The Educated Kiwi
Featured
Ultra Fast Broadband and NZ Education
Aug 16th
After attending the Learning without Limits roadshow hosted by Marg McLeod (Change Manager, Broadband In Schools, Ministry of Education) and Douglas Harre (Senior ICT Consultant, Ministry of Education) a few points struck me…….
Why strive to provide Ultra Fast Broadband in NZ Schools? While I totally agree with the following points made at the meeting:
•Online world now integral to students’ lives
•Increasing evidence that learning in online environments can significantly enhance engagement + lift achievement.
•Particularly effective for students who don’t respond to traditional teaching methods.
•Students can collaborate and learn anytime, anywhere and from anyone.
•In other words – learning without limits
I do believe we need to carefully identify how we are intending to use this resource and, just as importantly, how we are going to pay for it!!
The issue is that since ‘Tomorrows schools’ was introduced in the 1980′s we have all become ‘self managing’ and while that has allowed each community and school to make its own decision on how they do their “Core business”, I am increasingly concerned on how that is impacting ICT costs and ICT for Learning in schools.
While all schools understand their own community best, often there is nobody in the school that understands ICT infrastructures and how they relate to the successful implementation of learning in the school. Consequently, this job is left to the IT Technician or some classroom teacher with an interest or some ‘spare’ time. This often results in schools spending large amounts of $$$ to the vendor with the flashiest solution rather than the one that is best fit for both the school and the staff who will need to use it. Talking to schools, they are continually pelted with sales promotions for IWB’s, Software solutions, LMs’s, E-Portfolio solution, Phone solutions, wireless access etc etc etc ….and now its all the companies trying to sign schools up to fibre as fast as possible before the overall fibre Tender is announced in October.
I believe the most important aspect of the meeting last week was the Ministry basically asking for a mandate from schools to look at tendering for the ongoing cost of Fibre access to the school PLUS the data used. While this would come out of our bulk grants, the pricing they would be able to get for 2300+ schools would have to be better than we can get individually!! Our meeting unanimously ‘passed’ for this to happen so if we are willing to do this then perhaps the climate is right to put back into place some Educational IT specialists with geographic ‘regions of responsibility’ who are not advisors but individuals employed by the Ministry (maybe from ‘tagged staffing’) with the responsibility for liaising between the schools and vendors and who have the responsibility of ‘ticking off’ major IT purchases for ALL schools in the area. This would allow them to organise regional tenders for all the items that schools are presently trying to buy ….and due to ‘economy of scale’ the deals the schools would get would be a major financial win.
Then the next trick would be to set up the same sort of regional positions to provide ongoing IT professional development leadership ……but that’s a whole other post in the making!!
Just for those of you who were wondering what’s available presently via the National Education Network …if you are lucky enough to be on it :
New job new Moodle busy busy
Feb 17th
TBC Moodle
So it is that I have started my new job at Tauranga Boys’ College. I am now a teacher of Year Nine and Ten Social Studies, covering New Zealand history at the moment and Year 11 Geography and History.
One of my year Ten classes is a laptop class, 29 students with nice shiny Macbooks. This week we have been charting the voyage of Captain Cook to New Zealand which we have done with iStopmotion, a great little piece of software and also meant we could familiarise the boys’ with the machines again after the holidays and reintroduce some of the software changes from the holidays.
I’ve also been working on our school Moodle site at moodle.tbc.school.nz. bringing the previous moodle sites into one and adding a link to google apps with single sign on has been exciting especially as we have had a number of network issues that we thought were our fault but in fact were out of our control. So I look forward to the challenges of the coming months both in my classroom and digitally, Not to mention the impending arrival of our second child next week.
Wiimotes and Plasma Screens
Aug 10th
It may not be pretty but this is the modified TEK irpen that we have used for making a plasma screen interactive. The reasoning behind this came from having to put a wiimote in a year one classroom and the projector giving an image that kids would be too short for. So with a slight modification of the pen (we found that the glass on the plasma screen was too reflective in this case for an accurate reading) we were away. As you can see from the photo below the boys found it easy to use and were happily using the big computer monitor to write on ( they are playing echalk).
I guess I will have to add an update to this after a few field trials but we like the idea and with the price of Plasma screen so low at the moment it is a real option for class and hey there are no shadows. Just the thing to complement those Dell Latitude 2100 netbooks $1,046 NZD for a touch screen. Or $1500 for a Samsung 42 inch plus $400 for a wiimote kit hmmm I guess it’s lucky I already have a laptop.
Theming Moodle
Aug 6th
Now despite Kelvin telling me that I am not allowed to change things anymore I am a firm believer in innovate or die and if I don’t continually play with Moodle it bores me and the kids so I figured why not have a bit of a play around with the Newbury College themes created by Shaun Daubney
moodle@newbury-college.ac.uk.
These themes are highly customisable and all I have done is changed the background colour, link highlights and some of the images and links. Now I guess I can get rid of some of the messy menus that have been cluttering the front page and get that stuff into the menubar. Incidentaly the menu bar comes from lwis.net where you can find a free css drop down menu. In fact if Kelvin is still unhappy with the change I will use the nvidia style menus on the old theme.
The reasoning behind this change has for me come about from using
Moodle more and more with my classes and observing the number of clicks that are required to get to certain things. If through this change we can make Moodle a better portal and the technology easier to use it has to be win win.
Borneo – Travelog
Jul 30th
Now for something totally non IT related.
Recently I blogged about travelling to Borneo unplugged. Usually I don’t get into promoting travel destinations but this last trip was a little different.
We took our 6yr old twins with us on their first ‘adventure tourism’ jaunt so it was very cool seeing things through their eyes and I asked them when we got home “what where their favourite bits of the trip” …as they lined up with mine I decided to share them:
- Visiting Selingan Turtle Island, snorkeling with reef fish and staying overnight to watch Green turtles come in and lay their eggs and then watch a release of baby turtles ..laid 45 days before. This was also really special as we got to see and be involved with anatural turtle hatching during the day (somehing basically unheard of) …very cool see video here
- Visiting the Sepelok Orangatuan Rehabilitation centre …where we watched the Orangatuans be feed .got watched by another and ‘adopted‘ a baby one for the princely sum of $90 NZ a year!
- Taking a boat ride up the Kinabatangan river to see Probiscis monkeys and lots of other wildlife and staying overnight up in the jungle itself.
- Going into the Gomantong cave and seeing the bats, and swallows and watching mum freak out about the guano and the cochroaches!
- Swimmimg at the Sepilok Jungle Resort in 34degrees while Dad and Mum had a beer
…and it was so damm cheap !!(and I felt safer than in Auckland) $3000 for 6 days for 4 people …including all food, drinks accommodation and travel ..if you are interested in this sort of experience I would really reccomend it and I must make a plug for our guide for the six days as he was great and looked after our family. His contact details are below if you would like to contact him directly for a customised tour:
Casey Omar Zulkarnai
Nature Tour Guide
mar_cassey@yahoo.com
Travelling ‘Unplugged’
Jul 27th
Well back a week from 12 day family holiday in Brunei and Borneo. I made the decision the day before I left that I was going to go ‘unplugged’ …i.e first time in years I wasn’t going to take a laptop …shock ….horror!! Really couldn’t be bothered with having to go through the scanning, on, off etc at each airport. So I loaded up my iPhone with useful apps told all my friends I would be offline for 12 days and away we went.
I learn’t a few things while away …
1. iPhones are marvelous ..kept up with twitter, kept up with news on the net, laughed at the weather back here, talked with friends on skype ….in fact more connected than at home!
2. I had some significant misconceptions re how easy it would to be online in Borneo ….I got off the plane ..full 3G coverage (thank goodness I’d turned off data roaming ..$10 per MB would have killed the bank balance) …Both in Brunei and Sabah Malaysia every resturant we went into had free wifi ….something I never thought would be the case ..just showed my misunderstanding really.
3. We have lousy phone signal here in NZ. We drove 3.5 hours up into the interior of Borneo up to the Kinabatangan River then went up the river for 1.5 hours to view the wildlife (Probiscis Monkeys, Wild Oranguatuans etc) and my phone STILL had signal …in fact I had to turn it off so it didn’t scare the wildlife and I so I didn’t get thrown overboard!! ..I still lose signal as I travel from Home to school each day (it must be more remote!!).
So next time I’m looking forward to a another laptop free trip !!
Google Apps – Round up
Jul 2nd
Well biggest decision of this year (at school!!) was what to do with a aging Mail Server and should we go Google School. Finally the decision was really made for me as: 1. Staff and students were already using personal gmail addresses to collaborate on work 2. Richard was pushing, pushing, pushing….. and 3. The old mail server started to ‘lock up’ periodically and needed several ‘restarts’ (while holding my breath) to get it back fully ‘online’.
So after deciding that educationally it was a good idea to move all 1200 users and even if we decided to move to another mail server we were going to have to migrate everything anyway ….we did it!
Was it painful ……?
Tech side ……well not really it takes a couple of hours to setup the correct settings from the gmail, then some mucking with dns entries to get everything pointing the right way, then email away to them to get recognised as a educational institute ….tech side done.
School side …..Migrating users especially email inboxes etc would be painful but we just talked to the staff said that we would run the old mail server in parallel for a month and they were to look at this as a good chance to clean up their email. This went down fine with the understanding that we were happy to work with them to make this transition as easy as possible. This worked well and we have had no issues with this approach at all.
Problems
- IMAP speed issues with attachments ….none? ..others have noted this but we haven’t ..not sure why not ..must just be lucky!!! LOL
- Gmail doesn’t like to be ‘polled’ continously ( seems to think its an attack) so by limiting how often this happens this has disappeared.
- Gmail uses flash to upload multiple attachments and this proved to be an issue with our internal proxy …took a bit of ‘tweaking’ but all sorted and staff now happy.
- Issue with syncing user information between our LDAP (AD) server and GApps is a ongoing one ..we have found this application works well from Google ..for all things except passwords due to the format AD stores them. So we are manually having to do this. Anybody with magic bullet cure for this …let me know!
Positives
- Email is reliable, spam is better than before and virus protection built in …all great!
- Educationally staff are continuing to find ways of uses collaborative tools weekly ..if not daily …from class projects to faculty planning …again great!
- We haven’t had to replace a dodgy server!!
Concerns
- Bandwidth is important …bring on the Loop with pairing to Google!! We have 12mbs down and 5mbs up ..and its working damm well ..less might be an issue
- Data Caps …. we have noticed an increase in data use as classes are using Google docs to work collaboratively ….but surely well worth it educationally and it will take something like 2 years to equal the cost of a new server …even if we were to double our internet usuage!!
Some ‘Comments’ I have heard…
- Why would you want to use Google Apps and give them your data – they are just another Microsoft in sheeps clothing – looking at world domination!! – I just don’t see that as the case …its a free service and it works great lets use it!!!
- Who ‘owns’ your email/docs? …personally I don’t care !! ..cloud computing is a concept we need to understand …you back up what is necessary but otherwise its very convienent ..and I’m all for that!
- what happens if Google goes belly up ….HELLO …if Google goes down I think we will have more to worry about than our email!!!
Well must believe in it ..I’ve now ‘helped’ migrate six schools and this is the full ’round up’
Downtime, A Valuable Lesson
Jun 16th
For the past week Tek has been down. We found out on Monday Night 8th June that our site had been hacked. While this immediately had me feeling rather angry I wish that rather than wasting my time I had just moved forward what we had intended, which was to shift our hosting to a NZ based company and improve our overall security.
While the feeling of violation meant I got angry with people I did have backups and the only thing lost was the uploaded images from the database which we were informed was corrupted. (I should have backed that up too I know)
So now we are back and faster than ever. We have learned a lot from the experience and while I won’t detail what we have done here feel free to ask via twitter or IM if you want to know more.
Our backup regime has now had a major overhaul and we will no longer be relying on the web-host to keep archives. Rather we will download the database and relevant file ourselves. Now I know where all that 1 TB storage that I brought can be used. Hey maybe I’ll be allowed to buy that Drobo I’ve been thinking about.
This also provided a teaching point for my ICT students as away from their realms of bit torrent and pesky Virus’ this was a real example of how their skills when used in a negative way can cause a lot of disruption. All in all an experience that has perhaps made me change my somewhat cavalier attitude towards security.
Recent Comments