Category Archives: Top Posts

Data Analysis Spreadsheet for Edexcel Higher Maths Nov 2010

Edexcel admirably give you access to detailed question by question data from their Maths exams with the use of Results+. However I have always found that it does not come in a format that is particularly useful for teachers or individual pupils.

I have created a spreadsheet that analyses the data at a class and individual level and presents both in what I hope is a helpfully colourful manner.

To use the spreadsheet you need to download the paper analysis from Edexcel for Paper 3 & Paper 4. Copy and past the raw data into the data entry sheet and watch the magic happen on the other sheets. The individual sheet should be sized so that you can print the data for each child on 2 sides of A4 paper.

I hope this is of use to other Maths teachers / leaders. Please feel free to adapt / share as you see fit.

Any questions, feel free to leave me a comment here. File here: http://db.tt/xevYyYl (data included is anonymised version of my own so you can see what it should look like).

Data Entry Sheet

Class Analysis Sheet

Individual Analysis Sheet

#LWF11 – Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia – Evolving The Dream & Final Questions

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Another presenter who is challenged by presenting ‘in the round’!

Seeing a massive change in the quality and quantity of informal learning. Talk about the dream of free knowledge for everyone. Free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

What is free access? Free as in speech, not as in beer. Something more fundamental. Free to redistribute and re-use all of Wikipedia.

What is the sum of all human knowledge? Wikipedia is not an archive or library, nor a textbook, can be an adjunct to a textbook. Not designed to lead you through the learning. Not Youtube, no funny cat videos, try to keep things serious. Encyclopedia offers a summary of human knowledge.

Joked about being sick of seeing his face on the website calling for donations to the charity. Around 50 employees and a budget of $21million. It’s the 100,000 contributors who make it happen. All design and content is done by the community.

16 million articles across 270 languages. 199 languages have at least 1000 articles. Over a million in English German and French. Abandoned China for 3 years due to censorship. But was made accessible again around the Olympics, just with certain pages e.g. Taiwan, Tianneman being filtered. But only ranked around no.50 in China as a website.

Showed some funny Chinese menus translated into English and ended up with Stir Fried Wikipedia, probably due to it being first entry for every search on the internet:

Global content comparisons using a graph of % of page hits for the top 100 topics: Similar written content across countries. But readers vary more. Japanese love searching for pop culture. Germans most interested in Geography! Sex very popular except in France and Spain - because they are actually having sex while the rest of us just read it on the Internet!

Wikipedia has 408 million unique visitors (per how long?).

Who is writing Wikipedia? Important to know for young people as it is such a dominant source of information for young people.

87% male. Too many computer geeks! Want to simplify the editing interface. Excluding women but also elderly and other less confident users.
Average age 26.
Double % PhDs – geekier crowd than normal
People at the intersection between intelligence, obsession and free time!
Invitation is in the edit button to allow people to take part – nice quote from a ‘user’ in a video Jimmy showed

What is beyond the encyclopedia? Encyclopedia is just the start.

Library is much much bigger. Wikia is Jimmy’s next project to take over the rest of the library. Place for people to dig deeply into, used example of comparing the entries for Twilight the novel. No need for the ‘source’ in Wikia, more opinions and discussions. Went on to talk about Lostpedia, which was created on Wikia to write about Lost the TV programme. Believe that the writers took great inspiration from the fans documenting it, the show was something of a wiki in it’s self.

Jimmy’s final point: How can we get the learners involved in the creation of their learning?

As big a sales pitch as some other talks today, but enthralling. If only because of the influence it has on our learners, it’s so often their number one source. Who needs to know the dates of Kings & Queens when it’s a search away?

Final questions with Jimmy, Lord Puttnam & Graham:

Good point in the questions that the whole idea of Wikipedia was seen as complete madness beforehand. Which feeds into the ideas from Stephen & Lord Puttnam of this next multi-billion making innovation potentially being in the sphere of learning. Lord Puttnam later added that he thought that great innovation would stem from the games industry.

Great anecdote from Lord Puttnam about someone challenging a member of parliament in parliament as they searched on their phone about a speech from the week before and pointed out that what they were saying was not true and that they were contradicting themselves. Something that happens more and more in the classroom.

Great question asked of Jimmy as to whether a step by step learning based wiki could be built that would transform free education with a crowd sourced curriculum. The foundation have tried a variation with wiki-books but it has struggled as software not suited to assessment etc.. But also problems with fragmented educational standards. One of the big things that inspire people to take part is that they know someone will use their contribution. Jimmy thinks that people would feel that schools couldn’t use their content in the classroom -I’d disagree with this quite strongly. So many of us blog about our teaching BECAUSE we hope someone else might find it useful in their classroom. However he does think it should be possible.

Final question was about what 3 things you’d have in a new school. Lord Puttnam points out that it’s easy to do great things in a school but it’s really difficult to scale to every school. Jimmy would want to see increased teaching of media competence and the ability to assess the quality of a source of information, in context of Wikipedia – how do you use it as a starting point to go deeper into a topic. Fantastic point to finish on.

And that’s it – battery nearly flat on the laptop, and internal batteries exhausted – interesting day of live blogging, will read back later and see if there was any quality to it or if I just missed the salient points through distraction!

#LWF11 Katharine Birbalsingh, Teacher & Author

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Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Head Teacher famously sacked following her outspoken speech at the Tory Party conference.

Started with the story of challenging behaviour in Secondary Schools. How have we got to this point, a dark age of education? How can we move schools on into the 21st Century? Need to equip children with a bag of goodies to enable them to thrive in the World.

One thought is to stop teaching so much content and to concentrate on skills, group work etc.. Basic knowledge though is necessary to be able to be creative. Need to move back towards a more traditional form of teaching. A middle class child already has this as they pick up so much at the dinner table, from the Maths tutor or from Dad reading at bed time. Not so from less advantaged children who rely entirely on their schools.

Many reformers went to Grammar school and mistakenly think that most children are going through a similar education system. Creating a system where children do not get access to the ‘bag of goodies’ that they themselves received.

We know that exams are being dumbed down. We are letting down many many pupils.

Many believe that an injection of tech is needed. But this is reformers again misunderstanding what is needed. Eton has only 2 interactive whiteboards.

Katharine continued talking along these lines, pointing out that Eton etc are very different to main stream schools, but without really going anywhere with her argument.

Argued that lack of technology not an issue as children are already skilled to the hilt from their own use.

“The education that is best for the best is the education that is best for all”. Need to be educationally Conservative. Argued that main stream schools reject what is successful in the likes of Eton.

There is no hiding from negative feedback in this room, the Twitter feed on the hashtag #LWF11 throughout this talk was cutting in it’s criticism.

Slumdog Pythagoras – Minimally Invasive Education

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Inspired by Sugata Mitra at the SSAT National Conference I decided to try and ape his ‘minimally invasive education‘ within my own Maths classroom.

In a really tough December week this two hours shone out as a great teaching and learning experience.

Before going any further, please head over to my previous post to read about the inspiration for this lesson.

In a nutshell, Sugata discovered that children can teach themselves with the aid of the Internet. His hole-in-the-wall experiment inspired the book that inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire. He has since been investigating how to apply these findings in Western school systems.

I followed some basic rules that Sugata has developed. I split the students into groups, each with a computer and then gave them a problem to solve.

The rules are simple:

Students were told to get into groups of their choice of around 4 children.
They had one laptop per group.
They could walk around and cheat, looking at what the other groups were doing.
They could move groups if they wanted to.
No input from me other than some encouragement and praise.

My Year 7 class (11-12 year olds) are an able group who I have done a little group work earlier this year. I gave them a simple question:

Who was Pythagoras?

And with it, the text (but not diagram) of a typical GCSE question:

A ladder is leaning against a wall. It is 5 meters long, the base of the ladder is 3.5 meters away from the wall. How far up the wall does it reach? Continue reading →

SSAT #NC10 – Sugata Mitra

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Bio

Sugata Mitra is currently Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. He has spent many years in a huge number of research posts. With regards to education he is most famous for his Hole In The Wall Experiment whereby he put an Internet enabled PC in the wall of an Indian slum in 1999 and left it there for anyone to use.

You can see the talk here, or watch his similar TED talk here.

Reflections

Sugata was charming and engaging. The driving message that he had was that given some time and an Internet connection, children are quite proficient at teaching themselves.

He first discovered this in his now famous Hole In The Wall experiment. I won’t go over the details of that here as you can watch the videos above or read about it in detail on Wikipedia or it’s own dedicated website. Sugata explained that he did not go looking for this effect, however his experiments demonstrated that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Sugata calls this minimally invasive education. Continue reading →

SSAT #NC10 – Dylan Wiliam – Formative Assessment

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The first of a series of notes / reflections on sessions at the 2010 SSAT National Conference.

Bio

Dylan Wiliam has the grand title of ‘Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment‘ at the Institute of Education in London. He is a former Maths teacher and co-author of the book “Inside the Black Box“. He is a world renowned expert on assessment for learning, and was recently to be seen on BBC television in The Classroom Experiment.

My Notes

On learning environments & the role of the teacher: Teachers do not create learning. Learners create learning. Teaching is engineering of Continue reading →

Air Sketch – iPad to Projector – Wirelessly

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I’ve been trying to use my iPad in the classroom as much as possible, as a device for use in schools it is close to being perfect. One of the drawbacks has been working out how to get what’s on the iPad to be projected onto my classroom wall. You can connect it with the iPad VGA connector to a computer and project that way, but only a handful of apps support this. This can apparently be expanded somewhat by jail-breaking , but I don’t really want to go there.

Then last week Wes Frier alerted me to an App called Air Sketch. Air Sketch is a fairly simple drawing application with a killer feature, it will broadcast whatever is on the screen across your network to a webpage. If you open that webpage in a HTML 5 browser from any machine attached to the same network you will see the iPad screen. Any updates made on the iPad appear almost instantly on your PC or Mac. Air Sketch was £1.79 but there is also a free option to try.

Continue reading →

A Progressive Approach To The Internet In School

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A post I’ve been meaning to write for many months…

Battles:

I have had my battles with Internet filtering in the past, but I’m now the man in charge. Every school I have worked in so far in my opinion has had an old fashioned ‘head in the sand’ view to filtering and acceptable use of the Internet within school. I’ve ranted about this in the past.

Reversing a Head In The Sand mentality. CC licensed image from David Barrie at Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/addictive_picasso/

Battleground:

I would estimate that 95% of our pupils now own a mobile phone, and that 80% of these have unrestricted access to the Internet on these devices. This doesn’t factor in devices such as netbooks, iPod Touches and PSPs that are also brought into school. What this leads to is unrestricted, unfiltered access to the Internet within our school, and at a pace and quality that is ever increasing. I also regularly receive requests from teachers to block this that and the other as a classroom management tool.

Battle plan:

I strongly believe that in response to this situation we need a new approach to Internet access within schools, something that still protects our children but also that prepares them for the World in which they live.

This comes in 3 parts:

An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that is relevant, understood by all parties and linked closely to general school behaviour policies.
Relatively unfiltered Internet access.
Quality monitoring solutions.

Continue reading →

Digital Leaders

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I am excited to have been invited by Kristian Still to be involved with developing the idea of ‘Digital Leaders’ in school. Digital Leaders is an initiative started by Kristian Still at Hamble College in Southampton.

To quote Kristian: “The Digital Leaders are a group of students from Hamble Community Sports College that lead innovative ICT practice and regularly meet as part of the Digital Media and Gaming Club. They contribute to ICT innovation and curriculum development and contribute to school ICT policy.”

Continue reading →

TeachMeet North West – Expanding the Audience

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I had a great time on Friday night at BBC 21CC in Salford at Teachmeet NW. I presented briefly on Google Forms as per my previous blog post and listened to a wide variety of great presentations. I’ve collected all the links and chats from the evening together on the wiki. And, although it went against the ‘talk only on what you’ve done in the classroom’ Teachmeet rule, I did a very brief demo of Google Wave. Let’s be honest, I knew the ever-so-slightly geeky audience would like to see it!

But this got me round to thinking, how do we expand Teachmeets beyond the geeks? Almost every person in that room on Friday was on Twitter, had a blog etc etc.. I emailed all staff at my school on Monday about Teachmeet, a few took the proverbial out of me, a few said it sounded great, ‘but on a Friday night?’, in the end – nobody came.