I was chatting with a colleague the other day about the most effective way to create a list of online Mathematics resources for our school. We were both thinking of delicious as we have a significant number of teachers with accounts. The idea was to use a group of teachers as the “curators” of these resources and tie them all together in some way. Initially, my colleague figured starting a new delicious account perhaps under the name lnpsmaths might be the best approach. But the problem was sharing the logon and password with the others participating in the initiative – and delicious works best when you are constantly logged on, see the resource in the course of the working day, then hit TAG without too much thought required.
So, using the power of tagging, we decided the best and easiest option is to use a unique tag to tie all of the saved resources together regardless of who was doing the tagging and saving. This way, even the teachers who are not using delicious (even though we are getting closer to total staff participation) can just have a shortcut to http://delicious.com/tag/lnpsmaths on their EdPort homepage to benefit from the Mathematics focus group’s hard work.The only glitch we’ve discovered is that the same site can be saved by multiple users and it will show up each time as a separate entry on the list. Our stopgap solution is say the first person to find the site uses the unique tag, and others can save but avoid the lnpsmaths tag.
Now none of this is ground breaking or unique, but it showcases the simplicity of the way delicious works (I think it is quite a bit simpler than diigo and most staff are not power users of social bookmarking at this stage) in a very powerful way. Now, we have a hotlist of sites that is constantly growing, anyone can contribute and it gives using digital resources in the teaching of Mathematics a real vitamin hit.
Two weeks ago, we packed up our computer room in preparation for the impending demolition of our current library (Resource Centre) in the lead up to the building of our BER funded new “21st Century Library“. The thirty odd desktops of varying vintages were distributed throughout the classrooms or retired to the “obsolete” pile. Our focus has been on the development of wireless capable buildings to support our laptop program which has a trolley of laptops in both the upper and middle primary blocks. Add a small fleet of ten netbooks used by the Year Three classrooms to the pool and it felt quite strange to be putting old style desktops complete with CRT monitors back into classrooms where kids have become used to using the laptops on their desks as part of the regular classroom program.
As I unplugged, trundled and then re-assembled the desktops in their new homes (ably helped by an enthusiastic Year Fvie class), a few interesting things became apparent. Firstly when the classrooms were first wired with data points, it was obvious that no-one envisaged that computers would be anywhere but at the back of a classroom. The number of data points is also interesting to note where the educators responsible for planning and trying to predict future needs could not foresee a need for more than four data points in a junior primary classroom or six in an Year 3 – 7 room!
Now, my point is here not to criticise my predecessors for getting things wrong but to make the point that what we actually need in classrooms in the very near future is a very fast moving and elusive target. In the goal of future proofing a school’s technology needs, the constraints of budget and what is actually available at the time provide real barriers to what is possible. For example, currently we have wireless network points running on the “g” standard meaning that all of our laptops can log on, authenticate and access the network with ease. We could upgrade to “n” standard wireless at a much better data transfer speed if we wanted but as our technician pointed out, straightaway we would have to purchase “n” wireless access points at a much greater cost than the current generation ones we have and one fleet of laptops purchased in late 2007 would not be able to connect as “g” is their maximum connection, making them redundant on our network. Also attaching more laptops to the network means that we need to have the infrastructure to support this expansion. But if we hold off for six to twelve months, prices drop dramatically as a relatively new technology becomes commonplace and more readily supported. And with budgets always tight for a humble public school, these sort of trade offs mean that sometimes we will take a wrong turn or be surprised when technology opens up new opportunities.
So, we are now in a transition period where we try and imagine what the new learning space will be like and try to eliminate the “this is how a normal library looks” type of thinking that could be very redundant and date very quickly. Things will be testy for a while as classes go cold turkey from their regularly scheduled computing room time (which was a useful time for classes to work on individual tasks) and work on ways to use these newly created pods of older computers within their classroom. I know that I will find the regular access to our old computing room to be problematic as the trolley of twenty laptops only go so far between four classes. Time for teachers to get creative – yet again.
He’s a Noob in Second Life. He’s been hanging around Jokaydia, ISTE Island and freebie shops scavenging around trying to work out how to teleport, fly and strike up conversations with impressively physiqued and impeccably attired avatars. Gray has even been to a few events now, settling into custom bean bags and listening intently to talented educators detailing their innovation (both virtual and real world exploits). He even went to his first Jokaydia Unconference on the weekend – not as much as he was hoping, as his real world alter ego had issues that interfered (families, sleep) with a fuller participation schedule. But he did get to meet (virtually) one of his blogging heroes, Konrad March (aka Konrad Glogowski).
He has a lot in common with his alter-ego – me. Like Gray, I’m an ordinary person who is constantly in awe of the talent that is so easy to connect with online. What Jo Kay has created in Second Life is totally amazing – and a massive leap of faith in the potential of this online education haven. Build it and they will come, indeed. I’m not quite sure yet what this space has to offer me and its relationship to my current work – but as I (whoops, sorry), Gray noted last night at the beach side after event celebration, sometimes the deepest learning occurs in the space where I am doing something new and challenging, but feeling out of my depth.
The talent I can connect to via these avenues – my Reader, twitter and now Second Life – is unbelievable. Sometimes, I think that my main talent is recognising others’ talent and being able to stream and subvert their innovation for my own purposes.
The way I plan for my teaching has changed a lot over the past few years. This really was obvious today as my wife, Joanne, planned for her two days of teaching this week in the manner that I did not so long ago – writing out lesson plans by hand, cross referencing her resource books and creating some resources by jumping on the family desktop and printing it off ready for the photocopier. To be fair, she is just returning to teaching this year after five or so years out of the classroom (and we all know that the world has changed just a tad in that time) and she is teaching five-year-olds while I’m at the other end of the primary school spectrum. So, I thought I’d take ten minutes now and detail how planning digitally grants me flexibility and opportunity that was not possible in the past.
Firstly, I have the luxury of a school laptop. This means I can operate wirelessly wherever I feel comfortable around the house. I construct my program on a private wiki shared with my tandem partner and co-planning buddy – this enables transparency, collaboration, pooled resources and consistency in what we deliver in the classroom. We share documents, URL’s and flipcharts via this wiki. I have all of my key documents on my hard drive and backed up on my 8GB thumbdrive. So, if I want to check if I have the laptops booked for my Literacy session on Monday, I can pull that document up in seconds. Likewise, if I want to see if there is a spare slot to take my class to the Resource Centre, I can also have that for checking in an instant.
Our Inquiry Scope and Sequence document is readily available, as are my PDF versions of SACSA, our mandated curriculum. So today, I quickly checked what the next inquiry unit was, briefly read the relevant outcomes from the SACSA Lite PDF and did a quick search on YouTube to see if I could find anything that suited the theme of human effects on the planet which is the broad concept behind the title of “Whose Fault Is It?” The YouTube search found a clip from a CNN documentary titled “Planet In Peril” which gave me a new lead to follow.
I found the website, and the Google Video version, which I know won’t cope with our school filter and internet speed at school, so in the spirit of educational purpose, I started Vuze on the main desktop and started to download a torrent of the documentary so I could show excerpts tomorrow on the interactive whiteboard. This doco would be an ideal resource for “frontloading” students with ideas, base knowledge and questions for their own independent research later in the term. I also mentally noted the RSS feeds on the original website and fired off an e-mail to my colleagues about this find and then saved it to my delicious account.
I’ve been reading Dan Meyer’s blog – in particular his refit of a Darren Kuropatwa mathematics lesson – and with this in mind started planning one of my own on the concept of measurement in metres. Another concept that needs to be covered is scale drawing, so I used Google Maps to get a decent screengrab of the school for a introductory lesson based on the BER intiative. I dumped this into a flipchart for the IWB and into a worksheet that could be given out to the students. With this image safely stowed, I posed the problem that will logically require some conceptual measurement skills and then headed over to the DECS website to download plans for new libraries and classroom blocks which I’m hoping someone tomorrow is going to point out as a requirement to successfully meet the assigned challenge.
With all of these plans detailed on the wiki and saved, I decided to write this post. Time now for some tortilla wraps for the family evening meal, then back after tea to insert some links here and then to assess last term’s final inquiry assessment tasks which are sitting waiting for me on my students’ blogs. If I don’t get distracted doing other things, that is.
USB drives
Thumbdrives
USB sticks
Jumpdrives
USB keys
Flashdrives
These handy devices have become an indispensable tool for students at my school and until now the teachers have relied on the willingness of students to bring their own USB drives to and from the classroom to complete much of the digital work set in assignments. I know that it is almost impossible to get all of the tasks I set done within our limited computing room time and laptop access, and motivated students use their USB drives to continue work on slideshows, documents and other digital projects. But as these devices have jumped in capacity and power, and dived in price, other complicating issues have emerged.
With the ability to run executable programs directly from the USB drive, students are using their device to store portable applications, run flash games, store sizeable music collections and maintain personal libraries of images and videos. But what is stored is not always suitable for the school environment – songs with questionable lyrics and even more questionable LimeWire based origins, violent or politically incorrect games and video content and the increased likelihood of viruses and trojans being released onto the school network via some of the “fun” applications.
Anyway, my school has been working on a possible solution that still permits the use of USB drives in our school environment. It is not fair to expect that kids use their personal devices for school purposes so we will be supplying a smaller capacity drive (1GB) for purchase at a low price complete with school logo specifically for use between home and school. I’d personally like to give them away but tight budgets and Government tax requirements make that a difficult proposition. Now I am not naïve enough to believe that this will eliminate all potential for the problems described above but it gives the eLearning Committee here the power to prescribe the use of USB drives in our Technology Users Agreement for our students.
Now what I’m also interested in is how other schools have tackled the issue of student USB drives within the school environment. Has there been any risks or problems identified? How have you resolved these issues? Any advice or any holes in our strategy as outlined above?
Whilst flicking from one task to another I’ve been checking out some of the “Videos We Like” on Vimeo. I didn’t know much about Vimeo until Dan Meyer did his dy/av series and hosted his awesome summer series (during our wintertime) there in mid 2008. He’s pointed to a few since then and I find it’s more of an arty hangout for filmmakers of varying types and small ad agencies. So, I’m poaching an idea directly from Dan and asking a simple question:
The quality is way better than YouTube and there seems to be less wading through the junk to get to the interesting stuff. But maybe that’s just me. These will look great on the interactive whiteboard – but in what context?
…blogging is not necessarily dying, but is becoming an inadequate paradigm to keep up with all the data that the average internet consumer now produces. Lifestreams are the way to keep up with it all.
Yongfook has his own open source solution ready to go. Called SweetCron, you really need to see it to understand how it all holds together. Thankfully, Chris has installed it on his site so others can check it out. Barbara Dieu has hers up and running as well. It seems that you need to have your own hosted site and a bit of web nous to make it all work which puts it out of reach of a cheapskate free ranger like me.
And ironically, doesn’t this make me.edu.au a form of lifestreaming?
I was going to add this as a comment to Dan Meyer’s reaction to another edtech wake-up call video, but the stream of responses and the reasons for Dan’s displeasure seemed to be going down another track to what I observed so I held it over for this space. I’m not so bothered by the format of the video (although the style looks vaguely formulaic!!) as the underlying message that seems to be seeping through.
My reaction upon seeing grim faced child after grim faced child hoist a laptop into the air was, “Does the author really think that just access to technology solves the problem and makes the classroom an engaging place to be?” The statements being held up were unsubstantiated sentences and pleas and do very little to actually make a case for the thoughtful application of technology for learning. I kept thinking that the nature of the classroom and the lesson structures within were what needed to be changed rather than just adding the technology in just because it is “fun” and “easier to learn when it is noisy”.
I’ve said it before and this video doesn’t change my view that technology in the classroom magnifies a teacher’s practice. It will make a good teacher even better and it will make the shortcomings of a poor teacher even more obvious. This video sends the message “Just Add Technology And The Engagement Will Happen.”
Back in 2000 I attended a three day Discovery School program that was a key part of my journey into educational ICT. One of the tools referred to was the Software Pyramid, created by Victorian teacher Graeme Oswin which was a guide for schools to ensure that their software dollars were spent critically.
Well, a few months back this pyramid concept came up again in a conversation with Ann, my principal, as we talked through the relative merits of teacher software preferences. But the educational technology has moved a long way since this concept was first drawn up and we both wondered if there might not be a more modern equivalent out on the web that might inform in a similar manner.
It didn’t take long for this diagram to surface via Google, and thanks to the Metiri Group, we now have a new blueprint with which to guide our staff. Certainly, those edubloggers with misgivings about the absolute plethora of Web 2.0 applications spawning in cyberspace, can see how the latest and greatest tools measure up as learning implements.
Do you like the way I started this post by using one of your trademark writing quirks?
Anyway, it has taken me this long to pull together some bits and pieces since your post that got me thinking. I went and did what I threatened in the comment. I took your techno-ripe idea, ping-ponging its way via the network from California to Pennsylvania to South Australia, twisted it around to suit my Year Six classroom and have a few samples to share.
Check this one first…
The goal was to advertise their upcoming Personal Research Projects (starting up this week!) in one minute with the assistance of four relevant adjectives combined with four skilfully chosen CC images. Some kids did well with their adjective choice, their excellent speaking skills but struggled to break away from the obvious connection with their chosen topic. Not to worry – these are 11 year olds after all. I was happy about the attribution and thought put into this one.
Others were not as fluent at the speaking part but their image choice was positively inspired…
And if you’re wondering what four adjectives would sum up your own fine country from an Aussie child’s perspective, try this ad for the topic of the USA.
So, ken, I did much of what you suggested. In between the demands of your young family, just know that your influence (and so many others that I read and connect with) resonates in my classroom half a world away.
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