foolfillment: the blog

This year at Ross High we’re hoping our Higher Graphics Class will be producing some really cool stuff for their Thematic Presentations (a folio of different types of graphic work based around a single artefact) with a suggested theme of Lego toys. To get them started I’ve modelled a wee man with the intention that they can use him in their own work - with modifications of course.

For the course they will need to do a series of manual and computer generated drawings. One way of doing the computer drawings is to actually model the object in 3D like I’ve done above then get very accurate and detailed drawings generated from that. I’ve used Autodesk Inventor but if you want a shot of doing something similar yourself then Google Sketchup is a free programme that does similar things and comes highly recommended for all abilities.

What you see above is me just going that little bit further so that the class can see what is possible outwith the requirements of the course, animations are a fantastic way of really showing off a piece of work and can be quite good fun to make - unfortunately they aren’t currently assessed/assessable.

This example needs a lot of tidying up, but it is just a little bit of fun and (I think) quite cute.

Incidentally this took me around 2 hours to model and a further 1 at most to set up and tweak the animation. The bit that took the time was rendering the animation, around 450 frames, which took about 60 minutes for 30s of animation.

You might see a theme developing here, I’m basically just asking for people to give me lots of their ideas, under the guise of sharing good practice Today’s theme is how to set up a classroom.

In August I will have the amazing luxury of having my very own classroom, this is something that is almost unheard of for a Tech teacher, and as such it is not something I’ve given much thought to. Since getting the Hawick post I’ve been thinking a little about what I could do to the layout of desks, or what resources I should have out - that sort of thing. Having never had my own room before though I’ve never been through all the practicalities of it and I’m sure I’ll have forgotten or overlooked important things.

So, I’m asking those of you out there who may have something to say to say it. If you were starting from scratch in a new room what 5 things would you do?

I’m looking for your ideas in this post.

A quick summary first: Today saw the final training session for this year’s probationers in East Lothian. Training really isn’t the right word for it as it was more an informal afternoon with the focus being on sharing and exploring our ideas about the Learning and Teaching that is going on in East Lothian. There was another focus - recently all the probationers took part in a sector shadow where secondary teachers watched primary classes for a day then swapped over - so this gave a lead to the discussions.

The final activity we took part in was particularly useful - both for sharing ideas but also to justify what we do to other professionals. This is where I’d really appreciate your comments.

There were two headings under which we had to describe something that we think is great practice and we want to implement or continue to do when we take up our next jobs. We then mingled and shared ideas with each other. It opened up my eyes (even further) as to the variety of things that are going on in Primary schools that are just fantastic.

The first heading was Formative Assessment/Learning Strategies.
I wrote something along the lines of: Peer Assessment - evaluating each others work, pupils are much better at praising/criticising each other’s work than their own.

The second header was Management of Learning.
For this I wrote Starter questions/exercises at start of every lesson.

I’d love to hear you share anything that you consider to be essential to good learning and teaching so please leave a comment. It needn’t be much just a few words describing something that you think works.

( I toyed with the idea of writing this as a meme, so feel free to write up on your own blog and link here, or even to tag someone else.)

I’m pleased to let you know that on Monday I was interviewed for a position at Hawick High School, and subsequently offered the job which I accepted.

I’ll take up my new position in August for the new term, with my own classroom and possibly a workshop to call my very own too, unheard of delights for a techy teacher :-).

I’ll be very sad to leave Ross High as my time there has been very positive and it is a very busy department with a lot of great staff, and a lot of fantastic classes that I will be feeling very guilty about leaving behind. However this is the way things go in the current system.

The situation for probationers this year is looking pretty grim and there aren’t many jobs coming up for teachers of my subjects anywhere in Scotland so I am absolutely delighted to have secured a full-time permanent contract, with the added bonus that this is a school and department that I am really looking forward to working in. It’s a huge relief.

I came across this image via the logoblog today. See how many brands you can identify from just the initial. It’s quite striking how many of these are brands that don’t use the initial as their brand logo, yet are instantly recognisable.

The Brand Alphabet by InThePictureDesign.co.uk

One thing I like my pupils to think about when presenting folios is
consistency throughout the pages with something like this sort of
‘house style’, and this I think shows the impact and penetration that a
strong brand can have upon users/consumers mindset.

Dave McLeod, amazing rock climber and fairly prolific blogger writes this today: I hated school:

Before I found a focus, I was in the same situation as many kids. I went to school and sat in classes where teachers spent a big proportion of the time keeping order and not developing interest. I didn’t enjoy it, and even as a kid I could recognise there was much time being wasted.

Once I started climbing, and began skipping school, I was the opposite from a draw on resources. I learned by myself, eagerly.
…
The solution for teachers? Find a way to communicate the power of the ideas, rather than force feed the detail of a world youngsters can’t connect easily to. It is possible, even within the constraints of ‘the system’. If you don’t dig deeper to find a way to achieve it, who will?

He makes it all sound so easy! Real learning becomes happens when there is a meaning to the information you are getting, so if you can find something that you love doing then chances are there are all sorts of things you need to learn about to enable you to do it better. The thing you love becomes the way of creating meaning around discrete pieces dry information. Like Dave says, it stops being a chore and becomes just something that you do, something that you want to keep doing. The challenge for a learner is to find that hook, the challenge for teachers is to find 20/30/60… of those hooks!

“We learn from our experience…..if we reflect upon our experience” - John Dewey.

I have never been one for doing an end of year, navel gazing post,* instead I tend to be pretty reflective all the time, but now that the new term has begun I’ve found myself thinking more about how things have changed since August. There have of course been huge changes in myself professionally, I have gained a huge amount of curricular knowledge from teaching subjects I’ve not taught before, but it’s all the other areas that have changed the most (as an aside I wonder how many teachers well out of probation ever look at their practice compared to the Standard for Full Registration…) like classroom/workshop management, managing pupil behaviour, and short/medium/long term planning.

It’s the last one I want to pick up on. Last term the only constant was change, and things are continuing to change this term. It’s no doubt the same in every school: staff come and go; people get promotions; but it feels like there has been more upheaval than is normal. We are about to start with a new timetable on Monday and I will be losing a couple of periods a week with 2 of my classes. This means I’m going to have to plan out material for those periods for the foreseeable future. This would be quite a big task normally but this time it’s made more difficult by the fact that it is classes sitting our 2 year Highers - the first time we’ve run them. It means that while we have plans for the courses both long term and short term the classes are still being ironed out as we go to an extent.

I’ll try to let you know how things go, though hopefully you’ll be able to track the progress on the RHSCDT edubuzz blog.

*In fact I always find the New Year quite a bizarre idea, an enjoyable, but bizarre nonetheless. After all it’s just a moment in time, man just happens to have picked this day as the start/end of a cycle he has noticed. Nature itself makes nothing of the date - waves continue to come crashing in, the moon does it’s own thing.

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.

Ewan bookmarked a link to some Escher inspired Lego models today which I enjoyed looking at and reading about, I found my way from there to the official Escher website which features fly-throughs of some of his work.

It got me thinking…

How long would it take a pupil to create something like the movie above? The S1s on Islay are making stuff just as good using Google Sketchup, and it took me about 2 minutes using Inventor to make the impossible triangle below, so, who’s up for the challenge?

I’ll admit this is a bit of a non-post as it’s being mentioned in a lot of other places and I’m not adding anything new to the conversation but all I want to do was further raise the profile of an exciting new project from Learning and Teaching Scotland that was surreptitiously launched on the first of this month. ScotEduPedia is a wiki based encyclopaedia on Scottish education. The rough bones are there now, and content is trickling in at a fairly impressive rate. Go and have a look, the more people aware of it the better chance of it turning into something fantastic.