Shortcut of the week - Print

Well, holiday times are almost upon us in Australia, so this will be my last shortcut this year. To finish, an old favourite.

Shortcut of the week - Snapping Windows

Sometimes, when you are working on two documents at once, it is best to view two windows at the same time. This week's tip helps make this easier.

Shortcut of the week - Commenting

For teachers, commenting in a document is a very effective way to check students' drafts. This is even more efficient if the document is on shared storage like Office 365 or Google Drive. To make the process even more efficient, use this week shortcut (it works in both Word and Google Docs).

Shortcut of the Week - Selecting Two

Last week I showed you how to use the arrow keys to select text. This week we're going to step it up a bit an looks at more selecting more text in one go.

Shortcut of the week - Selecting

The last couple of weeks has been about moving around a document. This week we're going to look at a similar idea for selecting text.

Shortcut of the week - Navigating two

Last week I showed you how to use the arrow keys to move around you document quickly. This week a couple of other ways to mover around your document quicker.

Shortcut of the week - Navigating

Use the shortcuts below to move around your document quicker.

Things to consider when first using collaborative eLearning tools.

Last term, after 12 and a half years in one College, I changed schools. It's amazing the amount of knowledge which you develop about how a place operates. It is also amazing that you don't realise this until you leave, and you have to learn it all again.

Another aspect of changing school is the change in the classroom culture. At my previous school, I had taught my senior students for many years. Subsequently, my pedagogy and methods were familiar to them. They knew how to operate in my classrooms. Changing schools has meant that, in many ways, I have to start that all again. Hence the title to this post.

Last term I launched into an on-line collaboration activity with a class which has never collaborated on-line before. It resulted in one of those classes where you reflect and think "...well that could have gone better". It reminded me of what needs to be considered when introducing a class to on-line collaboration. These considerations follow.

Allow for the "look at me" factor

Whenever you first start on-line collaboration, I can guarantee that students will post silly messages just because they can. They will make comments to their friends, or post a silly picture, word, video etc. I call this the "look at me" factor. 

How you choose to address this is up to you, but have a plan in place before hand. A couple of points from experience:

1. It will stop as soon as the novelty wears off. By the third time you use on-line collaboration it really isn't an issue any more.
2. Making a big issue out of this and drawing more attention to it just fans the flames.

My approach is to let it run it's natural course for couple of minutes. Then, once it starts to settle down, announce something like "Ok guys. We've had our fun, got that out of our systems. Now it's time to get into the work". 

The most important consideration is to allow for this time in your lesson planning.

Create mid-size groups

A whole class collaborating on the same piece of work is very powerful, but you need to take students there slowly. Starting with groups, for example 4-5 students, allows the space for students to develop effective collaboration habits.

In addition, smaller groups limit the impact of the "look at me" factor. They also allow you to more effectively monitor each student's contribution.

Establish roles

When students first collaborate on-line, it is easy for some students to take over, and other students to sit back, or get lost. Providing each student with a particular role helps each student to find their place in the collaboration. For example, in a class where students where looking for cultural memes in media, allocate each student different media.

This demonstrates the power of collaboration: allowing the group to cover more ground then each student individually. Eventually, students will learn to divide the task up themselves.

Set clear goals

If the process of on-line collaboration is new and a little confusing to students, then you need to make everything else really clear. Set out the clear objective of the task, what the groups is expected to achieve, and how they can do this.

Normally, my initial collaboration tasks with a class involve groups working from a template document which I have created. This provides clear scaffolding for the task. The scaffolding can be an outline, or a graphical organiser, or even a table. The important thing is that students know where to add their input.

Allocate writing locations

If you are using a collaborative tools where everyone is accessing the exact same space (eg. Google Apps, Office 365 or Titan Pad), then, initially, it is important allocate where each student can write. Either by using templates, or tables etc. This prevents students from writing over each other.

Use chat and comments

Many on-line collaborative tools have chat or comment features. These are great for when a student disagree with another student's contribution. If your tool has these features, then I suggest that you establish the rule "Do not edit any other student's work". If there is a disagreement or a point of contention, then use comments or chat to come to a resolution. Then the contributing student can make the edit.

Postpone formatting

Some tools will allow formatting. Often, when classes first start on-line collaborating, time is wasted as students continuously change text types and colours. This is frustrating, as you want the students to focus on the content. Never-the-less, a certain percentage of students are concerned about the aesthetics of the document

I have found the best way to address this is to explicitly allocate time at the end to format the document and inform students as such. An extension of this is to get each student to make a copy of the final document and then do their own formatting.

Conclusion

I hope these tips make your class' first adventures in on-line cooperation run smoothly. I know I'll be using them the next time I use on-line cooperation in my class.

Shortcut of the week - Find

If you feel a little lost, then today’s shortcut can help you “find” your way. It works in most programs and is very helpful for locating a word or phrase in a webpage or text document.

Shortcut of the Week - Bold, Italics and Underline

This shortcuts will help you with the most common formatting of text.

Citizen Science

Citizen science has been around for a very long time. In fact, since citizen science is science being conducted by everyday people, it could be argued that it has been around longer than professional science.

Semantics aside, the world wide web has transformed the world of citizen science by enabling the general population to actively contribute to ongoing professional scientific research. The video below explains it all very nicely.



For schools, I think the real appeal of citizen science projects is getting students involved in genuine scientific research. This is far beyond the use of simulation, and engages students with the scientific community. Students can contribute to a field's scientific community, just see the example mentioned in the video above.

Finally, I think the biggest advantage of citizen science is the opportunity it provides to those students interested in science. It might only be one or two students in your class, but for those students these programs provide them with a opportunity to continue their interest in science outside of the classroom.

The options for citizen science is continuously expanding. Below are some resources to find citizen science projects.

Zooniverse

Zooniverse is one of the best know sites for citizen science projects on the web. It's ever increasing collection currently hold 37 projects covering such fields as zoology, archaeology, astronomy, climatology, art, physics, modern history, ancient history, meteorology, genetics, botany, biology, oceanography. Each project has a strong community, and a number of them also have resources for educators.

Atlas Of Living Australia

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a collaborative, national project that aggregates biodiversity data from multiple sources and makes it available and usable online. Much of this data is collected through citizen science projects. ALA has a citizen science project finder, which currently lists 95 active projects. The search filters helps to find projects to suit your situation, and many of the projects have mobile applications.

Wikipedia

It is amazing the things you can find on Wikipedia. In researching this blog, I found that it has a list of citizen science projects. The list is broken into active and completed, and, thankfully, identifies the relevant location for each project.

Citizen science games

Some citizen science projects are provided as games. Some of these games are window dressing on top of the project, but other, like Foldit, and Eyewire, use the power of crowd sourcing to achieve amazing results. You can find more citizen science games at the Citizen Science Center.

Local Universities

I hope the links above provide you with enough options to explore. However, don't forget your local Universities when considering getting your students involved in genuine science. Contact them and see if there are any project which you class can participate in.

Shortcut of the Week - Desktop

You know when you have a heap of windows opened and you want to get to something on the desktop. You have to go through the process of minimizing each window. How painful!

May be you're a bit more efficient, and have found the "minimize all" button at the bottom right of the screen. But, did you know there is an even more efficient way to get to your desktop?

Shortcut of the Week - Undo Redo

This weeks shortcut of the week is well known and loved by many.

Shortcut of the Week - Copy Cut Paste

If there is one technique you can use to significantly improve your computer efficiency, it would be keyboard shortcuts. This series of blog post will share one key-board shortcut (or logical groupings of shortcuts) a week. Try using them for the week, and see your computer productivity rocket.

Copy Cut Paste

These are among the best known keyboard shortcuts, but I still see people right mouse clicking to copy, cut and paste.

eLearning Tools for Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

Any educator has hear of Bloom's Taxonomy along with it's various iterations. If you haven't, there are some excellent resources available at Educational Origami.

To help classroom implementation, I have categorised eLearning tools according to Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. This is just a beginning, and it will grow, so check back for more.
Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, by damienmurtagh

Mobile Devices and Education

The Report

The recently published discussion paper Technology, Distraction & Student Performance has led to renewed calls for the banning of mobile phones in schools. The paper assessed the impact of mobile phone bans by comparing pre-ban and post-ban standardized test scores. The authors concluded:

• Mobile phone bans improved student performance on standardized tests by 6.41% of a standard deviation.
• The distraction of mobile phones can have a negative impact on productivity.
• Low achieving students are more likely to be distracted, while high achievers are barely effected.

While I can see no basis for questioning the validity of the statistical findings, I do have concerns about the assumptions on which the conclusions are based. The first assumption I am concerned about is equating educational performance with standardize testing results. Any teacher, or administrator, working in schools knows how poorly these tests assess what education is about.

The second assumption I'm concerned about is the belief that disadvantaged students cannot develop the impulse control of high achievers, and, therefore, need to be protected from their mobile phones. In other words, deficit thinking.

While both of these assumptions might make sense from an economic point-of-view, they have no place in a pedagogical framework.

An Alternative Approach

In response to these assumptions I would like to propose two alternatives. Firstly, that education is about helping students to develop the skills they will require to live a fulfilling life as a member of their society. The second assumption is, that every student is capable of developing these skills. The fact remains that mobile phones will distract students, particularly disadvantaged students, but using these two assumptions will lead to a very different resolution.

Firstly, mobile phones are not seen as problems that need to be removed from education. Rather, the new approach acknowledges that mobile phones are part of the student's society. Therefore, students need to learn the skill of appropriate use of mobile phone. They need to learn how to be productive while having access to their mobile phone.

Secondly, instead of believing that this skill in simply indicative of high achievers, the new approach looks at high achievers as an example that students can be productive while accessing their mobile phone. Therefore it is a skill that all students can be taught.

Consequently, I would like to propose an approach where schools teach students how to not be distracted by their phone.

Practical Application - The Pomodoro Technique

Just like the teaching of any skill, there are uncountable possible approaches. What follows is an approach that I have found to be effective. A small caveat, the subjects that I teach contain a significant component of individualized project work.

For a while now my classes have been using the pomodoro technique. It is a common technique for focusing on work, and curbing distractions. This technique involves breaking your work into focus blocks, separated by small breaks.

I use this technique when students need to focus on producing work (eg. assignment writing, or completing individual tasks). The process is as follows:

• Preparation
• Students log onto computers and open required programs.
• Students cue up enough music to last for the focus block.
• If they use their phone for this then it must be on no notification (ie. not even vibrate) and face down on the desk.
• I set up a timer on the projector (I use moosti, but there are plenty more).
• Focus Block
• The timer starts and students start working (15 - 25 mins).
• During this time the only person students can talk to is the teacher.
• If they think of something they need to do or say, they make a note of it, and get back to work.
• Break
• When the focus block ends, the short break starts (3 - 5 mins).
• During this time students stop work and:
• physically stand up and move around
• attend to the distractions they noted down during the focus block
• talk to their friends
• send all those 'emergence texts' to mum

The anecdotal evidence which I can provide suggests that this technique has been effective in helping students focus and reducing distraction. Even the students who struggle with focus work well through this process. I suspect there are two interrelated reasons for this:

• The process is about delay not abstinence. Students seem happier to accept "not now" rather than "no".
• The working block is small enough, that students are willing to postpone their distractions. This is reinforced by the timer which show how little they will have to wait.

There is one more aspect of this process worth mentioning. In introducing the process I explain the rationale behind it. Students are informed of the recent research which show why multi-tasking doesn't work. I find that students accept the process more readily when they understand that it is based upon scientific research, and not just some arbitrary decision by their teacher. I have found that this 2 minute video from CNN's Dr Sanjay Gupta is a great way to get this message across.

Conclusion

I know that mobile technologies can be extremely distracting, and that adolescents, by their nature, have very poor impulse control, but I don't not see this as an excuse for teachers, to shirk our responsibility. Our students will be inhabiting a world with increasingly pervasive technologies, and therefore need to develop the skills required to be productive in this world. As a teacher, I believe that this is one of the skills I am responsible for teaching.

Google Educator Certification - Docs and Drive (Session 6)

We're now up to Lesson 8 of the Docs and Drive Level 2 training. This is a huge lesson, so it is probably best to cover it in a number of sessions.

Today we will look at the first section Sharing, Privacy, Printing, and Publishing.

We will continue to take notes on our collaborative document, and don't forget to share classroom ideas.

Google Educator Certification - Docs and Drive (Session 4)

Today we will be looking at Lesson 5 and Lesson 7 of the Docs and Drive Level 2 training. Lesson 5 deals with Slides, the presentation tool, and Lesson 7 looks at the Google Drawing tool. We'll leave lesson 6 until next week, as it deals with Forms, and I think it would be best to dedicate an entire session to this.

We will continue to take notes on our collaborative document, and don't forget to share classroom ideas.

Now that we will soon be on holidays, I'd suggest that you should take the time to complete your Google Basics Exam, and get your certificate. I heard some good advice from the Google Education Podcast - When completing your Google exams, using Google is not cheating.

Google Educator Certification - Docs and Drive (Session 5)

Today we will be looking at Lesson 6 of the Docs and Drive Level 2 training. This lesson deals with Google Forms. A Google form is an information collection tool. The information is collected in a Google sheet, which makes it a sinch to analyse.

We will continue to take notes on our collaborative document, and don't forget to share classroom ideas.

Locking down Facebook

Being an education professional mean maintaining a professional profile, and many education institutions believe that your public image impacts upon that professional profile. Social networking sites have become a big part of your public image, and, if you don't manage them properly then they could have a significant impact upon your professional profile.

This short video explains the current privacy setting on Facebook.