BlogDale

A group of us have been thinking about ways to make the KS3 curriculum more contemporary. Jude has some superb schemes of work using kitchen designers and Rollercoaster Designers - the pupils at Lacon Childe love them if the blog’s anything to judge opinion by. Similar pupil enthusiasm appears at Thomas Adams where Gill’s pupils collaborate on MissionMaker programs, and at Priory where Trina’s Gamemaker and Missionmaker pupils are blazing a trail with their authoring.

So a number of ideas came together all at once. I can’t claim credit for any of these but only for the mashup at the end. And it’s early days yet anyway, my mashup is NOT refined in any way. Yet.

The Mirandanet research fellowship meeting the other week focussed on multimodal literacy and non-linear document production. We looked at concept mapping and a number of examples of how it can be used in learning scenarios. Also we looked at wiki, blog and other ways of producing documentation.

Steve’s been developing a unit of work for podcasting, notionally to replace the ICT Strategy Unit 7.1. Stuffy old powerpoint and “All About Me” gets replaced by a podcast “radio show” of the same name, taking in a number of the requirements of 7.1 but developing in the contemporary medium of podcast. I’ve been wondering about the wisdom of publishing Year 7 “All About Me” files in public though…might just be asking for trouble unless they’re carefully monitored. That being said, the Internet Safety could be a part of the learning.

Francis pointed me at Celtx, a scriptwriting/pre-production medium that rapidly produces standards-based scripts. Alongside the script it will record the scheduling, character profiles, the props and wardrobe stuff, etc. and produce the script for you at the end. As the script is loaded onto a webserver, it can be collaborated on by a number of writers - but not concurrently, and therein lies a problem. I think that’s the most limiting feature for what I have in mind.

Jim Mould, Head of Music at Mary Webb mentioned his “audio postcards” idea last week when we were talking about Audacity and blogs. Pupils would record the sounds around their homes and would use these to create audio files that would be published on a blog. I’m not entirely sure what format these would take but at the time I suggested talking to the ICT department as this could form part of a collaborative project.

And this evening I was Skyping Francis and the ideas started. Why not design a series of lessons that has the objective of producing a final podcast that provides information about “Where We Live”? It would have to include aspects of suitability for audience (”What makes it suitable for teenagers?” For tourists? For small children?”), suitability for purpose (”How will people use this audio file? Where will they listen to it? What will they gain from it?”). There will be aspects of project planning, literacy skills developed in writing for an audience, research skills in finding information, technical skills in recording and mixing, recording and playing their own music (possibly)….

So here’s the flow of the sequence of lessons:

1. Brainstorming collaboratively and concurrently on CMap. Main topics decided;
2. Time allocated to each topic (they’d need to have a face-to-face discussion, or eg Skype, to decide this). Recording plan done on a Gannt program like GanttProject or OpenWorkbench;
3. Script authoring on Writely, Zohowriter, whatever 2.0 WP app you like or even on a proper hosted Wiki;
4. Script transferred to CeltX and tidied to make it standards-compliant . Produce a pdf. (This would be a bit too much for Y7 possibly).
5. Record the audio files
6. Compile the audio files in audacity
7. Produce the podcast and publish online.
8. Complete the process for a different audience/purpose.
9. Blog each step of the way to reflect on progress and alert others to areas where help might be needed.

This could take until Christmas easily, and the learners will have had access to a number of cross-curricular skill not least of which will be the scaffolding for thinking skills that they will have developed.