Entries Tagged 'Projects' ↓

Maybe I should have a regular Good Stuff / Bad Stuff spot.

Today’s good stuff

Several completed Key Skills, two in particular standing out for excellent use of the tools, even my current pet favourite Bubbl.

The words “I could do the blog from my home computer couldn’t I?” issuing from a learners mouth!

 Today’s not so good stuff

The ongoing battle with the recalcitrant and thirsty colour printer.  As a colleague pointed out seeing their work in glorious technicolour is motivational, and the other learners who see it also comment on how good it look.

Unfortunately”happy trainees” is a rather intangible thing to put a price tag on whereas the colour toner cartridges have a very definite and LARGE price tag!

The upshot

I’d love to go over to e-portfolios and forget the grief of endless printing altogether but in spite of enthusiasm for the idea from all trainers, that seems to recede further every time we discuss it.  The extra time it would take to experiment is hard to find, but maybe it’s time to return to the idea and try it out.

It’d need to be with one our our more confident learners as I feel that our less experienced learners need that concrete reassurance of seeing the physical results of their hard work.

I’m looking forward to our next verification visit to see what the ‘official’ word is on our using the blogs as projects. 

The latest group are keen to get stared, but as they’re a small group I’m holding off until the next large group starts so I only have to go through the paperwork once!

We started discussing the use of comments today.  The group all seemed pretty savvy about spam and risks from viruses etc which was pleasing.

They did decide to err on the side of caution and enforce moderation on their comments — I suspect I’m going to have to prod people to check their queued messages.

The are still adding content to the blogs.  More slowly than I’d like as I keep having to drag in the paperwork and construction of the Key Skills portfolios and an hour and a half jsut flies by.

I wish I could get them to use the blogs a bit more in the course of the normal trinaing day instead of only touching it during the designated sessions.

Attendance continues to be poor, this week being particularly bad as a lot of our learners have no childcare over the  half term.

We’re also a bit miffed that everyone is leaving early and not using the allocated self study time.  We’re considering making that non-optional, as we’re really going to struggle to get qualifcation completed on time with the current level of absence.

To add to our woes, the next blog session was scuppered entirely by the company internet connection collapsing on us, a new intake of learners of which two dropped out before even attending induction, and the dispiriting discovery that the only trainee showing any enthusiam for using my new favourite tool Bubbl, was also the only trainee on whose PC Flash Player hadn’t been installed properly!

These things are sent to try us…

All happy and positive again today! Managed to keep the taught session down to a quick whizz through adding links and maintaining a blogroll, before everyone had the better part of an hour to work on their blogs.

I was pleased to see a lot less copying and pasting going on this week and a lot more self-written content going up (along with plenty of spelling errors mind you, but at least there’s a proper genuine feel there. Spelling we can fix.)

Spent a lot of time with one group helping them add images, and was intrigued by the amount of time spent selecting just the right image from the Creative Commons tagged content on Flickr. A nice sense of pride in their work developing there.

A few people were struggling with what to write about, including one poor soul who’d found themself the only member of their group not absent!

I resorted in some cases to having them print out a website on relevant a topic of interest and get out pen and paper to summarise in their own words before posting.

I’ve seen a nifty tool at http://www.diigo.com which looks like you can do something similar actually online, but haven’t had a chance to play with it myself yet and have a gut feeling that some of the less confident learners need something down on a physical bit of paper to give them the impetus to start in any case. The feeling of having to make it up on the fly which posting online engenders is off putting to some of them.

One tool which I did find useful for those who were having trouble thinking of what to write is the ThinkTank from the 4Teachers website.

This allows you to enter a generic research topic and depends on type of topic (history, place, person etc) narrow it down to a list of questions. This then forms the outline of your topic and gives you something to go away and research online or type up.

The learners who were keen but found their chosen topic of, say, “My Town” too broad to start off with, found this useful, as it could be narrowed down to something more specific like “If I visited this place, what things would I want to see the most? What is interesting about this place?” or “When was this place founded? Who founded it? Who settled it? Why was this place chosen?”

Two to three questions seemed about right for a single blog post.  More questions or detail could be added for a full length Key Skills Project, and I may recommend this to some of them later on.

I’m finding my own enthusiasm for the blog project, waxes and wanes dramatically with the learners reactions and workload!.  Having to chivvy several less enthusiastic learners into their groups with at elast one bluntly commenting “We’re not doing that now are we”, did not put me in a particularly postive frame of mind, although the learner in question regularly and loudly expresses their disinterest even during those projects such as the maths classes  which they’ve chosen to attend!

We were looking at adding images this time and most people were keen as they’d been asking how to do this from the start.

As usual there were a fair number missing and one group complained that their absentee had their folder of resources they’d been putting together.  I may have to remind people to not take those sort of things home.

We went through it initially on the “sandpit” practice site I’d set up to practise on, then they had the remaining half of the lesson to conitue with their own blogs.

They seem to be moving quite slowly.  I think I may have to severely compress the list of things I wanted to teach them in order to allow them enough time to actually contribute content.

I’ve also been informed that this is now going to be a regular “thing” every group starts, and we’re going to use it towards their Key Skills qualification.  Thats means that since we’re on a rolling programme and I’m the only one who teaches it I think I’m going to have to crop the taught sessions down to one month’s worth rather then three in order to be able to cover the content quickly enough to be able to turn the later groups loose while I work on showing the newer groups the basics.  I’m not wild about that idea as it’s taken longer than expected to cover even enough to get them going.

The nice long copyright discussion we had last week will have to be reduced to “don’t copy, or if you must, give credit where due” for a start!

I’m a bit gloomy about this news, as part of the point as I saw it was to broaden the learners’ experience of IT in a relaxed and interesting way, not just jam out another qualification.

Funding however trumps all, so it’s back to the (lesson planning) drawing board.

Not directly related to the blog project but I’ve just come across a brilliant web based tool I can use for the annotating texts. Spotted it on the RS Teacher blog and can see enormous advantage for the “Reading and Summarising” elements of the Communications Key Skills. It’s an element which always proves tricky to teach, and to get the learners to make a good job of and to assess!

http://annotator.thinkport.org
You can copy and paste a chunk of text and then overwrite it with highlighters.

Every time you highlight, it pops up a box for you to make a note of your own and then it compiles the notes at the end.

You can have different coloured pens for different topics, e.g. One colour for dates, one for technical terms, one for interesting facts you want to include etc etc. (it gives you a default set of pens but you can rename them)

Got to be easier and more fun than messing about with felt tips and bits of paper and scribbled notes everywhere!

Everyone now has some content up and the blogs are looking good.  Some learners were worried that other groups are progressing faster than them and worried about keeping up so I spent a few minutes to reassure them that, by definition, there’s no such thing as a “finished” blog!

The majority of the lesson today was just posting content and setting up categories and so forth.

Lots of learners asking about linking and putting images up but I’ve tried to put them off until next week when I can go over it with the whole group. Today I just wanted them to consolidate the skills they’d learned so far and get some content up there.

One reason for this was I wanted to go over copyright issues before we started posting pictures or using content from elsewhere, but here the learners where ahead of me and I had to have a hasty “copyright 101″ with one group who were wholesale copying and pasting from other sites.

“But it’s free if it’s on the Internet isn’t it…?” No one actually said as much but the assumption was hovering over the classroom!

I’m going to do a group session on it next time and am compiling a list of some “copyright friendly” resources for them to use.

The wholesale copied text was amended to short quotes with a link back to the site it came from.

Accrediting source material is something they’ll have to do in their upcoming Key Skills projects anyway, so hopefully it will be useful and relevant.

Today we were starting on the real ‘meat’ of the project and the class would have their first taste of the Wordpress blogging tool.

I was excited myself, as well as a little apprehensive, since the group is extremely mixed ability and some of them are only just become familiar with a word processor, never mind the ‘wonders’ of “Web 2.0″!

I was therefore keen to stress the transferable skills, and point out for example, that the formatting tools, like Bold, Italic, Underline etc. would have the same icons and work in much the same way as in Microsoft Word.

I had set up in advance a blog which with could use as a ’sandpit’ to mess about with the tools without the pressure of worrying about somehow ‘breaking’ or spoiling the learners’ own group blogs.

This was a success in that in encouraged experimentation and allowed me to demonstrate the tools without worrying about content, but there were a few hiccups caused by the fact I’d only set up one user and we were all logged in together.

Not a major issue but another time I think I’d get everyone registered and signed up first.

In fact I had the learners, do this part themselves, talking them through signing up for a Wordpress account, using their existing email address.

I discussed the various user privilege levels available in Wordpress and the learners agreed in their groups who should be the blog administrator.  One learners raised the good point that they should have more than one administrator in case they were absent. 

I was glad to see them considering absence in terms of the effect on other learners!

The groups are starting to work together quite nicely now.  Several people offered to take handouts for the absentees (although it appeared from my “catch up” session that not all of them followed through on that!)

A few people had even gone to the trouble of registering with the local library, unprompted, to gather source materials for their chosen topic!  I was impressed!

I set up a shared directory on the server to act as a “drop box” for scanned material since, unfortunately the learners don’t have access to a scanner and that had to be done by reception.  I must see if we can get hold of a low cost scanner they could use.

I helped a volunteer administrator from each group to setup the blog, and the group choose suitable URLs.  Again i was surprised at the level of ’savvy’ being shown.  Comments such as “We don’t want to make it too long or people won’t remember it” were being thrown about, and there was a lot of back and forth discussion.

Some patterns are emerging in the groups with some people adopting various roles, and some demonstrating a commendable amount of leadership.

Some groups got as far as selecting their template for the blog, others I spotted adding content in their self-study time.

Most people seem to be enjoying it so far, although some dislike having to give over time from their “main” qualification to the workshops and would rather just focus on the one qualification.

This is often the case with all the project / Key Skills related programmes though, so I’m not too worried.  Some people seem to naturally prefer to work on just the “main” qualification and go onto other things only after it is complete, if at all.

I’m not sure quite how to convince people that the workshops and Key Skills and things actually do contribute to their IT skills and knowledge.

Maybe I should map some lesson objectives against the ECDL and eQuals syllabuses and put them up at the start of the workshops to try and make it more explicit.  (Or maybe we should drop the phrase “main” qualification when talking to the student, even though we need it for paperwork purposes!)

My rough plan has been to split the lesson periods (1.5 hours) roughly equally between whole class teaching / discussion and individual group work — at least until we’ve covered the theory and skills required for the learners to work more independantly.

This time I was looking at “What is a Blog”

About 2/3rds of the class had never come across the idea before and the discussion on the differences between a Blog and a ‘normal’ website took some times, and I think some of the subtleties may have been lost.

Another time I think I might get people to produce a written list of differnces and try and make that clearer.

I described the basic components of a blog, the elements most blogs will tend to have in common – posts, pages, categories, archives, links and feeds, and compared these to the familiar company blog which all trainees are introduced to at induction and encouraged to use regularly through their training.

I then introduced the idea of searching for blogs and had trainees use Google Blog Search to search for blogs on topics of interest, and try to identify these common elements.

It was worth noting here that the vast majority of trainees could not identify the “Sponsored Links” as the adverts they were, and needed this explaining. The search terms chosen were also often rather weak. Another time I think I might devote a session before this one to ensuring everyone was up to speed on general Internet use.  We do have pre-exisiting learning material for selecting search terms and evaluating websites, which we use as part of the ICT Key Skills training.

However, with a greater or lesser degree of support all trainees were able to locate a suitable blog and identify the main points. The younger members of the class tended to race on ahead at this point, which wasn’t a problem as it kept them occupied with something at least vaugely related while I talked through the less expereinced learners.

To continue getting familiar with other people’s blogs and the kind of topics which can be covered I next gave out a handout listing some sample blogs and asking trainees to (in pairs) make lists of what they thought were the good points and bad points.

We then came back together as a group and discussed these.

The pairwork was the first taste of collaborative learning a lot of them had done in a long time (if ever) and as the group is still quite new and don’t know each other very well it was a slow start and needed a bit of encouragement to get discussion going.  I moved among the class prompting with questions where needed and agreeing with some of the good comments being made.

One learner in particular was very unenthusiastic about the pairwork and rather reluctant to contribute.  He was spoken to individually by a senior trainer and does seem to have improved his attitude dramatically since then.

The sessions seem to be over very quickly and could do with a bit more time allotted maybe, as it seemed to go very quickly, but the learners seemed much happier this session in spite of a lot of new material and information being covered.

Our average attendance rate is frankly rubbish.  Typically 70-80% on a 4 days a week, three month programme.

We’ve tried a number of things to improve it all without success. 

Our learners have a number of barriers which affect their attendance, a high proportion of single parents, people returning to work after long term sickness, and those with previous negative experiences of education and all of these combine to make motivation a difficult task.

A while ago a colleague heard about a project another training provider had run, which involved the learner creating their own Wiki as a group effort and the positive effects it had had on attendance and motivation, and we decided it must be worth a go.

As we already use a blog to communicate with our learners and I was familiar with that software from personal use as well, I suggested a Blogging Project.

We have several main hopes for the project:

• One, that it will improve motivation by giving the trainees an opportunity to work on something of interest to them and using the kind of up to date modern technology that all over the news and popular media.
• Two, that the group working element will improve attendance through a sense of responsibility to the group and getting their share of the project done.  “Peer pressure” maybe, though that sounds negative.  It’s noticeable that the trainees who share lifts to the training centre are more likely to inform their car-sharer when they are going to be absent than they are to phone us trainers and let us know!  I hope this desire to not let their fellow students down will carry over to the groupwork.
• That the group working element will help develop their interpersonal and communication skills.  At the moment the general level of literacy is on the low side, and the verbal communication skills are patchy.  Many of the students currently, will talk over you or each other, fail to speak up when stuck or interrupt while you’re mid-explanation to another learner.  In additional the two groups of learners will often not mix, and the younger learners can end up a bit isolated or alternatively in a “Kiddies corner” requiring constant supervision to stop them sloping off and ending up on the Internet messing around.

For a bit of background.

I work in a small IT training company.  We have two main groups of learners in-house who’ll be involved in the blogging project.

Jobseekers…
These are a very mixed group and vary from people with quite good existing IT skills but no formal qualifications or those looking for a change of career, through to the long terms unemployed with very few skills.  This often extends to basic literacy and numeracy needs as well as lack of IT skills, and they are often lacking in confidence and “soft skills”.   Often they’ve never worked, or have been unemployed for a number of years and lack the confidence to return straight away.

School Leavers…
Tend to have reasonable IT skills (though frequently not as quite good as in their own estimation) but have been referred to us because they’ve come out of school at 16 with poor, or few GCSEs or find themselves – in the buzzword vocab — “vocationally unfocussed”. 

All learners work towards either ECDL or the introductory City and Guilds “Certificate for IT Users”, depending on their skills.  In conjunction with this they normally do one or more Key Skills qualifications.  All learners work towards the “Improve Own Learning and Performance” and those who finished their ‘main’ qualification have the option of working towards others such as Communication or Application of Number.  These can be especially beneficial to learners without GCSE Maths and English as they occupy the same position on the National Qualifications Framework and will be accepted as equivalent by most institutions. 

Being project based the Key Skills also tend to be popular with the learners as we allow them to choose their own topics and research on the Internet is highly encouraged and supported.

Basic Skills workshops are also available to learners, some 80% of whom demonstrate a level below the national target on initial assessment.  These are informal and most learners who attend say they enjoy them and find them helpful.