Learning | doug woods

Posts Tagged ‘Learning’

Lesson Capture : An Introduction for Teachers

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

An Introduction to Lesson Capture

Lesson capture has been around for a wile, mainly in the US and in Higher Education, where it is known not surprisingly as Lecture Capture. I can see it becoming more widespread in schools, hence the change of term to Lesson Capture. The question I want to try to address in this article is, “What is lesson capture and why might one want to use it in school?”.

It is a question I want to try to answer more from a pedagogical viewpoint than a technical one but let me start by giving a simple technical explanation. Put simply, lesson capture is the recording of lessons by the teacher/department for pupils to later view to reinforce their learning.

So, essentially, we’re talking about videoing lessons to be viewed later but why would we want to do that, aren’t the pupils just viewing a repeat of what they’ve already done? Well, yes, in a way they are but I’m sure that as teachers we all know pupils who need things repeated (more than once) before they learn them. Traditionally, this has meant going over areas you’ve already covered in a previous lesson but, with lesson capture, pupils can watch the video and get the repetition they need.

Even the most studious and attentive of pupils can sometimes find it difficult to maintain attention for a whole lesson; tiredness, weather, time of day, other pupils, etc. can all conspire against full attention. Hence, certain parts or key points of a lesson may be missed even by the most interested and academically inclined learner. Lesson capture affords all pupils an opportunity to catch parts and points they may have missed during the original lesson.

We all know that attendance is important for learning but there are times when attendance is not possible for a pupil; illness, bereavement and other family situations, can all lead to a pupil being absent from lessons for short or prolonged periods. As teachers, we know this can be frustrating but, with lesson capture, we can at least offer these pupils an improved opportunity to catch up on missed sessions.

As well as absence, we also have the issue of exclusion. Even though there may be justifiable reasons for a pupil being excluded, they still have a right to learn and, if they are on the school’s books then the school has an obligation to teach them. With lesson capture, the school has a way of presenting learning opportunities to excluded pupils, while still maintaining their exclusion. As an added benefit, when the pupil returns from exclusion, hopefully they may not have missed out on so much of their education.

So far I have spoken only of lesson capture as a way of enabling pupils to catch up on any learning they may have missed or which they need repeating. This aspect of lesson capture alone could have one important benefit for learners and their schools; increased learning. By overcoming lost learning, lesson capture could lead to better performance, test scores and exam grades for pupils. This may be particularly true for pupils with poor attention, numerous absences, or poor study skills. This is not to say that lesson capture is not also of benefit to the more capable pupil; it is, for it allows them to go over material several times as and when they feel the need, including for periods of revision.

You Know You’re a 21st Century Educator When … (7 signs) (dougwoods.co.uk)
Almost 900 pupils suspended from school each day for violence (guardian.co.uk)
Are schools putting kids off computers? (postgrad.com)

Lesson Capture : An Introduction for Teachers

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Tags: education technology, K through 12, Learning, lesson capture, revision
Posted in education, elearning | 2 Comments »

The Best and Most Rewarding Job?

Monday, July 18th, 2011

: Image via Wikipedia

You’d think that working with children and young people, helping them learn, grow and develop would be one of the best and most rewarding of jobs. Yet often it isn’t. Just ask any teacher about the stress, the long hours, the pressures of working in a school and you’ll begin to wonder if there isn’t someting wrong with our education system.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll uncover more of the story. Teachers will tell you that it isn’t working with the pupils that’s the problem; it’s all the extra bits! By which they usually mean the paper work, the long hours spent in school and at home on preparation or marking. This has long been the case in education but has it got any worse over the years and what role does technology play in this?

I believe that technology is both an aid and a culprit when we look into teacher stress. Let me give you an example, take lesson planning; lesson planning takes time, it takes time to identify the aims, objectives and outcomes of a lesson, to identify and plan the use of resources, to set evaluation and success criteria, to identify differentiation etc.. Using a computer may make it easier to draw up lesson plans in a common format or template, printing a lesson plan may well be easier than writing it out by hand but does this mean it takes less time to create a lesson plan? Not really, it is the thinking and the planning that goes into a good lesson plan that takes time rather than the writing, so typing and printing saves only a small amount of time compared to writing by hand.

So why, then, do we expect teachers to write more detailed lesson plans? By using computers, we are often asking teachers to spend longer doing lesson plans than they used to. Ironic isn’t it?

Some people, and I am not one of them, believe that the purpose of ICT in schools is to make admin tasks quicker and easier for teachers so that they can devote more time to teaching and learning. This may sound good but what is happening is that teachers are being asked to do more and more admin tasks that take them away from teaching and learning.

Few teachers come into the profession, if it can still be called a profession, to do paper work. Teachers are not office workers and should not be regarded as such. The professional teacher is concerned with pupil learning, getting the best out of their pupils. Professional teachers welcome technology into the classroom where it has a clear benefit for learning and that, I feel, should be the focus of using technology in schools.

I’m sure that if we focused our efforts in using technology in support of learning rather than emphasising its role in school administration, we could once again see a happy workforce of teachers and also see learners benefiting from working with happy school staff.

In Praise of Entropy (ictineducation.org)
An Education Website Review of LessonSnips.com (brighthub.com)
Welcome to my dream school (guardian.co.uk)
Would More Time in the Classroom Help Our Education System? (triplepundit.com)
About My Job: The Teacher (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
What Teachers Learn (socyberty.com)
Pupils do better at school if teachers are not fixated on test results (guardian.co.uk)
Does skills-based learning face a lean future? (guardian.co.uk)
Young, gifted and likely to suffer for it (guardian.co.uk)

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Tags: Education, Educators, Information and communication technologies in education, K through 12, Learning, Lesson plan, Teacher, Technology
Posted in Classroom Technology | 1 Comment »

The Key to Successful Elearning

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

In the last few weeks I have been asked 3 times by different people what do I regard as the most important aspect of successful elearning. This is quite surprising as people dont talk to me that frequently about elearning, so maybe there’s a bit of a trend or bandwagon developing somewhere. I’m sorry to say that in each of the 3 cases, I was unable to give a succinct, or glib, response (which is also somewhat unusual). In each case, I said I’d go away, think about it and get back to them later.

This post is a consequence of my thinking about it. I have thought about it and drawn from my own observations as to what makes a successful elearning session. It has not been easy to narrow it down to identifying just one aspect that seems to be key to good elearning. However, when I reflect back on those times when I feel I have observed the best examples of online learning, there does seem to be one point of commonality among them. So what I’d like to do is to take this and present it as my suggestion for a ‘golden key to successful elearning.’

If you are a teacher or a designer of elearning courses, my golden rule for you is to ask yourself; “What am I asking the learners to do?”

There are so many elearning courses in which the learner merely sits in front of a computer screen reading text or listening to a teacher’s voice.

Let me put this into perspective. If you were a school inspector or a head teacher observing an hour long lesson in which the class teacher stood at the front talking and writing on a board while all the learners do is sit, watch and maybe copy what is written on the board; you would probably mark down that lesson or that teacher as being poor.

So why is it that something that is not acceptable in a real classroom should somehow become acceptable online?

Quite simply, it isn’t. Or, should I say, that I don’t think it is for the best examples of elearning that I have observed have been when the teacher has required the learners to engage in some activity rather than being passive recipients.

I’m obviously looking at this from the perspective of a school teacher and we need to be aware that elearning is very much more in use within higher education and in industry training. What might work for school students might not necessarily work with Higher students or adults in industry. Nevertheless, if made relevant and appropriate to them, I feel that learners at all levels would become more engaged if involved in learning activities rather than passively sitting on their backsides.

Now, before online teachers and instructional designers start ganging up on me, I do have some sympathy with you. I am aware that many systems chosen to deliver elearning do not provide learners with the tools or facilities to become engaged in activities we’d like to use. I have also discovered when attending the Learning Technologies show in London that there can be a huge chasm between what is envisioned for elearning in the conference and what is being marketed as elearning in the sales exhibition. It is quite evident that what is being offered to us to support elearning seems light years away from what we want to deliver.

On the other hand, I have seen teachers use the tools that are available in new and imaginative ways to engage and present to their learners. So maybe, the first point is for teachersd and designers to use the tools, or get the learners to use the tools, which are available.

Surely, though, the time has come when we cannot allow a program to restrict and define the learning opportunities we offer to our learners. If a package cannot deliver the learning activities we want to offer, then we must consider rejecting that package and either look to other packages and systems or consider breaking away from proprietary delivery systems and make more use of individual specialised online tools which are better able to allow learners to participate in ways that promote active learning.

So, there you are, maybe I’ve ranted on a bit too much but I do believe that when delivering or designing elearning courses, it is really important to consider what you are asking the learner to do. Come to think of it, that is probably very important in all lesson planning, not just online.

E-learning, Why does it have such a Bad Name? (dougwoods.co.uk)
10 Tips for Effective eLearning (dougwoods.co.uk)
Free eLearning for charities (raceonline2012.wordpress.com)
Shift up a gear: work with me from September 2011! (dougbelshaw.com)
Using teaching as inquiry to guide an eLearning action plan (freetech4teachers.com)

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Tags: Distance Learning, Education, Educational technology, eLearning, instructional design, Learning, online learning
Posted in elearning | 3 Comments »

OneNote : A Learners’ Tool

Monday, November 8th, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

If your school or organisation has invested in Microsoft Office, especially the 2010 suite, the chances are you are not making full use of the programs. I would go further and say that there is probably one program that you have hardly looked at or used in class. You may be surprised to learn that I am not talking about either MS Access or Publisher. The program I am talking about is called OneNote.

OneNote is, essentially, a note taking program. As such, it is perfectly placed for the education sector and is potentially an important tool for learners. Thus, it would be a great shame, having invested time and money in the Microsoft Office Suite, for this program to be overlooked.

Using OneNote, each student can create a ‘notebook’ into which they can add sections and pages. On each page, the learner can write their notes. These notes can consist of;

Typed notes
Pasted text
Images
Audio notes
Video notes
Attached files

Furthermore, if the pasted text or image has been copied from a website, the URL of the page is also copied across. This is useful when it comes to revision as the learner can check back with the site for updates or further information, it is also useful for essay writing as the URL can be used in any reference section.

The ability to add audio and/or video notes is a very useful feature. It obviously has uses for SEN pupils who may lack the ability to type and also those learners for whom text or language may be a barrier.

The ability to integrate with Internet Explorer (a third-party addon is available for FireFox) means that information from websites can easily be copied and referenced.

Notes (pages, sections or whole notebooks) can be exported in a variety of formats, noteably Word and PDF formats. Sections or pages can also be exported in OneNotes own format, meaning that they could be created by students or by teachers and then made available to learners to share or add into their own notebooks. In this way, a teacher could create learning plans, guidelines or a page of resources for the learners to add and use in their own OneNote notebooks.

Each learner’s OneNote notebook appears to be linked to their login or username. Hence, their own notebook can be immediately available when they login to the system from any computer. However, notebooks can be saved almost anywhere, such as on the web, on a SharePoint server or locally on ‘My Computer’.

Although a user can create many notebooks, essentially they need only create one and add sections for each subject, topic or project area. If they do create additional notebooks, then these are usually appended to their main notebook and can be easily accessed and notes linked or cross-referenced.

It has long been recognised that note-taking is an important part of both learning and revision. It has only been quite recent that computer software has become readily available to aid learners in making notes. While there are now a number of applications on the market for making notes, the position of OneNote within the MS Office suite puts it in a good position, especially where an institution has already invested in the Microsoft product.

In use, I do find some aspects of OneNote to be a bit ‘clunky’ and it is to be hoped that updates toi the program will make it a bit more easy or ‘fluid’ in its use. It is, however, a program that has a lot of potential to support learners and I would recommend schools and organisations to investigate its use.

To help you get started in using or exploring OneNote, I have created a pdf document, which can be viewed or downloaded from here .

What’s Microsoft OneNote For and How Well Does It Do It? (brighthub.com)
Learn…About OneNote (brighthub.com)
OneNote 2010 Now Syncs Multiple Notebooks on SkyDrive (pocketnow.com)
Curio: A Workshop for Your Creative Projects (appreaders.com)
Evernote for Windows 4.0 Keeps You Organized (pcworld.com)
How to Change Task Folders in OneNote (brighthub.com)
How to change the background image of a OneNote document (simplehelp.net)

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Tags: FireFox, Learning, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Suite, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Word, OneNote
Posted in Classroom Technology | 1 Comment »

The Real Purpose of ICT in Schools

Monday, October 11th, 2010

I don’t think anyone could deny that ICT or Educational Technology is a very versatile tool for schools.

If I were to ask you to list all the ways in which technology is used in your school, you’d come up with a list as long as your arm. Perhaps, I should rephrase that to read ‘the ways in which technology could be used in your school’ because I think it’s almost certain that few of us use the technology to its full capability.

Among the uses that you might mention, could be;

Writing reports,
preparing lesson plans,
monitoring attendance,
collecting data on pupils,
measuring progress
assessing pupils’ ability
writing letters to parents
creating policy documents, schemes of work etc.

all of which are very valid roles and tasks for the computer but they are not what the technology was originally put into schools for

When we first started putting computers into schools, we did not put them in to help teachers create reports and plans, we did not put them in to monitor and assess pupil progress, they were not even put in for teachers to use!

Computers were first put into schools to help pupils learn and, I would argue, this remains the prime reason for having computers in schools.

Yet, we seem to be in danger of forgetting this.

Too often, we see eduction technology discussed on an institutional level with its network infrastructures or as an administrative tool with its bloat of office software and services or as a ‘teachers’ tool with its aids for preparation, planning and lesson delivery. All of these have their place in schools but they do not always serve the prime role of schools, which is to educate pupils. Why is it that we feel it is right for every teacher in a school to have a laptop but not every pupil?

Even at times when we discuss how technology can help learning, it turns into a debate into how teachers can use the technology rather than the learners.

I hear people criticise schools because they have not used ICT to help save money. Yet saving money has never been the purpose behind putting ICT into schools. By all means criticise schools if they fail to utilise the technology for learning; that, learning, is the main purpose of a school. Criticise schools where money may not have been spent wsisely or correctly but please don’t criticise schools for not using ICT to save money when that was never the purpose of it.

At this time, schools, like everyone else (perhaps more than anyone else), are feeling the brunt of government cutbacks in spending and there is obviously concern as to how money, what money there may be, can be spent wisely. At such times as this, I feel schools need to refocus their attention on their core business; which is the education of learners. No matter what economic climate we live in, people expect schools to provide learning and that will be the criterion by which schools will be judged rather than their ability to maintain overblown network and administrative infrastructures.

ICT … have we spent wisely ? (dougdickinson.co.uk)
Teaching technology on a budget (guardian.co.uk)

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Tags: Education, Educational technology, Information and communication technologies in education, Learning, Lesson plan, school, Teacher, Technology
Posted in Classroom Technology | No Comments »

10 Lists a Teacher Should Write Before Retiring

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

: Image by Rex Pe via Flickr

For many of us, teaching is one of the best jobs in the world. You get to work with people, young people often, and you see them grow, develop and learn. It is a very rewarding experience to feel that you had some part to play in that growth and learning.

Although it is one of the best jobs in the world, it is also one of the most demanding. The role makes demands upon you personally, intellectually and physically, it makes demands upon your time and the time of those around you, such as your partner and family. Over time, those demands can build up and, sadly, many good and great teachers feel the need to move on or leave the profession.

Looking back on a teaching career can be full of regrets and joys, hopefully more joys than regrets. Yet how often do we teachers as individuals recognise and acknowledge the best times in our teaching careers? Perhaps we keep memories of such times to ourselves or perhaps we just forget them or perhaps there are just so many that we feel we cannot remember them all. So why not create a list, apparently teachers are supposed to be good at lists, of the best times in a teaching career?

I present here a suggestion of 10 lists a teacher might like to create;

10 pupils I most enjoyed teaching. We all know that some learners stand out from others and it’s not always the brightest or ablest that we most enjoy, sometimes it can be those learners who give us the most challenge whom we enjoy teaching the most.
10 things pupils taught me. Experience soon shows us that teaching is not a one way process, sometimes the learners show us things we didn’t know.
The most memorable school events. Teaching is not just about what goes on in the classroom, there are many other activities and events in which we get involved as teachers, from trips out, to school assemblies. Some are more memorable than others.
Best colleagues I worked with. Teaching is often about working well with colleagues as well as working with learners. Some of those colleagues can be inspiring and others are a source of help and support.
The topics/subjects I most enjoyed teaching. Some of the teaching we do, we may consider to be a drudge but, equally, or maybe even moreso, there are usually some topics or subjects that stand out for us and which we really enjoy teaching.
10 things I’d change for the better in schools. Oh yes, we all know about the grumps and the moans in the staffroom, how we’d like to change this or that but are there any changes that you’d really like to make that would makes schools better?
The best, or funniest, comments I ever heard from parents. Whether verbal or written, it is always great to receive praise or positive comments from parents, or sometimes even a thank you is nice.
The best jokes I ever learned from pupils. Keep them clean! We all know that some pupils are simply great for coming up with the latest jokes that you then go and retell in the staffroom.
10 things I wish I had done but didn’t. Ah regrets, I’ve had a few ….
10 things I’ll miss about teaching. You may think there is nothing you’d miss from teaching but think again and I bet you’ll find them…

There you go.

You will notice that my title says lists to write ‘before retiring’, you may think that you’re nowhere near to retiring or leaving the profession. I’d still say there is some value in creating these lists; they may help focus upon the good and positive side of the job, which are easy to forget on a Sunday afternoon when you’re planning and preparing next week’s lessons.

The little things that make a teacher great (parentcentral.ca)
Colleges With The BEST Teachers (PHOTOS) (huffingtonpost.com)
Teacher honored for years of service (mysanantonio.com)
Teacher Appreciation Song: A Song for Teachers – You Have Made A Difference (haroldshawjr.com)

10 Lists a Teacher Should Write Before Retiring

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Tags: Education, Educators, English, K through 12, Learning, school, Teacher, Youth
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘Learning’

Lesson Capture : An Introduction for Teachers

The Best and Most Rewarding Job?

The Key to Successful Elearning

OneNote : A Learners’ Tool

The Real Purpose of ICT in Schools

10 Lists a Teacher Should Write Before Retiring

Contact me

Follow us on Twitter

Doug Woods

Posts Tagged ‘Learning’

Lesson Capture : An Introduction for Teachers

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The Best and Most Rewarding Job?

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The Key to Successful Elearning

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OneNote : A Learners’ Tool

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The Real Purpose of ICT in Schools

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10 Lists a Teacher Should Write Before Retiring

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Contact me

Follow us on Twitter

Doug Woods