Graham Wegner – Open Educator

I’ve really enjoyed this holiday break – great chance to spend time with the family, get a few odd jobs done around the house and play a few rounds of golf. However, it got to Friday and it was time to re- engage for the term ahead and do some planning ready for Monday. Determined to lead from the front, I spent a stack of time on the computer creating flipcharts in ActivStudio to run on the ActivBoard. Following on from last term, I prepared Daily Mental for my Maths group. I used consumer feedback from the class and posed the problems in a lime green font on a black background. I’m not so sure but if gets all eyes in the right direction, it is irrelevant. Then I launched into what was going to be my masterpiece of flipcharting, right out there on the bleeding edge – an introduction to graphing and interpretation of graphs. The idea was pose the question for the class, “What is a graph?” and hit a link to Answers.com that would reveal definitions. Well, as anyone used to native Microsoft products knows, if you want to create a hyperlink to an image, you right click and choose Create Hyperlink and then enter (or paste) the URL that the image will link to. But, in ActivStudio, images are manipulatives unless set as a Link Object. So that’s something new to get used to until I look though the training manual and find the definitive solution.

Anyway. Got over that hurdle, and got stuck into the flipchart, searching the web, finding images to demonstrate the various types of graphs (bar, pie, line, picture), sticking them into the different pages, typing in text and thinking that I’m doing a great job. However, today, it entered my mind that if I wanted to find these sites again, I couldn’t. If one of the kids in my class wanted more information re: the context of a particular graph, I couldn’t give even go to the website for more information. And how can my students grasp the importance of citing your sources if I’m treating the internet as some kind of free supermarket? Modelling appropriate ways of accessing online resources (critical information literacy) is something these boards have the potential to do really well. I’ll take more care in future.

Just posted to the team blog at ActivBoarding. Thought it needed to be here as it is really from my own unique standpoint!

Well, we started off the term with the promise of our interactive whiteboards and we’ve ended up with something with more potential and scope then we could have hoped for. We held a very successful Staff Development Day where the team members drove the day (see my post A Highly Productive Day) and we scratched the surface of the possibilities our boards could give us in the classroom. So this post is to touch on some of the milestones throughout this term and put my spin on them. Maybe team members might feel inspired to post a comment, put me straight on a few things or blog their version of events.
Actually getting the boards installed was a major undertaking. I had to liase with the ActivBoard suppliers at Commander, the installation company while considering the aesthetic and technical requirements to make the whole scenario work. Remember, no-one really knew what this would look like. When I described to Steve, our on call technician what I wanted as a working solution for the laptop set-up, he was also using intelligent guesswork as he hadn’t seen a school with ActivBoards before and didn’t know how the connections to our network should be made. The laptops also had their fun moments especially when I thought they were defective but I just hadn’t stumbled onto the correct resolution for the data projectors. Note to any schools going down this path and you want to use notebook/laptops for your computer link to the ActivBoard, don’t go for widescreen. Well, the first one was installed into Learning Area 21 and we had our training from Peter Kent and I know my head was buzzing from that session. I think the frustrating part was that most of you guys didn’t have a board yet or the ActivStudio software to play around with. Then it turned out that the laptops needed insurance before they could leave the school grounds! Anyway, looking back at my digital notes from that day I recalled the following points:
– configure USB port (this process is actually on the CD-ROMs that came with the board)
– board calibration (once every two or three months)
– ActivStudio toolbar – TRAINING BOOKLET learn the software go through the tutorials to gain a specific level of competency
– stores a history of sequential flipcharts
– ideal viewing is Yellow font on blue background – minimum font size 24.
add ons for the AlB – microphones, multimedia speakers
The USB port isn’t an issue that will bother most teachers unless they stick the USB link to the board in a new port. The board calibration is an important thing to remember as I’ve a couple of callouts where the flipchart window couldn’t be closed but on close examination the cursor was about 2/3 cm away from the point of the pen. That’s a calibration issue and you just re-calibrate using the appropriate tool from the palette. Now the availability of the tutorial booklets has been a sticking point – we only got two (or three?) and I’ve had plenty of requests for extra copies. I was assured that a pdf copy would be e-mailed to me last week from Commander so you could print or use it from the file. Personally, the lack of a tutorial/ training manual isn’t an issue as I can learn a heap more from playing with the ActivBoard, but I realise not everyone prefers or learns that way. The preferred colour note is interesting because I trialled a few colour combinations with my Maths Group to see what they preferred. They ended up telling me that lime green font on a black background is superb to look at but it could be just that is a cool colour combination that doesn’t measure up optically! Also, I bought a pair of multimedia speakers which have been trialled by a few teachers. Annabel was less than impressed when she viewed a German DVD with her class but a “digital native” informed me that the sound was down because the laptops sound settings were set too low. See. we’re learning from them all the time.
Anyway by mid-term we had all boards installed and all but Meredith’s in the Science Room up and running. Hers turned out to be a connector problem, sorted out eventually by the installers. This was frustrating for her as we were looking forward to our Staff Development Day, she was under pressure to report back to the powers that be on the progress on her Science Grant and she hadn’t even conducted a working lesson involving the ActivBoard. Team members, don’t forget to support her via her blog New Wave Science – post a comment, give her a link, offer to review some of her research.
One big issue I touched on the training day was the need for us to show the way for our fellow staff members. Some of them are still unaware of how the whole interactive whiteboard thing works (can I come and play with it sometime?), some want to be ready for the next rollout in 2006 and a bit of awareness raising on our part on how big and steep the learning curve won’t go astray. They are watching us with interest and we have that responsibility to keep them up to date with realistic, not idealistic, information. We have to think of ways to give them hands on experiences which we, in a lot of ways, didn’t get. We are the digital pioneers and I have seen a lot of really great stuff from all of you just in passing or in professional conversations around the school.
One last thing before I finally wind this post up. I think that being accountable and documenting our learning journey is really important as we go. Being time poor, I think this blog is the best way for all of us to have a conversation that is not dependent on all of us being in the same room at the same time. I am really thrilled to see that several of us have started their own blogs and can see value in this two way technology tool. Our colleagues can then read up on our findings, frustrations, check our resources and be part of documentation that is living. Please contribute any little bits you can to ActivBoarding and make it part of your week to either post, read or comment on this blog. My thoughts and ideas will get pretty boring after a while if others don’t put in their point of view. As Marg has said in her blog digital immigrant – It certainly was food for thought pointing out that it wasn’t much good if we used technology such as the active boards to produce vamped up versions of old curriculum.
Thanks, Marg – couldn’t have put it better myself.

Here in South Australia, we’ve had Learning To Learn, and now I think I’m experiencing Blogging about Blogs. In the blogosphere at the moment, I would be like the new kid at school trying to work out who to be friends with (via Bloglines and the Blogrolls of those kids who’ve obviously been out in the yard playing for a fair while). There is still is a fair bit of novelty involved in checking feeds and assessing if each blog author’s voice resonates with me. I enjoy clarifying my thoughts via Teaching Generation Z but I spend a lot more time reading other blogs, searching for new blogs to read, downloading podcasts of interest (sometimes I even listen to them) and then reading some more. And maybe it’s still because I am still finding out about web 2.0 tools but it seems that every second blog I read is about blogging. Now in my job as an ICT coordinator, my job is to lead the way for my staff and make sure that we don’t have students using computers to learn word processing, or learn Powerpoint but using the tools to solve problems or create content documenting their own learning. So, if a blog is a tool for learning and connecting, how come there’s so much discussion about the tool? Isn’t it a bit like a group of builders discussing their hammers and saws instead of the projects they intend to complete!

Wow, what a great day yesterday. I helped facilitate our ActivBoard team’s training day and although my proposed outline of events didn’t really last for too long, I think everyone got something out of it. Teachers got to play, really play with their boards and were ready to share some exciting things at the latter stages of the day. We had an good lunch at Liquid Espresso (great steak sandwich with wedges) and we created a team blog! Yes, ActivBoarding is the new place for our new little learning community. I was worried that having a blog might have been a bit geeky for my colleagues but when I framed in terms of documenting our learning, avoiding unnecessary meetings and having easy access to online resources, they were super keen. The teacher in the next room even started her own blog so I will have to encourage her to really push that along as well.

It’s always a challenge to plan for and implement new technologies in the school scenario. That’s been my role in the purchase of our school’s new ActivBoards. Well, I know that interactive whiteboards are hardly a new technology in the scheme of things but they are a relative newcomer on the Aussie primary school scene. There are a few primary schools here in Adelaide who have got SmartBoards throughout their classrooms – Hillcrest and Ingle Farm come to mind but we are the first to purchase and install the alternative, ActivBoards. To me, the two options are a bit like comparing PCs and Macs. Both provide educational benefits but are significantly different, doing various things better than each other. I’ve detailed the decision making processes in an earlier post.
So, my next move in my role at work is to stay ahead of our dedicated group of ActivBoard teachers so that I can offer both support and direction to them. This Monday, we have a Student-free Day for staff development and the team have chosen to spend it getting more familiar with their new ActivBoard. So it’s been my job to concoct a plan of attack and compile a program that will blend some basics with some vision. Here’s what I came up with:-
Welcome:

Visit the wiki prior at http://www.activ.schtuff.com

I’ve just revisited one of my favourite blogs Teach 42 where I posted a response to Steve’s entry on Would you want a computer without internet? Here it is:
Mate, you are dead right about the web connection being the most critical part for a classroom teacher now. I had to present our new Activboards to the school council tonight and my flipchart presentation was unavailable because our local network was down and I couldn’t get to my folder where I’d stored it. What to do – go online, go to the Promethean resource website and download some samples (enough to show the parents) and some other online bits and pieces to get me through. It worked – without the web, they would have been less than impressed with the school’s new investments but when they could see the internet content coming through on a big screen and how I could interact with it, they were sold. Heads nodding, great job, Graham, no curly questions. Great observation, Steve.

Well, the school has released me from my classroom teaching duties to spend some time sorting out teacher issues/ questions with our ActivBoards. Part of the deal is getting to go along with my bosses, Jo and Mary to this EDC presentation by a teacher, Alison Sutcliffe. The full title is “Visual texts: a journey of discovery by our Year 2 class.” This came out of a research grant and Alison if explaining how the use of visual texts is totally different from their use. She talked about how our kids spend more time viewing than reading – she spend some time talking about the Disneyification of their content and how narrow their range is. (Certainly made me think about what my own two boys spend their time watching!)

She talked about using her interactive whiteboard to explore the text “Custard the Dragon” and the role colour can take in a text. Challenge and complexity were the key elements she measured the students’ progress achievements in powerful recognition of literacy/elements of visual texts. This was mainly an exploratory activity.

Once she’d addressed the various challenges that some of her “focus” students (research terminology), Alison started describing a unit of work focussing on aspect – she used hero Web pages and a book, “Just Another Ordinary Day” where the students drew pictures to demonstrate their understanding of aspect. Now I know Alison was talking about this in the context of research, but I think my own class could easily benefit from a focus like this to extract more meaning from any texts we examine. Just a footnote about the ICT tools used – Netscape (Composer, I assume) which I used back in 1999 before I got the hang of FrontPage and Safari which is the Mac standard browser. She points that Macs are limited in terms of software for an interactive whiteboard. She also talked about the fact that a SmartBoard is touch sensitive and kids have to adopt a new way of holding the pen. This is not an issue with our ActivBoards (not all interactive boards are created equal!)

Well, I’ve managed to get on top of the teething problems associated with the school’s ActivBoard installation – laptops  are now communicating with projectors, USB ports are configured to communicate to the ActivBoard and I’m now confident enough to start exploring the new ways in which I can present lessons to my class.  When Peter Kent spoke to our staff, he talked about moving beyond using it as a regular whiteboard. He also stated that he didn’t encourage us to use the board as a giant touch based computer screen although that is another way to impart explicit digital ICT skills before moving the class into the computer suite. No, the term I really like the sound of is digital convergence – where the ActivBoard could be the central focus within the classroom for viewing and interacting with a class blog, viewing breaking news items of interest via RSS, annotate and critique pieces of work for within the class, using real stimulus photos from photo sharing websites for active conversations and reflective writing. That students become self motivated towards improving their literacy skills because of the real and public ways their work can be viewed by their peers. Now I don’t know how the pieces all fit together – that will be the  real focus of the learning journey.  My own start in the blogosphere is still in its infancy – I still spend more time reading and scanning other people’s blogs than working on my own but having my own class blogging would be a real near future goal to work towards. The ActivBoard would be the perfect venue to model Read/Write technology and use it to track learning.  Plus  any learning, long term task criteria, assessment could be ”pushed” out to the students’ personal blog space. Lessons missed are kept in flipchart files that are posted on the class blog for students to utilise. I think internet access at home is around 80% with my current class so I have to be mindful of the 20% without and allow them  priority access to the classroom pc’s. But this is a real start in the right direction for using technology as the tool to promote the learning process. It backs my feelings about the appropriate use of ICT in Australian schools. I get worried when I hear fellow coordinators in my cluster talking about the proposed state wide testing of ICT skills and being supportive of the notion. I feel they are missing the whole point.  We have some of the most fantastic, interactive,  dynamic learning tools ever and open source applications are taking educators into places where you don’t want to box yourself or your students into product specific skills. I don’t want anyone to learn Powerpoint just so they know how to put a digital slideshow together. Make the whole thing purpose driven and the learner will engage. And to tie this whole post together, it is  the very fact then is no blueprint on how to specifically teach using an ActivBoard that makes its use so exciting.

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.