Numeracy and Arts & Crafts

I've been making 3D felt pieces for my City & Guilds Diploma in Stitched Textiles and yesterday set myself the task of making a felt hat that fitted me. My numeracy skills were put to the test!

Measuring around my head was straight forward enough. Then I had to measure over the top of my head from the same points, divide the head circumference in two, half the measurement of over the top of the head, allowing for shrinkage add 50% ....... and so on! (This isn't intended to be instructions on how to make a felt hat!)

(My hand writing will be a lot neater when this is a teaching resource!)

I reflected on the numeracy skills I was using and how I would input these skills when teaching. I tend to use metric rather than imperial measurements, I'd need to know which measurements each learner was most comfortable with. I'd need to have an idea of their numeracy skills. During initial assessment I'd need to ascertain their numeracy skills. Do other tutors have ideas to share on how to find out what numeracy skills learners have, in an interesting and fairly brief way?

I'd really enjoy a discussion on this.

My own numeracy skills have been put to the test and I'm pleased to say my hat fits very well!

Now here's an interesting challenge!

One of the blogs I follow is Jane Hart's Elearning pick of the day. Although the sites she highlights are sometimes of no interest to me, more often they fall into the "could be worth bookmarking" category. Then, every so often, she adds a link to one which is right up my street.

Like today.

The 140 University delivers learning in regular nuggets of 140 words, by means of Twitter or Facebook. There is a variety of subjects to sign up for and the material is archived to review later.

I'm not a Twitterer and not really a fan of Facebook either (though I have accounts for and have used both), but this could be something I'd like to take advantage of and I might well sign up to see what's what. It's also got me wondering how we might use this idea and take it further. Any ideas? Do share them here, in the comments!

Sony Camera tip

I love my Sony camera to bits. Really I do. But recently, my (own) Sony camera broke and until Santa Claus could find the time to bring me a new one, I used "my" (AdEd) Sony camera rather more than I generally do. But I couldn't understand why so many of the photos I was taking weren't so good. I've never had problems before and I take A LOT of photographs.

Not only that, but there were surprising videos that I didn't remember shooting.

The mystery was solved when I noticed that, whilst in my bag, that little dial was turning without my realising. Often, I'd take a photograph on a different setting from the "automatic" I intended (the green camera shape) Looking closely at the design of this particular camera model, the dial protrudes ever so slightly and is quite easy to turn. Once I started to check that it was set correctly before snapping my picture, all was well again.

And it's a jolly good excuse for taking a heap of bad photos too ;-)

Uploading photos

Lizzie wrote in the previous post, about her difficulties with uploading photos to this blog and sometimes, to Flickr. I have had similar problems in the past and can share one or two thoughts which might be of help.

Firstly, sometimes the photo doesn't upload because of a problem with Blogger - or Flickr - in some remote place, not on your computer. We tend to think that any problem we encounter must be down to something we are doing ourselves and that's not always the case. Web-based services such as these often have problems of their own. You can check if this is the case on their central website - I think there's a link from the Blogger sign in page - where sometimes, they report service interruptions.

Another possible reason is that the file you are trying to upload is too large. If the photos are only to be viewed on screen, then there's no need for them to be anything larger than about 100kb. Next question, how to reduce the file size...(cue Jane Carter-Dunn!)

Another thing could simply be that your own internet connection is busy. Might be worth trying again at a different time of day. Early evening and late afternoon is often the worst time, when all the schoolchildren are home and checking their email and playing games online. Try sometime mid afternoon, perhaps, or early morning.

Of course, you may still have problems....in which case I'm probably no help at all! But of course, I'll always encourage you to keep trying and exercise max patience (something which I find extremely difficult!!)

Evidence-Based Teaching

Last week a learner left the session saying "I hope I'll be able to remember!". She'd learnt to crochet. I saw her in town and discussed it and offered to show her again, we could film the demonstration and then I'd be able to put it on to CD for her to watch at home. I've thought of doing this several times, have never got round to it, here was a great opportunity, and since I'd said I'd do it for her, I'd have to!

Yesterday evening I looked at clips on youtube to remind myself of crochet techniques - since I was being filmed I'd have to get it right and I taught myself to crochet that way two years ago. I found an excellent link, very clear instructions indeed, I wrote down the link to give to my learners.

As I unpacked materials this morning I discovered my camera was very low on battery - mmm. I'd promised to do this! My learner arrived with a huge smile on her face and pulled out of her bag what she'd done at home - evidence that she'd learnt very well and more! No need to demonstrate again - phew!

Has anyone else ever had problems uploading photos onto this Blog? I never had until now, I'd wanted to upload a photo of some fabulous crochet samples done by my learner but that's not going to happen - I think my computer is very slow because it can't cope with all the photos and video clips it's storing! I'm having the same difficulty with Flickr - can't upload photos onto Flickr either at the moment.

I reflected on what I'd intended to do - why re-invent the wheel? I'd found some excellent clips on Youtube - mine were never going to be as good - why make extra work for myself?!

Laptops, Projectors and other Gizmos

My technophobe days are over at last! I am now among the anoraks (aka 'techies') of the teaching world, armed with my sturdy laptop case with projector bag slung over my shoulder as I stride confidently into the classroom to treat my learners to picture shows of gasp-making awesomeness..
Well, that was the dream..
The reality was somewhat different!
I decided to try it out at home and put some worksheets up on the lounge wall (not good timing, since Champions League was on the TV at the time and groans were to be heard from the depths of the sofa where partner was recumbent with lager and crisps ready for a footy evening.. undaunted, I ran a parallel viewing opportunity for the rest of the household in the form of Parts of Speech followed by Word Tag quiz).. so far, so good
My next tutor session was scheduled for the following day, so I included an 'Introduction to Online Tests' in my session plan, sketching in approximately 15minutes as the time slot... The first five minutes were spent looking for an extension lead, since desk and plug socket were yards apart.. the next five minutes looking for a thick book (mysteriously in a learning establishment there were none to be found! Only wafer-thin Readers Digests) in order to aim the projector somewhere vaguely in the direction of the whiteboard and not at my knees. The next five minutes I had to unscramble my desktop icons on the laptop to remember where I had stored my televisual feast of learning.. the class by now were doodling in their notebooks or looking out of the window. Then, tra-la! Up came the selected first page of links in glorious technicolour on the whiteboard, not a camera-shake in sight... success! Ah, but what was that mysterious glow on the laptop keyboard, followed by an intermittent bleep...? O joy, the power was fading and, well, dear Reader, you can guess the rest... Intrepid Tutor had left the transformer at home and the battery was dying...
Lessons learned, but not by the intended learners that day!
The projector and laptop have lived quietly ever since in my office cabinet, languishing beside discarded Sony Walkman and long-dead Betamax videos. However, life springs anew and the trusty equipment is due for another outing this coming session when I want to do some Practice Tests 'live' in class. To this end, I am wielding yet another sparkly new gizmo- a mobile webstick! Do I feel confident? Watch this space...

A plea!

It's interesting that Gill's last post, below this one, was titled "What's in a name?". I am currently setting up a course on Moodle for those taking the CTLLS course as we are piloting a new approach and are asking teachers to use e-learning as part of their course. Of course there is so much good practice on the blog that I want to showcase and the best way to do this is to link directly into the post I am discussing. In order to do this I have to be able to click on the Title at the top of the post. So no title - no easy linking. What's in a Name? - the opportunity to share your good practice with your colleagues, through Moodle as well as the blog.

This blog is itself an example of good practice and I know that others in adult education, outside of Gloucestershire, refer their colleagues to our blog - two examples are Sally Betts from NIACE who presented at our recent RARPA event and Tracey Morris from the RSC. So thank you for all your contributions and we look forward to some new contributors from our colleagues on the Initial Teaching Training programme.

what's in a name?

Tragedy

Norwegian Sky

Mermaid's Gown

This website has the most amazing collection of colours, each with its own story. It's great fun to simply click through to each and decide whether or not the name represents your own idea of the colour of the pencil.

Imagine what fun you could have with learners making up names for colours. Could be a useful starting point!

I have no idea what an Amaranth is (will have to google!) but it's a glorious colour.

TLP film competition

Rob Randall has brought this competition to my attention. Do any of you have learners who might like to create a film? We could loan you one of our Flips to record it. The closing date is the end of November so no time to be wasted.

Using Video in Spanish class

Using the Cybershot camera and the gorilla pod, I made a short video of myself having a conversation with a Spanish friend, perched on my kitchen table! I showed it in class using the laptop and projector.
The great advantage of making our own materials is that it can be tailored exactly to the learners - I have found it a very effective method of checking and consolidating what they've learnt.
It suits most of my learners that the classes are held in small, friendly and familiar settings - one of the disadvantages is that we don't have whiteboards suitable to project video clips and photos onto. The canteen blind worked fine! I chose this rather than a white sheet which I'd tried before. I wondered if AdEd could look into providing small, portable screens which we could use?

Go, see, now!

Just reading Sara's post below about her work prompts me to remind readers to visit the AdEd Interest Flickr Group which has got more than 600 photographs of the most amazing work done by learners over the last couple of years.

The work seems to get more inspiring by the day and is such a valuable record of what is happening in Gloucestershire.

If you visit, do leave a comment, won't you?

I am working with learners in Littledean to create a Community Textile for the village. As far as we know this has not been done before in the village. Learners felt it would be good to record the village landmarks as they are in 2010. The textile will be completed by the end of the year and will feature the local school, church, chapel, pub, our millennium field, the local meat and veg shop (including the owner Pete the Meat) and even the local bus! We have walked around the village and taken lots of photographs. The village is surrounded by glorious countryside and so this will feature prominently as well. The project has caused a lot of interest and most weeks we have visits by local folk to see how we are getting on. Sometimes visitors are from further afield as you can see by this photo. It also dispels the myth that men don't sew - this gang of four had a great time and the Arch Bishop stayed much longer than he intended. No - none of this was in the session plan, but learners loved sharing what they had achieved and explaining the plans for the textiles. There are photos of our progress on the AdEd 'flickr' site and on my own 'flickr' site.

Art and Craft tutors, please read

I had an email today from Mark Hewlett (AdEd Head of Quality Improvement and Contracting) which shared a link to an incident report which made me shudder.

As the original email, forwarded by Mark, said:

"I’ve not sent this out to you all to shock or upset but more to highlight the fact that this case proves that even when the task/activity appears to be straight forward, the lack of awareness and Risk Assessment has resulted in horrific injuries.

This was a simple classroom activity which should have been fun and enjoyable but the outcome so avoidable!

It may be worth sharing with those in your organisations (in particular large organisations like colleges where classroom activities are so varied) who doubt the need for health and safety, the appreciation of the importance of Risk Assessments, the need to communicate these risks to those who need to know and the potential consequences of failing to tell Learners! It may be an eye opener to them?"

Read the report yourself here

Thoughts and comments would be welcome.

I have recently bought my own dongle after trying out one on loan from AdEd kit. I could immediately see great benefits in this neat bit of equipment - not just for teaching but also for fun. However, so far I have not been able to get it working. I must admit I have not had time recently to spend long on this latest challenge. I wondered if anyone has any tips that I can pick up before I try again.

voice recorders

just to share something really simple that has made a real difference in our community choir.
Many of the members do not read music, so learning complex songs with 4 parts can be very time consuming, and 3 parts often sit in sessions while the 4th part "note bashes".

This time I've recorded the different parts on the Olympus digital recorder - some sung or hummed, some playing the lines on the piano, using a new file for each - my husband did the bass lines, so a variety of voices! and with some songs we recorded a quartet of us, so the whole effect of the song could be heard!

Once uploaded on the computer each of these files can simply be burnt on to an audio cd as a new track (straight on, no need for any complicated conversion software) the tracks listed, and the resultant CD can be copied. Once the files were ready the Cd took about 20 minutes to compile.
(We sold it to members at 50p a time, with all the term's music on it, which more than covered the cost)

The result has been dramatic! No more sitting around listening to others learning their part, only polishing up and focussing on the hard bits.
The speed of learning has increased not just for the individual but for the whole group, as the song can be put together so much more quickly.

It's not for everyone, but I know several members who have played it over and over at home or on the car cd, and it really offers an alternative learning style. The gain in confidence of the "I can't singers" has been tremendous!

A few links to share

It's easy to tell when I should be doing something else...I start following links on websites! There were some goodies to share today:

Aviary tools looks a useful place to find web based programs which can be accessed anywhere

I'm not a language teacher, so can't evaluate LiveMocha objectively, but it looks a pretty useful site which might interest your learners, as does Xlingo . Another language site which might be worth exploring is italki, especially the facility to communicate with a native speaker. I might exercise the usual internet cautions with that one however, reminding myself of some basic internet security advice before beginning a conversation!

Finally, I'm not sure that the ability to make a balloon starfish qualifies as an essential life skill but who knows when such a skill could come in useful? The 5 min website has plenty of displacement activities, most of which take slightly longer than the name suggests.

Hmmm...I wonder if learning to make a balloon starfish would count as CPD? I'm off to reflect on that right now.

Working Collaboratively online

I've just finished an online workshop run by NIACE, called "Working Collaboratively Online". It was delivered using Instant Presenter and I really enjoyed it, even though my sound wasn't working properly. There were sixteen participants, one principal presenter and two further staff to offer tech support (I needed that!)

We learned about - and used - Twitter, XlearnSMS, Etherpad and the discussion forum facility of a Moodle just like ours. We were introduced to the new Google Wave which looks fantastic - can't wait for that to launch and can see there's going to be much fun to be had with it.

There was pre-course prep to do, the course itself ran from 9.30 till 12.30 this morning and now we have homework. But the whole workshop was really enjoyable and surprisingly easy to follow. In particular, Instant Presenter is a remarkably effective tool for teaching online, involving everyone in the process, wherever we happened to be.

The picture is of the new home of Adult Education in Gloucestershire; a wonderful old warehouse in the heart of the historic docks, Gloucester and a step away from the new shopping centre. Things are settling down nicely!

Completed Hanging at Joys Green Community Centre

My learners at Joys Green Community Centre completed their hanging at the end of last term and it's now on display in their centre, they are rightly quite proud of their achievements.
I've sent several photos to the AdEd Flickr site and they've provoked some very positive comments. I look forward to being able to show them the comments, I'll probably print them out, I imagine they'll be thrilled.
The hanging will also be on disply at Cinderford Artspace's 21st birthday celebration at the end of next month. We regularly hold exhibitions to celebrate our learners' achievements. Being able to photograph work being exhibited and store them on the laptop and web is something I feel pleased to be able to do.

Power Point

Over the last 18 months I have made several power point presentations of, for example, work from exhibitions I've visited and other learners' work. I've used them in class and they've made a very useful addition to resources I take in.
I've come across a problem which I'm wondering if anyone can advise me on and help me solve. When I copy the Power Point to a CD and try to watch it on another computer, I am told "Power Point can't read XXX (name of presentation)." This didn't happen when I used the AdEd lap top I used before last summer - it was replaced because it had no firewall in place.
I still feel new to using technology and there's oh so much to learn! I'd hoped to give some CDs to friends, but don't want to give them power point presentations that they can't read.
Any suggestions?

What would make a difference?

Is there a piece of kit you feel would make a real difference in your classroom? Have you seen something new that you would like to trial? We will shortly be able to put in a bid for further capital equipment so please let me know as soon as possible what would be on your wish list and why. Please a new post on the blog with your ideas.