Jon Hoff’s Teaching ICT (PGCE year)

Wow, well I get home from a hard days slog at the gulag (well, observing Year 10s and Year 7s mainly) only to find my humble delicious slideshow is being shared around the interweb by some of the UKs premier ICT bloggers! Happy days…a basement room presentation to 15 people one day, a world wide web phenomenon the next day.

How did this happen I hear you ask?

Well, it’s a perfect example of the learning and sharing environment that Web 2.0 can provide for us. After writing the post below which explains the context for the presentation. I then posted the link to the blog to my twitter network, still a modest 40 followers. I got a comment from John Sutton of Creative ICT fame (an excellent blog). He read it, good enough I think. John then sees Mr Doug Belshaw post onto Twitter that he is doing an elearnr session on delicious. My slideshow gets thrown into the bargin. Thanks to the power of Slideshare Mr Belshaw can then embed my presentation into his presentation on elearnr. Slideshare tells me that so far 77 people have viewed my slideshow, 3 have favourited it and 2 have downloaded it. So, I am thinking to myself, it must be useful…

All this is not for the sake of showing off. It is an example of Web 2.0 POWER! Blog. Twitter. Share presentations with slideshare, embed, blog again. You love it don’t you. I do…

Thanks John and Doug.

As a part of the PGCE IT we each had to present a five minute microlesson on a topic of our choice. I chose delicious. I had a hard time narrowing it down to be honest, I had in mind teaching some beginners CSS, using Wordpress as a content mangement system, using Photoshop as an educational tool, using RSS and news readers, the possibilities of Flickr….here is the presentation I ended up doing. Presentation is a little lazy.

I started using delicious years ago as a way to catagorise my old blogspot site. Having started my PGCE course, delicious has come into its own. I am spearheading an effort to get our department its own delicious account, and I may be introducing it to the year 10s at my first placement school.

To see what a PGCE IT trainee gets up to you could check out my course site. This site was adapted from a combination of three column and CSS nav bar templates I found on the web. I love messing around with that kind of thing! Check out the directed activities page to see the work done so far including a presentation on Baud, Bit Rate and Bandwidth and tutorials on using Adobe Photoshop for staff training and student tutition.

Here’s a poster I used as a focused discussion for Year 10’s studying for their OCR nationals ICT option. It was meant to be a starter but ended up being an hour long activity.

After a feedback session students wrote their own ICT acceptable use policies for the school. Some sensible ideas arose about the issues of having useful educational resources such as You Tube banned in school. It is certianly a subject that got them talking on topic.

Home from the first day of my first placement on the PGCE ICT.

It was an interesting day. Certainly I enjoyed the biting humour in the staff room at lunch time, the fantastic tongue-in-cheek cynicism that weathered secondary school teachers acquire (and need) to survive. The school is an all boys that has around a 50% A-C GCSE pass rate. Fairly typical. I am really going to have to impose on the classroom, drawing on all my experience of keeping rowdy classes of teenagers in order. However, the nature of these students is slightly different to what I have taught before. They are English. This may require new strategies. I am fearful as well that a trainee teacher is forever in his or her mentors shadow and never able or feeling able to break entirely free and flex their teaching styles as they wish to.

I have decided to do my Microlesson (a five minute expose to be presented to peeps at Uni) on delicious, in other words, social bookmarking. I’ve already been booked in to present this to two Year Ten classes who have just looked at bookmarks in browsers on their OCR course. My cross curricular presentation on the potential support ICT can provide in Geography is also nearly finished, I’ll embed it here ASAP. I have used sliderocket for this one, and have had a mixed experience. For a while I was trying to screencast a tour of Google Earth and then embed it in the presentation. My machine just does not have those kind of capabilities! GE Pro has a movie making facility but I am not paying $400 for the pleasure. I’ll just do a live tour of the software. I need that one trillion bit connection to be available through Virgin sooner rather than later…

Are there any other PGCE trainees ICT or otherwise out there? How is your course going so far?

This week I’ve been to a number of lectures, including e-safety, behaviour management, ECM (every child matters) and the new national curriculum. 

During a ‘Where have we been with the National Curriculum and where are we going’? lecture, in reply to the question ‘Skills and processes for what?’ we watched the following show:

During an afternoon discussion, I bought up with my table the fact that this showed just how important ICT was in schools today. I was met with, I think, a reluctant acceptance. One voiced an opinion that students would always need the ability to research from books and physical sources. The justification was, for example, a History trainee who would glean most of their ‘data’ from books. Me? I remained steadfast, the future is digital. All books will be available (or released in some form) online. Is (or will) the skill of researching physical sources (still be) essential? 

I’d hate to teach someone how to find something in a book using the index just to look in the index of a book and find something. Especially considering that forward thinking world institutions are already digitising their paper collections. The Library of Congress is just one example.  Meaning that rare sources contained soley within their building in a physical presence can be accessed and searched by anyone with a connection.

Teaching kids to connect, how to access online tools, how to search and evaluate information, and how to share and collaborate is the key to unlocking their future success in a digital world.  

It’s the end of the second day of my first week in University on the PGCE ICT. Words like framework, statutory, Key Stage, curriculum, targets, objectives and outcomes are bouncing around in my head and ticker-taping in front of my very eyes. I am hallucinating. This kind of rigid structure in education in this country is something I will have to get used to and accept.

Previously I have had flexibility and freedom. I’d bump into Tim the Language Arts guy in the corridor at AIS and he’d be like ‘Hey Jon, doing a project called ‘Choose your own Adventure’ and I’d be like ‘Hey that’s prefect for an introduction to designing websites, let’s do it…!’ Alas, I get the feeling that most British teachers are so inundated and restricted that collaborative projects probably only feature deeply in their subconsciousness.  I hope to be proved wrong. 

So, spent the day looking at Key Stage 3/4 and some of the topics involved. Collaboration with Google Docs was mentioned very briefly. Got a few presentations coming up including one xcurricular (use of ICT in Geography) and one on Baud, Bit rate and Banwidth. I’ll be plying tweeters for some ideas on those….

I have been assigned my schools. The second, longer placement involved a ‘challenging’ school with some issues. Ofsted report is smothered in 3s and 4s. However, I feel like I am ready for anything. 

As the previous post refers to Google Forms being used in schools to cut out the misery of paper based labouring when collecting data, the same can apply to society as a whole. An example in my home town of Bournemouth left residents seething. Livid. Ballistic. Straining at the leash. Rabid even. And I would have had some special words myself for the people who arranged this traffic survey.

This from the local paper:

“NUMPTIES”, “brain-dead”, “jobsworths” and “survey monkeys”. And these are just the printable insults hurled at the people who organised the Spur Road traffic census, which caused giant jams north of Bournemouth on Thursday.

Twenty-four hours after the clipboards were packed away, Bournemouth motorists were still fuming about what one described as “the farce of the century”.

And from this article:

THERE was misery for thousands of motorists caught up in a six-mile tailback caused by the latest traffic surveys…

…The delays continued throughout the day, with the survey running from 7am to 7pm.

How, in this era of technology, was this allowed to happen! 

How about a simple Google spreadsheet form embedded on a simple website address. Let’s say 80% of those motorists use a computer at home or at work. Are they more likely to respond with useful data if they see a well advertised website along the way : *** Traffic Survey – Improve our roads – Visit www.bournemouthtrafficsurvey.com***? Would you feel more likely to respond to this manner of communication rather than being forced against your will to be stuck in a traffic jam on your way to work….?

The local council could/should also be compling a *mailing list of the willing* who are happy to recieve local information/newsletters via email. A big job, but once it is set up, it is set up. 

It was in late August 2007 when I was first offered a position teaching ICT. With three years previous experience of classroom teaching, a first degree in the right field and hobbies which involved blogging, web design and photography, I thought I could make the leap without too much fuss. My brief was simple : create a cirriculumn. Whilst other subjects in this young International School all had their swanky new text books, I salvaged a few photocopied chapters from an Office 2003 tutorial book.  Proceeding through the year I had my kids set up their own blogs here.

Seeing as the school was in Vietnam,  issues such as horrible connection speeds and regular power cuts affected my classes, along with the usual network nightmares and an I.T department insistant on change at all the wrong times. Through the year, I taught photoshop skills using Photoshop Elements, short video projects with Adobe Premiere Elements,  HTML and CSS coding, MSW Logo, Pencil, along with two collaborative projects with the Language Arts department.  Oh yeah, and Office apps. 

September 2008 and I am starting a PGCE ICT at Southampton University School of Education. Having spent today having a look around the ICT blogosphere, I’m wondering how much of the wonderful Web 2.0 resources I can work into my teaching units, if it will be applicable, or even possible.  

I am already excited about the prospect of doing some Voice Threads, a perfect example of using technology to teach not only technical skills but also literacy.  

I’ve already linked up to some of the best sites I have found so far, including Effective ICT (check out the presentation on the home page), Kim Cofino’s site (who is currently working in Bangkok) and ICT in my Classroom which has loads of great ideas of how to use Google Docs in the classroom (based on a primary classroom) and just posted about ‘cloud based computing’. 

I hope in the coming weeks and months to post about my experiences as a trainee PGCE student in the ICT field starting with five days observation in a primary school tomorrow.