#tds1850 Guesswork matters https://daily.stillweb.org/tds1850/
failure and hope are the very things that have propelled human progress to date
the loss of the random and serendipity are worrying too. #tds1850
Loved the linked photoset of kids playing, outdoors & sometimes, somewhat risky.
Over the summer I am working on #GlowBlogs help site, improving accessibility, clearing out out of date content etc. Any suggestions for improvement very welcome. #GlowScot @GlowScot
Saving this here for following up after the summer break.
The concept had passed me by somehow until Mr Dorman from the @PedagogyTeamNLC introduced them to my class, which very much enjoyed by the children. I had planned on thinking about this a bit more, but other things happened.
Today Arron’s bookmark reminded me and took me to Librarians turned Google Forms into the unlikely platform for virtual escape rooms which links to this example: Hogwarts Digital Escape Room.
I’ve seem a few examples using OneNote and google forms before but this is probably the smoothest experience.
I had wondered if using password protected WordPress posts or pages would work.
I even make a simple set up Make an Escape which produces a sort of digital multi lock (all the answers are 123) before lockdown.
Today I started doing a little reading following Arron’s links, Breakout EDU Additional Game Creator Lab Resources – bit.ly/boeduresources – Google Slides looks as if it is worth borrowing from.
I didn’t find the lack of video for pupils a problem during daily lockdown classes. This post goes over the reason why video might be a problem and lists some ideas for compensating.
also keeping in mind some people are voice shy, and some people have noisy home environments
Although from a higher ed perspective it all rings true from a primary perspective.
Now the term is over. Time to look back. This is one of a set of notes about my experience of teaching recently. This was going to be that amazing post that pulled it all together. After a week 10 days into the holiday it turns out is more an inconclusive ramble😀.
The results, (I am not sure stats like this tell me much):
24 pupils from composite p4-7
4 pupils never posted to their blogs
2 pupils never participated in a conference a couple more never stayed for more than a few minutes.
There was not a complete overlap.
I am quite please with the engagement. Given the short notice I was aiming for engagement as opposed to achievement.
The schools SMT were in touch with parents and we had no worries around pupils who did not show up online.
The above posts are a series of notes taken at the time. Musings and mumblings as opposed to anything well though out. Writing them helped me think through things and will help look back and learn over the coming years. What follows is more of the same.
Over the weeks I posted one big blog post a week with ideas for the week. These were all linked from a featured post on the blog: Home Learning – Banton Biggies
I was quite surprised that the take up of what I though of more creative and fun tasks were not taken up as much as some of the more basic stuff. Sumdog, which enjoyed in class was much less used than expected. I think I’ve underestimated the community aspect of a class in sparking ideas and encouraging children. Perhaps more show and tell about learning in Teams would help. One problem with that was the understandable uneven attendance in meetings. This made it hard to move on through the week.
Blogs are, imo, very good at sending information out. The combination of media, the ability to make the information publicly available and the way it can be organised are useful. I recorded the text as audio and pupils told me they found this useful.
The incorporation of posts allowed by the display posts plugin allows you to repeatedly add regular information simply. I’ve used Display Post plugin to list my lockdown posts above, but it is a lot more powerful that this simple example.
Blogs are not, imo, the best way to collect and review pupil ‘work’ on a day to day basis. But the pupils were familiar with them and they worked well for me in the short term. Using OneNote would have been better if I could have avoided previous problems. I didn’t feel the effort to get pupils using OneNote when they had not before would have worked. If I had had a straight p6 or 7 or even a composite 6/7 I would have done so, but felt it best to stick to what we knew.
Still some of the blog posts are valuable beyond the “handing in” aspect. first as evidence of learning and second a record of these unusual times. Making 380 comments wore out my emojis and kept me in touch with my pupils.
The Glow Blog reader plugin made checking the pupils posts really simple. I can’t recommend it enough.
I didn’t follow ‘best practise’ for my meetings. I worked it out as I went along. Each meeting had several shorter elements including:
My first method of organising the meetings involved a new presentation every day. Toward the end I stopped doing that. Pupils often saw nothing or didn’t see slides at the right time. I probably stuck in that rut, spending most of the morning making slides for far too long. Eventually I ‘presented’ by using the chat. Adding text, pictures and video as I went. Keeping the videos very small <2mbs meant this didn’t interrupt the flow.( Simpler Meet)
I used a fair bit of audio in the meets. Splicing together snippets from Farrago via loopback with my mic as input in Teams. This allowed me to ‘play’ poets reading their work and music. I used this to play bits of music as a timer when I gave the pupils time to work on something. (Lockdown Learning 18 May 2020 – virtual devices).
Having periods, 2-5 minutes of silence or music might seem a bit daft but I found the pupils enjoyed it and produced some good work. We used it for drawing, number talks, writing and brainstorming. I imagine it is even harder to respond immediately in Teams than it is in a classroom, so thinking time.
I ended up making quite a few short < 1.5 minute videos to explain things. At first I uploaded them to Teams well before the meets and asked for them to be watched, flipped style. As it became obvious that the class didn’t all watch them I continued but then uploaded them into the chat during the meet and gave time to watch them. This got round the problem of live explanations involving visuals synchronising. None of these videos were things of beauty. Earlier ones took time but I cut down and down in both size and speed of production. Either using the built in screen recording on iPad or recorded voice over for Keynote slides on Mac. In the later I used Screenflow to add audio for its better editing. In both cases reduced dimensions and quality of videos in HandBrake.
I found a few things irritating in Teams. The differing UI on different devices made it hard for some of my pupils, especially the younger ones. I would have loved a sticky post effect for announcements. I believe this is in the works but my pupils regularly missed announcements as they were pushed up the stream. I did have a channel just for announcements, but I don’t think the pupils visited that much.
The file dialogues in teams drove me mad. Years of selecting files and then double clicking or hitting return/enter to open got me every time. Files from the desktop were fine as it then used the system dialogue. Ones from OneDrive or the teams files area, bleh.
Closing a document you had opened from a folder in the files area didn’t as I’d expect leave you in the folder but put you back to the top level of files. Again not a big deal but it slows down a workflow. I guess this is to do with Teams being a cross platform app built on electron.
The ability to edit a document in Teams was turned off due to high demand but I think it would be a killer feature. I did work with older pupils a little in shared word docs. The whole bouncing back and forth between different apps seemed too complex to start using with my younger pupils. Being able to do this in Teams would have been great.
I’ve grown used to video only because I have to. I prefer audio / podcast / as a medium. I have at least 5 kids who are deeply uncomfortable on video. Which is understandable
— Athole (@athole) May 18, 2020
We had used Minecraft (and the open source Minetest) a bit in class before lockdown. We tried some of the worlds created for maths activities and around creative tasks.
Once I found I could run a server from home]
During lockdown I was in a particularly favourable place. I’ve no children to look after and was totally supported by my wife. I have no idea how teachers with children of their own or other family to look after managed.
Still this was an intense experience. My days were very much taken up by school stuff.
I got a bit obsessed with keep contact with pupils. A few less in a meeting or posting to their blogs got me worried. This despite the fact that I knew that they all were in quite different situations and had different needs from school.
I also got into the habit of responding very quickly. This meant I was on constant alert to teams and new blog posts.
As we got to the end of term it looked as if we were going back to some sort of blended learning situation. The rooms in school were prepared . I was feeling that this term had prepared me to prepare for a term or more of blended learning. My ideas centred round:
I was quite looking forward to getting this started before the change of plan at the end of my term.
Of course things have changed now, it looks like we will be back to a normal attendance pattern in August. I am also wondering about my OneNote plan, some of Nick Hood’s concerns echo my experience. But if we are to prepare for the chance of further lockdown I think it is my only choice. The temptation to fall back on AirDrop in the class will be strong.
The featured image on this post was taken by one of my pupils, used with permission. They shared it in our Team, I loved it & though it appropriate (I’ve used it before).
The Microsoft OneNote Teacher Academy is a learning path comprising four short courses introducing the use of OneNote in teaching for lesson planning, assessment and activities for learning ... These are my notes taken as I followed the learning path, including the reflection questions and my responses.
I’d pretty much decided to use OneNote path next year. My Previous problems lead me to depend on AirDrop, Apple Classroom & Apple Notes in my 1-2-1 iPad classroom. Local was certainly more reliable but lockdown made me think again. Nick Hood, @cullaloe‘s extensive post give me third thoughts.
Back to School – Engaging with the NEW NORMAL http://throughthewindae.com/back-to-school/
Fascinating read. Going to be a very useful starting point to to thinking about August 11, albeit my circumstances are very different. Delighted to see it coming to my RSS reader via ScotEduBlogs. Hopefully blogging is part of the new normal.
Preparing for meeting with class this afternoon, squashing images with ImageOptim. Back when I started teaching pupils to blog the first thing I taught them was to resize images for faster upload & download. We relay on bandwidth & servers now, not sure if that is an advance?
BacK to school tomorrow, ironically I had the smoothest teams meeting yet today. Relied on the chat for all display. This is how it went.
Everyone get chance to talk, some posted images at the same time into chat.
A pretty smooth, IMO, hour. Almost no time wasted waiting for pupils to see a slide. Preparation was a lot quicker too. A text file to remind me what was next and to copy text from. a folder for images, audio via Farrago.
I really hammered the size of the movie and images. Handbrake and imageoptim both multi platform, open source & free, are great tools.
I had suggested that the pupils watch the two videos before the meet, not all had but they were so short I don’t think it did anyone any harm to watch twice.
It was interesting too in the mix of audio, text and image posted to chat that the class used to join in.
I’ve not seen this rather crude method of running a meeting described but it has lead to the smoothest meeting of the nearly 30 I’ve had over the last 6 or 7 weeks.
Some notes, part of a ragged collection on my lockdown learning.
I had a wee lightbulb moment this week. I’ve been running daily Teams meetings with my class and having a lot of problems with pupils not seeing the content of slides presented. My way of handling these meetings has been to use a PowerPoint slide deck to step through what I want to discuss and teach. It gives me some structure, allows be a board and to explain some thing visibly.
It has lead to a lot of pupils telling me a they can’t see the slides.
I had planned to do a bit of flipping so this week I used the day’s slides as the basis for a screencast or two each day. These were posted first thing in the morning so pupils could watch before the meeting at 2. Then if the slides failed I’d just continue and hope the pupils memories helped untested what I was saying. This didn’t work all that well. Not all the pupil read the morning post or watched the video. The videos were all short, 2 or 3.
The other problem is that pupils don’t all turn up every day, so if you try to teach a series of lessons it gets complicated. This is further complicated by having a multi-composite with a wide range of maturities and levels. For those that do come every day I imagine the repetition gets a bit tedious.
💡On Friday I abandoned the slides. Not sure why I didn’t think of this before, caught in the headlights? Instead I had a text file of notes and in a folder a few images and a video. These were uploaded into the chat at the appropriate time. The video was only a minute or so long and very small. I can also copy and paste text to the chat.
This worked a good deal better, the pupils could all see the content, reply with text and their own images while we talked. I’d been using the chat to collect writing in previous meets but this was a lot better.
An easy way to export the chat would be useful.
We did have problems with some pupils getting dropped and a few who lost the ability to talk. Most solved by quitting the meeting and app and starting again.
So my plan is to do just this for meetings in the future. Not sure how much I’ll be doing going forward as we go back into school next week to start organising for the new year. That will cut down on time for meetings and preparation for those meetings.
I am hoping getting rid of the PP will save me a bit of time too. Making ‘good enough’ explanatory videos doesn’t take very long. I either record talking over a few keynote slides or the screen of a whiteboard on an iPad. Try for one take, little editing. I then run them through handbrake to reduce the file size.
Things that have worked best for me, or I think are worth testing more:
On the Minecraft front, I’ve had the server up and running for an hour every day, usually only 3-5 pupils this wee. Interestingly one who never comes to meeting, so proving useful in a small way. The Virtual Banton continues to expand. Now seems to have a railway in the sky and a zoo. I don’t spend much time there, occasionally popping in for a chat to to get some sort of idea on what is happening. I do listen to the talk though
