This article in the ICTforEducation newsletter highlights how creative and interactive material on Teachable can be used to engage a class and improve learning for the less attentive. It features our ‘Bubblesplat’ resource, contributed by Henry Cordy. Click on the image to read in full.
Teaching is more than just educating; sadly, government directives, tests and endless new ‘frameworks’ also fill up the working day.
Creativity though, is what makes every day rewarding for pupils and teachers alike. At Teachable we realise that blue-skies thinking and time for creativity is often squeezed out; by sharing excellent resource files in the online ‘cloud’, teachers harness creative ideas from around the country and save themselves time in creating lessons.
However, we still find scepticism surrounds sharing resource files; it is often seen as cheating or plagiarism. Yet using established, creative, interactive resources crafted by other teachers is the essence of many of the Governments directives. Our resources are edited by professionals and fully adaptable by the teacher.
We do exactly what it says on the tin; helping teachers share resources. And that is why our membership has risen 10 fold over the last year.
Not much was said, apart from the usual line about how much has ALREADY been spent on education over the last 10 years. But my nasty suspicion is that schools funding in the UK over the next 5 years could be in for a big shock. Pencilled-in spending for 2010 is the same for 2009, but this could well change.
Let’s explain why.
Firstly, the government, even by their own estimation, will have borrowed an extra £175bn this year (or over four times what is spent on schools) to fund their shortfall in tax receipts and bank bailouts. Currently, their plans to create a new top rate of tax at 50% will raise only £1bn extra a year… a drop in the ocean. And it is HIGHLY likely without spending cuts now, this debt mountain will grow to over £250bn by 2011.
To really make a dent in paying back this money (let’s say over 10 years), the next government will have to cut some spending. The splurge in government spending over the last 10 years (of which schools were a big beneficiary) was bankrolled by tax on financial companies and their employees. That has gone for good.
Let’s assume the government tries to pay back £25bn a year, and can’t do so by raising taxes. That is a lot of efficiency gains; around 5% of government spending. We are told Building Schools for the Future is sacrosanct, so that leaves a £37bn schools budget to play with, which is mainly teacher salaries.
There is a little footnote that foretells what is in store:
Unit costs for post-16 learners will be subject to a 1 per cent efficiency assumption in 2010-11. (Page 119, Budget report)
And it doesn’t take much imagination to see what that means: either cut staff or freeze pay. There is still plenty of scope to trim some of the quangos that abound in education, but I’m afraid that mainstream schools might share some of the brunt as well.
We can’t all party like its 1999 any more.
The release of Sir Alan Steer’s report into behaviour in schools has sparked debate on two counts.
Firstly, many teachers really do not agree that behavioural standards in school are improving. It’s probably impossible to generalise, but at least in some schools behaviour has got worse.
Secondly, there has been some derision at the idea of improving behaviour using ‘quiz show’ style games, such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire lessons. At Teachable we believe this is already a popular strategy with teachers across the country, judging from our lesson downloads, and could be extended to liven up lessons everywhere.
The most disruptive children will always need some (metaphorical) ’stick’, but we believe that engaging lessons are a crucial ‘carrot’ the encourage better behaviour.
Many of the examples Sir Alan uses in his report have already been put into practice by Teachable contributors:
Students play ‘word bingo’. Words in English
are numbered on the board. Students have
a grid of random numbers on paper. The
teacher speaks the words in French and the
students mark them off on their grids. The
winner is the first with a ‘full house’.
pupils travel across a grid containing initial letters to answers.
And our favourite idea, demonstrated with science concepts, doesn’t need digital resources at all – just post-it notes!
Students are studying ‘refraction and colour’.
Each student sticks an unseen word onto their
forehead, for example dispersion, spectrum,
dye, filter, optical fibre. They have to ask a
partner questions in order to work out what
the word is.
We hope teachers everywhere can boost enthusiasm for their subjects by using these simple, adaptable resources. Teachable.net already has over 200 teachers who have downloaded Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and nearly 1,000 teachers who have made use of our free and exclusive Bubblesplat resource.
Our most recent contribution was a series of whiteboard quizzes based on Battleships, Frogger and that classic 80s quiz show, Bullseye. We encourage teachers to contribute their best examples of fun and interactive lessons, and our collection of 3,000+ files is growing daily.
It is also quite possible to miss, within the 200 page tome of Sir Alan’s report (where ‘achievement’ and ‘development’ are mentioned over 60 times each), that there are some good and practical ideas for starters – both subject specific and general. You can download the 5 page excerpt by clicking on the icon.
It’s the ethical conundrum of our times – do you keep you social and work lives separate on social networks? For teachers, there’s the added problem of getting too close to pupils and letting down your guard. Everyone needs a some kind of work-life separation, and Facebook can seriously erode that.
We’ve been reading about one US teacher who was tracked down by the Washington Post:
Erin Jane Webster, 22, a long-term substitute teacher in Prince William, keeps a page similar to other teachers’. Portions are professional … but click “View Photos of Erin,” and you can see her lying on her back, eyes closed, with a bottle of tequila between her head and shoulder. Or click on her “summertime” photo album and see a close-up of two young men flashing serious-looking middle fingers.
Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.
The simple motto here is don’t join the open networks on Facebook – but even friends-of-friends can amount to a lot of people.
It gets worse: teachers get fired for derogatory comments on Facebook:
Superintendent Peter Gorman has recommended firing a teacher who listed “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” as one of her activities and drinking as one of her hobbies.
But, as an article in Teacher magazine in the US illustrates, there can be great reasons to link up with former pupils. Locking down all the security settings may be too restrictive for some.
My teaching friends seem to take two different approaches. They can both work, but don’t mix them. Personally, I would go with the first option.
1. Keep Facebook for your personal life
One of the most positive uses of Facebook is to share the fun stuff that goes on in your life, even if it does involve some riske jokes or slightly embarrassing images. If you’re sharing it with your friends, they’ll see it for what it is. So this only works if you change the privacy settings so that only your friends can see any of the photos or messages, and that you can only invite former pupils who are over 18.
2. Use Facebook in a limited, controlled way in school
It is possible to run a completely sanitised Facebook page, without links to the rest of your life, that you can allow your older pupils to link to. However, there are two big risks are: you may find out more than you really want to know about our class, and visa versa. Most teenagers are over-relaxed about what they chat publicly about on Facebook, and reading about their dabbling in drink, drugs or sex could open up a whole can of worms. That said, like in real live, it is possible to filter out what you want to hear.
The caveat is that your friends can post photos / comments about you that you can’t control – so opening your Facebook account up to your school depends upon the respectability of your friends as well.
In the long term, the theory goes that we’ll all become so used to personal revelations online, that it won’t cause a problem any more. But for now, you’re much safer being careful with what people see about you online.
If you are looking for something topical to include in your science lessons, diabetes has been hitting the headlines recently.
This week it has been reported that diabetes cases have jumped by 60% in the last decade and that more young people are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
For a lesson which incorporates “how science works”, try getting your class to investigate the evidence for this rise or to look at the link between obesity and diabetes. Starting points for the search could be:
http://www.diabetes.org.uk/Guide-to-diabetes/Introduction-to-diabetes/Causes_and_Risk_Factors/
http://www.diabetes.org/food-nutrition-lifestyle/lifestyle-prevention/risk-test.jsp
For an interesting practical activity divide your class into patients and doctors, provide the group with “urine” samples (also known as cold tea!), and ask them to work out who is suffering from diabetes. Make sure you remember to add glucose to one of the urine samples first!
You can extend this activity to cover kidney disease too if you add protein to one of your samples.