Just thought it would be a nice time to update on where we are and what we are doing at the moment. As you can tell, we have been rather busy for the last wee while, and that is not really going to change much over the next month or so.

We have just finished and handed in our Interdisciplinary Learning assignments. For this we had to present a literature review of IDL and demonstrate our understanding of  the various perspectives on the matter. It was interesting, challenging, enjoyable and horrible all at the same time. However, it is finished now and it marks an important milestone on the road to PGDE success. It was indeed the last ever written assignment we will do as part of the course (providing we pass).

Now that is out the way, we are now just preparing for our next placements. Lots of planning to do for this one because it is the placement that we take full responsibility for 3 weeks! Exciting stuff. We think that we can’t really get apprehension about this because come August we will have full responsibility for a year, so 3 weeks is a piece of cake? No?

So that is a very quick update, we promise to blog more over this next placement, but if we don’t then it is because we are so busy molding the minds of the next generation. Anyway, that is probably a suitably cheesy line to end this on so cheerio!

We had a day at Uni not so long ago all about ICT and how we can use it in the classroom. As part of this day, some lovely people from the BBC came to promote their website “Class Clips”. This is like a fantastic version of Youtube made specifically for educational purposes with the production values of the BBC. Its fantastic! You can also filter the clips by Primary or Secondary level depending on what you teach.

This week, our first week on placement, I taught a maths sequence which went really well. I was introduced to a new game that wanted to share with you all because it really is fantastic, especially for practicing your times tables with the class.

The children told me the game was called Killer 12, and you may know it as something else, but they love it so much that for some it is there game of choice come Golden Time on a Friday.

The game is simple really, 1 person picks a target “Killer” number, and a times table that the number can be found in (for example 21 and the 3 times table). The children then go round the circle counting up in 3s until the “Killer” number is reached, causing that person to sit down. But the magic of the game is each person in the circle can chose to say up to three numbers at a time. So there is a lot of strategy involved to ensure that you are not victim of the “Killer” number. I have played with the children three times now and lost every time, which they loved.

The second game I have tried out is almost like a treasure hunt, whereby you hand out clues to the children and they have to find the magic number in a number grid. I found it here on the Nrich website, which is just a great source of information on mathematics lessons.

I would love to know what maths games you have been playing with your classes, I think games are such a great route in to mathematics for all those children who readily dish out the immortal line that every teacher must have heard… “I am rubbish at mathematics”.

Leave us a comment with your favourite maths games.

Anyone who knows me (Jude) knows that I am a massive film enthusiast. I have a film and media degree, have worked as a freelance film maker and I have taught film/animation classes to children aged 4-18. It will come as no surprise to learn that on my first placement I made a film with my Primary 2 class and in my next placement I have an animation sequence planned.

I truly believe that film making embodies the very principles of the Curriculum for Excellence, and if engaged with properly, can enable some radical and transformative learning. “A bold claim” I hear you say, but trust. me, I have worked with so many young people who have all got so much out of film-making.

so, I wanted to write a post to share some of my ‘expertise’ in case anybody else was wanting to teach a film-making class. I am going to write up a sequence of lessons that I recently taught so that any of my peers would have a place from which to start.

Obviously this sequence can be developed and made to fit your own class, but it is a nice structure to start if you want to do film making but don’t know where you would begin.

Lesson 1

Before starting, you want to have a chat with your pupils to see how much they know about film-making and what their previous experience is. This will help you, and if you have a budding Spielberg in your class I would advise that you let them lead and help the other pupils.

Prepare a design brief that you will give to the children. I have found that if I limit the scope of the film making exercise, it can focus attention and lead to more creative projects than if I give the children free reign.

In making your design brief, think about audience, purpose, time limit and subject.

My brief was : You are going to make a film, to explain the 5 senses to a class of Primary ones. Your whole film has to be less than 1 minute.

The first lesson is to show the importance of planning in film making. I usually start with a group conversation with everyone contributing their ideas. Have someone record this and gradually bring the conversation towards a consensus. It is important they all agree as a big part of this will be teamwork.

Have some blank story boards prepared, and show them how to fill them in with the ideas they have. Get them to think about the way they are going to film, considering angles and shot lengths etc. Here is some information you can use to help you if you are unsure.

I would usually end lesson 1 here. I think it is important to have a planning session without jumping straight to the cameras. However, I have in some classes given the cameras at the planning stage to allow them to get used to the cameras and really think about shots and angles. You will know your class best so use your judgement here.

Lesson 2

Go over the plans and what was learned in the first lesson. Have the children recall what they are working towards, go over the brief again and ask if they are on track.

This is the lesson where you would give out the cameras, and refer to the story boards to determine what you are going to be filming today.

Before filming, you want to stress the importance of planning again. Have the children act as producers, and go location scouting, get any props they need etc. This is vital and ill make the filming a lot more effective and enjoyable.

I would also, for every scene, split the group up and have roles for everyone. I would suggest the following roles and they have worked for me in the past:

Director – This person will direct the whole scene, will refer to the story board to see what it has to be like and will be in charge of making sure they get the shot right.

Camera operator – this person will be in charge of filming, they will take direction, but will be responsible for making sure things are filmed properly.

Assistant Director – This is the person who gets things for the director, who helps out in anyway possible, there main job, and the one they like best, is getting people to be “quiet on set”.

Lesson 3

This is the day where you will be editing. I would suggest using either iMovie (mac) or Windows movie maker (PC) They are free, and easy to use plus the children will most probably have access to either one.

In the editing stage you have two options. Firstly you can help edit the film and let the children make the decisions, but you are the one working the computer. The second option (my favorite) is to actually build in an extra lesson so that they can play about and explore the software. Do not underestimate the children. My experience is that they will pick it up very quickly and learn what they want to do by trying. How great is that. However, for your sanity, you may want to familiarise yourself with the software before letting them run riot.

Another great aspect of this lesson sequence is that there is something to show, and assessment opportunities are built in all the way through (i.e. was the planning worthwhile and accurate enough, what were your filming techniques like with the camera, did the final film meet the brief?)

You need to build in time that you can screen the finished products, a crucial part of film-making is the audience.

That is a very quick run through, although I am aware this has been a long post. Any question please feel free to get in touch.

This term at Moray house we have been focusing on curriculum, teaching and assessment and we have been writing assignments on the relationship between all three. I chose to focus on Maths (Colin focused on music and will post his thoughts on that too).

I have found the subject to be really interesting and eye-opening for my future teaching of mathematics, so assessment has really been for learning in this case. Through my literature search for the essay I became aware of a philosophical argument around the epistemology of mathematics that has a significant impact on the way it will be taught.

A dichotomy exists in that there are two contrasting views of the nature of mathematical knowledge. On one hand, there are those who believe mathematics to be discovered; a set of unquestionable, certain, universal rules. Teachers who hold this belief are more likely to approach mathematics as something to transmit to learners. Mathematics in this view is concerned with finding the right answer. In this model, an instrumental understanding is being acquired and by that I mean learners understand what to do but not why they are doing it (Read this paper by Skemp for more information). I would hazard a guess that 90% of the people reading this were taught maths this way. I even think I have taught in this way, despite it being against what I hold to be best practice.

The second view of mathematics, and that which I now align myself with most readily, is the view that mathematics is invented. That it is dynamic, flexible, fallible and socially constructed. In this view, Learning is concerned with what mathematicians do rather than what they already know. Yes it is important to know basics skills, facts an theories, but these need to be applied an connected. Problem solving is at the heart of real life mathematics and in this view, learners further their knowledge by solving problems in real life, relevant contexts. This view promotes a relational understanding to mathematics, which if you consider Blooms Taxonomy, is a higher order of thinking.

For me, as I have already said, this later view rings true with what I believe to be the purpose of education. I want to provide tools that my pupils can then use to construct their own knowledge and flourish. I do not want to be a teacher who transmits knowledge and simply delivers a curriculum.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on this. I have purposefully been one sided here so as to stimulate debate, lets hope it works.

We have, as part of our Expressive arts course, a class title Creative Connections. It is such a fantastic class and really gets us thinking about creative ways that we can engage with the expressive arts strands in the curriculum.

We thought it would be a good idea to share some of the ideas that we get from the class so that 1) we remember hem for a later date and 2) we can share these great ideas with the world.

We had some cracking ideas in our lesson today and we wanted to flesh a few of these out here.

Park Bench

Oh what fun we had with park bench. It is a great improvisation game where you put a bench (2 chairs next to each other) in the middle of the class and one person is sat on one of the chairs. Person 2 comes along sits down next to the person and their goal is to try and get them off the chair in whatever way they see fit. However, you are not allowed to touch the other person.

Thoughts:

Really like this game and felt it would work well as an opener exercise for a wider drama class, or even as part of a sequence. For example, the class could have worked in groups and developed a character or creative writing and test them out in this game.

Charades

The classic game where we played with various different scenarios (washing your hands, making coffee, driving a car etc.) This is great for getting the children warmed up and trying to express themselves through mime. The challenge of not using words will encourage thinking about the visual presentation.

Thoughts:

As a group we felt that the charades on the cards were a bit too simple and mundane. We would like to perhaps use more abstract situations such as emotions.

Character profile

This was a more in depth exercise and would take a bit more time to formulate. It starts with a visual stimulus of a person, we used a photograph but you could use a painting of a person too. The children pick a character and work on their back story, really get in to a lot of detail about what their character likes, dislikes, feels, thinks etc.

Then have the group make a still or a freeze of a scene involving that character. Then the teacher or other pupils touch one of the characters on the shoulder where they can reveal what they as the character are thinking at that point. You can then guess the situation or have the group explain what is happening.

Thoughts:

We really like this exercise too and felt that it would be great as part of a sequence developing character. The children only have the visual stimulus to go on so there is a lot of inference and imagination going on, which is great for drama. It would be nice to take this further and act out a scene involving the character, or combine it with one of the other activities.

We at Think, Pair, Share are self confessed ‘gadget geeks’. It will come as no surprise then to hear that we are both fascinated by the role of ICT in education and as such we will try to indulge ourselves in some ICT discussion every week here on the blog (Technology Tuesdays is a working title).

We have recently had to reflect on our experience of ICT in the class as part of our Standard for Initial Teacher Education (SITE) requirements as part of the PGDE course. We have to consider previous experience and what we will be looking to concentrate on in our upcoming placement.

This reflective experience has shown us that we both feel ICT is not being used as effectively as it could be in classrooms. ICT to us has transformative potential to level out the education playing field and put learning in the hands of the learners as opposed to us, the teachers. A democratisation of education as it were.

However, recent research shows that in 28 countries across the world, ICT is not changing approaches to teaching, it is just a new way of presenting things. An interesting analogy is that we are viewing ICT in the rear view mirror, driving in to the future but looking backwards all the time.

However, while we agree that using ICT to present things in different ways is good, and is moving in the right direction. It can sometimes mask the fact that nothing has actually changed.

We would argue that ICT should be used to radically transform the way we approach education. ICT is liberating and allows learners to take genuine ownership of their education which fits with the principles of the Curriculum for Excellence.

There has been a democratisation of knowledge in the 21st century as a result of new information technologies, but not an accompanying democratisation of education. This is the view put forward in a great book Why do I Need a Teacher if I’ve got Google by Ian Gilbert. We completely agree with this sentiment, not that we don’t need teachers, but that we need rethink our approach to using technology in education to allow it to fulfil its true potential.

We believe in universal access to personal, portable learning devices, and from personal experience believe that ipads are the best for this. This, would allow for a transformation in pedagogy which we think would see a radical move away from a ‘smart board’ being used as a fancy overhead projector, and we think this would put ownership for education back in the hands of the learners, which is exactly where it should be.

Disclaimer: we understand that budgets and other safety concerns come in to play with personal learning devices, but allow us to just revel in this utopian view of technology, at least for a while. We will consider the limitations of this approach in later posts, but for now, can we not just dream?