Inspire Connect Engage Create
Literacy
Are Online Behaviours Affecting Reading Skills?
49 months ago
In my final weeks of school our class had our usual Tuesday afternoon guided reading session, where we get the opportunity to work on some reading text with a small group of children. One particular comment from a pupil has stuck in my mind, so I thought I would share some of my reflections with you.
Whilst exploring a text we came across a particular word that became the focus of our attention. Although the group had no problem reading and pronouncing it they didn’t know what it meant. I aimed to set the children off exploring the definition from the information we could acquire from the sentence and the text overall, we may have even cracked open a dictionary or two…
“We could just Google it!”
As you can see the comment from one of the group stuck in my mind for a number of reasons. Firstly it indicated to me how much web searching had become part of how these 9 and 10 years olds process the information they see in the world. The concept of search applies to so much around them and the need for a better understanding of how we instruct and guide our classes to filter what they find, has never been so more acute.
Equally the appropriateness of using different tools is a key part of navigating the learning landscape, indeed one of the most difficult aspects is helping young learners make better decisions regarding the tools they use.
Of course I was not surprised by this comment after all many of the children have Kindles and the latest model has a full Oxford English Dictionary available on it. The children simply have to move a cursor and the definition will be displayed on the screen at the bottom. I remember writing lists of words I didn’t know from texts during my English degree and finding out later.
The immediacy of information and indeed the expectation for it is all to clear. We expect results, definitions and answers faster nowadays and so do the children in our classes. The question is what are we doing about it?
Within the browser too you have access to dictionary tools to help when you are reading online. I use Google Chrome’s extension which allows you to double-click a word and a little pop-up dictionary definition appears. I use this loads – no more written lists of vocabulary for me!
Another reason the comment struck a chord with me is how the decision to Google a word comes ahead of trying to establsish meaning from reading skills, such as reading into the context and exploring the sentence further. Of course, this one comment should not be over played. However in my opinion it does hint at the ways children are thinking about processing the information, from reading material or otherwise, we work with everyday.
I am of course an advocate for the appropriate use of technology, where it can transform learning and add value – and in this instance it is not a “this skill replaces that skill” scenario but an opportunity to reflect on the ways we can enhance what we do and take advantage of ideas children have.
To answer my own question in the title, yes they are in a broadly positive way, but especially children in primary school or elementary need support and guidance to help them filter the information they search. They need contextualised examples and ongoing references to the ways we search and use information tools – I think this is a pivotal aspect of teaching and can only become more acute in the coming years.
Seeing Ripples
51 year ago
When you share your classroom experiences and ideas, one thing you hope for is that they are transferable to other classrooms. This week I was delighted to see three examples of my ideas being successfully applied elsewhere.
The first is from Peter Richardson a primary school teacher in Preston who took my idea for using Voicethread for peer assessment of writing and used it for work in their Egyptian work. Here is the Voicethread he shared.
Kevin McLaughlin is a Year 4 teacher in Leicester and after reading my blog post about using Twitter and Google Forms for a data handling lesson, has applied the same ideas himself. His class compared music tastes from Kevin’s Twitter network (via a Google Form) with their own. I am pleased it worked well for his Year 4 class too, as Kevin explains,
The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities.
The final ripple I caused comes from Jan Webb another Year 4 teacher in Cheshire. Jan took up the challenge of using my Maths Maps idea with her class and developed a series of activities in a Google Map of Berlin for her class to use.
View Berlin in a larger map
Jan explains on her blog how they enjoyed using the resource in her class.
…a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building! We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.
These ripples are very encouraging as you are able to clearly see the effect sharing your own practice has on other teachers and subsequently other children’s learning.
If you have always thought about starting a blog but never got round to it, why not give it a go. The more pebbles in the pond causing ripples the better.
Superhero Ideas That Didn’t Make It Through the Revolving Doors
81 year ago
Earlier this year we completed a very successful Superheroes topic in school. However many of the initial ideas I had never made it out of the revolving doors, so to speak.
One of the biggest influences for ideas and content was discovering the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company and the spin off thoughts that occurred. The Superhero Supply store is a real shop in Brooklyn which sells all sorts of hero paraphernalia, from capes to muscles in a tin. Behind a swinging bookcase is of course a secret lair, a children’s writing and tutoring workshop.
The Superhero Supply Company is part of 826 National a non-profit organisation in the US to help support school children with homework and writing. Established by Dave Eggers it now has “stores” across the country with a simple aim:
Our goal is to assist students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to help teachers get their classes excited about writing.
Of course what struck me about the concept and especially the Superhero online store, was the level of meta fiction that could be explored. This topic can easily focus on the comic book fiction but the mundaneness of shopping for a suitable replacement cape struck me as such a great idea to work with.
- Turn your classroom into a store for Superheroes.
- Try and find a mannequin that you could use to show a superhero outfit.
- Use the Pixar film The Incredibles.
- What happens in the everyday life of a Superhero?
- In drama explore everyday routines with a superhero costume on – queuing for a bus, picking up some milk from the shop.
The online store provided me with a rich vein of ideas for writing beyond children’s own fictional heroes.
The persuasive language used to sell the special products on offer would be a great text to unpick. For example on sale at the online store is Item No. 2503 - STANDARD 58″ SUPERHERO CAPE.
For over two centuries, the BSSCo. Standard 58″ Superhero Cape has been the industry standard in fly-wear for professional heroes. Every cape we ship meets all Superhero Alliance and FAA regulation requirements, and is specially designed for maximum flight control and resistance to air burn.
If you’re a working, flying superhero, the Standard 58″ Superhero Cape is a must-have. Because let’s face it. Without one, you’re just some guy who looks like he’s falling.
Available in a variety of colors.
The act of exploring the sophisticated persuasive devices used in the short product descriptions would be an excellent class activity.
- Develop your own online Superhero Supply store.
- Invite children to bring in toys and gadgets that could be rebranded as hero gear.
- Model how to write a similarly persuasive piece for their own gadgets.
- Children could role play the real life store or an order by telephone- Superhero and sales assistant, “I’m looking for something a little darker…”
- Develop a customer newsletter from the store or a flyer.
- What other things might we find in tins? Muscles, gravity – create your own Hero Basics range
- Script a radio or TV commercial as a Superhero endorses the store.
Further to these ideas we looked at how the children could design and make their own superhero costumes. This could be done so that they could wear them and then use them in subsequent drama and fictional work.
On reflection we did think that full size costumes for each child might end up quite a complex operation, so considered three alternatives. (1) To buy lots of dolls that could be dressed in miniature (2) Invite some local fashion design students to help (3) Creating a utility belt may be a design project that would allow children to work individually.
Accompanying these little design and make projects children could provide instruction manuals for the products that are created, such as the functions of the belt or the unique features of their cape.
Of course the stores have real products and their sale raises money for the 826 tutoring programmes and running costs. Each store has a different style as explained on the 826 National web page:
San Francisco’s pirate supply store sells glass eyes and one-of-a-kind peglegs, 826NYC’s Superhero Supply Company offers custom-fit capes, Seattle’s Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company sells all your space commuting appurtenances, 826michigan’s Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair Shop specializes in must-have mechanical conveniences, while 826LA features a time travel store, there’s a secret agent supply store in Chicago, and the Cryptozoology shop in Boston is now open!
Spend any amount of time browsing the products available in the online store and you are bound to be inspired.
It is unfortunate I never got to put some of the ideas I have outlined into action, but I hope that sharing them here may give you the opportunity.
Pic: Jeffrey O. Gustafson
3 Educational Web Applications I’d Like to Make
111 year ago
I am sure you have had moments when you discover your inner inventor too. Here are three web based applications I have much pondered and if I had more time, money, expertise would probably have made by now.
The old Story – A2 by h.koppdelaney
Attribution-NoDerivs License
StoryBook Earth
Inspired by my work on storytelling using Google Earth and WeTellStories, StoryBook Earth would be a place to share, develop and create geotagged stories. When we write or tell stories we are picturing a location, a setting. In combining the imagery of Google Earth, the ability to add text, audio and even further media to specific places, you have a powerful storytelling form.
StoryBook Earth would develop the idea of “story” and “narrative” and to connect students in different parts of the world. It would also be an attempt to explore how the local becomes the global: to provide an appreciation of students in other parts of the world. It would provide an alternative way of “seeing” and “reading” the world, and possibly introduce students to young people who have experienced:
- Very different lives and personal circumstances
- Conflict
- Natural hazards
- Different climates and natural environments
- Alternative cultures and traditions
I remember watching a 9 year old in my class tell a story to a friend whilst looking at his street in Google Earth, there is something very immediate about such narratives – similar in part to historical walks that explain a story in the places they occurred.
In partnership with the Geographical Association, StoryBook Earth was entered into the Google GeoChallenge grant application process but unfortunately was rejected.
(Thanks to Alan Parkinson at the GA for all his help developing this idea.)
On the platform, reading by moriza
Attribution License
My Reading Diary
In our school the children use little paper reading diaries, similar I am sure to many other primary schools. In it they record the books they are reading, their progress and there is a place for pupils, teachers and parents to make written comments too
So for this one think: Shelfari for kids. A learner centred online tool that would allow children to do all they could with a paper diary – without the worry of losing it! But it would also have a database behind it that would allow children to tap into further reading recommendations. Children could read reviews from other users and discover new genres or books they may not normally.
I would imagine that My Reading Diary would have the potential to integrate with library management systems, so children could read a review or see a recommendation and immediately know if it is in school – and if it is available to read or someone else has it out already!
A further unique feature of My Reading Diary would be as a reading portfolio for children as they progress through school. With simple book profiling it would allow teachers and parents to see the types of books any child is reading and make future suggestions.
I think there is huge potential in this to not only provide a manageable online system to track reading progress throughout school but to also engage children with reading and a social, smart, personalised reading diary.
This idea was sadly rejected by Channel 4′s 4iP which is an innovation fund to stimulate public service digital media (beyond television) across the UK.
Firespeed by kwerfeldein
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Connect Collaborate Content
I don’t know what I would call this application but I think it could be very important in the way teachers work in the next 5-10 years.
I would propose a single online place for teachers to find curriculum resources and ideas, connect with colleagues teaching the same topics and a platform for collaboration.
Ian Yorston quite rightly said that this place is the web. It perhaps is a matter of pulling streams of different information together, but I just don’t think there has been a purpose built online space that does all of these.
I am doing some work on the Victorians next half term – with my proposed web idea I want to be able to do a single search for “Victorians” and see a multitude of things that we regularly look for and seek out in further web queries elsewhere.
- Resources - planning, images, video, notebook files, PPTs, worksheets, that sort of thing.
- Ideas - the resources found on the web do not often come with the narrative behind it, I want to be able to read blog posts and summaries of experiences from those who have taught my topic already. My search results would draw in comments from Twitter and other platforms too.
- Connections - so many schools, teachers and pupils are working on the same topics, I want to know who is actively doing them too.
- Collaborate - once I have discovered that XYZ are doing the same topic, I want to have the means to collaborate and work with them.
We have a myriad of educational blogs to cover the ideas, places like Gareth Pitchford’s Primary Resources, Classroom 2.0 that does much to connect teachers and then there is simple tools like Teachers Connecting from Ben Hazzard that is a platform to connect and work together.
But we need one place to do all of this from a single search query, that would be the unique feature. You enter a single topic key word and your search results provide everything.
Another aspect that is important is what happens as we share our current classroom work. From blogging about my topics at school this year, for the first time my network has brought resources and ideas to me. Not as a result of me asking, but because they “read a post a few weeks back that I was doing sealife”. If we are all more aware of what topics colleagues are doing in their classes our sharing of ideas and resources can be more purposeful.
It will be intriguing to see what develops with mycurriculum.com from the QCDA and whether it will be able to build the critical mass of users to make it truly worthwhile – and also if it is smart enough to do some of the things I have outlined.
It has been an interesting process getting these ideas down in a post – let me know what you think of them and if they would have value in the educational world we work in. The ideas are there, feel free to go ahead and make them, just let me know you have so I can use them.
Using Voicethread for Writing Ideas and for Peer Marking
142 years ago
In the past week or so our literacy work has focused on a short sequence from the comic Spiderman #1. Our Superheroes topic is going well and in this post I explain how we have used Voicethread as a creation tool, a writing scaffold and as a way to do peer marking.
We began with the sequence in the comic where Peter is attending a science fair at a local school and is bitten by spider that has been zapped by one of the radiation machines on show. I wanted the short 5 panel sequence to be the focus of an extended narrative. I liked the tight focus on a few moments and the action and comic imagery would really help us to write some interesting narrative.
To begin with we made some notes about the short sequence as a whole class, mainly key words, things that just jumped out from the images and from the facial expressions of Peter.
The next step was to import the five panels from the comic you can see in the above image into Voicethread. I just used a screen capture tool and created some separate image files for each. The Voicethread was to be a collection of first ideas. At this early stage of the writing process I think Voicethread plays it’s hand superbly.
The children have the opportunity to say their ideas aloud. To articulate, listen back, correct and re-articulate very easily. All of the children in the year group worked on writing and recording ideas for the Bitten! sequence and as you know they are privy to all of the comments from their peers in real time. We used the vocabulary above as a stimulus throughout this early task.
After sharing literally hundreds of narrative ideas for the sequence, the children were put with a writing partner. Often we focus on writing in solitude but I think the support and insight children can get from working together is hugely rewarding. They get to see how someone else might approach the same piece of writing.
I modelled the up-levelling or improvement of some simple starter sentences for each of the panels. We worked together as a class to extend and improve on them using the language already collected. The children used Google Docs for their work and I encouraged children to also have open the Voicethread of ideas that we had created. The 5 panels acted as 5 simple paragraph changes. In this step the children are using Voicethread as a source of ideas and as a writing scaffold. They listened and read back the comments others had left and I think found these really useful in kick-starting their work.
As we were working in Google Docs I dipped into their work as they were busy writing. I have written before about how this is less obtrusive than looking over their shoulder or taking their books off of them. I added a header to the Google Doc and then used CTRL+M to add a named and dated comment. I would back this up by a quick chat with the pair if needed to ensure they would act on my advice and feedback.
The children had of course shared their Document with me and their writing partner. In my Docs home screen I used the star label to show which Docs I had marked and which I hadn’t. You can read some more ideas for marking with Google Docs in this blog post.
As part of the writing process I explained we would be publishing some to the class blog. I wanted the feedback from the blog to be part of the improvement process for the children. I think that if you plan to publish examples of work in this way, and the kids know this before they begin, you are not just bolting it on afterwards. The children know that the blog readership will be their audience.
We were able to publish 80 percent of the work from the class, those that didn’t were just unfinished. The comments that we received were fantastic and greatly encouraging for the children involved. We would revisit these later in the process.
Although the children have a finished piece of work at this point we are only part of the way through the writing process I had planned and this is where we turned back to Voicethread again. (We kept a printed copy of this first draft.) I have often said that the use of PDFs in Voicethread is overlooked. Clearly the use of images and video is very engaging, but adding PDFs is really useful functionality.
I did two things before exporting the children’s work from Google Docs. Firstly I added their names next to the title of the work. I knew from who shared it with me who the owner was, but as a plain PDF it would be missing that. The second thing was to increase the size of the text so that it was clearly visible in Voicethread.
Voicethread allows you to zoom in to text or images, but when you need to use the pen highlighter it zooms out. With a full page PDF the writing can sometimes be too small to see. Ensuring the text size is set as high as possible is really important if you want to take advantage of the pen tool.
Once this was done I exported all of the Docs as PDFs (no need to worry about the file names as you added their names to the text already) and imported these into a new Voicethread. I noticed that some of the pages were jumbled, in other words if a piece of work was over 2 pages these pages were split. Naturally you want them next to each in Voicethread - watch out for that, however it is easy to move pages about from the upload screen.
Saying that, it is hard to see from the thumbnails which belong together – maybe that is something for Voicethread to work on. Either a magnify function on the upload page for each thumbnail or better assurance PDFs will stay in the correct order.
Once the Voicethread was ready to go I asked each pair to record an audio comment of one of them reading out their own work. This is a simple step you can take to allow all of the children in the class to access the different pieces of writing. If they struggled reading it, there was an audio version! We talked to the children about adding comments and feedback and I stuck to a simple 2 stars (things they liked) and 1 wish (something to improve) which we have used before. I encouraged them to use the pen tool to highlight words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that they were referring too and this proved very successful.
Interestingly the process of reading your own work out aloud and recording it made the children realise where they could improve their own work.
The final step was to revisit their original writing and complete the editing process. It is sometimes hard to find time to review work in light of comments but is essential in helping children improve. Those with blog comments on their work were encouraged to look at what was written. Everyone had numerous comments on their own work as part of the Voicethread - they went back to their Google Doc and made alterations and improvements based upon the feedback from me, their peers and the wider audience on the blog.
I went to every single pair and asked them to talk through some of the alterations they had made and guided them to focus on anything they had overlooked.
In short the sequence looked like this:
- Reading the focus sequence
- Gathering initial vocabulary and feedback
- Voicethread of sequence – children add ideas
- Writing begins – using above resources
- Writing is published to the class blog and uploaded to Voicethread
- Voicethread of work – children add feedback
- Edit in light of teacher, blog and peer comments
This was over the course of about a week and half to two weeks. This sort of timescale really allows you the space to establish some quality and immerse you and the class in the piece of work. After all, we were only writing about a very short moment in time.
It may have only been a few fleeting, painful moments for Peter when he was bitten, but we found this extended writing and review process really successful.
