Saturday, August 28, 2010

Learn, Guide, Protect - Netsafe's new approach to cybersafety


Was able to spend an hour or so at the launch of the new Netsafe website aimed at promoting cybersafety for students (in fact aimed at everyone, not just students) last night. There was s small group of teachers from schools around Auckland and we were shown a brief look at the new website that Marty, Sean and Nancy have put together.

While I haven't yet had the chance to look in detail at the site I think the approach the team has taken is admirable - allowing users to add "bits" to the system - very much a social environment where those who want to can contribute to the greater benefit of all in this area of helping people make good choices out on the net.

The new approach is Learn/Guide/Protect and rather than be prescriptive, attempts to make the best information available and under a Creative Commons 3.0 license allows any user to reuse/remix and of the "bits" of information" for themselves. I will certainly be looking to use the reference materials in the site with our staff and parent communities at every opportunity over the next few months.

The site is due to go live at Ulearn in October, but have a look and provide some feedback to the team at Netsafe from next week when you should be able to register for an account.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Another inspiring TED talk - visualizing data with David McCandless

Making sense out of data is an art. Hans Rosling has shown this very graphically event times with his wonderful bubble charts. And now we have David McCandless, a UK journalist turned data analyst, bringing clarity to a wealth of data sets. And of course, if there is one thing that the Internet has brought us over recent times, it's a wealth of data.

So enjoy McCandless' talk - he's got some great examples to share, and enjoy the data right at the end about that volcano that shut down Europe in the middle of the year.



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Saturday, August 21, 2010

Hans Rosling on Population Growth and Raising Livng Standards to check it.

I've referred to Hans Rosling several times before - his graphical view of complex data is just so compelling. So enjoy his latest 10 minute presentation from a TED talk in Cannes. "The world's population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years -- and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth." This stuff is important.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

A Month with an iPad

So, 1 month in to my iPad journey - some thoughts. I started this exercise with an objective of trying to replace my laptop as my prime computing tool. That's a big ask - because in my role as an IT director at a large independent school I have a number of different functions that I need a computing device to do.

In no particular order I need to
1. Provide pd to staff at all levels
2. Presentations to staff, students and parents
3. Research into new and emerging technologies
4. Teach - I teach ICT to middle school students and we do anything from web design to 3D modeling. So I need applications to do video editing, photo manipulation and animation.
5. Interact with our various administration systems, including how we manage these devices in a large deployment.
6. Maintain my blog and other websites.
7. Have full editing access to Google Docs or other such cloud tools.
8. Must be capable of projecting via a data projector.


We run pretty much a Windows environment for our students - they have laptops running either Vista or XP - and while we are almost clear of running Windows only software, there are still a couple of areas where we have a dependence on that platform.

So, in my explorations over the last few weeks I've been asking myself the question - "can we introduce an iPad as the student device at our junior levels?" All of this while being mindful of the fact that the absence of support for Flash will make an impact?

Some findings so far ...

1. While the iPad doesn't support most applications via a data projector, if you jailbreak it and install TVOut2 you can get pretty reasonable projection capabilities - enough to satisfy me that this aspect of presentation and teaching is well enough covered.

2. It would be fair to say that while I can manually configure proxy connections for the iPad and Safari works quite happily over our network, none of the other applications that use the network by default currently work. For example I can not access the App Store or mail etc. Now, we do have an issue with iTunes on our PCs too - unless you have Safari installed on a PC and have it configured, then iTunes doesn't connect properly - this is a relatively new phenomenon for us and as yet we have not spent any serious time trying to resolve this issue. So, this is looming as an increasing priority if I can satisfy myself that other issues of multimedia creation are doable for students.

3. I have found the lack of Flash support more annoying than frustrating. That said, there are a couple of apps that we are currently deploying that make use of Flash - MyPortfolio.school.nz is one, and the Aviary suite of tools is another that I was planning to introduce but will now have to find an alternative to.

4. I must that when I spoke with a couple of our DPs a week or so ago I made the comment that perhaps we may be a year away from an iPad type device in our environment. I based this on not having found a video editing package or a 3D modeling tool. I now have - at least at a superficial level - but enough to make me not too concerned about this.

5. Google currently have an issue that they only allow editing of spreadsheets through their mobile application - this is a pain. In addition, there is a bug in the new Google Docs that stops you being able to download and edit documents created in Docs through such tools as Docs To Go - I understand that several attempts have been made to fix this issue but it remains unresolved as far as I can tell.

6. If we can get a web front end to our main admin system sort then we should be ok with our various admin connectivity for teachers - the rest of our stuff is based around SharePoint and Moodle - there is a mobile app for Moodle should straight web connectivity prove an issue. We are still very early in our Moodle stages with no deployment yet, so if we manage this component with our developers it should not prove an issue.

7. Maintaining blogs and websites is proving a bit more problematical. The likes of Yola and Weebly make extensive use of Flash and so are not a happening thing. I've yet to try the likes of Google sites or other tools, so have a little more work to go here. Maintaining my this blog with BlogPress (as I'm doing now) is OK for basic stuff, but not really a good enough editor for my liking. I'll explore the WordPress app for some new blogs we're setting up for a couple of classes and see how they go.

8. At this stage the iPad still relies on having access to another computer of some type for various functions - the extent of this for a school environment has yet to be considered (by us) to any extent.

9. The "instant on" is a huge benefit to a mobile student population.

10. The battery life is awesome. Easily get a day without a charge - so students won't need to bring a charger to school.

That's about enough for the moment - more to come as the exploration continues, but suffice it to say that I am getting happier with the iPad as a primary computing device by the day. Sure there are some big issues still to resolve, but with functionality in other areas (application wise) seemingly clo to being resolved, at least we can look at the big issues with a purpose.

More as we continue our journey.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

IWB Conference, Auckland, Day 1 and 2 : Best of the rest

The second IWB conference here over the past 3 days did not for me have the same impact as last years' conference. That's not to say it was poor - it just seemed to me that it was possibly a little smaller than last year and the trade show was a little smaller ... And perhaps there were not for me as many stand out sessions as there were last year.

That said - yes I got some value out of it and here are some of the highlights for me.

Craig and Tania Lineham are a husband and wife team from James Hargest College at the bottom of the South Island. They gave a thoughtful presentation about how they are charged with training and support of teachers in their school, and then they both had separate sessions - Tania is Head of Science and Craig head of Health and PE. More about Craig's session later.

In this joint session they shared their observation chart they use when they drop in to asses how their whiteboards are being used in class - accountability it would seem is alive and well in their school. They run drop in sessions each Wednesday after school for staff too - we used to do this several years ago but stopped it due to lack of interest - they say sometimes they have no one turn up, but they still offer them.

They are big on Blooms revised taxonomy - good to see that a school has a clearly identified pedagogy and that it keeps coming up in what they do.

I can't help but think that so much of what these guys are showing reflects the buy in that their school has - it's clear that their school has a culture of learning that their staff share.

I attended several sessions that were specific to Promethean's ActiveBoard - the software that comes with their boards. In reality there seems little difference between this software and Smart NoteBook. Perhaps the ActiveInspire software interface is a little more cluttered?

Without question the highlight for me was the session Craig Lineham, HOD Health and PE from James Hargest High School. His session had little to do with interactive whiteboards and more to do with ICT in health and physical education in general. For a great example of using technologies in PE, he was inspiring. Some of his ideas...

1. Orienteering - students create the courses they taken their cell phones with them and photograph evidence that they had actually done the course - they show the photos to their peers when they return as proof that they did the course.

2. VisibleBody.com have a great subscription based web service for anatomy - $20 per license for 6 months.

3. They use MentalCase to create flash cards for student cell phones - then key messages they want students to learn they save as a series of jpg files.

4. Mindjet Mind Manager Pro for mind mapping.

Overall comments:

1. there are a lot of activities that you can do well on an iwb but that take time - a lot of time - to develop. But as Craig Lineham has said though - it is an investment. An investment in the future.

2. One nagging thing - the term interactive whiteboard used to refer to the fact that to use the board you had to interact with it. More and more over the past year or so I hear that the interactive part comes from the way that a "well used" board promotes interactivity within the students in the classroom overall. I can't help but think is this true, or is this a way of deflecting the fact that maybe these boards don't deliver everything they promised in an interactive way?

3. Not withstanding what I said in 2), put a tool like an IWB in the hands of an already good teacher, then they will do some pretty amazing things with it.

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IWB Conference, Auckland, Day 1: Setting the Scene

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended today.

Keynote 1

Delivered by Peter Kent from Australia. Before a few of Peter's comments, one from the Prinicipal of host school Westlake Girls ... "Remember that we were all there once"... Alison Goernhoffer in reference to new entrants into the tech workplace. Worth remembering - not everyone comes to the classroom with all of the skills they might want to have as far as digital technology is concerned ... To this you can add pedagogy and practise too!

From Peter's talk, I guess the prime message he was giving ... "If you try and teach without technology ... it's a fools errand - you won't be successful."

Do I agree with this? Like everything ... It needs to be taken in context. John Hattie's research doesn't necessarily support this if you take it at just face value, but if you dig deeper ... What Pete is saying (I think) is that there has never been the array of tools for teachers to make teaching such a compelling thing to do as there are now - and of course this is only increasing at a rapid rate. Kids are growing up with this stuff, so we'd better join in.

Pete points to UK Research that struggles to find a relationship between technology spend and use and student outcomes. He cites the BECTA (RIP) research between 2000 & 2007 to support this. But why would we expect otherwise is my question. We have these terrific tools and the web, so called 21st Century tools, but we bring an assessment regime steeped in the industrial model to our classrooms still and to be fair in secondary classrooms we still teach to this assessment regime - so why would we expect anything different?

Hattie says good teaching makes a difference and his research shows that feedback (relationships and opportunity for reflection are included in this I guess) is high on the agenda of good things. But how many of us use the technologies available to us to better facilitate these fundamental things?

"Success is not always strategic" - I can vouch for that I'm sure!


Pete's final words ..."As a teaching professional - what is our responsibility?
We have the tools that no other teacher has had before ...."

So that's the keynote - some food for thought - nothing really new here - but always good to hear that we're on the right track.


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