MathsTutor v MathsWatch

You may recall earlier in the year I wrote this post about using MathsWatch. Not long after praising the MathsWatch SCORM package we have installed at school, I caught wind of a new rival; CGP’s MathsTutor - and yes CGP are the people who make the glossy-looking revision guides.

So this is basically a head-to-head battle (I know of no other alternatives). Who will prevail?

For starters, CGP’s MathsTutor looks good and the menus are easy to navigate, losing the slightly 1980′s feel of MathsWatch. It has a greater variety of activities for each topic, including hand written answers to exam questions which are a great idea. For my money, the explanations offered by MathsTutor are generally more detailed and certainly more interactive. However, I do wish  they wouldn’t try and make a terrible joke at the beginning and end of each clip (see video below for evidence).

CGP’s MathsTutor offers DVD-Roms aimed at the Higher Tier, Foundation Tier and an additional Foundation Basics DVD-ROM for low ability students, as opposed to the simple Foundation/Higher combination of MathsWatch. However, I do like the fact that the MathsWatch clips come with attached worksheets to practice the skills you have revised. CGP don’t offer this, presumably because they want you to buy another of their revision workbooks instead. I have attached two video clips of the alternatives to help you decide for yourselves…

Cost? As I mentioned, we currently have the MathsWatch SCORM package installed on our Maths department website within our VLE, setting us back £349 (plus VAT) per year. The CGP SCORM package comes in at a relatively healthy £250 (plus VAT) per year. Sadly, I haven’t had chance to test the CGP SCORM package so the review is based on the relative merits of the two companies’ DVD-ROMs. In terms of the price of those DVD-ROMs, both companies charge £3 (plus VAT) for each DVD.

CGP have clearly realised that their successful revision guides leave them perfectly positioned to take a share of MathsWatch’s market. I agree with them; if you sell CGP Maths revision guides to your students then it makes sense to use MathsTutor’s DVD’s or SCORM package, given their equal cost. Even if you don’t sell the revision guides, it’s the best set of DVD video tutorials I’ve come across. I don’t think it will be too long before CGP unleash a host of these DVD Video Tutorials for other subjects either…

The best interactive whiteboard/screencast app for iPad

Using screencasts to make educational videos isn’t a particularly new idea, as any ‘flipped classroom’ proponents will tell you. However, I did get excited and write this post after realising I could create videos that would not only demonstrate topics but also  the answers too. Better late than never.

I hurriedly went on a mission to discover how these videos had been made. ‘Using a graphics tablet and a decent microphone’ seemed to be the general consensus. Disappointing then, that I have neither of those things. However, the school I work at does have a few iPads kicking around…

I was kindly pointed in the direction of the ‘Interactive Whiteboard Apps for iPad’ market, which has led me to trial three apps: ShowMe, Educreations and Explain Everything. By far and away the best of those three is Explain Everything. Here is my own ‘first attempt’ at making a movie using it – the answer to an OCR GCSE Maths Exam Specimen Paper question with my best Radio 4 voice.

The first thing that appealed to me about Explain Everything is its import and export options. You can upload most types of file – ppt, pdf, doc – and you can move between slides  whilst recording. You can upload these files from either the Photo Roll, Camera, Dropbox or Evernote. Since I am a huge fan of both Dropbox and Evernote, this was a major selling point. Explain Everything also has the huge advantage of allowing you to export the video directly to Youtube, where it can be playlisted, embedded and shared with your students. It can also be downloaded as an mp4 file to Dropbox, allowing you to customise it as you wish.

As a Maths teacher, I was delighted to see options to insert lines and simple shapes – even if sometimes they don’t behave as I would like. There is even more customisation available with pen styles; thickness, transparency and every colour imaginable add to Explain Everything’s advantage over its rivals. The processing of recording, cancelling and re-recording is also lightning quick. You are able to watch your video instantly after its creation and can easily start again.

But there must be downsides?

Explain Everything does set you back £1.99, whereas its main rivals are free. However, it is definitely worth the small outlay. I have also chosen to purchase an iPad pen (since making that video) to help keep my writing small, which can be difficult on each of the apps.

Having shown all this to the members of my department, one of them said ‘I suppose I need a few more shapes than a square, circle and star’. Some people take a lot of impressing.

If Masterchef did ‘Virtual Learning Environments’…

Masterchef often gets me thinking. How do all the contestants keep their food warm when they are standing around waiting for John and Greg to judge the others? Why does it never seem to be on at the same time (or even the same day) each week ? How do they manage to give such a long assessment based on one spoonful of food? Why do people constantly try and cook soufflés when they surely know it will lead to their demise? I could go on…

Today, it got me thinking about ‘Virtual Learning Environments’.

#1

If I strolled onto Masterchef and confidently asserted I would be serving a pan fried fillet of gurnard, octopus pease pudding and mollusc ragoût, that would be exactly what the judges would expect. Anything less would be a complete failure. After all,  surely I could deliver on three items? If the mollusc  ragoût were missing, I would be lambasted for failing to deliver what I had promised. If the octopus pease pudding and the mollusc ragoût were missing, I would merely have served a pan fried fillet of gurnard.

#2 (the same but introducing price)

If I owned a fine dining restaurant and on the menu I advertised a rose petal masala-spiced halibut served with minted pea caviar and salted potato crisps, that would be exactly what my customers would expect. If the minted pea caviar were missing, not only would I be lambasted for failing to deliver what I had promised, I wouldn’t be expecting the customer to pay for their meal either. Equally, if neither the minted pea caviar or the salted potato crisps turned up, not only would I have merely served a rose petal masala-spiced halibut, I would be expecting the customer to publicly denounce the restaurant on  tripadvisor as soon as they got home on.

#3 (this is where the VLEs come in – you may have seen this coming…)

If I travelled the world with my company selling Virtual Learning Environments, that would be exactly what my customers would rightly expect. If the ‘Learning’ were absent from the package, not only would I surely be lambasted for failing to deliver what I had promised, I wouldn’t expect my customers to pay for what they had received and I wouldn’t be overly surprised if they publicly denounced my product across the world.

So why do schools so often turn a blind eye to the fact that their Virtual Learning Environments don’t deliver on ‘Learning’ in most cases? Why do schools so often choose to pay over-the-odds for ‘Virtual Environments’?

A different way of giving exam feedback?

Yesterday I came across this post on the Number Loving blog. Amongst lots of very interesting things was a link to Mr Buckton’s fantastic youtube channel. It is truly fantastic.

If you have been too lazy to click on the link, the youtube channel contains a catalogue of self-made answers to pretty much all GCSE Maths Exam Papers from 2010 onwards.

One of the lessons I have always felt I teach badly is the ‘exam feedback lesson’. It has been known to contain large elements of me speaking and students listening, often equally painful for both sides. Not any more.

There are lots of possibilities for these videos and I see no reason why they are limited to Maths. Here are a few ideas that instantly sprang to mind.

•  After marking and handing back your students their exam papers, give them the video links and ask them to return you a copy of the exam paper that would gain 100%. The beauty of the videos is that students can rewind and rewatch them, helping to build an understanding.

• Ask each member of your department to prepare the answer to 3 (or however many you would need) questions each. It would be a perfect way to introduce them to the idea of using screencasts in their lessons. The students would probably enjoy having recognisable voices. Collate them into a playlist on youtube and share them.

• Get the students to make the videos for you. Tell the students (in pairs?) to prepare model answers to a question, including what they would say to help explain it. In lesson, invite students to demonstrate and explain their answers on the IWB/tablet, whilst recording a screencast of their explanation. Collate them into a playlist on youtube and share them.

• Once the videos have been sorted into playlists – as @mrbuckton4maths as has already done, embed the playlists (or individual videos) into your class wiki  so that students can also use them as a tool for independent revision.

• I just had the idea to hyperlink the video answer to each question in the Google Docs Exam Topic Tracker I showed in my last post. This would allow students to instantly watch a video explanation of any question that they got incorrect. I have just hyperlinked one cell for now to demonstrate – OCR June 2010 Paper 1,  Q1.

@mrbuckton4maths has since informed me he used a graphics tablet running ActivInspire and Jing Pro to create these – accompanied by a decent quality microphone. To save me from having to create these by talking to my Interactive Whiteboard I am looking for ways to get hold of these things and do this as we speak! Hopefully, I can manage to do this using an iPad and save the additional costs of another tablet.

If you have any other ideas for using these superb videos, or how they could be created differently, please get in touch.

Using Google Docs to track exam progress (collaboratively)

Most Maths teachers (and many other subject teachers) will have tried to create an exam topic tracker before. Often, these are created using a simple  time-consuming spreadsheet into which the teacher has to manually enter the marks gained – by each student – for each question. This then allows the teacher to analyse the results and target areas of weakness.

This seems to miss the point a little. Firstly, in most situations the teacher should already be aware of the needs of the ‘whole class’. Secondly, and far more importantly, this doesn’t help necessarily help each individual in the class; the areas of weakness will not be the same for each student.

Our students need to be more independent and responsible than this ‘teacher reliance’. If they are aware of their own weaknesses than they can act responsibly to correct these. Surely students need to have their own version of an exam topic tracker if they are to analyse their results themselves?

I was challenged a while ago to try and make a tracker that would do exactly that, using the best collaborative tool I know: Google Docs. The result is the linked example here (and below), for OCR GCSE Mathematics.

The aim was to produce a tracker that would allow each student to become aware of their weaknesses, but retain the overall picture of the whole class generated by the exam tracker I referred to earlier. It did have to undergo a couple of reincarnations to achieve this, but I am pretty happy with the result (ideas for improvements welcome!). The tabs remain titled A1, A2… but can easily be replaced by students’ names/initials if you want it to be completely transparent.

It will be officially rolled out come May/June time this year as the exam season returns. As we complete each past paper, students will be asked to enter their own results in the relevant section. The document changes colour depending on the number of marks gained; encouraging students to target that topic with their revision. The real benefit of this Google Docs spreadsheet is that the ‘Overall’ page, located at the end of the tabs fills itself, providing you with not only the weaknesses of each student but also an overview of the ‘average student’ and their weaknesses.

You may have noticed I have claimed this to be a collaborative work. In fact, in one respect it isn’t. The spreadsheet is completed solely by the students and is designed so that the teacher doesn’t have to input a thing. Collaboration at its finest.

Feel free to have a play with the document and let me know what you think (I can always reset it to an earlier version if you make a complete mess of it). Click – File > Make a Copy if you would like your own version.

How not to use Google Sites for your (Maths) classes

I had been playing around with Google Sites (or wikispaces) for a while prior to introducing them for each of my classes in September. I had seem them used for students’ projects but wanted to try using them as a whole class tool. I decided to set them up using the ‘announcements’ template, so I could add comments and attachments. Initially, it began as a place to put the homework for each class with the occasional hint; somewhere I could put worksheets to ensure students couldn’t fully lose them any more, to give them no excuses…

And all of that works fairly well. But, fully aware of what I was doing, another member of the department rightfully asked ‘but how are they being used to enhance the learning of our students?’. Hmmmm. That is kind of the point, I suppose.

Since I am a firm believer that technologies should only be used in education if they are to enhance learning and motivation (learning often follows motivation), a change of direction was required. To fulfill that criteria it was clear that the site needed to be collaborative; it needed to involve input from the students rather than solely from their teacher. In retrospect, this should have been obvious…

So, after a period of extensive reflection, a mini action plan/list of ideas was devised:

1) The sites have to be a collaborative work.

2) At the end of each week, a student will be nominated to summarise the learning and topics studied each week, this will be entered as a new post.

3) Try to use the site for the plenary activity, rather than the end of the lesson, at least once a week (I am really keen on this idea). Use wallwisher and other online tools that can be embedded in the site to encourage students to reflect.

4) Encourage students to use the comments feature to help each other with homework, allow them to post videos to help explain.

5) I will continue to put homework on the site, but my contribution shall go no further – occasional praise comments aside.

6) Use Screenr and Jing on the Interactive Whiteboard whilst students are answering questions, save the video and upload it onto the site after the lesson for future reference.

7) The students will need to sign up for a Google Account prior to doing any of the above, as we are not yet blessed with Google Apps.

8) Keep investigating and looking for new features, ask the students. Give them the responsibility of choosing the direction of the site.

I will report back on the progress of the initiative in the future. After all, this post should have originally been made about 100 days ago. If you have any other ideas on how I could use the sites to enhance learning, please get in touch.

Google Apps Presentation (Day -103)

Nervous times. 3rd October – 103 days ago. (I appear to have missed a lot of days out).

The day of my first whole school presentation. ‘Any new technologies you have been using’ was the rough brief. There was only really one thing I wanted to cover – Google Apps. More specifically, I concentrated on Google Docs and Google Sites for my short gig, as well ensuring I remembered to wear some trousers.

The presentation I rolled out is available here  – unsurprisingly it is a Google Docs link – concentrating on the impact of collaborative learning, with a couple of examples of my personal work.

The role of Google within education is a well-debated topic. Either way, Google have a large collection of resources that can work together to enhance the learning of our students. This is another debate I will save for a rainy day, or at least until I get nearer to real time, since 103 days ago I hadn’t yet formed the opinions I now hold, yet. Confused again.

Autograph Video Tutorials

Since I have been given my Technology role, the most common question from my fellow Maths folk has been ‘Can you show us how to use Autograph?’.

‘No’. The scope of Autograph is huge. It is a truly amazing piece of software that can do pretty much anything. A training session with me would not only expose me as a blatant amateur, it wouldn’t even scratch the surface of this program’s potential.

So I cheated and made this AutographVideoTutorials pdf. The idea is simple; I can save myself from an endless stream of training sessions and my department can be provided with a reference document so they can watch the appropriate online video tutorial as and when they need to.

The videos are all taken from the superb mrbartonmaths.com. If anyone knows of any other Autograph videos I could add, please contact me on Twitter @riley_ed or add your own to this Google Docs version.

Evernote – What would I do without you?

For a while now I have been on a drive to write things down, remember things and save things. I am sure that the logic was correct in thinking that this would help me. Usually, I get given a teachers planner around about September (day – 180?), which I use religiously for 6 weeks and then forget of its existence.

No doubt I will still do that come this September. But, I have a new tool that solves plenty of my problems – Evernote - and it is fair to say I love it. I first came across it on this blog post by Colleen Young and have been using it ever since.

I use Evernote to keep a track of everything I come across on the internet that I consider interesting enough to maybe need again. Without it I would be relying on my memory or trawling through the history each time I wanted to revisit a website. With Evernote I save the webpage, categorise it and can easily search through Evernote for content and keywords. Genius.

It has a cracking Google Chrome Web Clipper, that makes life even easier to transfer information to Evernote. I haven’t tried it on any other platform yet, but it is available.

Not only does it help you recall websites instantly and answer questions from other people, it allows you to share your collections with others – here is a collection of websites I have collected on the Cloud/VLE debate.

Mathswatch SCORM Package

Bit of background here; Mathswatch advertises itself as ‘a DVD, playable on any Windows® PC, containing every Mathematics video clip needed for the GCSE exam’. It is a revision tool and a fairly popular (and successful) one at that. Rather than handing CD’s out annually, we looked at using an alternative, the Mathswatch SCORM package , effectively a program full of podcasts, which we could build into our VLE.

Technically installing this wasn’t my work, but I did give it a little jazzing up. In fact, the Mathswatch SCORM package is very good and far better than the traditional Mathswatch approach of handing out CD’s. Certainly, in terms of cost it works out far cheaper. £3 a CD x our 300 Year 11′s = £900 a year, not bad, but the SCORM package comes in at a tidy £349 annually. Of course, it isn’t going to disappear one day either, as it is firmly placed within our VLE for students and parents to use.

And use it they seem to, I regularly hear students complaining at the sound of the Mathswatch lady’s voice.

Using some skills I blogged about earlier, we used Issuu.com to host the ‘Podcasts Clip Guide’ where students can scan through to choose revision topics. Once they have found the grade and clip number they were after, clicking on ‘Grade C’ fires up the SCORM player, a little version of Windows Media Player appears and the video, with the sound of Mathswatch lady’s voice, begins.

Maths teachers, don’t worry if you have no idea what a SCORM package is; I didn’t. Ask a member of your tech team to look into it, this might just save you a few pennies!

(note – as far as I know, Google Sites are not SCORM compliant, so if you use Google Apps as your LMS you may have just read something very unhelpful). This is a major drawback of using Google Apps as your solitary LMS at the moment.