Teaching outlining with thinklinkr

The best educational software allows teachers to teach skills they have always taught but to do so in a much more effective way. Thinklinkr is the first online Outlining application and it has great promise for teachers. The video below shows a movie of an outline being built up. It takes about 10 minutes to become familiar with the controls. It does a simple task well.


I suspect that outlining is not usually well taught, because it is a tedious task for the writer, is messy as one moves sections around on a piece of scrap paper and seems to get in the way with the actual writing. A very easy to use and clean interface like thinklinkr is very accessible (once you have a computer and an internet connection) and is fun to use. There are few bells and whistles: just simple text that can be exported into Word or whatever at the conclusion of the outlining process.

A big advantage of this tool over conventional outlining is that being online, it can very easily be a collaborative activity. Students can submit their outline to the teacher for comment, groups of students can work on an outline together from home.

The video demonstrates a very neat function of thinklinkr, that the old versions of the outline, the revisions, can be played as a movie, and one can scroll back and forth to see how the outline has evolved with each keystroke.

A tool like this allows and encourages more attention to learning an important skill.
If you are using Internet Explorer, just click on the button to download Chrome Frame it it will work fine. You can have a play with my outline here (but not edit it).

Infernal technology 2: eBooks!

In Sept 2007 I wrote a post in the form of a facetious letter to the editor in 1899 about the shortcomings of the automobile compared to horse transport and bicycles and walking. It was inspired by the constant dribble of complaints about new technology based on a similar argument: that everything old is necessarily superior to new ways of doing things.

Over the last few years I have had numerous conversations with people who have never read an eBook - a book on a screen, but are quite convinced that they will never catch on, because the person just loves the feel and the smell and the touch of a book. Well so do I, but have read quite a lot of books on various small devices and I can tell you that it is a pretty good experience.

I am currently nearly finished a 500 or so page non fiction book on my iPhone, which is about a third of the page area of a paperback book, and I can testify to it being a darn good experience. I read it in bed, lighter than a book and does not require a bed light at 3 am, and I read it for 45 minutes while waiting for the RAA to arrive, and I have marked selected sections with Notes, and it cost less than a paper book, arrived in abut 1 minute and did not involve a trip to the library. I can't share it with others, so it isn't perfect in every way, but you ought be open minded to the possibility of eBooks, because like the automobile they are here to stay, and probably dominate reading in the very near future.

The image is what you see on the screen. The display can be rotated to landscape view as well.

Google Sites: a wiki with good sibling relations

I have been presenting a group of workshops recently showcasing a number of Web 2.0 applications and have used Google Sites as the starting point. From the speed with which teachers were able to set up a site and make it look presentable and funcitonal it is like most wikis, very easy to use. As I explored Sites more I found that it has some very useful features. One is that once you have a Google account - using any email as your identity, you can creat as many sites as you like. Different sites can have different acces right for a class of student to view, or edit, or open to the world. These can all be linked to a home site, so on the menu to the right, I was the sole editor of most of the pages listed, but Open Access is actually another site that could be edited by the workshop participants.

Another feature is a result of having some powerful siblings in the Google family, most of which integrate with Sites very well. You can view Calendars, Picasa Web Album slide shows, Google docs, and in the case of Forms, complete a suvey.

Many of the teachers immediately began setting up one or more sites for class use. The immediacy of wikis is very appealing to teachers, and the Forms from Google docs is an added bonus. This feature make creating a form, or survey a 15 minute task if you know what you want to ask and the resulting survey can be viewed in Sites, or emailed to the participants. The image of a survey to the right is how the survey appears when inserted into a Sites page.

A nice little feature is that when you go to the Insert menu in Sites and select a document to insert, you are taken to the list of files from you Google docs home page: Mr Google having taken the liberty of opening up the sibling site in the family. A single login to a Google account makes all of this very accessible and easy to use.

But really, most of these or similar features can be found in WetPaint or WikiSpaces and other wikis. The big news is that web publishing for students and teachers is available right now. What teachers really like and deserve is control of these applications. Teaching is an individual and often spontaneous art and teachers should not have to go through a middle-person to access these powerful learning tools.

If you would like to browse a site you can do so HERE.

Names, children, internet identity and common sense

Last year in a workshop on Web 2.0 applications we got into discussion about children's personal information and privacy and safety. Some teachers showed a deep-seated fear of children's identities being discovered on the internet and dreadful but unspecfied consequences occuring as a result. Obviously it is a good idea to be sensibly discrete about personal information, especially if you are young and not having developed the the set of sensible caution-antennae that is called adulthood. But after the workshop I called in at a local roasted chicken establishment, as one does, and waiting in front of me was a girl about 12 wearing a pullover with the names of all the year 6, 7s and 8s in her school on the back. So I can now tell you that Hazel McIntyre is in year 7 at St xxx School. Apparently there is something about internet personal information that is much more dangerous than old-media personal information. I can read in the local free newspaper that Lucy Liu is goalkeeper of the school netball team, just below her photograph. The unthinking fear about exposing any child information on the internet needs to balanced against the way we routinely use similar information in the public arena without any apparent harm. Teachers need to be engaged with Web 2.0 tools on the internet so they can understand from their own involvement how to manage privacy and openness in a sensibe ways.

I'm a teacher, why blog!

A blog is a journal that is published online. But very few people keep a journal, and even fewer publish it. So what's the attraction of a blog? Well, it is not for everyone. However, teachers have one or more captive audiences with which they are in constant communication. Secondly, blogs are immediately available to anyone with an internet connection. Thirdly, they allow comments by readers. So, if teachers want to get information to their students in a form that is always available (at home) and which students can respond to, and maybe parent can have access to as well, then a blog might be useful. Add to that the fact that blogs gererally look good, can include images and video, are searchable, then maybe they are a useful communication tool.

What about students, I hear you say. Well, blogs can be restricted to a limited audience, and if students have a need to communicate with more than just their teacher, they can be very useful. They are simple to structure: are always linear, and are a long term record. They can be a major journal of learning and observations. They can be open to parents and family, so can provided an instant and appreciative audience. That is a key attribute of blogs for students. They can provide a forum and an audience for student writing and images.

Students and teachers can have multiple blogs that are written for different audiences as the need arises.

Real learning, programming with Stratch

This is an image of my first bit of programming using Scratch, and I am interested in using it as a tool to practice and learn down-to-earth curriculum skills. In this case, mid primary exploration of what the main plane figures consist of: like equilateral triangles. The glorious animated version can be seen here - 7 seconds of maths glory. Scratch is a delight to use. Very very simple and apparently powerful.

I am interested in how to use a powerful tool like this for students to learn some nice measurable curriculum skills and understandings close to the heart of any teacher. Having just heard presentations at the CEGSA conference on Scratch is strikes me (again) that we often go out of our way to suggest the most complex ways of using ICT and then are upset when teachers do not apply our wonderful ideas. Everyone seems to see programming only as a problem solving tool that students use to initiate an investigation, work on it for a long time, and hopefully come to a rewarding conclusion. While this kind of project can be very effective and beneficial, it is just about the hardest kind of learning to manage, requiring particular attitues, patience, teacher skills and student perservearance. Why not think of ways to apply powerful technologies to quite rudimentary learning, like, in this case, Year 5s learning the characteristics of standard shapes, and becoming familiar with their construction and manipulation?

What did they learn? Not a bad question for schools.

I have been working away for some months on researching a paper on professional learning, and some of my previous posts late last year reflect this. I have now published a fairly extensive report on what I discovered in this search and here it is: What did they learn? The title of the site suggest the main finding - that the focus of everything in a school should be directed to improving student's learning. This may seem to be a trite thing to say, but it has clearly not been the case. As a principal of a school for about 30 years I can say that we focused on lots of things in the '70s to '90s including school culture, democratic decision making, staff development and a hundred other things, and paid little attention to measuring student outcomes. We certainly cared about student learning, but we concentrated on achieving a good environment for learning and agonised about how to motivate, encourage, support and recognise good learning. But we didn't measure it in a systematic way and did not compare our measurements very much. We got into a huge battle for the last 20 years about external testing, and I was very active in this fight, and much of the criticism of testing is valid. This is reinforced by an excellent article by Ken Boston Our Early Start at Making Children Unfit for Work.

The trouble is, that in that fight we lost some perspective, and while condemning some testing we drifted into a culture in which no comparative assessment of student performance was acceptable. We developed a hundred reasons not to compare one teacher's results with another's. Teaching became secret teacher's business into which no one can intrude. The research into school improvement makes a good case for bringing these two extreme view closer together and achieving teacher professionalism and accountability for student performance.