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.
