Mouse Mischief: For A Few Mice More

My move to my new school brought a temporary interruption to my Mouse Mischief experiment, but I’m up and running again. It has been by far the most popular tool I’ve used this year. (Last year it came second only to lessons using iPod Touches, but we don’t have any of those at my new school!)

I thought I’d share a few thoughts about some of the practicalities of using Mouse Mischief effectively in the classroom.

I’ve found these strategies quite helpful:

1. Make sure the teacher stays in control:

• NEVER give out the students’ mice until you’ve set up the teacher’s mouse.
• At the end of the presentation, unplug the students’ mice BEFORE exiting the slideshow.

2. Push the limits

The Microsoft website states that machines running Windows XP can run approximately five mice. I tried five mice, found they worked fine, then tried six, then seven…

My XP machine will run Mouse Mischief with eight student mice and one teacher mouse, but I think it is reaching its limit. Eight is fine for my current school – it fits the natural groupings without lots of furniture re-arrangement, but ideally I’d like to end up with one mouse per pair of students. Now I have my new school laptop (which runs Windows 7), I’ll be trying even more mice!

3. Consider how you want to start the presentation

Like many teachers, I move rooms from time to time, so sometimes I can set up a presentation in advance, sometimes I have to set it up during the lesson.

a. In advance

If I’m setting up in advance, I try to start the slide show and click to activate all the student mice before the students arrive. By the time the lesson begins,  the first slide is already on the screen. If I’m planning to have a ‘Do Now’ task on the first slide, this works well because the students can start work as soon as they arrived and they aren’t distracted by the mice until we reach the stage when we need them. Obviously the students still need to know which mouse is theirs, so I include a drawing slide with the heading ‘Take a few moments to work out which cursor is yours’. By the time I’ve finished giving out the mice, the students have worked that out and are ready to move on.

There’s an example of a PowerPoint that I used in this way here. It was used with a foundation set who were learning to solve one step equations. (If you want to reuse the activity, you’ll find the cards that go with it here.)

b. During the lesson

If I’m setting up in the lesson, I make sure that the students have something that they can work on independently for a few minutes while I set up. It doesn’t take very long, but there are quite a few steps: I have to switch on the projector, connect my laptop, plug in and switch on the mice and finally start the slideshow. Once I have reached the stage where I’ve set up the teacher’s mouse, I give the students their mice and let them click to activate them.

4. Learn the keyboard shortcuts

The keyboard shortcuts are really useful. If you have a wireless keyboard I’d recommend using it, then you can move around the room instead of being stuck next to your PC.

• left/right arrows: previous/next slide
• up arrow: show results (very useful if one group is mucking about – once they’ve lost their vote a couple of times, that seems to stop); clicking the up arrow a second time will hide the results – useful if you need to go back to discuss a question that the students didn’t understand
• down arrow: hide/show student mice
• f10: reset the slide, so everyone answers again (useful when students head for the wrong answer and want another attempt)
• f9: start the timer (this is a bit inflexible: you get one minute and as far as I can tell, there is no way to change this. I don’t really use this feature.)
• Alt+f4: end the show

5. Build in thinking time

I used Mouse Mischief with a top set Y8 class who were learning to multiply with fractions and mixed numbers. [PowerPoint file is here]. They really enjoyed it – which, given the subject matter, shows just how motivating it is!

At the start of the session, we spent some time working out how to multiply fractions. They had some whiteboards with pizzas (actually, the ‘whiteboards’ are printouts of this document, slipped inside plastic wallets – which we wrote on with a dry wipe marker), so the first few slides were just copies of those images which we used to discuss how to do the questions.

Then came the practice, followed by an extension to mixed numbers. I decided to use Mouse Mischief for this. These questions need thinking time, so I revealed each slide (right arrow) and immediately hid the student mice (down arrow). They worked in groups to work out the answers using mini-whiteboards. Once I could see that groups were reaching conclusions, I refreshed the slide (f10) so they could answer. I could have simply revealed the mice again, but I wanted to make sure that no-one had the chance to register an answer before they had worked it out.

6. Use the results for AfL, or to start a debate

As soon as the last student has clicked an answer (or as soon as I decide they have had long enough and press the up arrow), a graphic showing how many chose each response appears. If there’s a correct answer, this is a really powerful assessment for learning tool. I can see immediately which questions we need to stop and discuss. If there’s no correct answer, it can stimulate debate. I asked Y10 to select which method they used to solve a problem, we then discussed the relative merits of each one.

I’m still learning how to use Mouse Mischief effectively, so if you have any suggestions or advice, I’d be happy to hear it.