Working at a school this Friday, I came across a resource that I really liked but I could see that, with a few tweaks, it could be even more useful. So, I’ve made my own version of it.

Each ‘emoticon’ has beneath it a strip of five boxes that could indicate intensity or that could be used to track emotion over a period of five lessons. The sheet is purposefully made using outline drawings so that colour might also be used to develop an emotional pattern.

I imagine that this resource could be used to encourage students to reflect on their emotions say, as part of a SEAL learning objective. It might also be used to reflect on the emotions of others perhaps as part of engaging with a writer or speaker.

The link is below; I hope you find it useful.

How do you feel today.pdf

This is a resource that is part of the Teaching Inference and Deduction materials that I presented at our English Conference recently. It’s function is to serve as a thinking chart during an activity that simulates the fact that able readers frequently predict and reflect on reasonable reading conclusions.

At the conference I used a (very) short story which I separated into paragraphs and projected using PowerPoint. At the end of each paragraph, I invited pairs of readers to reflect on the main character and to write their thoughts in note form on the chart, placing them in an appropriate zone. This brought to the fore discussion on what exactly is a reasonable reading conclusion given the material. It also supported analysis of this aspect of reading to deduce by making the usually invisible, apparent.

Target Map.doc

Here’s one of my resources from the recent Conference (see previous post). This is an exercise that helps students to explore one of the skills of reading to deduce: how able readers can track multiple characters in a text.

The important element in using this piece of work with a group is not to focus on the ‘right’ answers but rather to highlight the strategies that students have used to deduce them. It can be a very enlightening reading activity to use with pairs of readers and exposes some of those invisible reading skills that seem so mysterious to less able readers.

It’s an A3 resource so download and print accordingly.
Sykes & Nancy Chr Tracking.doc

Here, as promised, is the PowerPoint from my session at our recent Regional English Conference.This is an annual event hosted in Doncaster to support the teaching of English in the north east of England.

For those of you unable to attend, it was another excellent event chock full of ideas for teaching English. There were brilliant sessions from Tara and Catherine on Writing to Describe; Charlotte on supporting ‘radical readers’; and Joy, Beth, Judith and Audrey gave us an amazing range of active strategies for teaching poetry.

Below is the link to download my notes on teaching deduction and inference in reading.

Teaching Deduction and Inference.ppt

I shall add copies of the resources that I used as part of the session soon. Check back to this blog in a few days for more!

Oh, and the tree? Well, that was our plenary activity. I’d assembled a few prunings in a pot at the front of the conference venue. At the end of the session, delegates wrote ideas on cut-out leaf shapes and were invited to add them to the bare branches. As you can see, those teaching ideas are blossoming in Doncaster!

Here is a resource that I made today to help my students understand the structure of their examinations in GCSE English. It gives you a way to teach ‘the big picture’ in an active fashion by presenting the students with a partially completed chart of the two examinations. They are then asked to use the cut-ups provided to add extra information such as the dates of the exams; the assessment objectives; the primary focus of the test; and whether their anthology is required.

By thinking about the pieces of information given, students can deduce where the extra information goes. Well, that’s the theory anyway.

Print the Word document on A4 and copy to A3 paper with two sheets per side if possible.

What the students will end up with is hopefully a useful chart and, by actually processing the information, a better understanding of the structure of their assessment. You never know, it might even make them feel less stressed.

English GCSEs 2009 Structure Activity.doc

For almost all of the time I have been teaching, I have been spoilt. Of course I didn’t realise this until things changed but having one’s own teaching room is an enormous advantage in a teacher’s pressurised working day. Working from one room means there are a vital few minutes between one lesson and the next when the learning space can be reorganised to fit a new group.

Sadly, I no longer have that luxury and this means that it is I who have to move between rooms, carrying everything I might conceivably need for the next group of learners. Fortunately, each teaching room in my new school has a similar setup and is well equipped for sound, visuals and interactivity. Still, I’m always on the lookout for anything that might speed these transitions and when I came across Portable Apps, I knew it was just the sort of thing that could help.

Most of us now use USB pen drives and think nothing of keeping lesson resources on them that can be opened by a ‘host’ PC. However, we have all experienced the problem inherent in this when a file that we’ve created on one computer steadfastly refuses to open on another.

The problem of course is to do with what programs are installed on which computer. Say I make a PowerPoint presentation on my home PC and save it to my memory stick. I then take that memory stick to a classroom and expect my presentation to run as it did on my PC at home. This may or may not happen as I expect due to the different versions of PowerPoint available or indeed whether it is installed at all on the PC into which I plug my USB stick. These kinds of problems seem demonstrably worse when one is working with sound and video as there are so many different formats available for these types of files.

What Portable Apps offers is a way to change your pen drive into a mini-computer. The idea is simple, why stop at storing data when these pen drives are fast enough to run tiny versions of very useful programs. Thus, instead of carting about a laptop with your specific programs installed and connecting it to a projector or interactive whiteboard, you run your vital applications from a humble pen drive.

If you investigate the excellent PortableApps.com you will find that your pendrive can have a start menu not dissimilar to the Windows one. This menu will automatically run when you plug your pendrive into a new PC. Into that menu you might add programs such as VLC Media Player (a piece of software that allows you to play almost any video format) or Coolplayer (a very fast, easy-to-use audio player). Now you are no longer at the mercy of software installed on your institution’s PCs; you can work safe in the knowledge that your saved file will indeed play as expected.

And while we’re on the subject of Portable Apps, one of the programs that has been made portable goes by the moniker of PNotes. Once run, it places virtual post-its on your screen that can be typed on, saved and set to display on top of any other window or programs that you run. I use this tiny but essential program to display the learning objectives for my lessons, making the ‘post-it’ that contains them slightly transparent so that students can select whether they are looking at the learning objectives or indeed the material behind them.

It has long been a gripe of mine that those people who make interactive whiteboard software have not included an easy way to achieve this relatively simple effect: having learning objectives visible to students no matter what else is one screen. PNotes running from your pendrive makes this a very easy trick to pull off and your learning objectives are saved for next time too.

One of the joys of my teaching life is to find ways to bring the learner to the learning no matter where they start from. This skill has been tested recently as I have been working with a group of highly reluctant (some might say ‘resistant’ or even ‘out and out hostile’) learners.

In my school there exists a small group of learners referred to on the timetable as a ‘re-engagement’ group or ‘R-band’ class. These students are a very challenging group of individuals with extremely low self-esteem and a group identity based on hostility towards schooling (and teachers!) as well as all the familiar symptoms of disaffection. In lessons, they swear; they shout; they fight; they ignore; they truant; they resist; they challenge; they vandalise; they attack; they demand; they flaunt their bigotry; they verbally abuse; and they destroy what work they do complete. In short, they are as far from being receptive to learning as you can possibly imagine.

It was with this class that I was asked to plan lessons that would help them to understand some literary texts, namely two poems from the ‘different cultures’ section of the AQA anthology for GCSE. At this point I suspect ‘the youth today!’ lobby have just had all their prejudices confirmed about the sorry state of British youngsters and are reaching for their extreme solutions. But wait, did I mention that these same students are naive and frightened and damaged and desperately looking for structure (even though they will go to enormous lengths to kick against it).

Watching these students in class is fascinating. Yes, it’s an uneasy business of preparing for the next explosion and trying to make the most capital from brief moments of calm but it’s also oddly reassuring. In amongst all this damage are twelve or so distortions of what it is to be a child with all the attendant insecurities. There are also moments that would melt the heart of even the most cynical. For example, in one learning sequence they wrote picture books for five-year-olds and the care that the group put into the task together with their haphazard (but correct) discussion of the needs of such an audience were, well, charming.

Tackling the poems was going to be different though. I mean, its a well known fact that poetry is universally disliked by difficult and less able kids, right? Well… not exactly.

I began with the ’stories’ of the poems. Here I presented the group with a prose narrative of each poem for them to sequence as a ‘cut and stick’ exercise. The challenge was ‘find the story here’. Next I gave a range of pictures that might illustrate that ’story’. Then I asked the students to find anything in this poem that might ‘go with’ the pictures (and the narrative). The idea was to encourage the students to create a 2-D presentation of the poem with three different representations of its narrative: in prose, in image; and in the selection of fitting snippets from the text.

The results were remarkable. I braced myself for chaos – there were scissors and glue involved after all – and had prepared a standby option but it was not needed. Before putting these pieces on display, I photographed some as a record of what was achieved.

If you’d like the resources used, they can be downloaded below.

Blessing narrative

Blessing flipchart

Blessing photosheet

Ah, it must be Monday again and, ensconced in my comfy thinking chair, I thought it would be a good time to share a few practical tips on using audio in lessons.

Firstly, if you haven’t already done so, investigate the wonderful computer program, called Audacity. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds and, in my opinion, one of the best. You can download it here.

I know it doesn’t look like much but trust me, it is a wonderful piece of programming.

Once you have installed a copy on your machine, you are set to record (or edit) sound files. These can be saved as *.wav, *.mp3 or ogg vorbis format (whatever that is). Mind you, before you start dickering, its a good idea to reboot your PC to allow Audacity to pick up the precise settings of your sound hardware.

[NOTE: if you do want to save to MP3, you will have to install an encoder. The free option is the 'LAME' open source encoder. It can be downloaded here .]

Audacity has many tricks but the one that I’d like to share today is its ability to record anything that your computer plays or that you can hear through your computer speakers. Just think about that one for a second, I mean your PC can play DVDs right? or YouTube clips? or TV and radio programmes? Yes. Now I would not be a responsible educator if I didn’t remind you of the laws of copyright at this point. Uh-hum, consider yourself reminded.

So, you’ve rebooted. Now what? Well the best way to demonstrate the power of Audacity is I think to use a practical example. This week in my teaching I wanted to create a listening exercise for a group where they were invited to listen to a soundtrack and to identify all the separate sounds. The learning was to do with writing to describe and I had selected the topic of ‘at the beach’. I remembered that I had a good bookmark for beach-type sound effects and loaded it into my browser.

The site is called http://www.soundsleeping.com/ and is meant to provide users with relaxing sounds that assist a peaceful night’s sleep. However, it is perfect for sound effect listening games too. On the site you’ll find a series of sliders. Select a sound from the drop-down menu, slide the volume up, and your PC will become a creek or forest or indeed, be caught in a thunderstorm. (Don’t hear anything? try switching your PC’s speakers on ).

So, with my PC making the sounds that I required for my listening exercise, all I had to do now was to record them and that is where Audacity comes in. The program has many options and just to the right of the Audacity window is a drop-down setting that you will need to alter (see picture below). PCs vary but on mine this needs to be set to ’stereo mixer’ though on others I have seen it set to ‘what you hear’. It all depends on your machine’s sound card settings.

Once the setting is changed, Audacity is ready to record anything that your PC can play. Simply press its red circle button (record) and Audacity will start recording. This can be confirmed by its display changing to a representation of the sound’s wave form (see below).

You’re almost done. All that’s left is to use Audacity to save (click ‘file’ then ‘export as WAV’) your resultant wave file and ‘insert’ it into a PowerPoint or IWB notebook file.

The joy of this technique is that , with Audacity set to record, you can operate your PC as normal and all its sounds are included in the recording. I was able to alter the sliders on the ’sound sleeping’ website to produce a simple ‘mix’ of all the noises one might associate with a day at the beach and Audacity placed them in the one wav file. Of course, if your PC is set to squeak whenever you perform certain actions then that will be recorded too; you may want to turn off that particular function of Windows before you begin.

It seems to me that this simple technique could be used to create any number of audio files for teaching purposes. Listening exercises are just a beginning. We can create extracts of any significant audio content and make our teaching all the more audacious for it.

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.

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