I set a laptop up in a remote location in school together with a USB telephone handset (which Skype detected with no problems).  This laptop was logged onto Skype and the screen positioned (and lighting checked) so that I would be able to see the person using the handset on the video stream.  Students had a very brief lesson in Skype (how to dial and hang-up was all they required) and sent to the computer to call back.  Students took it in turn to call back to the classroom and their video was displayed on the whiteboard.  I used a headset microphone and acted as intermediate between the rest of the class (who were asking questions) and the caller.

What surprised me was the level of engagement, and even my most reluctant speakers were willing to have a go at phoning back to the classroom.  Students who passed by were keen to join in and several asked if we could use Skype in their lesson.  The technology worked well and we enjoyed clear and lag-free conversations about a number of topics.

I plan to use Skype again next week to work on our telephone skills (this was a careers lesson).   Other ideas to try soon in other lessons include telephone hot seating (students take on a role and we take turns to phone them up and ask a question), telephone interviews and ‘ask an expert’.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who has used Skype in this way.

My KS4 students have been looking at trends in the periodic table.  I thought that a visualiser would be perfect for showing the reactions of the alkali metals, and for recording them to show absent students.  I tried to get the camera head into a suitable position but where it wouldn’t be at risk of jumping potassium which was easier said than done (I didn’t want to risk damaging it).  Let’s say I wasn’t very impressed.

This is typical of the still images I collected

This is typical of the video I recorded (I’ve removed the sound since it was captured using the microphone on my laptop and wasn’t much use).

I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the recorded video, and having the flexible neck on the camera didn’t allow the range of usable viewing angles that you would imagine.  My advice?  I’ve seen fellow bloggers talk about building a low cost visualiser (e.g. GlenGilchrist).  My advice is build your own – the quality of video from a home built visualiser will at worse be equal to the quality of the video I captured and would likely be much better.  As well as saving money you are more likely to be adventurous with a camera costing under £50.

BTW I’ll stick to recording my demonstrations with my Flipcam and mini-tripod!

My advice – if you have PGCE students get them on the case.  PGCE students have to show capability in ICT skills and what better way to learn than by mastering data logging equipment and rolling out activities to the rest of the department.

Data loggers are excellent tools for SEN students – hopefully the ideas below will encourage you to dig yours out and get them up and running again!

Using data loggers as a digital measuring device

At the simplest level just using a data logger as a digital thermometer works.  It is easy to read and using like this is a good way to introduce the technology to students.

Using data loggers on the IWB to show live data

Most data logging equipment can be connected to a PC and used to show live data from an experiment on the IWB.  You could even get students to take regular readings from this live data, building up skills like timing and recording results, whilst keeping the activity simple.  This is especially useful where there could be health & safety implications from the experiment.

The image shows the data captured from an experiment investigating the insulating properties of dog fur!  This graph was displayed at the end of the experiment, with live data being displayed on the screen as the experiment was underway.

Data loggers also allow many students with poor numeracy skills to visualise the results and answer questions like ‘did the temperature go up or down?’ which they might not have been able to do from a table of numbers.

Using data loggers to capture data and create a graph of results.

For students who lack the necessary coordination or organisational skills to collect results over a period of time, why not give them a data logger and get the hardware to do the work for them.  Students are released from the requirement to collect readings at fixed intervals, they don’t have to struggle to read the thermometer and the data is even graphed at the end by the data logging software.  More advanced students can even export their data into Excel.

This graph shows the temperatures collected during the dog hair insulation experiment (unfortunately I didn’t start the data logging collecting data until we had finished using the live display on the IWB).   Again this allows students with poor numeracy to visualise the results, and to make comparisons between the different data sets collected (e.g. which temperature dropped the fastest? the most? the slowest?)

Do you use data logging hardware/software with SEN students.  Leave me a comment and share your ideas with others.

From launching the app with the ‘My Exams’ icon, you come the my exams page where you enter the dates and subjects of any exams coming up.  You can also post how you feel about the exam (e.g. I am confident, I am busy revising) and also post a message about your exam to your Facebook page.  Once you have entered your exams, you are given a list of exams in date order, with a countdown for each.  Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much more to this section – I would have liked to see the ‘to do’ list as a separate tab in the application, perhaps collating the lists from all exams.

The app also has a section for useful and quite detailed study tips, like the importance of having a plan.  Whilst the app will only appeal to those students that are already preparing for exams (with an Apple device), it is another tool in their arsenal to help them succeed.  Search the Apple App store for ‘Exam Countdown’ – it’s a free download.

Now if only there was an app for willpower…

TES online

The Science forum on the TES (Times Educational Supplement) has plenty of enthusiastic teachers who are willing to answer queries, share good practice and act as a sounding board for your ideas.  The board is organised as a series of topics, and you can either start a new topic or respond to an existing topic.  The board can be used anonymously so you don’t have to reveal your identity if you are afraid to show your ignorance.

Twitter

Twitter is a website that lets you post short messages (140 characters or less).  People follow you and you follow other people – you can direct questions to individuals by putting @theirtwitterID at the start of a message.  To make twitter easier to use, you can use a third party program like Tweetdeck (which can also post Facebook and other updates for you too!).

Follow me on twitter and say hello – I’m cleverfiend (because fiendishlyclever was too long to be my user ID)

To speed things up I’ve created lists of the science teachers I follow on Twitter (note that the teachers may talk/twitter about other topics as well as science).  You can simply follow my lists and therefore follow the same professionals that I do.

Science teachers in the UK

Science teachers outside the UK

A word of warning about Twitter.  You hear some teachers raving about twitter saying its the best thing since sliced bread and how their PLN (personal learning network) helps them develop as a teacher.  I find it’s like shouting in the wind.  The signal to noise ratio is extremely low, and many of the teachers on twitter (including many of the ones I follow) are only there because they like to hear the sound of their own voice rather than to engage in meaningful dialogue.  I do stick with it though because it has proved to be useful on several occasions.

There are many other educators on Twitter as well as science teachers.  Once you find someone you like have a look at the people they follow and follow some of them yourself.   You can search Twitter for the #ASEchat tag – these are all posts (Tweets) by science educators using the Association of Science Education hashtag (#ASEChat).

Others

There are fan pages on Facebook but I’ve yet to find anything of value for CPD.  You can also engage in discussion with individuals through their blogs by leaving comments.  I know online communities have been set up in the past using the Ning platform but the people who run these tend to be ‘tech hippies’ jumping on every bandwagon that comes along rather than an overworked science teacher!

Let me know if you find a good online community that I haven’t mentioned – I would love to hear about it.

One of the questions we need to answer before we look for a solution is who will be sharing?  Will it be Science ASTs as a group of Nottinghamshire employees, will it be the Science ASTs acting as a group of individuals or does the LA want a county wide solution?  I’m assuming for now that we will be sharing resources as a group of interested teachers with a common goal.

Fragmentation is common online and sharing resources/getting your message across can be extremely difficult.  I’ve not succeeded in getting more than 100 visitors a day to my blog, and 150 a day to my resources site.  Of those that do visit my site, many science teachers are looking for a quick fix – to download a resource that meets an immediate need.  They aren’t bothered in improving their practice – just in taking the easy road.  I’d rather they do this with decent resources than not, so I don’t really mind – but it does make it difficult to get your message across.

The options we are considering are listed below.

As a matter of interest I looked at where the visitors come from to find my blog.

I then looked at similar data for my resources site

My figures seem to suggest that good visibility on Google is more important than the high number of visitors coming to the TES site.  Perhaps we should consider this as we make our decision.

I’d be interested to hear from other people who share resources and ideas.  What method should the Nottinghamshire ASTs use to share their resources and advice?  What have you found that works?  What advice could you give us?

Using Delicious(.com) to search for useful teaching resources.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo!  You can save, share and discover bookmarks with other people.  Because the opportunities to interact using this service are quite limited, it is often allowed in schools where other social sites are filtered out. Delicious is extremely useful for teachers and can be used in two main ways.

Saving and organising your bookmarks.

When planning lessons from home, if I find a resource that will be useful to me in future I save it to delicious (sometimes with a note of explanation).  This means I can access my list of bookmarks from home and school.  I now also have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies.  When you save your bookmarks you can choose if you want them to be private or public.  Public bookmarks are very useful because you can share them with colleagues and even students.  All I have to do is give students the web address to my delicious page  (delicious.com/fiendishlyclever) and they can look through my bookmarks to find the site they want.  More tech savvy teachers can embed this list on the school VLE as a way of sharing links very simply with students.

Searching for new resources and information

People only bookmark sites that are worth revisiting.  Searching the collected bookmarks of users from across the world should return better and more useful sites than just searching Google.  Simply visit the delicious.com main page and use the search box at the top.  Search results (example below) also show how many people have bookmarked each site and key words (tags) added to the bookmark when it was saved.  The search will also return any sites that match the search query in your personal collection.  (There is a save button next to each bookmark so you can save it to your personal list if you find the site useful)

Whilst many teachers do use Delicious to save and share links, many forget that it has tremendous value as a search tool.

A while ago I blogged that I used Windows Live Mesh (beta) for syncing files between home and work.  I’d recently got fed up of the huge wait on boot up while live mesh indexed files on my hard drive and I decided to try some alternatives.  These are my thoughts on the software products I tried:

So which did I choose?  There was little difference in transfer speed and overall functionality between products.  Live Mesh took an age to start up (whether from boot or resuming from hibernation) but the other two pieces of software made little noticeable difference to start up times.

At the moment I’m using Jungledisk (I’m on an old plan and only pay the storage fees, not the monthly fee) and I feel safer knowing my documents are securely encrypted in the cloud.  The only catch is the lack of conflict resolution which has to be checked manually at regular intervals.

There are many cloud-based file sync products out there, and I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried one of the products above or one similar (e.g. sugarsync) for use by teachers.

Update:  I’ve moved to Dropbox because of the relaunch of Microsoft Live Mesh (with corresponding moving goal posts), and I kept getting file conflicts in Jungledisk.  I found Dropbox was extremely reliable and I’ve got my storage limit up to 6Gb with referrals.  Dropbox also links with other services like PixelPipe, providing alternative ways of getting content into your Dropbox.  Remember to follow my referral link to DropBox if you haven’t got an account already – you get extra storage space!

With only one blog (with access controlled by the teacher), articles were written as a group effort, or simply in the last few minutes of the lesson as the plenary drew to a close.  More often than not this ended up being a photograph with a couple of lines of explanation.

The novelty of seeing their own work on the internet soon wore off and the blog stopped having a motivating effect on students.  As students lost interest in the blog, postings dried up and it became little more than a list of links sharing a space with stale content.

With less than 2 hits per day the effort of maintaining the blog didn’t seem worth the effort.  Content was transferred to my science blog several weeks ago (which seems like a more natural place to host the type of content we were generating) and search engines barred from indexing the site.  My school science blog has now been deleted and traffic redirected to point to this blog (at least until the domain name expires later this year).

So what did I learn from this foray into the world of student blogging?

• Students have to have ownership of the material to keep them motivated – this means students generating content.
• Think about purpose of the blog. Is it another writing medium? to showcase student work? to act as a newsletter or information to parents?
• There has to be an audience or purpose to the blogging – commenting on each others blogs, and feedback from the teacher meets this purpose.
• Embed using the blog into routines.  Completing a blog entry could be a homework or a regular plenary slot in lessons.
• Think about access to the blog.  Having one single blog limits interactivity and makes needs a teacher to manage the password.
• If you only want to host links then a Wiki is more appropriate (a wiki can also be a better tool for distilling and developing ideas as a group)
• A managed blog (or multiple blogs built on a single hosting installation) will save admin time in keeping the software up to date.

Have you tried blogging with students? I’d be interested to hear if you have any advice to add to mine for teachers wanting to try blogging in the classroom.

The training was delivered using a piece of conferencing software called Saba.  The session itself was very slick (despite the presenter not being fully familiar with the software) but not as interactive as a face-to-face session.  With yes/no buttons to signal our understanding (and laughter/applause buttons to convey some emotion) the presentation flowed quickly, with participants clicking on the raise hand button if they had a question (and they were duly ‘handed’ the microphone).

I found the session enjoyable, useful and was glad that I hadn’t needed to travel, but I began to wonder if a system like this could have any value in the classroom (or even replace the classroom).

Whilst online conferencing (video and audio) is suited to dissemination of information and CPD events, it isn’t ready for teaching or replacing the classroom yet.  Technology will have to evolve significantly before the job of the teacher is under threat.  Online conferencing made me realise the importance of face to face contact with your learners, their interaction with each other and how different teaching strategies contribute to learning in the classroom.

Have you used online conferencing with learners? What software did you use and how did it go?  I’d be interested to read your comments.