Posts tagged crowd-sourcing

74 Interesting Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

4
2 weeks ago
by tombarrett in , ,

The Interesting Ways series of resources continue to grow as the community add ideas from the classroom. Below is one of the most popular with over 70 ideas shared by teachers for using Google Forms in a range of different ways.

Make sure that you explore nearly 40 other crowdsourced resource like the one above – you can see the full series of resources on the Interesting Ways page

#CESIdeas – We Made a Mosaic!

10
12 months ago
by tombarrett in ,

Last Friday I flew to Dublin, Ireland to attend the CESI 2011 Conference in Portlaoise. I was delighted to have been asked to open the conference with the keynote presentation.

I spoke broadly about the idea of crowdsourcing content with teachers and asked each teacher to use a Post-It note they had been given to write one idea, one simple bit of advice or tip that could be shared. It could be about technology, after all it was a technology conference, but could have been about anything.

The response was fantastic and the stage was awash with ideas. I cradled these all the way home to England and have now written them up as a Google Doc to share with the world.

We hope you enjoy the mosaic we made together in the last 10 minutes of my keynote. It always amazes me what we can create if we make one small contribution.

Shared Search – Sign Up to Help Out

8
1 year ago
by tombarrett in , ,

I have a new crowd-sourcing idea up my sleeve that needs your help and input. It is all based around the idea of a collaborative search engine that can be constructed together – Shared Search.

Elevator Pitch

  • A community of educators work together on a Google custom search engine (CSE).
  • The CSE can be for any specific topic taught in the classroom.
  • A new CSE is created and collaborators are invited (like Google Docs) to add suitable sites.
  • Labels are added to the sites to filter their relevance, this can be used in the search results too – which means it can be relevant to different age groups.
  • Up to 100 collaborators can be invited to any one CSE.
  • The broader the pool of contributions the richer the search experience for the pupil.
  • The code will be shared to educators who want to embed it in their schools sites and blogs.
  • The community generate a growing library of relevant search engines for different curriculum topics.

So what do you think? Are you interested in helping with the first one. I have set up a search engine about SEALIFE, as this is a common topic and one that has a huge amount of content.

The idea of a Shared Search is that we act as first filter to the children’s own experience of searching online content.

If you have some underwater web gems to share please sign up in the form below and look out for the email invite into the Custom Search Engine. I look forward to seeing your response and I hope that we can once again help create something valuable together.

Why not try out the “SEALIFE” Shared Search below. Remember as more people contribute sites the more useful it will become.

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Tech-Neutral Interesting Ways: IDEAS WANTED!

3
1 year ago
by tombarrett in ,

The presentations below, from the Interesting Ways series, are deliberately tech-neutral and much more broad than their counterparts.

It would be great to build some new momentum with them again and gather together some further ideas from the community. Of course these ideas may well include the use of technology but there is no expectation for it to be included, anything that is a good idea gets in.

Remember One Idea, One Image, One Slide always works best. I have opened them up to be edited so you should be able to go ahead and do so without needing an invite. Look for the Edit option from the Actions menu. Any problems with this though just drop me an email or Tweet.

As always I look forward to your ideas and contributions to the shared presentations.

CASTLES – a new Curriculum Catalyst Document

1
1 year ago
by tombarrett in

The Curriculum Catalyst is about sharing ideas for curriculum content. It provides people the opportunity to contribute to a pool of ideas. Castles is the latest topic.

(1)Topic ideas are added into Google Moderator, (2) voted on for interestingness (3) an open Google Doc is created for the top topics and (4) teachers and educators add ideas and resources for the classroom about that topic.

Here are some highlights from the new topic document:

  • Turn your classroom into a castle, giving the children specific roles from servants to sovereigns. You could even dress up.
  • Castle design – think about the reasons behind the design of castles, focusing on defence and security etc.
  • Top Trumps – students research, plan and design ‘Top Trumps’ cards for Castles.

Make sure you explore the document to see the other ideas for using CASTLES as a topic in your classroom.

If you have ideas to contribute you can go ahead and add it to the document, no need to sign in.

Here are the other documents that have been created by the education community:

If you would like to add topic ideas, see what is in the Catalyst and vote on them take a look at the Curriculum Catalyst page for info. (Currently SPACE is the top ranked topic to be crowd-sourced next)

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 2 – Contribute Your Ideas

3
1 year ago
by tombarrett in

The Curriculum Catalyst is about the online education community coming together to produce practical resources that we can all use to support curriculum development.

At the end of last weekend the Catalyst had over 280 topic ideas for the curriculum and over 70 people had voted more that 3000 times for a top topic. It turned out to be SEALIFE and since then I have created an open Google Document to collate our ideas for the topic. (Stage 2)

The document already has over 50 crowd-sourced sealife ideas (thanks for your help so far) for teaching and learning including:

  • Subject specific lesson activities
  • Books to support the Sealife topic
  • Web based resources
  • Details of the Ocean layer in Google Earth
  • Nintendo Wii games that can be used
  • Possibilities for places to visit in the UK
  • DVD titles

I hope that it proves useful in sparking some ideas for you and your staff. Please consider adding a short idea to the document to continue developing it. Don’t forget to just explore the 280+ topic ideas themselves (and vote), maybe there is something there you haven’t thought of.

After a week, so this Sunday, I will repeat the process for the next highest voted topic and create a new ideas document to work on. Currently “Imaginary Creatures” is in the lead. All of the weekly docs will be linked from my blog’s Curriculum Catalyst page.

5 Fledgling “Interesting Ways” Presentations

3
1 year ago
by tombarrett in

Currently there are close to 30 different presentations exploring Interesting Ways to use a whole variety of different types of technology in the classroom.

Here are a few of the most recent fledgling resources, please let me know if you would like to contribute by adding an idea.

Don’t forget to explore the rest of the Interesting Ways resources.

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 1.5 – Which crowd-sourcing tool?

4
1 year ago
by tombarrett in ,

The Curriculum Catalyst has made a great start, it is only a few days old but 61 people have submitted 193 ideas and cast 1,896 votes. Thankyou to all of you who have helped so far.

Out of those 193 topic ideas will emerge one. For Stage 2 we will take that topic and crowd-source ideas, over the course of just a week, in a single space that will then be a resource for other teachers to use. After that is done we will turn our attention to voting for the next topic to develop and so on…

But which tool should we use to collaborate and gather our ideas?

The most important feature must be the ability to print a well formatted document. The printed page will have more influence, difficult as it might be to admit, to the vast majority of teachers. It can be copied and passed around, pinned on the notice board and shoved into pigeon holes.

Which tool will give us the crowd-sourcing freedom and access as well as the quality printed outcome?

I have been thinking this through and although Google Docs is terrible at printing, if the document is a straightforward heading /sub-heading / bullet list type of document it will export well to PDF and print well too. This will allow us the collaborative power of docs as well as the simple process of contributing a bullet point to a list.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas for tools that would fit perfectly for what we need for Stage 2? I would appreciate your help.

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 1 – Add your ideas and votes

19
1 year ago
by tombarrett in , ,

It is clear from our collective efforts as an education community we can create some excellent resources. The “Interesting Ways” series has illustrated how single contributions to a collective can be extremely useful. This has been underlined by the “Maths Maps” too.

The “Interesting Ways” series has focused on single tools and how these can be implemented in different ways in the classroom. I think we can do the same for curriculum ideas around a single topic.

It is one thing seeing individual ideas in the above presentations or in blog posts from teachers who share them, but these are often less accessible to the majority of teachers than we think. They are either too tool-specific or in the case of reading ideas in blog posts they can be difficult to apply to the general classroom.

The Curriculum Catalyst is about crowd-sourcing topic ideas – creating a resource that can be printed off, yes printed, to form the basis for more detailed planning. With the English primary curriculum in a period of flux we are in a great position to push the creative agenda more and more – online networks allow us the opportunity to collaborate on a simple resource to support this.

Curriculum Catalyst
Stage 1 of this is about gathering topic ideas. Of course these can be ones that already exist that you have in fact already delivered. Perhaps it is a book or film, a subject topic or historical figure. They should not be fixed to an age group so the process is broadly applicable to as many classrooms as possible.

To contribute your ideas we will use Google Moderator which allows for a community to contribute and then vote on different items. Please have a look at The Curriculum Catalyst series over the next few weeks and “submit an idea” or vote for the ideas already contributed.

After a period of voting we will then take the top topic, Stage 2 will be about adding your ideas to support or engage learners within that topic. I don’t have any set ideas for which tool to use for Stage 2 and so would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. Ideally anyone should be able to see the document and print off a copy in it’s present form.

I hope you can help with the first stage of this new project by contributing your ideas and votes. Crowd-sourcing education resources has become a genuinely valuable process. Our collective efforts should be able to generate some great curriculum ideas.

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