Displays Level 2 STLS – Short Course – an interesting addition?

Just been looking again at running a 3 day on-line intensive course about the displays optional unit for UK Teaching Assistants doing Level 2 STLS (Supporting Teaching and Learning in Schools).

• We would take 3 days to cover the knowledge base.
• I would work with them to make sure they understand exactly what evidence they need to gather for their assessor.
• Learners would then have a workbook to complete which would provide evidence for their portfolio.

Costs are yet to be worked out but using my own site lets me keep them quite reasonable. Teaching assistants (and teachers!) mostly fund themselves to take my courses so it needs to be inexpensive.

I decided against a self-study version due to upcoming changes in the VAT position with regards to digital sales. (Basically all digital books and any ‘automatically delivered’ digital courses will be subject to VAT from January. Boo Hiss!)

I’m really not sure though. I’ve been happy avoiding the NVQ style evidence box ticking with the Basic and Advanced courses. The Basic course produces people with a better understanding of display basics than the performance criteria of the STLS standards ever would. However there is a demand for the STLS course.

Still pondering this – what do people think?

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I’m interested in the scheme mainly from the point of view of learners participating in my on line Classroom Displays Training course. I introduced the course to meet the practical needs of teaching assistants who find themselves needing to improve their display skills. This has now expanded to also help librarians, NQTs, returning teachers and overseas teachers who want fresh ideas.

The main product is a portfolio of displays they have created that demonstrate the display theories and techniques learned during the course. This is not an accredited course and that is deliberate on my part. I wanted to cover a range of useful and practical skills that people actually need in the workplace and using a loose framework work to the current needs of the learner. Answering the question “What is the next thing need to learn?” rather than meeting pre-ordained performance criteria. Each learner can work at their own level and go as deeply into the topics as their interest (and current need) takes them.

Aside -Do you sense the frustration of the NVQ tutor here? You should!

As it is an on line course they may have learned a range of other skills that are not shown by the portfolio.

They may also learn

• To use email effectively for learning and reflection
• To manage their on line learning
• To use digital cameras to document their learning
• To use Flickr and other photo sharing sites to store their portfolio of work electronically
• To use sites like the Classroom Displays Flickr Group as an archive of ideas to build on.
• To use a forum, an email group, a blog and blog comments, or other online interactions to discuss and reflect on what they are learning.
• To work collaboratively online to improve each other’s ideas for displays.

I can see that some of these could be covered by the use of the Open Badges scheme. I am going to try to explore this further with a Learner Story. This is totally fictional, a thought exercise.

Paulo – a fictional learner’s story

Paulo ( Image leads to photo source – openmatt blog “badges in the real world”)

• Paulo is 28 and came to the UK 10 years ago
• English is his second language and has already achieved Level 2 English at his local college.
• He has been a stay at home dad for the last 3 years
• He likes technology and computers and has used a single dad’s forum for support while he was at home.
• He enjoys taking photos with his phone
• He recently got a job as a teaching assistant in a local primary school
• He likes working with the children but he is really unsure about how to tackle classroom displays.
• He is going to do his Level 2 Supporting Teaching and Learning next year but that says very little about displays and he needs practical help now.

How Will Open Badges Help Paulo?

Paulo talks to his line manager and tells her he wants to sign up for the Classroom Displays course. As it is inexpensive the school agrees to refund him the fee.

Open badges help Paulo because:

• He can collect badges for completing tasks and reflections within the displays course
• He can also quickly achieve badges that give credit for his current technology skills
• He can get further badges for improving those skills
• He can get acknowledgement and a badge from his peers for his reflections
• Through the process of peer review and assessment, giving and receiving badges, he can gain confidence and improve his self esteem as a learner.
• He can gain proof of valuable transferable skills .

Paulo adds his badges to a Linked-in profile and to his Blogspot photography blog.

Result

Initially the course and the badges help Paulo feel more confident about his role in school. He starts to look for more opportunities to use his technology skills and continues to collect badges via relevant courses on the P2PU.

Eventually he starts to look beyond the teaching assistant role as his life circumstances change. The badges show the skills Paulo has acquired since his formal education. Skills achieved both through work and  through his informal personal learning. These hard and soft skills are difficult to capture in a traditional CV. This could open new employment opportunities, encourage him into higher level formal education or give him the confidence to set up his own business.

Reflecting on the Learner Story

I had a couple of ‘aha’ moments when I read through what I’d written. My first thought was uncertainty about the application of the badges to the main topic of the course. I usually issue a certificate of participation to learners who complete the course tasks. It details the modules covered in the course. Not everyone who takes the course actually wants one. Some teachers in particular are just taking the course for their own reasons and do not feel the need to document their learning in that way. However, learners like Paulo, whose schools are funding the course, do need proof that they have participated. So my first question is:

Would it be possible for the Open Badges to replace my (very informal) certificate?

I am hopeful that this might be the case.

My second ‘aha’ moment came when I was looking at the incidental learning outcomes of the course. This reminded me of the dreaded end of year self-assessment units and in particular the ‘graduate skills‘ section of my degree. (note to self – remember to move all this to my own hosting soon!) It would have been so much easier to collect badges as I went along to evidence my learning of technology skills. For me they became the most interesting and worthwhile parts of the degree. Blogging, wikis, on-line courses all became major areas of interest for me and eventually part of my income stream but they were never regarded as very important by the people in charge.

That phrase sparked the next ‘aha’ moment. Badges put learners ‘in charge’ of their own learning and that is exactly what I think most learners on my course need.

I have minor qualms about a couple of aspects of the scheme.

The first is mercenary but still important to me. I need to be paid for my time facilitating courses. If my learners drift off into P2PU where does that leave me?

My second  worry is will UK employers actually see the worth and point of badges? There will be questions about rigour especially for peer awarded badges. Might they go the way of ‘continuing education credits’, which used to be, and I think sometimes still are, given for attendance at CPD courses?

Phew – this post is far longer than I intended but worthwhile I think. Good to exercise the little grey cells occasionally!

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Now -time for  a cup of tea anyone?

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I’m busy working out what to include in a one day ICT workshop for trainee primary school teaching assistants. I’ve got an ICT suite booked from 10 till 3 and I’m wondering what people think the TAs really need to know. I’ve had a few thoughts of my own and some great input from Andy. Last night I found that Anthony was thinking about something similar. He’s planning some longer training for TAs and has narrowed it down to 4 topics:

Redbridge Primary ICT Consultant: TA Training
* Using relevant software to support a child with special needs
* Training other TAs to create banners for display
* Researching websites for teachers and TAs to use in their lesson
* Using the IWB to teach

I agree with these and have added them to my list. I also think he’s hit on a couple of really important points but maybe not spelled them out. Teach one TA in a school how to do something really useful on the computer and it tends to spread without the need for formal training. Teaching assistants tend to be a resourceful lot and if something is actually useful it spreads virally through the school.

Of course I was interested that he’d picked out making banner titles for classroom displays. This is something I’ve banged on about for ages. Hand cutting lettering for displays is a hugely wasteful use of teaching assistants’ time. Often schools don’t even have die cutters for the letters so that means using wooden templates, drawing them out and then cutting by hand. If TAs, and so by implication teachers, learn how easy it is to do banner titles, and how good they can look, maybe this can change.

Other areas I’ve thought about:

• File saving and sharing – an introduction. Basic, but many people, including teachers, have no concept of the difference between files and folders, don’t understand about saving versions, or even sensible naming of .docs
• Calibrating white boards. This is a simple but really helpful classroom skill!
• Supporting from the side – how not to do it for them!
• Very basic troubleshooting. Things like checking knowing how to check the in control panel of the laptop when the sound doesn’t work. It’s often just defaulted to ‘mute’.

I think the best way to take this forward might be to use a wiki page so I’ve set up a Teaching Assistants ICT Training page on usefulwiki.

If anyone wants to join in it is easy to edit. Just set yourself up a user name and away you go

So what do you think teaching assistants need to know about using and supporting with ICT? Either add your thoughts to the wiki or leave a comment here.

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Dy/dan fell in love with the design aesthetics of this hand written worksheet and started to question our obsession with the word processor:

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Careful now.

I saw this in a pile of forgotten masters while walking by the copier. It was love.

Check out the clear hierarchy. The single, legible font. The single style for emphasis. Margins tightly aligned. The second lines indenting just as they should. Spacing is evenly distributed. The kids know exactly where to look, where to go for their next question, and where to find important information.

Somewhere, until quite recently I still had all my hand written masters for worksheets. They were done in the far off days of the banda machine. Everything came out blue, very dark bluey/purple if you were lucky or, almost unreadable, light blue, if the ink was running out. Your hand writing had to be clear otherwise there was no chance of the children reading it. You had to use weight, bullet points and underlining to make things stand out.

Pupils were used to reading cursive script and they loved worksheets. It was so much easier than squinting, copying notes off a blackboard. We were taught at Teacher Training College that using blackboards full of notes (as many of the teachers in our TP schools did) was very poor practice and the banda worksheet was the way forward. I think the word ‘personalisation’ might even have been used!

I looked through those old worksheets before I threw them away and realised they were from a time that shared many ideas with where we are now in schools. The tasks they set were differentiated by “must, should and could”. They often sought personal responses and gave scope for extended writing. They even included some line drawings and diagrams or asked for a pictorial response ( my subjects were Middle School English and Comparative Religion – does anyone still teach that?) They were then my very best attempt at helping my pupils to learn and I was still proud of my 20 year old self for having made a good job of them. But I binned them anyway.

Now I question the value of worksheets, how ever well designed. After all, as Adrian says

* In years to come will you be stopped in the street by an ex-student and they will bow down before you and thank you for all the exciting worksheets they gave? I don’t think so!
* Please challenge your students and teach them to think.
* Please give your students a 21st Century Literacy skillset.
* Please hang this poster next to your school’s photocopier.

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This video comes from Dr Andy Oliver, a member of the Flickr Classroom Displays group, via another more distant member of my network – Jen’s new Ning group, for professional development in her college. Real people using the power of Web2.0 and seeing its value for their own development not just as ’something to use with students.’ Good stuff!

I’m having one of my more connected phases thanks to the power of Twitter. This is where the network really shines and the dots connect themselves.

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I’ve added a new tag line to the blog:

Informal learning, Internet technology and Action research

This is taken from my degree title, of course, but as ever with the degree adapted to my own context! These are the main topics I blog about here so it seemed logical. I am also slowly, slowly, writing an About page like Andy Roberts and John at Sandaig. I can’t believe how quickly they’ve done it. Still, I’ve been busy writing an article so I might let myself off!

I’m currently updating the blog’s design so things might be a bit lumpy for a few days. In return for some research work Andy upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.2 for me. This is a huge improvement and means I can start to use some of the techniques I’m used to having over at Classroom Displays Blog

Still in order to make full use of the update I’ve had to change my blog design. After much swithering I think I’ve settled on MooPoint. It is very plain and functional which is what I want at the moment. I’m kind of tired of fussy blog designs. I suppose it might be a reaction to all the dark colours I was considering in my last post!

Having said that I will try to get a few more visual elements into the design, but I’m not sure how yet. I’m just enjoying the purity of the clean lines (lol – there speaks the daughter of a modernist architect!)

It would be great if people let me know what they think of the new design and any suggestions for improvements.

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See my full notes on Usefulwiki and feel free to add your own thoughts on the subject to the wiki.
As I said in my last post I did manage to make a virtual appearance at the NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) in Atlanta USA today. Many thanks to Andy for the use of his mac as my faithful old iBook finds Skype too much for it
It was a busy room by the sounds of things with about 250 people in the audience and Tom and I on Skype. Jane and Suzie had their hands full, but in a good way. Many of the people there were obviously interested in the topic of Project Based Learning.
Jane and Suszie emphasised that there was lots of good project based work going on but that it was easy for it to be happening out of sight, sometimes even other teachers in the same school didn’t know about it. So it’s all about using technology to share best practice. Ewan got a name check in the introduction and they used a quote from him during the session too.

Tom had some interesting insights as his background is in project management for development rather than education though he now works for a network of schools. I love his assumption that all participants, both pupils and adults are learners. It’s so obviously true but sometimes adults are too close to it to see it themselves.

I think their use of stories was the most powerful thing about the presentation. I learn so much more from authentic narratives than from theory and hypothetic situations. No surprise then that that’s one of the conerstones of the book!

I’m interested in the idea that although this is soon going to be available as a book it’s in no sense a finished work. The book will just be a snapshot of where the work stood at one point. The conversation will continue, grow and develop and hopefully become something far richer and more useful than the book alone. Already they’ve continued their learning journey with a Flickr group and a blog. I’ve popped up a quick page about their presentation on usefulwiki but that can easily extend to become a section of the wiki if other people want to put their own examples of project based learning up there.

I was quite nervous myself, waffled on a bit about the group and the blogs, but took a leaf from their book and told a story to illustrate how the group might change as children become more involved in celebrating their own learning and that went really well

That’s all for now as it’s been a long day but I’ll post more about my thoughts soon.

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Start by having a look at Six Questions where I cover the answers to the following questions:

1. Why did you start classroom displays?
2. What’s your underlying purpose?
3.What are you learning from
the community that has sprung up around the flickr group
and blog?
4. What does the range of pictures say about what’s
going on in schools?
5. Do you think old practices still hold their
grip, or are new more student-centered activities emerging?

In Reflections on blogging
you will find a discusssion of my own experiences of blogging and an explanation of the way I think blogs are used most effectively.

You might want to have a look at my research methodology. In it I explain why I chose an action research approach and discuss the assumptions that under-pin my work.

My statement of ethics will give an insight into my descision to be transparent in my actions.

There is also a podcast interview with me on David Noble’s Booruch blog

If you still have questions after reading this I’ll be happy to answer them. An e-mail exchange suits me best as I like to take my time and give reflective answers.

At some point I’d want to read any analysis of the blog and also have an opportunity to reply. This might mean my blogging about it in Acting to Improve. As I said before I like to do everything related to my work in the open so that there’s a visible audit trail to my on-going action inquiry.

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I suspect some old friends of mine might fancy taking theatre breaks in London to see this. I’m not sure if I’d want to or not.

When I was 12, for my birthday, my Dad gave me a hard back set of the three volumes of Tolkien’s classic. I’d already been primed with his old copy of The Hobbit so I knew the ways of the Shire, the charm of Hobbits, the humours of a certain wizard. I gobbled up the three books, wizzing through the first two at great speed, slowing down because I couldn’t stand the thought that they’d be over soon about half way through the third. I think it was just about a perfect read for me at that point, the next best book, that took me from children’s fiction to something a bit more meaty.

When I was a bit older, 18 or so, I was amazed to see friends lugging round the massive paperback version. I couldn’t understand why they’d want to read a ‘children’s book’ or why they didn’t know it already. It became an icon for many of my generations and that might explain the musical, but more of that later. As my daughter grew up I read her The Hobbit, well, really, we shared reading it, a chapter each, night after night. She loved it just as I had and I quite enjoyed re-visiting the characters and seeing them through her eyes. Then there was the BBC radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings. One of the afore-mentioned friends had taped the whole thing and we ploughed our way through it, every night for weeks. I got pretty bored with it and eventually lost interest.

When one of the 3 films came out I was dragged, protesting, to see it. There was another film on that I’d rather have seen. The tedium of the radio adaptation prepared me well for the film. I thought it was a giant turkey. What can I say? It was during my degree, I’d had a lot of late nights. At least I don’t think I snored, and they woke me up at the end

So how on earth have they made a musical of it? It’s a bit like my old friend Brett’s idea of Paradise Lost on Ice! You have to wonder not only how but why? A morbid curiosity overcame me and I decided to see if I could find out.

So here’s a synopsis of the musical:

It starts at Bilbo’s eleventy first birthday party – Bag End shenanigans, singing and dancing hobbits.

He does his vanishing act

Fast forward to Rivendell – lots of pretty floating elvishness,

Arawen – very pretty elvishness, Frodo recovering from the stabbing (Do try to keep up – they don’t show it just sing about it!)

Enter Bilbo, Gandalf etc for a council of war, er, Council of Elrond.

There’s also a quick show down between Gandalf and Sauron at some point.

Dance number with orcs on springs – I kid you not!

Off to the Mines of Moria – dark, scary, with brave hobbits and Gandalf

Interval

Enter Ents on stilts – sounds entertaining (sorry:-))

Very quick version of the Battle of Hornburg with only about 10 orks.

More meandering around the plot, Shelob, Gollum, etc.

At one point orcs invade the audience – sounds fun

The ring gets destroyed in a big set piece

Final section – back to the Shire, that bit always makes me sad, a vision of what was obviously meant to be England overrun with baddies, tattered, it’s innocence destroyed.

Departure of the Elves and Gandalf for the Grey Havens- Gladariel gets to sing a long song. This bit is often thought to be meant to be sad in the book but it always felt to me like it is clearing the way for people to inhabit a real world.

I hear the sets and costumes are gorgeous, the singing very good but I’m just not convinced. Part of me is still curious though. Theatre breaks in London don’t have to be too expensive, it might just be worth it.

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