The Educated Kiwi
learning
Free Documentaries
Sep 2nd
One of the good things about doing break time duty is that you get to talk to staff that you would normally not get to know. You also find out things that you didn’t know and some of them turn out to be useful. Top Documentary Films is a site which catalogues a bunch of free documentaries found on various video sites on the web. I scanned a few and some were English with foreign subtitles, others vice-versa and regular English no subs. Using the VideoDownloadHelper plugin for Firefox I can transfer these videos to our internal PHP Motion server so that students can watch them without cranking through the bandwidth. Another great resource.
New Geography Standard for 2011 may kick off the use of GIS, finally
Aug 25th
Geography 1.8 Apply spatial analysis, with direction, to solve a geographic problem
For next year we are looking at adopting the new Geography standard 1.8 which will allow us to do amongst other things use data in ways such as:
• measuring
• layering
• changing the symbols used
• sorting and editing a table
• querying the map
• using coordinate systems
• displaying a graph based on the map.
I order to do this I have been looking at a few resources. Initially Arc Gis explorer, which is an awesome resource (here is a Link to the iLearn blog with more information) I am currently using this with my Junior classes to test the use of Silverlight from behind the proxy at school and how it goes bandwidth wise as opposed to Google Earth. I have also started looking at Open Street Map. Mark initially reminded me of this with the following TED video:
Having now created an account I have used Motion X GPS To start doing some edits. Would be interesting to see a Geography field trip where the students can actually contribute to a real Map. My only problem is the ease of using the basic Garmin Etrex I have and using the serial converter to get the data off, as opposed to my phone which simply emails the data in .gpx and .kml format already. Still some issues to look at but I am very keen to continue.
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 :
Time for some inspiration.
Jul 28th
There are times when I start to feel a little stale cocooned in my world and I have forgotten to look outside. Thanks to my new iPad I found this as I browsed video podcasts on iTunes.
IQ Games for Geography and History
Oct 11th
On my return from ulearn09 we spent some time as a family playing the two games I brought at the conference The Great New Zealand Moa Hunt and the Terrific Tuatara Trail. Both were great for some basic New Zealand facts and figures and also got us discussing some of these thing with Rylee who despite only being three was enjoying collecting eggs and saying the place names.
There are a number of other games on the site including the Amazing Mammoth Hunt which is world geography as well as an interesting NZ investment game that might be good for economics. Have a look at IQ Ideas.com for their full range. I have to say this one is going to cost my department but it will be money better spent than on another set of textbooks.
And to think this was the first thing I blogged after an ICT conference, I might finally be getting this 21st century learner thing. Multimedia.
Academic: On a pedestal it doesn’t deserve?
Sep 2nd
As jobs get more scarce young people are opting to stay in education and some universities are starting to put caps on their intake, they just don’t have enough seats. The result of more people in tertiary education is bound to result in more people coming out with the same qualification, often a degree without an obvious career route, therefore creating even greater competition for the few jobs available.
I was recently involved in a discussion about the Technology achievement standards vs ITO (Industry Trade Organisation) unit standards in which it was suggested that one (unit standard) was lower in value to the other. Compared to what? There is no comparison, they are very different routes. In fact I would argue that the ITO has more long term value because it can lead to paid apprenticeship and clear pathway to employment, whereas tertiary education leads to a now common qualification and a lifetime of debt.
It is nearly 2010 and we still think that we get the most value from academia, even though both founders of Google and the founder of Microsoft dropped out of college to pursue their businesses.
It is time we stop looking from the top down to looking from the bottom up and asking ourselves, as teachers, what is the value to the individual student? What is the point in driving them hard up a road which doesn’t suit them just because of a perception of prestige?
I happen to have a degree which I earned later in life (27) and my childhood friends who left school at age 16 now run successful businesses. I feel that we expect so much of our young people at school that we forget that they a just kids and maybe we should allow them to enjoy it a bit more. In the words of Jeff Jarvis author of “What Would Google Do?” – Youth is something we only get once, education is something we can do at anytime in our lives. He is not saying we should not educate our young people rather have less emphasis on the type of academic achievement we expect.
For me the things I learned at school make up a tiny amount of the useful knowledge in my head, most of my knowledge has probably been learned in the previous 4 or 5 years of my life. I’m not really sure what that means but I guess it has something to do with trying to stay relevant, which will no doubt get harder as I get older.
The business end of the year
Sep 1st
So we come to the time of the year where assessments are due and option choices must be made for the future. It is about now that my Seniors are getting bored with me talking exam techniques or getting them to hand in work on time. But I will continue to do so until November when it will be up to them.
It is also now that I find the students use Moodle and elearning more than any other time in the year. You see despite the fact that the notes have been on Moodle all year many have just given these resources a cursory glance, whereas now it takes on true meaning. I like this as I guess my students can access the information when they would like to rather than when I allow them.
So I will be adding a number of new quiz/revision activities as well as linking them to a selection of sites that can help them.
I am trying to make the class Moodle page for the Year 11 History class very much a hub for their study while the year 12/13 ICT are more for putting up ideas and techniques to help them with their individual projects. I have also started using google docs extensively as it allows me to collect in volumes of work and then give feedback on it quickly.
So one week till the practice exams and then the a few short months till the end of the year.
OECD Factbook eXplorer
Jul 3rd
This is probably more up Richards alley but I can’t help thinking how much more interesting Geography A level might have been with resources like this. Check out the video on the BBC website and visit http://stats.oecd.org/oecdfactbook/.
World War Two Combat studies guides.
Jul 2nd
Recently @Moodlegirl sent me through a powerpoint of the War in Europe. This animated powerpoint show allowed us as a class to go through what happened very quickly as a recap at the end of the topic. I figured this must come from somewhere and there it is on the Combat Studies Institute pages, along with the Pacific and a number of resources on the US Civil War as well. Now the next step will be to get my students to create one of these using a task that I have traditionally done on paper regarding the post war period and New Zealand. Can I say agin how much I love finding stuff on the internet that we all share (cheers mel).
What was the better lesson?
Jun 30th
So yesterday I spent time preparing a lesson for my year 11 History class. The reasons being two-fold one, I had an observation lesson for my appraisal and I always like to show some technology off and two, It’s nearly the end of the term and I need to get this Origins of World War Two topic finished before the break.
So I headed off to the TES site and found a task on appeasement, similar to one I had used before but nicely presented. I then had the laptops booked for the period and after my initial discussion, a quick video clip of Chamberlain arriving with the document he claimed achieved peace for our time got the class started on the task which I had set up in Moodle. Now this task went reasonably well but at the end of the period when I checked what the class had learned I was disappointed with how little was achieved.
So the next day I taught traditionally I would say. We read and answered questions, drew some maps of the period 1938-1939 and discussed why people wouldn’t like to go to war after the pain of the years prior to 1938. At the end of the period during recap a number of the students remarked how they got that and how they like those lessons.
At this point I am confused. I guess when you are trying to move quickly through teaching content and facts it is hard to beat traditional teaching for the shear volume of stuff and it is by doing this that my students have gained scholarships in the past. I am however looking to vary this more and more. Aside from using ICT for making tasks ‘pretty’ I have, at the urging of @efreeman been getting one student a day to write a reflective piece on moodle which we can then work on to post as part of a class blog so we begin.
I must say it makes it hard for me to evangelise ICT use to fellow staff members when my class get better results from ICT poor lessons. I will keep trying to get the results that prove there is a better way.
When the Flu strikes E-Learning comes into its own.
Jun 26th
As the whole family has now had the flu it has been a decidedly average week. It has however been a good chance to use Moodle to set my class their work and still give feedback without being there. Our Year 11 History site has been used extensively while I have been away, coupled with plentiful access to our school owned laptops I can make sure that we are still on track for finishing this unit this term.
I can see when the Pandemic mania was at its height a week ago why some schools looked at having a few weeks worth on their schools Learning Management Systems. That panic has however passed and we can now be happy to progress at our own pace with E-Learning development.
iPhone apps my Daughter loves
Jun 20th
Recently Rylee has taken to playing a memory game on abcya.com, she does however find the multiple button mouse difficult so we were thinking about how cool a touch screen would be. I then remembered a review of some of the toddler games for the iPhone OS and to be fair I was amazed with the variety of different games available on the platform.
The touch interface is fantastic for her and I was amazed how quickly she started arranging the words and letters in the correct order. The following video is the two apps that I have brought first.
I did read some interesting comments on the review page of people saying how toddlers using an iPhone was the downfall of society but I think these people need a reality check. Rylee can play the games for about ten minutes and then we do something else. There is no need to hide her from technology when her whole life will be surrounded by it. I mean just imagine if I took the iPhone off Mrs van Dijk after only ten minutes, now thats addiction.
Photos that changed the world
Jun 16th
While looking to research the Spanish civil war for my History class I came across the Photos that changed the world site again. While I was only looking for the falling soldier there are just so many of these that I will have to spend a bit of time in class looking at some of the relevant ones to our topics this year. It is amazing how many of these photos are about war and conflict.
Everlong
Jun 16th
I downloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now. It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”. It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.
I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped. Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour. Even my wife said it sounded good.
I picked up a couple of key points from the video. Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier. Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets. Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.
I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this. Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.
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.
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