Tracking a Learning Story: Using Powerpoint and Slideshare as Digital Floor Books

Perhaps I should now entitle this post "Tricked into a learning story." I was amazed today when I visited my Slideshare space to find one of the Powerpoint files I uploaded a while back had been viewed 100504 times.

I don't usually quote my site stats, this space for me is not about that, it is a place where I reflect and share the work I do with my students and ideas that inspire me as a result. However I recieved an email from slideshare a site I trusted as a member and set off to see what it was all about. I was really excited as you may imagine by what I saw when I visited my slidespace having not visited for a while. I didn't expect a service like this to play about with my stats, and certainly not in a public facing space. I put together the original post and published a link on twitter to celebrate. As it turns out I have been well and truly had by what has turned out to be their april fool. Thanks to members of my Twitter network, and especially NeilAdam, I found out about this, and am feeling suitably foolish as a result.... Well done slideshare!

Now feeling marginally calmer about it I have decided I should take the "prank" as a dose of medicine to remind myself of all the esafety lessons I have taught my students. Now however it seems I have to add to these sessions, that even the sites you think you can trust may not be what they say they are. I can take a joke as well as the next, but am seriously unhappy about how this has turned out, and with the availabilty of my own hosting space am now intending to move my files as a result.

Originally the show in question was created as a "digital floorbook" as part of an MSc Assignment on the potential of ICT in assessment for learning. It follows through and tracks a teaching sequence, using IWB notes and photographs as evidence, in a planned process to move my students toward the formal algorithms for addition and subtraction, drawing on and evaluating the range of mental methods and informal jottings they were using at the time.

Using mental methods to construct a standard written method for addition and subtraction

View more presentations from twowhizzy.

This "floor book" has been shared a number of times, and featured in a previous post. It is now buried away but so this post does not become an entirely wasted space I am embedding it again in the hope that you may find it useful.

Thanks to everyone who really has viewed or downloaded the show, however many of you there are. Maybe Slideshare will be able to give me a more accurate view on this soon!