What in the world are QR codes??

Recently during a webinar, I discovered not only what QR codes are but how to use them which also gave me the opportunity to begin considering how they can be used in education with my class and how I can spred this resource to my colleagues.

To begin with, QR codes are Quick Response codes which are a visual representation of digital information. Here is an example of what a QR code looks like:



Increasingly, we can see these symbols popping up but how can we use them?

First, in order to use the code, we need to install a QR code reader onto our mobile phone. Now, before you panic, I was able to load the reader into my camera in less than two minutes. The readers work with any mobile phone with a camera. Moreover, there are tons of readers available and most, if not all, are free!

So, we need to begin by downloading the reader which we can do by finding our phone and the readers avaible for it here:



When you arrive on the landing site, simply find your phone's manufacturer down the right side of the page.

The next step is to select your model in the chart and read across the table to find the correct available software.

After you have done that, simply download the software from the link, for example, my model is from HTC so I was shown a choice of four different readers and I clicked on the one of my choice:



The download takes a few seconds onto my laptop.

I made sure that the ".cab" file was saved on my desktop and then using bluetooth, I downloaded the file to my mobile. I opened the file and installed and I was done!

Now, to test that the program was working correctly, I went to this site and created a test QR code which was done in a few seconds and was very easy.

As this is so new to me, I am still looking in to the educational aspects, but some immediate ideas come to mind such as assignments, notices, contact details, etc. can all be transwerred using this method. I am really excited about this tool and I look forward to being able to record here some success stories on its use!

Sir Ken Robinson - Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Although this video has been around for a while, I wanted to put it up here because I find myself watching it over and over because it is so insightful and provocative. Even if you have seen it before, it's always worth another viewing because I often take away something new afterwards.

Sir Ken Robinson from SMoK on Vimeo.

The Education Timeline...

My Current Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

Recently on Twitter, there was a brief sharing of which tools constituted our PLNs. I thought it would be a good idea to supplement that with a view of my PLE so that this time next year I can see how my use of Web2.0 tools for teaching and learning has changed.

So, here it is on the left. To get a better view of it, just double click the image.

A significant number of the tools I use are Web2.0 technologies. One major tool which which would have been conspicuous by its absence is Twitter.

I've included Twitter in this mind map even though I have not been using it long enough to have developed a strong PLN. Thus, I have tended to "lurk" most of the time but even now, I have noticed a change in my use of it. Over the last month or so my experience has been a more interactive and collaborative one. Nevertheless, I won't say I'll permanently add Twitter to my PLE until I manage to grow my PLN on it.

Using Slideshare in a Blended Learning Environment

One of the challenges of creating and maintaining a blended learning environment is finding a way to actually share the content I have created with the pupils. While this use to be a challenge, over the last few years the ability to embed content, which is housed at other websites, in our LMS has meant that the variety of resources I am able to provide to the students and that the students can share with us is staggering.

Web2.0 tools often have the ability to share content and allow content creators to distribute their materials and assist in the learning of others . While there are thousands of sites which allow embedding of content my focus in this post is on a service called “Slideshare.com” and how we use it in our blended environment with a group of 10 to 11 year olds.

Like Youtube, Slideshare allows the account holder to upload Powerpoint slide presentations to their servers. The presentations then become searchable on the site and the account holder has the options of determining various settings which decide how the presentation will be shared and the information available as well as the licenses to be applied.

So, this is how we use it:

Any time the children, either individually or in a group, create a .ppt, or .pptx file they upload the file to the class account. Usually together, but sometimes on my own, the settings for how the presentation will be shared are set. The file is then loaded to our class account. Unfortunately, Slideshare does not deal well with animations, so before uploading to the website we usually need to adapt the presentation by deleting any animation effects.

From there, we embed the presentation in our EDU20 Resources area, or add the presentation to a specific lesson, blog, forum discussion, etc. But, as mentioned in an earlier post, Prezi.com also allows embedding.

The ability to embed the presentation files, and Prezis in EDU20 is fantastic for several reasons, such as the fact that the children only need their EDU20 login details. Furthermore, it allows all children the opportunity to share, discuss and improve on the content we create together or individually. It also provides supporting material which children can access independently or as a class we can access together over Vyew.com(see more on this website in an upcoming post). Children do, independently review presentations and Prezis to review topics they are interested in and to revise a topic we’ve covered. Interestingly, the children also discuss the presentations independently with other friends over Skype!

One of the other benefits of housing presentations in Slideshare, could be the ability to share the content with other classes in the school, but since most other classes are not at this point yet, it will, I hope, serve as encouragement, when they discover a bank of content tailored to the curriculum available to them.

Do you use Slideshare for class content? How do you make use of the embedding feature with your class? Do you use a different presentation sharing tool? Let me know in the comments!

Class blog - a tool for reflection

Over the last two years my class of Year 6 students (aged 10 and 11) have had the opportunity to regularly participate in creating content for our class blog.

I would like to reflect on the “whys” and “hows” of the class blog and where we are with it now.
Part of my teaching philosophy is the belief that children need the opportunity to reflect, create, self assess and take part in authentic experiences which they can use to construct their understanding of the world around them.

Moreover, I think it is important to allow the children to have the opportunity to create “for the real world” and have the opportunity to display, justify and critique their work to a wider audience than simply the class or even the year group. In fact, last year, when I began structuring the blogging experience, the class was becoming very excited. One of the boys pointed out something quite interesting, the fact that now, his older brother who was away at another high school, could now read about what he had been doing.

As noted earlier, there had been detailed discussions with the school’s principal and we were given the green light to create, along a carefully delineated path which I had mapped out, our Blended Teaching and Learning Environment (BTLE).

As a class we had to determine how we would contribute to our blog, how we would maintain control and address privacy issues while still allowing the children to analyse, create and evaluate in our learning community. We initially housed our blog at Wordpress.com and then set to work setting up the blog.

For security reasons, it was decided that I would be the person to post messages for the time being although the content would be contributed by the children. Furthermore, as a temporary measure, it was decided that comments would not be allowed. It was not ideal, but I also knew that the roadmap ahead promised far more opportunities in the future, and this was a small step toward that.

The class and I then set out our ideas of how to organise our content and who would write it. We eventually decided that a weekly rota would be created so that everyone in the class had an opportunity to contribute reflective content about what they had done.

In the end, the first year of our blog was very successful, with over 5000 visits in an academic year. As we moved along, we fine tuned how we ran it but essentially, I continued to be the sole person responsible for placing content on the site after the children had discussed, drafted and written the material.

This year we have moved our blog to Blogger.com mainly because of the improved ability to use widgets. As a result, we have added items like a customised layout, Shelfari, and other widgets which we actively use in our lessons. Another change we have carried out this year is the allowing of comments. While the comments are always moderated by myself, it has now opened the door to far better reflection and discussion both outside of class and inside. Now, postings which get comments are topics of discussion in lessons as well, and the children are reading and writing as a fun activity which helps to increase interest and passion! The last change to our class blog policy has been to allow all the children in class to be contributors to the blog. They can edit their own posts as well as comment on others, but I still control the content to maintain security.

The class blog is just one aspect of the children’s PLE. Nevertheless, it has made a huge difference in they way they approach their lessons. They are increasingly recognising that we are creating a Community of Learners where their work is authentic, reflective and which they have ownership over.

Do you have a class blog? How do you arrange contributions to it? Which widgets do you use and why? How has a class blog helped your students? Share some of your insights with us in the comments!

Photo Credit: Maria Reyes-McDavis

Our Teaching and Learning Environment (TLE)

Early last academic year, I approached our school’s Principal and discussed with him at length how I could extend our learning environment beyond the walls of the school. It was, and remains, one of my core beliefs that as a 21st Century Educator, I need to help children see that learning does not only occur in a classroom setting. And, as such, I felt the need to open up access by the children to a learning environment that they had more control over which they could more actively and meaningfully contribute to. It would be a community where their ideas were shared with their classmates and they could collaborate, extend, inquire and build on their passion to investigate and explore regardless of their physical location or time of day.

Given the fact that we are in a primary school, and the children are 10 or 11 years old I recognised and, identified my perceptions about the alternatives open to me. I support wholeheartedly the views of commentators such as Martin Weller (2008) who tend to support the idea that PLEs and VLEs are actually part of a continuum of environments. Thus, our learning environment would be called (as Martin Weller points out) a Teacher learner environment (TLE). But I call ours a Blended Teaching and Learning Environment(BTLE). According to Weller, a TLE can be seen as a step, moving along the continuum towards a full-fledged PLE.

These are a few of the reasons I felt it was necessary to implement the BTLE in our school’s particular circumstances:
1. A BTLE would be preferable to an ad hoc solution because of the security concerns of parents and teachers. Given the varying degrees of IT experience the children possessed, it was felt that a BTLE would be the safest option and a would provide a good grounding for later.
2. A BTLE would likely provide a more efficient means for parents to monitor their children's progress versus a system which would be less centralized and would potentially require a large number of logins and passwords. Although use of OpenID is becoming quite widespread, I felt that it was still too limited to give us access to tools we may need to use.
3. The BTLE would allow teachers to more easily assess student progress rather than having to monitor multiple websites which may be difficult to obtain data from.
4. The BTLE would allow a more structured environment for the children where standards for content and etiquette could be carried over from the classroom.

On the other hand, there were several concerns which had to be either addressed or at least kept in mind:
• Human and hardware resources needs. The demands on our already over extended IT department had to be limited as far as possible. Moreover, the hardware currently in use in the school was considered at a point where upgrades were essential even without any additional demands of implementing a BTLE.
• Parental reluctance in terms of the cultural belief that if “it” wasn’t happening in a classroom and out of a textbook then, whatever one called it, it would not be education. In other words, there was a (in some cases strongly held) reluctance on the part of parents to deviate from a system of teaching which did not mirror their own past experiences.
• Security. Whatever environment I created, it had to be straightforward to administer and keep secure. Moreover, it needed to be seen to be secure where children were free to interact with their colleagues in a safe, educationally appropriate and meaningful environment.

So, with those perspectives firmly in place, I set about creating my game plan. I determined the needs of the children in terms of IT experience and attitudes towards technology. Then I began creating a road map of what I hoped to achieve at various "checkpoints" by the end of the academic year.

Over the year our class “tested” four possible learning environments and reflected on how they fit. It was clear from the outset that no “off the rack” environment would be perfect but given the cost and resources constraints we were under we had to be more creative. What we, as a class, needed to work out was which one was the most accessible and appropriate for our learning.

In the end, we ended up creating our BTLE, which consists of:
• EDU20.org – one of the two main facets of the TLE. It took me quite a while, but I eventually set up the class and the school environments, loaded all the student accounts, uploaded resources, created resources and lessons, which in some cases included recordings, video demonstrations, screen demonstrations and of course assessment strategies using rubrics for assignments and then linking the resources to the lessons.

Other facets of the BTLE are:
• Class Blog
• Vyew.com
• Shelfari
• Bubbl.us
• Google Wave
• Wikispaces
• Voicethread

While there are a number of logins to recall and passwords for students to remember, “experience is a great teacher” and there have been relatively few password or login problems.

So, in the end, we never really created a VLE/LMS but a BTLE in which we have a completely online (does not use any extra school hardware beyond a network connection) Moodle-type of environment which is complemented by a class blog and a few external websites. We have, over the last year and half, also developed the practice of adding and removing bits from our BTLE as we need them. So, a month from now, who knows, the list may look completely different.

Some of the many benefits of having created the BTLE is student online access to relevant assessment and standards of content, authentic reflection opportunities, collaboration, rethinking and changing ideas, investigation, inquiring, discovery and digital storytelling to name a few. In other words, 21st Century skills.

Have you created a VLE, LMS, or BTLE? Perhaps you have a hardware strapped school as well. How have you implemented your learning environment? Tell me about it in the comments!

Works Cited
Weller, Martin. The Ed Techie. March 6, 2008. http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2008/03/a-ple---vle-con.html (accessed 18 December, 2009).