Since September I have been using a set of PowerPoint Templates to help organise, standardise and simplify my lesson planning and organisation.
The templates carry a standard style
Unit/Lesson/Challenge Title
WALT (We Are Learning To) Overall Lesson Objective
Differentiated WILFs (What I Am Looking Fors), these are leveled and coloured Red, Amber, Green in rubric format to enable a view of progression in learning.
The Slides themselves are laid out differently according to purpose within the lessons, and may change according to subject, but the Title or WALTs are duplicated in order to be visible throughout the lesson.
My title slides include the session WALT and an image from the PLTS posters I created. The PLTS poster image displayed will be identified according to unit skills focus, and the particular skill focus for a session is highlighted on the image through the addition of an autoshape around it.
Slides to support progression within the lesson and outline tasks are inserted as duplicates where required in the lesson structure, and in some cases printed out for use on the desktops of students as “Success Criteria."
Within each Template show I have also inserted PLTS related slides, that contain the progressions we used to support learning during Integrated curriculum sessions. These have been placed to support rubric development by deletion. It is easier to start with all content included initially and delete those elements not required.
Here is an examples shared in Google Docs format to show what I mean. Any thoughts would be useful and helpful.
This morning I have been fiddling with my Iron Man Story with Wordle. I have made no alterations to it as a result, but wondered what visual pointers I might be able to pick out for improvement, by playing with the text and some of the tools on the site . Here are two versions of the story, as generated in different ways by the Wordle environment.
This image of my story was generated using the language menu, where I asked the tool to include all words from the text I had generated, in the word cloud. The variations in text size indicate the frequency with which words were used in my story, and as you can see the most common words used here are
the
to
his
and
Perhaps in sharing this image with a friend, or through projection as a class, my thoughts could be directed to reread what I have written, considering as I go the connectives and sentence openers I have used. I have a number of students who still regularly use "and" to join episodes in a story, and whose texts can appear list like as a result. Using Wordle in this way with them might be useful as a tool to highlight this, perhaps asking them to consider using "and" as an indicator of a sentence end, or to review their texts and consider other possible connectives to replace this as they revise their text. It is easy to get bogged down in the word level and sentence level structure of the text, and as a writer I should also be concerned about how my audience hears my voice and what I intend to communicate, the meaning I want to make, the images I want to share. The variation in my word choice and use of adventurous vocabulary and sentence structure will be indicative of this, and how well I have achieved my goals. So revisiting the language menu I set the tool to remove common English words from the cloud, to have a look see.
Don't know about you but actually I'm really pleased with this, I know I wanted to use some similes in my story, because Ted Hughes, my model, used these a great deal as comparative descriptive devices. The word Like is highlighted and knowing I was writing in the 3rd person, and past tense, I am more likely to have used this word as a comparative than a description of how the character was feeling about something, indeed had I done so the verb would have ended in "ed" to indicate this I hope. In addition throughout the cloud are a variety of adjectives and verbs, all of which are around the same size so I have not been repeating myself overly. On a word level the clouds seem to suggest that I am quite good at this writing lark, so perhaps my next step will be to review my work against the wider features of the Genre I am writing in.
As a tool for reviewing my own writing, I have enjoyed using Wordle to visually evaluate the tone and feel of my work. While writing my recent MSc Dissertation I checked each chapter in Wordle, to ensure that the key messages were included and that they focussed on particular aspects, by reviewing the Vocabulary they contained. Here on a more professional level, I have begun to use and explore the tool considering teaching points arising from my own exploration of the text type I would like my students to engage with. The final outcome of the unit will involve the students in preparing onscreen versions of the story for inclusion in their animated books, and use of onscreen "dulled texts" as models and frames. In reviewing student outcomes and encouraging self evaluation and improvement the visual nature of the text representation here could be incredibly useful as a support.
On a slightly different note, I am also wondering about wordle as a tool for presenting the outcomes of talk for writing. During Visualisation tasks, where tasks such as "burst Writing" or the creation "word showers" might be a transient outcome on whiteboards, Wordle could provide extension opportunities for students to engage semiotically to present outcomes for display, perhaps considering how colour, font style and cloud shape effect the tone of the collections they have made.
Popping into Honeycomb this evening was an absolute joy... Its official and from the mouths of babes, I can design cool pages. Greeting me when I logged on was a comment from C, who is as chatty in text as she is face to face.
Visiting her space to reply I was greeted with her home page now with the addition of a poem she had written in school today, and a browse around leading to a blog she had added that included an additional poem innovating on one developed in previously in class about Morning.
In addition to her own work, C had also been busily visiting her friends leaving encouraging comments and stickers too. What I was particularly impressed with was her use of the "assessment Sandwich," A slice of well done, followed by a filling of astute and insightful things to help her friends make their work better and sealed inside a further slice of encouragement. These will be really great tools to help others see how we can work and learn together in this space. Thanks C you are an inspiration.
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.
The Common craft Show, published by Lee and Sachi LeFever, has really helped me understand some of the principles and ideas I found tricky to explain to friends and colleagues, particularly blogs and wikis, and the principles behind RSS Feeds. During the Summer I was drawn into the "Twitterverse," following friends and fellow bloggers in between posts. An "enthusiastic lurker" perhaps more than a proactive participant, but nonetheless Twitter as a tool has fascinated me, like so many environments in the web2.0 world in terms of its hidden or not quite yet discovered potentials. It has among other things been used to facilitate audience participation at a number of conferences I have attended lately, through live publishing of comments and questions among other things during presentations and events, so when in my feeds and tweats I found the folk @ Commoncraft had made a video about Twitter, how it worked and how it was useful, I was quick to take a look.
This post is not about Twitter actually, sorry... Its more about the "CommonCraft" style and approach, and the additional videos I found in the catologue after watching the Twitter video and the inspiration that they evoked around the potential of this style of presentation for use in the classroom. As you can see the video presentation is chatty, friendly and I think enormously appealing. The professional homemade look and feel, I think lends them beautifully to a genre and style of animation and presentation that could be readily adapted and used to develop multimodal writing outcomes with students in the classroom.
My experiences with students, tell me how challenging amid the excitement of making a film students find taking time to frame shots, waiting for that hand to get out of the frame. It is usually not until the finished product, as they see it, is aired, that groans emerge about the hand in frame that shouldn't have been their. While watching the Commoncraft Show again this week, I have begun thinking about how often my intentions and desired outcomes may overcomplicate what is neccesary to enable the technology to fulfill its roles in class based animation activities. The students are usually happy with the work they make, and the outcomes they achieve excite and motivate them. I began wondering just how important in using audio and video as a writing medium it really is for students to be hindered by the issue of "hands in" productions. We all want quality outcomes to result from the work our students develop, but perhaps the question I have missed when thinking about animation projects in the classroom is why we were really doing them. What purpose will they serve? For me animation is about multimodal communication and storytelling, so maybe if this is what I want to achieve, then I should review this side of the process rather than dwelling on the technical aspects too much. Disney, Pixar and Aardman's animators, spend years honing their skills, and hours/months planning the outcomes and making the sets and environments in which they will set their stories. Perhaps their are other ways to develop situations where emergent learners can develop their understanding of the elements that make up the audio visual storytelling process. Ways that enable them to tell stories while they engage with and explore the nuances of the media and tools involved, and this is where the Common craft show came into my thinking.
I made some films with students in Y4 last year using the Stop Motion Process, and Stick Puppets to tell the story of the Ramayana. The project was split into scenes that we storyboarded in class and which the students went on to use in small groups to recount and tell different parts of the story as short stop motion clips. Their completed group video clips were later compiled as a class movie, by editing together on the IWB in Movie Maker. Communicating beyond the visual however was something the students found difficult to reconcile, and to support their story most drew on the familiar comic strip genre, including speech bubbles and captions to support their narrative. Because of our limited experiences at the time, time limitations for the projects and student eagerness to complete their work, the text elements were displayed for too short a time for their audience to see and appreciate them, but the idea was their. Animation as a storytelling process is incredibly complex, requiring more than the skills and knowledge of how to achieve motion, though in the emergent stages I think this is what the students find most exciting and appealing, the bringing to life of static and inanimate objects. While watching the Common Craft Show what struck me as powerful, was what might have happened if we had actually seen the video creation process as a digital writing outcome. Like "The Common Craft Show" this project used paper based hand drawn and screen printed cut outs. I have begun to ponder on how a "Common Craft" type approach, combining talk with the props we had developed as the "writing outcome" may have enabled text rehearsal and the bringing of these objects to life as a visual narrative.
A common craft type approach to using video and animation in the classroom seems to offer a powerful pedagogical tool, for linking some of the ideas I have explored in previous posts around multimodality and literacy development. Check out this description from The Commoncraft Blog where Lee describes
"How the workflow breaks down:
I create the first draft of the script and basic storyboard, we review it
We both edit the script, often concurrently using Google docs.
I create the illustrations
We walk through the storyboard and script together
In the studio, Sachi runs the camera and effects (animation/stop-action) and I direct the story
Sachi does all the video editing/finishing
I blog about it
In terms of our views of literacy and the writing process, what does this reveal about the complexities of digital text authoring. This reflects the complexities of a process based outcome, What Lies Beneath this situation, far outweighs the apparent simplicity of the outcome. Planning, drafting, , reworking/editing/revising, rehearsing, performing, evaluating, before re-editing, revision and publication; and throughout... Collaborating.
The process of oral storytelling, storyboarding and talk for writing we have begun to develop in support of "podcasting" seems very similar. Many of the materials the students develop to do this never see the light of day beyond the planning stage. Using this whiteboard based visual storytelling medium and process would I'm sure not only be really good fun but an interesting way to blend and evidence the role of talk for writing through practical activity and outcome. The added bonus is that using this medium as the writing outcome, we have courtesy of Common Craft a number of ready made models of the text form to draw on, share, evaluate and work with as a frame to hang the text development process on.
As a final soundbite, how about this project or one like it to link ideas from a science or geography project through ICT and an extended Literacy unit. How would you classify it? Is it a non chronological report, an explanatory or a Persuasive Text or does it encompass elements of all three?
How could we use this tool to enable students in taking ownership of and sharing their conceptual models or in bringing concept cartoons to life, perhaps using the process to explain pollination, photosynthesis or condensation? What about creating a set of instructions? Could we use the process to tell stories drawing on storyboards as writing media in their own right, with cut out characters and voice overs using digiblues. This would also be relatively easy to accomplish using digital cameras/ scanners and PhotoStory. How about using IWB presentations, capturing video through the smartboard recorder, with students adding narration through tools such as Movie Maker. The smartboard software could be installed for use as an application suite for this purpose on machines not attached to the whiteboard. This as you can tell has really got me thinking. What do you think?
I took quite a while formulating a suitably illiterative title for this post, that sets out to share two new podcast episodes. I didn't intend to publish these when I planned the writing unit from which they come, indeed the writing outcome for our work was actually to publish a written anthology, which even as I write is awaiting lamination and binding.
Both podcast episodes were actually recorded in class as integral and incidental parts of our talking for writing process while we experimented and explored rhyme and rhythm during the writing of Limericks and Spells. The poems created by the students were recorded and then played back during literacy hour plenary sessions, inorder to support evaluation of written outcomes against the success criteria we had established for each poetic form. Recording and Listening to the voice recordings was a part of the students ongoing and assessment for learning process, a chance to externalise and share their internal voice, and to consider how or whether their poetry worked within the rules we had established together, as well as an opportunity to consider with their friends how they might improve not only their content but also to gain suggestions about things they might do to restructure parts of the poem before publication. There is for me anyway an incredible sense of satisfaction in these recordings in terms of seeing (sorry hearing) how far the students have moved in their emerging understanding of the relationship between reading and writing for an audience and speaking and listening as a presentational device. They were so keen to include expression and what they were learning that in one case particularly the evidence presented in the limerick shows how the student had so obviously used the spoken cadence and rhythm rehearsed not only during rehearse and write process, but also in his final presentation of his final poem. It is also obvious from the background sound that each poem was recorded in class. The internal mike on my current laptop being sensitive enough to capture not only the performers voice but also the rustlings and tappings of the more "kinaesthetic" members of my class. Fortunatley within the spell recitals these have added to the stormy atmosphere added through the inclusion of thunder claps. I hope you enjoy listening to these, but that also this post in support, offers another perspective on the potential role of digital voice recording and podcasting software in the classroom.
I eventually got round to buying a copy of Comic Life for PC, from the good folk at TAG Learning on my recent visit to BETT, and having installed it on my laptop, am all geared up to use it as part of my Assessment For Learning toolbox.
In school we keep classroom scrapbooks, where we have begun to use digital photographs alongside written or scribed records of "snippets" from student talk to help tell learning stories. "Narratives of Learning" have been a key feature in my research work, forming the basis for data analysis, as well as acting as a vehicle to share my work with others. Classrooms are multimodal places, and context is key to using "data forms" we collect there. I have come to see learning and teaching events as acts of shared meaning making, where language is the primary mediating tool. Working with young children the ways in we share meanings and negotiate common understanding is usually through tool mediated talk and activity. Despite our knowledge that talk and effective questioning is often more revealing about the processes that students engage in when learning, than the material they record, we still seem to have a strong drive to ensure that what the students do is logged, even if as a dated sentence. What is missing from this as from previous methods of recording progress, tick lists and charts, is frequently the process that lead to the outcome, and the success of the child however small. The joy, the excitement, the disappointment, the shock so readily visible in the faces and gestures of the student, or the gusto and energy that students apply to the tasks they "do," followed perhaps by the surprise or pride in something believed to be so difficult suddenly achievable. Somehow all of this magic, the moments that bring joy not only to the class but that in my opinion, make classroom teaching so worthwhile and exciting, are rarely so transparent or the richness of the experience we shared evident when we look through our exercise books.
I have been incredibly excited by our Class Podcasts and Blog that have begun to inject a student voice literally into the recording system. Context driven activities with a sense of purpose and audience, that have begun to help both my students and myself engage with self review and evaluation, and are beginning through collaborative action to support a growing digital record of the "long Conversation" we have as teachers and learners. I am increasingly aware however that these objects, do not fit into the world of outcome driven assessment. What of the process behind these, the journey and the long conversation hidden behind and that lead to them. Well perhaps tools such as Comic Life can begin to offer me some scaffolding for this.
In PE this term we have been developing "passing and receiving" skills through the playing and designing of simple invasion games, and this week the students have been working in small groups to create their own, with the development in our next session of jigsawing to share our games with each other. The genuine learning experiences that have lead to this would be lost witho0ut the means to log or record them. Armed with digital camera, I had initially thought about creating a PowerPoint Learning story, and then as previously, using PowerPoint for Mac to change these into a video format to share with others. Instead I have opted to use Comic Life, with the students to create comic strips that tell the story behind their game and how it is played. My Numeracy Group require a great deal of practical work and consolidation, and their activities too are often transient mediated by recordings on Dry wipe whiteboards, through talk and the apparatus they use. These experiences are no less important to them as learners, than the need to show progress through written recording. As can be seen in previous posts, these processes too I have been frequently logged using digital Photographs and PowerPoint. I have pondered today, on how the practice of foundation stage colleagues might help me to log these events and processes. Using "post it" notes to record children's talk as we work, that can later be used to annotate digital photographs in Comic Life through the addition of speech and thought bubbles.
Comic Life affords a number of means of publication for the strips developed. They can either be printed out on completion, for inclusion in our scrapbook, or exported to html, for inclusion in our website community pages, adding another means of sharing our activity with carers. On interesting format, that I haven't had a go with yet, is the ability to export as movie. This will be something to play with later.
Explaining how I plan or visualise the learning routes I design for my students has often been a headache for me, since I haven't found a visual model to help me explain. The IKEA man image I presented in a previous post, although describing my behaviour during the planning process, somehow didn't really explain how I see this process in my head. In order not to make a mountain out of a molehill, I have made a molehill out of a mountain instead, and in this post wanted to share a visual model I am currently working on with my students to help break the processes we engage with into steps while supporting us in working towards the outcomes I want to achieve. I would like to thank Di Pardoe for the idea behind this image, and for the inspirational work she did with us around assessment for learning practices, in recent years.
I mentioned in my IKEA Man post how concerned I was becoming that when we look at planning frameworks, particularly like those presented in the QCA schemes of work, we tend not to look at the end product first, or the outcome we want to achieve. A learning focus often taking a back seat to the need to deliver. This may seem strange to some of us, plans are essentially linear after all, we move from point a to point b and then we can do c. Our plans might be, but classroom learning as a long conversation, provides many first hand experiences of how when engaging with students, the assumptions we make during planning, can quickly become unravelled, leading to more complex situations and requirements than we intended or expected. Recent events have required my reflection on this and to find a way of formalising visually, the processes I want to engage with in supporting student learning and to guide classroom visitors and myself toward seeing where we are now and how this has been achieved, modelling how the small tasks and activities in our learning process are leading towards desired and intended outcomes. I still feel it is important that we and the students see the big picture, to ensure understanding of how the steps or processes that evolve link to the way we are approaching these goals, and using the Maths Mountain above is enabling me to begin fulfilling many of these needs. It enables students to participate in the journey we have taken so far and to see where we are to go next as we traverse our topic. On the top of the mountain goes the big objective, or target outcome for the week, and at stages or stopping off points up the mountain the smaller objectives to be achieved are displayed. We have a character who climbs the mountain with us as the week progresses, and during our plenaries we review the sessions and make decisions using traffic lights about whether we can move on up the path. In our final sessions we engage with a problem or a puzzle involving the steps we have developed to review where we are. This simple visual device is helping me to improve the transparency of the processes we engage in, and currently flexible enough to allow small diversions, while focusing my attention and guiding my conversation toward the intended outcomes of each session, allowing at a glance for feedforward and feedback around the steps in our journey and the possibility of insight for students and visitors to where we will be going next.
After attending the Year 3 numeracy sessions held in Bristol today I have been considering how this tool might also support another issue, that of evidence of learning. The practical nature of the teaching and learning processes shared and outlined today by our colleagues, and the emphasis on talk as a process I have over time come to recognise as "thinking together" is in stark contrast with school based requirements to have children record all outcomes. I was interested to hear the question "Why are we doing this? raised, is it for the students, for their parents, for the inspector or maths coordinator? One suggestion made to free us from this concern was that we list the things students had done in a word processor and to copy and paste these to create cut outs that could be stuck into student's books at the end of the week, or to perhaps capture photographs of students engaged in practical work and discussion to be added. This essentially might turn the student's maths book into a learning log, where some pages have student recording, while others outlined learning outcomes or showed images of learning in the first instance generated by the teacher. This fascinates me since it parallels much of the work I have been doing for my Degree on "Narratives of Learning." As a result this evening I am toying with the idea of producing in a smaller format the maths mountain for students to use with our existing green for go and pink for think colour coding system, so they can use the I can statements included in our class mountain, to share with each other their personal progress towards the class targets set, perhaps helping to take ownership of the learning we engage in. Perhaps at significant stages in the process, during plenaries or as part of a morning task the students might be encouraged to highlight or later annotate these with sentences about their work, putting the vocabulary they are engaging with into practice, or illustrating the mountain with examples of what we have been learning. Perhaps the addition of a problem or puzzle to be worked together, could also be used to provide additional evidence of their ability to use and apply the skills and experiences gained during their practical work. I was really drawn to the power of the idea of encouraging children to express themselves, what they have gained from a set of practical activities, rather than forcing an activity merely to model it for an often remote audience. As professionals, the idea of our plans as records of learning, even though as an assessment support teacher I used to advocate this, somehow right now doesn't seem to cut the mustard in some circles, and so this for me right now is certainly worth further consideration. I would be grateful for any comments that might support this idea.
(Having just reread this I have amended the title, it is a bit of a ramble, perhaps I should have called it High on a Hill stood a ... it seemed to make sense at the time Ed.)
