Jonesieblog

School broke up for Summer on Thursday afternoon, and on Friday morning I was on a plane to Geneva with Alan.  We took a train then a bus to Saas Fee, and arrived in sweltering heat about 6 pm, to see this inspiring view.

Saas Fee is completely car-free, so we had to haul our luggage across the village and up the hill behind the church to reach our apartment.  We managed to get lost on the way (which did not bode well!) but eventually we found the right block, and were warmly welcomed by the owners of our apartment.

I had planned a full day of acclimatisation activities for the Saturday morning, but Friday was Alan’s birthday, and he was in the mood for a few drinks! After a vague attempt to encourage moderation, I surrendered to the inevitable and joined him in a round of cocktails, then another…

Some time around 10.30am, we declared that Saturday would be an “orientation day”.  We wandered around, picked up some supplies and pulled ourselves together.  We decided to buy lift passes for the week, then took a stroll  from the village (1800m) up  to the top of the Plattjen Gondola (2600m).

We both felt reasonably fresh after the climb, and were considering going further when a thunder storm began.  We jumped into a gondola and headed back down.

Since we had lift passes, we decided to get our money’s worth, and took the Alpin Express all the way up to Mittel Allalin (3457m).  We hoped that we would begin to acclimatise simply by standing around in the sun up there and admiring the awesome views.  As we gawped at the mountains, I felt very small, and wondered if we were really going to get to the top  of any of them.

Back at the apartment, we ran through crevasse rescue techniques on the balcony and agreed that we would climb the Allalinhorn (4027m) the next day.  It is only 500m up from the Mittel Allalin station, but I was, nonetheless, very anxious about it.  Alan had no previous experience of glacial travel, and we were going to be walking up a route which crossed crevasses and a bergschrund.  I had invited Alan to the Alps, and I felt responsible for his wellbeing.  I did not sleep well.

We took the first train up to Mittel Allalin, and set off over the top of the Summer skiing area at about 8 am.  The snow had frozen overnight and this made the walking easy.  As the path left the pisted area, we stopped to put on harnesses, ropes and crampons.  We were both feeling the altitude (getting breathless more quickly), but neither of us had any other symptoms.

We walked together along a well defined path through the snow – Alan 12m in front of me with a rope between us.  As we plodded along we began to get the hang of moving together – the rope needs to be taut enough to be hardly touching the ground, but not so taut that it drags on the person in front. This tautness is important because the rope is there in case one of us falls into a hidden crevasse.  If it were slack, then the person falling would build up a lot of momentum before coming onto the rope.  This would make it much more likely for the other person to get dragged in after them!

My anxiety subsided.  We were moving well together and Alan seemed relaxed about the climb.  The track passed beneath a steep snow slope, and disappeared for 150m beneath the debris from a recent avalanche.  We traversed  this nervously, then headed for the end of the bergschrund, where the path  crossed a solid snow bridge.

We kept on plodding, and reached the top in less than “book” time (we were somewhat obsessed with this during the first week, as we took it to be a good measure of our fitness).  After managing the ascent without incident, the summit ridge was pleasingly narrow and exposed.

 
Alan and I posed for photos, scoffed a sandwich and headed back down. At the Feejoch, we passed a group of 20-30 walkers heading up. We were glad to have made it to the top before the masses!

The snow was already softening up, and by the time we approached the Mittel Allalin station every footstep was sinking a foot or so into the snow.

We drank a celebratory beer on the balcony of the station, then took the gondola back down to Saas Fee, where we began to plan our ascent of the Weissmies.

Stumble it!

1. provide students with tools to help them to reflect upon their own learning

I want the students coming to my department to be aware of themselves as learners, and to be active participants in their own learning processes.  Of course every student is actively involved in their own learning – no learning would take place otherwise – but I want them all to be able to take a step back from themselves and reflect upon their own progress.  Making this reflection regular, manageable and meaningful is a challenge!  We don’t have 1-1 computing devices in class, so if we are going to use ICT we are largely going to have to use the students’ devices in the students’ time (until enough of them have smart phones!).

Moodle

Moodle offers a plethora of tools that might help here:  Class wikis, glossaries, journals, forums… the list goes on.

Glow

Wikis and blogs are in Glow now aren’t they?  Or they will be soon.

Google Apps

Google Apps include forms and shared documents.  I guess they could be used somehow.

Edubuzz blogs

I’ve used scribe post blogs in the past. They can be very effective, but are really reflections upon the group experience rather than personal self assessment.  Blogs can be made private, so we could have individual scribe post blogs.  Unmanageable perhaps?

The desktop

Students could write up learning logs as word processing documents, stored on the server.  Not appealing!  We don’t have 1-1 in class, so impractical.  They could do the same at home.  How would they share these reflections with me?

Ad-hoc tools

Wallwisher could be very effective for group reflections. Can anyone suggest other tools that would work?

Non-ICT solutions

One solution would be to have 5 minutes at the end of each lesson for students to write up learning logs by hand.  This is simple, manageable and accessible for all students.  But the activity could quickly become perfunctory.

I don’t really seem to have resolved anything here.  Moodle and pencil-and-paper seem to be the front runners.  I’d be most grateful if you could help to clarify my ponderings!

Stumble it!

So the “best class ever”  have moved on to new teachers, and I have new classes starting on Monday. I’ve been reflecting, for myself and in my role as head of department, on what I am hoping to achieve by using ICT with my new classes. I want to make sure that I’m focussing on quality learning and teaching, not on ICT for its own sake. Here’s a provisional list of aims:

1. help students  to reflect upon their own learning
2. help them  to discuss their learning with each other and with me at any time
3. help them  to gather evidence of their own learning
4. help them to learn collaboratively
5. help them to self-assess their progress, and peer assess each other’s
6. provide them with alternative resources to “close the gap” if they have not mastered learning objectives
7. provide parents/carers with information about their children’s learning
8. provide me with tools to manage assessment data
9. save money!

Along with this list of potential benefits, I have a list of possible tools to deliver the benefits:

• Moodle
• Glow
• Google Apps
• Edubuzz blogs
• desktop applications and the school server
• ad-hoc use of Web 2.0 tools (Wallwisher, Posterous, Twitter etc.)
• Non-ICT approaches

I’m going to work my way through the first list in subsequent blog posts, considering the best solution for each (whilst at the same time thinking about the whole package). Please let me know if you think I’ve missed any important potential benefits, or important tools. Also please let me know if you have been through a similar thought process and have any conclusions to share.

This may take a while – don’t expect a new post in this series every day – and I may give up on the series if I feel that I’ve reached a decision already.

Stumble it!

A year ago, I had my first lesson with a new S2 class – a middle set. As usual, I began by saying:

Imagine that it is a year from now. You are leaving the classroom, and as you go, I have a tear in my eye and say “you were the best class ever”. What kind of things do you think you would have to do, individually and as a group, in order to make that happen? And as you leave, you say to me “thank you Mr Jones – you were the best teacher ever.” What kind of things would I have to do to make that happen?

A year ago, as usual, this led to the class coming up with an excellent set of class rules, and a clear list of their expectations of me as a teacher.  The pupils all signed their list, and I signed mine (once I had negotiated away items like “no homework”!)

Now things don’t always pan out the way I would hope, but today, as the class left the room for the last time, I must confess that there was a lump in my throat, and I was able to tell them honestly that they were the best class ever.  They have been a superb learning community.  They have supported each other, never slagged each other off, developed a clear sense of themselves as learners, taken on responsibility for their own learning and been brilliant fun. It was this class did the Counting Cogs investigation, and chose their own method of assessment.  It was Harriet from this class that spoke with me to a journalist (Douglas Blane) from TESS.

I was discussing them with a colleague at the end of the day.  I said that I felt very pleased with the job I had done with them, despite the fact that I knew that most of the success of the class had been down to the youngsters themselves, and that they would have been a great class for anyone.  ”That may be true to some extent” said my colleague, “but at least you know that you did not squander that opportunity.”  I do, and feel good about that.  But I’m going to miss them.

Stumble it!

Over the last 2 periods with my S2 class, we have been working on the Counting Cogs task from Nrich, using the groupwork roles suggested by them. 

I plan to use this task as an introduction to multiples, factors and primes in our new  CfE course, so I was really using my S2 class as guinea pigs!

The task was genuinely rich: the pupils came up with many conjectures which I had not predicted. Here are some snippets of the artifacts they produced:

I was particularly pleased to be able to discuss the “failed attempt” and convince the students that it wasn’t really a failure at all. It was really a great bit of evidence of the scientific method in practice. They could have improved their recording by showing how they found out that it wasn’t true (by making a prediction based on the conjecture, then finding that it didn’t work).

The pupils were using words like multiple, factor and prime without any prompting from me to do so. I think this task would work very well as an introduction to these concepts.

Stumble it!