Coursera for PD

\PD (professional development) is hard to do sometimes, as a teacher. The best courses are in the holidays, are affordable, and are applicable straight away. Flexibility is a bonus, because as with every occupation - and life in general! - things crop up and the weeks get busy. Providers like Open Universities are great, as their courses are recognised as formal qualifications here in Australia. So are standalone or non-award units from bricks and mortar universities, and short courses through TAFE or CAE.

Me, I've chosen a slightly different route. Mum put me onto Coursera about two years ago, and I kicked off by doing a short art appreciation course before starting on education-based courses. You can do courses on just about anything! Art was great but you can study IT, business, marketing, engineering, health sciences - you name it, someone has probably put together a course on it. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are easy for universities to run once they've set them up, because they're asynchronous and assessments are automated or peer marked, so many very reputable higher education providers are putting them together. They're a bit of a cash cow when they're set up through Coursera, too, I would imagine - you can get a verified certificate for a small fee, though you can still do the course for nothing if the certificate doesn't bother you.

After my art course, I hooked up with the Virtual Teacher Program, a specialisation (series of related courses) run by the University of California Irvine Campus. I've currently completed the first four modules and am waiting for January when they will run the final unit (the Capstone Project) over four weeks. I'll be completing it while on the road on our summer trip, so I'm proving the flexibility of the courses first-hand! I've been able to complete the rest while working full time (and studying another course or two part time!).

MOOCs were intially designed for adults, but there is a movement towards them diversifying to be accessible and appropriate for children, such as the Stakers and Brain Chase. I feel like it's the next step in online learning for children - recently someone said 'If there's an internet connection in your classroom, you're no longer the smartest person in the room!' and it's true - it's really true. The MOOC movement makes learning available to all - in the education industry, that includes children seeking different knowledge presented in different ways than what's available in their learning environment, and includes teachers seeking flexible, affordable PD solutions.

Check out Coursera, and also this article which talks about child completion rates of age-appropriate MOOCs. Fascinating stuff.

MAV - Lectures and Support

When they redeveloped Docklands here in Melbourne, they built a beautiful library on a dock. They weren't brilliantly imaginative when they named it, but it doesn't seem to have mattered too much - The Library At The Dock is proving to be a great hub for all sorts of learning communities that can converge on the city.

One of those communities is the Mathematical Association of Victoria. Each year, they host a series of free lectures for anyone interested in Mathematics. Last year, knowing our school was looking into branching into 3D printing as a Design and Technology and Mathematics endeavour, I was looking for professional development to help me work out what direction this might take in my classroom.

MAV came up on a Google search, and I registered for a free lecture on 3D printing and Mathematics as presented by Dr. Burkard Polster and Dr. Marty Ross. It was a great afternoon, with lots of interesting information about the evolution of 3D printing and how 3D printing gets used now. While they were presenting, I was making some connections to curriculum links, and I came out of it with some really interesting ideas and new concepts to chew over.

MAV offers really interesting topics for their lectures. Last year they also offered 'Was Pythagoras Chinese?' and 'The Mathematics of Futurama'. This year, so far they've done 'The Mathematics of the Simpsons' and 'Footy Maths', and they still have 'Calculus In One Easy Lesson' and 'Yin and Yang Maths' coming up.

If you're interested in changing up how you think about maths in the classroom, as well as updating your own mathematical knowledge and understanding, you can register for the remaining lectures here. MAV also offers support to teachers with lesson plans and resources for differentiated instruction under the 'Teach Maths for Understanding' or 'TM4U' package as part of their membership.

New School Year... sort of?

It's an interesting time of year for educators. Here in Australia, we're racing towards the end of Term 3, which means beginning our work on reports, assessment, online and offline student folios, PDPs, and job applications for next year. On the other side of the world, though, our North American counterparts are heading back to school - and that's great news for us. Not only are there an abundance of sales on online resources and subscriptions, just in time for a new year of planning, there are also about a million parodies out there about back to school scenarios.

Most of what I post here is professional and digitally minded, but today's post is lighthearted and fun. My two favourites from this year's parodies.

One Day More by the Des Moines School District

I Like Big Buses

Making Maths... More... with Vi Hart

A while ago, while looking for an interesting way to teach students about fractals, I came across this amazing video.

It was made by the very talented Vi Hart, a 'recreational mathemusician' of agnostic gender who has worked for/with the Khan Academy as well as being an academic in her own right. Videos on the Vi Hart channel cover a lot of high school and university maths concepts, but they're built from the basics, and often revolve around easily accessible/visible/constructible more advanced concepts. My students may not understand all the mathematical theory in the videos on the Vihart channel, but they recognise the representations of concepts like hexaflexagons and infinity trees and how they fit (at a very basic level) with what they're learning in primary school.

The video above is still their favourite, though! We had a table filling up pinecones, flowers, weird seedpods and photos of vegetables and fruit from home after watching it.

If you're looking for a way to capture your students' attention (particularly your bright little buttons!) and get them wanting to explore the maths they're learning in class more deeply, or in ways they can see and touch in the world around them, Vi Hart is a phenomenal hook, line and sinker. You can also check out Vi's website here and follow Vi's Twitter feed here.

Screencast-o-matic

So this year was the year of the great e-portfolio shift in my pedagogy. I've used them for the last three years, but this year, I've been able to embed it much more holistically into my classroom program as we've had all four members of our level team on board to develop, trial, review and assess elements of the platform.

I'll do a post on our platform - EduPLEX by OzInterbiz - another time, but today I want to share a Web 2.0/3.0 tool I was encouraged to become familiar with by our outsource instructor, George Sorgi. We had a lot of instructional videos at our fingertips to embed into our portfolio artifact pages, but not one for a graphic manipulation tool we wanted to use, so George suggested I make one. I had seen my Virtual Teacher instructors on Coursera use software where they could play their presentation and talk to it, recording it for us to stream later, and they had briefly mentioned that it would be useful for us to learn to use said software, but they'd never gone into much detail about what to use, or how to go about making a good video.

Screencast-o-matic has a free online version of its software that you can use for just such a purpose! Prepare your presentation by whatever method you like, then load up Screencast-o-matic, and talk to it while you record - voila! Well, not quite voila - it took me nearly two hours to make my first, very short video. Since then, I've become a bit more streamlined in how I go about making videos - I make a running sheet of what I need to cover (usually in point form on the back of an envelope!), practice once and then record. I try to make sure I'm ready to record it in the evening, as the mic picks up background sound very easily (as you'll hear in my example below!).

Feedback I've had from my students has been positive! It took a few of them a little bit before they paused it, took off their headphones and, looking at me with big eyes, asked "Ang, is that YOU??" as they are used to hearing George or one of the other instructors on the videos. It's been a great tool for testing whether they can extrapolate instructions about one task and apply it to another, too, as the examples in the videos are showing how to use functions on the tools, not complete the artifacts themselves.

This was my first Screencast-o-matic video, explaining how to create a graphic using SketchPad. Enjoy!

Classroom Blog Repository

I want to share a great initiative getting off the ground in educational cyberland.

It's called Classroom Blog Repository and it's pretty awesome.

Some, only scratching the surface of the site, may look at it and say it's just a collection of links to classroom blogs - but it is SO much more than that. It is a platform from which teachers can draw inspiration, view best blogging practice in action, connect with like-minded educators, and connect their classes with like-minded students. It is an opportunity to showcase student work and receive feedback from others around the world, and an opportunity for students to learn about giving useful, academic feedback, and engage in cyber-savvy discussion about how to improve their own work.

There's no cost involved, and every blog is manually entered by the creators, who touch base with you afterwards to make sure you know your blog entry has gone live. Submitting your class blog URL, in my mind, is the ideal next-step for an educator who has got the hang of posting meaningful, relevant content - and now wants to broaden their audience.

Some interesting notes - while some educators still use Blogger/Blogspot (like I do), many are using Global2 (attached to vic.edu.au). Many choose to include photos of students, featuring identifying data (school logo, etc.), which I don't. Many have students contributing but not moderating (also my practice). The entries act as an excellent tool to encourage reflection!

Click through and have a look sometime!

iii2015 - Introducing Adobe Slate

Recently, I attended the IGNITE, INNOVATE, INTEGRATE ICT Conference for 2015 at Kingswood PS. It was an AMAZING day (hence the inception of this blog, among other new innovations in my teaching life) so I'm going to spread out the new things I learned about over a couple of posts. Enjoy!

Dr Tim Kitchen presented about flipped learning and how Adobe software can help with both teacher-based presentations and student-centered tasks. A few of the programs we use at school already - Adobe Voice, for example, which has been installed on the Macs in the Media Studio and in the Senior Lab. Some were new, though, and we are already using one to great effect in the classroom!

I recently surveyed the parents in our class about what they would like to see more of on the blog, and the top answer was 'Photos!' I've used Flickr feeds in the past, but as this is not accessible from student laptops and the lab desktops, I was searching for a quick, free, drag-and-drop app or program or Web 2.0 tool that we could all use easily to make a weekly presentation of what we've been doing. Enter Adobe Slate!

We've been using it on my iPad, as my class already take photos of their work in literacy and there are always a few photos there to begin with. It's encouraging me to take HEAPS more photos of my class, too, so there are plenty to choose from each week. You can enter text, set photos as a grid or by themselves as part of a 'glideshow', embed links, and heaps more. Here is my first attempt:

You do need an Adobe Education Exchange ID to operate it, but it's free to sign up, and they host the final product for you so it is easy to embed and share. More about Adobe Education Exchange in a future post!

Chatterpix

A colleague who came to the iii2015 conference with me picked up this very entertaining little photo-to-animation app, which she spoke about during our PD round up this evening. It's called Chatterpix, by the developer group Duck Duck Moose, and it's vastly entertaining.

Chatterpix in a nutshell

Take a photo, draw a mouth, record your message, add accessories, share it. Sounds like a frivolous, purely-for-entertainment app on the surface, right? But the implementations for flipped learning with younger readers are awesome. Using characters from school-wide curricula, such as the You Can Do It program, or the Kimochis, or school-specific mascots, can help you create presentations for students to watch from home in preparation for workshops or lessons the next day.

Meet Ricky Resilience

Follow-up to this is a brainstorm session (collaborative creation of a KWL chart using the stickynotes widget and the touchscreen) used as a pre-assessment of students' intrapersonal learning.

Improve.edu.au

Our unit leader and I have been trialling combining our classes in Mathematics so that groups who need consolidation get the extra exposure to course material that they need, and those who need stretching can zoom out with lateral extension tasks.In order to give students who need extension extra room to show us what they can do, we've started using Improve as an addendum to the available Mathletics topic pre-tests (Are You Ready?) and post-tests (Test) that we'd been using to group and benchmark students.

Improve is accessible to teachers working for most states and territories using your Scootle username and password. Teachers can set up tests from a question bank, added to and edited by teachers from around the country. You can share your tests with your colleagues if you have their email address, so that if like us you are comparing cohort results you have a common platform from which to do so. The report on results from each test (pre and post) is presented as a graph so you can easily see the average from each test, the improvement each student has made, etc.

Awesome easy-to-interpret graph representation of results

Students sit the pre-test using a password and test PIN, answering the questions and also rating how confident they are about the answer they've given. They then have activities assigned to them based on their results, then take the post test after they've finished them. The activities are pulled from a number of different websites, including the NLVM, and the students love them (especially the jigsaw ones where they have to solve problems to remove pieces of a puzzle to reveal a picture!).

A few small flaws, one of which I have given feedback about already - if a child accidentally presses 'take the test again' (to take the post-test) after finishing the activities and then clicks back, they get zero, and there's no way to just re-set the test for them without erasing the class' data and completed activities and re-setting the whole unit for everyone. In this day and age, with differentiated learning as highly-thought-after as it is, I don't think you can afford not to have this function built in.

It's a good add-on to other online assessment methods, and we'll continue to use it while we are streaming our classes. Another great benefit to having access to Scootle!

Robots and Circuits and Paint - Oh My!

I was preparing to do a session on electricity and circuits, and stumbled across the concept of conductive ink and conductive paint. Initially, I was going to buy a classroom kit from CircuitScribe but it ended up being just a bit too expensive, so I went with this Flashing Robot Parade card kit from Bare Conductive as it was considerably cheaper and made something kid-friendly that they could take home.

Meet my robot, Nano

Sure enough, the robots were a hit. It took two tries for me to get it right on my own, and I was a bit stressy about getting it to work with the students, but it was nowhere near as aaargh as I thought it was going to be. I prepared the switches on the circuits beforehand, and punched the holes where things needed to be attached to the card - so all that was left to do was decorate, install the battery and LED bulb, and then use the conductive paint to connect them, making a circuit. The group did the lemon battery experiment beforehand, so they'd seen and felt firsthand how a circuit worked, and could explain to me what was in the robot's circuit that was different and why it would work better (stronger power source, and a smaller bulb). We had a small army of robots ready to go home at the end of the session, and I still have heaps of paint left over.

A Nano robot in action

My only criticism is that the paint took longer than the quoted 15 minutes to dry. On a product recommended for six year olds, this is a bit of an issue, in my mind. My group are pretty good at being patient, but when you're six, you don't really have an endless supply of calm when you're waiting for a robot to play with. The best result I got while experimenting was leaving it overnight to dry, and then closing the circuit with the switch to test it out, and I explained that to the group from the beginning, which helped. I also made the recommendation to the parents when they came to pick their children up, so we'll see what the feedback is like when I see them again in a few weeks.

Totes electrifying. Bare Conductive have other cool cards, too, that come in smaller (read: less expensive) kits - I'd definitely recommend checking them out for holiday fun/birthday parties/an add-on to school electronics programs. I'm tempted to purchase a few for myself, too!

Virtual Robotics Labs

We had our annual robotics program at school this week, but I had a few students who did not elect to participate, so we ran our own robotics program in the classroom. I found two websites featuring virtual robotics labs they could use to learn to build and program, and most of them finished at least the first one, with two getting almost to the end of the second one.

The first is the Wonderville Robot Lab which introduces components robots are made of (gears, levers, wheels, etc.), and sends children on a little mission to help Crash finish his chores so he can go to the movies with the professor. Unfortunately, Crash is destined to be washing dishes forever, as the program glitches as you try to give the dishwashing robot something to move with. It's definitely designed for younger children - some of mine got quite bored with it easily, while others really enjoyed the cartoon interface and were sad they couldn't do more with it.

Wonderville Lab, Crash, and the robot building lab

The second simulation we used was the Mind Project Virtual Robotics Lab, where students learn to build a real robot (IRIS) using a blueprint and click-and-drag components, and then learn basic programming to make the robot move and perform simple tasks, like picking up a can and putting it in the recycling. This is far more advanced, and only three of us stayed the course for the time we had. It's probably better suited to upper primary students, or gifted students from middle primary.

Screen grabs of building IRIS and the robotic arm, and programming wheel motion.

Why do I see robotics as important? Eighteen years ago, I taught myself html and had a look at Java, and began making websites on the now-defunct Geocities hosting service. I had no idea back then that the internet would expand to the point it has, and that there would be jobs that existed now that hadn't even been dreamed up when I was 11. In eighteen more years, it's quite likely that even more of our manufacturing and manual labour jobs will be done by machines, but while that shuts down many jobs that have been in existence for humans since the dawn of the industrial revolution, it opens up the doors for careers in programming and building robots and components that have barely begun to be dreamed of now. Agrarian, to industrial, to virtual - the world in which the generation I teach will work is is vastly different to that which we prepared to work in at their age.

This video sums it up pretty well.