More than a maths teacher

Preparing for Paris: Engaging the Bloggers

loislindemann — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:39:49 +0000

I’ve used class blogs with several groups of students, but I’ve never been happy with the results.

When asked, my students say they like the blogs, in fact last year most of my Y9 ICT class immediately went online and opened their class blog at the start of each lesson. They loved using embedded slideshows and videos (not surprising – the videos were rather excellent, being mostly Commoncraft’s Plain English explanations) and they complained if there was nothing new on the blog. The blog was pretty useful, but it was really just a vehicle for conveying instructions: you need to do a, b and c to pass this task; this is how to do a, b and c.

I’ve found that getting students to engage with blogs in a more active way is much harder. Asking them to rate posts produced the first signs of resistance, there were surprisingly few takers. Almost no-one wanted to leave a comment. Moving on a step and asking students to write posts of their own will present real challenges.

I don’t think my students are in any way unusual. They enjoy online gaming, are active users of Facebook and spend hours chatting online, so you might assume that asking them to use a blog or wiki for learning would be something quite normal and natural, but evidently it isn’t.

I’ve been pondering the many reasons behind this for a while, but when Kevin Jarrett tweeted links to articles about the 90-9-1 rule, it really helped me to clarify some ideas. After reading this* I started thinking, especially about the suggestions for minimising the problem. (*You might like to follow that link before continuing.)

If I apply the 90-9-1 rule to a class of 30 students, I can expect maybe 2 or 3 of them to be intermittent contributors and one (if I’m lucky) to be a regular contributor. The figures may not be exact, but that’s not really important, it still means that the majority are happy to be passive consumers – which is exactly what I have experienced so far. Put in this context, the fact that one Y9 student left several comments and and another 4 or 5 rated posts or sent me a couple of emails doesn’t seem so bad, but it’s still not the level of engagement that I was aiming for.

I agree that I can’t remove this discrepancy in participation, but as a teacher it is essential that I find ways of minimising it, otherwise I’m simply creating a pretty website that has no real impact on learning.

We are hoping to use a blog on our Paris trip next July. The students all know about it, but getting them to start contributing is – as always – going to be a challenge. My aim is to have a group of students who are reasonably competent and confident bloggers by the time we set off on the trip. So how am I going to try to maximise participation?

Here’s my plan:

From past experience I know that students are very unlikely to use our Paris blog outside school unless they’ve already used it inside school, so starting next term we are going to have some blogging sessions during tutor time (registration). I will be meeting up with small groups of the students who are going on the Paris trip and helping them to create their first posts. Hopefully once the students have published something, they will start to feel some ownership of the blog.
I’m including polls and I’m going to add a rating function, so students can easily leave feedback with one click. I’ve noticed that many students don’t like to be the first to rate or vote on something, so I’ll vote first (a bit like the approach of a busker who puts the first coins in their own hat). I’ll be encouraging students to leave feedback on each other’s posts during in-school sessions.
Our school sessions will include commenting on other students’ posts. Obviously I’m going to leave comments as well; I’m hoping that I can persuade some other teachers and parents to join in.

Will it work? I hope so. If anyone has any advice or suggestions, I’d be very happy to hear from you.

Using Rollover Images

loislindemann — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:00:47 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about creating rollover images in Wordpress. This is all very nice, but what’s the point?

1. Engagement

Last term I sat with some students and asked them to show me things that they liked on various websites. There was no agreement whatsoever about preferred colour schemes, design styles or layouts, but almost everyone liked games, videos and interactive content. I am reliably informed that buttons which change when the mouse is rolled over them are ‘cool’.

If a set of buttons with rollover effects will encourage students to access the site I’ve set up for them, then it’s worth doing. (Yes I know, it’ll take much more than that, but it’s still worth it.)

2. Simple interactive content

Once you’veset up the use of rollover effects for the first time, it makes it possible to put some simple interactive content into web pages or posts in a class blog. Here’s a few examples:

Flashcards:

I’m going to ask Y10 to make some of these for the perimeter/area/volume formulae that they need to learn for their exam in January.

Revision prompts:

Can you name the sides in this triangle?
(Roll your mouse over the image to see the answer.)

Giving information or clues:

In a flowerpot in my garden I found 3 slugs, 2 spiders and 4 beetles.
How many legs were there altogether in the flowerpot?

Any more suggestions?

Creating Rollover Images in Wordpress

loislindemann — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:04:55 +0000

My student website is long overdue for a major revamp. I decided to rebuild the site using Wordpress, which is going well, but some of the things I want to do are not automatically built in, so I thought I’d try to write some very simple guides as I work out how to do things.

My students all seem to like rollover images, so I wanted to incorporate them. Here’s how I did it:

You will need:

- A self-hosted Wordpress blog. This simply will not work for a blog that is hosted on Wordpress.com, because this process requires Javascript, which is not allowed on WordPress.com blogs. (That’s one of the many reasons I opted to go for the self-hosted option.)
- A folder somewhere on the web to hold your images.
- A text editor, such as Notepad.

Step One – Create some images

You will need two images – the basic image that will appear at first and the image that will replace it when the user hovers their mouse over. Obviously these images should be the same size! I created gifs, but pngs and jpegs will also work. You will need to stick to one format, don’t use a mixture of file types.

Your rollover image needs to have the same name as the basic image, but with an ending such as _over added at the end: e.g. my-image.gif and my-image_over.gif

Once you have finished, upload your images to the web. You must save the two images in the same folder.

Step Two – Create and upload a Javascript file

Actually, no knowledge of Javascript is required here, because Atlanta Jones has created and shared a tutorial and a script that works perfectly. If you have created gif files and used the _over ending on your file names, you can simply download and use this file: rollover.js. Alternatively you can copy and paste this script into a text editor (NOT MS Word – I used notepad) and save it as rollover.js:

jQuery(function($) {
$(document).ready(function() {

		// Preload all rollovers
		$("#hoverlink img").each(function() {
			// Set the original src
			rollsrc = $(this).attr("src");
			rollON = rollsrc.replace(/.gif$/ig,"_over.gif");
			$("").attr("src", rollON);
		});

		// Navigation rollovers
		$("#hoverlink a").mouseover(function(){
			imgsrc = $(this).children("img").attr("src");
			matches = imgsrc.match(/_over/);

			// don't do the rollover if state is already ON
			if (!matches) {
			imgsrcON = imgsrc.replace(/.gif$/ig,"_over.gif"); // strip off extension
			$(this).children("img").attr("src", imgsrcON);
			}

		});
		$("#hoverlink a").mouseout(function(){
			$(this).children("img").attr("src", imgsrc);
		});

	});
});

If you have changed filetypes or endings, you will need to edit the script with your text editor to change anything that says .gif to .png or .jpg, or to change anything that says _over to match the ending you used on your file names.

The script tells Wordpress to pre-load your rollover images and what to do when the mouse is rolled over and off. It is dependent on a tag called hoverlink (I made that name up, you can change it if you want). We’ll use this tag in step four.

Once you have your Javascript file, you need to upload it. It needs to go in the root folder for the theme that you are using in Wordress.

Step Three – tell Wordpress to use the file that you just created

The good news is that Wordpress comes bundled with JQuery, so all you have to do is tell it to use it. Even beter, Brian at frodesigns.com has kindly shared the code that is needed.

You will need to edit your header.php file, find this by clicking on Appearance, then Editor. First find the tag. NB in some themes the the tag may not look exactly like that, so you may need to look for something like this: .
Once you’ve found the tag, copy and paste this code under it:

    

You can see the penultimate directs Wordpress to the jQuery code for the image rollover effect that we are creating. It also refers to the hoverlink tag that we’ll use in the next step.

Step Four – putting your images into a post or page

Now you can actually put your images into a post or page. The last bit of technical trickery is to put your images inside a section tagged "hoverlink". To do this, use the html editor to create your page or post, rather than the visual editor.

This is the code that I used to create the image at the end of this post:

http://www.morethanmaths.com/teacher">http://www.morethanmaths.com/teacher/sample-files/2009/12/my-avatar.gif" border="0" alt="My Avatar" width="220" height="220" />

You can see that the code relating to the image is contained inside two tags:

and

. Obviously you will need to change the highlighted sections to match your own choice of hyperlink, image location and size.

Want a rollover image that isn’t hyperlinked? No problem:

http://www.morethanmaths.com/teacher/sample-files/2009/12/my-avatar.gif" border="0" alt="My Avatar" width="220" height="220" />

Want your rollover image in a sidebar? Add a text widget and put the code into that. Wordpress will recognise the code and display the image with the rollover effect enabled.

Here’s the finished product:

There’s also an example of a rollover image in the sidebar of this blog, try rolling your mouse over the juggler to see it action – it’s a fairly subtle effect this time.

I’m not a Javascript expert – in fact I know next to nothing – but I got this working with little more than copy and paste. I’ve tried this with Wordpress 2.9 and 2.8.6, using the Atahualpa and the Default themes. I tested the finished product in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. As far as I can tell, it’s working perfectly.

Merry Christ-maths!

loislindemann — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:04:02 +0000

Whatever form your festivities may take, I hope you have a Merry Christmas!

I don’t know why I associate puzzles with Christmas. Maybe it’s childhood memories of tiny plastic tangrams from the insides of crackers, maybe it’s because I’ve been lucky enough to receive lots of puzzle books as gifts over the years. Anyway, here’s one of my favourites, hope you like it.

#movemeon – the book

loislindemann — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:01:19 +0000

What happened when Doug Belshaw asked educators to share hints and tips using Twitter and the #movemeon hashtag? Lots of people joined in to share their ideas and create a really interesting crowd-sourced resource.

Doug created an archive of the tweets using Twapperkeeper, which is great, but it’s not likely to reach teachers that aren’t already using Twitter. So he made a book as well. Brilliant.

This isn’t just for new or trainee teachers, we’re all learners, I’m sure everyone can find something in here to make them think ‘I’ve got to try that’, or ‘I used to do that – why did I stop?’

I have to say that Doug and Stuart Ridout have done a fantastic job with the book. Best of all, the e-book is free, so what are you waiting for? Go and download one.

I’ll definitely be sharing copies at school next term.

PDF/ebook (free download): http://bit.ly/movemeonpdf

Book (at cost price): http://bit.ly/movemeonbook

Badges to promote the book are at: http://bit.ly/movemeonbadges
(no need for CC attribution, etc.)

On the move

loislindemann — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:42:30 +0000

If you are reading this – then welcome to my blog’s new home!

I enjoyed using Wordpress.com – and I fully intend to continue to do so – but I always intended to use self-hosted Wordpress for this blog. It just opens up so many more options. Since my old web host couldn’t seem to provide the necessary support for me to run an up to date release of Wordpress, that presented a bit of a challenge. So I’ve moved: firstly to a new web hosting provider, then to a self-hosted blog.

Unfortunately I couldn’t automatically redirect any readers from my old place at Wordpress.com. So if you’ve followed the trail of breadcrumbs and made it here – thanks for making the effort!

#movemeon – making sure I remember

loislindemann — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:15:50 +0000

I am absolutely brilliant at forgetting things. I specialise in it. As a child I had a fantastic memory, but I suspect that these days I simply deal with far too much information to hold it all in my head. Consequently I make a lot of lists!

Recently Doug Belshaw set the ball rolling for a collaborative effort by educators to share hints and tips using Twitter and the #movemeon hashtag. The result is an amazing collection of ideas: some familiar, some new. There were lots of ideas that made me think, ‘I’ve got to try that’, or ‘I used to do that – why did I stop?’

But as I said, I forget stuff – and just because something is a great idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will stick in my cluttered memory. So I’ve created some reminders, in the form of a set of header images which appear here and on my planner. (Of course, if you’re reading this on a feed you won’t have seen the header image, in which case you might like to click through and take a look.)

The header images combine Chris Spooner’s bird graphics with a selection of tweets from the #movemeon collaboration. So far there are 10 (and counting) great ideas that I’ll see on a regular basis. Let’s see how many of them I put into action.

If you would like copies of these images, feel free to help yourself:

Set of 10 in gif format [zipped folder]
The same set of 10 in png format [zipped folder] – larger files, but more easily edited

On the Tiles

loislindemann — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:06:46 +0000

I was going to wait until we had finished until I blogged about this, but I’m really excited about our latest STEM Club project!

We’re making Escher style tiles – real, actual clay tiles and it’s great fun.

Last week we started by setting the students a challenge:

Making Escher Tiles

View more presentations from Lois Lindemann.

They came up with some designs, this week we’ve started to make them out of clay:

OK, they aren’t perfect (yet), but isn’t this brilliant? I can’t wait to see the finished result, so I couldn’t resist making a preview:

Retweet? No thanks.

loislindemann — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:42:55 +0000

Twitter means different things to different people, I have no problem with that. This is not going to be one of those ‘You Just Don’t Get It Do You? 10 Ways You’re Tweeting It Wrong’ type of posts.

For me, Twitter is about conversation. Retweets are part of that – and something that I’m a big fan of, so it was good to see them finally appear at Twitter.com. However, I don’t use the web-based version of Twitter much, so I didn’t play around with the new retweet function until last week. Sadly, I soon learned that whilst Twitter’s version of retweeting may fit their business model, it doesn’t work for me.

In an offline conversation, if I repeat something interesting that I’ve been told, I don’t necessarily do it verbatim, I’m able to add my own comments if I want to. If I retweet via a Twitter client (such as Tweetdeck) I can do that online too, but I quickly discovered that Twitter’s own retweet function is exactly that – a verbatim retweet. There’s no opportunity to add anything. That’s not facilitating a conversation, so personally I’m not interested.

I just hope that as Twitter develops their new retweet function, they don’t end up affecting the ability of the rest of us to RT in whatever fashion we choose.

STEM Club Reloaded

loislindemann — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:14:11 +0000

We had second attempt at relaunching STEM Club today – and it was much more successful than the trip that we were forced to abandon last week. This week we just ran a few simple challenges for a group of Y7, Y8 and Y9 students.

Science: Neutralise it

We gave the students some sodium hydroxide and added a couple of drops of universal indicator. The students had to neutralise it with some hydrochloric acid – harder than it sounds. We challenged them to do this in less than two minutes.

Engineering: Paper towers

The challenge was to build a structure that would hold a ping pong ball as high up as possible, using just newspaper and two long strips of Sellotape (about 3 metres). Last time we did this, some enterprising students tried to tape a tower to the ceiling, so this time I told them that they could only use the paper and tape to build a tower on the table. Of course, some of them promptly utilised the table leg as a support – evidently I need to work on my instructions!

Maths: Möbius strips

Obviously this was my favourite challenge. We gave the students a strip of paper and asked them to turn it into something with only one side. They tried really hard, but we weren’t surprised when they didn’t manage it.

We demonstrated how to make a Möbius strip, then did all the usual stuff:

coloured the strip and watched amazed faces appear as they realised that something most unexpected was happening
coloured the edges of the strip to prove that it also only had one edge
cut down the middle of the strip to cut it in half – except of course we didn’t, then repeated the process and enjoyed the baffled and amazed looks on our students faces.

They loved it. ‘Why can’t we do this in maths Miss?’ one student asked. No reason at all, in fact I think the Möbius strip might get revisited very soon.

Anyway, I think it all went well, the students obviously had great fun and said that they would be back next week. All in all, a pretty successful first session.