The Educated Kiwi
Recent News
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 :
iPad first thoughts
Apr 15th
Well thanks to the Tauranga Apple Centre I had a brief play with an iPad today. I even got to take it home to see what Mrs van Dijk thought of it. My thoughts- I was really excited by the idea of the iPad largely for my daughter, at three she already uses the mouse and loves reading books and generally playing on the computer. The iPad seemed more natural for her as she is very happy with Dr Seuss on my iPhone. Alas apart from native iPad apps most of the sites my daughter like to use like starfall are flash based.
This is a huge minus for the iPad and would stop me getting one personally as i’m quite happy reading things on my phone and the lack of flash on a smaller device is not so noticeable. It makes me think that Apple is expecting people to spend the money on iPads and the app store. Now if only they released a model for schools that was flash enabled. Then I could see us getting a few as alternatives to laptops.
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.
Virtual haircut
Oct 30th
Nat came home today and told me about the virtual haircut well worth a look. It had me reaching out to see if there was someone there. I can only imagine what this will do for gaming and the movies some day.
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.
Albany Senior High School
Sep 26th
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nznationalparty
Last week we had the privilege during our ICTPD home group meeting of visiting a number of Auckland Schools. I will try and put down my thoughts here so they stay fresh in my mind. I guess the one that stood out the most was Albany Senior High School, ASHS as it is known is a year 11-13 college on the North Shore. In fact the school does not exist in the google images and it is being built further down the road.
There are a number of development that make the school quite different from our own. Among these is the fact that the school only has students from years 11-13 (with only year 11 at the moment). This alone makes it much more flexible. The school runs in 100 minute blocks during the day and each subject is given two 100 minutes blocks a week. On Wednesday morning after a sharing session students are given time to complete an impact project of their own development. This project is not assessed presently for national qualifications but I’m sure as it develops more cross curricula credits will be brought in.
Also interesting was the treatment of the students as young adults. There are no separate staff and student toilets, students address staff by first names and the learning spaces are very flexible in their design to allow for more movement and remove some of the rigid methods we are forced into with traditional classroom design.
As far as students addressing staff by first names I guess this further moves the teacher from the front of the classroom to beside the learner. I have also noticed that this is a trend of society as a whole. As a child I remember calling any adult Mr or Mrs and it wasn’t until my late teens that I called any of my friends parents anything different. The only exception being my rowing coach. Odd how I recall this now but I am Richard to most young people now, I almost feel I’ve missed a stage.
The toilets is interesting as well, Warren pointed out that there are no toilets in malls for under 18s and maybe this would stop vandalism and smoking in the toilets if students knew teachers went in to the toilets regularly. A small point but very different from the norm.
And I guess the impact project and the class times are the ones that should be given the most thought but I think I will leave that until another visit so as not to be premature in my judgement of what seems risky for teenage boys especially but with big benefits as well.
I say good luck to the team as ASHS and I look forward to following their developments.
( I have not written about their decision to be an open source school as thats been both covered and a whole new post.)
Exam Room Cricket
Sep 12th
And so we come to the time of the year where we have to supervise exams. You can’t do marking, you can’t surf the internet on your phone, what’s left? Well being stuck in the hall again I have decided on cricket. The international rules are as follows:
Happy Examining
Teach Tech
Aug 13th
I recently received a request for information on how ICT is used in a Hard Materials Technology class so I decided to start a new blog. I bought teachtech.co.nz back in January intending it to be a wiki for New Zealand Technology teachers but I realised that the Tech Teacher community was probably not ready for it. So when Toni Twiss the ICT facilitator at Matamata College asked me for information about how ICT can be used in a Hard Materials workshop it seemed logical to create a blog which Technology teachers can visit and get ideas. I realise it is very much a niche audience, but that is what the internet is about, and hopefully it will help Technology teachers, new and old.
If you are a Hard Materials teacher and have some great ways to use ICT in our subject you are more than welcome to become a contributor on Teach Tech, or if you know a Hard Materials teacher who is using ICT as a teaching and learning tool please let me know.
mark@tek.net.nz
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.
How much work do we do versus how much time we have.
Jul 30th
So at present my class are working on Achievement Standard 1.1, History Research. For this they have two weeks, Four class periods for research in which I have booked the library and laptops and then a week by themselves. As always I feel that this graph accurately shows how busy they are given the fact that two weeks must seem like an eternity to a teenager. The graph was created with Crappy Graphs which I find very funny, especially given that I am known for drawing crappy maps in class.
So now I await my students finished projects and I’m again left wondering. If I gave them two days to complete this how different would the result be? Just how many hours make up a good task?
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
Bad Gramma, the video.
Jul 27th
Despite Evan distracting me with good humoured music, after a revisit of jamesatwar we watched Bad Grammar. At the end of the video it thanked HotForWords which made me curious So with a click I found the site of Marina Olvova. Not that it needs much explaination but as wikipedia states the theme of Orlova’s YouTube videos, which begin with the tagline “Intelligence is Sexy”, and of her website is tracing the origins of English words. This video from AP gives some insight or the site is here.
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 !!
New Draft – Section 92A
Jul 23rd
During the holidays the Creative Freedom Foundation sent me this email regarding the new draft for section 92a. It is worth a read so that you understand the potential impact on your school and yourself.
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/.
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