Fun On Friday #120: Toontastic

What we did on our holidays - by Daughter Number 2. (It's a bit slow to load at first but stick with it!):

Brilliant, isn't it.?

Created in Toontastic - possibly my favourite iPad App at the moment. You move the puppets, you speak, you make a movie. Excellent! Daughter Number 2 drew her own puppets but there are loads of great pre-drawn models, with moveable limbs. (For example, see Pirates.)

When you tap the button to create a story, the App suggests you make five scenes:

1. Setup;
2. Conflict;
3. Challenge;
4. Climax;
5. Resolution.

Some great teaching points there even before you start but all wrapped up in a bundle of the best fun ever!

Do you have any examples of classes using this app? How did you use it and what did the pupils make of it?

New Session, New Students... Old Question!

I've asked variations of this question before (see ICT: Tell me everything I need to know!, What did they need to know? and Initial Teacher Education and BectaX) but with 550-ish new students starting a PGDE course next week, and with the ever changing nature of technology, it seems it's time to ask it again:

What should I do in a one hour lecture to get new student teachers excited and enthusiastic about ICT in education?

277/366: Drag and drop, a photo by
DavidDMuir on Flickr.

My question is, essentially, how do I avoid this? -->

To set the context, I get one hour to talk to students about ICT in the first week of their PGDE course. This will not be the only thing they hear about ICT during the year, but it might be the first thing they hear and it will be the only time I have the opportunity to see the whole cohort at the same time. Roughly one third of them will be primary students and the rest will be secondary students covering just about every secondary school subject.

So, what do I do? What do I say? What could I get the students to do? How can I get such a large group, with different experiences, different interests and different levels of competence, interested and enthusiastic about ICT in Education?

Looking forward to seeing your suggestions.

Fun On Friday #119: Webify Me

I downloaded and installed the latest version of Firefox and followed a link to their Webify Me page. It claims to let you...

See your Internet as a custom collage.

Here's a picture of my collage:

You can click on the graphic to see an interactive version that explains what all the different parts represent. To be honest, I think it's more than a little off in places. Specifically, it has me down as a "Gear Head" as represented by a car magazine! Nah! Not even close.

Have a go yourself, post a link in a comment and let me know how close you think it got to you.

facebook for data collection

Back after a long gap with a post prompted by a conversation with Daughter Number 2, who said that a friend of hers had recently set up a facebook event that wasn't an event...

The idea was that, instead of describing an event, her friend asked a question. Then, people could respond to the question by selecting one of the three attendance options available in facebook events. For example, you could make a statement, such as "School Computing helps prepare pupils for real world computing uses.", and map the responses as follows:

Attending --> Agree
Maybe --> Not sure
No --> Disagree

Obviously, you can substitute any question/statement you like and define whatever mapping for the answers suits your purpose. As long as you are content with only three responses, this looks like a quick and dirty way to collect data. Here's one I made earlier:

I thought this was interesting. It uses a technology with which students are already familiar (arguably "addicted to" in the case of my daughters) and so requires no special logins or hurdles to jump through for the participants. Also, it is easy to use existing friends and contact groups to restrict who can see and respond to your question. Finally, because you have to choose a date for the event, you automatically have a deadline by which the responses have to be made.

It is not entirely satisfactory, however, because you cannot change the response buttons, so you have to explain the mapping to potential respondents and there is no way to export the responses for further analysis. Therefore, I had a quick look to see how else it could be done and found that there is a facebook poll app that allows you to create your own response options. It draws a decent graph and can export the results to Excel. Also, if you are willing to pay, you can get other useful features.

Clearly, neither solution is as flexible as dedicated poll/questionnaire tools such as SurveyMonkey and Poll Everywhere but I think that doing everything in facebook is an interesting approach. I especially like the way you can take something created for one purpose (event management) and subvert it for an alternative use (data collection).

Have a go at my event poll and my facebook poll and then let me know what you think. Would you use either method, or is it just a daft idea?

Lateral Promotion

I should probably have kept this for a fun on Friday...

Reminds me of something, but I can't think what.

Fun On Friday #118: Happiness Is A Warm Electro-magnet

It's art. It's science and technology. It's happiness.

F5 2011 RE:PLAY Film Festival. Inductance from Physalia Studio on Vimeo.

I would love to know more about this project. For example, what did they put inside the plastic balls?

Work station?

To borrow an advert from Rock Radio, "If a train station is where trains stop, and a bus station is where busses stop, what happens at a work station?"

The coming session is set to be our last on the Jordanhill Campus here at Strathclyde. While I see the advantages of a single campus university and while I look forward to new facilities in the City Centre campus, I must admit to some sadness when I think of the loss of the Jordanhill campus and all the history associated with it. (My personal history as well as institutional and educational history.) That, however, is a topic for a future post. This post is about work stations - hence the introductory paragraph.

Today, I had a look at samples of the furniture proposed for the new office space. The only piece I have strong feelings about is the stool pictured here as I found it surprisingly uncomfortable. Therefore, I was going to send a, "Not really fussed", message to the people asking for opinions. But before I sent the message, I decided to clear some of my email backlog... and I'm glad I did because I read message from Terry Freedman's Computers in Classrooms newsletter - specifically the June edition.

There are a number of interesting articles in the newsletter (as always) but two in particular caught my eye and connected to what I had just been doing. The first was "Building a thinking room" in the news section. This article led to a piece of the same name in the Wall Street Journal which talked about research into the effect of things like colour, light and space on peoples' creativity and their well-being. Given that we are moving into open plan staff accommodation on the city centre campus, I was especially struck by Terry's comment which I will quote at length:

It reminds me of when I visited Pearsons publishing a year or so ago. Our guide said, “Let me show you our ideas room”. This turned out to be a plain room with white walls and white comfy furniture and, if my memory serves me well, a single painting on the wall. Very relaxing, and certainly a far cry from the sort of open plan, manically active spaces that seem to be de rigeur these days. I asked a proponent of such areas how the kids and teachers cope with the noise from other areas. He replied, “Oh, they get used to it.”

No, they don’t. And even if they do, why should they have to?

Spaces should be designed according to the purpose for which they’re intended to be used. Vast open plan areas are great when you’re running an activity that involves students working in groups and then coming together or interacting with other groups. They are hopeless for housing different classes working completely separately from each other.

Part of the rationale for moving to open plan is that it will encourage collaboration but I wonder what proportion of our time as academics is taken up with, "working completely separately from each other..." Perhaps that proportion needs to change. If I am to up my research profile, I probably need to work more with others and by myself less. Perhaps a new layout and new office space will help me do that. But I wonder if I will become more or less effective when I do have to work on my own?

The second section of Terry's newsletter that connected with what I had just done, was "Youngsters designing learning spaces" in the "Quick Looks" section. It linked to a report from RM on a competition for schools to design their ideal learning spaces. The winners and further details can be found on the RM site and a report in the TES gives a good summary. Two things struck me. The first one picks up Terry's comment above as the TES notes: "Perhaps surprisingly, controlling noise was important to many pupils, and sound-proofing the room was suggested in many cases." I suspect that it is not just about having somewhere quite to go and think (interesting that the iPod generation sees the value in this) but also about having somewhere they can make noise without disturbing others. I was also struck by the pupil's understanding (at least at some level) of the importance of colour and comfort in a learning environment.

The end result is that having read Terry's newsletter, I'm going to go back down to the room with the furniture, I'm going to look at it, I'm going to use it, I'm going to think about colour... and then, I'm going to write what will hopefully be a more considered response on what furniture and colours I'd prefer in the re-furbished accommodation on the city centre campus.