Jonesieblog

This morning I got up at the ungodly hour of 6am in order to be ferried to Haddington (thanks Elizabeth!) and thence in a Don Prentice bus to Port Glasgow for a morning of workshops on the effective use of interactive whiteboards in maths.

The first session I attended was run by an enthusiastic chap (whose name I’ve failed to record). He spoke to us about the way that his department is using interactive whiteboards to support formative assessment developments: waiting times, questioning techniques, self/peer assessment, group/pair work etc. It was a fascinating session - these points stood out for me:

• Sharing learning objectives on first slide - flip back at end of lesson
• Pair work - one minute silent, then one minute discussing with partner using clock
• Pupils making up question - make up a trinomial that factorises!
• A thick white pen over text can be rubbed out to expose the text

What really shone through the session was the extent to which the presenter’s thinking was grounded in the reality of the pupils in his school. In Port Glasgow, in appears that pupils are by-and-large quite happy to traffic light and admit to weaknesses in front of their classmates. This is so different from the culture at North Berwick, where most pupils are uncomfortable about admitting to needing support.

During the coffee break, John Connelly from Musselburgh Grammar shared the following technical tip with me: a button exists in the toolstore that disables the right-click on the pen. Very handy - thanks John!

After the break, I went to a session run by John and [will insert name here once I find it] from Promethean. They showed us some technical tips - I learned about the action icons that are already in the library, and about work with layers.

On the way out, and on the journey home, I think I heard both Tim Schmitz and Paul Goodall saying that they were planning to start blogging about their use of the interactive whiteboards (amongst other things). This is great news - go for it guys!

Stumble it!

In my work visiting schools across East Lothian I’ve seen examples of the use of interactive whiteboard which are, in my opinion, much more exciting and creative than anything that I have done. This is, of course, wonderful. I’ll share this good practice, hopefully in a way which adequately recognizes the contribution of the teachers concerned, many of whom are recently qualified.

I don’t think, in taking on my role, that I ever claimed or was expected to be the fount of all knowledge regarding interactive whiteboards, but I have certainly met some expectation in schools that this is what I should be. “Here’s the whiteboard expert come to show us what to do” is the way I have been introduced sometimes. From this perspective, it could be seen as somewhat threatening to discover that there are others who know more than I do, or are using the board in more exciting ways than I am!

My perspective, however, is that my job is to support the effective use of whiteboards and voting systems to improve teaching and learning in maths. Nothing in that job description says that I have to be the source of all the good ideas, nor that I have to be the expert. It does say that I have to make a positive difference, and this is made all the easier by the existence of excellent practice to draw upon.

My role in East Lothian is in many ways similar to my Glow mentor role. As Glow mentors, we should recognize from the start that we will not be the experts. Within a couple of weeks of the roll-out of Glow, there will be bright eyed young (or maybe not so young) enthusiasts putting us to shame. At least I hope so! This is all fine and grand, provided we don’t create a model for our own roles that is based upon our being the experts. If we do, then we will end up looking rather pointless and ridiculous before too long.

I suspect that I may be simply paraphrasing part of Don’s vision thing. Once his podcast becomes audible, I’ll find out!

Actually, lest you think me too modest by far, I should say that in the field of web application development I am indeed an expert. Anyone looking for a Ruby on Rails developer should get in touch - I work freelance for very reasonable rates

Stumble it!

Dagnabit! I just looked to see if maybe Sufjan Stevens was going to play in Europe some time soon, and it turns out that he is touring in Oct/Nov/Dec, but the two UK gigs are sold out already. Sigh… I would seriously have considered a jaunt down to London to see him live - I can’t think of any other artist in the last decade about whom I would have said that. Awesome genius. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to pay closer attention, and wait for the next tour.

Stumble it!

East Lothian Glow mentors met today at The Gothenburg in PrestonPans - here’s the agenda.

I missed the afternoon (visiting Ross High School), but thoroughly enjoyed the morning.

Karen Robertson began the morning with an overview of where we are and where we are going.

Alan Yeoman then spoke to us about the training programme for Glow mentors, and I was very impressed by what he had to say. Whilst the Glow launch at SETT was a disappointment, with the feeling that it was underprepared, Alan’s presentation today showed that they have been doing some serious thinking about how to prepare us for our roles as mentors.

The residential training at Stirling may include sessions on ACfE and the theory of co-coaching, for example. I had been concerned that the training would focus upon the basics of the use of the Glow portal tools. In fact, as Alan said, most teachers won’t need any training to use the tools - if you can use a web browser, you’ve already got most of the technical skills you need.

Alan told us that VLE training is not going to be part of the residential training. The cynic in me can’t help wondering whether that’s because it won’t be ready by then!

After coffee, Don Ledingham spoke to us about the vision. He ran us through his multiple metaphor model, which I have to say made a lot more sense than when I read about it on his blog - there is sometimes no substitute for face-to-face meetings! A lot of what Don said about the role of Glow mentor applies equally to my secondment so I found it very useful.

Towards the end of the morning, Ewan McIntosh raised an interesting challenge. To paraphrase him, “Most of the tools in Glow are already available for free online now. Hardly anyone is using them. Simply putting them within Glow will not guarantee that they begin to use them”

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If you blog and you want to know who is reading it, you MUST get into Google Analytics if you can. It is free, and gives you a mind boggling wealth of information. The screen capture below is just a fraction of the information available to you:

You’ll need to be able to put a bit of code onto your page to get all this goodness.

By the way, I have 99 gmail invites if anyone wants a gmail account to use for google analytics.

Stumble it!