Formative assessment tools

So I've been playing with ways to assess students understanding and ensure they are secure in their knowledge.

I've been playing with a few tools and I'll go in order of my favourites.

Plickers - www.plickers.com

Plickers is a great tool to use if you don't have a great student internet or device availability. 

Students have a piece of card and hold up the card in different ways to show their answer. They each have an individual card so you can see what each student has answered. To collect answers you scan the room with the camera of a device (either ios or android). It will collect the answers, from the students.

Pros	Cons
Easy to use and easy for students to understand.	You can only ask multiple choice questions.
You can download class information into CSV, excel files to review.	You may need to unblock/remove from a blacklist their cloud image sharing site.
Easy to see display on the app means you can identify who is getting the right or wrong answers.	You have to download the app onto your mobile device or tablet, trying to do it from a laptop is really hard.
Students can easily see if they have voted using the live view on a screen or with a projector.	Difficult to use if windows or light sources are behind students.
Students can easily see how they are doing and how others are doing in class, but still remain anonymous with how people have voted.
Student's don't need a device.

Kahoot

Kahoot is a great way to assess knowledge or get feedback from students and doesn't require an app on students devices to access. It can be used on every type of device mobile and laptops. You can ask multiple choice questions and students love it and its timed and gives points for speed and accuracy.

Pros	Cons
Easy to use and easy for students to understand.	You can only ask multiple choice questions.
You can download information regarding how your students have answered.	Every student or group needs a device.
It has a group mode so if you don't have 1:1 devices you can allow discussion time.	The music is really annoying, which doesn't sound bad until you have listened to it 10 times in a day.
There are loads of quizzes by other teachers that you can use and adapt to your classes.	If your internet connection is patchy in any way the screen will freeze and students will get very upset.
Students love it.

Kahoot questions with answers

Mentimeter

Great app to review feedback and to check understanding. Again it asks multiple choice questions but the main point of this is as a decision-making tool. It shows a bar graph on the screen and is great for getting students to collaborate and make decisions. You can also use it to ask a question and students can respond.

Pros	Cons
Looks simple and very easy to view answers	You can only ask multiple choice questions.
Students go to a website menti.com and input a code to access the site.	Unless you allow multiple votes it will not allow more than one vote per device. Which is difficult if you don't have 1:1 devices.
Unless you allow multiple votes it will not allow more than one vote per device. Which is great for making sure you only get one vote per person.

Socrative

Still playing with this one so can't yet do a pro's and cons list but I'm definitely finding it interesting. It's a way to get answers from students. It's the only programme that allows long answer questions. Students can also vote on their favourite answer to questions and this allows students to learn from each other.  

Socrative home page

BETT

BETT

So I went to the BETT conference on Saturday. Wow, that is one big event and it was so busy.

Seminars

So I was a bit slack and only went to half of one seminar but there was so much to see! I saw a brilliant discussion from Lauren Thorpe (Head of data and Systems strategy, ARK), Catherine Scutt (Director of Education and research, Chartered College of teaching) and Nic Newman (Partner, Emerge education) all compered by Abdul Chohan (Director of Learning and development, The Olive Tree Free School). So all very experienced individuals, discussing teacher workload. The first Question which really interested me was "How can technology reduce workload?" The answers and discussion were quite enlightening.

- Technology in schools should be easy to use and reliable. This is something I'm definitely struggling with at the moment with Microsoft technology it isn't easy to use and it isn't reliable across different platforms. Google sometimes have these issues as well but they seem to be less frequent nowadays.

- Schools need to evaluate the technology they are using to see if it has benefits or whether it is just extra work.
I have been part of an evaluation process in a previous school and I have to say that when we found that the idea had not worked out as successfully as hoped it did not go down well.
I will now be putting in place an evaluation tool to work out if the effort I'm putting in is effective and not losing sleep if it isn't. I think I'll start off with the student's voice as this is often the easiest way to collect feedback. I will try more quantitative analysis with a couple of apps I'll be using later on in the year as well.

- Coursera is a great place to get CPD, yeah it really is.

Technology and apps

Science Journal - Google were showcasing this one and gave me more ideas on how to use it. The Chromebooks have more functionality in some ways than Ipads to use this as they contain a magnetometer but actually, they are still pretty good. Can't wait to use this in more ways.
- Available on Google Play and IOS free
Science journal website on google

Book Creator - This is an app where you can make your own book add video, sound, pictures and text. It can be downloaded as an epub or a pdf. The free version allows students to make one book at a time. It doesn't have spellchecker or grammar checker but it does make pretty books that can possibly help organise students work in a clearer fashion. To be fair if you are working on the computer and have Grammarly on your chrome app you can use that to check out the spelling and grammar.

Squid Notes - So I've had a quick play with this and the free app is a way to draw notes but not type them. You can type them and draw on PDF's, however, this is only available in the paid part of the app. Could be useful especially if you get a lot of PDF's and want to write on them digitally and then share them it's only £4.79 for the PDF import tool. 

Squid notes webpage - https://www.squidnotes.com

Microsoft specific apps and tools

Paint 3D - Available on any computer installed with Windows 10.

I met some of the developers of this app and they were super excited and really knowledgeable and weirdly enough for people developing tools had actually spoken to teachers (one of the members of their team is a graphics teacher) and they had got some of his students in to test it. I've had a play with it and I can see that for graphics student's it might be great but I can see it being a massive waste of time for student's in science for example. 

Using Padlet in the classroom

Using Padlet

Padlet is a really useful collaborative programme and I've got to say I really love it for use in class. It's a great way for students to learn from each other.

The limitations are: 

- You have got to monitor students posts as they tend to get excited about the fact that they have free reign to post whatever they want. This calms down after the first few uses as they like the positive feedback.
- Trying to get students to all log onto a new programme at the same time is little like herding cats.

The Positives are:

- Students can post video's, photo's (I especially like photo's of their work), links to useful websites and any document they have on their device.
- Feedback is really easy for teacher and students to give to each other (I especially love the fact you can choose to like posts).
- It's a way to promote rewindable learning from the students.
- You can make it look really pretty really easily. Which is important to students and means they tend to engage a bit better.

How to use this in the classroom

First of all make your link easy to write down, especially if your a school using Microsoft 365, and sending out a group email is quite challenging. This will make your life so much easier and especially for students who are struggling with spelling and literacy.
Students really enjoy working as collaborators, and sharing their knowledge. Students need a place to practice commenting on others work and Padlet is a great place it allows you as a teacher to delete innapropriate comments (really easily if you download the app onto a tablet), it allows teachers to comment on posts and give a thumbs up to great comments or posts. 

I quite like padlet as an easy way for students to share their knowledge. It's easy to use and students can use it on a range of devices (it even works on ipads). For a revision tool it works quite well. I've only tried it as a way to reflect on their learning so far. I would like to use it for individual students to post every lesson and then use it as an aid to revision. If you try it let me know how it goes. It will be easier to monitor in a Google apps for education school as students and teacher can log in using their google account.

http://www.lunarbaboon.com/comics/feedback.html

Reflection on my time at Westland High School

Video reflection completed for Phillippa Mallinson so she could review the schools progress. Sorry, the first videos cut out but actually, I don't think there really needs to be much more said.

Microsoft 365

So I've moved to a new school and I'm now using Microsoft 365 and mainly Ipads. First of all I need to say that I've never really been a fan of Ipads in the classroom. I also need to state in the interests of transparency that I'm new to Microsoft 365 so I'm still working out how to use it properly.

I've been using Google for the past few years (I got my google level 1 educator a month or so back) and I have to say I enjoy how easy it is to use for students and I now know its way easier for admin to use as well. I've been using Microsoft 365 for just over a month and it has some great benefits which Google doesn't have.

Benefits:

1. One note is a great way to see a whole class full of work and you can set work for for loads of groups of students.
2. One drive works as well as google drive so no complaints there.
3. Using powerpoint/ word/excel online is great and as you can download the files and edit them on your computer it makes using powerpoint a whole lot easier than slides.

Ok now for the problems I've been facing, which are not all due to Microsoft 365:

1. Powerpoint in Onedrive is not able to be edited on Ipads with ease. This is also a problem faced by Google slides but not to such a severe extent.
2. Passwords are incredibly difficult to change in the admin. This is also due to the fact that Microsoft 365 doesn't sync easily with SIMS.
3. Sharepoint, I can see that they are trying to emulate shared servers on Microsoft computers but it uses the worst part of Microsoft and it's really difficult to find anything.
4. The editability of Powerpoint, Word and Excel is reduced to a very basic and frankly unusable version if you are doing it online. A lot of the better features of these programmes are completely lost on the online version.

I'm also working in a school that is part of a group of schools so there are restrictions on all sorts of things and how they work within the group. I don't have all the permissions I used to have (I'm now an Admin not a Super admin) so that can be an issue. So some of the issues I'm having with using this new system is in part due to the restrictions in my user name.

I really want to emulate the work I was doing in New Zealand and make the learners in my classroom self motivated in their learning. I know that the student's I am teaching are more than capable. The school I am working in has high expectations for their learning and behaviour so there is a framework in place. All I need to do is find a way to get the technology to work for me. I'm really trying to keep an open mind but I have to say I'm struggling with Microsoft 365, so I think this will possibly be my greatest technology challenge so far.

The brain, exercise and learning. The research

Most of this information in this blog is taken from New Scientist, The Collection Vol 4 / Issue 2 The Scientific guide to an even better you. The articles in this "were first published in New Scientist between July 2014 and March 2017. They have been updated and revised". However I have also read some of the original papers (I'll cite those as I go along).

Are you or your students worried or getting stressed about exams?

Turns out that mindfulness and meditation can actually change parts of your brain.  A study carried out by Massachusetts general hospital showed that after 8 weeks the part of the brain (amygdalae) that processes anxiety and stress has reduced in density. This study only had 16 participants meditating (didn't state how many were in the control group) so it's not a truly sound study but interesting first step to see that meditation actually does something to your brain. Original study.

Need to boost your memory, concentration or increase creativity?

When I first started teaching there was something called brain gym it had no scientific background but we were still taught it during our PGCE. However there are now proven exercises that actually will help yours and students attention and memory. 

To improve your working memory go surfing! Or actually anything that involves moving and balancing, something that involves spacial reasoning as well as exercise. For children running along a beam, climbing a tree or running barefoot would be an ideal activity. As you are learning a new skill or knowledge test yourself in a well ordered way for more information see the study here. 

If you find your mind wandering embrace it if you are going to have to recall the information in a distracted or loud environment it's best to learn it in the same way. Inconsistent distraction is the problem so checking your phone every 5 minutes is not going to be good for memory retention (study). 

Something which every teacher knows is that if you think you are going to have to teach a subject you will suddenly remember a lot more about the subject and the panic or worry of standing in front of people and not knowing yourself is a powerful way to make you work. Weirdly I accidentally found another article from the same author about students procrastination stating that a task will typically take 50% longer than estimated . I wonder if the pressure of having to teach someone else about a subject means peoples estimates of how long a task will take increases or whether the fact you will be watched has an impact on your learning and behaviour. I heard a radio programme recently that said people do better in clinical trials as they are watched maybe this is the same effect.

If you really want to learn something over a long period of time then wait ages to test yourself, the longer you wait the better it becomes embedded in your long term memory. Which is great as for the past few years this is what I have been doing with my seniors and it seemed to have worked but I didn't know why. Even if you get it wrong it still seems to aid memory retention. 

To improve concentration running around for 20 minutes and then trying to concentrate on a task may work, however they don't know how long these effects will last for (study here). However if you know you really need to concentrate go for walk beforehand it might help and getting exercise is never going to harm. 

To increase creativity - Go for a walk or a dance (study here)

The main thing about learning is if you think you can do it you can Wilson, Dweck and Yeager all seem to come up with similar ideas that back each other up.

feedback from year 11

Form given to my year 11 students at the end of their topic.

I got some lovely positive feedback from students. But this was probably coloured as it was my last day and the students were feeling a bit sad about me going especially as I have taught some of them since they were in year 8. There were two reasons for me doing this survey the first was that I have been trying to teach the students in this class to critique others blogs and their work. I wanted them to know that even teachers can be helped to improve. It didn't really work s they were all bit too lovely.

9 students responded to the survey as there were a few off school that day.

What was your favourite topic?

4/9 = Physics
4/9  Agriculture
1/9 = none

What was your least favourite part of the year?

3/9 = Agriculture
4/9 = enjoyed the whole year
1/9 = no comment
1/9 = when we had to move out of the lab as it was being painted

What did you like best about Miss Blake's Science?

"She was a good teacher and really cool and has a bubbly personality"
"It was pretty fun"
"I don't like science"
"Probably the experiments that we do."
"EVERYTHING! It was fun and the lessons were made fun and not boring. I liked doing the experiments and the internals were fun to complete too."
"she actually helped me with my work when i needed it. For example when I needed help to do my work she would always help me and explain it to me so I could understand"
"Always there to help and get us doing what we need to being doing to improve like having the classes scheduled on the website and emailing us feedback on our blogs. Just always helping us improve in every area of science"
"Her enthusiasm "

What do you think Miss Blake could do better?

"idk"
"wear her hair like that all the time" - this relates to the second photo of me dressed as a mad scientist.
"She has done everything very well and I have learnt a lot this year."
"I don't know but she has been a awesome teacher. "
"I don't think she could do anything better because she is a really great teacher."
"i don't really know to be honest. There isn't really a lot she needs to improve on well that's my opinion"
"i dont know"

My favourite jokes

What did the lion say when I found him in the closet? it's Narnia business.
"What do you call cheese that isn't yours? nacho cheese."