ICTeachers - The Independent Voice of Teachers

ICTeachers Magazine January 2007

Definitely the best not quite monthly independent ICT newsletter in the world!

Circulation 11.5k including Educational Organisations World-wide

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ICTeachers has been in business since 1999. Our website has well over 100k visitors every month and our customers are very happy with our web building, maintaining and hosting services.  We include the whole range of schools, including special, businesses, LA's and individuals as our customers. We are a committed to providing colleagues good service at the lowest possible price.  

Message from the Editor

Greetings colleagues!  
I was at the BETT show in Olympia London earlier this month, the great freebie rush for teachers. I used to go there as an ICT co-ordinator to stock up with mouse mats and pens for my classroom but over the years I've noticed a paucity of freebies given out. Most of the best stuff is guarded by fearsome sales people in luminous t-shirts or spotty youfs in wide ties (spiv style retro?) 

In order to get access to the real goodies you have to listen to some presentation of an inflated piece of software, the power of which you would barely even scratch, and yet you sit and listen because there is a bouncy ball there which lights up and I must have it for my collection! 

At this year's BETT I was on the NCSL stand, with my e-learning colleagues doing the presentations! This was GREAT FUN! All teachers are showmen and women at heart and a group of us were presenting on different aspects of our online work, be that new programmes like Leadership Pathways (awesome!) or lessons we had learnt from running the largest online community (100+k members) of school leaders in the world. Some cynics might say that they came for the memory sticks we were giving away...but no! Because not only were the 16 seats filled but the crowd gathered two or three thick to hear about these things. Very gratifying and I think and important indicator of how seriously school leaders, including ICT subject leaders, are taking their role and show a desire to improve and a will to improve. 

My best giveaway was probably the neck rest I got from a basket out of reach by the usual sized teacher but I managed to make it mine in a sort of swooping move feigning interest in the goods on sale.  But, in the end, and as usual, when I returned from my three days at BETT,  my children claimed all the goodies as rightful recompense from being denied their daddy's presence for such a long time, and divide them amongst their selves using some ancient code known only to them. It was good to be back. : ) 

The Editor
md@icteachers.co.uk

The comments of the Editor in no way reflect the views of ICTeachers Ltd and do not claim to be either well researched or even vaguely coherent.  They are, though, intellectually dubious. 

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School Websites

Sites include primary, infant, junior, secondary, community and special schools.

Here's what our customers think...

"Bob gives wonderful follow up service and uploads the stuff I send him without fail. He gives me tips and advice and I really feel that I am an honoured customer. Nothing is too much trouble and he never makes me feel dumb or ICT illiterate." Headteacher

"Thanks for the info and the cost! It is well within my current ICT budget and I am very interested. I have already gathered a lot of photographs ,info etc but can't seem to find the time!! I will speak to my head on Monday morning and will be in touch. Thanks for help."

For a no obligation discussion contact our sales consultant Fiona
fiona@icteachers.co.uk or phone 01934 811132

Go to www.icwebs.co.uk for more information

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Primary Teacher UK

Primary Teacher UK is a news, reviews and resources site with daily updates for primary teachers in the UK. The website is run by Andrew Ross, a year 6 teacher from Northwich. A range of teachers submit articles and add to the resource bank.

The site is updated frequently with links to websites, news articles, and additional resources along with personal observations about teaching in the primary age range. With an average readership of 600 teachers a day the site continues to grow.

Visit the site at http://www.primary-teacher-uk.co.uk to get all the latest news. If you enjoy the site please feel free to add your own contributions. Full details on how to do this are available on the site

http://www.primary-teacher-uk.co.uk

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 ePortfolios for learning

I’ve recently attended two conferences in Oxford that focused exclusively on ePortfolios, with examples from several continents. Globally, there is growing interest in large-scale ePortfolio projects. Institutions, states and nations are using a variety of home-grown, commercial and open-source software to help learners record goals, capture evidence of achievement and reflect on their progress.

Some projects use specific eportfolio commercial software, but others use slide show tools or web authoring software that meets their needs. In my view, the best type of ePortfolio systems provide a place to store evidence of many types (an archive space) and tools to allow material to be organised for particular purposes. They also encourage reflection and feedback, whether in a formal journalling style, or in a blog.

England is one of the few countries in the world where eportfolios are encouraged through educational policy. Improving the transitions between levels of schooling, and between school and further or higher education are important to improving lifelong learning. There are many projects designed to record the skills and competencies of learners to assist their employability. These also have the potential to create national data banks of people’s skills and competence.

You don’t need to be a student or a teacher to use eportfolios for learning and development. In Wales, a project launched by Careers Wales and the national government in 2004 created an ePortfolio space for all citizens. Europortfolio, a consortium including The European Institute for eLearning, European Schoolnet, the Centre for Technical Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and IMS Global Learning Consortium in Europe, has as its slogan ‘an ePortfolio for every citizen by 2010’ (www.eife-l.org).

ePortfolios have great potential for personalising learning. It’s not just about learning styles, but also about personality. It’s important to feel a sense of ownership. Digital productions enable students to show who they are through the choice of material in their ePortfolio, in their presentation style, and in their reflections.. However some ePortfolios seem be very text-based, missing the potential for developing and presenting new literacies.

Over the past few years, I’ve visited numerous ePortfolio projects in different settings. At a specialist day school for students with a moderate intellectual disability, teachers designed templates and the students gathered examples of their learning via video, digital photos, and audio files, with a focus on progression over time. They inserted their artifacts into the template during class, and collaborated with teachers to add reflective comments. A file management system was set up on the school’s server to store the ePortfolios as they were being developed. Once completed, parents and carers were invited to visit the school to attend a portfolio presentation and see the evidence of their children’s progress. At the end of the school year the students’ portfolios were saved on CD ROM and given to the family. A teacher reflected ‘Whether it be counting, reading, swimming or drawing, every step of the journey is immensely important to both students and their parents, who can see that their child is learning, in a more concrete way than was previously possible’.

In a primary school, Year 6 students planned their collections of evidence and used mobile camera phones to capture important memories around the school buildings that they were soon to leave, as well as images of assignments and models that they were proud of. They created their portfolios as slide shows, and took them on to their Year 7 teachers. One very memorable portfolio included 4 video clips showing a students’ progress playing the trumpet over the year.

Where ePortfolios are introduced, teachers are important in developing a culture and skills of reflection. Students (and teachers) often need scaffolding for this task. One teacher said ‘It was putting their reflection into words that they found difficult. When I asked some probing questions and provided some examples, the students’ writing improved’. Feedback is also important. Successful use of ePortfolios clearly takes time, and is best integrated into daily work, rather than added on.

ePortfolios don’t have to be for individuals, either. Groups of students and teachers can create a project ePortfolio, or a class version. Teachers who create their own portfolios often report personal benefits, as well as the value of modeling for their students. Several years ago I started a project with women teachers to learn more about ICTs through developing individual and collective digital portfolios. We called ourselves ‘women@the cutting edge’ and, apart from the increased skill and confidence with technology, we all found that our self-esteem grew, as we reflected on our professional growth over our careers. A recent report called The Self-Esteem Society suggests that self esteem is a form of human capital that has wide benefits to society, and government and other institutions can shape environments where everyone can develop self worth.

ePortfolios are communication tools, so one of the important aspects is knowing your audience. ePortfolios should be tailored to the needs of both learners and audiences, whether they be teachers, parents, institutions or employers. That is why the best tools allow a range of ePortfolios for different purposes.

Visit these websites for further information:

Helen Barrett’s site http://electronicportfolios.org
ELGG http://elgg.net/
Centre for International ePortfolio Development, University of Nottingham http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/eportfolio/
JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/e-portfolio-summary.pdf
Becta http://partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=pv&catcode=_pv_ep_02

I am keen to hear from any of you who are using ePortfolios.
Please contact me at elizabeth.hartnell-young@nottingham.ac.uk

Elizabeth Hartnell-Young is the author, with Maureen Morriss, of Digital Portfolios: Powerful Tools for Professional Growth and Reflection (Corwin Press, 2007). [http://www.corwinpress.com/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book229229 ]

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New Year = New Career? Earn money from your hobby!

As you start a new year are your thoughts turning to a change of career, a new direction or a new challenge? Maybe you are looking at semi retirement or would like to run your own business making people happy and fulfilling your artistic and creative ambitions?

Well there is a great opportunity to start your own Wedding Videography business. The beauty of this is that for a relatively small initial outlay you can begin to make really good profits quickly (try looking for wedding videos on google in your area and see how much they are charging). As this is mainly weekend work you can start a wedding videography business while still working full or part-time, and build up your jobs according to demand or your personal objectives.

Contrast video is a new company which can start you on the road to living the dream of being your own boss. Contrast video offers seminars which will give you all of the information and training you need to get started as a wedding videographer and stat getting bookings. No previous artistic or technical experience is necessary. For more information go to www.contrastvideo.com . Imagine – a rewarding career with no marking, targets or inspectors and everyone a smiling face….

Richard
richard@contrastvideo.com

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Computer music production for beginners  

The Punk Rock scene held serious implications for modern music.

The point was that anyone could make music – as Fatboy Slim says ‘why try harder?’ Now anybody with access to a computer can capitalise on that basic foundation.

A good place to start is to play around with loops in a program such as Sony Acid Pro which is relatively cheap. As with any software it’s a good idea to try a demo first

Download Acid demo here….

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/download/step2.asp?did=661

When you grow tired of playing drum loops and other samples you may wish to start programming individual sounds in a more controlled manner. In Fruity Loops you can do this and export your own loops into Acid….

Download Fruity Loops demo here….

http://www.tucows.com/get/209204_156965

Fruity loops is a good program for understanding bar structure and how bars relate to each other. On opening the application you see the visual representation of a bar- broken into 16 steps (quarter beats) by default.

Pressing play runs through the displayed 16 quarter beats, playing whatever noise you place on any of the 16 steps in sequence, looping at the end of however many bars you program in this way.

You can try out different amounts of quarter beats: 16 = 4/4 (most music!) 12 = ¾(waltz, reggae). This will help to understand how bars are portrayed in most music production software. nb most of the feels of these odd bar structures can be emulated through 4 4 adequately so stick to this.

We can look at the construction of a music track like building a wall-

laying down required materials i.e. sounds along the length of the track

No doubt you will soon build 4 bar loops and beyond. You don’t want the same loop playing constantly so some more advanced ideas for variation throughout a track are as follows..

You could try adding alternation on the 4th bar of your 4 bar loops.

The basic trick is to Listen – see if things go together 4 bars/ 8 bars

Get the feeling from a song that you like as a starting point, and try to emulate that in some way. Copy notes from one pattern to a different  instrument pattern (copy notes from the bass track to say a saxophone track, patching sounds together to build  more unique sounds.

Contact me here:

www.myspace.com/robmachine

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From Web to Work: Websites by Teachers

As technology becomes more and more intrinsic with everyday life, so too does our reliance on the Internet and websites for sources of knowledge, interest and inspiration. In educational terms, it is teachers themselves who are taking on this challenge with passion and enthusiasm. Sites are springing up from teachers of all walks of life, in widely divergent areas of the curriculum (and indeed, the world), and for much of the time, this is of huge benefit to those in schools. So why did they start, what so they get out of it, and how hard is it to do? As someone who has recently set up my own website based (loosely) around my educational experiences ( www.thesameas.com), I wanted to find out more…

Doug Belshaw (www.mrbelshaw.co.uk) is a good person to start with. A young history teacher, he is a fierce advocate of teacher websites, sharing of knowledge and skills, and is a passionate user of technology in his lessons. Until recently, he encouraged the cameraphone capability of his students' phones to record what was on the board as an aid to learning. As he says, his aim is to "make new technologies more accessible and relevant to the busy professional teacher." So what does he get out of it? For Doug, he believes that he has learnt more in the past year than any other year of his life!

There are some in the profession who would view all the effort some teachers are putting in online as a bit of a waste of time, but many would disagree with this. Joanne Shaw ( www.instantdisplay.co.uk) has managed to turn an educational need into an ongoing concern. She found a lack of posters for her classroom a real problem, and so began creating her own, then selling them online. She found such success with her enterprise that she eventually had to give up her teaching job to manage the business full time. Her original purpose behind the website remains the same however –to fulfil the passion she had for using a computer as a way of improving her teaching environment.

Patrick Allen (www.classinaflash.co.uk) had a similar experience, enhanced by the nature of his job as a school supply teacher. He was acutely aware that a lot of money had been spent on ICT in schools, but that "much of the software, while being all 'whistles and bells', took a lot of the skill of teaching out of the equation." Patrick was a comfortable Flash programmer, who had made many free (and paid-for) resources for use in schools with access to interactive whiteboards. He also says that having a website is a lot simpler than carrying resources from school to school each day.

So how difficult is it to set up your own web presence? The costs of hosting your own space are around £5-10 a month (Ed. ICWebs offers it for only £3.99!), which can be offset by selling small items or hosting advertising space on your site. An alternative is to write a weblog. These are often free to start and host, as Debbie Jones, who writes a blog called Little Miss Teacher ( http://littlemissteacher.blogspot.com) knows. A British-trained teacher who now works at an International School in Thailand, her ethos for keeping a diary was to make her life, and those of other teachers, easier, as she is "fed-up of trying to reinvent the wheel every week at school." A weblog is perfect for this, as it can help to channel your thoughts, as well as take advice from those who read your online diary. Debbie also admits that keeping it is cathartic, as she also likes to "have a good old moan about work!"

All agreed that it was something that was demanding in time, but given the pleasure and achievement that they all felt came from their website, as well as the contact with other teachers and educators as a result, it was worth it. Linda Hartley's weblog, based around classroom displays ( http://lmhartley.edublogs.org/), began as her action research project in her final year of her degree course, and she firmly believes that it contributed to her gaining a First Class degree. More importantly, she agreed with the other contributors to this article that the best thing about having an online presence was the ability to "widen the conversation" – an apt phrase, especially given the environment the conversations are taking place in.

The future of teacher-based websites would appear to be safe and strong. Like the wide range of channels now broadcasting on cable and satellite television, each teacher's website caters for a particular niche, be it using technology in History lessons, inspiring students in the their surroundings or enlivening an unknown group of children. What's not to like?

Stephen Lockyer

mr.lockyer@gmail.com

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Copyright ICTeachers 2007