Headteacher confiscates home computers

Now this is interesting... A BBC News story with the title Head teacher takes home computers caught my eye. On the back of some of Ewan's recent posts from blogs.ac.uk on restricting Internet access in schools, I thought this was going to be a story about schools going even further to restrict pupil access. Thankfully it wasn't, but the story it tells is even more interesting.

The headteacher is concerned about the children in his primary school who have access to TV, computers, Playstations, etc. in their bedrooms. The BBC report doesn't go into great depth, but an article in the Telegraph fills in a bit more background. It seems that at least part of the problem in his school comes from children who are too tired from staying up half the night in their bedrooms playing games and watching TV - so he takes the stuff out their bedrooms! Interesting, yes?

I especially liked this quote:

"It also improved the 'self-esteem' of parents who felt they lacked the authority to do this themselves to their children."

What!? Parents give their children TVs and computers to use unsupervised in their bedrooms and then don't feel they can do anything about the negative effect this has on the children's behaviour and attainment! (*Rant mode off*)

The main reason I wanted to blog about this however, was because of the headlines that drew my attention in the first place. A casual glance suggests that, once again, computers are causing trouble and have to be controlled - thus confirming prejudices. A closer reading suggests a much more complex problem. What do you think?

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Technorati Tags: education, computer, ICT, restricted access, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

Coming to you live...

I thoroughly enjoyed the eLive conference - I hope you got a flavour of this from my posts. :-)

One stunningly useful aspect of the conference was the free wi-fi Internet access. It made a huge difference. For example, I don't know how many times I've written a web address down on a bit of paper only to find that I couldn't make head nor tail of it when I tried to go to the site at a later date. "Is that a wibble dot com or a wobble dot com I've written down?" At this conference, I could go directly to the website and bookmark it, or blog about it. Great! Also, being able to blog the conference as it happened was good. I think it kept me sharp, kept me focused.

There were a number of active bloggers at the event so that you could get a variety of interpretations of the same session or find out about one you missed. ...And wasn't it interesting that one keynote speaker created a blog post about the other keynote? The explosion of posts seemed to catch peoples attention. For example David Warlick picked up on it with a post on Hitch Hiking and Learning. As he says:

"I'’ve breathed in the exhaust of the eLIVE event, and I've learned."

I'm not sure about the "exhaust" bit, but I think I know what he means. :-)

IMG_1351.JPG,
originally uploaded by Edublogger.

However, the very best bit of the conference was getting to meet and talk to a whole bunch of fantastic people. For example, I got to talk to Will Richardson - in fact he came with us on the Scotedublog Meetup which was brilliant. I've included a photo here that Ewan took of Will saying good stuff and me trying to keep up! I am sorry though that I didn't get a chance to talk to Alan November. Ewan said that he had read my post of his keynote and that I should have said hello, but he'd gone back to the States before I had a chance... maybe another time.

16 DB ScotsEduBlog,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir.

It was also good to spend time with Ewan and John. Back at SETT last year, as far as we knew, we were the only Scottish edubloggers there (although I'm sure there were others). It will be interesting to see how many there are by this year's SETT. :-) ...At least 118 more if Andrew has his way! I took my laptop to SETT last year, but didn't see anybody else using one (other than presenters showing their presentations!). I suspect things might be different this year... and I hope that they have free wi-fi access to make it easy for people to share what they're learning.

And aprt from everything else, John told me what changed him from being suspicious of technology in the classroom to the uber-geek he is today! No offence intended John. :-)

This has been a bit of a self-indulgent ramble, so I'll try to redeem myself with a couple of questions here at the end. :-)

• How useful did people find the posts from the conference?
• Did anyone else feel, as David Warlick did, that they learned from all the different people making posts?

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Technorati Tags: eLive2006, blogging, Alan November, Will Richards, David Warlick, John Johnston, Ewan McIntosh, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

eLearning

Thought I'd sneak this in before my final eLive post...

A chap called David Gee (who claims to be a "Digital design/multimedia & elearning tutor at Manchetser New Technology Institute" on Technorati) has a blog, eLearningSource, full of good links - every time I go there I get sidetracked for ages following up loads of interesting stuff.

I liked one of his recent posts on eLearning. Yet more reading! However, it is worth visiting for the cartoon alone. Enjoy. :-)

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Technorati Tags: eLearning, DavidGee, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

More Cool Stuff from eLive

I think two more posts should just about get eLive 2006 out of my system...

I've already blogged about the sessions I attended, but here are a few of the things that caught my eye elsewhere at eLive.

A rolling demo of some animated lego caught my attention at the Kudlian Soft stand. (Try saying the name out loud if you can't see straight away what a good name Kudlian Soft is!) The software used to produce it is called I Can Animate. (It is Mac only, so sorry to all you Windoze users. They have an animation package for PCs too although I don't know if it is as cool.) The chap at the stand showed me how easy it was to put things together. He took a picture of the Lego aeroplane against a green screen. This single picture was replicated over twenty-five frames. A picture file of a grassy hillside with sky at the top was then brought in to replace the green background. Then he zoomed in on the background picture and panned across on the first frame so that it looked like the plane was in the sky at the top left of the image. Flipping over to the last frame he panned the zoomed background picture and made it look like the plane had landed on the grass at the bottom right of the image. The package then filled in the bits in between and he had a sequence which showed the plane flying across the sky and landing on the grass - all from one image capture against a green background and moving another still image behind it. Brilliant and stunningly easy. Just a few nights previously I had been watching the extras on the Animatrix DVD {Sad geek credentials well and truly established I think!} where it was explained that sliding two still images past each other, or zoom and pan across a still image are standard tricks used in anime films. Professional animation techniques from a £30 piece of software! It had other tricks up its sleeve all of which made it easy to produce high quality stop motion animation in next to no time. I hope I can talk someone into getting this for me before I teach my next digital video class.

I also liked what I saw at the Promethean Interactive Whiteboard stand. (And that's not asentencee I thought I'd write!) I remain unconvinced by Interactive Whiteboards. One of the things that annoys me about them is that almost inevitably you stand in the way of the projector when you try to interact with them. The Promethean people however were using a pointer instead of a pen. It was a fairly short pointer (about 60cm long) but it was long enough for the user to get out of the way while pushing things about on the screen. Long enough for shorter pupils to reach the top of the board without having to stand on a box. I can't see it on their website, so maybe it is not on sale yet, but if you have a Promethean board, I'd say it was worth investigating further.

A couple of the best things though was stuff I saw pupils doing. On the first day I saw some pupils using Comic Life. I'd seen that already and was well impressed, but one boy was using something different. It looked like an animation package so I sat down and asked him what he was doing.

SqueakScreen,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir.

It turned out not to be an animation package, but a free programming environment called Squeak which is available for Windows, Macintosh, various flovours of Unix and even RiscOS! There are not many programming environments I'd recommend for primary schools. Up until now, my favourite has been Stagecast but Squeak has real potential to at least challenge Stagecast... and Squeak is free! The pupil drew a car on the screen with basic paint tools and clicked on it to bring up a range of options. He then dragged stuff over onto the car's area to start it moving up the screen. He then painted a steering wheel on the screen and, again just using drag and drop, connected it to the car's direction. This meant he could turn the steering wheel he'd just painted and it would change the direction of the car he'd just painted. Fantastic! And the package is free! See also Squeakland for all sorts of goodies to help you get the best out of Squeak (tutorials, background reading, community of users, etc.). And did I mention that the package is free?

I also liked some remote control Duplo I saw pupils playing with. It looked like great fun and the teacher said that while some pupils werecontrollingg the vehicles, others were buildingstufff to go on top of the motor and wheels for when it was their turn to get the radio controller. It looked great for early years classes.

Finally, did anyone else get asked by a couple of pupils what they would buy if they had all the money in the world. The two girls were asking everyone that passed and writing the answers on a whiteboard. By the time I got there, they had answers like a sweet shop, a pink Ferrari and a yacht (although I thought it said yoghurt!). I'm afraid that I failed to say, world peace and an end to hunger, but opted for the more predictable, "Lots of technology". What did you answer?

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Technorati Tags: eLive2006, education, ICT, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

eLive 2006 RSS The Killer Application

eLive 2006 – RSS The Killer App
Will Richardson

More information on this, handouts etc. can be found on his wiki.

We are in a changed world and in a period of disruption at the moment. Every day new tools are coming out. Not only do we have access to a lot of information, but access to a lot of teachers and a lot of ideas. So how do we manage all these connections? RSS.

RSS = Real Simple Syndication. It is the syndication bit that is key. It is about the connections.It brings the content to you – pulling the information we want.

01 Will Draws,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir.

Two parts to it: Feed = new content; Aggregator = pulling it together to display. {Will did a cool instant drawing to demo this. He used the stylus on his tablet style laptop (the kind with the type screen that spins round and folds flat over the keyboard). He talked about the different types of information sources available - magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc. - and how allof these flow into an aggregator. As he talked, he sketched. It was very cool!}

The point is that it is under your control. So many blogs – it RSS that makes it possible to keep track of all this stuff. …And it is essentially spam free because you subscribe to it – it’s not what someone wants to send to you. It’s about the conversations – distributed conversations which are almost impossible to track by other means.

How do you spot feeds? Look for buttons with RSS or XML – often orange. Or even go to Google and search for your favourite information source and RSS, for example “New York Times” RSS. Once you find the feed, copy the link location and use your aggregator.

Bloglines is the aggregator that Will uses. Bloglines lists the feeds you have subscribed to and gives all sorts of information about the feeds, for example how many are unread, how many you have saved, and when you click on a link – it tells you who else has referenced that post. You can also chunk the feeds into related categories – for example Will has classroom stuff in one category and people he learns from in another. Here is Will’s public feeds from Bloglines which {I think} shows his teachers – the people he learns stuff from.

RSS as Research round the clock. You can also track what people are saying about you or your site with RSS because you can create search feeds. In Google you can search for a specific area of interest and then subscribe to just the results of that search. For example Global Warming from the BBC. If you look on the results page , there is a link to an RSS feed.

You can do the same thing in Technorati to search blogs. For example teen obesity in blogs. When displaying the results, Technorati, it tells you information about how many links and from how many sites go to that blog to give an indication of its value. Make the search results a watchlist in Technorati and then subscribe to the RSS feed. Search feeds means RSS is therefore around the clock research.

RSS as Read What I Read – e.g. RSS feed of del.icio.us or Furl. Not just reading what other write in their blogs etc. but also read what they read! For example, here is my del.icio.us links about Flickr and here is its RSS feed. This means the people you subscribe to are feeding you interesting stuff – doing research stuff for you. Furl is similar, but it also saves a picture of the page – so even if the page changes or disappears, you can access the Furl saved version. Even better, Furl will export the bookmark in APA bibliographic reference format. {Cool!}

RSS as Read What Others See – RSS feeds of Flikr photos. For example, search for eLive2006 on Flickr or Somalia and subscribe the search feed.

RSS as Web Pages – You can also take an RSS feed and fold it into a web page or a blog page. Pull stuff in and highlight it without having to re-write the page – an automatically updating web page. {See for example, John Johnston's RSS experiment. - DM}

RSS for Podcasts – It is the RSS feed that does the cast bit of Podcasts. So you can subscribe to the podcast – do it once and whenever something new comes you will be told.

SO there is RSS for weather, ebay, package tracking, flight information, …

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Technorati Tags: eLive2006, Will Richardson, RSS, eLearning, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

eLive 2006 - Mobile Learning

eLive 2006 – Mobile learning
Dewi Lloyd and Aidan Prior (I think!)

Dewi said he was going to explain how he got here and then why he is angry! :-)

IMG_0001,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir.

He talked about how he went from product design to ICT advisor and then into being a mobile learning consultant – Steljes. He found being an advisor frustrating because of the concentration on office/ICT skills at the expense of ICT across the curriculum. More successful in primary.

Teachers have always taken content and adapted it to their own needs – the web is making that even easier.

Mobile Learning: The educational philosophy is finding the balance between the “Ooo” factor and the “Ow much!”. The qualities we’d like to be developed are in the “Ooo” side – motivated learners, self-directed learners, … but the “Ow much” holds everything back.

Why is he angry? Focus on office skills. Inappropriate hardware – designed for individuals to use rather than groups to share. The price of the product dictates the quality of what is available. {Excellent! Too much make do and mend! – DM}

The digital toolkit of stuff available is not new, but using it can cause problems – e.g previous person using it didn’t re-charge batteries, or has lost a cable, or…

Dewi got involved in the Learning2Go project. One of the interesting things about this project is that the pupils own the device themselves. It is not the school’s or the authority’s. It’s theirs – and that makes a huge difference to the way they use and interact with the technology.

The project has led to a huge increase in performance (grades). Not clear if this improvement will be sustainable, but the project is about more. What difference does it make to how pupils learn when they can browse and publish from their own device that they can hold in their hand. Anytime, anyplace, anywhere... He showed a video of a girl who produced an animation on pollination on her mobile device. She worked on this for over a week when and where she wanted.

He talked about the effect of the children having the PDAs, for example boys having to dragged off reading and writing their own e-books. Also PDAs as voting clickers sending free text entries to whole class instead of just multi guess answers. {Software called VPAD? - DM} Also Eduinnova {Spelling? -DM}– teachers create questions and the computer then puts pupils into groups and then they have to collaborate to decide the answers. {Why can’t the pupils make up the questions – that would be cool. – DM – Update: I asked the question at the end and they are doing this next week. :-)} Video showed pupils working with the PDAs and textbooks and the teacher controlling and looking at pupils collaborative work as they were doing the discussion.

GPS devices and map software to show where they are on PDA as the go around taking video and photographs. Camera, video, microphone {and GPS? - Update: Asked at the end and GPS is an add-on, it is not built in like the camera - DM} built into the one, handheld device. Pupils can record their own voices, peers, parents…

Parents realised that they can look at their children’s PDA and see in the one place evidence of all the educational experiences they have been having on a day today basis.

The system is wireless and some of the schools in the project have hundreds of wireless devices in use by pupils. Wolverhampton may be going wireless city wide – every home wireless. Think what difference that would make to the way these devices are used. I think he said every home currently has a device {Surely not? Maybe every home with a school aged pupils? – DM Update: Again I checked at the end. In their project schools (currently 16 out of 60ish in the city I think) every child in primary 4 and 5 has a PDA. Rolling out to more schools this year and again will start with P4 - DM} and the ambition is to add every home with wireless access. Every child has a device, exactly the same device, so the teacher doesn’t have to worry about digital divide issues etc.

Some parental contribution to the cost. {A pound a week? – DM} The contribution is optional{?}, but so far evry paernt has contributed.

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Technorati Tags: eLive2006, mobile learning, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

eLive 2006 Keynote 2 - Will Richardson

eLive 2006 – Keynote 2
Will Richardson

The most powerful learning experience in Will’s life has come from his blogging activities. Learned about people, technology (yes), about education, ….

IMG_0001,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir.

Will pointed out that typing Will into Google makes him come up fourth! Beats Alan November :-)

It’s not about the technology! Take for example, One Red Paper Clip – a chap trying to trade his way from one red paper clip for a house! At the moment he has gone from a paper clip to a night with Alice Cooper! Imagination!

Imagination. See also anime mash-ups {Didn’t get the site… hopefully I’ll get it from watching the video later. - or from Ewan who was better at paying attention :-) Will talked about the Anime Music Video site.} More and more now, the Internet allows us to use our imaginations to explore.

One trillion links on the web… and it is in these links that you see the power. And that’s the “old” web. What about the read/write web? Not just about consuming the information, but about creating and sharing. Web 2.0 is a turning point (see quote from Tim O’Reilly). Remember, it is about the links. The blogsphere {hate that term! - DM} is experiencing huge growth. According to Technorati they are creating billions of links. Not just linking pages, but linking ideas.

The web is about conversations now. As an example, Will talks about how much he has learned from Ewan despite only meeting him face to face yesterday. The knowledge is in the network and the skill is finding the information in the network. {He demonstrated the network with a cool graphic from Touchgraph… will need to explore this further later! - DM} Also used GlobalVoices as a good example. People talking about themselves. Everybody has their own printing press – brilliant! We don’t yet understand how significant this will be.

Imagination: Hear Matthew Bischoff’s podcast and listen to the excitement. See also Tess Richardson’s Weather Recipe book on Flickr. It started as an exercise for grandparents but more than 800 people have looked at it. Aslo talked about Sandaig Otters and the excitement that a worldwide audience generates for the pupils. Children can teach… children can learn with this technology.

Drew on ACfE to show how this sort of technology fits with ACfE.

“Please stop thinking of your schools as four walls. Thinking and linking is what it is about.”

“It’s not about the technology, it’s about imagination.”

The read/write web might change the world. How might it change education? Firstly, moving from a closed content model to an open content model. Everything is not in the text book any more. The content is not only created, but it is being given away for free, See for example Coming of Age, or MIT Open Courseware. Now it is Rip, Mix and Learn. See for example Will’s H2O site on Martin Luther King. The teacher as DJ! For example Will’s class blog where he hooked his pupils up to authors of the books they were studying.

From some time learning to anytime learning. It is move from a push model to a pull model. Anything, Anywhere, Anytime. {Goodies or The Goodies :-)}

From working alone to working together. The idea that children shouldn’t work together is daft. We live in a collaborative world. Wikipedia is a great example of this. Is this a model for how our pupils create knowledge? Whatever we think about Wikipedia, we can’t ignore it – our pupils are using it. Collaborate with peers around the world or collaborate with peers in the classroom!

From audience of one to audience of many. From “hand in homework” to “publish homework”. Think about the shift this means! Move away from grades! Think about Fanfiction site that Alan talked about yesterday – children don’t use their names so that their work is criticised, not them. Would we accept anonymous homework?

From experts to networks. E.g. RSS. We can track the research that others are doing without having to go and look for it. RSS collects it into the one place.

From know what learning to know where. The key thing is not learning the formulas, but learning where to find it – know how to use it. Our pupils need to know how to use their mobile phones to find information.

From information literacy to network literacy. How do you navigate the network, How do we work in a distributed collaborative network?

• What needs to change when our children can publish to a world wide audience?
• How does a teacher’s role change when we can connect our students to Pulitzer Prize winning journalists?
• How do we define literacy when we need to be able to read, create and publish content?

{Feel free to answer these questions. - DM}

Teachers must become content creators. Make us aware of the issues and model good practice. For example, children forget their Myspace stuff is out there – college entrance people and future employers look at them! Must be collaborators. Must be the change agents – at times this will mean being subversive. Model ethical uses.

The tools are not difficult to master, but we need to be imaginative. What are we willing to trade from our old classrooms?

In response to question on how to change Will suggested starting small. Introduce simple ideas to pupils and let it grow. We also need to start conversations about what these tools can do.

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Technorati Tags: eLive2006, Will Richardson, eLearning, imagination, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog