May

16

The writing's on the wall for paper and pencil

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Interviewed by Heather McLean for today’s Guardian about blogging and wikis in primary schools:

Blogging has been brought into the classroom at St Ives school in Haslemere, Surrey. Each student in year 6 has their own blog in a secure, walled setting using Elgg software. Deputy head and information systems manager Miles Berry explains: “We wanted students to learn how to express their views, and it’s been a success. We also wanted them to develop an acceptance of other’s contributions, to appreciate others’ perspectives. They are learning and being inspired by each other’s writing in a far more immediate way than if we just stuck their work on the wall.”

Also at St Ives, students in years 5 and 6 are using wikis (web content that anyone has freedom to edit, such as the free encyclopaedia at www.wikipedia.org) to develop collaborative writing skills. Within the school’s virtual learning environment (based on free, open-source Moodle software) wikis have been incorporated to allow classes to work together on homework assignments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/may/16/elearning.schools6

May

12

Moodle in the TES, Friday 5th May

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

My article in last week’s TES Online on how we’ve used Moodle at St Ives is now online in their web archive.

“The vision for the learning environment at St Ives was simple – to use Moodle and the internet to make the best aspects of our classroom practice available to pupils when they work at home… Online communities, co-created by teachers and learners, seem far more appropriate in primary education than a one-dimensional “learning platform” that presents individualised sequences of resources for learners to work through at their own pace.”

May

11

Latin and Programming

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I, alas, missed out on Latin in my school days, but feel that a Basic grounding in programming was almost as good at teaching something of linguistic structures, and the creativity-within-constraints that’s been important for lots of real world problem solving.

These days, it’s all too likely that young people will miss out on both, as some deem them too difficult or irrelevant for inclusion in the curriculum. A shame this, and whilst I’d acknowledge that they might not suit everyone, surely personalised learning should include challenges for the brightest and best. Furthermore, I can’t help feeling that by not providing today’s pupils with the opportunities to write code that the BBC Micro generation had, we’re limiting their (and thus our) chances to compete in a global knowledge economy (yes, I’m reading The World is Flat at the moment, qv Friedman’s videoed lecture at MIT).

There’s been an interesting set of discussions on the HMC ICT list recenly about teaching programming, and what are the best languages to use with lower secondary pupils. Logo is great for primary aged pupils, and Papert’s work seems just as relevant today as it did when Mindstorms was written back in 1980. That said, there must be a place for teaching proper programming too, as such a rich environment for authentic, problem-based learning. The favoured options seem to be:

  • VBA, as a way of extending Excel work, and probably relevant for coursework projects for those continuing on to A-levels in computing
  • Java, for object orientation, and because it’s a grown-up real world language, although there was concern that the learning curve was a bit too steep
  • Python, as it teaches good habits, can integrate with lots of other tools very easily, and has some well designed IDEs; I’ve heard python recommended highly as a good first programming language by other folks too; and
  • PHP, as pupils can do really useful stuff without too steep a learning curve, and there are loads of FLOSS projects that they can start contributing to. That said,  word has it that PHP is just a bit too easy, and so isn’t as likely to encourage good programming habits as some of the others.

I’d be interested to hear what folks think about the relative merits of these, or other possibilities. For computer club this term, I’ve taken up Dale Jones’ suggestion of Alice, which is a highly visual, open source, object oriented ‘language’/IDE, and looks great for writing animations and simple games. We’re still working through the excellent online tutorials, but I hope to be able to share some of this work here in due course.

Back to the Latin: although it’s not on the curriculum here, we’ve had an optional after-school club for Latin, and I can recommend the excellent online materials from the Cambridge Latin Course. They’re well presented, and so well structured that they can almost be used by pupils independently, without much need for teacher input, although I think they’d be much more effective as support for a classroom based course. I’ve also just discovered that there’s a Latin “vicipaedia“, which would be a great thing for a few school classics departments to adopt. Anyone fancy writing a latin language pack for Moodle?

From http://eduspaces.net/mberry/weblog/14441.html

May

11

Latin and programming

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I, alas, missed out on Latin in my school days, but feel that a Basic grounding in programming was almost as good at teaching something of linguistic structures, and the creativity-within-constraints that’s been important for lots of real world problem solving.

Read more

May

9

More fun with Flickr

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Thinking more about ways of using Flickr in the classroom, I’ve discovered the wonderful world of geotagging. Essentially, all this involves is attaching geographical metadata to content, in this case Flickr photos. This then makes it possible to integrate the photos into maps, such as Google Maps or Google Earth.

Read more

May

7

Flickr@School

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

The St Ives girls are making increasing use of Flickr as a source for images for school work, which I’m delighted to encourage. Not so much of this in my maths lessons yet (although I have things in mind for patterns, symmetry and tessellations…), but there’s been some great use in geography for illustrating work on glaciation, and this last week I’ve been hugely impressed by the way it’s being used for English lessons.

Read more

May

6

Götterdämmerung

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Inspired by Radio 3’s Ring in a day on Easter Monday, I stayed on in town on Wednesday to see Götterdämmerung at Covent Garden. This was the first time I’d seen it live, and I found the whole emotional rollercoster an almost ovewhelmingly moving experience. I was left quite stunned by Siegfried’s unwitting betrayal of Brünnhilde. as well as the deaths of hero and heroine, accompanied as they are by such great music. All this despite what some of the critics have had to say about the production.

Photograph by Alastair Muir, Daily Telegraph
Photo from the Telegraph’s Review

Read more

May

5

Harnessing technology – beyond tomorrow

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

NCSL asked me to run my seminar on ‘extending the school’ for Wednesday’s London conference as part of their SLICT conference series. My perspective is, as you’d expect, about the contribution that a VLE can make to extending opportunities for learning beyond school into the home environment, and thus utilizing pupils’ home technology to provide far more access to computing to support and enhance the curriculum. Having been inspired by some of Futurelab’s work on informal learning and personalisation, I’ve also tried to weave in a few threads about using blogging and personal learning spaces to reverse the direction and bring some of the strengths of home based learning into the school too. As my audience was school leaders, the key message was about choosing and using learning platforms in a way that supports and underpins the school’s own vision for learning and teaching. I think the sessions were well received by those attending, and there were some good questions raised. The notion of using Moodle courses (or their equivalent) as a mechanizm for communication with parents seemed an appealing one. Somewhat depressingly, this was the second NCSL event where I’ve been asked ‘what does open source mean’. I’ve uploaded a pdf of the slides, and NCSL have asked me to take part in one of their Hotseat follow up discussions for the next three weeks, for those who have Talk2Learn accounts

Read more

May

1

Moodle concept map navigation

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I’ve been playing around with the Flash browser for Freemind maps, and I’m very impressed. Here’s an attempt at one for navigating Using Moodle as an example:

It also turns out that Slovenian schoolteacher Janko Harej has already coded up a Moodle filter for Freemind maps, and I don’t think it would be too difficult to adapt this to use the Flash browser instead of the standard java applet, so concept map navigation for Moodle courses is pretty much ready to go! How cool is that?

The next step is to get Moodle to write the Freemind .mm file automatically from the course structure stored in the database. Now this is beyond my coding skills, but the .mm file will have a very similar structure to the human-readable course homepage that Moodle creates on the fly already, so it’s quite a tractable problem.

http://eduspaces.net/mberry/weblog/13232.html