The Educated Kiwi
School
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 :
Auckland War Museum Cenotaph Database Great for research
Jun 17th
On Monday we took our Year 11 students to Auckland to visit the War Museum as a part of our NCEA 1.1 and 1.2 assessments where they have to research a person from the 20th century and create a poster with a brief bio/timeline and the relevant historical ideas that apply to that person.
The Scars on the Heart Exhibit always gives them plenty to look at and I only wish we were able to spend more time there. For now we will make do with our local information.
While there I was kindly reminded about the Cenotaph database
The cornerstone of our military information system is Cenotaph, a biographical database of New Zealanders who have died in the 19th century, from the New Zealand Wars and South Africa, through the First and Second World Wars to Korea, Malaya and Vietnam.Cenotaph started primarily as a roll of honour of those who died as a result of war service. Now it includes many personnel who have died since war service. Virtually all those who served in World War One are included.
The database already consists of over 122600 records, many of which include a portrait taken from published sources or supplied by family members. We draw information from a range of published sources and from the Museum Library’s manuscripts collection and references to personal items on display in the Scars on the Heart galleries.
It’s an excellent resource and one I’ve been trying to get the students to look at to see their own family history.
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.
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.
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
Getting work handed in the easy way.
Aug 18th
As I come to using Google apps more and more I find it very easy for my marking work flow. I set the task in Moodle.
So in this case it was a quick lesson on one of the types of modern slavery. They were given these sites as a reference:
Then had to make sure these things were in it as a minimum.
And finally they had to share the presentation with me which since we are all in google apps they just start typing my name and it is there for them to click on.
So the screenshot below shows the work arriving at the end of the day now all I need to do is look at it and I can give feedback and even edit it in place. The final step is for them to present this back to their classmates.
Oh and I guess I should mention that the top message is from my History class with someone handing in their work late after school has finished for the day.
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.
What to do with 80 laptop bags?
Aug 6th
With buying second hand laptops for our laptop program we have the problem of them all arriving in bubble wrap in the bags that they were returned from their lease in. Karamjeet kindly stacked them in the office but the question now is what do we do with them all. We have given many away already to students who want them now what to do with the remainder.
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?
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/.
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.
Teachers Report Assistant
Jun 25th
It’s report time again and as always I have left it to the last minute. Aah, where would I be without that last minute? Writing reports one of the least favorite jobs I do but thanks to Teachers Report Assistant from Rays learning it’s a breeze.
It is windows only and as a Mac user I run it on Windows XP under VMWare Fusion with unity switched on. It just looks like another app window and copy and paste works fine, you wouldn’t even know there were two operating systems running (2GB RAM helps).
It has been a while since I have used this app and it is now up to version 6. The new version allows you to import student lists to further streamline your work and there are a number of comment banks for different subjects which you can copy and paste from the site.
I do still like to write individual reports for those students who stand out at both ends of the spectrum but for the majority of reports this is a huge time saver.
If you don’t have VMWare you can download Suns Virtual Box for free and Windows 7 RC1 is a solid operating system and is free to download until the end of July and use until March 2010.
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.
Looking at Edubuntu
Jun 12th
This week I attended a session on open source solutions for schools. It was hosted here in Tauranga by Technology Wise who have largely made their name supporting local businesses with open source solutions. The keynote was presented by Don Christie, president of the NZ open source society.
The presentation really got me thinking about Linux again and this week Kelvin and I have begun experimenting on our network with Ubuntu to see how it will go with reasonably astute teenagers.
Our key points are that it must be able to be imaged easily (well G4L will do this easily) and that there must be some way of it integrating with our existing active directory.
At present at Katikati College we run 110 Desktop Windows machines, 130 Windows laptops, 140 OSX Desktops and 90 OSX Laptops. A number of the Macs are now eight-nine years old and still running Tiger hence they are very much at the end of their life so we are looking to replace these and a similar number of the Windows machines are about five-six years old. We are interested to see if running Linux will give us a bit more life in some of these machines and as I tried last year it wasn’t hard to get Ubuntu on an old iMac, for the Windows machines it will hopefully mean that one lab can continue to run comfortably for web-apps and office apps leaving the rest of the school as is.
I don’t really see a need for us to dump Windows as an OS, I personally don’t have a problem paying for software if it is good. I know that if the school Microsoft deal doesn’t roll over that there may be some cost issues but then we can just add some money to the Windows machines we buy and have the OEM license. Much like paying the Apple Tax we will pay for a user experience if it makes people more comfortable.
Where I guess my own ideas on this are conflicting are on the office suite of products. I have not used MSOffice for a number of years now and really don’t see why we are paying for product that we don’t use, not to mention getting parents as a flow on effect to buy 90 plus excel functions when they may only ever use eight but that’s just a personal axe I grind.
MSOffice may be industry standard but as I proved in a little experiment I conducted where instead of installing Office 2007 I put on Open Office Three and the user noticed no difference ( I know it was sneeky but I had to prove a point) we may have missed a very easy time to switch as people are now familiar with the ribbon interface.
So.. what next, well we have had Open Office for a while in the OSX labs due to the MS Schools agreement not covering them for Office and really our kids don’t notice a difference. The real key is getting adults to break the apron string.
AIR CON, Global Climate Change
May 7th
I just popped into the local post shop today and skimmed through Ian Wishart’s AIR CON. Since I am studying Climate change with my Year 10 class this seemed interesting. It is a look at the other side of the debate on climate change and since I share clips from An Inconvenient Truth it does seem important to look at both sides of the issue. So it certainly gives a lot of figures and the referencing is great which allows us to make up our own minds. Looks like I will have to get one for the department.
I did however feel sad as while people are entitled to their opinion as to if Climate Change is happening I hope this doesn’t distract us from the fact that the world is in a pretty messy state and any message that forces us to tidy up a bit has merit.
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