(What we used)

1. Scripts
2. A moderate amount of time
3. A decent camera on a tripod
4. Editing software (Imovie)
5. Our youtube channel to upload and share finished videos

First tutorials

Our rationale for doing this was clear – as a Media department it seemed a crime that we had no videos of their teachers’ attempts to do the same things we ask our students to do all the time (and its a fair question in general I think: how often do we actually do and experience for ourselves the things we make students do every day?!). We hoped that on the simplest level, just having a clear, engaging visual representation of key things in our subject would really appeal to students. Also, it should provide variety and enable independance – easy for students to watch these again in their own time and to provide variety in teacher-led talk & explanation.

My first attempt was….ok. I worked mostly alone, with the help of one colleague for the main part – a scripted conversation with myself (watch it and you’ll see what I mean) to show the basics of using a green screen. A key thing I had wanted to do was to make the tutorials just a shade of laughable (remembering Jim Smith’s RING <RELEVANT, INTERESTING, NAUGHTY & a GIGGLE principle) so that students might be even more likely to engage with the material. I am not entirely sure how well it worked here, so you will have ot judge for yourself.

Conclusion: When making these tutorials it is better working as a group wherever possible – better ideas=better results.

Main tutorial: Camera shots, angle & movements (see here)

This was the first thing we did as a department (3 people involved in total) and it was much more successful that my lone first attempt. First we picked the best camera possible to film it (d’uh!), but what also worked really well was that in the planning stage we thought really carefully about the mechanics of the video and how it would communicate genuine learning and subject specific vocabulary to our students (the aim of it was to get them familiar with the various ways in which you can describe film)

What we settled on doing was using the ‘camera within a camera’ idea to really show off the mechanics behind the short film’s construction (see screenshot below). So, I was the hapless teacher with the coursework, while my other colleague filmed me who was in turn filmed by the other person in the department! This meant that we were not only showing our students what the different shots the camera was taking but also the way in which my colleague had stood/moved/sat(!) to achieve that shot. Have a look for yourself and see if you think we’ve pulled it off…

Final thought: Keeping tutorials short seems to be the key. We have noticed that students want to be able to access the information quickly and not have to trawl through information that is not relevant to them. So, say for a program like photoshop, we have been making lots of mini-tutorials that don’t last more than 2 minutes – generally they are only showing one or two processes at the most.

Will be reporting back soon to see how they are affecting the teaching & learning of our students.

One of my first aims was to develop a departmental approach to using blogs – i.e. to actually build it into the actual SoW and assessment of our teaching Media, rather than just trying to make it an optional, or ‘bolt-on’ extra.

We’ve started this by doing it Key Stage 5 (or A-level – 16-18 yrs). It made particular sense with Media because the syllabus for A-level strongly encourages teachers delivering the course to use blogs (forward thinking from exam boards for a change!). Setting up a blog proved more difficult. As alluded too many times, blogging sites (including this very one) are all blocked by Local Authority internet filters. This draconian measure means those of us who see the potential in blogs can sometimes not even get started. Luckily though, the very helpful IT guys at my school worked out that the mac server that our computers runs off also came with a blogging/networking facility, that, until now, had gone completely unused. Fantastic!

First step was to set up my own blog which would act as:

• A conduit for students to find work for lessons and for independent study
• A place for other teachers within the department to see how I was using the blog and hopefully, gain ideas from it.

As well as this, I created a ‘student’ blog, to model what kind of things students should be producing in their blog. So far, I have really underused it, instead focusing on just getting my own blog in order, but I plan to use it much more once blogging as a system is established. I wonder, if, in part the idea quickly became defunct – as students quickly became more used to the blog, they naturally started looking at each others’ work – a handy feature for encouraging students to think about their own work and adjust it accordingly.

This was one of my own blog posts. As well as more typical ‘how to do my lesson’ type posts, I tried to post tutorials for neat little tricks they could do, such as taking screenshots. What I found good about doing this particular post is that when one student looked at my own post they showed me an even quicker keyboard shortcut to doing what I was talking about. Excellent – so I was able to very quickly edit the post and put that in as well, thereby showing how the collaborative nature of the blogs could be both ways rather than just one. The blog itself looks like this to students as they click into it:

Attaching files is fantastic – instructional ppts are the mainstay, but also something as simple as having a picture on the different blogs means that students can find the appropriate blogs for their class that bit more quickly. I am also training students in the use of tags – and have tried to make my own blog reflect that. Once my blog gets into the 30+ posts mark, it will be interesting how quickly students get into the habit of clicking on the correct tag as opposed to spending ages trawling through the pages.

Conclusions

Currently, both AS, A2 and OCR national students are using the blog – roughly in excess of 40 students. Also 2 other members of staff are using them to set and mark their own work in their lessons. One member of staff has also created a youtube channel for the department, then linking it to their blog, creating a great way of linking different multimedia together. The intention is to continue to get students to look at good and bad blogs – and use these to generate discussions on standards and allowing for improvements. As a final aside, I am just wondering if anyone has any experience with using these MAC-servewr generated blog – one issue we seem to be having at the moment is that embedding video (i.e. from youtube) just doesn’t work. Although (and I think this particularly cool!) my students figured this out, got annoyed by it, but then some managed to download the videos (*cough*TOS*cough*) and insert them into their blogs that way. And that’s my favourite thing about using the blogs across a whole department so far – it seems to be encouraging resourcefulness – from both staff and students.

I knew that students had to show me their skills at writing in the tabloid style for the upcoming exams and I knew that I wanted them to peer assess each others’ work. As their writing was a ’work on progress’ I wanted them to be able to edit it easily, so I decided they could use the computers to write their articles. I then thought I would just let them print off an early draft of the work. Could I avoid the hassle of 23 students printing off work at once then going crazy with post-it notes? Then I remembered the ‘review’ feature on word – what if I could get students to do the process of peer assessment in ‘real-time’? What I envisaged with this is that another student could quickly offer written feedback to the student on their word document and then the student could return to their own computer and edit their work quickly.

Q: So how did I achieve this?

A: In word click ‘review’ (top menu), highlight a piece of text and click ‘add comment’. Done!

 Key notes from observing students carrying out this task:

• Easy to be specific. Sometimes when you get students to peer assess their work on paper they don’t like drawing on the other person’s work or underlining key things. With reviewing on word all the comments are made on a wider right margin and so don’t actually impinge on the actual content. Students generally seem to enjoy working on computers and this is another way of exploiting that engagement for learning.
• Keep it moving. The slight kinaesthetic element of this activity meant that students didn’t have enough time to become bored sitting at a computer – after five minutes they were shuffling onto the next one! I wonder if in the future I could make this moving a bit more fun…
• Success criteria to frame comments. Before students started, they had a display on the board that modelled the kind of language they should use to make comments (e.g. they should imagine someone else is reading it and that they can understand the explanation) and the kind of language techniques that you would expect to find in a tabloid style article. This meant that students had an expectation, right from the beginning, of the quality of the peer assessment they were supposed to produce.
• The text box problem. Students who had done fancy layouts to mimic the look of newspapers were left a little despirited, because you can’t add comments to text inside text boxes. If the focus is on writing, then next time I do this I’ll make a point of saying that layouts are not our focus and should not be used.
• Highlighting too much text. Often students (by mistake I think) highlighted the whole part of the text. I will make it clear to them next time not to do this, or to delete any comments they make doing this by mistake.

Conclusions

I got a little carried away by how well this process was going that I didn’t leave enough time at the end of the lesson for students to go back to their work and use this to strengthen their learning. Many students raced back to their computers and immediately started editing their text based on the suggestions other students had left. This made me realise that the best way to use this will be in short, sharp bursts. What I mean is this: Students spend 10 minutes writing a paragraph, break for 10 minutes to peer assess using word and then return to their work. Repeat when necessary. Having, in a sense, a series of peaks and troughs of peer assessment is going to be valuable for the reasons above but also for the purposes of ensuring all students are engaged and on-task at a similar level – if they know that in ten minutes another student will be seeing their work, I believe they might just sit up and take a little more notice of their writing.

Richard’s noticing

Richard started off by showing how he had been using blogging with a couple of the Year 7 classes he teaches. Both Richard and Andy had previously worked out how to create blogs (which is detailed in this post) and so at the end of their last meeting they had decided to start trying to use it with one task on a few of our classes. Andy was interested in how the approach of using blogging for homework out of the lesson as a starting point for using it, had worked. This was different to Andy’s approach of using it firmly within the context of the lesson and showed that they already had developed different ideas about how the idea of blogging with a class could be used.

The responses from Richard’s homework blogs were promising; a number of students had completed the homework already and were now queued for Richard to ‘approve’ or ‘reject’. Richard again highlighted that this was an interesting option because it places increased emphasis on the value of what appears in the blog: if the students work was not quite up to the standard expected, then it could be sent back to the student for redrafting. This means that the final product of the blog post is given more value to the students, as they can see that the piece of work that have produced has met or exceeded the required standard.

Andy’s noticing

Andy showed Richard the way he had been using blogging with his Year 8 English class. Essentially the blog was being used as an opportunity for students to post their creative writing pieces. There were different examples available on the blog – some the ‘bite-sized’ mini-sagas they had produced (which must be exactly fifty words), and some postings were of the students Horror stories. Andy remarked that an issue with using blogging in class is that the teacher can quickly move away from being a facilitator to an administrator – especially with only being able to approve one blog post at a time. Nevertheless, what had been achieved was a blog that contained both further comments from the students on blog posts that weren’t just their own and some students had recognised the instruction to begin categorising their posts in the ‘Gothic Genre’ area; easier to find for future for reference.

Ideas for further development

• Richard was interested in exploring getting students to comment on other students’ post, and categorising posts. Andy showed him how to do this and then they both discussed why both could be useful – Andy had used commenting as a way of encouraging peer assessment between the students’ story and had begun to try categorising because he wants to be able to keep using the blog throughout the year and wanted a way for students (and him) to organise and easily find the rapidly increasing amount of blog posts.

• Andy was very interested in the idea of setting a blog post as homework. This could really help develop students’ reflective learning. It also places more value on homework, as the blog is something that could then be reflected on in another homework by other students, or within a classroom lesson.

We intend to meet soon after Christmas to further explore the issues raised in this post. Merry Christmas everyone!

So the title of this post is compromise. I knew that the failures with the wikis no longer working on our schools systems could easily be repeated if I choose to continue with the approach of using the kind of external websites. This was further confirmed by one of my most valued websites, diigo.com, suddenly being blocked when I returned after half-term (eventually I managed to get it unblocked with help).

This didn’t leave me with very many options. I knew I wanted to continue to push the use of podcasting in the school but the reality of knowing that there is a definite and sometimes steep learning curve involved in using this meant that I wasn’t sure it would sit with people who were sceptical / didn’t think they could use new multimedia . This ‘group’ of staff represents the point of the project I am doing – I have found it relatively straightforward and rewarding to collaborate with members of staff already proficient in using multimedia, as might be expected – what I need to do is try and encourage those who want to be proficient but don’t know how to be. On this I think the merit and point of my project stands and falls.

I found that I was struggling where to turn to know what to do next – some kind of compromise with the multimedia tools I was using needed to be made.

The VLE

For those not familiar with the terminology, a VLE is a virtual learning environment or school portal, through which students and teachers share a space where they collaborate and share resources. In principle its great – mainly because it neatly dodges all those issues associated with e-safety – the space is enclosed and only teachers, students (and parents) have access.

For me though, the VLE, or at least what existed of it for my school (we run the version by RM) a year ago was, in my own words clunky. There seemed very little in the way of ‘web 2.0′ tools – I could find no blogging facilities, for example. The thing was slow and when I tried using it with my Year 11 class last year, it frequently crashed. I dismissed it as something that was not analogus with what I wanted to achieve with the use of multimedia – I resolved not to use it as one of the tools for advocating my use of multmedia.

The RM VLE - and the 'space' that the year 11's had to revise - containing podcasts they had made for revision in class - they could then access this from home.

Present day

To give credit where credit is due, RM have made a lot of improvements to the VLE in the past year. I always kept half an eye on it – continuing to use it with Year 11 last year as they entered the exam. There were successes as well as failures – details of which you can see in this short video. What I noticed was that gradually features such as blogs, wikis and discussion forums were being added (to be fair they may have been there from the start, but I found them neither easy to find, or easy to set up).

Then, for me, recently came the neatest innovation – every time you created a course for a group that you teach, a learning space was automatically created for it as well. What this means is that the resources are there and easily accessible, but you are also given a fully customisable page for each group you are teaching. On this page you can add a number of customisable features easily – including blogs, wikis, forums, RSS feeds and document libraries – all things associated with user-generated content. At this point I began to realise that I had made an error in being so dismissive of the VLE – and actually it appeared to be coming into its own just as I was facing problems using the external websites I had been advocating in school.

This half term has therefore seen me trying to throw all my efforts into using the VLE as a tool for helping me work with other colleagues. Responses so far have been positive and currently I am working with colleagues by:

• Using the VLE to collaborate with one teacher in setting up a blogging facility on classes learning spaces – allowing them to reflect on their learning as well as access course materials.
• Posting homeworks that English teachers in one year group can access and set to their students.
• Helping one teacher to set up a discussion forum for her high-ability GCSE group to encourage discussions related to exam texts in the run up to the mock exam.

Conclusions

I feel like I am getting to the stage now where I have developed meaningful collaborations with colleagues. I don’t intend to stop this process beyond the scope of this project – indeed, this blog will hopefully provide a way with me to continue collaborating with colleagues who are perhaps not even in my school. What a focus of mine must be now though, is in collecting the thoughts of my colleagues on whether they now feel more confident in using and collaborating with innovative, engaging forms of multimedia.

So in this case, compromise seems to have worked, although it is too early to tell whether the project has resulted in significant differences in colleagues’ practice. How do others feel about this issue of compromising in the use of technology in school?

This blog post therefore has 2 purposes – it shows you how to use the freely downloadable program cooliris to provide a rich multimedia presentation and also I will talk about the content of the presentation and how it reflects the practices I have been developing in using multimedia.

My presentation. You can view it @ http://tinyurl.com/ygv4glj

Cool Iris. My tools for this presentation came from these three blog posts. I was particularly wanting to use cool iris for a presentation because it enables you to switch between ‘slides’ (actually pictures) easily. I had a selection of images that I thought enabled me to frame what I was trying to say and a few powerpoint slides for moments of building on / concluding points. Cool Iris is great primarily because of how it is activated. When browsing with it installed, all you need to see is the little triangle/arrow () that lights up in the bottom left corner of an image, click it and you automatically launch the cool iris browser.

My intention was to move away from the ‘death by powerpoint’ thing that can sometimes happen when people give presentations about technology. Moreover, I wanted my philosophy of using innovative, engaging forms of multimedia to colour the the tools that I used to present my noticing (Mason, 2002) of it. I hoped this would provide a genuinley engaging way of presenting to staff who may or may not have an interest in multimedia.

1. Putting the slides together. I started by putting the images I had into a test folder called ‘reflectivelearners’. I then opened my PowerPoint slide and selected ‘save as‘ and then ‘other file formats’ – here you can save PPT slides as jpgs or pngs – these then went in along with the other jpgs in the folder. I suppose a disadvantage at this point is that you have lost the ability to now easily edit these slides – so I would possibly still want to use ppt for some work in the classroom. But for a presentation I know I’m doing then I believe it’s worth taking the little bit of extra time to do something like this – where it’s more of a multimedia text in itself because of the ease at which you can switch between lots of differently presented information.

2. Pic lens. Like Cool Iris, piclens is a free, easy to use program. It makes your folder of pictures into something pretty neat that can then be used for the purposes of a presentation. Putting my folder through the pics lens program resulted in a new folder containing:

• The original images.
• Thumbnail versions of these images, so they could be easily previewed on the internet or browsers such as Cool Iris.
• A gallery.html page, where all of the pictures can be displayed at once (see here).
• A ‘photos’ .rss feed – where you can edit the finer points, such as the title of the slides and the links they ‘click-out’ to when you leave the cool iris browser. There are other neat little tricks that you can do with the RSS feed, but for that I reccomend you can read the blog posts I linked to at the start of this post.

Once I had this folder, it was just a question of uploading it to my website so the people could access the presentation independently once I had given it. (This isn’t totally necessary though – CoolIris supports internal browsing and you can just view the files on your computer without having to upload them onto the internet).

3. The use of video. I had originally wanted to insert flash videos into my presentation, but a subsequent blog post alerted me to the fact that this was no longer possible. (we’ll ignore the fact that I only found it after trying to do the damn thing for two hours!) What I settled on doing was giving a series of short videos that I recorded using the very funky (not to mention, free) Jing. I had debated using screentoaster, which is also free (and also gives you the option of saving a hard .mov version onto your hard drive), but Jing just looks a little neater and works a little more seamlessly. I used my Samson C01u condenser USB microphone to record narration to these videos and what I hoped this achieved was an element of ‘what the hell’s he talking about? Ah! That’s what he’s talking about!‘ – I didn’t want to talk about the benefits of these multimedia without giving practical (albeit quick) demonstrations of how I had accomplished it. You can see all three videos I made by heading here.

4. Concluding reflections

I felt the presentation was stronger than a similar presentation I gave to my own school.I got positive comments from people on the day, with a fairly neutral observer commenting that those attending had found the session thought provoking. Subsequent evaluations seem to have revealed that participants would have preferred to see the presentation focus more strongly on PLTS. I did assume that developing personal learning thinking skills and reflective learning were pretty synonymous concepts, but evidently a lesson to be learnt from this presentation is that I needed to make more of a critical argument at the beginning before launching into practical demonstrations.

As a result, I feel almost there when it comes to presenting to an army of caffine addled teachers on a thursday evening (as much as one can be anyway!), the thing that I am most passionate about in teaching.

References:

Mason, J. (2002). The discipline of noticing. London: Routledge.

A brief recap for those who are first timers to this blog: My aim is to work with other colleagues to encourage them to use new and innnovative forms of multimedia. If they use them with their students: bonus. If they don’t – I might still judge what I am doing a success, mainly because of reflecting on how developing my own Personal Learning Network (PLN) through this blog has improved my use of multimedia in the classroom. Will Richardson writes (see bottom for ref.):

“While there is no doubt my classes were in many ways profoundly changed by blogs and wikis and the like, the bigger truth is that the transformation in my own personal learning practice is what informed my work with students.” (Page 8 )

This is how I feel about the potential of engaging multimedia to enhance the practice of teachers and underpins what I am trying to do at the moment.

What follows is an account of some of the things that have gone, err, wrong since I started trying to change things…

September-October 2009

• I was using wetpaint to develop two wikis for school; one is for teacher reflection, the other was the development of a sports website for the school where the PE staff could provide out of school access to resources for students and allow students to contribute to the website. Unfortunately over the summer, wetpaint upgraded their service, leaving my school, which still uses Internet Explorer 6, unable to access the website properly anymore – they are virtually useless at school. This is a real shame; I have spoken to the IT technician at my school and he thinks it’s unlikely that we will be upgrading IE anytime soon, nor is it a decision that is in his hands. So, at least for a while, its back to the drawing board for me with these two small projects! I would appreciate any suggestions people had…
• Inset – I was originally hoping to give a town-wide inset on using podcasts, wikis and blogs (there are 5 secondary schools in the town where I work). This would have been a fantastic chance to show some of the things I feel I have learnt from using these 3 different multimedia , but unfortunately I have found out that the session will be run in another school, by others. There is little I can do about this and instead I have resolved myself to attend the meetings (which have now been seperated into ‘podcasting’ and ‘blogs/wikis’) and make sure that I take advantage of the fact that there are going to be other colleagues from other secondary schools who clearly have an interest in this area – and see if they are interested in collaborating.

So, technically speaking, my ‘project’ should be finished (as if I’m ever going to stop doing this kind of thing now!) by around February, so the clock is certainly ticking. Still, the chance to reflect in this blog and hopefully develop strategies to build on difficulties should ensure I still have plenty to write about.

Recent Links worth checking out:

- Those who have been interested in my work exploring the use of diigo in the classroom may also be interested to read Katt Blackwell-Starne’s blog. She is planning to use diigo over the coming year to investigate if it can help improve students’ writing to specific audiences.

- Doug Belshaw writes a series of excellent posts about how to use Cool Iris (a fantastic multimedia tool) for presentations; one for beginners, one for advanced. Well worth checking out.

References:

Richardson, W, (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful webtools for classrooms. London: Sage LTD.

Harrison Ford refers to the treasures that Indiana Jones chases as 'mcguffins' - a treasure that fuels and drives the plot forward, but that isn't really that important to the overall story. Is the use of social networking in websites in danger of appearing in the same way? (Used under CC, by redplasticmonkey)

‘Social networking’ is the latest ubiquitous term in educational usage of ICT; right now to me it feels like it is everywhere. Controversy continues to abound regarding the issue of teachers having personal profiles on websites like Facebook and Twitter. I have very mixed feelings about whether I should make my Twitter profile private – I feel that it actually runs in direct contrast to the spirit of the site, but I am careful to exercise common sense in the messages that go up there. Likewise, I don’t consider that my facebook account is anything other than very private and flat out refuse to add students, even old ones.

Meanwhile, social networking is frequently being added to new ICT resources at what I consider to be a ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ rate. Our school is about to begin using B-Live, a careers website that has high standards of professionality – it looks great for starters, and provides good guidance and advise on progression in an accessible way. Part of the website allows students to engage in social networking – they can create avatars and social profiles that other members of the site can view. While B-Live is one of the best careers websites I’ve seen, I am unsure of the need for this type of element to the website.  Many students in my school already have their own facebooks (strange in itself, considering its minimum age tag) and myspace profiles and funnily enough I do believe that students themselves are cynical enough (oh yes!)  to notice when they’re being marketed to in a way that isn’t really useful or new to them. Why go social networking on a new site when they already have their own personal network which they see as efficient and engaging enough for expressing their own interests and socialising with their peers?

In this case (and in a few other websites I have seen that purport to have educational purpose), is there any in-depth consideration of how the social networking element of the site actually adds to the experience and the learning for students; or is it bound to just become a way in which they can wonder off task, or worse use the websites to break rules of e-safety? Are there any social networking sites for education that offer an effective use of the concept? Something devised by the UK goverment, cyber-mentors seems to me to be an admirable attempt to take the concept of social networking and use it in a positive way (only negative thing is the use of ‘text language’ on the main webpage, but hey that’s me with my English teacher hat on). Essentially the idea is that students mentor each other through difficult experiences associated with bullying. The difference is that a student could be mentoring another student from the other side of the country. I think it encourages students to make social connections and express themselves in an emotionally literate, mature way. Its definitely worth checking out, particularly if you’re a teacher in the UK.

Photo by M.Keefe, used under cc license

This photo seems to address my mood ahead of delivering the staff inset issue. While it was nice to have a ‘loudspeaker’ to the whole school, I was very conscious (as a lowly English teacher with no other responsibilities), of making the most of the opportunity to encourage others to share and develop good practices associated with multimedia.

This is a reflection on a session I gave to the staff in my school on a whole school session, on a baking hot Thursday afternoon, fairly close to the end of the school year. My intention was simple; I wanted in a way to show that I was doing things in the classroom with multimedia. I also enlisted the help of another colleague, which I felt would help strengthen my argument that it was possible that more than a tiny minority of teachers within the school are trying to use multimedia to enhance teaching and learning.

The talk itself was based around showing quickfire examples of multimedia usage, mainly based around website used. As I have done extensively on this blog, I summarised my use of diigo with Key Stage 5 students. I felt that I was careful not to English-ify my talk and I deliberately gave quick demonstrations of sites such as wordle and freeplaymusic which I felt could have applications accross more than one subject area. I then asked my colleague to speak and I thought she did a fantastic job with a small slot of introducing the concept of ‘podcasting’ to the staff. She spoke honestly about the positive and negative experiences (the negatives were mostly about the problems with computers!) of taking such an approach. Afterwards I bought the session to a close and introduced the next stage of the session – the staff would now split off into groups to discuss how they felt about the issue of using multimedia in school. The discussion would be shaped by a series of questions that I adapated from Pan’s (1999) ‘Using technology to promote teacher action research’, a great paper which can be found (partially) on google books if you search for ”Information Technology in Educational Research Statistics”, itself an excellent book! Here are a few of the prompts:

• Is multimedia used to impact on student learning in your classroom?
• Do you think multimedia can be used to solve real issues associated with learning?
• Can you name a particular student who is benefitting from using multimedia?

Reflections wondering around

So after I’d delivered the sheet and the talk, it was time to ask the staff to split off into four groups, all mixed-subject and reflect on what their own experiences with multimedia were like in our school. This was an opportunity firstly, to get out of the sweltering heat, but more importantly for me, to witness any impact that my words or my colleague’s words had produced.

I decided early on that instead of staying in the group I had been placed, I would give myself an opportunity to have a peek at what the other groups were upto. By no means did I see this as an opportunity to walk into the other three rooms and tell them exactly what they should be doing – rather I saw it as a way of observing the differences in how the groups had absorbed the short lecture they’d just been given.

One room was particularly organised and arranged themselves in a circle and were working their way through each of the prompts on the sheet by having an open discussion. Meanwhile in another room, all of the teachers went straight to computers and seemed engrossed in examining the websites on the list I’d handed out. Given the limited time teachers have to consider this issue anyway, I found myself reflecting that the different approaches of different groups was perhaps a good thing, in that it seemed clear to me that people were finding different ways to react to what had been said. I had been deliberately unperscriptive about exactly how the ‘discussions’ should take place – the only thing I had asked for is that staff take the time to feel in a final reflection on what we had done on a sheet of A4 paper, that was essentially to be their responses to the various prompts that had been adapted from Pan’s work. So, some of these responses were filled in at the end of the discussions, others were filled in after they had been looking at the various reccomended websites individually. This variety, although not wholly intended has led to interesting responses which I intend to put up in my next entry – they are interesting enough to warrant their own blog entry, I promise!

Conclusions drawn

You always build up expectations for things like this – for me it was the culmination of a year of intensive experimenting in my own classroom with multimedia. I genuinley felt like I had found interesting and engaging resources that could be applied accross a variety of subjects. Thinking ahead, one of my main aims was essentially the simple way of showing my colleagues that I knew something (hopefully) worth knowing about multimedia – I hope this will play into my hands as I begin to try and encourage collaboration with our ICT and multimedia throughout the year.

Watch this space for some of the responses from staff in future blog entry and an analysis of the implications they have for my own work and how they might reflect wider perceptions of positive and negative thoughts on the use of multimedia to promote teaching and learning.

Freeplaymusic is a website that has been around for a while, but its functionality and applicability to the classroom is, I think, definitely worth expanding upon here, mainly because this offers some simple but interesting ways of developing the quality of students’ learning.

The concept is simple enough: everything on the website is free and and available to all. When greeted with music, you can either listen to a preview or download the file as an MP3.

What kind of music do you find on the site then?

For some time now, freeplay has been adding what is quickly developing into an excellent library of free, classical music (and no need to stream either, you just download it). There is fantastic stuff here, ranging from the whole suite of Holst’s ‘The Planets‘, to ‘Swan Lake‘. Although classical music might always have allusions of stuffiness and incompatability with the general crop of today’s students, as an English teacher I would argue that pieces of music like ‘Mars’ from ‘The Planets’ can provide interesting ways into a lesson, and not just in English. Talking about the planets in Science? Use one of the pieces of music as a plenary but don’t tell the students which planet it is; they have to write down reasons as you’re playing it for which planet they think it is.

Then there’s the eternal, slightly trendy idea that playing classical music in lessons helps students focus and concentrate. I’m not going to completely side with it; but as a musician who also happens to be an English teacher, I have frequently noticed that bringing in a musical instrument to use to play an idea or demonstrate something (always fun doing the Jaws theme on a Melodica), just helps you approach variety in lessons from a slightly fresh, engaging perspective.

Music for multimedia

The other big strength of the website is its search facility, as evidenced by the homepage below.

Using the 'feel' option is a greay way for students to find appropriate music on freeplay

There are a variety of ways of searching, but my favourite is ‘feel’. Say students are working on a multimedia presentation of some kind – maybe a movie of their E-Portfolio – they could find ‘reflective’ and then be drawn to a page where free pieces of music are available. There are also no issues with copyright in using this site, which is a welcome relief. Its also good for:

• Scoring dramatic readings of poems (e.g. having a student reading out ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ with this in the background)
• Producing authentic sounding newscasts (lots of cheesy/over-dramatic ‘NEWS!’ type cues available)
• Providing ambient but not over-distracting backgrounds for podcasts.
• Scoring short narrative films students have produced.

If anyone else is doing interesting things with it, please let me know!

In other news, school is slowing down now; we have that mid-june malaise that means its time to start getting ready for September. Am very much looking forward to continuing to add to this blog and would like to take a quick opportunity (don’t worry, no curtain-call) for those people who have been leaving really interesting comments. Ta!