foolfillment: the blog

On Wednesday I was fortunate to get the chance to go to the Scottish Learning Festival, in the evening I also managed to get along to TeachMeet07 in the Science Centre. As you would expect there has been a flurry of posts already by people giving their take, I’m going to try to summarise my thoughts, one thing that has been said already that I will repeat without any shame is how good an event it was and say thanks to everyone who made it possible - Ewan for organising it, the sponsors, and of course the people who came and gave such wonderful presentations.

First up was John Johnston on ScotEduBlogs - a great aggregation of blogs that I use everyday. It was a perfect way to start the evening.

The stand out 7 minutes for me was Iain Stanger’s piece on Dartfish, a video editing software that allows for easy annotation and lots of other useful features - there are so many possibilities throughout education. I really enjoyed talking with Iain afterwards about what the software can do.

David Gilmour also gave some time to using blogs for school websites and the importance of parental involvement - a group who’s involvement all too often get missed.

David Noble, reflective podcaster extrodinaire, talked about Flashmeetings, his point about teachers who aren’t particularly tesh-savvy fighting for their right to ‘attend’ these online meetings from within school networks. “We’re professionals, let us use this service to share our practice and improve what we do - don’t block it”.

Like the last teachmeet in Edinburgh, it was good to put faces to names. Jim McDougall and Lee Carson fell firmly into that category, I was sorry not to get chance to speak to either of them. Lee had set up a class blog in his school in South (?) Queensferry only to find the pupils didn’t really care for it - that was until something magical happenned and someone left a comment! We have a moral obligation to leave comments.

I have very few notes for Neil Winton’s presentation - because it was so good - some of my scribbles include ‘I love salling clicker’; pupils are ‘autonomously reflecting on work and experiences’ and ‘Bona fide evidence of confident individuals, effective communicators, successful learners, and responsible citizens - now where have I heard that before?’ Neil was of course talking about Bebo and why teachers should be aware of what goes on there

Nick Hood spent a few minutes explaining why he’d set up his online classroom - to allow his pupils to learn without risking a battering. Having used Moodle he now is working with wikis and finding it much better. ‘What will Glow’s VLE be like?’ was a pertinent question, I don’t know the answer. I’d first met Nick by chance in the Ministerial keynote earlier in the day.

One other person who stood out was Andy Black from BECTA. I really enjoyed his presentation ‘It’s not about the device, stupid’ - so much energy!

I’ve not really done any of this justice, it and the meal at Kublai Khan’s afterwards was a great way to end the day, and it was good to see so many teachers coming along to share good practice. The next teachmeet is at BETT in London after Christmas, somehow I don’t think I’ll get along to it but no doubt it will be recorded one way or another by some of the great teachers who’ll be there.

I’ve said this before, but in introducing 2 year Highers at Ross High there is scope to move from teaching the course as a ‘two term dash’ to having time to further explore the parts of the courses that otherwise get glossed over or missed altogether. In the Product Design course the pupils spend their 4th year working through whole projects and then making the product.

We are getting towards the end of the first project now and my thoughts are turning to how it is to be assessed. In a normal Higher you teach some content then assess with a NAB, a centrally set test. In this project though the aim wasn’t to pass an Outcome, but what was it? Sure, there are some aims like gain an understanding of vacuum forming, develop a better understanding of the design process, but looking back I wonder how well as a department we have shared these intentions with the classes - I know I haven’t done this particularly well. And what about specific Learning Outcomes?

Then thinking about how to assess the projects I’m pretty keen to get the pupils involved. A big part of the Product Design course (and design generally) is to analyse and evaluate existing stuff, so to me it makes absolute sense that the pupils should evaluate each other’s designs and folios. It would also steer them away from wanting a grade.

On AB’s prompt I’m noting what I’m doing when I got to the Scottish Learning Festival next week.
I can only go for the Wednesday but I’ll be trying to pack in as much as I can, starting off with Ewan McIntosh’s We’re Adopting session, then Our Journey to Excellence along the Microtech Road and finishing up with Stephen Heppell’s keynote Twenty First Century Learning.

Then of course I’ll be heading over the bridge to TeachMeet07.

I’ll be busy twittering and hopefully doing some live-ish blogging throughout the day too.

I’m also wondering if I’ll have the time to get to the In the Wild event in the afternoon.

Having posted a week or so ago about trying to get my 4th years to be a bit more creative, my efforts have come around to bite me.

With Standard Grades being sat at the end of 3rd year at Ross High it gives us a whole 2 years to cover the higher courses. So far this is showing some good and some bad points. One of the good things to come out of it in the CDT department is the chance to overhaul the structure of some courses. In Product Design for instance we are giving the pupils the chance to be a lot more hands on and to actually make some of the things they design. This is great because the pupils get to see their designs right through from brief to manufacture and evaluation, it also makes sure they have to take the development of ideas through its full cycle and leave no details uncertain.

However that is causing some small headaches. The project they are currently working on is to design a promotional radio. The pupils are to design the radio and then create a pattern around which plastic will be vacuum formed, then they wire up a radio kit and mount it inside their plastic shell.

The class have come up with some really creative forms, the trouble is finding a way to create the pattern that the plastic will be formed around. The original idea had been that the form of the radios would be simple extruded shapes, and we’d be able to make the pattern from some timber or MDF - no such luck, I’ve tried to put together a rough model of one idea, I’ve probably simplified it:

This afternoon I posted this image on pownce asking for any advice on how to make it and Ian quickly came up with some good ideas. Of course that is exactly the sort of conversation that the pupils could have benefited from being involved in or even better, leading - my task is to get them set up on pownce sometime in the next fortnight or so.

The link above to my pownce post won’t work unless you have an account and are marked as my friend, but I have invites left if you want one.

On the invitation of Guinea Pig Mum I went along to see about helping our at Tranent ASC on Thursday and Friday night. I had been meaning to get in touch with my old coach for a while to see about getting involved in swimming at some level but I was waiting for school to settle down then see just how much time I would have to commit.

Going back to the Loch Centre for the first time in about 6 years really made me think back, on two levels. First, the building has barely changed in all the time I’ve been away so I found myself slipping back into what is basically an old habit or routine - taking the stairs in the same way by swinging round the banister at the bend, using the same changing cubicle, standing/sitting in the same old places - it was as though nothing had changed. I even found the swimmers using a kickboard that was covered in doodles and names of people I used to train with.

On another level it made me think about how you teach people. I can only remember how I swam aged 16 not aged 8, likewise I can’t remember what my coaches did to progress my swimming when I was 8, those memories have all been replaced by those of what happened later.

I know I have all this knowledge about how to swim well, but I don’t know how to get it out. I could take a session of swimmers who are at a similar level to me when I stopped, but younger than that I don’t know where to begin.
Yet, this is what I do at school. I switch from teaching 1st years to sketch to teaching 4th years how to draw complicated measured perspective drawings. I go from showing a senior to cut a mortice and tenon joint to showing a 1st year how to hold a saw.

I suppose it is all about breaking everything down into its component parts in my head, going back to first principles then building it up from there. How do I do that in swimming though? It feels like I need to try to forget everything I know and teach myself from scratch.