Sometimes you find the perfect thing

Ever heard of SnagIt? Well, this post is one for those ICT-curious teachers who are looking for tools that can create (among others things) interactive resources for their students.

I must admit I am attracted by the possibility of using Flash animations in my lessons but simply do not deem such labour-intensive resources worthwhile for everyday purposes. I mean, who has five or so spare hours to create a Flash based resource that might be used for a ten or fifteen minute activity in class? Ah, but then I found SnagIt and a few nifty shortcuts that create just such resources in, say, ten to fifteen minutes.

For those of us who have not come across it before, SnagIt is primarily a screen capture program. It’s function is to ‘grab’ anything that we can see on a computer screen and turn it into a picture or video. So, with SnagIt running, I can capture this window as I type my blog post. Thus…

Yes, yes, that’s all very fancy Andrew but how is it useful? Well, SnagIt captures pretty much anything and then whisks it into its ‘editor’ - a place where annotations can be made. Like so…

Ah-ha, now we as teachers can begin to see some possibilities. For example, we could use SnagIt to respond to students’ work or to annotate an image. Yet there is far more to this apparently humble program than just that.

For example, SnagIt can be used to capture a movement on screen and save such input to a video file. Using this function we could create demonstrations of say, a modelled text or a mathematical process.

We could also use SnagIt to import or capture text and then use its ‘hotspot’ annotation tool to create areas of the text that are ’sensitive’ to the student’s mouse. You know the kind of thing - you move your mouse pointer over part of an image or text and a pop-up appears. Like so…

Snagit allows us to produce this type of resource in a few minutes and saves the resultant work as a .swf file (that’s Shockwave Flash) which you could then use in a PowerPoint or on your interactive whiteboard. What’s more, SnagIt will allow both pop-ups comprising of text or images.

Suddenly all sorts of possibilities open up for the teacher pressed for time and yet wanting to create novel interactive resources. The example I’ve shown here is of course Blake’s Sick Rose turned into an interactive reading resource with reading prompts for the student to consider. The delightful element here is that the text appears complete and without annotation until a student hovers their mouse over a word that contains a ‘hotspot’.

I am just beginning to imagine all sorts of applications for this technique and would welcome any suggestions from readers who might think of further uses for this in the classroom. Just comment on the post, using the form below.

Oh, and did I mention that SnagIt costs £30? It seems to me that this is an inexpensive way to produce Flash based resources in a fraction of the time that Adobe would have us put in. A trial of the program can be downloaded here.

Schemes of Learning

I seem to be assisting a number of different folk with their schemes of work lately. SoW (now renamed [renewed?] Schemes of Learning - SoL?) sometimes seem a bit like those stories of people painting the Forth Bridge: only just done when they need doing all over again. Thus I have yet to meet the English department with them all at the same state of development.

Today I found myself embarking of just one such process of development with a very talented team of English teachers in Barnsley. We will work together in the new school year and this afternoon considered the often unspoken question, “Just what makes a good scheme of work anyway?” Their answers seemed far more elegant than mine but I offer the following extract from my PowerPoint presentation for this session by way of a starting point for discussion.

Yes, I know it’s been a while.

Okay, okay - yes, hands up, I know I’ve been neglecting my blog but I have news dear faithful readers. You see, changes are afoot. Having worked at my school for the last 14 years, I have decided that a change is in order. This, among other things, will mean more time to write which hopefully means that I can blog a bit more often.

On that note, today was one of those very special ones in teaching. Thanks to Sian Pascoe and those lovely people at Doncaster I took my Year 10 Media BTEC group to work with a professional animator today. I was alerted to the visit by my ever-vigilant deputy head with only a relatively short time to organise it but hey, if someone makes a learning opportunity available for free, you bite their hand off don’t you? It may have been a bit tight to organise but it was fantastic nonetheless. And why would this possibly interest yourself? Well, it brought to my attention two learning avenues very definitely worth exploring.

Firstly, Autodesk Maya. What? Well, yes, that’s what I thought too. Maya, it turns out, is an industry standard 3D graphics and animation package that my students loved. Put simply, it is a program that allows the user to create very complex three-dimensional drawings that can then be animated with a very high level of detail and fluidity.

Our professional animator was from WAK Studios and showed students how to create a 3D model using Maya and then how to perform some simple principles of animation. Not only was he patient and incredibly skilful but also able to model (no pun intended) the principles of animation workflow.

The result was eighteen completely absorbed students, working for a full day with good humour and a large degree of creativity. Far less daunting than working with Flash, Maya gave the students fairly immediate rewards and they loved it. Best of all, they (like your own students) can download the Personal Learning Edition of the program for free to carry on the work away from the session.

And the second avenue? Well, that takes us to the amazing Arts Council’s Creative Partnerships programme. This is an initiative designed to “support thousands of innovative long-term partnerships, between schools and creative professionals - from architects to scientists to multimedia developers and artists.” There is no doubt a project near you - get involved!

Talking Maths (and English)

This week, among other things, I was asked to kick-off a development session on talk. The brief was straightforward enough - a bit of a background on the importance of talk to learning and then outline one strategy for supporting extended talk in the classroom. Straightforward indeed, but then, as I began pulling together my research, I started mulling over the observations of teaching that I’ve seen in the past few years.

I wondered in just how many lessons that I’ve seen were students expected to use their formidable speaking skills to further their learning? Would the old criticism still be true -that the majority of talk in classrooms comes from the teacher? Thinking this, I blushed with embarrassment at the proportion of time that I hog the floor in my classes. Yes, setting up talk tasks can be tricky, but could I use it more frequently as a learning tool?

I suspect that as most of my lessons at present are about revising past learning in preparation for the examination season, it was a sense of frustration that was driving my thinking here. And what of the other subjects? If I as an English teacher wasn’t fully utilising the power of talk, were they?

As the development session was to be cross-curricula, I began reflecting on my experiences in teaching outside my specialism. For example, one of the hardest things I found in teaching maths was finding the points where a student’s thinking goes astray. Looking at a maths exercise book full of problems and their solutions, finding the exact point where the student’s logic failed can be taxing. Perhaps talk might be able to expose those points more effectively.

So, equipped with a cheap mp3 recorder and an equally cheap microphone (£5 from ASDA) I set about recording the thinking of two of my form group as they multiplied out quadratic expressions. Doing a bit of recreational mathematics with students is not unusual in my registration period but recording it is. Obligingly, Joanne and Tim agreed to let me record their thinking. You can hear the results below.

Joanne

Tim

What I wondered was whether other students could follow Joanne and Tim’s explanations and whether they might be able to offer a useful criticism of the way each approached the problems.

In English, when we teach writing to describe, it is fairly common to explore skills using a simple ‘back to back’ strategy. Two students sit back to back and one describes say a simple image. The other attempts to reproduce the image from the description alone (no peeking). Could the same thing work in maths?

Keen to try this out, I played the recordings to two extremely able mathematicians (actually, the immensely talented Ruth Russell and Mary Walker, both maths consultants for the borough). Interestingly, both had difficulties following Joanne and Tim’s explanations. Even better, they instantly recognised why and found the points where the talk was unclear. Now, if that had been a classroom, how might Joanne and Tim have benefited from those observations.

Sadly, I don’t have a maths group at the moment where I might explore this idea further but it struck me that here was a technique worth developing. Given that recording students’ speech is so easy these days, it seems that there may well be a place for using talk and reflection in my next maths class.

Open Minds are at it again

Honestly, I should be on commission… actually, now there’s a thought.

I’ve just spotted the next production by Rotherham’s innovative theatre company, Open Minds. It’s Brecht’s Threepenny Opera - a retelling of John Gay’s eighteenth century Beggars’ Opera.

Brecht’s work is a dark and violent piece set in a criminal underworld where self interest is all and the nobler human emotions are completely absent. All that and the haunting songs of Kurt Weill including the classic Mack the Knife.

As the flyer says, “just the thing to chase away that Springtime optimism!”

Teaching teamwork (and ballads)

Part of the challenge of teaching English within the revised National Curriculum is to embrace the personal learning and thinking skills (PLTS). These are described by QCA as “essential to success in life, learning and work” and published in a framework that you may download here.

This framework identifies six groups of skills and asks that students be taught how to be:

• independent enquirers
• creative thinkers
• reflective learners
• team workers
• self-managers
• effective participators

The way my school is managing this one is to focus on one of the PLTS each half-term. Y7 will begin the Autumn Term with a focus on teamwork and my colleagues in our English department began planning this process last Thursday.

We discussed many ideas where collaboration is a key feature in English but eventually settled on a scheme of work that I have taught five or six times on the theme of Ballads (originally a development of Julie’s excellent scheme on Narrative Poetry).

Briefly, the scheme centres on writing a whole-class ballad. Examples of this work adorn classroom walls and display spaces around the school and one of my favourites was written by a class who decided that the story of the Titanic was to be their subject. Their complete version only exists as a display piece now but the first verse was…

It’s a great poem and a fantastic example of teamwork at its best in English. I thought you might like to see the scheme and its resources so I’ve placed links for them at the bottom of this posting. The key steps in the scheme are outline in the document entitled “Teaching Ballads and Teamwork.doc”. The other links are to various supporting resources.

I hope you can make use of the sequence somewhere as its always been one of my favourite pieces of work.

Teaching Ballads and Teamwork.doc

Supporting resources

Briefing sheet

Ballad of Charlotte Dymond

The Gresford Disaster

Y7 Ballad example 1

Ingredients grid

Y7 Draft ballad 1

Y7 Draft ballad 2

Sample class planning sheet

Rhyming bag sheet

Rhyming bag sheet (publisher)

Support for verse writing

W. Owen draft 1

W. Owen draft 2

Display poem format

Payment for such nice resources is a comment by way of a thank you on this blog

The polyhedral curriculum (at last!)

As a boy I remember being captivated by Norton Juster’s story, The Phantom Tollbooth. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s an allegorical adventure that takes the main character of Milo on a journey to a fantasy land known as Dictionopolis, where all the world’s letters are grown in orchards. A rival kingdom, Digitopolis, where all the world’s numbers are mined, is in dispute over which is the more important. On his journey he meets many marvellous characters including a Tock (a watch dog - literally!) a Whether Man (sic); a Mathemagician and a Dodecahedron. The latter is a figure having twelve faces, each of which expresses a different emotion.

A Dodecahedron? Surely such a thing (like walruses) cannot really exist I thought. But there it was, on my page and in my imagination. My world, through reading, enlarged.

I was enraptured by the sheer playfulness of Juster’s vision and loved the idea personifying both figures of speech and mathematical concepts. Yesterday, as my school got to grips with the revised National Curriculum, I found myself transported back to that book especially the preposterous Dodecahedron. How? Why? (leaving aside the “You are just plain weird, Andrew”). Well, dear reader, it’s just that the revised National Curriculum has, it seems, finally made it to polyhedral dimensions.

The first few versions of the National Curriculum were pretty dull and two dimensional. The Education Reform Act of 1988 introduced the idea of it along with SATs and League Tables and those marvellous market forces to make everything better. Well, that was 20 years ago and ‘better’ is a highly relative term. Eh-hum. Moving swiftly on, hardly a month since then have the politicians resisted fiddling with the curriculum, introducing this and that until it became clear that just releasing another bolt-on was not going to cut it. This thing needed a complete overhaul.

And lo, it came about that the ‘new’ National Curriculum was published. It combines (deep breath required) the 14 main subjects; the 5 outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda; the 3 functional skills; the 6 personal learning and thinking skills; and the 7 cross-curricula dimensions. That’s 35 glittering facets in all - polyhedralism to make even the poor Dodecahedron look plain by comparison.

Don’t misunderstand my light-hearted tone here - I am not mocking the complexity of our new (revised?) National Curriculum. Far from it. In fact, I’m am rather glad that our educational thinkers have conceded that education is complex. Actually, I think that they still haven’t charted all the dimensions of the thing. For a start, what about adding all the complexities of the emotional aspects of the curriculum or learning styles or curriculum provision for additional needs…

Anyway, at least they’ve made an effort this time to acknowledge the glorious intricacy of our work.

Oh and just in case you were wondering, a 35-sided (solid) shape is known as a triacontakaipentahedron.

Stuck for a rhyme?

Occasionally, students (and myself) get stuck for a rhyme. Of course, I do have a rather lovely little rhyming dictionary in my classroom but I should have guessed that by now the internet would have another answer. Click the image to give it a go.

Another one to add to your bookmarks.

Progression in writing to describe

In Stella Gibbons’ 1932 comic masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm, the author obligingly stars the most purple of descriptive passages with one, two or three stars to allow readers to skip or admire her descriptions. The first of her starred passages is a description of the eponymous farm and begins:

“Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm. The farm was crouched on a bleak hill-side, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away . . . “.

The novel parodies Laurencian, over-romanticised accounts of rural life but Ms Gibbons is still working (mostly) within the rules of descriptive writing, albeit with a comic twist. In the extract above we see extended metaphor (and a mixed one at that) and a density of poetic techniques placed cheek by jowl with an appeal to the reader’s senses. There is also a unity or direction to the description that attempts to paint this world as a dark and menacing place.

Of course, it doesn’t quite come off as Ms Gibbons well knew. The creeping white animal (some sort of cat?) becomes ’sluggish’ and the wind, personified by its ’snarling cries’ loses its menace when it encounters the absurdly over-detailed list of ‘dormers and mullions and scullions’. When we read that the neighbouring village is called ‘Howling’, the joke is complete. Ah-ha, we think, this is parody - the clumsiness in style is all part of the deliciousness of the conceit.

Right now, I expect that Ms Gibbons would be amused. My attempt to analyse her technique with a degree of seriousness would have her chuckling heartily because that’s pretty much the point really - it’s a style of prose that is quite deliberately awful in order to make us smile. We don’t need to analyse it, we just feel it. Nevertheless, it’s a great starting point for more able students when teaching them about some of the finer points of writing to describe.

Progression in this topic begins with the basic definition of descriptive writing as being rich in an appeal to the five senses and full of poetic techniques. I usually start with a sense chart (see below). Students use the frame to capture details of a scene, making sure that all columns contain at least one or two details.

For the least able students, using this chart as a basis for writing can create a pleasing first draft.

As with teaching any form of writing, the teaching sequence follows the flow chart pictured below.

To take this one step further, each sense detail may be developed, usually with reference to simple poetic techniques like simile or metaphor. There are many ways of achieving this with students and a handy reminder of the range of techniques available to writer may be useful (the resource below is suitably simple although as you can see it was made for a different purpose).

Middle ability students now have the basis for a very pleasing piece of descriptive writing. It contains an appeal to the readers’ senses and has that density of poetic techniques that is the hallmark of description. However, the work does not need to stop there. The most able writers don’t just describe; their writing has an overarching unity, a direction, a point. One way to introduce this to students is to examine some critically acclaimed examples.

The choice is almost limitless but three that immediately spring to mind are the killing of an iguana from ‘Out of Africa’ by Isak Dinesen; ‘The Shooting of an Elephant’ by George Orwell and the description of Coketown from ‘Hard Times’ by Charles Dickens (see resource link at the foot of this posting).

More able students can admire their rich use of sensual detail and the wonderfully poetic language but, more than those, they can see in these descriptions something else - that overarching unity, the drive to harness description to the writer’s purpose.

Once I have modelled my reading of one, students explore the others, recording the three main elements - sensual detail; poetic language; and writer’s purpose. Now, they have a way of shifting their writing to the highest level.

I usually follow this reading sequence with a writing task that gives students a chance to explore their new-found knowledge. They plan their writing using a frame divided into three sections and headed with the elements of descriptive writing outlined above. The results are startlingly original and often reach the highest levels of attainment. You may even want to explore with your learners the delightful Ms Gibbons’ work.

Resources to download

The Teaching Sequence for Writing - boxes.doc

Small Sense Charts.doc

mr strand drops explained.doc

Writing to describe examples.doc

How to kill a love of reading

Just when we think that teachers have no standing in our communities, one of those delightful and flattering conversations occurs. You know the ones - they begin with a circuitous preamble (about the weather or a statement beginning with ‘I don’t know how you do it’) and then move towards the request for one’s opinion on reading or education or, best of all, learning.

I’m always a bit surprised when it happens. I know I shouldn’t be but it’s just that immersed in a world of educational giants as I am, I forget my position as ‘expert’ to many of my friends.

Such a conversation happened recently at the end of a busy school day. I almost missed my cue: after all, it seemed that I was just chatting inconsequentially. Then, the friend moved our conversation towards the subject of her daughter’s reading. I should explain that her daughter is 7 years old and a pupil in a local primary school. The girl, let’s call her Susan, has been a keen reader for a while and has shared her reading daily with both mum and dad, graduating from first readers to some quite challenging books and enjoying every moment of it.

Recently, however, things have changed. Whilst reading a story, Susan has told her mother on a number of occasions, “Right, Mummy, we have to stop now and I have to tell you what I’ve noticed about the characters, the writer’s methods and what happens next.” Once, whilst reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Susan stopped short and pointed out to her mother, “There’s no comma in that paragraph.” When her mum asked what she meant, Susan replied, “Well, he would have got more marks if he’d used a comma.”

Susan’s mother is, quite rightly, concerned. Just what is happening to her daughter’s love of reading? The answer, sadly, is in an ill-informed (but wholly predictable) Gradgrindery from her primary teachers. You see, we live in an educational world of TARGETS, TARGETS, TARGETS. In this world THE LEAGUE TABLE dominates common sense ( I do apologise for my Swiftian capitals - but I am incensed). Susan’s primary school teachers are clumsily trying to push her to meet a target of Level 3. No doubt they are doing it with the best of intentions but the fact remains that she, like many other children, is being taught that ONLY THE TEST MATTERS. They are also simultaneously having their love of reading warped by utility. Did I mention that she is SEVEN YEARS OLD?

‘Oh, really!’ I hear you cry. ‘I mean, what’s wrong with encouraging children to be analytical?’ Absolutely nothing of course but there’s time enough for that once our children have an unshakeable love of reading for its own sake. Just show me where ‘reading for pleasure’ is promoted with the same fervour as examinations in our school system and I’ll shut up.

What would Susan’s preferred author have thought of such teaching brutality? Would Mr Dahl have got more marks with children everywhere if he had used more commas? Are we, as teachers of reading, becoming just a little insane?

It is de rigueur to place all society’s ills at the feet of its teachers but in this case it may well be justified. Yes, the government dictates; yes, head teachers bow to pressure as OFSTED intimidates; but do we as teachers really have to play along to this extent? I mean it’s one thing to crush the joy from reading in our lessons but quite another to extend such brutishness to the bedtime story.

In case we’ve forgotten the phenomenon of turning enquiry into a quest for the RIGHT ANSWER devoid of wonder, is not new. It was most famously satirised over 150 years ago by Dickens. To educationalists everywhere I urge you to re-read his novel, Hard Times; for pleasure.

[By the way, there are 40 commas in this posting. Take that Mr Dahl!]