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Sir William Borlase's Grammar School
School Contact - Louise Campbell
Aims and Description of project
The school started the project by inviting a local primary school to be our partner, after a initial interest they declined due to concern over the amount of additional work it might involve. After a second school similarly declined it was decided that we would go ahead individually.To make up for the lack of a primary school and to give Geoff the opportunity to work with two separate groups, I scheduled the lessons for a Friday morning. Neither of the groups taking part was a class that I taught, and this meant that there would be two members of staff available ? myself and the class teacher. Group 1 was a year 7 Art Class and the second group was a Year 9 ICT class.
I found the training day hard, artistic skills, are not my strong point! Although I was happy about the principle of layering and tweening, I was confused as to the order that I placed items on the screen when wishing to tween them. It took me a long while over the half term using the tutorials and a textbook to come to grips with this and I still have difficulties if I try and do work on Flash after not having used it for a while.
The approach with the classes was very different, as the Art teacher although interested in the potential of Flash did not have much knowledge of the program. The ICT teacher however, spent some considerable time using Geoff s tutorials and those provided by Flash, prior to the lesson so that she was able to lead the lesson herself.
The class were working on a topic about themselves and the teacher wanted the Flash work to fit in with that theme. We thought of trying to use photos of them with different emotions/ poses as an inspiration for the lessons, so the week before we were due to start on Flash I spent a double period with the digital camera taking pictures.
The class started off using the Dancers/Fireworks template and learning how to make small changes in order to customise their work. The pupils enjoyed this, it was relatively simple to explain each type of change using a projector screen and some excellent graphics were produced.
On the second week, which Geoff was present at, they moved on to the Walking Man template and increased the number of skills they had learnt. Again this went well and there was a lot of creative work, including use of layering on Scene 1 so that the man could walk in front of and behind of objects.
By week 3, 1 was concerned that the Art teachers objectives were not being met and that we should try and develop the work on the `self theme. The posed photos that I had taken were deemed to difficult and instead pupils were asked to bring in a close?up facial picture of themselves to draw and animate. The drawing session was on the whole fine, and although not all pupils initially built up their faces in layers, I think that by the end of this period they all had the idea.
The last week was where things went wrong! I had created an animation myself with a winking eye and wanted to explain it to the pupils so that they might animate a feature of their own project. I successfully showed them the animation working but when I tried to show them via the projector how to build up a similar animation, I must have done something in the wrong order and got in a mess. Geoff tried to unpick the work, but in the end gave up and started drawing it all over again. By this time the Year 7's were getting a little restless and the thread of the lesson was lost. Some pupils managed to create working animations but many only succeeded in using Flash as a drawing package.
Another member of my department taught this class with myself in support. As we didn't have the same necessity for an outcome, I felt we would be able to concentrate far more on the ICT skills. The first task that she gave the pupils was to read and do the Flash online tutorials, this being how she had successfully taught herself.However as I had suspected would happen, many pupils did not give this method of learning much of a chance and very soon were experimenting for themselves. There was a great deal of confidence in this exploration but not a great deal of outcome. I found myself speaking to pupils individually, suggesting they use the first template, and explaining how to several times as there was little constructive work going on.
Lesson two was far more successful and was much in line with the lesson undertaken by Year 7's, with the other teacher doing the explanation of the template. Homework was set to draw a four/five strip cartoon on a school?based topic with the idea of making an animation the following week.
Lesson three saw some very good bits of homework, with a couple of pupils already having started their animations on Flash, but again progress was slow, due to a lack of understanding of the layering principle. By the end of the fourth period with three of us assisting that lesson (+ Geoff), there were some very good animations but there were also a few fairly frustrated pupils who again had a sequence of pictures but no movement.
At the end of week 4 all pupils were asked to evaluate the project and the software. These were mixed although most pupils had enjoyed the lesson some had not really got to grips with the software and found it overly complex. One of the comments was that it would have been better if we had made lots of short presentations during the lesson instead of one large one at the beginning and perhaps 1 or 2 more later in the lesson. This was a very valid comment although the difficulty of course is in judging when the majority of pupils are ready for the next bit of information.
In all lessons the pupils were very supportive of each other and those who grasped ideas were often found explaining them to other pupils.
My own feeling is that we tried to do too much in to little a time. In trying to teach a new piece of software in such a short period of time we needed to abandon any specific outcome and teach the software through set templates introducing new skills with each. This would have worked well for many of the pupils but may have stifled the creativity of others. The problem is that with such a prescriptive IT syllabus there is not really time to extend the project length and similarly it would be difficult to schedule more lessons in another year.
The Year 8's in Borlase have a Science/ ICT rota where they are taught half of the time by the science department with a member of ICT staff in support. When planning the scheme of work for the science element it was suggested that they might do some research on sound and produce a Powerpoint presentation on the topic. Instead of which I suggested they might use Geoff s quiz template, which asks them to produce a quiz with right and wrong answers and reasons why they are right or wrong.
Four weeks were spent on researching material, formulating questions and inputting them into the templates in the science based lessons, in preparation for which a third member of the ICT department taught herself some Flash.
A further two weeks of ICT lessons were spent in `prettifying' their work and with some pupils adding simple animations, e.g. making words or pictures move across their screen. The pupils produced some good work from both a science and an ICT based point of view without resorting to yet another presentation.
The template is, I believe, sufficiently developed that next year the science department would be able to work with pupils on it, without requiring back up from the ICT department. This use of Flash is more in line with Geoff's views that it is a piece of software that could be used to support work in any area of the school syllabus. However if we had been unable to support the Science staff the first time they had used it I think they would have dismissed it as being too difficult, even if they had been given training on it.
The pupils were keen to demonstrate their finished projects which also include the dancers/fireworks screens as introductions to the quiz and time was made for some of them to do so. However the problem with running Flash movies was the speed at which they ran on the school system. Pupils who had used a lot of colours / shapes in their initial screens found that the movie nearly ground to a halt on running it. Even if they removed some of the complexity it didn't seem to speed it up again, so I am not sure how we could improve that in school.
Several of the animations are now linked to the school intranet and there
are several pupils who regularly use Flash in their lunch hours; including
some who have not had a lesson at all but picked it up from friends /
experimentation. Unlike the Office suite of programs few pupils have Macromedia
at home so apart from lunchtimes there is little opportunity for them
to improve their skills.
Following on from this work on Flash Geoff put my name forward to BECTa and I was invited to a Creativity Conference in Coventry. This was all about how ICT could be used to allow pupils to be more creative in the classroom, and as well as a presentation form Geoff, included several other speakers talking about uses of ICT in the multimedia area. This was an interesting two days and I feel that I have picked up a lot of suggestions, several of which I hope to put into practice with the English / ICT rota which will be starting in September for Year 9.
I am pleased that we took part in the Flash project, I feel that both myself and the other two members of my department have increased our range of ICT skills as a direct consequence of the project. The training and opportunity to meet other people also trialing a new piece of software was also useful. Having the licenses included was a real bonus for the school and has widened the availability/ choice of programmes on the network.
In order to run the program effectively in the
IT rooms, the school purchased an additional 6 licences for Flash. There
was confusion in that the licenses we were given were Flash 5 and came
with a Flash 5 disc, which the technician loaded only to have to overwrite
with Flash 4 when we got the full copy from Geoff. The paid supply cover
from County meant that it made it easier for me persuade school that I
should have a day and a half out. But the other time on Friday mornings
came out of my free periods.