Ok, here’s what I want…

I want a simple tool where:

• teachers can add new learning tasks / activities to individual student task lists (i.e. learning plans)
• teachers can add new learning tasks / activities to a number of students’ task lists at the same time (for individual and group work)
• students can add new learning tasks / activities to their task list themselves
• teachers can list / attach the scaffolding resources, links, activities, criteria, rubrics and exemplars to support students in completing each task / activitiy
• students can update their progress as they work through each task / activity (i.e. as a percentage complete or as ’started’, ‘in progress’ and ‘complete’)
• teachers can view an overview of each student’s task list, is notified when a student completes a task and can see an overview of student progress when they’re working on the same task.

This tool could be web-based or Mac OS X compatible. It needs to be kid-friendly (in terms of usability).

Am I asking too much?

Well, apparently I am, as I’ve been searching for about 2 days and have failed to come up with any tool which can assist us to effectively manage personalised learning next term.

What’s the point, you may ask? Well, as our class (a year 5/6/7 class with 45 students) moves to a 1-to-1 trial next term and our desire to adopt a genuine ‘personalised learning’ approach, one of the biggest threats to our success is having students ’slip through the cracks’. In ‘traditional’ classrooms, where all students work on the same activity at the same time, and when students always work at the same desk, facing the same way, so the teacher can always see what they’re doing, the job of ‘managing learning’ is probably simpler.

However, the work isn’t targeted at students’ zone of proximal development. Students aren’t using a range of multiple intelligences. Work isn’t targeted at student’s visual, auditory or kinaethetic learning styles. Students aren’t using the learning space to support their learning. Students aren’t working across disciplines. Students aren’t collaborating or communicating. I could go on, but you get the idea? We all understand the need to be personalising learning, but as 45 students work on different projects across a broad learning space, how to you ensure that students who require support are getting it and how do you ensure students are taking responsibility for their learning and are using their time wisely?

This is where I’m at at the minute – what (effective, sophisticated) tool / method can we use to support this process?

In my last post, I mentioned the possibility of teachers emailing students details of learning tasks, and then students add these to their Learning Plan which exists in a wiki on the (school-based) Mac OS X server. This process, though seems very clumsy and time-consuming (and I’m pretty sure it would be), with students doing a lot of copying and pasting etc. Surely there must be a better way than this?

To start off with, I began searching for existing, hosted free web-based tools which fit the bill. I came across a couple of neat applications, particularly Soshiku and HiTask. However, these either cost money for the functionality we wanted (HiTask) or they were for an individual in managing their own tasks (i.e. they didn’t address the last point in my wish-list above). There was also the issue with students using these tools and having their information / data hosted there (I believe our department discourages this, without there actually being a directive or policy implemented… happy to be corrected, though). As mentioned in my previous post, I did come across KnowledgeBox, which is a UK-based tool for teachers to access learning objects and resources and allocate them to individual or groups of students. I believe there is a cost, though, and probably not available for Australian schools…

So then I began looking more at finding an open-source PHP-based solution, and hosting either on our school website or even on our local member server at school (which would improve speed but would only be accessible when students are at school). As I have some PHP knowledge and experience, I thought that even if I didn’t come up with something that was perfect, that I would be able to customise it for our needs (particularly the interface). I spent an hour or two at HotScripts – one of my favourite directories of web-based scripts – but failed to find anything significant. While there were some notable group-management tools, they were either too heavily targeted at the business world (not user friendly enough) or, like Soshiku, didn’t allow easy functionality for administrators to easily see an overview of all individuals’ tasks.

I then took a different approach and began searching Download.com for local applications which might be able to be ’synced’ to a database or repository somewhere (i.e. students could sync their task list at the end of each day so teachers could view where they’re up to). Things for Mac was by far the best task manager, however, was commercial software and also didn’t have an ability to sync or to see an overview of many users’ tasks. While I was at Download.com, however, I did come across Mindnode, however, which is a really simple mind-mapping tool for Mac. Dead simple to use, and can be exported in a range of formats. Love it! But back to the point…

Mac Mail To Do list feature

So then I went back to the drawing board and began looking at some basic tools provided with the Mac OS X platform that we could use. I honed in on the ‘To Do’ feature in the Mac Mail program. It was ugly and clumsy, but perhaps could be leveraged for part of what we want. However, I was already planning that email would be one of the primary teacher-students / student-student communication tools during our trial, and the three RSS feeds we’re planning work very nicely in Mac Mail, so having it all in one program would be great. My strategy was to get students to setup a Rule in the mail program that whenever they received an email from one of their teachers with the words “New learning task” in the subject that this would automatically be added to their To Do list. So when students came into class in the morning and checked their email they would automatically have an updated To Do list with teacher-generated tasks. This wouldn’t solve the problem of teachers having an overview of student progress, but that this point that was something I was willing to sacrifice! The benefit of this was that teachers could easily “push” new tasks out to individual or groups of students via email. But alas!! I couldn’t create a rule which automatically generated a ToDo!! Argh!! I did find a site where I could use a bit of fancy Apple Script to do this, but we’re getting pretty technical now…! Setting this up on each kid’s laptop would be a bit of a drag too (and probably prone to failure).

So I was at the point where I saw some potential in email applications for what I wanted, so I went off in search for other application which could serve a purpose. Mozilla Thunderbird didn’t have a task manager or to-do list (at least that I could see) so I downloaded the trial of Microsoft Office 2008 and gave Entourage (Outlook equivalent) a crack…

My Day toolbar in Entourage

I really like Entourage, and used it for my main email client a few years back when I had a MacBook. It’s very powerful (perhaps a bit too powerful for our purposes) but got closer what I was after. Apart from being able to setup a Rule which automatically created a new Task when an email met a certain criteria, Entourage also came with something called the My Day toolbar. This is a floating bar which updates you on your upcoming meetings / appointments and has a list of the tasks you’re working on. When you double-click the task it opens up in Entourage to give you the details. Students can also set their completion and the due date. All seemed to work quite well (apart from the fact that students would be using Microsoft Trial software… yuk…), until I realised that Entourage doesn’t support RSS feeds !!!!!  Amazing!!

So, I feel as though I’m almost back to square one. Perhaps we’ll just use Mac Mail with a bit of Applescript which can make students’ lives easier. This doesn’t solve the fundamental question though of how can teachers easily track student progress. Of course, this idea relies on whether students can reflect on their work and accurately update their ‘progress’. I’m still stunned that Entourage doesn’t include the ability to bring in RSS feeds – if it wasn’t for that blemish we may have been going down that path.

Of course, we could always adopt a paper-based model if we can’t find something digital to suit our needs. Students could ‘copy down’ the teacher-generated tasks each morning and hand in their paper-based learning plan at the end of each day for the teachers to peruse (and subsequently plan for).

Would definitely appreciate any ideas or suggestions for anything else I hadn’t thought of!