Tag Archives: Braeview

Glow, Technologies

Pupil Surveys at Braeview

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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

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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

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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.

S1

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.

S2

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

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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.