foolfillment: the blog

I’ve been spending some time recently writing up a book of notes for Standard Grade Craft and Design. There is a booklet of notes that have been in every school I’ve been in. I think they were originally written by a teacher at Penicuik High School, but I’m not sure.

They are a pretty comprehensive set of notes and I use them a lot, however nobody seems to know about where they came from or what the copyright issues are for sharing them about. So, I’ve been writing up my own booklet based quite closely on these existing notes, with the intention of releasing them freely under a Creative Commons license so people can change them to suit their own needs. I’ve done about 45 pages so far.

Then I got thinking though, after reading We-Think by Charles Leadbetter, if I should be doing this all myself or if I would be better to try and get them written collaboratively, in a more open source sort of way. I’m not sure how if would work but I envisage some place – like a wiki but with more control over the layout – where people can contribute, edit, discuss, and importantly take, the content.

Does anyone know of something like this happening for a school book already? Or of an online environment that would allow for this easily?

Does anyone think it could work?

And the big question: Does anyone want to help? Or would I end up writing it all myself anyway?

Last night I talked about alternative tasks for pupils in Craft and Design. I’ve blogged about this before but I want to just pool the three things I mentioned here so they can get aggregated with all the other TeachMeetBorders stuff.

I have a pupil who has been unable to work because he’s been in a sling. He couldn’t draw or write, but he was able to use his left han to control a computer mouse. While the rest of his class were sketching out designs for a wooden box, he was busy drawing the box on the computer, using Autodesk Inventor. He came up with something that looked a little like this:

Then when the class wre in the workshop making their boxes, again he was unable to do this so I gave him a camera and set him the task of documenting the different stages in the manufacture. He was going to put it all together into a ComicLife strip, and hopefully a short Animoto video. Unfortunately he has been absent again and hasn’t had the opportunity to complete these tasks, so I’ve done some examples of the sort of thing he could get done:

ComicLife strips:

Animoto video:

One of my 3rd year Craft and Design pupils has been in a sling recently and unable to do most of the normal work, we’ve been designing and making a small trinket box in the last few weeks so I’ve had him taking photos of the class’s progress. Soon he will be putting these images together into a Comic Life strip. I’ve not got him onto that stage just yet – snow impedes progress! – but I’ve had a little play with Comic Life tonight with his images. I wanted just to show what’s possible but without stealing his thunder too much, so rather than publishing it on their class blog I thought I’d put it here (under the banner of sharing resources!).

I’ve also been playing with Animoto again, still waiting for my education key so still limited to 30s videos, here’s one I made last night…

I like to share

I’ve got a wee corner of this site where I make some of the things I use available for others, I’ve finally got around to adding a few things for Standard Grade Craft and Design.

My Standard Grade Craft and Design resources page.

I’ve made up a few woodworking joints in Autodesk Inventor, and they are now available for anyone to use. Currently corner butt joint, corner rebate, hidden dowel, box comb, dovetail. More are there but I’ve yet to build the links to them, in time they will get done.

Creative Commons Licence 2.5 applies as always – copy, edit, reuse how you like, but make no money, and give attribution. If you share it further the licence persists.

I have other things made in Inventor that I will get on to uploading soon. Please let me know in the comments if any of the files do not work. They were made in an educational version of Inventor 2008.

I’ve got a big poster in my room which is almost entirely blank, I’m going to use it with my S3 Craft and Design class on Thursday. The only things on it are big black letters spelling out “Design is…” Onto this sheet I’m going to ask my class to each stick a post-it with a few words, or a picture, explaining what they think design is and why it is important. I am secretly hoping that one of them will write ‘everything’ but I don’t hold out much hope!

Anyway, serendipity struck tonight. Just after looking through “Thirst” on slideshare (via Ollie) one of the recommended shows was called … you guessed it “Design is Everything“. It is perhaps a little above S3 level but it has plenty of talking points and I may try to get a modified version made up – or even better get my class to do one.

I’d like to see what design means to other people too, so on flickr I’ve put a similar image to my poster. I’d like you to add a note to the image and add a few words, just like my pupils will be doing with post-its. Here’s the link.

One of the great things about being an NQT is that you get a lot more time to do the sort of things that other teachers can’t quite fit in so easily, one of these is the chance to observe other lessons throughout the school.

This afternoon I was able to watch Digital Katie’s friend Jack Tennent teach computing to a 3rd year class. One pupil in that class is also in my 3rd year Craft and Design class – a class that has not been going as well as it might. This afternoon’s lesson was with a much smaller class but the difference between then and my classes was still very marked. The main reason behind that I think is the different environment and a few missing faces, but one big contributing factor to my problems, I think, is the content of the lessons. Today there was a series of short achievable tasks, a whole class game related to the material, and then some free time as a reward at the end, whereas in Craft and Design at the moment the class are working on a long running project with not a lot of scope for doing anything else but the project.

Allow me to use a metaphor, if I was planning a long walk for myself, say from Lauder to Dunbar, then I would probably plan to follow the Herring Trail route – pretty much a direct route over the Lammermoors but one that is fairly committing and offers no easy escape route. On the other hand if I was taking someone along with me who isn’t a big walker and is really more interested in learning a few more outdoor skills then I would plan something different like an easy coastal walk that could be split into little bits and allowed us to escape to a road and catch a bus home or spend a night camping.

At the moment my 3rd years are somewhere on the Lammermoors and while some of them could be making good time and enjoying the scenery there are enough of them who have blisters so that everyone is being held back. Basically they are not able to cope with the project and I need to find a way of getting them onside again. I also need to find a way to spend time with those at the front so that they don’t go the wrong way and get lost.

I had a brief but very worthwhile conversation this afternoon with the pupil who is in both this class and in mine, he told me that what I am doing with him is no fun. I totally agreed, being in that class at the moment is no fun for me or for them, but making it better with the current project will be hard. This was not news to me, I had a conversation at SLF last week about just this class. The suggestion was to throw out all the course content as it is and come at it from a different direction, I know this is what I need to do but I feel like I’m committed at the moment and my only option is to push on and try something new when we start the next part of the course. Unfortunately that is their final project in Standard Grade and the one which they get graded on, I need them on side before I start that so I’m trying to work out what short bits of work I can do with them to win them over in between now and then.

I’ve also been given a maths class to watch tomorrow, again with the same pupil – the lad will think I’m deliberately following him!

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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