The joy of pre teaching with Google Drawings and Read and Write by Texthelp

I remember my first EAL student many years ago. We gave him a a dictionary of English to his birth language that he dutifully carried to every lesson. I never once saw him use it. I remember thinking he is doing really well following all this without his dictionary. Then it came to assessments and it was clear he wasn't. He was embarrassed to use his dictionary. That experience has stuck with me for the past 10 years. Even now for exam access we can ask for a dictionary to be taken in. The time it would take to flick through a dictionary to look up every word we were stuck on, is it fair? Should we do more? I speak fairly OK Spanish. If the exam was in Spanish I would need to look up so many words, I wouldn't have time to answer the questions! Does our exam system reflect the society we live in? Is it fair and accessible for all? Are our solutions of additional support purposeful and timely? As educators we need to make accessibility solutions relevant and timely for all our learners.

Comic strip templates (which I make in Google Drawings) are my go to initial solution for pre teaching. 

Not for everyone but it's always my first attempt. I might do one on the sequencing of the skills needed for the next lesson. Nothing new in content just pointing out skills we have previously covered that need to be fresh ready for the next lesson. I might do one on what we are going to do next lesson from start to finish and ask the learner to fill in a blank one on what skills they would need for this lesson. I might to a visual timetable one with days/times on as to when I would look at key points in the week ready for the lesson. In this example I talk through the episodes of the lesson. For my adults my template has moved from a comic strip to a flow chart. I have found this approach help my learners with EAL, ADHD and autism. With my adults I have also found it useful to help them practise retrieval in a busy house whilst juggling parenting and working. It has become the norm for me to share with all my learners a flow chart (in Google Drawings, downloaded as a pdf) of the pre teaching for the next lesson. No one has to use it but no one is singled out. It is a purposeful and timely support to help my learners.

I know teachers who have done this for years. One teacher ends a lesson with an exit ticket and on the back is a list of topics to look over ready for next week. But this is the very minimum of pre teaching. I have a shopping list when I go shopping. It doesn't mean I use it. A list is a starting point. Pre teaching is about what you need to access the lesson. My flow charts are hyperlinked to tasks, resources, videos. I provide the list and the material so that when the lesson happens it feels like retrieval followed my a deeper learning experience. This normal way for me could become the new normal for many in a blended learning approach. 

Here is an example for the one I sent prior to the comic book one above, this is the pre teaching for the angles in polygons lesson. Each section has a hyperlink to a task or resource.

Yet I am not an expert in SEND. Nor do I get it right. I very much get it wrong. Last year I set a mock exam and my top learner in class achieved the lowest result. I asked him why. He had no answers. I was devastated that something was holding him back but I couldn't get to why. In class the next week we did probability. I asked "what is the probability of getting a jack when you pick from a deck of cards?" This is a standard opener for me in probability. Learners can visualise there are 4 suits and therefore 4 Jack's and form a fraction out of 52. We then move on to simplifying fractions. Standard. Normal lesson. My top achiever with the poor mock result looked bewildered. I went over once we moved on and the tasks begun. He explained that he didn't know what a deck of cards was. Right there in that moment I questioned my ability as a teacher. I had failed him.

The reason my learner struggled in his mock exam is because English isn't his first, second or even third language. He couldn't read the exam. I knew he was an EAL student and had given him a dictionary but we don't have any in his first language, I had to give him one of his second language. It is no surprise he didn't use it. We have all experienced the strain on our brain trying to understand written text in another language, be it a warning sign on a foreign beach or an airport notification. Imagine that strain 4 times over. Even if he had been able to read the exam I doubt he would have achieved his full potential due to fatigue through translation.

I sat with the learner and set up Read and Write into his first language. Texthelp had achieved more than we had already! I am lucky in that where I work pays for premium Texthelp products, where you work some features may not be available if you don't have premium. I configured the English to a familiar accent to him. He could now listen to English being read to him and understand it easier than in my dulcet Yorkshire tones. I showed him the dictionary feature, the picture dictionary and the prediction feature. He enjoyed the screen masking too so we kept that when I went through data desk and personalised it for him. As he left he thanked me. I was embarrassed, I had let him down and he was still thanking me? It was a sobering thought about how much content he hadn't been able to read. We had been in class for 2 months. I was slow out of the blocks on this one.

That week I reflected. I went through the next lesson and picked out words that I thought may pose a problem. I highlighted them in one click and ran them through the vocabulary list in Read and Write. It instantly gave me the definition and a picture to go with these key words. This was my pre teaching. In my class the majority of learners were EAL, many were studying GCSE English. This picture dictionary allowed me to give them pre teaching that was purposeful and relevant. Regardless of their home language they could see a picture of what we were going to be talking about next lesson. Students had a definition that they could translate in Read and Write so that they understood the key vocabulary before the lesson. Imagine a 60 year old grandma in a GCSE maths class who has never left the UK. What good would a vocabulary list be to her you may wonder? It was a revelation. She pulled my observer to one side in a lesson and said, "these words are great, means I can read t'questions dead quick now" My pre teaching is now a hyperlinked flow chart and a vocabulary list for all learners. Support that is relevant, timely and useful for many. If you do something well once it will save you time in the long run. Building pre teaching into my practise has and continues to do this, in reflecting and making this change I have almost forgiven myself for not spotting my EAL learners issues sooner, almost.

PDFs and blended learning

It maybe summer but my head is full of blended learning ideas. I am a huge fan of Puentedura's SAMR model. When we think about what we are planning for (which is still unclear in terms of live in person and live online, certainly for me!) I want to make things as easy as possible. For me and my learners. I would love to rip up the rule book and start again. Make a completely new way of learning maths. A project based curriculum completely interactive. Make some apps. Create some platform games. Use GoPro cameras to track journeys and explore the maths. But...I'm not going to. 1) I am not capable or capable of creating a team who are capable of helping me achieve this at this time. 2) I have no budget for this. 3) As things stand my job is to prepare learners for a paper based written GCSE maths exam. My project based learning can come in in elements but ultimately I have to prepare them for the paper based element. 

When I look at Puentedura's SAMR model, I need to substitute that paper based element onto online in the first instance. Working in FE I have learners that have sat the exam before. They will be expecting a similar experience, I have a lot of content to cover and I need to make things as simple as possible. Sure we will spend time learning about the apps we need to use like Google Classroom. We will learn about logging in to systems correctly. We will spend time helping those who need accessibility features turn them on. To support all of this their material and content need to be as easy to use as possible.

For years we have been fortunate in maths to have Corbett Maths with brilliant pdf workbooks of exam style questions, and answers, on every topic as well as videos! For years I would have been lost without this resource. It saves my life weekly in class when I need to put my hand on something, I know Corbett Maths will have it. I am going to be honest I don't have time to sit and make beautiful interactive activities every week for all 5 different levels of ability of students I am expecting in my adult FE GCSE maths class, sorry. What I need is a way to make existing content, that I know works, interactive and accessible quickly, so that if I do have a spare 5 I can choose to spend that making a brilliant new innovative resource.

I created a workflow that looks like this, take the pdf resource, pop it through a pdf to slides converter. My favourite is ilovepdf I like this one because it is easy, it has never let me down and it converts maths nicely. I use the pdf to ppt to make a slides presentation from the pdf. I like to do this as it makes each page 1 slide in a  slide deck, so if I want to differentiate I can chop and change using the slide deck to remove or add in slides. I then save the ppt as a Google Slides, but that's just me, if you use ppt, leave it as a PowerPoint presentation. I then insert text boxes over where the answers should be written. I change the line colour of the text box so that it stands out and I type in 'please enter your answer here'. This bit takes time but CTRL D in Google Slides is duplicate, so once you have 1 you can duplicate. CTRL C and CTRL V also work. Because ilovepdf keeps the pages as they were in the original pdf the text boxes tend to be in the same place on each page so I can select all the text boxes on a page and CTRL C and CTRL V them onto the next one in most cases. I am not endorsed by ilovepdf, and there may be alternatives you prefer

I have shared this with colleagues and it seems a popular way of working. Staff are keen to substitute their existing paper based pdfs into a digital format to get ready for teaching, however we are going to be teaching in September. Job done, sorted! Even exam papers can be done this way, fabulous! Then the thought popped into my head that because ilovepdf converts the pdf as a mix of images and text it makes it hard for screen readers to read the converted file out. Back to the drawing board...so I thought and then I remembered about Texthelp's pdf reader! Again I am not endorsed by Texthelp, you may have an alternative that you prefer! There is a video of installing the pdf reader on our Driving Digital You Tube Channel, as well as Google Classroom tutorials, here.

Texthelp pdf reader allows the user to have the pdf read aloud. You can screen mask making it easier to read. You can add text over a pdf. You can freehand draw over a pdf. This can then be saved, printed or shared to Google Classroom. I am lucky that where I work pays for premium Texthelp products, if yours doesn't many of the features are available for free. You can annotate the pdf, so to differentiate you could add in a note saying this Q for those aiming for a grade 4 and this question for those aiming for a 5 and so on. Students will need to open the pdf in the pdf reader to see this. After spending a little time teaching students how to use the pdf reader, this could be a workflow for you. The tool works in Google Chrome as a web based tool, so on any device that use has a Chrome browser installed.

What I like about this as a workflow is that it is accessible for all. There are no barriers. Students who have additional needs don't need to draw attention to themselves, they can access the work and join in with the rest of the class. Imagine if you needed a pdf read aloud and you were studying from home with no printer to make it larger or clearer, you would feel pretty alone. I love the fact that we can teach digital skills and independent learning skills to learners in how to add pdf reader and access it whilst making work accessible for students, that sounds like a good workflow to me!

The other beautiful thing about the Texthelp pdf reader is the freehand draw. I don't know about you but I have been sent a million pdfs to sign recently via email for return to works, policies, kids clubs, membership forms and so on. I have a printer but I don't have the time to print the pdf sign it and scan it back in. Nor do I think that is a good use of my time or paper, ink and electricity. So now I freehand draw my signature on and download it and email it back. Time saving, yes please!

blended learning 2

Earlier this week I shared a brief, very brief, Slidesmania template adapted to a maths classroom for geometry. It went off! I mean it was really popular. This struck me for 2 reasons. 1 staff are working or thinking about planning in the summer. And 2 staff need quick easy to adapt ideas. If you missed this and have no idea what I am on about the link to the blog is here. As part of #VIA20 and a Google Innovator it was probably one of the simplest examples I have ever constructed. This made me think about the level of interest... I'm too techy in my normal work!

Normally I will say here is an idea, we can then take it online with this idea and students can adapt it with this idea. Actually we're not in a new idea world at the min. We are in a substitution world. Looking at Puentedura's SAMR model. We are rapidly trying to substitute our traditional classroom activities with online activities. We are not limiting ourselves and stopping at substitution but this is the current state of play. Even for me, my classroom is quite paper heavy to be fair and I am trying to move my content online. Sure I have flicks and hints of tech but as it's a linear paper exam activities are regularly paper based.

When we learn a new skill we are asking our brain to learn the new skill as well as linking it to our previous experiences and making room for us to adapt it in future experiences too. That's a lot. So if it's a lot for us, it's going to be a lot for our learners. Especially in FE where you may be returning to education after a 20 or 30 year gap and all of a sudden it's all online. That just seems overwhelming. We need to make it as familiar as possible and as simple to use for learners to settle them in and from there we can build to new ideas. Now in terms of accessibility I'm not fully there yet, in a general sense. I am fortunate that where I work we have Texthelp products so many issues are overcome with those tools but if you're not; sorry I don't have all the answers for now. One thing I can recommend greatly is nOverlay. It's a chrome extension and puts a coloured overlay on your browser. For those who need things on yellow paper, this helps virtually. If you're using a chromebook turning on select to speak or any of the other accessibility features may help too. But yes hands up, I don't have all the answers for accessibility yet.

Thinking about what will be needed in September, whatever that brings, we need to build relationships. Something as simple as a slides presentation with each learners name as a title and a slide for the teacher. Then everyone adds a video using INSERT>VIDEO introducing themselves. This can be a regular check in tool too, how are you feeling, how's the work going? General ideas. Or use it for topic based discussion. Personal connection is huge. Those uncomfortable with video could insert a bitmoji and an audio file using MOTE. Once we have the relationships we need to get content delivered. Delivering in a live meeting virtually sounds exhausting and tricky to manage, why not alternate or switch it up?

The value of a teacher is in their guidance and support. A live meeting where teachers and students chat through ideas, misconceptions, how tasks went sounds like a wonderful meeting that everyone wants to join. A meeting where a teacher talks over slides and students zone out does not. Why not share videos that cover the content and set students work. Then you can have the nice chat about how it went and where to improve.

Thinking of all this made me feel inspired to make this I built a bookcase and inserted books for algebra, each links to a video, from YouTube and some questions. I think it is easy to follow and can be replicated regardless of subject or topic. Now obviously students wouldn't be left to cover all of this on their own but this with a virtual meeting every week checking in sounds like a supportive approach that allows learners to push themselves asynchronously of they want to. To link to slides within a presentation it's INSERT>LINK you can link to another slide or an external website. Here the little library in the top right links to the first slide. The videos were all dropped in by INSERT>VIDEO and then safe searched on YouTube. The questions are either pdf exam booklets run through ilovepdf and converted to slides or free self marking websites. I hope it's useful, it's a step up from the hyperbook and allows us to build as we step back into the classroom. If appetite continues I will keep playing, thanks for reading.

Fully editable blank version of the library template here. Please feel free to use it but remember it was from here that you found it and credit it as such, a tweet saying you have used it would be nice :)

Blended Learning Quick Wins

I have just published my blog on what I plan for September and I wanted to follow it up with how I will do it. 

Cast your mind back to a lesson that required cutting paper. Perhaps they were making their own loop cards, or cutting triangles to prove Pythagoras. Remember the times you needed to stick work into books. Your lesson was planned, it ran well, but you probably had a frantic 5 minutes at one point because of the extra equipment, I know I did. In my experience finding the scissors posed a challenge, including the left handed ones. Finding the glue sticks too. Handing them out in the class, realising some students had 3 pairs and others had none. Losing glue sticks lids, the time lost to equipment diverted from valuable learning. All of this happened on more than 1 occasion to me and can still heighten anxiety, including now when I reflect. What caused me the problems was the extra equipment, to make things flow I like to give my learners everything that they will need all in 1 place. In my physical classroom I have a helpdesk where they can come up and grab maybe a device to check an idea, watch a video. It might have the scaffolding sheet for the topic, a broken down task. It might have the help sheet or template to help write a cheat sheet or multiplication grids pre drawn. It may have foreign language dictionaries. Everything that they need to access the lesson themselves, helping them be independent no matter how much assistance they need to get there.

Blended learning is going to be no different. I am going to want to put everything in one place for them. Hyperdocs then come into their own as do Hyperbooks. A hyperbook is a notebook digitally held, maybe for a unit of work. A hyperdoc is a lesson plan of everything they need for the lesson. There are different types of hyperdocs. Ones that guide through each stage of a topic, discover, explain, explore and others that are choice board in style.  I can see benefits of all of these. Mainly they help the learners be independent and progress through their learning at their own pace. The true meaning of asynchronous learning. Slidesmania is my go to place for these things. Well worth checking out. Imagine a hyperbook of tabs all within shape space and measure. Once for area, one for perimeter, one for circles, sectors, compound shapes, problem solving tiling questions, sounds good! Sounds like a lot of work from the teacher, but when was teaching not a lot of work? We are planning for a new way of learning and perhaps we could save some time in this and insert a video on the first page of each section that already exists? Is there a youtube video we could insert? Yes of course there is! Can I take a moment to recomment the brilliant Mars Maths videos, worth checking out! All we need to do in Google Slides is click Insert>Video and search for the best video for our needs.

 The beauty of Google Slides we can start the video at certain points, so only the first 2 minutes are relevant to your group? No problem! Use the start and end times! 

I accept building a hyperbook on a series of lessons within a unit is a lot of work, but ready made videos can be a real help. Like Alice Keeler says 'stop pretending Google doesn't exist' Let's use the videos that are available. Personally I will be mixing it up. I like the way I explain certain topics, you can see in my blog about, SASSYLASS for Pythagoras, ADAM for ratio, TERRY for transformations and DIN0 for nth term. I will be using a mixture of Loom, Screencastify, Hippo Video and Screencastomatic to record my explanations. I will be recording my desktop whilst I talk over my slides that I would normally use in class.

I have begun doing this for lessons and recording over my slides. In what would have been a 3 hour lesson previously I have found the actual teacher talk element is only 20 minutes when recorded. I have used the exact same slides I would talk over in class. No editing. What I found that when I would normally set them to work on the topic I have explained I have asked them to pause the video. This means that I can edit the videos into shorter videos later or leave it as 1 long video. I found that the problem with doing this is I am assuming they will get to the end point I am anticipating. I think there needs to be a mix of my own videos and ready made ones. I can select and curate existing videos to show progression, of topics I think they will get to and signpost it as such. This one is only if you got 100% on the quiz on that one. This one is if you struggled in that quiz. You get my meaning. This will all be trial and error but I was surprised that in a 3 hour lesson I only talk for 20 minutes! It feels a lot longer!

OK what about questions? Could we insert hyperlinks to a quiz in our hyperbook? I think so! 

Quizzes are quite easy, if not easier to replicate online. I think many have been using Kahoot for a while in the physical classroom. Now you can assign Kahoots for home learning. You could insert the link on a page in a hyperbook, the beauty of Google Slides is you just need to click INSERT>LINK or use CTRL+K. There are lots of existing quizzes already on Kahoot.

Another favourite for quizzing is Quizizz. You can post the quiz to your class and they can do it at home. Again there is a wide library of quizzes to choose from, so if the one you are looking for doesn't exist on Kahoot, Quizziz is a good place to look. If both of these are familiar to you and you want to change things up a bit, there are lots of others but Assistments is a good tool too. The old Transum quizzes, although can't be assigned and tracked are still great. 

Transum was around when I began teaching, starter of the day was everyone's form time activity! I like to insert the link to Transum in the hyperbook in Google Slides and ask the learner to insert a screenshot of their results underneath when finished.

Many of them are levelled and differentiated allowing learners to push on if they are finding it easy. I like that there is no sign in, they show progression, sure I accept I don't hold all the results in a nice Google Sheet, but I could type them up myself if I really wanted to! Transum has self marking on all sorts of activities and topics so for me it's on my list of places to link to.

Don't forget that in our Hyperbook, because it is in Google slides we can insert our own Google sliddes from our lesson presentation to help learners follow the topic too! Copy and paste in our summary slides or our nice examples into the hyperbook, sure! In our hyperbook then we have video, explanations, questions. All in one place! I think that if we could create a hyperbook on a unit sectioned by topic it would be a great experience for our learners. I'm now thinking it doesn't seem that much work? Maybe a little more but I think I see a way of suing some stuff that already exists?

Now what about robust questions? Teaching GCSE resit in FE means there have to be some GCSE exam questions in there. I am a big fan of both the old 1MA0 topic questions which you can find from Mr Barton here and the Corbett maths ones here. In my physical classroom I love handing these out as my consolidation exercise. Putting what we have learned in the lesson into exam context practise. But we have a problem. They are paper based pdfs, much like the real GCSE! (Which will obviously have to move on...but we will save that for another day!) This is where I hit a snag, how can I move these online? Then I hit upon ilovepdf and my life was complete! 

I convert the pdf to powerpoint. I then save the powerpoint at Google Slides. 

Once in Google Slides I insert textboxes for learners to insert their answer. This bit is fiddly but they could insert their own, I'm just being super organised! I plan to share these with the answers so it can be self marked. Whoa you say, self marking, they will all get 100% surely! Ah but the beauty of Google Slides is we can use FILE>VERSION HISTORY and see when the changes were made and what it originally looked like! 

Obviously not all my ideas are acceiboe for all, I am HUGE fan of Texthelp and for those with additional needs I would leave the pdf as is and encourage them to use the pdf reader from Texthelp. We can then screenshot or save their edited version. I haven't gone into it too much on here as I wanted to present an affordable acheivable work flow. We could use this method for all but not everyone subscribes to Texthelp products. 

There are a thousand more ideas that I could talk about for blended or distance learning but I have tried to keep it as simple as possible and as free as possible. Through my work I have seen that not all schools have access or subscriptions. I think and feel it is doable to create a unit workbook using a Slidesmania template. Inserting videos, inserting self marking quizzes and linking to exam workbooks in Google Slides format. What would be really great if we got learners to find the videos that spoke to them, if they created the content in their workbook. They research the topic, curate the resources, and design their own template. That is my aim but I know that as new as blended learning will be for me in September it will be multiplied and magnified for my learners and we can build to the top of any learning mountain. But to start with we are at the base camp and I need to help them pack their rucksack with all the right tools for the job and I think a hyperbook is the way to go!

Here is my rough first draft, welcome to copy and adapt, please click FILE>MAKE A COPY. Many thanks to Slidesmania for the template.

Example