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.

Dropresize sorts that problem for me. It’s a really simple little tool and really easy to use:

To install it:

1. Download it from here (hat tip to Lifehacker)
2. Extract the files

That’s it – it’s ready to use, no further installation required.

To run it:

1. Just run the .exe file. It doesn’t sneak into the programs menu, so just find the folder you extracted it to and double click – how very nostalgic! Once it’s running an icon appears in the taskbar.
2. On the first time of running, you need to tell it which folder you would like it to watch. (Being of vast imagination, I called mine Resize.)
3. Tell it how many pixels wide you want the pictures to be.
4. Dump everything that you want to resize into the watched folders. If you want to keep the originals, you will need to copy and paste. This might be useful if you are just shrinking some copies of pictures that will be emailed or put on the web, but don’t want to lose the quality of the original photos. (I know this should be obvious, but some commenters at Semigeek didn’t seem to realise this.) If you want to shrink the originals, just put them in the resize folder. The icon in the taskbar will change to show that Dropresize is shrinking the pictures. Once it’s finished the icon changes back and you can move the pictures back to another folder if you wish.

It’s pretty fast, although obviously the speed depends on how many files you ask it to resize at once. It’s also pretty ace – I’ve cleared the most amazing amount of space on my busting-at-the-seams laptop today, just by shrinking snapshots.

I’ve used this on Vista without problems (so that’s a first!); it should also work with XP and Windows 7, but I haven’t tried it with either (yet).

I spent a lot of time wondering about ‘cloud’ storage. I dabbled with Google docs and also with placing some files in a folder inside my website, but neither solution was ideal. Basically, I didn’t want to end up being dependent on an Internet connection to get at my files. Then I discovered Dropbox, which seemed to be a perfect solution, so I decided to try it. I was a little nervous about trusting Dropbox with all my files, especially since it was still in beta, so I started with just a few files, but everything has gone smoothly. It’s solved all my file management problems and made my life so much easier.

How does it work?

Dropbox provides a personal, password-protected area to store files online, in the ‘cloud’.

The real beauty of Dropbox is that it doesn’t rely on a permanent connection to the Web. You can download the Dropbox software onto as many computers as you like. This creates ‘My Dropbox’, which is basically just a folder on your computer. Any files and folders in the My Dropbox folder synchronise with the online version automatically.

Since I have a copy of every file inside My Dropbox on each of my laptops, I’m not relying on an internet connection to get to my files, only to synchronise them. I can still work with my files if I’m offline; then the next time that I connect to the net, the online versions get updated.

I still use my laptops in the normal way, except that files magically appear and update every time I swap machines. When I use the eee-pc or someone else’s computer, I can still access all of my files by logging in to the website.

There’s more…

The website also saves deleted files and previous versions, so when I used one document as a template for a new one and forgot to save it with a new name (doh!), I just retrieved the old one.

Backing up files is now really easy. Since the files synch every time I switch the laptop on and connect to the net, I already have one backup, so I’ve chosen to just take a backup of My Dropbox onto a portable drive once a week. No, it’s not a perfect system, but it’s quick, easy and I’m comfortable with that level of security.

Since My Dropbox is just a folder, it’s easy to decide what goes in it (and consequently appears on any other computers) and what doesn’t. I’ve put My Dropbox into the My Documents folder. Any really personal stuff that I don’t want to appear on my school laptop stays in My Documents on my personal laptop, outside My Dropbox.

Photo albums are built in, so I can have instant access to all my pictures, not just the ones I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

What’s the catch?

As far as I can see, there isn’t one. If you want up to 2 Gb of storage it’s free. I quickly outgrew that, so I pay $9.99 a month for up to 50Gb of storage. (There is also an option to upgrade to 100Gb, but I can’t see myself using that much space.) Given the amount of time and hassle this has saved me, I’m more than happy to pay a few pounds each month, especially since the alternative involved shelling out for a third hard drive.

If you are interested in trying it, you might like to use this link, which offers 500Mb of extra storage for free ( to both you and me). No, I’m not recommending it to you in order to get extra space for myself (I’ve not even used half of my 50 Gb yet!), I’m recommending it because I’m really impressed with Dropbox, in fact I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Useful links:

getdropbox.com

Get dropbox, with 500Mb of extra storage for free.

Take a tour of Dropbox, or watch a screencast.