 2 between 6 in a room that is only 4 new ones needed. Laptops with wireless built in are the norm these days and my initial checks have found access is feasible in most rooms so there's not much need for any cabling or IT Services staff costs which often cause projects to be jettisoned at early stages. My guess is that it would cost nearer half that and would be an instant hit with staff. I'd like to include part-time staff too but that's a bit tricky - something along the lines of laptops available for them while they're there may work if they don't all want them at 9am on a Tuesday.
We've got a pile of projectors and whatever money has been sifted away from more smartboards can go to just them instead.
Who knows, I may soon be able to get on with getting ILT more visibly used across the College as there'll be no excuse then at least for tutors to carry huge piles of paper everywhere if there's a smart ILT option available, which there usually will be.
It is so bizarrely simple. I have been saying it for years but now, doing the Strategy, it may actually happen. Now I've been saying that all this e-stuff is a bit old hat now but if an E-learning Strategy gets me what tutors want then I may keep quiet on that one for a while!
There is a lot more in the Strategy document and if anyone wants to use it to help draft theirs then I'm happy to share it, minus identifying features. I'll add a link soon.
With a new building looming for 2010 we're now in that phase where it is so easy for any requests for new equipment or changes to rooms to be answered with sentences beginning "Well, when we have the new building . . . " or the slightly better but still unsatisfying "Planning the new building will take that into account . . . " That still means two whole academic years by my calculations and simply isn't acceptable or, more importantly, necessary.
The problem I have to deal with is rooms with no computers coupled with tutors having to share computers in the staff room. So even if a tutor does have a room with some equipment, he often hasn't been able to have sufficient access to a computer (when and where he wants it) to work ILT into his sessions or put materials and things on-line. Or if he is lucky and has a computer to work on, he then is unable to use the lovely stuff in a technology-bare space!
Against my advice several smartboards were slapped up in rooms but are not used particularly effectively as smartboards and the cost of the whole installation comes out at not much under £3000. It was when I realised that that could now buy 10 laptops that I began to formulate the new policy.
With 100 staff, the maximum cost would be £30,000 but a good number already have a computer and where there are 2 between 6 in a room that is only 4 new ones needed. Laptops with wireless built in are the norm these days and my initial checks have found access is feasible in most rooms so there's not much need for any cabling or IT Services staff costs which often cause projects to be jettisoned at early stages. My guess is that it would cost nearer half that and would be an instant hit with staff. I'd like to include part-time staff too but that's a bit tricky - something along the lines of laptops available for them while they're there may work if they don't all want them at 9am on a Tuesday.
We've got a pile of projectors and whatever money has been sifted away from more smartboards can go to just them instead.
Who knows, I may soon be able to get on with getting ILT more visibly used across the College as there'll be no excuse then at least for tutors to carry huge piles of paper everywhere if there's a smart ILT option available, which there usually will be.
It is so bizarrely simple. I have been saying it for years but now, doing the Strategy, it may actually happen. Now I've been saying that all this e-stuff is a bit old hat now but if an E-learning Strategy gets me what tutors want then I may keep quiet on that one for a while!
There is a lot more in the Strategy document and if anyone wants to use it to help draft theirs then I'm happy to share it, minus identifying features. I'll add a link soon.
There's only one e in education
Despite a post which I'll be publishing shortly about E-learning strategy, or maybe as a result of thinking about that, I have come to the conclusion that there's little point in the expression e-learning. It really isn't terribly difficult to talk about using technology to enhance learning and, although there could be some subtle differences if we are being pedantic, most staff understand this as ILT, which, unless you're fresh from teaching in the States, seems to have stood the test of time and is understood for what it is, learning with IT, and everyone knows IT now.
In fact, if it wasn't for government agencies perpetuating the term (and worse ones like eCPD, e-tools e-etc.,) I'm sure it wouldn't have survived this long.
The test of a good term is whether normal people start using it (reasonably correctly). All of us who live with technology and all that it offers in education know what we mean but I'm not so sure our colleagues do. They certainly would be hard pushed to distinguish it from ILT so why bother trying?
There is also a huge chasm opening up between places like my FE College and mostly private training organsations and course providers who use e-learning to mean on-line learning, or distance learning or quite specific packages of materials that deliver session materials with little tutor involvement. Indeed, the growth of these in the commercial sector is founded upon the very fact that organisations can save a fortune by substituting these 'e-learning' packages for human tutor packages and the rather more swish image that the monitor presents in comparison to the usually rather less than swish, and tending to the dowdy, appearance in the flesh of the human.
Interestingly, OFSTED inspectors at a recent visit to an FE College commented on the use of ILT and, to the best of my knowledge, made no reference to e-learning at all. Some may say they're behind the times but I reckon they've got it about right.
In fact, if it wasn't for government agencies perpetuating the term (and worse ones like eCPD, e-tools e-etc.,) I'm sure it wouldn't have survived this long.
The test of a good term is whether normal people start using it (reasonably correctly). All of us who live with technology and all that it offers in education know what we mean but I'm not so sure our colleagues do. They certainly would be hard pushed to distinguish it from ILT so why bother trying?
There is also a huge chasm opening up between places like my FE College and mostly private training organsations and course providers who use e-learning to mean on-line learning, or distance learning or quite specific packages of materials that deliver session materials with little tutor involvement. Indeed, the growth of these in the commercial sector is founded upon the very fact that organisations can save a fortune by substituting these 'e-learning' packages for human tutor packages and the rather more swish image that the monitor presents in comparison to the usually rather less than swish, and tending to the dowdy, appearance in the flesh of the human.
Interestingly, OFSTED inspectors at a recent visit to an FE College commented on the use of ILT and, to the best of my knowledge, made no reference to e-learning at all. Some may say they're behind the times but I reckon they've got it about right.
Tuesday, 20 November 2007
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Google documents get better and better
The addition of a presentation tool isn't why I had to be so enthusiastic. In fact I still prefer Thumbstacks. What I really find useful is the addition of folders so that I can finally organise what was becoming a huge list. Sharing items with people is now a dream. Write some notes in class and then e-mail them to a group. Charts in spreadsheets too and several other tweaks regular users will appreciate.
Read all about them here.
Read all about them here.
Thursday, 26 April 2007
Thursday, 19 April 2007
Why Blogger gets banned
Just returned from a very interesting Web Technologies Day, organised by RSC Eastern, at which I was, as ever, keen to get people using web logs and talking about how Blogger makes this pretty simple and how the built-in RSS feed can be used to weave a bit of magic. I was initially dismayed to find that blogspot.com urls were blocked by the venue (an FE institution) but they were kind enough to remove them for us on this occasion. What I hadn't appreciated before, though, was the reason for the block in the first place. That is the 'Next Blog' feature that is built in to a navigation bar that comes with all the templates. This is a bizarre and, in my view, totally useless feature, taking people to another random blog which could throw virtually anything onto the user's screen. I've written to the Blogger people to suggest that this is revised at the very least and preferably removed as I can't see how anyone finds it of any value.
Just as I don't want young or easily-offended people in my sessions to get offensive material thrust at them when they might just have thought it was my next blog or another on an associated topic that would be presented, so too, I imagine would someone with a passion for, say, Something Deep & Dark be particular happy with my e-learning ramblings popping up between Revues of Gothic Blackness and Even Darker In The Night or whatever their taste may be.
Anyway, there are ways to edit the template that I've discovered and you'll see that the whole bar has disappeared on this blog but (a) it's fiddly and (b) I've lost the useful Dashboard link so it's not ideal. I also understand that the contract entered into upon setting up a Blogger account does require that users retain specified features of the navigation bar but it does not appear to specify that one has to include the annoying links and I would relish the publicity that Blogger banning me for not showing the bar as I don't think I have much choice.
So, if you want to know how to do it I can supply some instructions but what I really hope is that Blogger see sense and, at least, make the Next Blog an optional thing. If they don't, and in anticipation that they won't, I am now on the look out for an alternative web log provider that is as simple to use and which can be simply edited, can incorporate the same types of additional content and also looks good. Suggestions much appreciated and I'll let readers know what happens.
Just as I don't want young or easily-offended people in my sessions to get offensive material thrust at them when they might just have thought it was my next blog or another on an associated topic that would be presented, so too, I imagine would someone with a passion for, say, Something Deep & Dark be particular happy with my e-learning ramblings popping up between Revues of Gothic Blackness and Even Darker In The Night or whatever their taste may be.
Anyway, there are ways to edit the template that I've discovered and you'll see that the whole bar has disappeared on this blog but (a) it's fiddly and (b) I've lost the useful Dashboard link so it's not ideal. I also understand that the contract entered into upon setting up a Blogger account does require that users retain specified features of the navigation bar but it does not appear to specify that one has to include the annoying links and I would relish the publicity that Blogger banning me for not showing the bar as I don't think I have much choice.
So, if you want to know how to do it I can supply some instructions but what I really hope is that Blogger see sense and, at least, make the Next Blog an optional thing. If they don't, and in anticipation that they won't, I am now on the look out for an alternative web log provider that is as simple to use and which can be simply edited, can incorporate the same types of additional content and also looks good. Suggestions much appreciated and I'll let readers know what happens.
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
Slideshows ancient and modern
Another addition to the webtools site soon will be slide.com. With a bit of luck there'll be some pretty flowers above in a display made in just a few minutes with that tool. Substitute pics of students doing things or some course-related visuals and you've got a nice change to PowerPoint.
Don't get me wrong, PowerPoint is one of the Microsoft greats, its oldest features being, in my view, some of its best - like being able to make quick graphics and save them has got me out of trouble time and again when there's no familiar image editing applications for students in classrooms and it's an excellent way to fill the screen with something attention-grabbing.
However, just try figuring out animations and orders and the rest for something like the show above, never mind putting on-line for everyone to see at their leisure. That would take more than a few minutes!
For an imminent webtools session or two I'm using another alternative - Thumbstacks. Very simple, no special effects but I love the way you can just do it there, on the screen, and it's there, wherever you can access the internet.
Don't get me wrong, PowerPoint is one of the Microsoft greats, its oldest features being, in my view, some of its best - like being able to make quick graphics and save them has got me out of trouble time and again when there's no familiar image editing applications for students in classrooms and it's an excellent way to fill the screen with something attention-grabbing.
However, just try figuring out animations and orders and the rest for something like the show above, never mind putting on-line for everyone to see at their leisure. That would take more than a few minutes!
For an imminent webtools session or two I'm using another alternative - Thumbstacks. Very simple, no special effects but I love the way you can just do it there, on the screen, and it's there, wherever you can access the internet.
Wednesday, 4 April 2007
I keep remembering things I forgot to include
. . . in the new Webtools site, that is. Think I might call it Webtools2.0 for a while because I'm doing an event soon with a worrying title that includes the words Web2.0 technologies. Ah, but that would then imply that I know what web2.0 is which I'm not sure I do. Hmmm. The point is I spent many nights burning the old midnight oil on this and you ought to have a look at least. Only published it a couple of days ago and there have been 930 page views already which beats anything else I've done so hopefully someone somewhere got inspired and will be making a better impression in class after the break.
I can just see it now: that usually apparently ICT-illiterate old lecturer who normally heaves the OHT from the window cill and passes that huge pile of still-warm photocopies of some book pages to the poor lad whose name just happens to land him in the front row left or right and the next ten minutes are taken up by the sound of transparencies slithering around and notes being passed around - but this time he walks in, naked, in a manner of speaking and drops a url into the stunned silence or slaps a really smart-looking web page on the screen. "How did you do that, Sir?" someone asks. The emphasis could be on any of the first five words.
There's the usual brief descriptions of what things with mostly pretty odd names and pastel logos are supposed to do and I'm hoping that people will use the Comment links to add something about what they might to or even have done. That bit's possible thanks to a wiki - pbwiki are really making life easy in that respect - and one or two other interactive features courtesy of Google's Notes and Labpixies' Todo list.
And yes, I'm sure I'll have omitted someone's favourite - so don't whinge, just tell me and I'll do my best to remember to add it. Incidentally, there's something called the Curriculum Champs list here in the UK where some really clever people recently listed their choices of software and I've tried to include as many of their suggestions. Trouble was, over half of them were quite expensive things so I couldn't include them. All the stuff I've added is free, almost entirely ad-free and most of it doesn't need any special knowledge or complicated downloads / installations but works on the web wherever you happen to be.
Hope you find something inspiring.
I can just see it now: that usually apparently ICT-illiterate old lecturer who normally heaves the OHT from the window cill and passes that huge pile of still-warm photocopies of some book pages to the poor lad whose name just happens to land him in the front row left or right and the next ten minutes are taken up by the sound of transparencies slithering around and notes being passed around - but this time he walks in, naked, in a manner of speaking and drops a url into the stunned silence or slaps a really smart-looking web page on the screen. "How did you do that, Sir?" someone asks. The emphasis could be on any of the first five words.
There's the usual brief descriptions of what things with mostly pretty odd names and pastel logos are supposed to do and I'm hoping that people will use the Comment links to add something about what they might to or even have done. That bit's possible thanks to a wiki - pbwiki are really making life easy in that respect - and one or two other interactive features courtesy of Google's Notes and Labpixies' Todo list.
And yes, I'm sure I'll have omitted someone's favourite - so don't whinge, just tell me and I'll do my best to remember to add it. Incidentally, there's something called the Curriculum Champs list here in the UK where some really clever people recently listed their choices of software and I've tried to include as many of their suggestions. Trouble was, over half of them were quite expensive things so I couldn't include them. All the stuff I've added is free, almost entirely ad-free and most of it doesn't need any special knowledge or complicated downloads / installations but works on the web wherever you happen to be.
Hope you find something inspiring.
Sunday, 18 March 2007
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