Red Pen Tool - 66% say Yes

I am having a first look at this on-line marking tool for Moodle (http://www.redpentool.co.uk/).
Showing a small group of Initial Teacher Trainee students the Red Pen Tool (RPT) interface resulted in 66%* of them saying they liked the approach and would want to use it in their teaching.

At the moment, I use Moodle Assignments to collect student work and the 'Insert Comment' facility in Word for my on-line feedback and marking. The Moodle grading tools allow me to provide overall feedback and marks (whatever the type of file uploaded).

That seemed fine for me even after seeing the RPT approach.
However, the interest shown by the trainee teachers has pushed me more into the 'pro' camp.
The benefits of the RPT over my current method are:

• you can annotate any format of file uploaded.
• specific marking criteria can be included in the Moodle Assignment.
• clear signposting of where assessment criteria have been achieved within the upload.
• different layers and colours show clearly the feedback and marks added by student, teacher, internal verifier, etc.
• feedback tools include audio recording and playback.

As at the time of posting, the cost of the assignment module (available for most leading VLEs) is around £1.00/£1.35 (ex VAT) per student per year with a minimum of 300 students. Discounts are available for longer subscription periods and for subscriptions covering 2,000+ students.

I have some reservations about how this approach might be received by University external examiners and how large FE colleges might view the annual costs when the current assignment module is 'good enough'.
However, the Red Pen Tool is worth a look - contact the company for a free trial.

TGIF

Note: * Those trainee teachers who said they wouldn't use the Red Pen Tool seemed to be actually voting against on-line assessment rather than the interface per se.

JORUM - Learning To Share

When very young, children are essentially egocentric and selfish.
Children want to keep ALL their sweets and won't easily give up the best toys to others.

As we get older we are taught to take our turn and share the goodies that we have. There are tantrums along the way of course but mostly we give and take with good grace. Then, at some point puberty (and/or teacher training) comes along and somehow we find ways/excuses to avoid sharing. Teachers in my college usually come up with one or more of the following reasons why they are unwilling to share their teaching resources:

1. I don't have time to assemble and disseminate the resources
2. It isn't new
3. It isn't good enough
4. Others wouldn't understand how to use the resources
5. It might actually be copyright somebody else
6. Why should I help out the lazy people
7. They wouldn't share with me
8. etc

Sharing good practice has been a mantra in education for many years as one of the main ways to improve teaching and learning. Disseminate the best/good/effective so that others can benefit and learn.
While there are teachers who are willing to share their work, it remains a problem (real or imagined) for many.

Another post will look in more detail at teacher these perceptions. The rest of this post describes one solution to how resources can be stored, discovered and shared:

The JORUM Repository (http://www.jorum.ac.uk)

Jorum is a JISC-funded Service in Development in UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing. This free online repository service forms a key part of the JISC Information Environment, and is intended to become part of the wider landscape of repositories being developed institutionally, locally, regionally or across subject areas. Jorum is run by Mimas, based at the University of Manchester. The word ‘Jorum’ is of Biblical origin and means a collecting (or drinking) bowl.


Anyone can search the repository and view the free learning and teaching resources but only staff in UK Further and Higher Educational institutions can login to download (or upload) materials. Primary and Secondary school teachers can view the resources which might act as a source of inspiration (although there are regional login services and trusted uploader status available for schools).



The advanced search allows filtering by Subject, Date, Author, Title and Keyword searching the Full Text or resource description. You can also browse the same fields by using the 'Find' link. resources use the Creative Commons 2.0 licences covering:

• Attribution  
• Attribution-Share Alike   
• Attribution-No Derivative Works   
• Attribution-Noncommercial   
• Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike    
• Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works

The search results show clearly which resources are available with links to further information, view and download options. Resources are downloaded (exported) as zip files from the site using a weblink eMailed to you. You should already have created a login account using that eMail address.






I first came across JORUM in 2003 as a 'repository in development' to store Learning Objects being created by the JISC Exchange for Learning (X4L) projects that I was working on. Around 2007 JORUM changed status from being a JISC project to become a JISC Service. In 2011 changes to the hosting of the site and the copyright details of the resources took place presenting the site as we have it today.




Information on all aspects of using JORUM can be found at http://www.jorum.ac.uk/Support and an A5 double sided leaflet giving a brief overview is at http://www.jorum.ac.uk/squeezy/cms/media/2jr2n9445twk.pdf

Effective sharing of resources is one of the Holy Grails in education and the number of resources packages held by JORUM (FE=845 & HE=11662) shows that there is still some way to go.

JORUM, other repositories and OER sites provide us with a place to play nicely.
We just have to convince our colleagues to also put their toys into the pot.

TGIF

Wordle - Visualising Text

After last week's post on visualising date/time data I was reminded of Wordle and how many people use it to create unusual images. BUT, Wordle is also a good text analysis/visualisation tool that can help many learners begin a more detailed engagement with a passage of text in a visual way.

For example, pasting a textual summary of Macbeth into Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) provides a learner, especially a more visual learner*, with an instant analysis of important aspects of the play.

Any teacher with a bit of imagination should be able to create a variety of learning activities based around a passage of text and a Wordle analysis.

Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg (partly on IBM Research time; good old IBM) to generate “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text (ie a simple frequency analysis). The site works best using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

I won't review all the other 'word cloud' generator sites today but I will finish with an interesting 17 min video from TED by Jonathan Harris who analysed blog postings to show how the Internet feels:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html

If you haven't been to the TED website before it really is worth spending some time watching the video presentations.

TGIF

*Visual Learners - I know there is debate about the scientific rigor of Learning Styles/Preferences (possibly a future Friday Feature) but the notion helps many students so I continue .....

Timelines – Visualising date/time data

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t find tables of data or continuous prose having data buried within particularly beautiful. I do find visual expressions of ideas and data more memorable and easier to analyze.

This post looks at different timeline creators available on the web. All are free or have a free component and some need to be downloaded and run on a web server. If you want to create a few timelines for your teaching or provide a timeline facility for your organisation; read on.

Timeglider (http://timeglider.com)
My favourite site for aesthetics and smoothness of operation. The creation interface is easy to use and the timelines produced are satisfying to use with a good level of functionality.

 Event labels and span lines expand to provide further information, links and images. The time base intervals can be changed from 1 hour to 600 years using the zoom slider so allowing a wide range of date/time data to be easily managed and interrogated on-screen. Although the website is Flash based and so inoperable on iPad devices, there is an open source Javascript plug-in viewer available for download.

Events can also be listed and sorted by title, start and end date. Timelines can be scrolled by mouse or keyboard. Account options include Free (3 timelines, 1000 visits per month), Plus (5$/month for greater functionality and collaborative editing) and Enterprise (organisational data display).

The site also includes a facility to create a free timeline based on the New York Times database of news stories using search terms of your choice (http://timeglider.com/app/nytimes_explorer.php).

A great site for creating a few free timelines with the minimum of fuss.

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SIMILE Timeline (http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/)
This timeline widget was created as part of the SIMILE project (MIT, 2003-08) that was investigating how to visualise data held in different formats.

The open source code can be downloaded and run on your own web server.

Although the timelines can be generated from a variety of source data types and integrated with other webpage features, eg Google Maps, this one is really for experienced web developers.


There is a WordPress widget however if you want a timeline of your blog entries and themes; http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-simile-timeline/

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Dipity (http://www.dipity.com)
A good looking site that offers a host of features to include media rich content, use of real-time data sources with the ability to allow/control collaborative contribution or editing. Dipity members can also leave comments on the timeline or individual events.

A neat feature is the ability to add existing content from sites such as Youtube, Flickr, Blogger etc rather than having to add manually all of the timeline events.

I have experienced problems at work where the timeline does not display in the browser (a firewall issue I believe) and the site can be rather slow to load.

Account options include Free (3 timelines, 5000 visits per month) and other options ranging from $5 to $100 per month for greater (enterprise) functionality. There is quite a lot of advertising and you would need the Channel plan ($50/month) to have ad free timelines.

Great for those users who are ‘Web2 enabled’ and want to aggregate all manner of content.

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Tiki-Toki (http://www.tiki-toki.com)
By far the most beautiful timelines around!

The simple panning control is intuitive and works smoothly bringing events (with links to more details) gracefully into view. A zooming tool would be good for when your timeline gets larger.

Images and video can be added to events but you can only create 1 timeline with the free account. Bronze ($5/month) and Silver ($20/month) accounts give 5 and 25 lines respectively with other features available. A teacher account ($100/yr) seems to focus on 1 teacher and 1 class, not a suitable solution for widespread use within an institution.

This is the site to use if you want one WOW factor timeline.

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TimeRime (http://www.timerime.com)
My first impressions were not great and I put this site some way down my top-sites list.

The timelines created improve once you learn how to navigate the site properly using the various tools available (some more obvious in their use than others).

One nice feature is the star rating and number of views data shown for each timeline.

The account structure looks quite attractive. A free account gives an unlimited number of timelines (max 100 events per line) with most of the functionality enabled. The Premium account (e39/yr) gives greater storage, events and video options. The Edu Standard account (e149/yr) provides a number of desirable ‘walled garden’ features that many teachers would want to see.

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xTimeline (http://www.xtimeline.com)
I find this site quite frustrating to use. The line slider is difficult to control and events tend to ‘dance’ around the screen as you try to explore the events.

Further details of each event appear in a drop-down screen that obscures the rest of the line. Although a nice feature of this creator is that you can have a group working together on a timeline, the outcome just isn’t as engaging as the sites mentioned above.

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TimeToast (http://www.timetoast.com)
These timelines are also rather frustrating to use; event bubbles appear with the slightest mouse movement and the panning control take some time to get used to.

Further detail again appears in an area that grows to obscure the rest of the line.

While the layout is clean and simple, I would prefer to use a number of the other sites.

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This brief coverage has focused on web based generator sites. I'll post again in the future to look at other sites for creating printed timelines or software to run on a PC (not to mention existing timeline resources ready for use in the classroom).

TGIF