Worksheets become self-marking online

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Before using power tools, school students are given safety guidelines and a quiz to check that they recall them. Some schools use specialised online quiz and document kits such as OnGuard. Other schools assess students with paper worksheets. However, we know that timely feedback aids later recall (Race 2005), so marking worksheets is an urgent task.

Producing a self-marking, online quiz may take less time than marking worksheets. As a proof-of-concept, four samples were produced by pasting the text of existing worksheets into Hot Potatoes (JCloze and JQuiz tools). They cover Workshop safety, Cordless drill safety, Drill press safety, and Metal folding in the context of the Alubind project in a NSW school.

OnGuard logo

OnGuard logo

Hot Potatoes logo

Hot Potatoes logo

References

Designability (2009) Alubind project. Designability.com. http://www.designability.com.au/projects_alubind.html

OnGuard Safety Training (2009) OnGuard(r) Safety Training Products. http://www.onguardsafetytraining.com/products.htm

Half Baked Software (2011) Hot Potatoes 6.3. University of Victoria Canada. http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

Race P (2005) Using feedback to help students to learn. HEA Assessment Series, London.  http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/aso/learningandteaching/id432_using_feedback.pdf

Population Pyramids

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Population 2006

Population 2006

Population Pyramids are still required in Stage 5 Geography. I was surprised to see students hand-drawing them despite being equipped with notebook computers. Is the labour and extra opportunities for error involved in hand-drawing each bar really instructive?

Hand drawing is not mandatory, as far as I can discover. Advice published in 2003 assumed that charts would be hand-drawn.

“Population Pyramid activity: Students construct a population pyramid using up-to-date statistics. Teacher supplies worksheet with grid on which students plot their graph.” (BOS 2003)

But the “Evidence of learning” relates to comprehension and application, not to pencil technique.

“Students provide evidence of their understanding of Australia’s demographic characteristics through the completion of the pyramid and a comment on what the pyramid shows…. Teacher provides both oral and written feedback on student work samples. Comments inform students on how well they can draw a population pyramid and describe Australia’s demographic characteristics.”

The capabilities of new technology should be exploited here. For example, students can roll from 1971 to 2056, seeing the population profile shift as death rates and birth rates fall. (ABS 2008) The same can also be done for other countries. (De Wulf 2011)  Population trends and other variables can be seen more vividly in new visualisation tools. (Rosling 2006)

Population as an outcome of understandable individual, familial and social decisions is a vital theme in Geography (Robbins 1983), and tools that reveal interactions of multiple factors are to be welcomed.

However, to return to the Pyramid: how would a model, efficient student produce a population pyramid?

Excel 2010

Excel 2010

Google unequivocally suggests Excel. Old instructions don’t work well, due to Microsoft’s shift from menus (in Excel 2003) to ribbon interface (in Excel 2007).There are some non-intuitive steps. Male population figures must be input as negative numbers, a custom number format must be applied to the horizontal axis, and the overlap and spacing of bars must be adjusted.  Illustrated instructions (Javaid 2011) and  video demonstrations (Lee 2008) are available. I can’t guess why Microsoft has not published a Population Pyramid chart type for Excel in 15 years.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice

OpenOffice can be used in the same way, if Microsoft is not in favour. (Gerard24)

Apple iWork Numbers

Apple iWork Numbers

Numbers (in Apple iWork) is similar, but the chart format is not quite as adaptable. For example, I couldn’t get the vertical axis to cross at zero. In both packages, male data must be input as negative numbers.

Population Pyramid Generator

Population Pyramid Generator

Recommendation

It is far simpler for students to type or import data into an application designed for the purpose. University of Leeds supplies an open-source Applet which a school can run on a server, so students need no software but a browser. (Evans 2011).

For individuals, the easiest tool by far is the (free)  Population Pyramid Generator (Heaton 2011) for Mac OS 10.6+ –  simple to use and quick to install. (Installation does require administrator permissions.) I have found nothing like it for Windows.

Population Pyramid Generator 1.1.2 screenshot

Population Pyramid Generator 1.1.2 screenshot

References

  1. Board of Studies of New South Wales (BOS) 2003, Geography Years 7-10 Advice on Programming and Assessment, p.28 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  2. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2008, Australia Age structure in 2009 Projected Resident Population, ABS, revised 27/10/2010 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  3. De Wulf, M 2010, Population Pyramids of the World: 1950-2050. populationpyramid.net [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  4. Rosling, H 2006, Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen. Ted.com. June [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  5. Robbins, P 1998, Population and Pedagogy: The Geography Classroom after Malthus, Journal of Geography, 97:6, 241-252 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  6. Javaid, U 2010, Comparative Histogram in Excel 2010. AddictiveTips.com, 19/03/2010 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  7. Lee, C 2008, Create a Comparative Histogram in Excel 2007. Youtube.com, 23/02/2008 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  8. Walkenbach J 2007, Creating a comparative Histogram. Excel 2007 Charts. Wiley.com [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  9. Gerard24 2011, Re: Population pyramid. Openoffice.org community forum. 28/03/2011 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  10. Heaton, C 2011, Population Pyramid Generator version 1.1.2, Mac App Store, 16/04/2011 [Accessed 26/04/2011]
  11. Evans, A 2011, Demographic / population pyramid graph applet (v1.0), Centre for Computational Geography, University of Leeds. [Accessed 26/04/2011]

Facebook covers Google logo with Bing

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Foursquare pinpoints you on a GoogleMap and posts it to Facebook. But Facebook brazenly replaces the Google logo on the map, in favour of its ally, Microsoft! Microsoft must be delighted.

Notice the Bing logo where Google used to be?

Notice the Bing logo where Google used to be?

Maybe it’s not quite that crude. Perhaps Facebook has taken the GoogleMap reference sent by Foursquare, and pushed it to Bing Maps. I may have overlooked this because it doesn’t happen on a phone (Bishop 2010), my usual platform for watching for ‘checkin’.

Reference

Bishop T (2010) Bing, Google get split decision in Facebook Places mapping feature. TechFlash, August 19. http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/08/facebook_places_debuts_with_split_loyalty_to_bing_google_maps.html

Are you comfortable there?

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Sick mannequin sprawled on wooden rocking chair

Artwork: Penywise

How can I make learning more comfortable for you?

Going far beyond Gardner’s Learning Styles, Dunn and Dunn categorised a range of preferences, and others have suggested redesigning everything from architecture to homework, to cater for them.

Online teachers need to think differently about preferences. Some of these things are completely out of the teacher’s control, while others can be regulated much more tightly through technology.

Consider Dunn’s list:

Environmental Stimuli Preferences Sound Preference
Light Preference
Temperature Preference
Design Preference
Emotional Stimuli Preferences Motivation Preference
Persistence Preference
Responsibility Preference
Structure Preference
Sociological Stimuli Preferences Self Preference
Pair Preference
Peers/Team Preference
Adult Preference
Varied Preference
Physiological Stimuli Preferences Perceptual Preference
Intake Preference
Time Preference
Mobility Preference
Psychological Stimuli Preferences Global/Analytic Style
Hemisphericity Preferences
Impulsive/Reflective Preferences

Environmental aspects are entirely up to the learner.

The  emotional, social, physiological and psychological range of activities is limited by online delivery. However, course designers have far-reaching power to shape these aspects. “Learning Technology” can provide statistical reports on time on task, speed and error rates, interactivity, and linguistic complexity. With data like that available, we (teachers) face the important pragmatic and ethical question:

When should we let a learner skip personally inefficient learning tasks?

References

  1. Ethica 2003, The Dunn and Dunn Learning Style Model of Instruction. Online at http://www.ethica.dk/doc_uflash/The%20Dunn%20and%20Dunn%20Learning%20Style%20Model%20of%20Instruction.htm
  2. Shepherd, C 1999, Ways of looking at style. Fastrak Consulting. Online at http://www.fastrak-consulting.co.uk/tactix/Features/lngstyle/style03.htm
  3. Hinson, B Utilizing the Dunn and Dunn Learning Style Model in the Development of Instruction. University of West Florida  http://brendawelch.org/gedunk/cnetdoc/gedunk/content/01lr/learnstyle-mh.rtf

Photo credits

  1. Penywise 2008, Sick. http://mrg.bz/QpFHYz (M)

What the Head in the Sand thinks about filters

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Chris Betcher is a thoughtful educator and inspirational classroom innovator. Yesterday he asked,

in the schools that do block access to certain sites (and it sounds like it tends to be mainly social media sites), what educational reason is given?

Many articulate, well reasoned responses later, the agreement among Chris’ readers is pretty clear. So, I’d like to volunteer as Devil’s Advocate, not because I disagree, but because the supporters of rigorous filters are ascendant and important, and their stance should be understood.

I think the basic question is a pragmatic one rather than a research question: the justification for blocking is to prevent irreversible harm. We can’t fix a child’s reputation or self-esteem by blocking a website later, once the damage is done.

I think schools cannot discard their filters yet, for four reasons.

1. Further research is needed

Yes, there is an association between of social software use and social/emotional welfare (e.g. Ellison, Steinfield, Lamp 2007) but we haven’t seen empirical studies of how it works, whether the online behaviour is causal or an outcome, nor which specific kids benefit.

2. Theory requires a complex response

Stage theories of cognitive and moral development suggest that kids in middle-school years, and their parents, will have very different capacities to process their experience and exercise judgement. Rules are not enough, but a blunt system of rules is still necessary unless we are going to exclude some students and parents from the school community. (e.g. Kohlberg’s moral stages in news about Facebook.pdf)

3. Business culture is increasingly restrictive

Public companies have increasing obligations to manage all communication that has a potential business impact, even if their employees don’t recognise the intellectual property or reputational value. What lesson about civic rights and duties can students draw from your school rules?

4. It’s easy to blame new technology

Facebook etc. give school administrators an easily named target for reduction of opportunities for cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is more easily managed than the (larger) general picture of all peer bullying. Peer-Bullying is less controversial than the (larger) general picture of coercive/exploitative culture of a school. And School Culture is a more palatable scapegoat for parents than the (often more dangerous) background of intimidation in home life.

It’s pretty hard for a Principal to face down all of these lines of criticism at once.

Still, if we are going to block access to the Net, we should carefully consider the meaning of excluding the school from an important part of a child’s identity-formation and social development. We should be reluctant to do that.

Kohlberg’s moral stages in news about Facebook

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horror5When I read the furore over the punishment of a few students for defaming a teacher in Georgia, My Fox Atlanta seemed to illustrate Kohlberg’s stages 2-6 quite clearly.

This is personally relevant: my middle-school daughter complains about her teachers on Facebook.

Detail

Kohlberg moral stages in news about Facebook [PDF]

Conclusions:

The kids’ quotes fit Kohlberg’s stages 2-4 (expected at age 9-20), and adults’ quotes fit stages 4-6. In the light of that difference, we should not be surprised if parents are frustrated by a resolution that satisfies the kids, or if the kids feel that the agreement reached by adults is needlessly complicated.

Calling in lawyers sounds like bad strategy, possibly just bluster. It raises the stakes beyond anything the kids seem to want, and no one in this story has a solid legal position. Facebook users implicitly agree to “not use Facebook if you are under 13.” So who lied in order to set up Facebook accounts? Are parents responsible for the defamation by minors? Did the school fail its duty of care, by letting students on Facebook, knowing that they were under-age?

Acceptance of a stage-theory of moral development can unfortunately lead to sequestering of moral authority and codification of rules which are inexplicable to students, such as bans on Web 2.0 sites or explicit lyrics. On the other hand, it can inform a greater engagement with character development. We can expect middle-school students to work hard on questioning rules they have previously accepted and reconstructing their moral responsibility and the social order in their minds. We can expect students to differ in their readiness for different forms of rules. We can model acceptance and consideration for the less sophisticated, because that will be a necessary skill and discipline throughout life.

And like the kids, we need to keep constantly revisiting this.

References

Facebook.com (2010) Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Revision October 4, 2010. Facebook.com http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Proctor, A (2011) Douglas Co. Students Disciplined Over Facebook Post. My Fox Atlanta. 1 March, http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/news/douglas-co-students-disciplined-over-facebook-post-030111

Protalinski, E (2011) Students suspended, expelled over Facebook posts. ZDNet, March 4, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/students-suspended-expelled-over-facebook-posts/517

Classroom technology breakdown

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In a traditional classroom in a fee-paying school, when a lesson is interrupted because the technology misbehaved, the teacher is expected to make a rapid judgement and decision.

  • Can the technology be fixed before the class is distracted?
    • If not, is the repair process a justifiable learning opportunity for the class at this time?
      • If not, is it easy to move to a known-good alternative facility?
        • If not, abandon the technology promptly, report it to Helpdesk, and review its place in the teaching program if it is not made reliable.

An ‘extended period of time’ for class-control issues in K-12 can be as low as two minutes. This may be just long enough to restart a computer, but not long enough for a projector. It is not long enough for a messenger to go to the HelpDesk and get back. On this basis, it is not appropriate to send a human messenger to the HelpDesk during class. If the Helpdesk can offer next-minute response, and the problem can be completely described in few words, it may be worth sending an electronic message from one of the networked computers or mobile phones in the room.

Otherwise, since real-time response from the Helpdesk is unlikely, teachers often (prudently) abandon technology-based lesson plans. Later classes need the technology, so faults should be promptly reported to helpdesk. (Sadly, the only practical way I found to ensure this has been to sympathetically but consistently embarrass teachers who failed to report a fault.)

The ‘Learning Opportunity’ in a technology failure in class depends on context and outcome.

  1. If a repair attempt conspicuously fails, students may learn the ‘anti-lesson’ that technology is hard and troubleshooting doesn’t work. This lesson is most vivid for the person who tries to resolve the fault, but it’s bad for all if the failed attempt is made by someone considered expert or authoritative (such as a teacher or student-guru).
  2. If a repair is accomplished by helpdesk but unexplained, students learn the anti-lesson that technology is hard and the school has not equipped them to solve their own problems.
  3. If a repair is accomplished by helpdesk repeatedly, students learn the anti-lesson that the specific technology is incurably unreliable – or the helpdesk is incompetent to fix the underlying fault.
  4. If a repair is accomplished and explained by a teacher in an extended period of time, students may perceive a (regrettable) subtext that the technical learning is more urgent than their syllabus.
  5. If service is restored rapidly by a student, students may perceive (correctly or not) that the teacher is incompetent with her professional tools.
  6. If service is restored rapidly by a student but fails frequently, students learn the anti-lesson that the specific technology is incurably unreliable and that students are incompetent to fix the underlying fault.
  7. Only if service is permanently restored rapidly with the teachers’ approval, do students learn the highly desirable lesson that students are able to fix things.
Photo: jdurham

Photo: jdurham

Yes, most teachers I have worked with have been too slow to ‘pull the plug’ on lessons stymied by technical faults. Teachers typically need to rehearse their troubleshooting and this decision process, off-stage.

The technologists in schools need to distinguish between innovation (with uncertain outcomes) and embedded technology (required by syllabus) – but that’s a matter for another post.

Transcription Tools

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Dozens of hours of interviews were recorded. Analysis begins with tagging phrases in the transcripts. The preferred tool for tagging (‘coding’) is NVivo, and at first it seemed sensible to do the transcription within NVivo. But I soon changed my mind.

NVivo 8

http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx
The obvious advantage of using NVivo is that the transcript will be created within the project file, and structured suitably. Playback can be controlled with Function keys: I just hit the F7 key to pause or resume playback and other keys to skip, accelerate or slow it. The three typing/playback modes deserve some attention: I found it easiest to use Transcribe mode for the first draft, using F7 to pause/resume and F8 at the end of each row, then to audit the whole recording in a playback mode to find errors, then to use the looping synchronised mode to concentrate on specific lines.

However, at 50% speed, extra noises appear that make the audio difficult to understand. There is no internal spell-check, so every transcript must be exported then reimported. And the export does not go smoothly for me. First, the export launches Word, but fails to open the document. Then, once the document is manually opened, the notorious Word 2007 page-orientation bug strikes: despite changing every margin and page layout setting in both the document, Word Normal Template, and printer settings, the document has page-breaks suited to Portrait layout but prints only the top ⅔ of each page. Further, the text is presented as a table using a non-standard text Style. To remove the ‘coding’ highlight, I found it necessary to change the Style of the whole document.

The final blow is its dependency on Microsoft SQL Server 2005. After NVivo crashes (about once a day) the residual SQL working files NVivo launching until I manually stop the SQL service, manually delete the residual files, and restart the SQL service (and sometimes, Windows, too).

For these reasons it was clearly worth trying another transcription environment.

ExpressScribe

http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html
The most widely advertised product has a free version that is adequate, and fits in a family of related, useful tools. It works, and it implements a worthwhile workflow concept, but it is badly behaved adware, installing a raft of other NCH applications which cannot be uninstalled.

Silently installing unwanted, hard-to-remove components, it is behaving like a trojan. This should not be tolerated.

F5

http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/f5 for Mac,
http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/f4-v42 for Windows.

This tool is focused on one task, and does it superbly. Playback even at 50% speed is the clearest I’ve heard. As-you-type spell-check uses the familiar red squiggle. Press F6 to pause, F5 to play, resuming a few seconds before the pause point, or Command+Arrow to skip. In Preferences I defined a few hotkeys for common phrases such as [incomprehensible].

Finishing is easy enough. F5 saves in RTF form by default, or Word formats. I use Word to set the Title in Document Properties, open the document, convert text to table based on colons, delete the columns containing time marks, resize columns, hide borders, insert page numbers and insert the Title on a page header.

Voice Recognition

http://www.macspeech.com/pages.php?pID=181 for Mac,
http://www.voicerecognition.com.au/dragon-naturally-speaking-11/dragon-home.htm for Windows
These products are advertised as suitable for a single voice only at this stage.

Audio recordings

http://uk.yamaha.com/en/products/music-production/portable_recorders/pocketrak_2g/
A Yamaha PocketTrak 2G delivered beautiful recordings of live interviews (as MP3 files), but Telstra-recorded conference calls (as WAV files) were a surprisingly good second-best. iPhone recordings of face-to-face conversation in good conditions were adequate; recordings of speakerphone calls suffered very uneven quality.

At the time of interview, iPhone, Skype and GoogleVoice did not produce recordings. SkypeRecorder was successful in tests but not easy or convenient for the interviewer. Hardware adapters were not tested.

Current Solution

Transcription process

Transcription process

Imminence of e-assessment

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An extract from a recent essay submitted to Deakin Uni. Imminence_of_e_assessment

Computer-based assessment comes in many forms and is adaptable. Online exams have been observed to have some typical impact on students and teachers. Relief of scarcity of devices is creating an opportunity for computer-based testing. Measures can be taken to minimise cheating on computer based examinations. eAssessment offers good schools opportunities to reform school reports.

XMind v Inspiration

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Today I trialled XMind 3.1 side-by-side with Inspiration 9.

XMind Free advantages

  1. The free version is not time-bombed. (Contrast with the Inspiration trial version which is limited to 30 days.)
  2. Drill down. This is fantastic!
  3. Tag objects with multiple images – flags, emoticons, or imported images.
  4. It is possible to exactly position objects and connectors (unlike Inspiration)
  5. Fishbone and Spreadsheet views are interesting and useful
  6. Better Import and Export formats. For example, the HTML export includes the full text, not just an image of the map.
XMind

XMind

Inspiration 9 advantages

  1. Cuter, less intimdating appearance. (XMind uses palettes of properties which are convenient but unfamiliar to children.)
  2. Text can be edited in the Outline view.
  3. I found it slightly easier to link and reposition objects in Inspiration than Xmind.
  4. Each object can be represented as a picture. There is a reasonably small collection of standard pictures available on screen.
  5. Inspiration’s export to Word quickly produces a respectable looking document.
  6. Presentation mode is like a lite PowerPoint.
Inspiration

Inspiration

Webspiration

Webspiration is a browser-based, hosted version of Inspiration. Data is stored ‘in the cloud’ (ie. by the server) and easily shared with other users. Sadly, it is currently too slow for satisfactory use. (Doubling the CPU speed, RAM and broadband speed makes no difference; the bottleneck is presumably at the server.)

Kidspiration

Kidspiration is a simplified version of Inspiration with a lower emphasis on text. For primary school users, it is the best of all options.

Visio

I have been in a school where the it was cheaper to add Microsoft Visio to the school’s site license than Inspiration. It is much easier to handle rearrangement of objects and links in Visio. Visio is obviously preferable for complex models, diagrams where dimensions are important, or knowledge that is not hierarchical. (In the mind-map programs above, data is organised as a tree.) However, Visio cannot compete with dedicated mindmap software for managing text.

References

  1. Softonic 2010. Comparison of XMind with other programs. http://xmind.en.softonic.com/compare/inspiration,lupo-pensuite
  2. XMind 2010. Better Mind mapping. http://www.xmind.net/
  3. Inspiration 9 Software, 2010. Inspiration 9. http://www.inspiration.com/Inspiration