Learning - Thinking - Playing

New research shows technology is vital to 21st Century learning

Well who would have guessed it that "technology is vital to 21st Century learning" as the latest media release from the Rudd DER (or if you are not aware Australia's Digital Education Revolution) spin machine.

I have uploaded the press release and research document (Download 295M1722) for your enjoyment and when I get a little bit of time I will have a look at it myself and try to explore the findings and results. Your comments and thoughts are always welcome.

Australia's Digital Revolution - Part 3 - Wayne .. Swan or Goose!

Just sitting in LA International Airport waiting for my flight back to Australia and I am catching up on emails and I have just come across a news story posted on The Australian newspaper website titled "Govt didn't err in PC plan cost" where Wayne Swan tries to defend the current situation involving Australian States/Territories around the computers in schools fund, especially NSW reported position where they are looking to pull out of the program due to not enough funding being provided for all the on costs. (See Part 1 and Part 2 for more information).

Wayne is quoted as saying "the government recognised there were on-costs" great, thanks for RECOGNISING this error - now fix it. You have the power and the ability to change the direction and application of funding - change it.

Wayne then goes on further to make the following statement:

"I am not going to debate this in public. We will reach an agreement with all of the states including NSW in the interests of the students and the families of Australia."

What - you are not going to discuss this publicly - are you kidding. This is tax payer money, it is my children's education, it impacts my country. Get a grip - how dare you say you are not going to discuss this in public - what is more important, admit there are issues and have an open discussion about this crucial and important area. I have just been to a major conference in America (NECC), where 18,000 people attended and discussed the importance of technology and professional development. Having a high computer ratio is not the answer - we are seeing that already with our students using mobile phones and iPods and computer game consoles. This issue needs to be discussed in the open with more visibility of what you and the states/territories are planning -  I am not happy and not convinced you are doing the right thing for me, my children or my country.

All educators and parents need to make contact with your local member, get on twitter and blogs and forums and raise this issue to make it a priority for discussion and action - it will effect you in the long run, make sure you have a say.

 

Social Networks for PD - NECC Edubloggercon 08

Just sitting in the discussion around the using social networks as a professional development tool/service/application. It is amazing to be a part of the conversation and the realisation that the experiences, ideas, fears, challengers are very similar the world over.

The following clip is of Kevin Honeycutt talking about the challenges with teacher professional development.

5 Photo Story

Last week I was in Alice Springs, Norther Territory working with teachers and students in a range of situations. One was working with digital camera's and providing example activities to engage and challenge students and teachers in a short period of time to complete an activity. The following example was from a group that had to put together a simple story using only 5 photo's without text or audio. In the short time available they were abale to work as a group to produce this final product.

| View | Upload your own

During all these tasks I was not surprised with the maturity and focus of the students - not one accident, not one student in trouble but lots of productive work, discussion and reflection. Our students can be amazing.

Some feedback included the following:

"I did a follow on to your session with another class on Thursday of last week and then some more with the original group on Tuesday.  Their motivation and mine are high so we are all happy.  The conversations in the staff room are good and people are asking for more ideas and sharing."

Games: A balanced View?

A number of times I have posted on my blog things about games and game playing (Halo 3, ADF, Wii, Games on the Road etc), over the weekend a 'fan' of mine, and I say fan as she is part of my Del.icio.us  network and we have reciprocal links sent me site that I might find interesting. The site called Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions and Digital Deprivation from Jamie McKenzie site FNO. I first came across Jamie at a presentation in Alice springs in the late 1990's, I was never really inspired or engaged by Jamie but I enjoyed the challenges his ideas posed, so I have continued to follow his work for some time.  

This latest article as takes up an interesting discussion around the ideas of Marc Prensky (a person I do find engaging and challenging) and his notions and ideas around the digital natives vs the digital immigrant.

Why I have felt compelled to write about it, is that one thing that has always struck me and dare I say it made me feel a little annoyed is Marc's notion of a digital divide between people of certain ages. I have always thought that some of this is purely to beat up an issue to make it 'enrage' more senior members of the community that do not fit in the supposed 'Digital Native' category. I was lucky enough to be born just as computers made their way into classrooms (Commodore64, Apple IIe), just as the atari game systems entered homes and I was fortunate enough in Alice Springs to have school leaders that saw the emerging IT environment and invested in labs and rooms with computers for student access. In the mid 80's I had teachers with high level IT backgrounds working with students on BBS systems  (public Bulletin Board Systems) with students in the UK and USA. I worked on award winning publishing projects run out of the UK communicating, chatting and emailing schools long before it was considered vogue.

I am one of many in this mould and whilst Marc's interest and evangelism about games and game building really inspires me, I do have to balance my views with that of my generation and what we did as an Australian - with a different take on the world. The article is worth having a read, and it is worth considering what a debate would be like between the two! And this is what education and learning is about, being able to see both sides of an argument, being able to discuss and talk about issues and have the capacity within each of us to know that what we do is valuable, that each of us is at different points on a learning/experience continuum and that talking, sharing, exploring together will make us all more knowledgeable and skillful.

Thanks for the link Deb, this one got me thinking...

Tags: Jamie McKenzie, Marc Prensky, Games, Del.icio.us, debate, digitalnativies

Cyclones - slow moving systems Part II

As a follow up to the last post on Education Departments in Australia and their response to ICT developments - I thought I would follow up with an example. In Australia slow moving systems that have  clockwise wind circular rotation and destructive winds are called Cyclones - more information on what Cyclones are can be found here. And these are 2 that I have experienced firsthand: Thelma and Ingrid.

One question I have discussed with people recently is around what would be required to change our Education Departments so that they could become more adaptive, supportive and understanding of the requirements of the educational process. The first thing that stands out for me is the core task of teachers and schools - that is to educate and empower our students. Do the ICT departments have a fundamental understanding of this concept?

In my experiences the answer would be NO - a case in point is the recent refresh of laptops in the NT. Whilst working with a number of schools in the NT I discovered that the new DELL laptops provided do not have built in FireWire ports or Bluetooth. In the case of the schools I was working with this meant that accessing footage from their digital cameras was not possible due to the lack of the firewire port. I know that there has been discussion on various forums around this issue and the response from the IT services branch on their website - is that:

"We acknowledge that these are valuable features for some teachers however when we are purchasing 2700 devices in a single configuration we need to try and optimise the features and performance to suit the needs of most users. ... we believe these provide teachers     with the best mix of price and performance for the available budget."

Now if we look at the above statement the questions I would be asking is:

• Who established the configuration of the laptops?
• What was the process to determine the best mix and performance?
• What was the available budget?
• What feedback and testing did you do prior to committing to purchase?
• What process will be established for the future to avoid this situation again?

In regards to the budget, if you do your sums it would look something like the following:

• 2700 teacher laptops at bulk purchase price of $1500 each = $4,050,000
• The cost of a firewire port built in - conservatively $30 by 2700 laptops = $81,000
• This item as a percentage of the total cost would have been 2%

Surely the budget was not key decision. The bigger issue is the process and understanding of what teachers do with their laptops - yes give them more memory and better graphics cards to do video editing but do not take away the firewire port that allows that technology to connect to the laptop at reasonable speeds - no educator would have made that decision.

Schools and teachers have wasted valuable time and effort in trying to work out a solution, and the solution put forward by the ITSD branch is to post up sites where schools can purchase a PCMCIA card to plug in the side of the laptop, this means teachers will need to learn how to use and care for PCMCIA cards. I wonder what the total human and time cost is for the schools that were frustrated by this issue.

What should have happened was a recognition that a mistake was made and that ITSD should have provisioned 2 PCMCIA cards per school just to show they understood and were trying to help. This would have cost around $25,000 but would have procured a better relationship between schools that provide the core services and those that are meant to support them.

A different room with a view...

Recently I had the good fortune to be able to visit a primary school in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne called Wooranna Park. As you drive down Carlton Road, Dandenong North there is nothing special that sticks out about Wooranna Park Primary School, it is not until you get inside that you start to get a feel for something special. I met the principal Ray Trotter a few months before at a meeting in the Western Suburbs school. Ray struck me as a principal from a different mould - his approach and interest in he application of ICT in education struck me as very interesting, his approach to new ideas was intriguing.

Rather than try and explain my visit to the school I will simply point you to the design notes posted by Mary  Featherston, designer who has posted a website that discusses the design apporach and structure that has been developed within the school.

The school website (http://www.woorannaparkps.vic.edu.au/index.htm) is also worth a look as it has a number of video's that discuss the what has occured within the school and what students are doing at Wooranna Park.

Thanks Ray and Hardef for your time and sharing your school and ideas.

 

Did you Know...

A little while ago I was lucky enough to be pointed in the direction of a presentation called shift happens. This was a great presentation to make you think and evaluate the world we live in and what it means for us and our students. Recently I have posted and linked to other resources of a similar vein "Pay Attention" and "The Machine Is Us/Ing Us" and  the slide "ShiftHappens" at slideshare. Then there is the powerpoint presentation called "Did you Know" developed by Karl Fisch which he constructed to present at one of his beginning of the year faculty meetings (read the story about the develoment of this powerpoint) - the subsequent powerpoint that was developed for this meeting has now been seen by millions of people and started conversations all over the world. There has been an update to the 'Did you know' powerpoint that has taken ideas, concepts and information from other sources and merged them into 'Did you know 2.0' - this clip is worth a look and although on the long side at 8 min 19 sec, it is a great video for staff meetings, parent information or professional development sessions.

The video has been developed by XPLANE, Scott McLeod and of course Karl Fisch.

Teacher Video Sites - Popping up like Rabbits

Just recently I have come across a number of very good teacher video sites that focus just on Education. It is great to see this type of development, however they are in the early stages of development and the ordinary videos still outrank the good videos - you have to start somewhere.

Teachers TV :: http://www.teachers.tv/
This site is based in the UK and as a result has UK focused content. The site is structured and is much like a TV station where the content is provided for you to access - currently there are no options for visitors to upload content but you can suggest ideas. Not sure what level of communication or response is provided. The site does have a large range of videos on a wide number of areas - well worth a look.

Teacher Tube :: http://www.teachertube.com/
This site has only really been going for the last 2 months and has been in beta testing phase  - this site is very much like YouTube but for teachers - so there is a mixture of great stuff and not so ordinary stuff.

Vidipedia :: http://www.vidipedia.org/Main_Page
This final site while not strickly a video site for teachers is claimed to be "the free video encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and seems to have drawn a large cross section of informative and instructional video content as well as the odd funny video. The site is based on Wiki software so that evereyone can post videos and edit content - it is worth a look just to have a peek. Of all the sites this one has by far the larges file sizes - so watch your badwidth usage. Thanks for the lInk Darrel.

Happy viewing.

Pay Attention
One last one just to add a little video to the Blog - the following clip can be found on teacher tube and makes you think about your students and what you are teaching - take the time to have a look.

 

Vista and Office 2007 in Education...take a second look

Earlier this year an important report was released by BECTA on the application and deployment of Vista and Office 2007 in educational settings. One of the reasons why this report is so important is that unlike other recent changes in educational software this upgrade is a fundamental change. By fundamental I mean that Vista requires a new way of thinking and Office 2007 requires the ability to adapt to change easily and over come frustrations that will be experienced. For 15 years I have worked to develop teachers skill, knowledge and attitudes and on the whole I have been successful, but what this experience has taught me is that the majority of our teachers when dealing with ICT do not change quickly, can be frustrated easily and simply think about things in an altogether different way - an this is one reason why our students pick up technology so quickly and our teachers do no. and

Moving to Vista and Office07 if not planned by schools and departmental authorities has the potential to back fire on rate of ICT implementation by teachers, one example is the fact that any work created in the new Office Suit is saved in a completely different format to any other office suit and to other open source products. Imagine the frustration teachers will have when they do work at school in Office 2007 and then send it home to finish in Office 2003, not only will the teacher need to know how to make the transition between the 2 products they will also have to make sure their friends, student and parents know this process as well.

The report titled "Microsoft Vista and Office 2007: Interim report with recommendations on adoption and deployment" discusses the implications for the deployment of Vista and Office 2007 into educational environments, the report provides a very comprehensive look at the issues facing any possible future deployment of these technologies. Whilst this is only an interim report it provides a starting point for informed discussion by those that make the decisions and those that can influence any deployment decisions.

If you read the summary of the report you will get the general flavour for the reports contents, some of the more important features are:

Vista

• Many (27%) of the added features are available without the cost and effort of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista
• The impact on digital rights management on the approach to authentication needs to be evaluated further
• Cost of deployment - the cost of upgrading or replacing PCs which do not meet the Vista-capable specifications
• Training, deployment and testing costs will be high

Office 2007

• There will be issues with variations in User Interfaces that users will need to overcome in a mixed software environment
• Office 2007 will run on PCs currently running Office 2003 - although all PCs will need XP Service Pack 2 or higher
• Training costs and deployment costs will be high especially in regards to support and general help

Interoperability

• In relation to interoperability between Office 2007 and competitor products, all tests failed as none of these alternatives supported the new Office 2007 file formats.
• Microsoft's current adoption of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is limited
• Using the default file format of Office 2007 has the potential to exacerbate the 'digital divide' issues as a result of the loss of interoperability with free-to-use products

Take the time to download, read and share the report....