Planbook as a lesson planning tool

Last year I got pretty interested in the application of what Vic Zbar called ‘highly effective micro-teaching strategies’, particularly in the area of feedback and formative assessment and particularly related to the Hattie research and applications emerging from all that. Things like: ‘wait time’, ‘no hands up’, the icy pole stick questioning and the ‘pounce and bounce’ strategies, some of which I blogged about last year, and most of which are firmly analog. It’s hard to imagine something more low-tech than an icy-pole stick, even one decorated lovingly with texta and fineliner pen.

I enjoyed that thinking and aim to continue lots of those approaches this year.

One new thing I’ve want to explore is some of the work around ‘explicit teaching’ and particularly the lesson stages approaches that move from things like a ‘hook’ or intention to instruction, guided practice, group work and individual practice, concluded by revision, review and next steps. These are largely American ideas, but have been interested in how they’ve developed from there. Every lesson must have impact, every lesson should have a coherent learner-centric structure.

Sort of makes sense, but it also seems daunting to do that for every class every time.

So, I was interested to see whether there are lesson planning apps that might help, and came across Planbook. Planbook has been a Mac app for a while and I know nothing about that except that it’s about $36 and I’m not sure how well it syncs with the iPad version, which I bought for $9.99. Don’t be confused; there’s several Planbooks out there. I’m talking about the one from Hellmansoft.

What I like about Planbook is its ability to cope with a variety of timetables including our ten day rotation but the ability to customise the fields are the big winners for me.

The fields I included were based on Hattie’s extensions to work around the explicit teaching model.  There’s six customisable fields, so here’s what I chose for each field:

1. Topic/Content/Part of course

- What’s this topic
- Standards
- Stage in the learning

2. Beginning of lesson

- Learning Intention
- Activate
- Review
- The HOOK

3. Presentation

- Teach the concept
- Teach the skill
- Check for understanding

4. Guided Practice

- Development and engagement
- Feedback and individual support

5. Independent Practice

- Applying the concept or skill

6. Review

- Clarify, conclude
Homework/Assignments
- What should be done between lessons

Below, you can see the editing view of Planbook on the iPad. It’s not the prettiest setup in the world, and it would be easier on the Mac I’m sure, but it works well, syncs with Dropbox and is pretty user friendly. On the left hand side you can see the fields I’ve set up for each component of the lesson.

 

 

Below, you can see the weekly view. I’ve got three lessons this week (in green) and you can see the subject name, times and the lesson plan there.

 

 

Below, you can see the single lesson view (not in edit mode) I’ve been using this as my lesson planner, having the iPad on my desk as the planner, and the computer plugged into the data projector showing the students the lesson content or activities.

It is a bit daunting to plan every lesson in this detail, and to be honest some of the year 12 lessons don’t go exactly this way. But, it has really sharpened my planning and I’m going to persist with this and give it a decent trial. I was considering using Evernote as the lesson planning tool (setting up a blank note with the six fields and simply copying that to a new lesson), but this more purpose-built app has some advantages over that approach, particularly its integration with your timetable schedule. If it really did sync well with the Mac version, it would be even more powerful.

Watch a screencast of the basics of Planbook below; it’s the Mac version, but the basics are the same.

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Flashcards+

I’m always a little envious of those kids with piles of flip cards. Bundled up in big wads, encircled with rubber bands. ‘This is what I need to know’, they seem to say. Here is the contained knowledge. They sit at their desks and spread them before them, almost smugly.

So, I wanted to have some for my students … Just like they had in Psych. And, who knows, maybe some students actually learn like that? Like the question and answer, the certainty, the ability to review and revise.

Doing *some* research for flash card apps (of course I wasn’t going to go down the ‘paper’ pathway, I found Flashcards+ which works quite well (actually it took me quite a while to work out how the cards could be viewed) and works well with Quizlet, a kind of online community of Flashcard makers. I was very surprised to find several sets already made for Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which isn’t’ that widely taught.

Still, I made a set of cards for our literature study of *Wide Sargasso Sea*, mainly terms, concepts, characters, factual stuff, which connected more to the things I wanted the students to know and work on, rather than the standard vocab. style ones already there. You can look it up on Quizlet.

 

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Then I told the students about it in class and via the class blog where I could EMBED the cards so you could actually play them from the web site.

And, a couple of the students really liked it. Said it was useful. Said I should do it again.

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Back to school apps

Somehow, I still get the feeling that I always got when I saw the Officeworks ‘Back to School’ catalog in the mailbox in old media days. NO, not  yet!

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Rethinking Innovation in education

I’m usually reluctant to write about articles that I can’t immediately share with a quick link but Charles Leadbeater’s most recent piece Rethinking innovation in education: Opening  up the debate, published recently by CSE, seems only available as a purchase.

So I must have really liked it to be writing about it, and I did.  He uses some modern technology comparisons (the App Store, Pixar Studios) to talk about what constitutes effective cultures of innovation and what that means for school systems, including the necessity for sustaining innovation: ‘leading innovation means creating and then leading a creative community, around a cause.’

He talks a lot too about a growing consensus, partly from insights into brain-based learning, about what constitutes effective 21st century learning, something I’ve written about here at times too. He writes, ‘to put it simply, the core of this consensus is that people learn most effectively when they are mainly learning WITH others, and sometimes BY themselves, and less frequently when the are having things explained FOR them or knowledge delivered TO them. Increasingly, to make learning effective we need to design it as a WITH and BY activity, rather than something tat’s about doing FOR and TO us.’ (his emphasis through the caps)

He then lists 10 main ingredients (I love recipe lists!) about that emerging consensus coming out of a range of sources (which he lists)

1. Learning is an active and engaged process
2. Engaged learning is impossible unless the learner feels motivated
3. To be motivating, learning has to be personal, rather than standardised
4. As well as feeling deeply personal, learning needs to be highly collaborative
5. Mastering knowledge and skills is not a process of memorising content and regurgitating it in a form for a test; learning is about application
6. This kind of learning thrives on feedback
7. Learning needs to be stretching and challenging
8. That kind of learning is a structured process, not a free for all. Learning should be hard work but rewarding and fun.
9. Learning should take place in a wide variety of settings, not just at school or in a classroom.
10. Designing the conditions for this kind of learning is hard; we will need perhaps fewer but more skilled, creative, master teachers.

He says lots of other stuff too, including ‘if education systems were like the App Store, developers from outside and inside the system would be adding new apps the whole time to help people learn’.

Lots of food for thought as I sat in on  a session on personalised learning today.

Top: 19th Century innovation; a steam engine in a Murray River paddle steamer. Photo: Warrick

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Travelling with technology

Now that the tapas bars, Gaudi extraganzas and wide open squares of Barcelona and Madrid are already fading into memory, pushed aside by the blunt reality of the school day, I thought I should reflect on what it was like to travel with an Ipad for the first time,  and the kind of technology I found useful.

It was the first time I’ve gone more than a couple of days without a ‘real’ computer and I’ve gotta admit that I did miss the keyboard at times. However, for email, twitter, surfing the AGE website for news on the footy and even for the occasional blog post the Ipad was more than adequate. That, and it  fits into the airline seat storage in front of you, the ten hours battery life, the instant-on etc. It worked well and I used it in various ways beginning with using a little app called Plan-Pack-Go to get myself organised.

I had a Skype conversation from the apartment in Barcelona at one stage, which was seamless (wireless connectivity through most of the place we stayed in Spain were better than Melbourne) and bought a camera connection kit to import photos from my Canon into the Ipad at the end of each day. That way I could email someone a photo directly from the Ipad photo application and also had two copies of the photo: the one on the camera card and another on the Ipad. I could also upload photos to Picasa with a great little drag and drop app called Web Albums.

Of course I also had my Spanish Phrase Book App, and my DK Top Ten Guides Apps to Madrid and Barcelona, as well as some handy offline maps on the OffMaps app.

I used world weather apps Weather Watch and the international version of PocketWeather to check the daily weather in key cities and used the Ipad app for Tripit to access details of the trip I’d previously loaded into that website.  WorldClock was also handy as well as the XE Currency Converter. I put key documents like passport details, travel insurance details etc. into GoodReader so that I’d have access to them whether I was online or not. I also put the PDFs of my camera manual and my GPS manual into GoodReader and was glad I did.

For the first time I read an e-book, all the way through. I bought three books from Amazon and read them using the Kindle app on the Ipad. I didn’t find it too bright and in the bit of the trip where I was seated next to a sleeping baby (:-} I found that reading on the Ipad was less intrusive to people around me than having the overhead light on and reading a paper book. Of course, with airlines getting stricter on weight limits of bags, it was nice to have as many books as I wanted and not worry about how I’d carry them. In fact, I took 2 ‘dead-tree’ books with me as well, and left them in Spain somewhere after I’d finished them, because I couldn’t be bothered carrying them. I loved the way that I could highlight and annotate with the Kindle app and those highlights and annotations are available on my Amazon web page to copy and paste late on.

The thing about reading I found was that, if the book was good, after about 5 pages or so you were just ‘reading’. You weren’t thinking any more about the nature of the physical object you had in your hands, but you were in the story. I also liked that I could buy more books from Amazon if I wanted (and finding English language material in the brick and mortar shops was a challenge at times) and after I heard about Washington Irving’s books on his travels in Spain and downloaded a couple for free from the Itunes book store when I was in Seville. The generic Ipad reading app is just as natural as the Kindle app I think. I also made sure that I’d been regularly saving interesting looking articles from the web into Instapaper so I always had a ready supply of shorter reading too.

I did a bit of writing too, mainly using Documents to Go, but also playing around with MaxJournal as a travel journal app.

I did find it tricky to listen to the Grand Final but found a great little app called ooTunes Radio which allows you to tune into pretty well any radio station in the world. So, I heard the Grand Final over breakfast in Barcelona. That was fun, and it was an exciting game!

I’ll always have a computer, but I’m convinced there’s a place for a different kind of device too now.

I should end by saying too that at times I was totally amazed by the technology in the architecture, the water and sewage systems, the defensive planning in medieval palaces and gardens we saw.  And the beauty of it too. There were moments when I wondered whether ‘technology’ has really improved at all; I can’t imagine too many Ipads still hanging together after eight hundred years!

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Reading on the screen

Just about every English teacher I know is passionate about books and reading. Loves it. Is good at it.

They (we) love books. The smell, the feel, the texture, the excitement of a new book. And, if I had $1 for every one I’d heard say something like “I couldn’t possibly read a book on the screen”, then I could buy an ipad.

So, it was funny the other day teaching Jane Austen to my Lit class and talking about some important passages that were revealing about Austen’s views and values to look up and see one of the girls looking at her computer, not the dog-eared Penguin Classic everyone else had open.

When I asked her why she wasn’t looking at the passage we were discussing,she said she was, but that she preferred to read it on the screen, where she could annotate it direct and make notes on the discussion somewhere else than in the margin. It wasn’t so much as an ‘aha’ moment, as a ‘oh yeah’ moment. I did give them the text version of Emma from Project Gutenberg and had encouraged them to use it to find quotes or to pull apart key passages. But, I hadn’t thought that some students actually PREFER to read this way. That it’s not all about the book for everyone any more (if it ever was)

And I find myself reading more and more on the screen now. Not just online newspapers and the reports from the Giro cycling race in Italy. But substantive articles, even books. I read The Call of the Wild for the first time ever on the plane going to the USA, on my ipod application called Classics, which had 24 other classics I could have chosen. Or, from another app called Classics2Go which has 60 classics from Wuthering Heights to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or, I could have opened up Grimm’s fairy tales or the Shakespeare app I paid a couple of dollars for which contains ALL of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. A lot more choice than I could fit in my take-on luggage.

So, if my reading behaviour is changing, little wonder that our students are going to have less qualms and want more opportunities to be doing their reading in a new format. The stories remain the same.

Below and above: screen shots from my ipod-touch and the apps I’ve talked about above.

Cross-posted at English Teaching it IT (with more screenshots)

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Rupert Murdoch vs my Iphone App

I’ve been following the recent bluff and bluster from Rupert Murdoch with interest: ‘Google are ripping off my content’, ‘You can’t do this to me!’, ‘I’m taking my newspaper off the internet’, ‘Pay for view for news is the future’, stuff like that (I’m paraphrasing but you can do a Google News Search and get the exact quotes yourself; what am I, a journalist?) Here’s a snapshot:

Some see it as a bluff, or an attempt to cut a deal with Bing or some other search engine, others see it as the last gasps of a media mogul who just doesn’t get it and/or the desperate last throes of old media.  I heard that a year ago Rupert Murdoch had never done a Google search himself. That figures.

I love newspapers but some of them aren’t doing a great job of convincing me that I care. I loved reading the NY Times when I was there recently and bought it every morning and I’ve got a lot of time for the AGE but then I go there this week and find vitriolic opinion columns from sensationalists like Catherine Deveny or across town the same stuff from Andrew Bolt in the Herald-Sun.  It’s fun for language analysis practice for Year 12s, but you dont’ go there for insight, or even particularly good writing. Can a newspaper that has to be one thing to all people really work any more?

Truth is, when I wake up each morning I check my email and my Google Reader feeds before I check the newspaper online.  I follow 101 blog feeds daily, from people who are expert in their fields, who I respect, many of whom also write better than Bolt, Deveny and the rest. Try Scott McLeod, Derek Wenmoth, Don Tapscott or David Warlick on education, for a start. I could go on!

And I’m hopeful that a new era of open-ness has begun and that the genie is already out of the bottle in a democratisation of the media. We want access to the information that matters to us in exactly the format that works for us and I hope that Murdoch’s view of the world is fading.

I’m teaching the classic text Frankenstein to my literature class next year and have been trawling around for resources. One that struck me was a study guide on the text available as a web site you could visit, a PDF you could download or an Iphone App you could buy for $1.19. You can find it on Itunes.  It’s not anything particularly intuitive except that it understands the ubiquity around content now, and that we want choice in how we receive it.  The ABC seems to understand, they’ve been working hard at delivering their content in increasingly diverse ways, including on hand held devices.

I met with my publisher recently in planning a new text book for next year, maybe. We were talking about models of publishing and they’ve begun to move (slowly) toward a sort of print on demand model where you order a customised version of the book depending on the texts and contexts you’ve chosen to study. But what about making that same content available online? We’ve had a web site resource add-on for a while now, but I’m arguing for the book to be available in other ways too: to be read on the Kindle, downloaded and purchased in bits, even as an iphone app. It’s going to be interesting to see who catches us on quickest in all this; the slow ones aren’t likely to last.

I’ve been following the recent bluff and bluster from Rupert Murdoch with interest: ‘Google are ripping off my content’, ‘You can’t do this to me!’, ‘I’m taking my newspaper off the internet’, ‘Pay for view for news is the future’, stuff like that (I’m paraphrasing but you can do a Google News Search and get the exact quotes yourself; what am I, a journalist?)

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