never mind the optics

…is perhaps a grand title for an informal after-school get together but I think it conveys the importance we placed on coming together as a group.  Last month, a group of teachers from Highland schools were invited to Dingwall Academy to meet fellow teachers who either run blogs themselves, or have classroom or even whole-school blogs.

The group, initially all primary teachers, were contacted by email to see if there was sufficient interest in the idea of a meeting.  Louise Jones suggested that Stephanie Disbury and I, both secondary teachers, should try to attend as there was currently no framework for us to participate in a similar group with a secondary focus.

We met in one of the computer suites in the recently-opened Academy.  The idea was for us to spend some time looking at each other’s blogs and seeing what other practitioners were using their blogs for, both inside and outside the classroom environment.  I was really surprised by the frequency of media use.  Photographs and embedded video seemed to feature prominently in many of the sites we visited.

Louise brought us all up to date with the e-safety CPD roll-out across Highland and an interesting debate on the use of 3rd party sites followed, particularly around the issue of whether or not pupils should be using a personal account.

A theme that cropped up several times was that of internet filtering and the problem associated with hosting materials to be used in school on sites such as youtube, vimeo and flickr.  I must thank Margaret Vass for coming to our rescue with suggestions for sites that would not be filtered in primary schools, Photobucket seems to have gone down well – it works in school and has shorter upload times.

Jim Henderson, our virtual learning coordinator, also joined us.  He delighted several of us with his announcement of a new server, complete with WordPress MultiUser, to give a safe blogging platform for schools across the Highlands.  This could not have come at a better time.  I am planning a series of blogging sessions with staff at my own school during study leave and now have an appropriate hosting solution that will not require vigilance for inappropriate advertising in the sidebar.

Hopefully this will be the first in a series of meetings.  It was great to see how others not only use their blogs but also to hear how they think their use of blogs will change over time.

I’ve clocked up quite a few miles lot in the past few weeks.  The trip to Perth for TeachMeet Physics (see earlier post), a day trip to Aberdeen to help write resources for science teachers to assist with the new optoelectronics CfE outcomes and then, after 2 days of Easter study school, I headed south for a check-up with my NHS dentist (one filling, btw) and let off some steam in Glasgow.

One thing I like about these long drives south (and back again) is the opportunity to fill my iPod with podcasts that I’ve just not had time to listen to during the typical school week.  With such patchy radio reception on the A9, it makes sense to have something else on standby for entertainment.  My “binge listening” habit has been commented on previously.

This last trip was accompanied by the 365 days of astronomy podcast, a project to celebrate 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.  The individual podcast episodes are very easy to listen to, with a maximum length of 10 minutes per day.  Clearly, several weeks of podcasts are necessary for the 5 hour drive to Glasgow.  The topics discussed each day are diverse and I enjoyed learning Swedish astronomy nouns, hearing various speakers talking about our debt to Galileo, different views on Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet and the answer to the question “What would happen if the moon didn’t exist?”

I’m currently looking at the astronomy outcome with my S2 class and one of the ideas they have put forward is the need for any colony to be sustainable.  It just so happens that one of the earlier podcasts in the 365 days talks about the space beer brewed from barley grown on the International Space Station.  So here we have an example of an arable crop being grown in space.  This is just the point my class were making – at some point you have to start growing your own crops if a space colony is going to survive.  The people behind the 365 days of astronomy podcast allow the audio to be reproduced, so here is the space beer episode.

January 9: The Link Between Beer and Space Settlement [ 10:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I finished my book chapter today and have emailed it in to the editor for review.  I’m not going to say much about the content just now but you can get an idea from this wordle I made from the text (just under 8000 words).  I started out using PBwiki but ran into difficulty with a ropey internet connection at school.  I decided to give Pages a try as I had forked out £50 to get it preinstalled on my mac.  My verdict?  It’s quite good!

Louise Jones, Health & Wellbeing supporter for Highland Council, was on the local news last night when STV covered an Internet Safety Awareness Day at Crown Primary School in Inverness.  This was part of Safer Internet Day 2009, which Louise is leading in our council area.  You can follow other safer internet activities on Louise’s blog.  Watch the whole news story by clicking on the picture above.

With the decision to stop using Edublogs, I am left with the question of what to use instead.  This isn’t just a decision for hosting of my own blog, that’s done and dusted now.  The problem is that I am not sure where to point others who are looking for a blogging solution.  In particular, I’ve been charged with providing blogging training after Easter for staff at my own school and will need to have something for these practical sessions

I had heard of WordPress multi-user before when I had exchanged tweets with David Gilmour, who administers the East Lothian Edubuzz.org blogging system.  Then we had a brilliant session last Sunday on EdTechRoundup, when we had several people join us to talk about WPMU.  In the main meeting and background chat room, we covered the rationale for using WPMU over the established vanilla-flavoured WordPress solution, moving on to cover the set up and maintenance of WPMU.

Feeling enthused by the discussion, I’ve downloaded WPMU myself and had a go at installing it.  There are ongoing teething issues.  For example, my web hosting company will not allow me to use wildcard subdomains (you’ll know what that is if you read the installation documentation) and issues with too many redirections (stuck in a forwarding loop between the login screen and the admin dashboard screen) amongst others.

All of this makes me agree with comments made during the week on twitter, where Stuart Meldrum and others voiced the opinion that the biggest problem with maintaining WPMU was having the time to do it.  In the mean time, I’ve had a blog comment from Jim Henderson suggesting that there may be a server coming to Highland at some point, giving is all access to a centrally-maintained WPMU installation.  My fingers are tightly crossed now because I can’t wait for that to happen!

Following on from the comments I received after blogging about being approached to write a chapter for a book on digital literacy in science teaching, I’ve started work on the piece.  I’ve created a wiki for note taking and am now drafting the chapter.  I seem to have plenty to say, the problem will be keeping it within the context of science education.  How often does a person get the opportunity to write for an academic textbook about using their favourite web2.0 tools in the classroom?  There’s a danger that I end up submitting something too edupunk for either the editor, publisher or both.

I thought I would say something about my project to place homework and screencast solutions for Higher Physics on iTunes.

This week saw the first submission deadline since homework questions had been made available in the iTunes podcast directory.  My feedburner statistics suggested that just over half of the class had downloaded the homework using iTunes.  Looking at the Podpress data on my own WordPress dashboard, it looks like the others have downloaded direct from the blog instead.  I was pretty confident this was going to work.

When Wednesday came round, I was disappointed to receive only 11 sets of homework from a class of 19.  I felt fairly miserable about that and obviously my first instinct was to blame the new delivery mechanism for the sudden fall in submissions.  I mentioned it to my faculty head, who uses my room last thing on Wednesdays and he was more upbeat, telling me he’d just had a go at his Higher Biology set for an usually poor homework response and he had heard that the Chemistry dept were also reporting low levels of homework this week.  Clearly this was something bigger than a move to iTunes.  Perhaps we had hit the senior pupils’ party season?

I went ahead and uploaded the screencast solutions.  It had taken quite an effort on my part to prepare these so I was determined to persevere.  Since the solutions have gone online, I have spotted distinct spikes in the downloads.  It looks like my pupils aren’t using the “get all” option in iTunes but are focusing on certain sections of the solutions that have given them difficulty.  This isn’t an observation based solely on this week’s homework either.  A similar uneven distribution of views/downloads exists in the original files that kicked off the project on youtube.  I am wondering if pupils are actively choosing only to see worked solutions to those problems that presented them with difficulty, rather than watching all of the screencasts to reinforce what they have learned in class?

In the past couple of weeks, a few people have expressed an interest in this idea and have posted questions on Twitter.  Joe Rowing has picked up on the idea and is also trialling it.  Interestingly enough, Joe also teaches Physics.

I had a light bulb moment last week.  It followed on from my post about the inset I gave on the first day back after the October break.  I’d been screencasting and uploading narrated worked example to Youtube but I was still relying on pupils actually bothering to go to my site to play the embedded files.  My idea was to highlight valuable resources by adding them as podcast content and have them pull everything on to their home computer and I realised I could use iTunes to do it.

I used Quicktime Pro to export the video in MP4 format.  I selected  the MP4 video format after reading this page which suggested it would be suitable for more than just iPods.  You wouldn’t have to use Quicktime for this, an online file conversion service like Zamzar would also work and save you some cash in the process.

I added the PodPress plugin to my WordPress-powered classroom blog to handle the media files.  I don’t think you really PodPress but it does provide a neat and automatic icon for the media file in your blog post and it has a widget you can use to add an iTunes subscription button to your blog’s sidebar.  For me, the main piece of magic is the Feedburner feed.  This is a free service that has excellent features such as the smartcast option.

Smartcast is the killer feature.  It allows you to create an enclosure (the thing that iTunes looks for in your blog’s feed) for any rich media file.  This is a blanket term that includes file types such as MP3, MP4 and, more importantly, PDF.

So here’s what I’ve done.  Pupils in the class have subscribed to my podcast in iTunes to download fully commented solutions to their last homework exercise.  This evening, I finished creating their next set of questions and uploaded them to my site as a pdf.  Thanks to feedburner’s smartcast, the pdf quickly appeared in iTunes.  The next time my pupils open up iTunes, they’ll get the homework exercise downloaded automatically on to their computers and the following week they’ll receive the screencast showing the worked solutions as a video podcast.

I have no idea how this will go down with pupils.  When the novelty subsides, will they see it as a creepy tree house?  I don’t know if it’s all that different from having a VLE for school work, although pupils know fine well what to find when they log in there.  Is the delivery of homework by iTunes an invasion of their recreational space?

I mentioned previously that the group of UK teachers behind EdTechRoundUp had released a discussion-based podcast on the use of VLEs. One of the contributors to that show, Doug Belshaw, also blogged about it in a post where he asked the question “What is a VLE?“. He tweeted today to tell us he was called into his school office today to be told that the supplier of one VLE mentioned in the blog post and podcast were demanding that he remove the post and accompanying podcast from the web or face “legal action”.

Core Projects & Technologies (UK) Ltd are the people who sell the TALMOS system. Their approach to Doug is heavy handed. They might not like the fact that he said something negative about their product but that’s life. It speaks volumes about a company that makes a living selling interactive software to react in such a “web 0.5″ way to a single blog entry comparing VLE systems. Incidentally, the link I gave for Doug’s blog shows the version he edited today, possibly an act on his part to appease his employer who should never have been involved in the first place. Here is what Google’s cache told me he said in the original post

“There are other VLEs available – for example Doncaster, where I teach, has gone for FrogTeacher from 2008/9 onwards. Despite the bizarre name, I was quite impressed with it when I had a play with it at the BETT show earlier this year. Up to now we’ve been using TALMOS. Well, not using it, actually, as it’s so difficult to use, cumbersome and singularly un-useful…“

There are lots of questions raised here. Doug himself raises the professional versus personal aspects in a post he made today. I’m concerned by the way in which these people get heavy on his employer when something he does outwith his classroom annoys them. I’ve been googling today and the one thing that I learned from the TES is that Doug is not alone in having few good words to say about the TALMOS VLE. Can I redirect those with a curious mind to the following threads: “poor version of powerpoint“, “does anyone have anything good to say about TALMOS“, “please say something positive” I am sure that you will find more if you dig deeper but the point has been made.

Bottom line? Well, TALMOS may wish they had never called Doug’s school. How long before a standard Google search for TALMOS produces a marketing manager’s worst nightmare. Next time you take issue with a blogger, try getting in touch direct, possibly with a comment on the relevent blog entry, to find out what issues they are having. Maybe that blogger can help you to make your product better.

I’ve heard people talking about “dead time” recently. It’s defined as the time between pupils choosing their course options for the next few years and the end of the current school year. The problem is that you end up with kids in your class who are not going to be taking your subject next year (for whatever reason) and whenever you try to motiviate them to work, they remind you that they don’t need/want to do your subject next year, so why bother?

Well, it bothers me. The way I see it, it makes little difference whether a pupil is taking my subject next year or not. Those who are will start their new course in June, those who are not don’t need to be dragged through what is left in the curriculum, all this does is switch them off to the possibility of picking your subject up again in later years.

Last year, I used the “dead time” to work with my low ability S2 class to produce a series of short films, each showing a small group performing an experiment (they all chose an experiment that went bang!) After filming, editing and producing a compilation DVD, they voted on their favourite script, effect, experiment, camera operator, scientist, etc. and awarded prizes at a “Science Oscars” ceremony.

Being the new boy in our department, I have the bottom S2 science set again this year. I’ve taken my inspiration for this year’s “dead time” from a Curriculum for Excellence meeting I attended back in November – a group of physics teachers and university researchers got together to start work on a set of resources supporting the introduction of optoelectronics in the draft science outcomes. We were looking at cross-curricular opportunities, linking physics outcomes on light into the chemistry/biology outcomes, and someone suggested an investigation into the response of plants to different colours of light. So that’s what my S2 class will be doing this year.

We have propagated some geranium cuttings from the school greenhouse and are getting ready to grow them on under single colours of light. I persuaded my PT to part with some cash and I’ve bought a supply of ultra bright blue, yellow and red LEDs. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to show some of the class how to assemble a circuit on prototyping board before we move on to soldering next week.

One of the things I am really looking forward to is the chance to give the class an opportunity to try soldering. Everything we do with circuits in school is based around the ubiquitous crocodile clip, a component designed to allow teachers to move quickly from one circuit to another with little thought for giving pupils the skills they might need if they decide to follow a career in electronics.

When I asked the teams to develop success criteria for their experiment, they told me it was important to know if the plant had grown. They came up with a range of ideas and settled on three different measurements; plant height, leaf size and “greenness”. While my classroom is fully quipped to deal with height and “size” measurements, I’m not so sure about the determination of colour. The kids came to the rescue with a suggestion to make their own “paint chart” to compare the shades of green, so that’s another task for tomorrow. It’s going to be a busy 50 minutes and that’s before I introduce our new wiki for recording our progress!