Speaking and Listening resources

New whiteboard clips will be transmitted on BBC 2 on 21st April at 11.40 and repeated on 9th June in the overnight service on BBC2 between 04.00 and 06.00. They go out as a 20 minute chunk on TV but will also be clipped up and added to the BBC’s Broadband Class Clips service so you can use them freely. They’re aimed at speaking and listening skills for top primary and lower secondary but you may find other uses for them.

Clips include:

999 call: What’s the wrong way to call the emergency services?

Explanation: When is an explanation not an explanation? When it uses jargon

Interviewing Skills: How can an interviewer miss the most important bit of news?

Debate: Should the driving age be raised or lowered?

Job Interviews: 3 candidates apply for a post as an office junior in a games company. Who would you give the job to?

Explanations: a demonstration of making a cheese sandwich and making a cup of tea.

Teaching Guantanamo Bay in Second Life

At MipTV two lecturers showed us what they’d been doing with Guantanamo Bay in Second Life http://tiny.cc/bM9UW I thought this was a visionary tool for teachers.  Pupils can swiftly come closer to the story in a way that hours of news footage are unlikely to ever achieve

The game, which requires you to sign over your avatar to another’s control, also integrates the facts and feelings researched through the footage, interviews, news reports, poetry and other official and personal sources of information around the issue. It’s an amazing piece of work and points to a whole new way of undersatnding War, Peace and Citizenship both formally and informally.

Whiteboard video clips for Eng Lit teachers – shameless plug for my work

60 minutes of HD video clips for secondary schools based on popular texts for Literature.
They go out as a programme on BBC2 in the Learning Zone from 5-6am on March 19th. Soon after the BBC will make them available as individual clips on the BBC’s class clips website, where they can be streamed in the UK.
The texts are:

• Opening two chapters of Hard Times as a period and modern drama and as a reading
• My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, performances of the orginal text set in two contrasting locations. These also contrast with the original version we made, set at an asian wedding, still available as a class clip
  
• the Gettysburg Address from the point of view of contrasting audience members, with some of the positive and negative press that followed the event
• War Poetry: Anthem for Doomed Youth and The Soldier, alternative readings in battlefield and home settings
• Sonnet 17: readings by male and female characters in contrasting moods 
• Go, Lovely Rose: readings by male and female characters in contrasting moods
• Inversnaid: reading by Hardeep Singh Kohli

The clips are between 1 and 6 minutes long. I hope they can:

• provoke questions about what writers mean 
• to show how meaning may change depending on viewpoint. 
• show how these very old stories continue to have great resonance and relevance in the 21st century.

Produced by me and made by a very hard-working team

PSP in the classroom

Paid a visit to Mount St Mary’s to see the whiteboard in action. Mr Flaherty uses ICT seamlessly and innovatively. He’d created tailor made ‘Millionaire’ style quizzes to recap on earlier poems and get the class warmed up.

He introduced Dulce et Decorum Est using a youtube video

The video represented the poem inaccurately in one or two places but those inaccuracies became part of the lesson as he unpicked them with the class
He then used 15 PSPs with the camera attachment, dividing the class into pairs setting them the task of interviewing each other as though they’d witnessed the events of the poem. The PSPs were simple to use so nothing got in the way of the learning.
It was an impressive and engaging session.

Video on whiteboards vs computers

A colleague working on video clips for whiteboards was auditioning young actors last night and asked them about their experience of whiteboards. They’d experienced the problems of washed out video clips and said it was largely down not being able to close curtains or blinds, or control the classroom lights on.
One student had an interesting new suggestion. Their teacher, she said, often previews or watches the video on a high quality laptop screen, while the class watches it on the big projected whiteboard. So it’s possible the teacher already has good knowledge of the video which they unconsciously carry over to the more wishy washy projected image. They may not recognise their pupils are seeing an inferior reproduction which can affect their engagement with the material

DVDs of schools video clips for whiteboards

Most schools TV is now in clip form. If you miss a schools TV broadcast on BBC2’s Learning Zone, it’s still possible to get it on DVD to play on your whiteboard.

1.Your school can buy DVDs of many key programmes. The service is cheap, at about £10. for a DVD wth two hours of high quality Schools TV on it. (I made a chunk of it so I would say that)
Tel 08701 272 272 or email bbcsbr@twoten.press.net
This is what’s called the BBC’s Cost Recovery service or Overnight Broadcast Service. It’s poorly advertised but an excellent source of missed video material for your whiteboards.
The DVDs can only be sold to educational establishments. It’s useful to the teachers who forget to hit record or who end up with the last five minutes of their recording missing.
iPlayer and other online delivery streams remove this issue for the general viewer but teachers need longer than 7 days, or even 30 days, to integrate a new video into their lessons. It’s often a ‘holiday’ time activity and can take a year or more to get round to.
The Overnight service can’t be anything other than just the basic video material of the programme. No video that hasn’t been transmitted can be added to the DVD, No notes or other support material can be offered with it, so teachers have to come up with ways of integratng it into their lesson from scratch.
This cost recovery Overnight Broadcast Service is sometimes confused with the commercial DVD service offered by other providers such as:

2. BBC Worldwide/Pearson DVD service.
Commercial DVDs are not tied to broadcasts and often offer extras. They aren’t restricted to providing just the video but can produce well-researched supporting materials, extra video clips not transmitted, extra audio, e-books and all of the other stuff that can make a stimulating whiteboard experience that teachers don’t have time to build from scratch.
What used to be BBC Worldwide Children’s Learning is now part-owned by Pearson and called BBC Active
There is a more specific primary schools site for primary whiteboards also. This is where you can get the wraparound of notes, clips from various sources and teachers’ and pupils’ books, posters and ebooks.

3. Channel 4 also has specific schools resources for sale at the 4Learning shop.

4. Teacher’s TV has shedloads of great resources permanently available on their website. All can be streamed and many are available for download.

5. The BBC also puts clips which can be streamed from the Class Clips section of the learning zone website

Literacy at Norfolk Community Primary School

Yesterday I visited Norfolk Community Primary School in Sheffield, where whiteboards are fully integrated into the school’s daily practice. This is an inspiring school in many ways, both for its use of technology to foster creativity and for its general ethos. It’s an eco-school with a grass roof for insulation, recycling of rainwater and integration of activities like gardening, composting and growing food into the children’s curriculum.

Most inspiring are the teachers and pupils who have really got into writing stories and retelling stories with group presentations, using a wide range of techniques to scaffold, model and collaborate. Year 4 interrupted their PE lesson to give me an impromptu performance of a story they’d created, which fizzed along with great brio.

It’s a wonderful example of a very new school, only four years old, that seems to have been designed for learning, with wide corridors, great spaces, small and large, and a sense of warmth and welcome. And it feels like every inch of space is used, with words and maps and vivid art at every turn, creating a sense of an exciting learning community.

Whiteboard vs Television Set

On another school visit today I went to the Sheffield Springs Academy where I watched an impressive display of how integrated whiteboards can be in practice. Emmanuelle Bishton is the epitome of the 21st century classroom teacher, using her whiteboard as creative stimulus, collaborative workspace, timer, ticker-tape reminder and record keeper. She showed me the thick green folders of lesson plans that are about to be jettisoned now she’s stored her bank of lesson plan powerpoints. Each one is a slick and flexible bank of targetted resources. Some came free from the BBC and Teachers TV. Others she rated were bought in from providers such as Teachit, They can all be fine-tuned each year for different types of learners. Creating a bank of resources like this feels onerous, especially in the middle of a busy term. But it’s clear once it’s done how much time it saves year on year and how simple it is to add to.

In the lunch queue it was remarked that soon no-one would ever wheel a TV into a classroom again. I wonder how many still do?

Whiteboard and mobile clips for drama, english, history

The drama of p-ause for thought

An Arts Council initiative at B-Tween is encouraging people to pitch interactive ideas. I like this deceptively simple one by ‘Catra’ for KS2 teachers

The idea seems to be that kids aged 7-11 receive footage and are encouraged to use it as the basis for a KS2 creative writing exercise. So it’s a bit like story starters from Teacher’s TV, a bit of film that can inspire investigation and creativity.

The TTV videos are much more structured as dramatic starters while Catra’s is much looser and purely location based, serving more  to provoke the imagination.

There is no particular reasons why it has to be an age-specific experience. Although it is a good way of generating creative writing or exploring genre or ‘other worlds’ in the primary curriculum it can also have application for all ages and for cross-curricular purposes. 

It could stimulate work in geography, or art. In one sense it’s a postcard propped up on the desk, but the delivery mechanism and its capacity to be moving, developing footage makes it so much more laden with possibility – receiving a random bit of footage, possibly away from your desk turns you into a detective immediately – why this piece of film? what could it mean’

The effect could be generated by teachers sending pictures to mobiles or PDAs, or, in the classroom, by using video on whiteboards or sent to individual workstations. If pupils have access to individual devices, handheld or not, it would be possible to let the pupils send a choice of video to their colleagues. You could have a chain reaction and have each participant sending a picture or video on for exploration. It’s a very simple but powerful idea for generating stories, poetry, or what the proposer calls ‘what-if’ writing.

I would like to use this method for teaching Drama. The late great Dorothy Heathcote’s teaching method was one in which pupils and teacher assumed the ‘mantle of the expert’ and created the story as they went along, with very loose prompts to react to. That teaching method would be enhanced by the ability to play off short video clips that would inspire new possibilities for participants to weave into their dramas.

Nice idea for History – or Geography?

http://just-b.com/btween/hp-labs/place-holder

This is a great idea for the teaching of history – it’s only possible if you have access to an existing asset, postcard, footage or graphuc, showing a scene from the past, which pupils can view on their hand held as they walk around a site. Excellent for historical monuments or locality studies but I would like to see this developed for Geography – if you could stand in a spot and see what it looked like last year, twenty years ago, a hundred years ago, five hundred, a thousand you could see both the change over time wrought by events e.g. The Industrial Revolution, and the consequences for the landscape.