Featured, Health and Wellbeing, Technologies, Third

Choices and Challenges

May 21, 2012 User deactivated Leave a comment

Within S2 Health and Wellbeing we have programmed a 7 week Choices and Challenges block. This year we wanted to develop our pupils awareness of life and learning by introducing a couple of lessons encouraging personal career planning and preparation.

To build on, and make the pupils investigation more meaningful, Harris Academy invited over 40 professionals from different occupational backgrounds / education or training to one of their Social Education classes. The volunteers were interviewed by small groups of S2 pupils. These interviews were recorded using Talk-Trakers. The Talk-Trakers were ideal for gathering evidence and the recordings (podcasts) were an excellent assessment tool as they could be shared and compared.

The experience and outcome covered is

“I am investigating different careers/occupations, ways of working, and learning and training paths. I am gaining experience that helps me recognise the relevance of my learning, skills and interests to my future life”. HWB 3-20a

Pupils have also published their pictures and podcasts to their e-portfolios.

Learning Intentions

To construct a set of questions to gather information about their visitor
To identify other post-16 routes such as Modern Apprenticeships
To identify the local college and university
To identify the links between school subjects and occupations
To anticipate future decisions in education, training or work
To identify influences on career decision making
To investigate the knowledge and skills people need at work

We found that pupils really found this experience worth while, they were completely engaged in their learning and enjoyed listening to recordings of the other groups.

Glow, Technologies

Pupil Surveys at Braeview

May 1, 2012 Mr Christie Leave a comment

Surveys in Glow

As part of our department development plan a task was to elicit more useful feedback from pupils on the content and delivery of our course so that we could adapt our courses moving forward. An ideal way to do this so that the feedback can be collated quickly is by setting up a Subject Glow Group and then creating and adding a survey to the page.

Depending on how you word the questions glow collates the responses for you and can show you graphical summaries of responses so that you quickly see patterns regarding which techniques and topics are most popular etc…

Having used the survey feature a number of times now I find the restricted choice or scale questions the best for summarising responses for a large class giving you hard and fast percentages, but free text questions can certainly throw up points from pupils who might not feel comfortable speaking out in class.

So far pupils have taken the opportunity to give feedback in the right spirit and comments have been appropriate and meaningful, however you can easily go in and delete any unsuitable responses.

For instructions on how to create a survey take a look at the glow cookbooks:

http://cookbooks.glowscotland.org.uk/blog/category/glow-components/survey/

Technologies

Interactive Voting at Braeview

May 1, 2012 Mr Christie 1 Comment

Activote Handsets at Braeview

I have tried out these handsets with a number of classes of varying ages and stages and they are a great tool for revision and for pair or group exercises when pupils have to discuss and agree on a response.

Using ActiveInspire you can easily create professional looking multiple choice quizzes, ideal for revision before a test or for a lunchtime supported study club. Once the assessment is created you can use it time and again.

Our technician installed the Activ Hub for us and registered the handsets. If you don’t have an interactive board in your room, the assessments work fine through a plain old multimedia projector.

Before letting classes loose you create a database of classes with pupil names which allows you then to see individual pupils performance. To run the quiz, you dish out the handsets and then through the voting button on the toolbar you can register the handsets, pick a class and then assign handsets to pupils by using a 3 letter code.

Once users have registered their handsets you can run your quiz.

I used this software in conjunction with AB Tutor and displayed my screens on their screens so that they could read the questions more easily at the back of the class.

To release a question to the pupils I simply clicked the Activote button on the toolbox and then in the top of the screen a timer bar ticked away with pupils names underneath to indicate who has responded. When the time is up you have the option to re-release the question to give pupils more time. Once everybody has answered there is an excellent feature which displays the results in a number of ways from a chart providing the percentage of correct answers to a table of names indicating which option the pupils chose and even how long it took to answer it.

The program keeps score as you go through the quiz and you can then collate all the results in a league table (The response time feature comes in handy here if more than one person gets the same score). The table is exportable so you can take it into MS Word for your own records.
I think these handsets are an excellent resource, and the pupils keep asking me when they can use them again.

I have used the more sophisticated ActivExpression handsets which allow pupils to enter text based responses rather than just A to F . Personally though I find the simpler Activote handsets easier to get up and running and quicker for pupils to get into.

More details on Interactive voting including example quizzes I have created can be found on the Interactive Voting Glow area.

https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/dundeecitycouncil/StaffDevelopment/ICT/Activexpression/Lists/Pages/Sharing%20Practice.aspx

interactive voting

Technologies, Third

Inter-Disciplinary Learning at Braeview

May 1, 2012 Mr Christie Leave a comment

Our ICT courses in S1 and S2 have been designed to accommodate meaningful cross-over with other subject areas as recommended in the Curriculum for Excellence.

In S1 we have links with Modern Languages, Home Economics, RME and Science. In the units studied we use topics pupils learn in other subjects as a context to apply the skills we teach, e.g. in our Word Processing unit pupils create a word processed evaluation form for Home Economics and for RME, pupils create a Wheels of Faith poster using MS Word and the BBC World Faiths website for research. In our Presentation unit pupils are working on a hyperlinked PowerPoint on the theme of the Animal Kingdom. These links continue throughout the year in other units, for example in our Graphics unit pupils draw a face and label it up using Modern languages vocabulary and for Home Economics we show the pupils how to design a funny face salad using graphics tools. In addition to the above there is the cross-curricular work the Technologies subjects do in the S1 Rich task where pupils work in teams on a challenge which pulls in skills learned in all four departments in a real world scenario.

As part of our animation unit with the Story Telling Alice application we have an exercise whereby pupils devise a foreign language conversation using vocabulary learnt in Modern languages. We also deliver a small unit looking at numeracy and literacy educational games with all of the S2 pupils competing to get the best scores in each area with prizes for the top boy and girl.

Glow, Senior Phase, Technologies

Podcasts at Braeview

May 1, 2012 Mr Christie Leave a comment

Podcasts at Braeview

As an alternative to past papers, a revision technique I use (which is perfect for filling a double period) is getting pupils to create revision notes on key exam topics and record them as podcasts.

Resources required: Audacity (on virtual apps), microphone, speakers/headphones, Glow Group (optional if you want to upload and share podcasts with other pupils).

Summary of steps involved:

1. Produce a list of revision topics/titles for pupils to randomly choose from.

2. Get pupils to write a study note/summary on that topic.
3. Pupils then use Audacity to record their study note.

4. Pupils can edit the track perhaps altering the sound of their voice using the pitch control.

5. Pupils Export the track as an MP3. (Note for Audacity to export as mp3 you will need the LAME dll file, which can be downloaded from the web)

6. Pupils can then transfer this to a memory stick or MP3 player. In addition to this as a teacher you could gather the class’s podcasts together and upload to the documents tab of your subject Glow Group so that pupils can share/pool resources.

Expressive Arts, Health and Wellbeing, Languages, Literacy, Mathematics, Numeracy, Other Big Stories, RME, Sciences, Senior Phase, Social Studies, Technologies

Advice for new National Qualifications

April 30, 2012 User deactivated Leave a comment

Education Scotland have today published advice and guidance, with exemplification in a range of subjects to support learning and teaching in the new NQs. More material will be published over the coming months.

The updated NQ website can be found here:

http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/nationalqualifications/index.asp

Technologies

Visualisers at Braeview Academy

April 27, 2012 Mr Christie Leave a comment

Visualisers at St Paul’s Academy

In case you didn’t know, Visualisers or Document Cameras are basically powerful digital cameras on flexible arms which when connected through your computer and a projector allow you to share a magnified image of an object (a page of a text book, 3D model, pupils work etc…) with the class. When connected through the computer you can then annotate the image and/or record video and audio so that you could replay the demonstration at a later date to another class without having to set it all up again. There are a number of different makes and models out there I have been lucky enough to trial the following:

Easi-View Visualiser

Approx. Price £100

Slot for SD Memory card – No

Resolution (Megapixels) – 3MP

Image Capture Area – A4

Zoom – N/A

Remote Control – No

Avermedia CP155

Approx. Price £400

Slot for SD Memory card – No

Resolution (Megapixels) – 3.2MP

Image Capture Area – 330 x 248 mm

Zoom – 8 x Digital

Remote Control – No

Samsung SDP860

Approx. Price £450

Slot for SD Memory card – Yes

Resolution (Megapixels) – 1.39MP

Image Capture Area – 420 x 336mm

Zoom – 6 x Optical 8 x Digital

Remote Control – Yes

Elmo L-12

Approx. Price £600 (including tablet)

Slot for SD Memory card – Yes

Resolution (Megapixels) – 3.4MP

Image Capture Area – 420 x 334 mm (A3 size)

Zoom – 12 x Optical 8 x Digital

Remote Control – Yes

Promethean ActiView 322

Approx. Price £400

Slot for SD Memory card – No

Resolution– XGA (1024 x 768)

Image Capture Area – 350mm x 280MM

Zoom – 6 x Optical 6 x Digital

Remote Control – Yes

Avermedia V355AF

Approx. Price £600

Slot for SD Memory card – Yes

Resolution (Megapixels) – 5MP

Image Capture Area – 400 x 300 mm

Zoom – 5 x Optical 8 x Digital

Remote Control – Yes

In summary for me the most important features are the resolution of the camera, and the capture area if the resolution isn’t good enough then if you are trying to show a page from a text book up on the projector or through AB Tutor onto pupil’s screens then the text will be too fuzzy and illegible. Similarly if the capture area isn’t big enough then you have to keep moving the textbook to show different parts of the page. It is worth noting the two main types of mountings for the visualises, they either come with a goose neck flexible articulated arm which you can bend into any position you like, or the more expensive models have a mechanical arm which although lacking the flexibility to put into any position would seem more robust for a classroom situation.

The easiview camera is in my opinion fine for displaying 3D objects or perhaps doing some stop-frame animation, but as a document camera the image quality was too poor.

I found the other visualisers to be fairly similar in terms of quality and functionality, however my favourite to use and the one I thought had the best overall performance was the Avermedia V355AF. The thing I particularly liked about the V355 was laser positioning guide to help indicate where to place the document/object under the camera.

Two exemplar papers ready underneath visualiser

Zooming in to the relevant question

Two different pupil answer clearly displayed together on screen

Using AB Tutor software answers displayed on all pupil screens in the computing lab,
but also displayed on the multimedia projector.

There are loads of features I haven’t used or talked about in this blog, but to round it off visualisers are a great tool whether it is just to save money on textbooks, to quickly show off a good piece of writing to a class or to show a large class the insides of a computer or other small object.

News 20/01/13

Recently I got to use ELMOs latest compact visualiser (MO-1 MOBILE VISUAL PRESENTER) and I have found it very easy to use and very practical for the classroom. For more information click here

The MO-1 is tiny, and I can easily put it in my laptop case along with my laptop. The visualiser can be mains powered or just powered through the USB connection which again adds to its convenience. Having used a number of other visualisers I can confidently say for me as a normal class teacher overall it is the best I have used. If you need really high resolution images say for Technical Drawing then perhaps you might need one of the top end models but for everyday use the MO-1 is great.

What have I used it for? The MO-1 is good for showing the whole class an object that is on my desk through my projector and if you are in a computer lab with AB Tutor it can also then be shown on pupils screens at the same time. When delivering a recent training session on Flipcams I used the visualiser liked to my projector and ABTutor to show people a close up of the camera buttons and screen as I was demonstrating functionality. With my S5/6 Digital Creator class, pupils have used the visualiser with I Can animate to produce Stop Frame animations, the software picked up the visualiser on pupils computers without drivers needing to be installed, and the fact that the camera is fixed makes animating very easy allowing pupils to keep their hands free for animating rather than having to perch a webcam precariously somewhere . The MO-1 has other functionality like the ability to run by itself and store images directly to an SD card but I have not had the need to use this yet. Priced at around £280 the visualiser is more affordable than most of its rivals too and you can get it in different colours if that interests you!

Senior Phase, Technologies

Arduino at Braeview Academy

April 26, 2012 Mr Christie Leave a comment

Arduino at Braeview Academy

Education Scotland have a facility called CPD Consolarium whereby teachers can sign up to the Glow Group and then make a bid online for software and hardware which if successful you can use for loan period, the condition being that you give feedback through a Wiki created for you by Education Scotland.

This past year I have had a loan of Arduino kits which are programmable boards to which you can motors, lights, sensors etc.. and then by plugging the board into your PC using a USB cable you can then write computer programs and upload them to the board. I used the boards with my Advanced Higher pupils and also arranged for Chris Martin from Dundee University who has some experience in this field of physical computing to deliver a workshop to my Higher pupils with his wheeled robots made from Arduino boards.

Rather than repeat the information on the blog the link below takes you to the wiki I am working on.

https://wikis.glowscotland.org.uk/0001398/Consolarium/Other_Technologies/Arduino/@Braeview_Academy%2c_Dundee

I strongly recommend putting in a bid for some kit as Education Scotland has a huge amount available from Nintendos to PS3s. If my bid is successful I hope to try out some other programmable boards that they have made available.

Expressive Arts

Wallacetown Nursery School

April 23, 2012 User deactivated Leave a comment

At Wallacetown Nursery School the children have been learning about the work of famous artists. By using the Bear Hunt story as a focus for our art we were able to discuss ways which we could recreate the story. By looking at the work of Jackson Pollock we made mud pictures which involved the children working together to create large pieces of work.

We looked at some of Claude Monet’s work and created our grass and water pictures which allowed the children to be creative.

We also learned about cave paintings and created our own using tissue paper prints and black paint. The children became very familiar with the work of the artists and enjoyed exploring the story of Michael Rosen’s We’re Going On A Bear Hunt.