Yes APP arose from the need for consistent assessment data between schools and more importantly to fix the discrepancy between primary and secondary NC levels (I’ve yet to find a secondary teacher who uses primary science levels as a reliable baseline!).   Yes APP came from the National Strategies team but the bank of APP statements represent a very useful resource for AfL – after all what is the point in having accurate and reliable assessment data and doing nothing with it?

As a leader of APP practice within the authority I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject.  The points below summarise my thinking about APP

What APP is:

• An assessment system that allows for consistency between teachers, between schools and between key stages
• An opportunity for AfL linked to meaningful (sort of) criteria
• Customisable to suit the needs of you, your school and your learners.
• An opportunity to gather reliable formative assessment data for every learner

What APP isn’t:

• Statutory – no one can tell you what you MUST do
• Hours of trawling through students’ work and books
• Something that need increase our workload
• A tick-list of what a student has or hasn’t achieved (software companies take note)
• Just another type of summative assessment
• Perfect!

I teach in a special school where teacher assessment has been for norm for years.  APP is nothing new to us – we’ve been following a very similar process for years, finding new ways to make assessment work.  I know APP isn’t perfect, but it occurs to me that a lot of teachers seem to be getting into a flap about nothing – APP will be what you make it!

Click on the APP tag to read my other posts about APP

My opinions are based on my experiences of using the Science APP framework.  Whilst I’ve looked at APP materials for other subjects I haven’t used them with students.

Firefox

I know Chrome is quicker but every time I use Chrome I end up moving back to Firefox.  I love the extensions/plugins available for Firefox and have a very similar set on both home and work computers.

Firefox extensions I have on both PCs.

Live Mesh

I tried Dropbox but first I became annoyed when it kept syncing MS Office temporary files (because I work straight out of my drop box).  Then I exceeded the amount of space they offered for free – but I only needed around 4-5Gb storage and I’m not paying for 50Gb that I’m not going to use.

I moved to Live Mesh and it works flawlessly.  Files are synchronised between my work folders and home and school, and updates happen without any user intervention.   Add a net book to that mix and it becomes even more useful (also allowing you to remote control another PC on your ‘Mesh’).  You can also access your files from your Live Desktop should you find yourself working on a different PC.

Office 2007 and 2010

The new ribbon interface.  You either love it or you hate it.  I love it – and now I’m used to using it I couldn’t go back to the old version of Office.  I am the only member of staff at my school running Office 2007 (and I use the beta of Office 2010 at home) and I hope to convert my colleagues at some point in the future! 

GMail (Google Mail)

Feature rich, spam free and hosted in the cloud, Google Mail is useful because I can access my email from any computer (and also from my phone/iPod etc).  For those who don’t like web email it supports POP3, IMAP and SMTP so can be used with a desktop email client if you prefer.   Although I tag my emails, the search feature comes in useful for finding those emails where you only remember snippets of information.  I use Google Mail as a client for my work based Exchange mail, and prefer the interface to any of the desktop clients I have tried. (The to-do-list whilst basic is pretty handy too)

Google Reader

I started using Google Reader to keep track of blogs and news sites I like.  Google Reader pulls in RSS feeds and can then be accessed from anywhere.  Interesting articles can be emailed to friends, or shared with other users (and mine are even imported into Facebook!).   The addition of Google Buzz added a new layer of functionality to Reader and you now see articles/posts that your friends (who you follow) have shared.  Google Reader keeps me up to date with educational and news feeds.

Windows Live Writer

Part of the Live Suite available free of charge from Microsoft.  This is a useful piece of software for writing blog posts offline (and publishing them to your website).

Other software/sites

Google Calendar (I’ve tried lesson planning again this year using Google calendar. I kept it up for a over half a term but still ended up going back to a paper diary).  The SMS reminders are useful for reminding me of appointments when I’m not near my email.

Twitter.  I have a PLN (personal learning network) on Twitter but I’m still not convinced that this is a must-have tool.  A significant majority of people I follow are broadcasters rather than being interested in a two-way conversation, and most don’t reply to tweets directed straight at them.

What software do you use every day?  What software couldn’t you do without?

VLC

I managed to grab several clips using VLC following these steps.  First of all enable advanced options

Then play back your video/DVD.  Click on the red button to start and stop recording.  The recorded file is saved in your documents folder.  It is possible to change the output video format, however the defaults worked fine with movie maker. [Mac users – I believe you press Shift & Command & R instead]

Unfortunately I had problems with one of the DVDs so I had to use a different method.

Handbrake and K-Lite pack.

I installed the K-Lite pack to give me codecs I would need later on.  (Without the codecs from this pack windows movie maker was not able to use the audio on captured files in AAC format).

Handbrake is simple to use, but the files it generates will probably need some editing/trimming unless you need the whole DVD.

(You can also use handbrake to convert DVDs into a format suitable for an iPod/iPhone just by changing the preset at stage 2).

That’s all there is to it.  If you are grabbing clips from DVD make sure you own the copyright or else you could get into bother!

I looked for some other ways that PowerPoint (and possibly its Open Office equivalent Impress) could be used as a teaching tool with students who have special needs or perform below national expectations.

Sequencing

Give students a presentation in which the slides are in the wrong order.  Tell them to put the steps in the right order and then give a presentation based on the new order.  It is a good idea to use pictures/slides in which the order is ambiguous or where there could be more than one correct answer.  For extremely weak students this could involve sequencing photographs from a previous lesson e.g. ones taken during an experiment.

Example: Year 7 students (Wikid Science – Forensics) are asked to solve the mystery and explain how the forensic investigator came to be in hospital covered in burns.  Students have to solve the mystery and put the slides in the right order.  They then present their ideas to the group where they receive peer assessment/feedback.

Audio (or video) annotation

Give students a presentation with information to be interpreted on each slide.  Pupils must record an audio or video clip for each slide with an explanation.  Play back to group, possibly with some peer assessment.  Can also be exported as a video clip.

Example: Year 7 students (Wikid Science – Extinction) are asked to interpret the graphs and say what they mean.

Completing presentations

Using a partially completed presentation you would ask students to complete it.  This could include adding suitable graphics to text already created (or vice versa) or adding existing information to a scaffold.

Example: In this writing frame I would ask students to add information to each slide from planning through to conclusions and present it.  Students can add extra information and peer assessment information about the content.  To differentiate the activity, add more detail to the scaffold (e.g. sub-steps).  Students then present to another group or the whole class.

Story telling

Ask students to prepare the narration and present to a pre-created presentation.  This is similar to adding narration but is simpler to organise and doesn’t require microphones.

Example: In this presentation on the water cycle (from the TES resources site) students have to explain what is happening and present to another group of pupils (or the whole group depending on numbers)

Multiple choice questions

Just as it sounds – using a presentation with a quiz, let pupils answer the questions individually at computers, or on the IWB in a group.  If you search Google you can find pre-created templates, or you could make your own.

Example: Multiple choice quiz on plant classification.  Plays a different sound for right and wrong answers.

I hope you found some of these ideas useful.  Please leave a comment below (or via the contact me form at the top of the page) if you did, or if you have any questions.

This is what was inside the box (as well as brown paper packaging).

And this is what was inside the white plastic container.

Perhaps a padded envelope would have been a better way of shipping it! Packaging #fail

The popularity could have something to do with being the near the top of the Google search results for BTEC Applied Science resources.

Good news.  I’ve continued working with Wheldon School in Carlton, Nottingham.  Working together with Helen Cawthorne we’ve looked at the changes from September 2010 and written a biology module, complete with assignment briefs and a full set of resources.  As with other resources we have shared them with the hope of raising the bar in science teaching across many schools.  Please treat these resources as a work in progress – they haven’t been tested with students yet! (The module could also be used with current specs with some tinkering).

This is our interpretation of the changes and implications for schools.

Please leave feedback if you find these resources useful – hearing from others is a good motivator both for myself and the other teachers involved.

Click here for BTEC biology resources.

In terms of organisation the new year 8 modules are a huge leap forward.  Lessons are organised into folders by lesson which makes a huge amount of difference when it comes to locating resources and lesson plans.  The content of the lessons is much the same, although they aren’t as heavily dependent on the power points to make them work which is a relief because the novelty of showing presentations soon wore off, both with myself and the pupils! The new modules have supporting video from Teachers.tv (anyone can download these from the teachers.tv website) which the Wikid team have skilfully woven into their topics, helping maintain the theme that runs through each.

The structure of the topics and activities makes it easy to add APP criteria to an activity turning it into an APP assessment with the minimum of effort.  Hot off the press is their mapping grid which helps you see which topics relate to which strand of APP, proving the Wikid team are listening to customer requests).

All is not perfect with the Wikid scheme though, and it still requires some work to use it well, and many schools may not feel confident adopting it lock, stock and barrel. 

To improve the scheme I would like to see Wikid:

• Reduce the content in the scheme and flag lessons as core lessons and lessons that can be skipped
• Less detail on lesson plans – they take ages to read!
• Lesson plans in one place (ideally one document) so you can see the progression from lesson to lesson and how they flow together.
• More AfL linked to APP built into the scheme – and not the absolutely ghastly Apprend scheme they are flogging like a dead horse.
• More support for SEN and lower achieving pupils.  Many of the activities are too wordy or too complicated and require extensive adaptation.  Not all pupils achieve level 4 – yet this seems to be the starting point for many of the assessment activities.  (And remember that many of these pupils have poor literacy skills – expecting them to write more than a few words is not an option).
• Fewer resources to photocopy – and in black and white please.  I haven’t seen a school yet that colour photocopies or prints whole class sets of colour worksheets.
• Promote the Wiki that the whole scheme is named after and encourage participation by ALL teachers who deliver the course.  At the moment the Wiki is difficult to navigate and is further let down by the lack of participation.
• Remove the Upd8 forums since Wikid staff never bother to reply to questions in there anymore.  If it’s obsolete, take it down!

Would I recommend Wikid to others? Yes.  In fact I’ve had science teachers come from out of county and within county to see it in action.  Wikid science shows enormous potential, and most students are engaged and achieving well on the course.  Of course the scheme isn’t perfect – but show me a scheme that is!

This is a collection of extracts from my logs over the last few months showing some of the more interesting visitors to my site (I’ve removed the IP addresses myself).  The bottom image shows visits from Microsoft and Google following an Outlook web access vs Google rant I had (#GoneGoogle).

I’d only recently noticed that the interface you get depends on the web browser you use.  If like me you use Firefox as your primary browser at work, a huge chunk of functionality is missing already (gee thanks Microsoft!).  The screen grabs below give an idea of the differences.

Straight away I’m using a clunky interface that looks like something from the Nineties to manage my email.  Compare that to Google mail which looks the same in IE, Firefox or Chrome (and I have all 3 browsers installed on all my laptops!).

I was going to write a comparison of the two platforms but it’s hard to find an aspect that OWA excels at.  Contact management is a joke, the PIM functions make me want to stab myself with a biro in frustration and anyone who has used Google mail knows the advantages of tagging mail versus folders.

Most teachers work as much from home as they do from work, if not more.  I know I do.  I like to have access to my emails from home and when I visit other schools.  All of my email that is, not the last two or three in my inbox.  I never take my laptop home – who’d want to use that piece of junk in preference to my own modern machine – which means I need access to email in the cloud.   Look at the generous mail allocation I get from work versus Google Apps email – I can search through archived emails and contacts with ease using the Google interface, without having to fire up a desktop mail client to achieve the same result.  It might help if EMBC gave you a reasonable amount of space – 100Mb is nothing, I’ve sent more email than that in a day!

(Compare that to the standard space allocation provided with Gmail and you see a world of difference.)

Fortunately Google Mail will retrieve emails from my work address, and send replies that look as though they have come from my work address, so I don’t have to soil my hands with Outlook Web Access (or a desktop client).

Until Microsoft comes up with a better interface that works well with Firefox, and EMBC can give us sufficient storage, I’ll continue to use the Google mail interface as my primary mail client.  What’s your email client of choice and why?

I was looking at the Google Analytics report for my science resources site – and I noticed that traffic levels drop slightly on a Friday and then go right down on Saturdays (the red dots).  Thank goodness science teachers take one day a week off.  The same results also suggest that science teachers work hard planning lessons on a Sunday.  What a dedicated bunch of science teachers we have!