T6 An account of an innovative approach to differentiation/creativity
Originally written in 2011, with minor changes for the web
Why I did what I did and what I was hoping this would address
My subject mentor asked me to write a new SoW for Small Basic, a Microsoft environment for teaching programming skills in the Basic language. I initially created an internal Web site for the SoW with a single webpage for each lesson taking the pupils through the work. This was designed to create digital worksheets allowing pupils to work independently at their own pace.
When using this resource, which included extension work, the length of the document put pupils off. I decided to convert the material to a PowerPoint presentation so that the instructions were chunked up.
I also found that pupils with low reading ages (generally reading ages of 8/9 in year group 8/9) struggled to read the content. I decided to add audio to each slide so pupils could listen to the instructions. Initially, I was going to record this audio myself, but then I realised I could create a simple script on my Mac to convert the selected text to an audio file (using the inbuilt text-to-speech software). This would save a lot of time compared to reading each page, recording the audio, and then editing out background noise.
What I changed
My school has a subscription to emasuk.com, a translation website. I cut and pasted each piece of text in the PowerPoint into the website and translated the PowerPoint into Dutch. I then converted the text to speech again. The text-to-speech program is set up for American English pronunciation, but I think it will still be understandable.
I have also used this technology in other differentiation - for example, converting instructions in an Excel spreadsheet into Arabic.
What I found happened
When the pupils used the PowerPoint, the first thing they did was scroll through the slide preview window to the very bottom and exclaim how they couldn’t do it all (there were too many slides). Despite repeatedly telling pupils they weren’t expected to get all the way through it, they still were panicked by this and so were reluctant to work.
About 75 % of the pupils didn’t have headphones to listen to the instructions, so I asked them to bring them to the next lesson, as they almost all had headphones at home.
I also had an EAL pupil whose first language was Dutch who couldn’t read the slides and didn’t have headphones with him.
What I would change in future
I will chunk the PowerPoint into a separate file for each task. This will reduce the fear factor of the pupils and also allow me to track how far pupils have got each lesson more effectively. It will also reduce the download size of the files. As pupils are all trying to download the same file from a remote VLE simultaneously, this has caused problems with network load and files not downloading correctly.