blog.mrstacey.org.uk

This tweet went out yesterday from Tom Sale

A follow up explained that it was for year 6 students. Rather than try and squeeze these into a Tweet, here are a few ideas that could be used.

• Ration book cooking
• Design a propaganda poster
• Speech writing
• Local study - was the town bombed? any names on the war memorial? - possible link to family history - find out where Great Grandparents served, plot it on a map alt. talk to the local museum to see if any children were evacuated.
• Building a model Anderson shelter
• Keeping an Evacuee diary
• Link with a novel
• End with a VE day party?

Any more ideas for Tom?

Having written twice in the last few hours about a list of things to try this year, and knowing what my memory is like, I thought I ought to set one up.

This page on my wiki will serve as a temporary dumping ground of things I would like to try, both general ideas and specific lessons, in the coming year.

Do you have a list of things to try this year? If you do, fancy sharing it? ;0)

Edit: To update link to new wiki 060909

Image Credit: Andrew Coulter Enright on Flickr

Followed a Tweet to this excellent blog post by Tomy Cassidy explaining his idea for getting students to create fake facebook profiles from everyone/thing from Lucifer to a chalk headline!

This would work just as well for historical characters of course, which reminded me of a thread I had seen a while ago on the schoolhistoryforum about using the ‘timeline’ in Facebook to track an historical event (in this case the Russian revolution)

Definitely on the ‘one to try’ list for this year!

Image Credit: Tony Cassidy

We’ve now done two out of our three training sessions on Moodle now, and the reaction has been very positive. Lots of people making the right noises, and lots already getting stuck in with some courses for next year.

The sessions were a little different that how I thought they would be when I last blogged. In particular:

• Our idea of splitting people into two groups (beginner / intermediate) was scapped in favour of having one group with both of us available. As much of the course is self directed anyway, having both of us in the same place made more sense
• In the end I settled on a generic paper guide, rather than one personalised by department. I just didn’t have the time to justify the extra work in the end

Feedback has been very positive, and I’ll come back to this topic with some more reflection when I have more time (whenever that will be!)

In the meantime, I thought I’d share the resources that we’ve put together so far. I’ve opened up both of the courses to guests, so you should be able to access them (although not all the linked courses, the county course for example continues to be our staff only as it’s not mine to give away). If you’d like copies of either or both, please do drop me a line.

The online Big Friendly Guide (inludes links to the training course, help forum and more introductory information)

VLE Intermediate (although as I said above, in the end this was the course everyone was using!)

I’ve had a number of questions in the last few days as we do a big push on the VLE in gain time about copyright and the VLE. To address these questions as much as I can I’ve written the following page to go on our help page.

I’m putting it up here not as an example of what is right, but simply as what I’ve got so far, and in the hope that if you know better, or have any suggestions on how you could be improved you leave a comment below!

Copyright and the VLE

The law sees a VLE as an extension of the classroom as long as those areas are secure behind a password that only our students can access. This is the case for all the courses beyond the departmental homepage.

This means:

The rules about photocopying articles or sections from a book apply to scanning and making them available on the VLE. You can view the current schools CLA licences here, but basically you can scan a section as a pdf file and add it as a file for students to access. When you do this you must attribute it correctly, including the name of the book and author and follow the rules amount how much of any given text you can copy.

Any resources that you create you can share. Obviously copyright applies to resources you produce as much as anything else. As such you shouldn’t be including copyrighted materials (including images) in your powerpoints and word documents without first getting clearance from the copyright holder.
One way round this is to use images and music released under a Creative Commons rather than a copyright license. Flickr allows you to search for Creative Commons images and Wikimedia Commons contains thousands of materials that are copyright free for various reasons. This site allows you to search a range of sites for creative commons images, music and video, although it’s not the easiest to use site in the world.  Many places are happy to grant copyright uses in an education context, just email them and ask.

One grey area is resources that other people have produced. Most resources that teachers have put online via places like NGfL Cyrmu or the Teachers Resource Exchange are free to use in classrooms and VLEs. If you’re in any doubt just email the person whose site you are using to check they are happy. Many teachers I know put it up, email and then remove it only if they are explicitly told to. While I’m no lawyer and wouldn’t like to comment on whether this follows the letter of the law, it does seem to be common practice and reasonable given that the material is restricted only to students of this school.

I am happy to try and help with any specific inquiries you have, but it is worth pointing out that this whole area of VLE development is new and so the law remains very vague in many places. However both the UK and Welsh Assembly governments are pushing schools to use them in this way, and the whole concept of copyright is being reconsidered in the light of digital innovation.

Be reasonable, ask when you can, and where possible use copyright free materials, but don’t let copyright fear stop you from developing great learning resources!