Teaching Generation Z

Implementing new technology is not always easy -but, the teething problems will usually be worth it. Witness my current frustrations with our new ActivBoards. (Last one finally installed today-hooray!) See my link here to our team wiki, ActivBoarding for the full post.

Team members will either be heartened or dismayed by my rising frustration with the install of the ActivBoards and their associated peripherals. The big issue is the way our laptops are communicating (or failing to) with the projectors. At present, only one team member, Suzanne, has a laptop that will get a display through to the projector. And considering that most of our laptops started off in a promising way, who knows what the final outcome will be. At first, I was convinced that it was the VGA outlet that was faulty and so I took the offending laptop back to its manufacturer (just got to love those back to base warranties!) and sure enough the guy behind the warranty counter plugged it into a flat panel to test my claims. It didn’t work so he told me that the chassis would need to be replaced. It turns out that everything in a laptop is interconnected which means that basically the whole thing needed to be replaced. He said to leave it with him so that all of the data would be transferred to a new machine AND that he would ring me the next day.
Well, the installers started putting in the ActivBoards and problems started emerging when I tried connecting other laptops. So, today I hauled all of the laptops back into town where it was demonstrated on all of the laptops that they were fine, accepted a signal to an external monitor (same deal as a projector) so I brought them back, none the wiser. My next move will be to contact the ActivBoard vendors to get one of their techies out next week to sort though the issue. So, I’ve done as much as I can with the limited technical knowledge I have - it’s time to consult some experts so we can get on with using the ActivBoards for their intended purpose, teaching.

I’ve been a bit slack of late and I know that a blog is only as good as the contributions that are put in it. It’s nearly been a week since the ActivBoard has been installed in my classroom. It’s a first on a few levels - one, it is the first one of six here at our school and, I’m prepared to be corrected, it is the first ActivBoard to be installed in a state primary school here in South Australia. We did a fair bit of research before settling on this particular model as most interactive white boards here in Adelaide are of the SmartBoard variety. In a quick history thumbnail, I received a phone call last year from a guy at a company called Electroboard who distribute SmartBoards in South Australia to come and do a demo at our school. Our education department DECS had a deal with them as the preferred model to support our internet provider Educonnect with their video conferencing capability. Well, he came out, did his demo to me with our teacher-librarian checking in from time to time. Based on that, we decided to put in a submission for the 2005 school year budget to use with our Problem Based Learning program. My boss came back to me and said, “What is this interactive white board thing you want here?”  It seemed most of the staff were oblivious to the world of interactive whiteboards until ……………
Earlier in 2005, our school leaders were invited to Canberra to accept a $20 000 National Excellence In Schooling award. While the leadership team were there, they got to check out the name most dropped in the Australian world of interactive white boards, Richardson Primary School.  Finally, they knew what I was talking about. But my boss was talking about ActivBoards, not Smart Boards. It turns out that school started with SmartBoards but nowadays, all of their classrooms sport ActivBoards. After viewing a presentation from Peter Kent (Richardson’s deputy on leave - currently working as Education Consultant for Australia’s ActivBoard distributors) they were convinced that a board in every classroom at our school was a perfect way to follow our school vision of “using up to date technology” for learning.
So the rest are getting installed later this week. Keep watching this spot for more information as we travel down this very exciting road.

Wow. Sitting here on a Friday afternoon at this three hour workshop with Yvonne @ tsof. There’s only about four of us here who actually come from schools - quite a few attendees from tsof itself. The workshop is all about RSS and how we as educators might be able to harness its power to sort through the overwhelming resources of the Web. Now I know who Vonnie from SouthOz E-Learning is. Blogs are a very crucial part of this whole picture as that’s where this whole Social Bookmarking aspect of RSS comes into play. She’s shown us a Powerpoint that she already showed @ CEGSA State Conference this year. If I didn’t have a knowledge base to go from, my head would be spinning right now from information overload. Now we are watching a future Flash movie about how the Web is evolving. Check it out @ http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic I’m too busy scribbling notes on my Pocket PC to really take it all in. I’ll have to rewatch it to really take it all in.
Yvonne’s talking a lot about the rss and xml labels for want of a better word. A big question for me right now when Yvonne is talking about Web 2.0 - Does that mean any website will be ignored in Web 2.0 if RSS is not a feature in the future?
We’re looked at a couple of explanations of rss on the web but now we are going to look @ a Feedreader in action. Starting in http://www.edna.edna.au and I’ve done a search on Interactive Whiteboards. I then look through the hits for websites with an indicated RSS feed. We’ve planted that in the FeedReader and played around with that. A little bit later, Yvonne is taking us on a Web tour - looking @ Tagcloud, deli.cio.us, Technorati. After a while I’ve lost my concentration and start playing around with deli.cio.us, don’t get me wrong, Yvonne has been a fantastic presenter but it is very late Friday afternoon, school issues from earlier in the day have been playing on my mind, so my mind drifts away for a bit. One classic moment towards the end when Yvonne is showing us her tags and does a search for “interactive whiteboards” and what pops up as the number one hit? My blog Teaching Generation Z! On that note, I’ve got a lot of social bookmarking to do……….

Wow, I’ve been trawling the web checking out blogs of an ICT educational bent and I don’t know where to start. I am very comfortable with ICT tools but I feel like everyone who is worth reading has been doing this stuff for a fair while already - so who will be interested in reading this? I suppose we all start out small, get a few colleagues to check it out and go from there. The first good education blog that switched the light on for me was Teach42. If you haven’t checked it out, it is really great. Anyway, to really get my head around all of the concepts that are emerging technologies like rss and podcasting, I’m off to a training session here at Technology School Of The Future here in Adelaide on “the Magic of RSS.” I’ll make some notes and post them up here for future reference - it’ll be a good benchmark to see whether what I think I know matches the reality! Until Friday.

My school is having 6 ActivBoards installed and the pioneering teachers need a ICT Learning Community where we can exchange ideas as they happen without the need for extra meetings. Check out the wiki I am proposing that we use at ActivBoarding

I’m hoping that this blog will be a workspace that I can use as an evolutionary tool in my role as an ICT Coordinator here in a South Australian school. I have a number of key factors I want to keep a tab on via this blog so I’d appreciate any contact if you are an expert, know something about or can point me in an interesting direction!! The factors I’m interested are:
Interactive Whiteboards in schools
Problem Based Learning (or inquiry based learning)
Blogging as an educational tool to build learning communities
Training a staff in ICT with a broad range of interests, motivations and confidence levels.
Cheers - keep watching this space.