Next Horizon Project starts tomorrow

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.

Horizon Project 5

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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???

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.

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.

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...