I've just got back from my first visit to the BETT show and my first TeachMeet with my head now even more jampacked with fantastic ideas than it was before I went!
I had several reasons for wanting to go to BETT, one being a hunt for visualisers, but the main one was for inspiration and ideas.
Ok, for me, BETT was rather like one giant shopping centre and I don't really do shopping. If I need something I'll research the possibilities online and either buy it there and then or go to somewhere I know sells it, buy it and leave, which is what I did with the visualisers. If I do venture into a city centre full of shops I'm likely to get distracted by two things, tea and street entertainers! So for me TeachMeet takeover was the perfect distraction, a fantastic idea, and the one's I had the pleasure of seeing were full of really useful stuff I can't wait to use. I really think this idea should be made bigger and better for the next show, and well done to everyone who was involved in organising it.
I was really looking forward to TeachMeet on Friday evening, by the time it started I had already spoken to many Twitter people and was excited about meeting more and watching the presentations. With free beer and Dyson Airblades in the toilet I knew I was in for a good evening! I have to say it was lovely to have so many people come over, introduce themselves and say hello. I have, in the past, been described as 'unapproachable' so I'm hoping it's a sign I'm softening in my old age!
Lisa's (@lisibo ) presentation reminded me that it was after coming across her on Teachers TV talking about using Twitter to teach Spanish that resulted in me joining Twitter in the first place, I had completely forgotten! And, like she was after her first TeachMeet, I have been inspired to get up and talk. I have set myself a challenge to put my name down to present something at the next one I go to.
All the presentations were excellent, have a look at Dawn Hallybone's blog or Stuart Ridout's blog for more info of who talked about what and Tom Barrett's thoughts on TeachMeet Takeover.
I went to TeachMeet with someone who isn't a teacher, he doesn't even work in education, and he was impressed by the enthusiasm and passion we have for our work. He also commented how he didn't realise what a male dominated profession teaching was. Except it's not is it? 85% of primary school teachers are women, secondary is more even but men are still in the minority with 56% being female (that's according to Office for National Statistics, I didn't make it up!). It's easy to see how you would think that by looking around TeachMeet and BETT though, I wonder if it's just the 'technology' side of it that brings out the blokes or perhaps because many attendees are in management positions rather than class teachers and there's more men in those positions?
On Saturday I went to seminar on Enhancing Creativity and Innovation through International Partnerships, I hadn't heard many positive things about the seminars at BETT so I wasn't sure what to expect but as I am planning on creating links with schools abroad I thought this would be a useful one to attend. And it was. It was really inspirational to hear about the work of schools who have links with, amongst others, Finland and Afganistan and how, with sponsorship from Nokia they've been using Mobile phones for their students to communicate with children in other countries. We heard about a primary school who brought their WW2 topic alive by linking with schools in Malta and Poland and sharing videos the children made of their grandparents talking about the war, fantastic stuff.
All in all, apart from the hotel bathroom injury I sustained, and mostly thanks to everyone involved in TeachMeet, I had a fabulous weekend!
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Wallwisher Feedback from Children's Questionnaires and Interviews.
I am doing an MA in Advanced Educational Practice at the UEA in Norwich, this year, Year 2, is School Based Research Methods and I have just finished writing up my first research project ready to hand in on Saturday. After introducing Wallwisher to my class as a way to do homework here, I decided to do some research into how they felt about using Wallwisher;
I was interested to see what effect doing their homework online would have on the children's motivation, whether their usual homework 'behaviours' remained, and what they thought of the website itself. I used written questionnaires with a mixture of closed and open questions as well as in-depth interviews, I'm not going to post the whole project but here is some of what I found from the children.
21 children completed the questionnaires, 13 boys and 8 girls; 100% of them responded positively to the question 'How do you feel about doing your homework using Wallwisher?', 81% found using it easy or very easy with the remainder giving the neutral answer 'ok'. It would have been interesting to see whether there would have been a 100% positive response if I'd included a neutral answer to both questions, or whether anyone would have chosen 'difficult' instead of 'ok' had I not included a neutral answer in that question. I wonder whether not including a neutral answer in the 'How do you feel...?' question has given a false positive result and if I were to use this questionnaire again I would probably change that question to include a neutral answer. It was the open-ended parts to these questions where the children explained the choices they had made that I felt were the most useful, many of the things they said I had predicted but some came as a surprise to me.
Why the children liked Wallwisher
Reasons for answering that using Wallwisher is 'easy'.
I had expected the children to enjoy using Wallwisher and find it easy, but I wasn't expecting so many of them to refer to the fact they didn't have to do any writing or have to think about presentation, around 40% of the children in my class are working below the expected National Curriculum level in writing and are unlikely to reach level 4 in writing by the end of Year 6 and having to do writing for homework is obviously a big concern for them. The actual content of the homework would have been no different had they not used Wallwisher but the very fact of not having to pick up a pencil and do writing made this homework more accessible and enjoyable to those children who struggle with literacy. There was no difference between the presentation of the homework of the children who are working at Level 5 and those who are still at Level 2 and as the actual task was manageable for all of them, doing the homework on Wallwisher put the children on an equal level.
57% of the children claimed to have changed their normal homework behaviours for this piece of homework, with 38% doing it sooner than they normally would and the remaining 19% doing it later than they normally would. Of the children that did it later all but one gave their reason as not being able to access the website at home (those children completed the task during a lunchtime at school instead) with the remaining reason being, predictably 'I forgot'. The children that completed the homework sooner than usual gave the following reasons:
Again, the issue of writing came up, those children who would normally put off doing their homework because of the writing had no issues with being motivated to complete this task.
76% of the children said they would like to use Wallwisher for homework again, with 14% being not sure and only 10% said they would not want to use it again, the negative responses were all from the children who had not been able to access Wallwisher at home.
The final question asked the children to write down anything else they thought we could use Wallwisher for in school, many of their answers referred to things we had already done in class that they thought we could have done using Wallwisher instead, for example one child answered 'English poems' which was a reference to a lesson where they had written a collaborative poem using lines written on actual post-it notes; but it was also good to see the children coming up with ideas of their own, many of which I hope to implement.
What we could use Wallwisher for.
Although I didn't know which child had said what, I used the questions and responses from the questionnaires to guide the in-depth interviews which I conducted with two children, Edward and Elizabeth. The children talked a lot about the same kind of things that came up in the questionnaires but they also elaborated on many of the issues that they have generally with homework such as forgetting to do it, forgetting what they have to do and forgetting to hand it in, using Wallwisher eliminated all of these issues for them. Edward said that he found using Wallwisher quicker than traditional methods of homework, if these children are living within households where the computer is already on and connected to the internet it would simply take a couple of minutes to complete a short exercise like this. Elizabeth talked about the fact she had tried to make her own Wall after she had finished her homework, she didn't manage to but it was positive that she had seen Wallwisher as something she might like to use for herself and not just as something she had to do for school. Neither Elizabeth nor Edward needed any help from their parents to use the website and both of them said that this was due to the fact I had demonstrated how to use it in class and how easy the site is to use. Edward told me that he didn't go onto the internet specifically to do his homework but that he was online doing something else when he remembered he had homework to do, he went on to talk about how he would like to do more homework online and mentioned both English and maths. He talked about how he would like to have his homework task on the internet so he could both access what he had to do and complete it in the same online space, “it's quicker, quicker than getting out your pencil case, deciding which pencil to use and then putting it all back”. If Edward is typical of the children in my school it is a shame to see children so eager and motivated to access learning online completing the majority of their education in a school that has neither a website nor a VLE. Edward also mentioned that his parents responded positively to him doing his homework online.
I was interested to see what effect doing their homework online would have on the children's motivation, whether their usual homework 'behaviours' remained, and what they thought of the website itself. I used written questionnaires with a mixture of closed and open questions as well as in-depth interviews, I'm not going to post the whole project but here is some of what I found from the children.
21 children completed the questionnaires, 13 boys and 8 girls; 100% of them responded positively to the question 'How do you feel about doing your homework using Wallwisher?', 81% found using it easy or very easy with the remainder giving the neutral answer 'ok'. It would have been interesting to see whether there would have been a 100% positive response if I'd included a neutral answer to both questions, or whether anyone would have chosen 'difficult' instead of 'ok' had I not included a neutral answer in that question. I wonder whether not including a neutral answer in the 'How do you feel...?' question has given a false positive result and if I were to use this questionnaire again I would probably change that question to include a neutral answer. It was the open-ended parts to these questions where the children explained the choices they had made that I felt were the most useful, many of the things they said I had predicted but some came as a surprise to me.
Why the children liked Wallwisher
Reasons for answering that using Wallwisher is 'easy'.
I had expected the children to enjoy using Wallwisher and find it easy, but I wasn't expecting so many of them to refer to the fact they didn't have to do any writing or have to think about presentation, around 40% of the children in my class are working below the expected National Curriculum level in writing and are unlikely to reach level 4 in writing by the end of Year 6 and having to do writing for homework is obviously a big concern for them. The actual content of the homework would have been no different had they not used Wallwisher but the very fact of not having to pick up a pencil and do writing made this homework more accessible and enjoyable to those children who struggle with literacy. There was no difference between the presentation of the homework of the children who are working at Level 5 and those who are still at Level 2 and as the actual task was manageable for all of them, doing the homework on Wallwisher put the children on an equal level.
57% of the children claimed to have changed their normal homework behaviours for this piece of homework, with 38% doing it sooner than they normally would and the remaining 19% doing it later than they normally would. Of the children that did it later all but one gave their reason as not being able to access the website at home (those children completed the task during a lunchtime at school instead) with the remaining reason being, predictably 'I forgot'. The children that completed the homework sooner than usual gave the following reasons:
Again, the issue of writing came up, those children who would normally put off doing their homework because of the writing had no issues with being motivated to complete this task.
76% of the children said they would like to use Wallwisher for homework again, with 14% being not sure and only 10% said they would not want to use it again, the negative responses were all from the children who had not been able to access Wallwisher at home.
The final question asked the children to write down anything else they thought we could use Wallwisher for in school, many of their answers referred to things we had already done in class that they thought we could have done using Wallwisher instead, for example one child answered 'English poems' which was a reference to a lesson where they had written a collaborative poem using lines written on actual post-it notes; but it was also good to see the children coming up with ideas of their own, many of which I hope to implement.
What we could use Wallwisher for.
Although I didn't know which child had said what, I used the questions and responses from the questionnaires to guide the in-depth interviews which I conducted with two children, Edward and Elizabeth. The children talked a lot about the same kind of things that came up in the questionnaires but they also elaborated on many of the issues that they have generally with homework such as forgetting to do it, forgetting what they have to do and forgetting to hand it in, using Wallwisher eliminated all of these issues for them. Edward said that he found using Wallwisher quicker than traditional methods of homework, if these children are living within households where the computer is already on and connected to the internet it would simply take a couple of minutes to complete a short exercise like this. Elizabeth talked about the fact she had tried to make her own Wall after she had finished her homework, she didn't manage to but it was positive that she had seen Wallwisher as something she might like to use for herself and not just as something she had to do for school. Neither Elizabeth nor Edward needed any help from their parents to use the website and both of them said that this was due to the fact I had demonstrated how to use it in class and how easy the site is to use. Edward told me that he didn't go onto the internet specifically to do his homework but that he was online doing something else when he remembered he had homework to do, he went on to talk about how he would like to do more homework online and mentioned both English and maths. He talked about how he would like to have his homework task on the internet so he could both access what he had to do and complete it in the same online space, “it's quicker, quicker than getting out your pencil case, deciding which pencil to use and then putting it all back”. If Edward is typical of the children in my school it is a shame to see children so eager and motivated to access learning online completing the majority of their education in a school that has neither a website nor a VLE. Edward also mentioned that his parents responded positively to him doing his homework online.
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