Going to start with Kate from Landco to help set the scene then run through this Slideshare deck with the students. This slideshow has two extra slides that I usually don't use with this age of student - I have tended to just draw these on the board as I go. Slides 3 and 4 show the growth of information over time - the exponential nature of slide 3 is usually enough to convince most people that something needs to change, and quickly, with respect to what we try and teach and how. But it is worth going back to the overall view of all of history - I've just used since 0 AD - the graph is startling - we go "vertical" with our change of volumes of information - or knowledge. Just how do we cope with this with a society at large that is often blissfully ignorant of just how significant these times are in the history of our planet.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Google Apps, Video, Sites, Reader and Gears
We've trialled Google Apps for one of our Horizon Projects at school recently. Our projects run for four weeks and over this time our students explore the K-12 2009 Horizon Report and work with a number of outside experts in design and education to design a school for the future.
One of our motivations for setting up our own Google Apps domain rather than allow individual students to set up their own Google Docs account was to make life easier for students and teachers in collaboration and communicating. From this basis, Google Apps is quite good. It allows simple collaboration and sharing of documents well. The ability to upload Office documents is good. Unfortunately it doesn't allow sharing of Acrobat documents in an easy way, but this too can be done if you are prepared to spend the time typing individual email addresses. To date, haven't found a solution to publishing in foreign languages - haven't looked that hard, but if anyone reads this and has a solution, then please let me know!
Perhaps two of the unheralded features of Google Apps are Google Sites and Google Video. Google Sites gives you an excellent tool for building web sites, similar in some ways to the likes of Wikispaces. It integrates well with YouTube (as you'd expect) and it is pretty simple for students to build a nice looking site without much help. Google Video as part of the Apps suite allows you to upload video of any length (up to 1 GB), and this gets over YouTube's 10 minute limit and Fliggo's 25 minute limit. We video our outside experts so that students and staff can look back at the presentations for information they may have missed - and several of the presentations are 45 minutes in length, so not having to break them up into 2 sections is a real bonus.
But using Google Apps has not been without difficulty. We have a pretty strong bandwidth available (supposedly), but at times with as few as 30 students connecting simultaneously to our Google Apps site, the response has been not much short of atrocious. As anyone teaching will know, letting kids loose on laptops when they have to wait minutes for relatively short documents to load is asking for trouble. Further investigation has involved our ISP and at present we still await the results of a number of trials which from where I sit seem to indicate that our bandwidth within NZ and across to Australia is OK, but we are missing out badly with traffic from the USA and Europe. We will certainly need to get more response to the desktop than that we have had till now if we are to seriously consider Google's cloud offering.
As an RSS aggregator or subscription reader, Google Reader is my tool of preference for a couple of reasons. Firstly it has a gadget for iGoogle making it easy to see what is new, and secondly, the ability to take it offline via Google Gears makes it easy to catch up on reading when away from a network - like we were last week when away on holiday in the motorhome. In the middle of nowhere (well, Waingaro Springs to be exact) there is no cell coverage and no wireless, but I was able to deal to 50 or so blogs that I was behind in once the kids were asleep.
One of our motivations for setting up our own Google Apps domain rather than allow individual students to set up their own Google Docs account was to make life easier for students and teachers in collaboration and communicating. From this basis, Google Apps is quite good. It allows simple collaboration and sharing of documents well. The ability to upload Office documents is good. Unfortunately it doesn't allow sharing of Acrobat documents in an easy way, but this too can be done if you are prepared to spend the time typing individual email addresses. To date, haven't found a solution to publishing in foreign languages - haven't looked that hard, but if anyone reads this and has a solution, then please let me know!
Perhaps two of the unheralded features of Google Apps are Google Sites and Google Video. Google Sites gives you an excellent tool for building web sites, similar in some ways to the likes of Wikispaces. It integrates well with YouTube (as you'd expect) and it is pretty simple for students to build a nice looking site without much help. Google Video as part of the Apps suite allows you to upload video of any length (up to 1 GB), and this gets over YouTube's 10 minute limit and Fliggo's 25 minute limit. We video our outside experts so that students and staff can look back at the presentations for information they may have missed - and several of the presentations are 45 minutes in length, so not having to break them up into 2 sections is a real bonus.
But using Google Apps has not been without difficulty. We have a pretty strong bandwidth available (supposedly), but at times with as few as 30 students connecting simultaneously to our Google Apps site, the response has been not much short of atrocious. As anyone teaching will know, letting kids loose on laptops when they have to wait minutes for relatively short documents to load is asking for trouble. Further investigation has involved our ISP and at present we still await the results of a number of trials which from where I sit seem to indicate that our bandwidth within NZ and across to Australia is OK, but we are missing out badly with traffic from the USA and Europe. We will certainly need to get more response to the desktop than that we have had till now if we are to seriously consider Google's cloud offering.
As an RSS aggregator or subscription reader, Google Reader is my tool of preference for a couple of reasons. Firstly it has a gadget for iGoogle making it easy to see what is new, and secondly, the ability to take it offline via Google Gears makes it easy to catch up on reading when away from a network - like we were last week when away on holiday in the motorhome. In the middle of nowhere (well, Waingaro Springs to be exact) there is no cell coverage and no wireless, but I was able to deal to 50 or so blogs that I was behind in once the kids were asleep.
Google Gears also makes it easy to read documents from some of the applications in Google Apps - most notably word processor docs. So, if you have student work shared in this manner you can read and comment back offline, and once reconnected, can synchronise back to the cloud and everything is as it should be. But Gears needs to offer more functionality in relation to creating new documents and editing existing ones, plus it would be good to have Blogger compatibility built in.
So, at this stage in our trials, its a big thumbs up for Google Sites and Reader, limited thumbs up for Google Docs and Gears. If we can resolve our bandwidth issues and Gears allows a little more interaction, then Docs will be useful contender for replacement of Office applications for students.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Great Resources for Educators I
There are a host of fantastic sites that provide useful information and support for teachers and learners in ICT. (After all, we are all learners these days). These are a couple of the places I look to for information on leading technologies and the impact they might have on education. I'll add others in later posts, because there are so many good sources, and they should be shared.
Educause - although its mission is to promote "intelligent use of information technologies" in the higher education environment, it has a couple of projects that are really useful for those of us in the K-12 space.
Similar to the Educause "7 Things to Know" series, many of Becta's articles have some useful synopsis of just what the technologies are and how they might apply to education. This article on QR codes is an example.
Educause - although its mission is to promote "intelligent use of information technologies" in the higher education environment, it has a couple of projects that are really useful for those of us in the K-12 space. First is the Horizon Report - 2009 saw the first K-12 Horizon Report, a report looking at 6 technologies likely to impact K-12 classrooms in the next 1 - 5 years. A joint production with the New Media Consortium, the annual Horizon Reports provide great insight for emerging technologies and what they might mean for teaching and learning. Indeed, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis have used them extensively for their Flat Classroom projects over the past few years.
The second cool offering from Educause is the "7 Things You Should Know" series. This series began back in 2005 and basically provides a concise 2 page report each month about some new technology. What makes this series a great resource is that they break each technology into simple language and discusses
- what it is
- how it works
- where it is going
- why it matters for teaching and learning
Recent additions include Twitter and Voicethread, but you'll find everything from QR codes to Second Life in a language that everyone can understand.
If you haven't used this site, I highly recommend it.
BECTA - This UK organisation is the government's agency leading the national drive to ensure effective and innovative use of ICT in learning. It has done some excellent work for a long time. It's emerging technologies for learning section draws together research, news, analysis and views around technologies for learning. It has a wide range of research papers and its Tech News section is always up to the minute with news, views and reviews. 
Similar to the Educause "7 Things to Know" series, many of Becta's articles have some useful synopsis of just what the technologies are and how they might apply to education. This article on QR codes is an example.
Monday, July 6, 2009
More on Free
Just read this article from WIRED on Chris's new book FREE. There are 3 videos in the article - watch the second one first and if this one gets you thinking, then watch the other ones too ... in any event read the article.
We're on the verge of something big in education ... this is another piece starting to fall in to place for me ...
I also read Scott McLeod's post on the Florida Virtual School and 360Ed and the $ they have poured into an online game for students ... not free ... then I watch my 11 year old and his stop motion Lego Batman (used to be Lego Starwars and Indiana Jones) ... there is a huge array of this type of stuff on Youtube ... and piles of (to me, anyway) more useful stuff for an educator ... all free, though it costs me time to find it - still faster than creating it though.
Free - the future of education???
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Now here is a cool tool ... PREZI
I first came across Prezi late last year when I saw a presentation created using it when it was beta. I applied for a beta account and heard nothing back from them, so it was with some surprise that I "refound" it today. But after playing with it for 30 minutes or so, I really like it and will be introducing staff and students to it in the near future. Here's my first effort - haven't found the embed capability yet (might not be there ... at least in the free version). Must check out the different options in the pay category.
Key Competencies
The Ministry of Education has launched a new web site dealing with the "key competencies" as outlined in our new curriculum documents. "Key competencies matter because things have changed" says the first line or so of the "Why are key competencies important". What I found interesting though was the short into video by Karen Sewell, our Secretary for Education. In this she alludes to many of the issues raised in the original (and many versions since) of Karl Fisch's "Shift Happens".
Why do I find this interesting? Well, I guess two apsects to this.
1) it gives credence to Karl's work and
2) if the Secretary of Education is making these noises, then maybe, just maybe, the messages are slowly getting through.
We are at the "mother of all inflexion points" that Tom Friedman talks about in his "The World is Flat". In Papert language, we are in the stages of fundamental change ... it's just that we don't often talk enough about just what constitutes fundamental as far as what we teach and what we learn.
Just in case anyone reads this and are not from NZ, the NZ key competencies are:
1. Thinking
2. Using language, symbols and text.
2. Using language, symbols and text.
3. Managing self.
4. Relating to others.
5. Participating and contributing.
At first glance I like what the site is trying to do - provide information and support for teachers (and leaders) trying to implement the new curriculum, and build in the KC's to classroom activities. The following is a snap from the page exploring what the KCs might look like in teaching.
The highlight is mine - the teaching profession in our country is aging, and for a good number I wonder just how long it will take them to adopt these two "fundamental" changes in the classroom practice. Over the coming months we have the opportunity to really try and make a difference in education in our school and in NZ I suppose. I hope we are up to it.
Friday, July 3, 2009
It's happening all over again ... so much for the holidays!
So, having hung the curtains in #3's bedroom, put #4 to sleep (he's still only 2 after all) I thought I'd just sit down and have a cup of coffee before dealing to the issue of securing the TV in the motor home (hate it to fall off the wall while driving!) For that unknown reason opened my email while sipping the coffee, and for some reason just happened to read a message from someone joining a Diigo group that I am a member of ... and that's when it happened ...
Twine? Never heard of it before. Well 10 minutes later I now have a whole new PLN to get to grips with. Time will tell long term just how much use I make of the new tool, but at the moment it's given me a new avenue to explore ... and I just can't wait ... and just in case it's new to you too - try it, I think you'll like it...
Twine? Never heard of it before. Well 10 minutes later I now have a whole new PLN to get to grips with. Time will tell long term just how much use I make of the new tool, but at the moment it's given me a new avenue to explore ... and I just can't wait ... and just in case it's new to you too - try it, I think you'll like it...
The Long Long Tail of Education
I was lucky enough a couple of years ago to hear Chris Anderson (of WIRED fame) talk about "Long Tail economics" and its application to technology. It was at the Digital Summit 2.0 run by the NZ Government. I remember the talk quite clearly and wrote about the potential application of long tail economics to K-12 education when I returned to work a few days later. It's a thought that has stayed with me since. Just when will "education" become "commoditised"? And what will that mean for the independent school sector? [Note - you can hear Chris talk about the Long Tail and Technology on TED].
Now, in this talk Chris talks of "free" - particulary in reference to band width and fibre optic capacity. As you may know, the capacity of fibre is huge - currently capable of delivering 2500 CDs of data per second, and increasing at a rate of 3 fold every year or so. The FREE notion is the basis for Chris's new book -"Free : The Future of a radical Price". His promo for the book makes some interesting analogies (Gillette, coffee machines, cell phones, video game consoles) of products basically "given away for zero or very little cost, with the benefit to the company coming in downstream consumables. I thought that probably printers would have been a better example for many today - zero cost for the printer and exorbitant cost for the ink/toner. Malcolm Gladwell doesn't agree with all of Mr Anderson's assumptions - in his New York Times review he points to the inability of YouTube to make a profit as a key flaw in Anderson's position. As Gladwell points out, with a potential audience of 75 billion, even 75 billion x a few cents is still a lot of money.
Despite this, its hard to argue too much against Anderson in the educational sphere, and particularly the K-12 space - a space where education, at least in my country, is supposed to be free anyway. MIT have provided vast libraries of free content through their Open Courseware site. The Open Educational Resource movement (eg OER Commons, Wikieducator) are other examples where anyone can access learning material. Couple these types of resources with the myriad of other online sources and the ability to customise learning opportunities for people of any age is just sitting there waiting fore someone to challenge the embedded educational systems in many countries.
As Robinson points out, most societies have a similar system of education, so surely some clever group is going to challenge the status quo? As bandwidth continues to increase, the availability of courseware/content continues to increase and your ability to participate in communities anywhere continues to increase, then putting all of these together seems to make online learning for any age highly likely ...
... Or is the embeddedness of education, broader governmental involvement and the strange way we assess student learning at the senior end of schooling enough to suppress any revolution in this area? Perhaps the custodial reasons for existing school (aka baby sitting while parents work) is still way too strong for this change to happen?
We are awash in a sea of change, and that rate of change is increasing. With so much knowledge and information available on the network, it does seem rather quaint that we still have so many classrooms around the world that exist in a way where the teacher is still seen as the font of all knowledgea
Now, in this talk Chris talks of "free" - particulary in reference to band width and fibre optic capacity. As you may know, the capacity of fibre is huge - currently capable of delivering 2500 CDs of data per second, and increasing at a rate of 3 fold every year or so. The FREE notion is the basis for Chris's new book -"Free : The Future of a radical Price". His promo for the book makes some interesting analogies (Gillette, coffee machines, cell phones, video game consoles) of products basically "given away for zero or very little cost, with the benefit to the company coming in downstream consumables. I thought that probably printers would have been a better example for many today - zero cost for the printer and exorbitant cost for the ink/toner. Malcolm Gladwell doesn't agree with all of Mr Anderson's assumptions - in his New York Times review he points to the inability of YouTube to make a profit as a key flaw in Anderson's position. As Gladwell points out, with a potential audience of 75 billion, even 75 billion x a few cents is still a lot of money.
Despite this, its hard to argue too much against Anderson in the educational sphere, and particularly the K-12 space - a space where education, at least in my country, is supposed to be free anyway. MIT have provided vast libraries of free content through their Open Courseware site. The Open Educational Resource movement (eg OER Commons, Wikieducator) are other examples where anyone can access learning material. Couple these types of resources with the myriad of other online sources and the ability to customise learning opportunities for people of any age is just sitting there waiting fore someone to challenge the embedded educational systems in many countries.
As Robinson points out, most societies have a similar system of education, so surely some clever group is going to challenge the status quo? As bandwidth continues to increase, the availability of courseware/content continues to increase and your ability to participate in communities anywhere continues to increase, then putting all of these together seems to make online learning for any age highly likely ...
... Or is the embeddedness of education, broader governmental involvement and the strange way we assess student learning at the senior end of schooling enough to suppress any revolution in this area? Perhaps the custodial reasons for existing school (aka baby sitting while parents work) is still way too strong for this change to happen?
We are awash in a sea of change, and that rate of change is increasing. With so much knowledge and information available on the network, it does seem rather quaint that we still have so many classrooms around the world that exist in a way where the teacher is still seen as the font of all knowledgea
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
A letter to the teacher ...
"Dear Teacher
I am writing to you today following the publication of the White Paper Your Child, Your School, Our Future: building a 21st century school system."
So begins a letter from Ed Ball, Minister of State, to teachers in the UK today. Head teachers got their version. Boards of governors got their version. Support staff got their version.
So, you've got to think that probably the white paper is reasonably important as far as schooling in the UK is concerned. I've had the chance to read the teacher letter and skim read the 18 page summary version of the white paper. Yep, on a quick summary, it looks pretty significant.
Here's a couple of the highlights so far ..
.
Here's a couple of the highlights so far ..
.1. Pupil Guarantee - a 4 page document outlining the rights and expectations that pupils have. eg every pupil will go to a school where there is good behaviour, strong discipline, order and safety; and how about this one - every pupil will go to a school where they are taught in a way that meets their needs.
There's more, much more, like the Parent Guarantee, but this is a good place to start. I'm sure there isn't a school in our part of the world, or the UK for that matter, that wouldn't have something like both of the above points as part of their vision/strategic plan. But how many of them mandate them and have them as part of a student "guarantee"? A published one for all to see and be held accountable to?
Another part that appealed ... teaching seen as a Master's level profession with a new Masters in Teaching and Learning with associated professional development, oh, and the accountability part ...
So far I like what I read. Leighton Smith on ZB this morning was on about the Herald editorial supporting league tables for NZ, same in Aus, and so it's interesting that the planets are aligning with the UK going to publish school scorecards and faciliate league tables. Maybe some of the education leaders in these countries are talking to each other ... or maybe not. I'll look more at the UK plans in the next few days.
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