Why strive to provide Ultra Fast Broadband in NZ Schools? While I totally agree with the following points made at the meeting:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

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?