OllieBray.com

K-12 On-Line Conference 2009: Computer Games in the Classroom

The 2009 K-12 Conference has been as successful as ever and now its my turn to contribute to this years programme. My presentation 'Using computer games to enhance learning and social interaction' goes live over on the K-12 site at 12.00h (GMT) today. This automated post provides a bit more background on the project that I describe and also gives a few more links.

Please feel free to leave any feedback below or over on the K-12 Conference Ning. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can although I’m out and about a lot at the moment so it might not be straight away.

Background and Introduction

The project was inspired by some early work carried out in Aberdeenshire by Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium.
 
The idea behind the project is to use commercially available ‘off the shelf’ computer games that have been built for entertainment and then retrofitted for education. By their very definition commercially available games (due to their high production budgets) tend to be more engaging and cheaper than games that have been build solely for education. The challenge is finding the right games that are suitable for use in the classroom.

Another underlying principle of the project is that in order for quality learning to take place there must be a combination good pedagogy from the classroom teacher combined with activities that are either interesting or engaging. There is a distinct difference between what I mean by interest and engagement. Learning will quickly blossom if a child’s natural interest in a topic is combined with good teaching. Unfortunately many global education systems require children to have specific knowledge or specific skills that they find un-interesting. This is where teachers need to find engaging ways to deliver the content. Technology including computer games can provide this engagement.

For example the project described below has successfully used the game Guitar Hero as a stimulus to teach literacy, numeracy, art, physical exercise, science and lots of other curriculum areas.

This particular project was also designed to help children have a really positive end to primary school and a really positive start to secondary school during their time of transition. In Scotland (and in many other parts of the world) at transition the children move from having most of their teaching from a single teacher to a system of timetabling in the secondary school where they will be taught by perhaps 8 or 9 different teachers.  It is widely recognised that transition and movement between primary to secondary school can be problematic for many pupils and can lead to conflict. Appropriate computer games can provide the ideal medium to reduce conflict within schools at they are competitive but in a non-threatening environment.

Further information about the project is below:

Thinking out of the xBox (Using Guitar Hero in Schools)

Purpose

The purpose of the project was to improve the process of transition for pupils moving from primary (elementary) to secondary (high) school through the medium of a three stage innovative computer games based learning project.

Aims

The aims of the project were:

• To improve the process of student transition between primary to secondary school.
• To develop relationships between cluster staff, students and parents.
• To use Guitar Hero as a context for learning within the seven Musselburgh primary schools during the summer term.
• To hold an innovative transition morning at the secondary school based around the game Guitar Hero.
• To use the theme Guitar Hero as a stimulus for discussion when the children moved to the secondary school.
• To develop a different way of updating primary teachers on individual student progress after they moved to the secondary school.
• To prove that school and learning can be fun!

 
Structure of the project

The learning for the project was structured in three main stages:

Stage One – Guitar Hero is used as a context for learning in primary seven (P7).

This learning took place between the Easter holidays and the summer term 2008. Every primary school was given ownership of the project and a number of learning activities occurred. An example of the types of learning that took place are summarised below in this mind map from Stoneyhill Primary School. The mind map was created at the start of the project by the classroom teacher and their class.

As a result of this planning, a number of worthwhile activities took place across the cluster. Some of these activities can be viewed in picture gallery.

 
Stage Two - All of the Primary 7 children visit the secondary school for a transition day to participate in a number of Guitar Hero related activities.

The day was launched and concluded in the school assembly hall. During the day all of the children got to participate in three workshops using a ‘round robin’ rota system.

Workshop One - The Battle of the Bands in the School Hall (1)

There were 10 games consoles set up in the school hall. The children had to compete against someone who they had not met before. The collaboration during this activity was amazing. Senior students supervised the event so there was also an opportunity for new students to ask them questions about life at the school.

Workshop Two - The Guitar Hero Challenge

These workshops were facilitated by the school’s Guidance Staff. In Scotland secondary school guidance staff have the main pastoral / welfare responsibility for children.

The first task was to ask the question, ‘tell me and your class what you have been learning about during the Guitar Hero Project’. As each school took the project in its own direction, it was a chance for the class to communicate with each other about a common interest, swap ideas and learn about the learning in each others’ schools.

The second task was to allow 20 minutes for the whole group to be split into smaller groups of 4/5 people and to come up with a band name, logo and jingle. One of the S6 students commented, ‘I can’t believe it, they have just come up with that in 5 minutes.’

Logos and jingles had to represent the interests of the whole team (eg: it was work about themselves). The finished products were photographed and videoed and the results were shown at the end of the morning.

 
Workshop Three – Peer Led Activity

Each practical set, for the following year, had an opportunity to participate in a different activity. All of the activities had a different theme related to rock music or to the game. The idea behind this was to make the most of the senior pupil expertise from the secondary school, but also to capitalise on the peer led experience. The senior students were briefed to speak to the young children about the sorts of things that they might be embarrassed to ask adults. Things like where the toilets were, how much money to bring to the school, if they would be allowed out at lunchtime or not, etc...

 
The peer led activities included:

• Guitar Hero Orienteering – using maps of the school to navigate around the school grounds to find the name of rock bands and answer the bonus Guitar Hero Questions.
• Deigning a CD Case – using Microsoft Publisher.
• Designing a guitar – using Photoshop
• Rock Drama – mime and improvisation to rock music in this workshop. It was great to see four different schools collaborating and working together in almost perfect sequence.
• Rock Dance – Led by S6 Student.
• Meet the Band – Working with an S6 band and learning how to play ‘Smoke on the Water’ on the guitar as well as getting a tour of the MGS recording studio.
• iTunes Challenge – A numeracy related quiz using Activote.

Displays - During the day there was also an opportunity for schools to display some of the Guitar Hero Work that they had produced over the last few months. It was all outstanding!


Stage Three – Guitar Hero in the Secondary School

The final part of the project took place between the start of term and the October break 2008. The children were tasked with designing Guitar Hero Postcards and then sending them back to their old primary school teacher. The postcards were produced in CDT and the content was written in English. 

Subject teachers were also tasked to use ‘Guitar Hero’ as a context for discussion with their new classes.
This simple activity not only put closure on the project but was also a very powerful learning experience. It also developed increased communication between the primary and secondary school.

The quality of writing on the postcards was also outstanding as the children were writing with a real purpose. This was able to be used by the high school staff to provide formative feedback to students.
 

Evolution of the Project

Local Scale

The evaluation of the 2008 Guitar Hero Transition project was so positive that East Lothian Council decided to copy the model and roll the project out across the education authority. During the summer term of 2009 all six clusters (that’s a total of 46 schools and over 70 xboxes in classes!) were involved in a new phase of the project based on the original Musselburgh model.

The Musselburgh Cluster staff were involved in training the new P7 teachers and working with each of the secondary schools to promote games based learning as a context for transition.

The project will continue in 2010 this time adding an international dimension to the work by networking xboxes. We hope this will provide an interesting way for children to learn about life in other countries, contribute to the breaking down of cultural difference and introduce an exciting way to learn about other topics such as time zones, location and place. Agian this new section of the project will have a strong literacy focus.

Wide Reach

The project blog have been successful that now other schools elsewhere in Scotland, UK and internationally have started to mirror the project and adapt it for local need. An additional project website was set up to support the larger 2009 project and web stats for both sites show that lesson material has been downloaded all over the UK and a number of other countries including the  USA, Australia, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong.

Awards and Recognition 

The project has won a number of awards including:

• Winner Microsoft UK Innovative Teacher Forum - Feb 2009
• 1st Place Microsoft European Innovative Teacher Forum (Innovation in the Community) - April 2009
• 2nd Plave Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Teacher Forum (Innovation in the Community) - November 2009

If you have further information about the project then please get in touch.

UK Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum and Conference 2009

Yesterday along with Con Morris (National CPD Team) and Joe Wilson  (SQA) I traveled down to Birmingham for the Microsoft UK Innovative Teachers Forum and Conference.

This is the first time that Partners in Learning have run a conference like this as part of the UK forum and it was a really good event. It was also free for anyone to attend and a great day of quality professional development with a bunch of very enthusiastic teachers.

The event was opened by Steve Bewsick, Microsoft UK. I met Steve last year in Reading and it was nice to meet him again and listen to him open the conference.

The morning keynote was given by John Davitt who did a really great job of getting the day off to a positive start. I’ve seen John present before and really enjoy his style and humor. Amongst other things he demonstrated the Learning Score and of course his Learning Event Generator (LEG) and the iPhone version the Random Activity Generator (RAG).

If you have not seen or heard of the LEG or the RAG before have a read of this post from Stuart Ball and if you want to find out more about John here is a really nice article about some of his work that was published recently over on Merlin John’s site as part of the Innovators series.

After the keynote I had a chance to look around some of the Innovative Teacher projects that were on display. All of the work was very impressive and it was nice to chat to such dedicated and enthusiastic teachers who were all very obviously passionate about learning.

I had a second dose of John Davitt for my morning workshop where we were challenged to complete one of the random activities generated from the LEG. My group had to produce ‘knitting as a role play’.  We had great fun collaborating, gathering props, filming our role play and of course learning how to knit (thank goodness for YouTube!)

After lunch I went to a workshop that was run by Shirelands Learning. Shirelands are doing some interesting work with their first year curriculum (it is now completely thematic). They have also invested heavily in technology. Some of the students from Shirelands showed us some of the work that they have been doing using Microsoft Surface and also Little Big Planet for the PS3.

I particularly liked one of the ideas for Little Big Planet – where Shirlands have re-created their school in Little Big Planet. First year students play to the game to get to know their new school and to learning about their new surroundings. We have a number of Little Big Planet projects starting from the Consolarium in the new year and this might be one of the ideas that we follow up on.

The final part of the day was the UK Innovative Teacher Awards. All of the projects were great but the four projects that will be representing the UK in Berlin will be:

• Dave Rogers (Priory School Specialist Sports College) Pirates and social networking
• Simon Horleston (Howe Dell Primary School) EcoVids    
• Amy Lewis (saltash.net community school) Heroes    
• Jan Webb (Weston Village Primary School) A classroom without walls    

I was particularly delighted to see my good friend David Rogers pick up an award – which was very well deserved. I was also really pleased to see Dave Garland from Saltash.net get a special achievement award for all of the hard work that he has done to promote ICT in Schools.

So, overall a great event and one that I hope to have an opportunity to attend in the future…

Curriculum for Excellence, Science, Change and New Technologies (SSERC Conference 2009)

Yesterday I did the Keynote presentation at the Annual SSERC Conference and AGM.

With support from Learning and Teaching Scotland SSERC have done a good job of developing resources and a new interactive website to support the development of the emerging 3-18 Curriculum in Scotland for Science.

It was a real pleasure to be able to speak to the assembled audience. Although I have to admit as non-science specialist I was a little worried about how I might be recived. My brief was to talk about on-line tools and their role in science education.

If you were at the presentation I would welcome your feedback either by leaving a comment below or by sending me an email (contact details top right).

I promised that I would post the slides from the talk, so here they are:

Curriculum for Excellence, Science, Change and New Technologies (SSERC Conference 2009)

View more presentations from Ollie Bray.

Here are also my thoughts, notes and links that I referred to during my presentation:


1. Technology always wins

Everyone questions changes to technology adoption – but wide scale technology adoption nearly always wins. The question is more around the speed of adoption and how this relates to the speed of engagement with learners.

2. Its now easy to generate ‘rich’ content – but you need to think about using it in creative ways

It is now easier than ever for teachers to create on-line content that can be used as tools to enhance learning.

Wordle is an example of a generator that provides an interesting way for teachers to work with students to analyze and look at text. Sinclair Mackenzie who writes the excellent blog 'Never Mind the Optics' has recently used a combination of Wordle and blockposters.com to create some key word revision sheets for his classes. He has written about his experience of doing this here.

3. Change

No one likes change. But thing are changing…

The key message (hopefully) from my presentation was that we need to understand how children are changing, technology is changing and how the curriculum is changing before we understand how we should change or pedagogy to support all three of these things.


4. Changing children and young people

I think that children are changing. One of the reasons for this is that I think that now children and young people have increased access to knowledge. This knowledge is normally found via the Internet.

In the past parents, teachers and responsible adults used to the gatekeepers of knowledge. In short we would normally decide when a young person was old enough to know about sex and drugs and rock & roll. This was one of the reasons why we had a curriculum that tried to link essential knowledge with age-and-stage.

In the majority of cases knowledge was often only introduced when it was believed by the professional that a young person was emotionally ready to receive it. There were of course, as with anything, exceptions to this rule.

The Internet and increased use of mobile technology has changed all of this. Now children have access to unlimited knowledge. Unfortunately sometimes children come into contact with knowledge that is unreliable and also content they are emotionally unprepared for. I’m convinced that there is a link between this and behavior in schools – but I have no evidence to back this up.

A recent survey commissioned by Channel 4 looked at the online behaviors of young people between the ages of 12 – 24. In uncovered some interesting statistics that included:

• They personally own 8 devices (including MP3 player, PC, TV, DVD player, mobile phone, stereo, games console, and digital camera)
• They frequently conduct over 5 activities whilst watching TV
• 25% of them agree that “I’d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone access”
• A quarter of young people interviewed text or IM (instant message) friends they are physically with at the time
• They have on average 123 friends on their social network spaces
• And the first thing the majority of them do when they get home is turn on their computer

The questions is what does this mean for schools?

I think that Schools should:

i) Collect their own data. You should know how many children in your school have devices, have internet access at home, have the ability to play an mp3 file etc…

ii) Teachers should have an understanding of the websites that their classes use for school work and for non-school work. They haven’t got to use the sites just have an understanding of what they can do. This knowledge will also contribute to the relationship building between the teacher and the class.

iii) Collect data on student ICT skills. Schools and teachers should know what ICT skills young people have. This is particularly important at the transition between primary and secondary stages. Again data needs to be collected on animation skills, digital video skills, web skills search skills etc…

iv) Make sure that all school staff are adequately trained in Internet Safety and Responsible Use. I find it worrying that young children have so many ‘friends’ on social networking spaces. Schools need to re-define what we mean by that word ‘friend’.

Unless schools do this how will we ever stretch children and set appropriate assessment tasks.


5. Changing Technology

Technology is changing faster than we ever imagined it to. In reality schools will never be able to stay up-to-date and keep up with technological change. But we need to try.

Microsoft recently wrote a report called ‘Europe Logs On’. Where it predicts 5 technological changes that will occur by 2012. In reality these changes are already occurring but there is just not wide scale adoption yet. Schools need to change and adapt resources in parallel to technological change if we want to try to keep up.


Change One: The Three Screens

The distinction between your computer, television and telephone will become more blurred. You will be able to do core functions of all devices on any of the devices. I big step forward in this paradigm was the recent development of TV catch up for the iPhone. I still can’t quite believe I can watch the news on my iphone over my normal phone network.

What should education do in response: Any education content that is developed need to be optimized for use on mobile.

Commercial publishers – please take note.

Change Two: The rise of connected entertainment

You will be able to interact with your media. The BBC red button was just the first step in this direction. BBC iPlayer that allows you to re-watch television programmes that you have missed is another important development.

What should education do in response: We need connected education.

The Climate Mystery by Cogin, Microsoft and the Discovery Channel is the most advance form of connected education that I have seen to date. An education soap opera with a social networking backend to allow real time global collaboration between users. This combined with well thought out mini games to allow a non-threatening but competitive environment for children to learn.

 

Change Three: The whole web will become social.

The web will become more personalized and as much about people as about information. Other people will be used increasing more to filter the information from the web.

What should education do in response: Teachers need to learn the value of the social web

I don’t know very much about science or what resources are good for science teachers. But I have a whole personal learning network that know more about science teaching than I do.

When I was asked to speak at the SSERC Conference I asked on Twitter for some people to recommend resources to me. I was able to make the assumption that because they were coming from people that I trusted that they would be of value in the classroom.

One of the links came from Nick Hood (PT Physics at Glenwood High School in Fife) Nick sent me a link to his delicious links. Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to save websites that you find as a list on to another website. Anyone can see your list and it will also tell you if other delicious users have also saved the same link. It’s a powerful way to share peer-reviewed resources amongst teachers. I’ve been using delicious for years and find it incredibly valuable. More info on delicious here.

Here are some of the links I was recommended by my professional learning network before yesterdays conference. I would have never of found them without using the Internet socially:

• Nick Hoods Delicious Links – links to hundreds of other great resources

• BrainPop UK – Great little animations that explain things in a simple way for children. Some BrainPop movies are always free (others you pay for)

• 60 second science podcast – from Scientific America

• Interactive Science Simulations – from the university of Colorado

•  Visible Body – a 3D immersive anatomony and physiology model (30 day free trial)

• 10 Science Apps for the iPod / iPod Touch – Many of these Apps are free

• Science Songs – Different songs about Science topics

• Topic Box Science – Links to other recommended science websites

• 3D mouth – everything you need to know about teeth in 3D form

There were lots more…

Change Four - The 3D Internet

Increasingly you will be able to interact with information and people on the internet in a 3D way.

Many young children (eg: 5 – 8 year olds) are already interacting with the 3D internet. They occupy sites like Club Penguin and Lego Universe. I think it’s unlikely that these children will ever grow into social networking sites like Bebo – that are mainly text based. 3D immersive environments are incredibly engaging for children is if they are used in the right way

What should education do in response: Embrace and prepare for the 3D internet and make sure that staff are trained on the responsibilities of using it and the safety messages that they need to give to young people.

In the Consolarium we are already working a number of 3D Internet projects. CANVAS is currently our flagship project but we have other ideas and projects in development.

WonderVille 3D is a good Canadian example that combines a 3D simulation and static content. You have to navigate around a world to find information and the answers to problems.

There are other good examples of science education in the 3D world that are already available in Scilands in  Second Life. The challenge for us is to now make these environments safe for young people.



Change 5 – The rise of the Smartphone

Internet enabled mobile phones with robust web-browsers will be the norm by 2012. The iPhone and Google’s Android Platform and good examples of current models. I recently read somewhere that my iPhone has more computing power in it that the first Apollo Space mission.

What should education do in response: We need to rapidly consider how we integrate technology like mobile phones into the classroom.

Mobile phones are no longer phones any more. They are mini computers that you can make phone calls on. They can be used to take pictures, record video, record audio, surf the web, download lesson content and there are a variety of powerful Apps that also have strong education value.

Schools teaching Advanced Higher should think about how they can make more use of iTunesU (The ‘U’ is for University). Many university departments (such as Oxford) now give the content of their lectures away for free over iTunesU. School need to make more use of these high quality and free resources.

In my opinion in terms of Science and the use of mobile technology Saltash.net Community School in Cornwall have got a good approach to the use of mobile technology for learning.



6. Changing Curriculum

The Science curriculum is changing. I get a little fed up when we talk about A Curriculum for Excellence and people tell me that they are doing it already. If we are doing it already, why have we wasted all this time and money developing a new curriculum? For me Curriculum for Excellence is about thinking differently and then doing things differently.

It would be unprofessional of me to comment on the content of a science curriculum as I have no expertise in this area. But I do worry that across the Scottish teaching profession that teachers are still thinking in subject boxes. In my opinion schools need to start working in clusters and thinking about how a young person progresses through the 3-18 curriculum. Then we need to think about Curriculum architecture and only then should we start thinking about content. Which takes us back to thinking about 3-18 in a planning clycle.


7. Changing Pedagogy

I think that for good learning to take place there needs to be a combination of good pedagogy and either interest or engagement. I think there is a difference between interest and engagement. If a child is interested in something then combined with the right support from the classroom teacher learning is likely to flourish.

Unfortunately, children are sometime required to learn things that they don’t find interesting and that is when we have to teach things in an engaging way.

Technology is engaging and teachers should think about capitalizing on this as they develop learning activities.

All registered Scottish teachers should already be able to using technology in innovative ways:

    ‘Registered teachers skillfully adopt and deploy a wide variety of innovative resources, including ICT and, where appropriate, the outdoor environment'

(GTCS Standard for Full Registration)

Some possible ways to use technology to engage our students

 i) Use their tools (eg: social networking spaces)


ii) Offer choice of output (written, typed, poster, presentation, video, podcast etc…) the input (planning, drafting, re-drafting, collaboration etc…) remains the same and the most important bit.


iii) Provide a real audience for students work (Wikipedia, blogs with comments, school radio podcast, science television station on YouTube etc…)


iv) Be creative with on-line technology tools. The ones I specifically mentioned were:

Comic Life / Comic Brush (www.comicbrush.com) - I showed an example of a cartoon where a girl is having a conversation with red blood cells.

Pixton (www.pixton.com) - I showed an example of a comic that has been made about Newtons Laws.

WorldWide Telescope (www.worldwidetelescope.org)

A powerful tool to explore the universe and to teach about space.

 

As well as providing a great way to learn facts about the universe. Science teachers should also think about how this could be used in different way. For example wouldn’t Worldwide telescope be a great stimulus for creative writing. Where children imagine want it was like to explore planets and far off lands?


Google Earth (www.earth.google.com)

The days and night feature of Google Earth combined with other layers such as the Earthquake layer have obvious links to science education. Its also worth exploring Google Sky, Google Moon and Google Mars.

GPS and other data can be collected from data loggers can easily be imported into Google Earth to provide a special dimension to any real data collected.

Computer Games

Computer Games again combined with good pedagogy can provide a great contextual hub for learning to teach science. Good games for science education include:

• Endless Ocean – where you can explore the ocean as a diver. There are obvious links to marine biology but also to buoyancy, sea water, pressure, Oxygen, physiology etc…

• Spore – This is a game about evolution and you evolve from a micro-organism to intergalactic planet habitation. Obvious links to biology, diversification, evolution and adaptation.

• World of Goo – a crazy game for the Wii where you have to build things out of…goo. Good for introducing concepts such as texture and viscosity. Also the principles of different forces on structures and you have to build complicated bridges (out of goo) to move between levels.

8. Changing Professional Development

We need new models of CPD to engage with a Curriculum for Excellence. If your interested in this have a look at my Drip Feed Vs Sheep Dip CPD post here.

The future of professional development is on-line, have a look at:

• CPD Find
• Curriculum for Excellence
• Consolarium: Games Based and Innovation in Education
• LTScotland on iTunesU (the ‘U’ is for University)

Also consider reading about the daily practice of other Scottish Science Teachers such as:

• Nick Hood - Mr Hood.net
• Sinclair MacKenzie - Never mind the Optics
• Jaye Richards - Mimanifesto

Feedback

I would welcome any feedback or comments on the above. Please feel free to get in touch (details top right) or leave a comment below.

Wikipedia, schools and the BBC - a response to tonight’s BBC Scotland Radio Broadcast

My thoughts on Wikipedia and its use in schools has been getting some in interesting press just recently. My original thoughts were posted here after the Handheld Learning Conference in London.
This article together with my presentation at the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers Annual Conference in October resulted in a nice piece in the Times Educational Supplement Scotland. I made some comments about the TESS piece just so I could clarify a couple of points. Overall I was very happy with it and I did say the things that were highlighted.

The TESS article was then used by Cara Sulieman to write a piece for Deadline Scotland. Unfortunately, I felt this piece missed the point. I’ve contacted Deadline and explained to them that I would be willing to do an extended interview – but they haven’t got back to me yet!

Anyway, I had just got back home tonight when I picked up a ‘tweet’ that said they were talking about me on BBC Radio Scotland. I tuned in but missed all but the last minute or so. I’ve now had a chance to re-listen to the piece on iPlayer.

The BBC didn’t mention me by name – but I’m well known enough for people to join up the dots. I think it’s a real shame and unprofesional of the BBC that they didn’t contact me for my opinion because actually they have completely missed the point in what I consider to be a poor piece of journalism. You can listen to it here and tell me what you think

I have written a rough transcript from the programme below. It may be slightly inaccurate as I just typed it as I was listening. I have also then inserted my own comments.

Anyway, it went something like this:


BBC: "Depute Head teacher from Musselburgh says that pupils should be encouraged to use the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia despite its inaccuracies".

OB Comment: That is actually not quite what I said. You can read the extended piece here.

The BBC Introduce Oliver Kamm (Times columnist) who recently defined Wikipedia as 'vain, glorious amateurism'. They ask him what he thinks is wrong with Wikipedia.

NOTE: for the record - I enjoy Oliver Kamm's articles on the Times on-line (although he would probably argue that the on-line version is not as good as the printed version :-)) . But I think he was misinformed and badly briefed by the BBC.

Carrying on:

Kamm: "What’s so wrong with it is not so much the balance between accurate articles and articles that are self- promoting rubbish. Wikipedia makes no distinction between someone who has knowledge and are competent to comment or if you are just someone off the street".

OB Comment: This gets us back to age old debate of knowledge, what is knowledge and who has the expertise to write articles? The person ‘off the street’ might actually write a really good Wikipedia article – particularly if it was about their street. You see Wikipedia caters for niche markets as well as the big issues and articles. That is one of the reasons why it is so big.

Kamm: "The problem is that knowledge is democratic in the sense that no one has the last word. But its not democratic in the sense that anyone can join in".

OB Comment: Depends of your definition of knowledge. Why can’t anyone join in? The more people that join in, the larger the debate we have and the more conversation we share with each other, the more we contribute to the growth and understanding of knowledge.

Kamm: "Wikipedia doesn’t encourage people with real competence to express their expertise".

OB Comment: Yes it does Wikipedia encourages anyone to comment – even people with errrmmm….’knowledge?’

Kamm: "It’s [Wikipedia] certainly fresh in the sense that it doesn’t distinguish between total rubbish and genuine expertise. But that doesn’t contribute to the sum of knowledge".

OB Comment: Do the disclaimers that are littered all over Wikipedia not contribute to this?

Surely it flags up when something might be ‘rubbish’ with text boxes saying things like "The factual accuracy is disputed' - 'This article contradicts another article' - 'This article contradicts itself' - 'This article reads like an advertisement' -'This article needs additional citation for verification"

Anyway, if you find something that is not actuate in your opinion, why don’t you have a look at the discussion tab, collaborate with the on-line community and then edit the article?

Kamm: "If the teacher, the Deputy Head Master (that’s me by the way!) who is encouraging his pupils to look at Wikipedia is unconcerned about that distinction then I’m slightly worried about it".

OB Comment: Really sorry you were poorly briefed by the BBC about my original article. My point is that because children use Wikipedia and because we can’t make it go away, WE SHOULD be teaching them to use it responsibly, rather than giving no guidance at all on its use. If we give no guidance at all they are likely to believe anything that they read. I actually think we probably agree on this point?

Kamm: "There is no equivalent on-line resource to my knowledge that is as reliable as your standard printed encyclopedia. There used to be a great printed encyclopedia by Columbia. Proper scholarly works written for a non specialist audience such as school pupils are the right way to imbibe and encourage knowledge".

OB Comment: Yes there is? If you really want  ‘scholarly works’ what about an on-line version of a traditional encyclopedia? For example Britannica on-line? Surely on-line is better than printed because it is kept more current and up to date?

Kamm: "What I would like educators to do is to encourage school pupils and students at university to approach critically the resources that they use and to be aware that only things that can be properly checked and researched are reliable knowledge. Wikipedia doesn’t discriminate between different types of user and that’s what worries me".

OB Comments: I completely disagree. Wikipedia can be properly checked and researched but it doesn’t mean that it is reliable, refuting the point about reliability being guaranteed through the checking of sources.  I do of course agree  that we need to teach school children to critically approach sources – that’s why I wrote the article on Wikipedia in the first place. We need to teach learners to use Wikipedia properly and to do their best to verify all the sources that they use.

I actually like the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia and I’ve already acknowledged that this brings associated difficulties. I like the fact that knowledge doesn’t have to be elitist.

The interview went on a bit longer. But I think I’ll leave it at that.

I wonder if the BBC will get in touch now and ask me for my opinion? They presented a rather one-sided, biased argument that if it was a Wikipedia article would be unlikely to come up to standard and would be flagged as a concern…

By the way Oliver and I have already made our peace over on his blog.

New Tools for Teachers: BEd Primary Focus @ Edinburgh University

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to the Secondary PGDE Students at Edinburgh University for a few years now. But this week I was given the chance to speak to the BEd Primary Students on ICT in Education.

I’ve been trying to up-date my handout and slideshow for my ‘new tools’ talk for some time now - I’m still not quite happy with it but its getting there and I used it on Tuesday.

If you were at the presentation I hope you enjoyed it and as promised here are the slides and links that I referred to. Please feel free to get in touch and leave a comment if you have any questions.

New Tools For Teachers - Primary Focus November 2009

View more presentations from Ollie Bray.

Main content and links:

1. The use of ICT

Generators

Use generators to liven up your lessons and to set learning / home learning objectives in a more creative way. Some good examples include:

• Fodey – Includes the famous wizard text and the newspaper generator

• Wordle – Turn paragraphs of text into beautiful work clouds (try it with your exam syllabus departmental development plan or anything else you can think of!)

• Smoke Signal Generator - Make smoke signals come out of your location. Imagine if you were learning about Japan and your lesson objective floated out of Japan on a Google Map.
  

2. 21st Century Students

21st century students expect a new level of engagement and they have very high expectations. Many young people now exist in a high tech, multimedia rich and highly glamorized world. We need to be prepared to deal with and capitalize on this in our classrooms.

Tips:

• Think about your own on-line presence (social networking, ex-directory in the phone book, be careful what you post etc…)

• Make sure you know what resources your students have at home. For example how many of them have a computer with Internet access? How many have the capacity to play an mp3 file? How many have a games console? If you don’t know this information how will you set appropriate and imaginative home learning tasks and get a real understanding of prior learning?

• Also make sure you know what skills your students have. Many of their ICT skills will be more advanced than yours. Lots of children have made an animation, edited a video and created a website. Make sure you know what skills your students have . Use these skills to build progression and to extend learning.

• Regularly talk with your students about what websites they use. Not only will this keep you up to date but it will also provide you with opportunities to coach and nurture children and young people in Internet safety and Responsible Use. It is particularly important that primary teachers gain an understanding of appropriate behavior in virtual worlds - this will be the on-line environment that they grow up in. Teachers have a responsibility to keep children safe where ever they are - that includes on-line.

• If you have gathered the above information it will make setting appropriate assessment tasks so much easier.

• There is some interesting research on young people and on-line behavior here.

3. The Basic Tools

Search

Tips and good search engines:

• Use the Advanced Google Search – remember you can use this to get specific file type returns such as just PowerPoint or shockwave flash (animation) files.

• Quintura - provides a really good visual search – excellent to use with children on project work.

• Google News - searches the most up to date news web sites.

  
  

Images

• Don't forget Advanced Google Image Search

• Flickr can provide really good and powerful images that can be used in education. Many of these images are are licensed under creative commons. Which means if properly attributed they can be used in education for non-commercial purposes.

• Flickr Slideshow - this will be the quickest and most powerful lesson starter you ever make. More details here.
  

• Big Huge Labs - make your own motivational posters that are truly cross curricular. More details of how I did it here.
  

• The BBC Day in Pictures – great starter or discussion activity.

• The BBC 3 minute news bulletin – children like to watch the news if you give them the chance!

• Microsoft Deep Zoom - great for creating immerse works and for story telling. More details here.

3. The audience tools

Tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis allow you to quickly publish information to the Internet. Most importantly they can be used as an alternative to traditional assessment and give the children a real sense of audience. Use these tools to make your own World Wide Wall Display.

• Some Good Blogging Tools include

  wordpress, blogger and typepad.

• Audacity is a free audio editing piece of software that will also w you to edit voice and audio recordings. It is also available as a Portable App – which means you can run it off a memory stick.

• Think about getting your students to write Wikipedia articles. Also make sure your students know how to use Wikipedia. I've written in length about his here.

• CANVAS (Children’s Art in the Virtual Arena of Scotland) – Is a new LTS project that will allow children to display artwork in an on-line world. More information here.

4. The Creative Tools

• Comic Brush – On-line comic book creator (a bit like Comic Life – but free!)

• Pixton – Sophisticated on-line comic book creator

• Go Animate – Robust on-line combined on-line / animation software

• Google Earth – Watch my 15 minute mini-note from Teachmeet NorthEast on how to use Google Earth in the Classroom here.

5. Computer Games Based Learning

Good case studies of games based learning available on the LTS Consolarium website.

Here are some examples of web based games that can be used for home learning:

• Classic Sim City – Useful for teaching about towns, cities and settlement.
• Ordnance Survey Map Games – Good for homework.
• Fantasy Farmer – Manage a farm for a year
• Stop Disasters Simulator – Can you protect the world against floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and other nasty stuff?
• Sim Sweat Shop – What is it really like working in a sweat shop in a less economically developed country?
• An idea for setting web based games for homework activities

Remember the use of off the shelf games and games consoles can make a massive contribution to education. For more information in the use of computer games to improve literacy have a look at this recent workshop that we ran in the Highlands.

6. Don't stop learning

The future of CPD is on-line:

• Find CPD opportunities using CPD Find

• Record your CPD using CPD reflect

• Download CPD from LTS iTunes U

• Take part in a CPD event in GLOW (eg: Glowing Thursday’s?)

Develop your personal learning network by finding out more about:

• Teachers TV – good classroom and professional development resources

• Slideshare – A place to up-load and view PowerPoint and other presentations

• Microsoft Innovative Teachers Network – join and collaborate with teachers globally

• Twitter - A micro blogging service. You can follow me here.

Follow some other teachers blogs and find out about their classroom practice. For starters try:

Tom Barrett - Primary School Teacher, technology advocate and all round good guy form England

Jen Deyenberg - Primary School Teacher, Technology advocate and GPS Jedi from Canada

7. Finally

If you were at the presentation. Please leave any comments and feedback from the presentation below or get in touch via email (see top right for details).

Killing good ideas: the stone and the stone wheel

I think this YouTube Clip may be coming to one of my in-service training courses soon.

It’s a great light heated example of how difficult it is to sometimes get people to take on new ideas…

Managing Risk on Youth Expeditions: Leading Edge Expeditions

On Saturday Clive Burgess, Mark Salmon and I ran a youth expedition seminar for Learning Edge Expeditions. The aim of the seminar was to provide future expedition leaders will advice and support on running their own trips.

I was given the task of speaking about 'Managing Risk on Youth Expeditions' and also providing some sources of information on possible ventures, venues and ideas.

I promised that I would post the slides that I used during my morning slot – so here they are:

Managing Risk on Youth Expeditions

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If you were at the seminar and would like further information and advice please get in touch.

NOTE: The picture above is Chesil Beach on the Saturday afternoon. the waves were wild!

"Why it’s all Ollie Bray’s fault..."

I laughed when I read Dave Rogers recent post in my RSS Feed Reader. It was a real delight to read a lighthearted blog post called 'why it's all Ollie Bray's fault' from someone I have so much time and respect for.

Dave was writing about the first time that we met at the Scottish Assosiation of Geography Teachers Conference (SAGT) in 2006. I over ambitiously presented  a talk titled ’50 ideas in 50 minutes’ – at the time (despite over running!) it seem to be quite well received by the assembled audience of close to 200 geography teachers.

I made a screen cast of the talk and posted it to Google Video – it surprises me that it still continues to get hits and views most days. Much of the content is now quite historic and some of the tools that I mention don’t even exist anymore! I’ve also changed my mind about lots of things – but otherwise if you have not seen it, it might be worth a watch?

It’s nice to think that I might have influenced Dave’s practice in some way. But I’m sure if I had not introduced him to blogging then he would have found his own way. Never the less reading his post made me feel quite proud. It’s great to be able to work with teachers, introduce them to new ideas and share resources. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

I also read this article on PopTalk (the BrainPop UK Blog) titled 'Save the planet with a little help from Tim and Moby'. It was a post about Annette Lafrate a newly Qualified Teacher at Knightswood Secondary, Glasgow she had been using Tim and Moby to teach her class about environmental issues. The children had produced BrainPop posters as part of their assessment for the unit of work. Again Annette had discovered BrainPop through this site.

It is stories like this that remind me why I continue to blog, share and collaborate with the wider education community. I still believe sharing is the biggest efficiency saving we could make in education.

How many people have you shared your thoughts lesson plans or ideas with this week? Also if you have used a link or idea from this site - I always love to hear from you!

Photo: geoblogs

On-line CPD: Internet Safety and Responsible Use (Glowing Thursday)

Most Thursday’s Jennifer McDougall (one of our Glow Development Officers) at Learning and Teaching Scotland hosts an on-line CPD session that we call Glowing Thursday (the name comes from here).

The programme is available well in advance and the CPD sessions are about an hour long and led by someone who has interest or expertise in the chosen field. The sessions are delivered via GlowMeet (Glow’s video conference client) and anyone with a Glow log in is welcome to join. You just turn up in the virtual room.

The sessions are nearly always videoed if you miss a session or if you can’t get along to watch the presentation live. GlowMeet is currently based on the Marratech client which allows instant messages between participants, a shared whiteboard space for presentation slides and video / audio capacity.

When I’m out and about speaking to teachers I always try to make the point that was well as Glow having fantastic potential to enhance and open learning in schools and classrooms. It also has amazing potential for CPD – Glowing Thursday and our Building Windmill Events have been really good examples of this.

Anyway, below are the slides that used during this evenings presentation on Internet Safety and Responsible Use and thank you so much for everyone who attended. Its great to see web cams pointing out into classrooms with groups of staff watching these presentations after school on-line. This really helps demonstrate the wide impact that this type of technology can have on professional development.

Glow Internet Safety Talk

View more presentations from Ollie Bray.

If your looking for some notes on some of the things that I said have a read of this blog post and for specific information on http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/2008/05/mobile-phones-i.html

Also, we are currently working on a National Internet safety and Responsible Use Glow Group – that I hope will become a great resource for all Scottish teachers.

Feel free to leave feedback about tonights talk below.

New Tools for Teachers: Barnet, London

Yesterday I had a flying visit to the Borough of Barnet in London. The Borough of Barnet have been great friends to Learning and Teaching Scotland during the last two handheld learning festivals in London and as a result I agreed to go and speak at their annual ICT Leader Conference.

The other reason I agreed to go was because Professor Tanya Byron was the speaker before me at the conference. I have heard Tanya speak on-line a number of times but I had never seen here live and I was very keen to meet her in person. More on her presentation in a later post.

Anyway, I promised I would post the links from yesterdays talk. I’m not going to re-post the exact slides but you can find a very similar presentation and on-line hand out here.

Also, if you were at the talk – thank you for your positive feedback on the evaluation forms. Please feel free to leave further feedback or comment below.