Jonesieblog

As I have visited schools across East Lothian this year, I have shown several maths teachers the Geogebra dynamic geometry package. They have all been impressed, but asked for more support in learning how to use it. This morning, I’ve put together a quick screencast to show the basics of using this excellent Open Source program. This first screencast looks at the geometric constructions that you can create. My next screencast will look at graphs and functions.

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There have been several headlines over the last few days along the lines of “£50 million wasted on iwbs”, based on this study from the DFES.

So what does it really say? Unsurprisingly, it does not say that iwbs are a waste of money:

Overall, the statistical analysis failed to find evidence of any impact of the increase in IWB acquisition in London schools on attainment in the three core subjects in the academic year 2004/5. However, given the variation in use documented in the case studies, this is in line with what we would predict at this stage in the policy cycle.

The study is worth reading in its entirety, but if you want my spin on it, I picked up on a couple of key points:

A theme running through the report is that this technology itself will not change what happens in classrooms.

….the introduction of an IWB does not in and of itself transform existing pedagogies. The capacity of IWBs to support, extend or transform existing pedagogies depends upon the teacher’s intent and the ways in which they exploit the resources they have access to.

Positive change in classrooms will occur only if teachers consciously seek change. This seems pretty obvious really. It echoes the discrediting of the “spray and pray” approach to investing in IT in education. The unfortunate conclusion drawn by many from this obvious fact is that whiteboards are useless. Of course that’s nonsense. If you stuck a bunch of teenagers behind the wheels of cars and found that they didn’t instantly become safe drivers would it be reasonable to conclude that cars are useless?

An interesting question then arises – how should an authority make the most of this technology? In other words, how can we encourage teachers to seek to change what happens in their classrooms? The report has this to say:

Given the diversity of classroom use for the technology and the difficulties of foreseeing its full potential at this stage (see section 5), our own research raises questions about the aptness of predicating formal training on a dissemination model where the pedagogic possibilities of the technology are presumed to be both well defined and finite.
We would advocate more emphasis on the role of jointly facilitating mutual exploration of what the technology can do in context, with the aim of building teachers’ understanding of when and how IWBs can be most appropriately exploited for a specific pedagogical aim. We would envisage that such an exploration would be less tied to the dissemination of a specific set of IWB techniques such as drag and drop, but more open to exploring teachers’ own pedagogical purposes, and the role the IWB might play in achieving them. We see individual teacher’s commitment to exploring the potential of the technology as an important resource for colleagues that could act as a catalyst for change if it were well supported.

And so we come back to the same old stuff! Using an interactive whiteboard effectively requires the same kind of effort, exploration and reflection that teaching effectively does. And your colleague in the next room who’s found something that works may be more useful to you than all the in-service under the sun.

Over this year I have sought to act as the enthusiastic colleague next door rather than the deliverer of in-service. I hope that my colleagues have benefited from my enthusiasm, but would not presume to speak on their behalf.

I’ll return to this study in future posts no doubt – 161 pages take a while to digest!

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For the last few weeks, I’ve been putting interactive whiteboard posts on this blog, as I knew that old exc-el site was going to be transferring to a wordpress system. That transfer has happened, so I’m going to put interactive whiteboard and specifically mathematical stuff back on my exc-el blog from now on. If this fragmentation bothers you, why not just subscribe to this feed which is combination of the feeds from the two blogs, courtesy of rssmix? Aah – can’t you feel the Web2.0 goodness?

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I just caught the end of a learning curve on Radio 4 that seemed to be all about technology in education, with Stephen Heppel amongst others.  You can catch it here

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In part 1, we set up the user database to store all your classes. Now it’s time to actually do some voting!

Labelling the devices

Your voting pads will have numbers 1 to 32 on them somewhere. Take the time to write these numbers on the top with indelible marker pen. Trust me, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.

Setting up a flipchart for voting with a class

• Open your flipchart
• Go to ACTIVote/session
• Click on “Named Mode”
• If the pupils in the list don’t match your class, click on “Users…” then select your class from the dialogue that appears

Classroom routines

Pupils will need to know which device is attached to their name. I would start by having the user database screen showing on the first lesson with ACTIVote. Ask pupils to take the device with the number beside their name, then to make a note of that number in their jotter/planner. In subsequent lessons, establish the routine that if the box is open at the front of the room, they take their device on the way in. This saves a bit of time.

At the end of the lesson, take the time to develop the good routine that the devices go back into the box in the right order, ready for the next class. If I can manage this level of organisation, anyone can!

Running ad-hoc votes the terror-free way

So, we’re finally ready to vote! Electronic voting systems allow every pupil to communicate directly with the teacher simultaneously and confidentially. That’s amazingly powerful, so we need to be careful not to mess it up!

• DON’T EVER DISPLAY RESULTS WITH PUPIL NAMES ON THE WHITEBOARD

If you need convincing of this, read my cautionary tale here.

When it comes to it, the process of running a vote is very simple:

• Take a fresh flipchart page (votes are stored on a one-per-page basis)
• Write up a question on the board
• Ask the class to work out the answer and write it down ( I find this works better than just giving them the choices from the start)
• Once they have answers, write up or reveal your multiple choices and click on the voting pad icon in your toolbar

You’ll now see a banner across the top of the screen with each pupil’s name on it. As the pupils vote, their names turn yellow.

Once everyone has voted, click again on the voting pad icon. If everyone has voted, you’ll be shown the summary screen. If not, you’ll be asked whether or not you want to give the slow turtles a chance to vote.

The summary screen is pretty self explanatory:

Option B is highlighted as correct here because I clicked on it – the system is not that clever! This screen and the right/wrong summary are the only screens you should show your class. Clicking on who answered what brings up the full vote results (different vote – no names here because I’m writing this at home on a machine that does not have my user database on it):

This “who answered what” screen is very useful – view it once you have frozen or switched the board to “no show”!

The picture above shows an example of a couple of pupils voting for F, when options A to D were only given. This will almost certainly happen in every class, but once they realise that you know who voted what, and that you will not allow them to take part in voting unless they take it seriously, they will soon stop.

Pre-prepared votes

Promethean have this excellent pair of flash animations showing how to use question master:

• Question Master Part 1
• Question Master Part 2

Formative Assessment with ACTIVote

This is the most important bit, so I’ll put it into a separate post…..

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