Mapping Software Google Earth/Maps

GOOGLE EARTH FOR TEACHERS!


Minutes to get familiar with
15-20 minutes (2 mins to download over fast network)

Ages suitable for
Any but most suitable for Y3-Y9

Key Features
Search feature (key in postcode or place)
Ruler (miles and km)
Insert your own information on Google Earth (only for your class)
Look at weather, videos, photos etc., of each searched location.

Health Warnings
Watch the Flight Simulator with boys – very addictive!
Information entered in Google Earth is not checked so suggest children cross-refer with other information sources (a bit like they need to do with Wikipedia).

How to introduce
Bring up Google Earth and spin the globe (use the mouse like a finger on a normal globe)
Explore your local area and different images, videos etc. Look at the HYBRID view and see images + roads to help everyone get orientation.
Take children on Googletour (free) http://www.googletouring.com/

Quick Activities (skills)
1) Using the ruler: Ask children to measure their route to school in kilometres and miles. Other measuring activities can be substituted. The length of the M1 or Old Kent Road or M62.
2) Using Layers View images/places of interest in somewhere they have not been – Gabon for example
3) Adding content: Ask children to insert on their map some information about your school or another

Longer Activities (capability)
1) Google have provided some useful activities to use with Google Earth. They are free and can be downloaded here: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/schools/classroom.html
2) Investigate physical geographic features such as: rivers, mountains, volcanos, lakes, settlements, valleys, roads, railways. Children can copy the image they want and then paste it into a word document, detail the specific feature and define the feature.
3) Students can investigate an area they know well and add in their own detail be that text, digital images, video.

See also the attached worksheet.

Questions for SIFE Team

Here is the agenda for our meeting tomorrow.

Agenda
Third Sector Edge Meeting
4PM, Caffe Nero, High Holborn

1) Introductions
2) Outline of the project including the UK education context.
3) Publishing 101 - a quick guide to how to publish a book!
4) SIFE Questions to Ben Barton
5) Thoughts on questions below
6) Role allocation and next steps
7) End

I think we should allow 90 minutes in total.


QUESTIONS
Some of the questions we might like to consider before our meeting tomorrow at 4pm are as follows:

I) What roles do you each want to assume in the process? - some traditional publishing roles are listed below.
a) Editorial Manager - good attention to detail and great written English skills.
b) Operations Manager - keep track of budget, negotiate with suppliers, own and drive the schedule.
c) Marketing Manager - getting publicity for our booklet, thinking about sales of the book beyond the free copies to Hackney, working with Operations Manager to look at profitability of product.
d) Project Manager - essentially a people centred and coordination role, ensuring that the VIth Form students are involved and informed, using text and email to make things happen. Sorting out problems.

II)How frequently do you want to meet or update on this project?
This project is on a relatively tight timescale with most of the people working on it part time. How can we use technology to its best use to help us make the project happen.

III) Are there any knowledge gaps you have around publishing or primary education in general?
I am quite happy to begin our meeting by explaining how books are produced and the requirements of each of the different stages. I can also explain how the UK Primary School system works (and lots has changed in the last 10 years!!).

IV) Where next?
A book of study skills is a great start but if we to want this product to become a business (which will fund reading volunteers in Hackney), what ideas do you have for other products and services.

See you tomorrow!

Third Sector Edge day at NESTA

Future Foundations and SIFE hosted at Third Sector Edge day at the NESTA offices in Plough Place on Friday. Attending were about 80 students from VIth form colleges in London, several university students and a few social enterprises - me included.

The day was fantastic and rather than go through it in detail I thought a few moments captured with words would be better.

Moment 1
Thanks to Kerry who told me and others her own story of not learning to read until she was 11 and the methods she and her tutor used to get her reading. She is now studying for 3 A Levels. It took bravery to approach me to tell this story and lots more to share it with her friends.

A note to this moment: two teachers also shared their own knowledge that some kids in their classes couldn't read but that they had to move the whole class on. More bravery.

Moment 2
After my pitch and the Questions slide went up. Most places you speak there are no questions or a couple of fairly lame ones but I have over 20 questions relentlessly pushing my ideas forward, challenging them. One girl from Thomas Tallis school was concerned disbelieving that some kids couldn't read. "What about the teachers? What about their parents? What is going on?"

Moment 3
Ciaeran and his mate from St Angelo's who asked searching questions about my book idea and how it would be produced - and then suggested speed dating to save a floundering cafe in Nottingham.

Moment 4
Meeting Jack and Jon who set up Future Foundations when in their early 20s because they had been inspired in their lives and wanted to inspire others. Somewhat humbling.

Moment 5
Laughing duing the human knot game and the human switch game and the energy that people twenty years younger than me have in abundance.

Moment 6
Walking home realising that I had let the cat out of the bag, had two schools who had pitched themselves to me and wanted to get involved and that I had to work out how to get every Primary child in Hackney reading now. There is no possibility of failure because I would now be letting down 80 students who believe it IS possible.

Keystone Education - first post

This is my first post about Keystone Education. Keystone Education has one aim which is to make every 11 year old in Hackney a reader.

Our first project is to work with Future Foundations to produce a booklet about Learning2Learn and transition to secondary school as well as running two events in Hackney to support those issues. Learning2Learn focuses on study skills, note-taking, revision and learning how to learn at secondary school.

The book and events will be FREE to every school in Hackney and maybe offered at a small price to other local authorities.

This blog will keep everyone updated on the development of this project as well as provding a place for briefing notes and congratulations on successes.

Do keep popping back to catch the updates.

End of Tests at Key Stage 3

Last week the government ended tests at 14 in English, Maths and Science. This is seen by many as a good thing but one argument about the tests is that they did give some purpose to life at school in years 7, 8 and 9. With my youngest about to go to secondary school next year, even I am asking what the importance of Key Stage 3 is.

What actually goes on in years 7, 8 and 9? Is it a preparation for GCSEs, is it all about transition - doing more subjects in different classrooms? Is it about growing up and doing so in an environment with controls and discipline? I have no idea and from visiting a number of schools both in the state and independent sector not one has really inspired either my son or I that his next three years are going to be a wonderful journey or a hard slog - its just a bit of a weak Key Stage with all the excitement going on at GCSE and of course A-Level.

Schools do have an opportunity with the New Curriculum for secondary schools to teach pretty much whatever they want through years 7-9 and so here is my quick go at a bit of whole school curriculum design for Key Stage 3!

Year 7
Term 1
Learning how to learn (note-taking, revising, working together, moving around the school, using technology) + catch up English and Maths to get all students on similar levels.

Terms 2 and 3
Subject introductions to Sciences, Geography, History, RE, Art, DT etc that focus on the amazing and exciting parts of the subject - basically using popular science and history books. Think Bill Bryson. This should capture the imagination and spark ideas for students to take into Year 8.

Year 8
Team Projects - cross-curricular projects that encourage team-work, cooperative learning, fun learning, investigations, presentation and success. These projects should run across a year with updates formally presented to the school every half term. Teams from tutor groups will allow students to bond and work with a purpose during the Year 8 dip.

Year 9
Get them started - GCSEs start here. Not so that they can finish in Year 10 (though GCSEs should be taken on a 'test when ready' basis) but so learning can take place over time with reflection. Cynically you will get more GCSEs if you take 3 years to complete the course rather than 2.

I am sure that there are different ways of looking at the Key Stage 3 curriculum and given there are no tests now in Year 9 I think we need to be thinking radically about the 'lost' Key Stage.

Life as a Teaching Assistant

This article first appeared in The Assignment Report in July(http://www.theassignmentreport.com/).
Enjoy!

Life at the Coal Face – Working as a TA in Inner London
Ben Barton, Director of Rising Stars and Teaching Assistant, Whitmore School
For the last term and a half, every Friday, I have made my way into London but not to the Rising Stars offices in West London. I travel east to take up my role at Teaching Assistant Year 5 at Whitmore Primary School, Hackney. Whitmore School is an improving school in one of the poorest boroughs in the UK with a high proportion of children with SEN. Over half of the children speak another language at home.
Unlike many in educational publishing, I have never been a teacher but having published educational resources for 16 years, visited over 400 schools and met with many teachers at focus groups and education shows I have a strong idea of what goes on in schools and what life is like for teachers and assistants generally. Educational books and software are a huge part of my career to and I wanted to find out whether they are of similar interest to teachers and even children!!
I had my CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) check and, after going through some volunteer training, (made much more arduous for men because of significant child protection issues), I began my first day at Whitmore in March of this year. First day nerves didn’t appear in the playground or in the class but in the Staff Room which was a hive of activity as teachers prepared for their day, discussing exclusions and flare-ups of the previous day and got coffee inside them. I felt lost.
Fortunately my teacher, Michelle Williams, saw the fear on my face and ushered me into her class to be briefed. “You are going to work on Maths with each child on their own,” she said, “here are their Year 5 Optional Tests, go through each of them and work through the questions they got wrong.”
Taking one child at a time, I was to go through the tests and help them find strategies for answering questions and helping the (level)3s get to 4 and the 4s to 5. I had a work bay with two tiny chairs (one importantly larger than the other known as the teacher’s’ chair.), a pencil and a stack of test papers with marks ranging from 2a to 5c. The spread of ability was huge given that there were only 25 children in the class.
The children themselves reminded me as a teenager; wanting to be cool but not sure what ‘cool’ was yet; challenging of authority with some reason and desperately keen to succeed and please if given some attention and praise. They challenge why Maths is important but accept how the subject can benefit them if the examples are relevant to them. And looking at the Optional Tests the examples they were given to work through later; there isn’t much that is relevant to the average 10 year old (or any normal human being) in many of the questions.
The other thing that was clear is that the National Strategies have a job on their hands for at least the next generation as so many of these children were getting significant and useful help from home; so we had ‘my granny’s 9x table solution; Uncle Hakan’s way of doing division and my brother’s way of doing the grid method’. Universal methods costing millions of pounds to disseminate will always struggle when the home has such strong and compelling alternatives.
So, what have I learned from the last term and a half at Whitmore that could provide a useful insight into schools for publishers and software suppliers?
Firstly, I have never seen a rep or even heard menti on of one at Whitmore. Many teachers claiming that: we just don’t have the time to see them and it can be embarrassing if we don’t like what they are selling.
Secondly, I have not seen a huge amount of whiteboard software being used. Usually the whiteboard is used by teachers to demonstrate methods using their own pen and interactivity.
I have however seen loads of really great reading books for different abilities, quite a few homemade worksheets and loads of photocopied QCA tests. The curriculum in terms of resources is a very much a hotch-potch rather than a clear, coherent scheme. And this does work, particularly in a school with such a wide range of abilities and backgrounds.
Finally, I have seen amazing teachers struggle and succeed with challenging children and even more challenging social circumstances.
I am now trying to work out how the publisher in me operates in this world. The TA knows exactly what to do!

Changes to the National Tests at Key Stage 2 and 3 – a pilot

Last week’s exciting BETT exhibition was somewhat overshadowed by changes proposed by Alan Johnson (Education Secretary) to the testing regime at 11 and 14 years old.

A pilot has been launched (and pilot has always equalled policy since 1997) that will test students when they are ready, rather than all together at the end of Year 6 and Year 9. Children will take a single level test (for example a Level 4 test) either in December or May but in ANY year. The tests will still be externally set and marked.

Other key parts of this pilocy (or polot) include the dropping of Science from the National Testing regime, financial rewards for schools (up to 10% of the per pupil budget) for achieving targets and new targets (importance will be placed on % of children who move through two levels in a key stage).

As usual the changes were announced to the press before schools and then sub-edited to fit agendas. Some of the headlines from GoogleNews were interesting:

• Government to consider scrapping National Tests - Telegraph
• Government to 'scrap' tests at 11 and 14 - 24dash
• Schoolchildren in England face more but shorter national tests - Guardian

There is a great deal to unpick here, not least the question of whether students should be tested so frequently between 7 and 14. Under the new plans the shorter tests could be taken between 2 and 3 times in each Key Stage.

Now, I actually think this is not necessarily a bad thing. You are tested every two years from 14 so the cycle is a bit out with tests at 11 and then 14. Also the tests have assumed such importance (because there is often build up of pressure over a year or two) that teaching can be subsumed in a mass of revision and test preparation throughout Year 6 and Year 9. Finally, the shorter tests will allow children to progress at their own level rather than either feeling like a failure or getting terribly bored by revisiting concepts they know.

I will talk about the national obsession with levels (and indeed sub-levels) another time.