Support Materials and Links from Paul Hopkins' Workshop.

On this page you will find some of the links and some further thoughts on the ideas I explored in my workshop. I would be very interested in hearing about the ways in which you are using technology in your classrooms, in your lecture halls or in your other professional arenas.

• Seeking Information: The internet is full of information. See below for comments on criticality. Finding information is the easiest thing to do on-line the question is what do we do with this information once we have it?
  • Key processes are: Retrieving, recalling, or recognizing: knowledge from memory. Remembering is when memory is used to produce definitions, facts, or lists, or recite or retrieve material
• Analysing: Breaking material or concepts into parts, determining how the parts relate or interrelate to one another or to an overall structure or purpose. Mental actions included in this function are:
  • differentiating
  • organizing
  • attributing
  • as well as being able to distinguish between the components or parts. When one is analyzing he/she can illustrate this mental function by creating spreadsheets, surveys, charts, or diagrams, or graphic representations
• Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing. Critiques, recommendations, and reports are some of the products that can be created to demonstrate the processes of evaluation.
• Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing. Creating requires users to put parts together in a new way or synthesize parts into something new and different a new form or product.

• Using the range of information that is available on-line to enrich and develop your teaching and the learning in your classroom. This might be just access to the wide range of video, image and audio information that is on-line but also it should be creating your own dynamic resources, presentations can be much more than text, communicating with the wide range of expertise and professional support that is available and collaborating with your colleagues via the message boards and forums that are developing and Accessing personal viewpoints and authentic members of the religious communities via on-line video sharing sites such as YouTube (see the article in RE Today of Autumn, 2008 for more ideas); or allowing you students to go off and interview members of the religious and faith communities and bring these personal stories into the classroom
  • Just a few places to start this journey
    • The Shap Working Party Audio Glossary - Link to website
    • Paul Hopkins' Audio-Visual Gallery - Link to website
    • You Tube, a wonderful Aladdin's cave of wonder, but search carefully! - Link to website
• Developing with your students a critical evaluative approach to on-line resources, the internet is a treasure trove but to get the gold out you often have to shift a lot of rock. Are you giving your students the skills to ask key questions of any resource they find on-line, questions such as “who wrote this?” “How do I know?”, “what is their bias?”, “Is it accurate?”, “is it coming from a particular faith or religious tradition?’”. Are you asking the same questions about the resources you access and use with your students or do you take it all on “blind faith?”
• Allowing the students to present their work in a variety of multi-media formats. It is not longer acceptable to expect your students only to do ‘written work’ every one of your students, except for a tiny few, will have access to a digital stills and video camera, and a voice recorder – they will be part of that device which we still call a mobile ‘phone’. Are you flexible enough in the work you set to allow your students to produce a storyboard, video clip, audio clip or mixture of these into a multi-media presentation? This work can easily be kept in the students’ e-portfolios and be made available for you, their parents and the wider school to see. You may be amazed at what children for whom writing is a problem come up with when allowed to make a movie, an advert or a documentary and remember they will have the technical tools and probably the technical skills to do this – you may have to challenge the conservatism of the SLT in the use of these tools but RE is good at challenging orthodoxy
• Using the school’s learning platform. Learning is not a nine to five occupation but an “anytime, anywhere, anyplace” thing and you need to putting up resources on the schools learning platform that allow this to happen. At the very least this should be the materials you are using in the classroom but also extension materials, links to support video and audio (see below) and allowing the students to contribute to this resource bank. At best you should be using the blog, wiki or forum facility to extend learning and offer the wider community the chance to participate in the activities happening in the RE classroom
• Using technology to capture the work that your students are doing in the classroom. How often does the excellent work that your students do disappear into the aether because it is ethereal? Do you use still and video cameras to capture presentations or dramatic episodes? Do you use audio capture to get the key ideas of groups at the end of a discussion, debate or dialogue (the 3 D’s of the RE classroom)? So often we only assess written work, or work on paper and I am sure that there is much more of this happening in your RE classroom

You may say, “I can’t do this, I haven’t the time, skills or options”, but that is no longer acceptable. This is the way of learning for many of your students already and to say that you are not willing to learn is a poor role model for a teacher, who expects their students to learn new things every day. So you need to get yourself on a course, look at some on-line INSET or take it in hand.

These new ways of learning are, and will continue, to change the way we think about learning; information has never been more available. It is how we turn this information into knowledge and this knowledge into wisdom.

• Communicative: Learning which enables partners into the learning process, children, teachers, parents and others.
  • Can you bring members of the community into your classroom? This might be via Skype or other Video Conferencing opportunities but it might also be physically bring them in and then using video to capture then for your local resource bank.
• Cinematic: Learning in which live visual images reinforce the learning process
  • The use of sound, images, graphics and film is something that should be being used more and more both in the more passive way of the teacher using these as part of their teaching but also in children / students becoming film-makers. For more ideas on using these see this link and for more ideas of how children can become filmmakers see this link. For a list of films that you could use to teach about RE see this link.
• Collaborative: learning based on on-line communities of practice, sharing knowledge and information from a range of different cultural and geographical perspectives:
  • Wikis, Forums and blogs are wonderful tool as are the growing social networking tools. These can and should all be employed when working with students.
  • As well as these are the wonderful links with the communities of practice you can find in resources such as People of Faith, the faith communities and, of course, on You Tube.
• Concurrent: learning linking the school with the home and other facilities such as the library, VLE etc..
  • The idea of anytime / anywhere learning is very important and and as many resources as possible should be made available to the students in your schools. You might do this via your Virtual Learning Environment or you might do it via some software such as dropbox.
  • Developing "e-boxes" of electronic resources as well as physical packs of resource is a way to consider giving students access to a wide amount of resource materials.
• Consensual: learning in which the student becomes a much more active partner in the learning process
  • The "e-boxes" mentioned above give a real sense of control over learning for the student as they can select the appropriate resource when looking to solve problems.
  • Using video, audio and other data capture mechanisms means that the student has a way of gathering, analysing, evaluating and presenting information in a way that is not just "ink on paper"
• Creative: learning in which the student has some control over the outcomes of learning and the artifacts of learning that they produce.