Teaching is a fairly insane way to spend the day and by the middle of the year it is easy to lose sight of goals and lose direction. News From the Front is intended to be a place for me to store experiences in the classroom, ideas for improving my own teaching and documentation of pilots and projects I am running alongside my teaching. The Wishlist is intended for myself and organisations supporting education, in particular those supporting classroom teachers and will likely focus on issues that need resolving, the sorts of systems we need and hopefully provide a glimpse into what it is like in a classroom for those who do not work in one.
News From the Front
Web Design for Beginners
While teaching IT across Year 10 - 13 I built up some resources around web design to help explain the basics and let students build skills to the point they could create their own web site with a decent visual style. I taught them to adhere to the W3C specs (web standards) right from the start and aimed to keep things as simple and uniform for myself throughout the different age groups.
Year 10s typed in the XHTML and CSS and used the existing images to make a snazzy little site. The focus was on understanding the idea of structured content, separating visual style and the really switched on kids could grab the Gimp concept and tweak the images. Time was the biggest constraint with this age group.
Year 11s could be stepped up a notch as they were ready. Not all my students had done the Year 10 course so the scaffolding was important. They still typed in the XHTML and CSS but were expected to use the concept as a base to build their own visual style (keeping the same basic layout).
Year 12s worked through the basic template and students who had completed Yr10 and 11 with me were introduced to more complex layout techniques (not covered in this resource ... next one maybe). They built visual styles from scratch and were required to get the concept approved before moving forward. Testing and validation became more important and a key criteria for the assessment.
Year 13s who had been through all the previous years were beyond this resource but, again, some of the students were new to the course. Extensions were about more complex techiques and an introduction to content management systems. Validation and quality assurance testing were assumed to be basic skills and students were expected to set up and document the testing. Visual styles were expected to be built from scratch and a level of complexity and skill were expected.
This book is the tidied up verson of the various resources I used in class and while it arrived a bit late for my teaching I hope it is of value to other teachers who need something solid to introduce web design to students. The resource comes with a layered concept made in the open source image manipulation tool Gimp and the files for the final web site.
It has been published by User Friendly Resources and is available through their web site in hardcopy or PDF formats.
Education: Wishlist
Classroom timing
The classroom can be a busy environment to organise. Planning is critical to a successful classroom and the timing is important to get right. The systems a teacher uses need to operate within very small time slots (measured in seconds and short minutes) and allow for constant interruption as they work with students (which is the key focus).
A typical class where I teach is either 60 minutes or 120 minutes (quite a special arrangement and great for project based courses). In a single hour with a standard class of 25 students it wil usually take a competent teacher about 5 minutes to settle the class into a working state and about 5 minutes to finish up leaving about 2 minutes with each student. Typically students take up more than their share of time so a teacher may spread time across a few lessons during the week and get around all students that way. Some students obviously require less time than others but equity is an important part of keeping a classroom a safe and honest environment.
When you start to look at the systems a teacher needs to interact with during a class the timing starts to get very tight. Attendance recording really should take no longer than 30 seconds but paper based systems invariably take minutes and many of the electronic systems are no better. This does not count the time a teacher may have to use to translate that information into Ministry of Education approved systems.
Student achievement and behaviour records need to be equally robust and simple to record in. Ideally a teacher should be tracking student behaviour (both desirable and undesirable) during class (or close to it) to create a running record and remove the need for those awful end-of-term reports with superficial comments. The system that would facilitate this needs to be packed with customisable defaults so a teacher can quickly set and forget on a regular basis.
The focus for the teacher is always on the students and their needs. Systems must support this and allow the teacher to track information and progress with the absolute minimum effort and maximum output. Timing is critical in a classroom and needs to be a key factor in every system design.
