Entries Tagged 'Research' ↓

And finding time to do it…

I taught a class on Internet search strategies recently. The course demands that learners know the difference between search engines, directories, and metasearch.

I find this a little irritating to teach, as the Internet has evolved a fair bit since these syllabuses were written and things seemed to have converged somewhat. At the level to which they’re working, it’s hard to find good examples of things which can’t simply be found by banging them into Google!

I deliberately kept the advanced functions of Google for last because I knew once I’d hit Google Maps and they spotted the aerial photograhy, that would be it for keeping them on task!

Then I caught myself — the learners were enthused, searching and playing with the resource and I was feeling impatient and wanting them to “get on with some work”.

Arrgghh! No! This is exactly what I WANT them have time to do.

Alright they were “only” doing (predictably), “I can see my house!”, but they were thinking about it and when they got unexpected results were reasoning it out.

I resisted the urge to rush them onto something else and wandered the room, listening out.

“Hang on there’s loads of’”John Streets’ in different places — try putting the town in as well.”

“I’ve spelt that wrong.”

“Would putting the postcode in work?”

“What does that button do?” “Don’t know – try it”

Is it directly relevant to their course? Maybe, maybe not. But they’re undoubtedly developing their learning skills.

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.

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.