How Has Podcasting Helped Me With My Learning?

Last summer at about this time I published a post, " So what do you think the children get from Podcasting?" Since then I have extended my adventures, using Podium as a tool to support talking for writing and having posted my thoughts for the past 6 months, I thought I should share my students ideas about how the tool has supported their learning. I am currently writing student reports. Part of our reporting process is a series of Teacher/Learner Conferences, where we share and set targets and review our progress. The children are asked about things they feel they have made improvements in, things they still need to develop, and finally the things that they think have helped them to move on with their learning. Last week I began my end of year reviews, and several students mentioned how the podcasting process had helped them. I will not expand on this any more for the time but hand you over to the voice of my class. Here are some quotations lifted directly from conversations with students in my class.

• Podcasting and talking for writing have helped me to, think about if my sentences and the things I am writing make sense, so I can go back and change them
• Podcasting has helped me because I could listen to myself and then go back and correct the things I have written.
• I like podcasting because it is fun, and it has helped me to think about full stops and capital letters in my reading and writing.
• I really want to work on my reading, I want to make better sense of things, and read with expression, because I really like podcasting... We do lots of talking for writing before we write things and this also helps me get my ideas sorted before we work.
• I like it when we get the chance to go over stuff again, so I can see where I went wrong. I have really liked podcasting too because it has helped me think about my punctuation, and what kind to use.

Look forward to any thoughts you may have.

Storyphones: Language for Learning

With the increased availability of cheaper MP3 players, I have pondered buying a few to use with portable speakers. The main problem is that this would further add to the cacophony that already exists in my talk driven classroom, or require children to take turns with headphones. I could not really see a way of enabling multiple access to the device without a portable speaker or docking option. Then today this was published on Ictopus, about a new device the Storyphone. What a cool idea, essentially a wireless mp3 based listening centre.

I love the effect that podcasting and audio recording has had on my student's perception of reading and its purpose, and have wondered for a while about how we could use this to our advantage, in having students prepare stories for others around school. Either performing from existing texts or preparing their own for sharing through the network. The recording part would be fairly straightforward but individual or group access as said above to the completed texts more of a challenge, requiring either computers to be tied up or access to individual mp3 players. I realy like the idea of the storyphone on soooooooo many levels! Or something similar, and would encourage the company to ask the question "Why stop with selling this idea as a foundation stage tool?" I would love to have something similar available to use more widely with students of all ages across my school, how about you?

Softease Branch, Y3 and the Properties of Shape

As we aproach the end of term and the end of another school year, I am in the process of what might be called mopping up, looking at areas from the Mathematics framework that we have either not yet engaged with, or which the students have found tricky. Alongside this are some ICT curricular elements that I have not fully developed with the students. We have used data handling environments to for example present data from Science Experiments and as teaching aids with the IWB, but the children themselves have had limited independent access to the tools, other than in small groups at classroom based PCs.

This week we have been involved as a class in a Using and Aplying Mathematics unit, to consolidate our use of vocabulary relating to the properties of 2d shape. At the same time I wanted to embed and develop key skills from the ICT curriculum through the use of a Branching data base. The tool I chose to use for this series of tasks comes from Softease Studio, and is called Branch.

The sessions began however, not with Branch, but with a drag and drop sorting tool I had made using Smart Notebook. Other whiteboard users could make something similar, and an image of the tool is presented to the left for reference. The key to making and using Branching Data bases, binary trees or "dichotomous keys" is an ability to generate, ask and use "null" questions to divide a set of objects into two sets initially, gradually refining questions to distill the set until the branches at the end of the tree have only one object. This involves asking questions that have "yes or no" answers. This is process I have found easiest to develop using the observable features and properties of sets or collections of familiar objects. We often use Carrol Diagrams and Venn diagrams to do this, and the whiteboard tool I used as an introductory frame to support student and teacher discussion around this process before engaging with Branch itself, was designed to act as a link between these tools.

Since our task had a mathematical focus, we began with the shapes to the left of the book engaging the children in paired discussions around questions such as

• What can you see?
• What is Special about this shape?
• How is this shape different to or the same as this shape?
  

These were used to focus the students attention around the visible properties of the shapes, and to begin drawing on their prior experiences to describe them, for example

"It has four sides and four corners, all of the corners are right angles."

A great set of reponses describing the properties of a rectangle, however in our set we had two rectangles, a square and an oblong. Developing this we began to use the sorting tree model above dragging the two rectangles to the top of the simple tree, and asking the students to propose questions that focussed how they were different. Is it a rectangle ? Or does it have right angles? don't work since both shapes have right angles and by defintition are both rectangles. Are all the sides the same length? Provides a yes or no answer and allows the two shape to be separated.

We used the notebook to practice this idea together, comparing a number of shapes from our collection and then, testing our questions to see if they worked. The children were then introduced to branch and starting with only two shapes each time initially were were encouraged to make a series of trees practicing and rehearsing their questions together.

During follow up sessions the idea of working with 4 shapes was introduced and the children challenged to devise questions that would begin by dividing their shapes into two equal sets. This sounds easier than it is. Eg I have a square, an oblong a triangle and a pentagon. A good starting question might be does the shape have right angles? Does the shape have 4 sides? And because of our previous activity the children suggested these? From here the next question was also fairly straightforward for them based on the practice sessions of small trees the day before. However what happens if we drag a circle, a triangle, a square and a pentagon into the tree? Is it curved? Does it have three sides? Although having yes or no answers don't work in relation to the challenge question set at the beginning of the session. What is needed is to ask a question such as does the shape have "more" or "less" than x numbber of sides/corners/angles? The students were then encouraged to use Branch to explore these ideas, Before during our final session requiring the children to begin with 8 given shapes to design a game for their friends to play and test out.

The children really enjoyed this series of tasks, which challenged their thinking and enabled them through paired discussion to use and apply vocabulary developed in previous classroom based sessions to a decision making process. The UK Primary Mathematics Framework says students in the course of their work should

• Follow a line of enquiry by deciding what information is important; make and use lists, tables and graphs to organise and interpret the information
• Describe and explain methods, choices and solutions to puzzles and problems, orally and in writing, using pictures and diagrams
• Use Venn diagrams or Carroll diagrams to sort data and objects using more than one criterion
• Relate 2-D shapes and 3-D solids to drawings of them; describe, visualise, classify, draw and make the shapes.

As a guided and collaboratively based series of activities, using Branch in this way really helped support and scaffold this particular group of students engagement and discussion around these processes. It also enabled me to give context to the use of a tool that I have found frequently to be used because it is expected within the ICT scheme of work structure. As with many ICT tools I feel Branching data bases are incredibly useful and powerful tools, if they are used in designed and considered cross curricular learning situations where they can act as a "person plus," or a frame and scaffold to support use, application and transfer of skills and experience from one subject domain to another.

How to write...

in 1000 words or less. Just found and skim read this post from Lifehack, really like what I have read so far something to come back to later.

Pondering on visual storytelling

We have been sharing adventure stories and traditional tales with a twist, during Literacy Sessions for the last couple of weeks, and this week we have particualrly focussed on another of my favourites The Paper Bag Princess, By Robert N. Munsch.

My students seem to really enjoy, my taking a story I love and then trying to retell it in my own words. Perhaps this has come from the podcasting work we have done and their appreciation of how challenging this can be for them at times, or perhaps it simply comes from watching and listening as I try to recount and embellish the tales going through the mental processes I expect of them, visualising, mentally rehearsing and then retelling the tales as they develop. Hopefully though it is also because they recognise the magic of ideas. A story although in existence can still be reshaped, reformed, and refined in the mind of the teller. Even great stories and books such as this are made and altered through performance and enhanced by our interpretations and imaginings. This story telling process however I feel closely models and mirrors the path I currently using in encouraging the talking for writing process. Multimodal views of literacy see written text as "oral text," a symbolic permanent or semi permanant record of what it is we want to say or wish others to hear. Maybe as experienced writers this is something we have lost sight of in the teaching of writing. How many times do we say to ourselves, "hang on that doesn't sound right!" Perhaps we have forgotten over time that the voice we hear, and link to our actions as writers, took years not only to perfect but also to internalise. A forgotten part of our writing repertoire, however this is something which in the primary sector particularly many of our students are either only beginning with or are still in the process of developing. It took an introductory course in Semiotics, communication and representation recently, to actually challenge my perceptions and help me to realise just how complex this process must be. It was great this week then, when the students having eventually read The Paper Bag Princess themselves for the first time, to hear expressions about how they had already read this story, not heard it as I might have expected, and beginning I hope to make the link even if inadvertently between the spoken word and written text they were engaged with.

Over the last couple of days the students have begun to move on from the reading process to begin talking together, planning, mapping out and rehearsing potential plot elements for their own versions of the story. We have discussed and collected new titles for the story to help us innovate on the text, these include such barnstormers as; The Trash Can Princess, The Wheely Binbag Princess and so on, all of which have potential to influence the reactions of other characters in the story, and effect closing dialogue between the princess and the kidnapped prince charming she sets out to rescue. In the process the children have also created some fabulous story maps, and it is these that have prompted this post.

Stimulated by the discussion which began to emerge from the class and the quality of the illustrations the children generated around the story, I have decided to trial something a little bit different in tandem with the story writing process itself. We often use role play and freeze framing as part of our talk for writing process and in a previous post I talked about how interesting it might be to use elements of the Commoncraft approach to animation to support visual storytelling. Having watched the recent release of the Indiana Jones trilogy that featured some really great animated storyboards, I was really fired up to have a go at using this to frame my in to the process. This week we began making scenery and cutout characters, to support the idea of multimedia storyboarding. I am hoping this will inspire the children and help with rehearsing story sequence, something one or two are still finding difficulty with. The idea revolves around using the scenery and character cutouts to frame scenes from the story, capturing these as digital photographs and then using Photostory to sequence the scenes and events. From here I would like the children to add voice overs to tell the story with completed outcomes for publication as simple group movies.

For my more able students I hope this will help extend and expand their vocabulary use and help with the text revision process as they write, while for others, some who are still reluctant to record, or having problems in maintaining logical sequencing as they move from plot element to plot element, that this visual and oral story prompt will help scaffold their progression through the story events they want to tell.

From Probot to LOGO: Some previous posts in action

I have put together this photo montage for the time being to share some of the activities my students have engaged in while using Probots and MSWLOGO this term. Even though presented here in an ICT context, references placed towards the end of this post highlight a number of areas from the Primary Framework for Mathematics with which the children engaged, through the using and applying strand, and which draw into focus the cross curricular potential of work such as this to help children make links between areas of learning.



The file is progressive and begins with the children using the probot to create skeletons around which they made and then decorated their own floor compasses. From here working in groups the students used their floor compasses to learn about compass direction, predicting outcomes from given inputs, eg if I am facing east, and make a 1/4 turn east what direction will I be facing? This required them to know and use the numerical values for rotation sizes, or to calculate these using halving and doubling strategies. Within the problems set we also replaced fractions of a turn with the number of degrees, and the directions of a rotation with clockwise/anticlockwise, and right/left. The children went on from this to make up challenge questions for their friends in other groups.

In the next series of activities the children made mazes using strips of paper. Working initially with right angles, some children chose to extend the activity to include 45 degree turns. The children used their knowledge that a Probot step was 1 cm to help them measure the distances the probot would need to move, and estimation to predict and test the size of turn they would need to make at each point in order to navigate the maze. After step by step planning the children were asked to input procedures, that would take the turtle from one end of the maze to the other without stopping.

The final photographs in the series represent a session in the ICT suite where children used MSW LOGO for the first time. The students were given a prepared treasure map which they loaded into the LOGO workspace, before we discussed as a class and decided the route around the island we would take, or the order in which we would visit particular landmarks. Transferring the floor based experiences of the students to the screen was not difficult, and after only a brief introduction to the commands and how these should be input, they worked very successfully and independently, to resolve many of the issues they encountered. In the plenary to this session the children were asked what they would like to do in the next session, and suggested that they would like to have a blank treasure map, that they could add landmarks to themselves, they could then ask their friends to journey around their island following a route they had prepared.

This series of activities, as well as the obvious ICT and Geographical links, offered opportunities for the students to engage practically with the following strands and related objectives from the Primary Framework for Mathematics

Measuring

• Know the relationships between.., metres and centimetres..., choose and use appropriate units to estimate, measure and record measurements
• Read, to the nearest division and half-division, scales that are numbered or partially numbered; use the information to measure and draw to a suitable degree of accuracy

Understanding Shape

• Read and record the vocabulary of position, direction and movement, using the four compass directions to describe movement about a grid
• Use a set-square to draw right angles and to identify right angles in 2-D shapes; compare angles with a right angle; recognise that a straight line is equivalent to two right angles

Counting and Understanding Number

• Read and write proper fractions, interpreting the denominator as the parts of a whole and the numerator as the number of parts; identify and estimate fractions of shapes;

While using and applying their knowledge and understanding of these areas in the context of problems and puzzles.

Many of the activities here are drawn from or build on previous posts that can be found within the control category to the left of the page.

Explanatory Texts From a Multimodal Starting Point

As a class this term we have been reading the Amanda Mitchison Biography "Who was... ? Isambard Kingdom Brunel." The story even though a challenge in places has fascinated the students. The book has proven to be a fantastic stimulus for discussion about the "great man of Iron" but when combined with web based images and tools has also stimulated high quality talk for writing in support of mechanism based explanatory texts .

Of Worms and Men..

The tunnelling shield invented by Brunel's father, appeared in the opening chapter of the biography and was a great starting point for discussion, one which began with Marc Brunel's observing ship worms at Chatham Docks, before inspiring his idea to dig tunnels through a process of removing spoil, inching men forward in a protective shell and lining with bricks the space behind them as they work. This principle is still employed in modern tunneling, and the enormous tunnel boring machines we see today work on a similar basis. The use of modern control technologies, machine automation of processes, global positioning and monitoring and sensing technologies may have improved navigational accuracy, speeded up the process, but it is no less dangerous today than in the past, spoil still must be removed and the machinery maintained, driven and programs planned, miners still scurry around in the spaces between the tool and the tunnel, lining it as the machine edges forward. The system has advanced, but even as the technology charges on, the principles of its evolution and in many ways its operation remain similar to those originated in Brunel's time. A need is identified, available designs and tools explored affordances exploited to identify possible solutions, before adaptations or innovations are made on these to create a product that either meets our needs, or carries us forward into the unknown. As we have read Brunel's story together I have tried to be mindful of this in the discussions we have had, not only talking about the great man's life and works, but also exploring the similarities between old and new technologies. Not only is this a valuable place to be in terms of historical investigation, comparing past and present, but an essential process based conversation to have in light of a DT curriculum in the England that requires students to engage as designers and makers through Investigation Dissassembly and Evaluation Processes, and an ICT curriculum that requires a similar set of processes to evolve beyond the skills based aspects of the curriculum in developing ideas and exploring the impact of ICT on everyday life.

In terms of Literacy development the formal use of terms relating to "cause and effect" are not common place in the talk that we use or encounter. The written genre of explanation requires us to write from an impersonal perspective and to use "Causal Connectives" such as "this causes, " "as a result," and so on. Taking an impersonal view of the action we are describing can be a real challenge, I remember myself writing science experiments up for the first time at secondary school and being reminded constantly that I needed to use impersonal pronouns while I tried to explain the process as if I wasn't involved. In essence this made the difference between my report being an explanatory text and a set of instructions or a recount. In talking about diagrams such as the tunnelling shield I began the process of modelling the language structures the students needed to hear, that would help them rehearse the written work they would use later. Recording these on the diagrams we explored as a flow chart.

Eg
Men standing in the shield dug out the soil and rock, which was thrown to the ground.
Labourers loaded the spoil into barrows, that were used to carry it out of the tunnel.
As the shield moved forward, the tunnel was lined with bricks, this helped support the roof... and so on.

As the students became more familiar with the sound of the genre, we began to collect some of the words and phrases we were using to display on our word wall.

Converging Technologies

For the last couple of weeks we have been using our literacy sessions to extend our experiences of writing explanatory texts while exploring how some of the technologies that enabled Brunel's visions to emerge worked. We focussed on steam engines and Steam Locomotives technologies Brunel did not invent but was keen to adapt and exploit in his endeavours. To explore the principles behind turning up and down movements into rotary movement to drive ships such as the great Eastern and Western we explored how stationary pumping engines worked. "North Star" one of the first locomotives to run on the Great Western Railway was built at Robert Stephenson's works in Newcastle, and as we had found some amazing material online about Stephenson's Rocket we decided to use this as a model to help us find out about how Brunel's locomotives worked.

Multimodal Starting Points Using Talk to Promote Writing

Within this unit although using some written texts initially to support how the features of an explanatory text are presented and work, most of our activity involved making and using models, and exploring video presentations and animations to help the talk for writing process. During the first week we used videos from Espresso, to share visual and audio descriptions of the processes involved in powering a Bolton and Watt Stationary Beam Engine. We used these video texts to scaffold and rehearse verbal explanations of how the engine worked. As a class we made cardboard models, including linkages and a background diagram of the engine to help us create the link between our talk and the writing we would later engage in. As the children worked with these they were encouraged to talk about share and rehearse with their partners their growing understanding of how these machines worked, gradually being encouraged to expand and present their oral explanations to include a range of sentence openers from our word wall and to begin including the causal connectives they would need to use in their written captions for presentation later in the week. The children were very excitied by the quality of the modelled outcomes they produced, but I was also really impressed by the quality of written outcome produced.

The second week, of activity involved the students in expanding the process previously worked on by creating a similar model of Stephenson's Rocket. We began with the image below left, before the students began creating their own background diagrams similar to that on the right. The students were given a cut out drive wheel to begin with, and the large wheel space at the front drawn in as their starting point. While discussing the source image we also identified that this drive wheel would be where our mechanism would be added to the diagram later in order to give a sense of scale to their drawings.

To support the sessions as the week progressed we used this nice Flash animation from the BBC website as our stimulus for talking for writing. It helped us decide what the mechanism we needed would look like, and to pick out the four key processes we would include. The Steps in our explanation would be

1) Firing up the engine (how the water was heated)
2) Water turning to steam (why the water was heated)
3) Steam forces down the Piston (what the steam was for)
4) The drive shaft turns the wheel (the outcome of all this effort)

On completion of the diagram and mechanism the children were encouraged to explain the process orally to partners and rehearse the captions they would add.
They were challenged to use a variety of sentence openers interestingly several of the students used time connectives they had collected in previous writing session and units to do this. Among the success criteria for the activity was also the need to use the causal connectives we had collected link action with outcome in their model as they described them. I have been really excited by the quality of the children's work. I haven't any photographs of the outcomes from this activity yet, but will include an example or two later. Combining multimodal text use, talk for writing and animated mechanisms however did have a dramatic effect on the way the students finally presented their outcomes. Linking the use of DT to model the process not only gave context to scaffold talk for writing but beyond the DT and literacy based experiences gained from this series of activities, the students were also helped to make links between this and their science work on forces using magnets and springs, and to apply language developed here in their ICT unit on control as we explored how input brings about output.

Image Credits:
Tunnelling Shield from Wikipaedia
Stephenson's Rocket Cutaway From BBC
Student work and outcomes SDMills

Using Textease to make Hide and Reveal Tools

I am commited to a multiple tool approach to working with ICTs and keen to explore as many tools as possible, when writing or developing classroom activities for students rather than simply promoting and sticking with the ones I am most familiar. I feel it is important to be mindful that any one tool rarely meets the identified learning outcomes or the processes we want to use the tools for, either in resource development or with the students during projects. Following my interview with James for the Podium Podcast during half term, I was forwarded some Textease files to play with, they didn't quite fit the bill in terms of the resources I was working on but did excite me in terms of how they and the environment could be used to develop resources and model and make pictograms with students.

There are a number of available tools that can be used to create pictograms as tally charts. Tools such as Interactive-resources' Maths Pack 2 include flash based ITPs that enable class tally charts and pictograms to be made, by dragging or clicking to reveal images. These can be used to support discussion and preparation for students to engage with other data handling processes. IWB Notebooks too can be made, drawing axes using the line tools, then stacks of images created for drag and drop, using the clipart gallery and clone tools to create more personalised pictogram as tally surveys.

The method used to create the pictogram files with Textease, allows a hybridisation of the two process, using the hyperlink tool in the software to create an onclick event. That is to say, to create a file that when spaces within the chart are clicked or pressed, reveal an image or object.

So How do we do this?

The first step in creating a pictogram file is to decide what your survey will be about, and then to collect and import images that will represent and support the data collection process. These images can either be selected from the extensive clip bank provided by the software, or imported from outside the tool.

To create my pictogram I began by inserting one of each image I wanted to use, resizing each one to scale to the chart space I was using. With the images in place and resized I selected, then copied them, pasting repeatedly until I had the number of images I wanted to use in each area of the chart. Next I arranged the images in columns as shown in this image.


Unfotunately at the moment there is no quick way to carry out the following step, which is to create the onclick effect, so each image must have the effect applied individually.

Adding the Onclick Effect

1) Click to select the image (object) you want to hide and reveal on click.
2) Select the hyperlink button from the tool bar
3) Click the animate tag
4) Click in the "hide/show on click," and "hidden on open" tick boxes
5) Click close

Clicking off the object, the next time it is clicked, it disapears. Clicking on the object again, or rather the space where it should be, reveals it or makes it appear.

Now saving the file and closing it, when opened again it presents the viewer with an empty set of axis, and clicking in the spaces reveals the images hidden there. This tool can now be used with the class to collect data, on our journey to school today as a personalised ITP.

However if your school has a network or site license for the suite of tools, the file can also be shared with students to work on themselves. By placing a copy of the file in a shared folder on the network, students can open softease, and the file to work on themselves; customise it based on their own surveys, perhaps by visiting other classes, or the one developed by the class. They could add personalised titles and axis labels, and "save the file as", to personal spaces to maintain the original template.

As you can see the process of creating the file is fairly straightforward so students could also be helped or shown how to make their own and not ticking or unticking the "hidden on open" box, the survey data can be maintained, for use in other work. The outcomes of activities using this tool can also be saved directly or printed out, without the need to copy the screen to another software environment, which is neccesary when using ITPs such as those mentioned earlier. Providing template files with onclick reveal means this activity would be ideal for use with younger students making pictograms, where the charts can be generated quickly, and the focus of Data Handling activity, that of solving problems and asking and answering questions reache with increased pace. Thanks to Doug and James for sharing this technique with me. I hope the post has done it justice.