BlogDale

This week I have been playing with my Wii. Following Johnny Chung Lee’s posts about his research into using Wiimotes and an IR pen to create an interactive whiteboard (for less than £50), and Doug Belshaw actually doing it, I’ve mashed up a complete solution that is cheap and convenient.

Interactive whiteboards are like marmite. People either love ‘em or hate ‘em. I know people who believe strongly that the IWB is an expensive luxury in a classroom and that the same learning gains can generally be met using just a projector; conversely I’ve spoken with teachers who believe strongly that the interactive aspect of the board is what makes it useful, and they now wouldn’t be without the IWB. Interestingly, these two poles of opinion were found to be split generally between phases, where primary teachers wouldn’t part with their boards but secondaries were indifferent to them. My own observation was that whereas a huge investment was made in putting IWBs in classrooms, less importance was placed on training teachers how to use them. And so they sat on the wall as an expensive ornament for months until somebody went on a course and found what “other people” were doing with them.

To me, the biggest impact of a school’s investment in IWBs lies not in the whizzy resources that they produce for their own particular brand of IWB with its proprietary software. The biggest impact is to get teachers to use ICT to prepare and deliver rich content that is pertinent and relevant to learning objectives, and the rest will follow. As suggested here, the initial use of an IWB is simply to use it as a data projector and not to exploit the features of the interactive board itself. Surely that represents a wasted investment? Couldn’t we have bought two projectors rather than a projector and board? Yes we could. We should. And now there’s a way to dispense with the expensive board altogether, or at least see if your teaching style needs the features that a board has to offer.

Here’s how I did it…

Read the rest of this entry »

There are some classes who try to scare teachers by being rowdy, belligerent and generally just Not Nice. (Actually, I can’t think of ahy who do that at this school). However, when I get a class as inspirational as 9Y I get really scared. They are intelligent, polite, hard working and they listen to instructions. What a challenge - there is NO challenging behaviour other than the hum of work and the buzz of enquiring minds. Today is a case in point. I love to push these kids as hard as I can. Last week we looked at different ways of presenting information.  I taught them to use Animoto, Comic Life and some of them experimented with the lesser-known aspects of Word.  Since then my inbox is inundated with messages about new Animotos - the creativity is awesome.

So today they’re doing some coursework, on databases.  It’s a really dry boring task but to spice it up I suggest they can  collect their screenshotted evidence and display it how they like.  Some played safe with Word but others started to tell a story in Comic Life - some really excellent renditions of coursework are coming out.  With 10 minutes to go they were asked about other ways of showing the info - they suggested Animoto and my eyes sparkled with the vision of an OCR moderator watching Animoto’ed files of coursework evidence.

I’m not sure if they managed to get any done with only 10 mins to go…still watching the inbox.  I bet I get some next week though.

I’ve been mooching around Second Life lately, now my machine can cope. Although I’ve been on the WMNET island for ages I’ve done the least building and my patch looks rather unimpressive. Bare, too.

Thing is, apart from the nagging doubt that I didn’t ought to be building things in a Second Life until I’ve finished building the place where I and family live, I wonder at the structures some of my fellow denizens are setting up. Sure, it’s good practice to pass this creativity and the skills required on to others and I salute that - but the elaborate buildings I’m seeing onscreen are - um - buildings. Beautiful, often unique, buildings. With walls.

I tentatively showed spouse SL last night and it was she who pointed this out; that was when the penny dropped for me. Apart from the aforementioned reasons, this might have been why I have been so slow to develop a vision for my patch on the island. I didn’t know what I wanted to make my learning space resemble. I was thinking of reproducing various buildings, from 1970s concrete and glass schools to a sci-fi building from a Brian Aldiss novel (I think it was). But no - Karen’s right, it’s a learning space and the form of it should follow the function.

Do I need chairs to sit on in an online environment? No. Do I need a whiteboard where I can assist learners with resources that can be changed and delivered at the press of a button? Probably, although it might take some other form.

Do I need a means of assessment to make sure they “get it”? Yes. Am I going to feed back to them and help them along their learning journey? You bet.

Do I need a wall to hang my resources on? Nah. I need to have lots of stimulating resources though, that can be changed quickly.

Why should a virtual learning space resemble the real-world enclosures by which we are confined? Surely we have a chance to redefine learning spaces…

So my part of the island is unlikely to have a building on it (there’s a token gesture underwater) but it will be a learning space. At the moment it has a virtual Sloodle classroom on it (standing in the bounds of the blue box puts you in the classroom) which, in time, will link to my school moodle so that I can test how the two online environments work together.

Shame I have to do real work too. These reports are late…

Everyone I show my Asus to is really impressed. Teachers can see that it will fit into their daily flow, students all want one (not just to play Tux games). In a Year 9 sessions today we talked about how useful it would be to have one in lessons and how they could grab information from the web to support their learning. Again, this use raises the issue of “information literacy” in that they would need to be able to differentiate between good and bad information, and where they should be looking for information and how to acknowledge it. All of the class members thought that the outlay was justified.

After a night of no-sleep on Weds (working on a project for somebody) I was in no shape to try to get the Asus to talk to the WPA-TKIP network. Apparently it won’t do it with the native ndiswrapper package and it needs madwifi. I think I fell asleep trying to install it all, but anyway my patience wore thin (helped with the nagging conscience that I should be doing reports) and I left it for another day. But I’d scrambled the wireless settings for home… Not to worry, there’s an easy rollback to default settings on the Asus and I was home and dry again.

Getting software - once the Synaptic repository manager is set up, installing packages is a doddle as with any Linux distro these days. I installed Audacity for good measure (just to prove it could be done - Harvey had asked me recently if I could do it, and it was easy once I’d found how to install synaptic). My favourite so far is the advanced desktop tweak, which changes the look and feel to be a standard KDE desktop. I was intending to install Ubuntu on the machine instead of the factory default Xandros Linux, but I don’t think I’ll do it yet awhile considering that Ubuntu isn’t so hot on wifi at the best of times (so I understand - please tell me if I’m wrong, but it took a bit of fiddling to get ndiswrapper installed on the kids’ EdUbuntu machine at home so that I could move it out of the study.) The Xubuntu people are getting things solved daily though, so it’s only a matter of waiting.

As I said in a previous post - this little machine is really going to change things around here.

Please don’t tell on me. I bought a mac.

<whisper> OK Steve, you were right.  I do like it. </whisper> (Steve knows how hard it was for me to say that.  In public, as well).

Yes, I know, one of those “plastic toys” (I got round that, mine’s aluminium). After a lot of thought and anguish about how I’d need to transfer all my Windoze expertise and Stuff (lots of Stuff) across to a Mac, and how there would be a huge learning curve, etc., etc., my thirst for adventure exceeded my reluctance and I made the jump. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the PC running right by me - Just In Case, you understand - and I have taken out insurance against hitting technological brick walls such as You Can’t Do That on a Mac. Umm..the insurance is that this Mac runs Parallels so I can run Windows on it (and Linux, w00t) all at the same time. Scary stuff. I’m still gathering confidence to run Bootcamp so that I can run Windows DirectX 3D games on this baby (Parallels won’t do it - yet) but when that’s done I shall retire the old PC to the children’s room.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mr C is asking about open Source software. I was responding to his post when I thought I might be better off posting here and using trackback.

Open Source junkie that I am, I’ve used all the items on his list for quite some time. Predictably, my fave open source software is Moodle. See eCognition if you want some (commercial plug).

Scribus is a superb OS DTP program.  Unlike the M$ offering, it maintains standards.

We use GIMP alongside paint.net (not OS) on the school network, and despite the cries of “totally unusable, you need a degree in nuclear physics to use it” from people who really should know better, GIMP is excellent. Get this - at our school an Art student teacher used GIMP with a year 7 class to do popart pictures using their own portraits. With no preconceptions of unusable software on the part of teacher nor pupils, the lesson went down a storm. None of these people had a degree in higher Computer Science. Mind you, if your photoshop-savvy friends sniff at it, show them Gimpshop. And remind them what they paid for their (legal) copy of Photoshop.

WINK is another fave of mine. Rather than getting kids to produce lengthy tomes for their Nationals coursework, we’re gettting them to record evidence using WINK. It creates a swf which we’re putting on the VLE so the moderator can see it.
I think Nvu is an excellent replacement for Dreamweaver (particularly if you haven’t bought Dreamweaver yet). Another alternative is html-kit. I’ll be using it with Year 7 later this year.

AVG. Wouldn’t be without it. Honestly. It’s freeware rather than OS though.

Videolan - use it instead of Windo$e media player. Works for me. Freedom means more than “no cost”.

Inkscape - oh boy, I love this vector-graphics editor. Only today Year 9 spent half an hour learning the basics of Inkscape to produce a scalable logo in svg and png formats. One of my favourites is it’s ability to produce vector images from rasters. Cartoonify your friends!

Thunderbird - if I wasn’t using Googlemail these days, I’d still use Thunderbird although there might be a blip on the development horizon as Mozilla are concentrating on other things. (Actually I still do use Thunderbird too).

If you need ftp, take a look at Filezilla . I’m really impressed with it. Does what it says on the tin.  WinSCP is a great SSH tool too, I use it all the time.

If you’re into project management try Open Workbench . Can be a bit complicated but worth a try. Apparently GanttPV is an alternative but I haven’t tried it.

Blender is awesome for 3D modelling but there’s a steep learning curve (I’m at the bottom, looking up). A more creative colleague than I uses Wings3d and swears by it. Another learning curve for me though, I’m afraid.

Synergy allows computers on a network to share keyboard and mouse.  You probably need it, you just don’t know it yet.

I could go on - it’s late though.  Take a look at this list of OS. I concur with most of it.

Soon I shall get to compile a CD of OS for the kids at school so they can use school software on their home computers without needing a licence.

In these days of flux it’s often unsettling to think that your VLE is at the mercy of somebody else further up the line. At my school we host our Moodle VLE independently with eCognition, a company that will exist for as long as I do because I set it up to make sure that there was reliability and continuity of VLE provision to schools. We (my school) don’t feel the uncertainty that other schools might be feeling at this time when we HAVE to have a VLE in place before Sept 2008, because ours is set up and flouorishing and in a stage where exponential growth of usage is about to take place next term.

So how to add stability and peace of mind to those teachers who have created course content on their chosen bespoke VLE and are facing the prospect of having to move it to another VLE? Personally I would hate tha; going through all my files and courses and converting them to another format.

Well, if I were starting now (and some are) I would be seriously considering creating learning objects NOT within the structure of my VLE but in SCORM-compliant format. (Yikes. Even the acronym SCORM still makes me come out in a sweat). Don’t worry aabout the technicalities any more. Packages like RELOAD and eXe will help create and compile your learning objects into coherent course structures, but there’s still a learning curve. A nice online SCORM creator that I just discovered is myUdutu that allows you to export the packages you build for free, so you can then put them into your own VLE.

Basically, your course content needs to be delivered in some sort of framework. You create pages that deliver it, and you can then test the learning that has gone on in various quiz-type ways. The content can be any number of digital formats including text, pictures, video, audio etc. You pull them together in ways that you want your learners to experience and you test their new knowledge along the way. Then you bundle it all up into a package. That’s how online learning works in its simplest form, (the package is a SCORM-compliant learning object. You didn’t need to know that bit).

And the beauty of SCORM is that it’s a standard (*cough* well, mostly). So anything that is created in SCORM compliant format will import nicely into any VLE that says it will support SCORM (Moodle does. So do many most others). So whatever VLE your department/school/district/consortium/LA/RBC dictates you should go with, your SCORM packages are transferable between different ones. So whatever VLE you choose (use Moodle, do yourself a favour and save yourself much heartache - SCORM is just a minor trick in Moodle’s bag - there are many more learning-rich tools to use) you can import your SCORM packages with peace of mind.

Steve just pointed me at this video.   Since I learned that ordinary citizens can build stuff in Second Life I’ve become more of a convert to its potential for worthwhile learning…and my graphics card has a fit and all of a sudden I can’t get logged onto Second Life due to a technical fault dammit.  I’m itching to get working on it.

Anyway, here’s the vid.  I think it’s an awesome rendition of just some of the creativeness that can be tapped.

Download link

From Steve Beard’s blog, he’s been looking at ways of making quizzes on the iPod.

My concern is that these quizzes only work on an iPod, not on any old handheld video player. I like freedom of choice; I’m averse to vendor or platform lock-in, and therefore worried about inclusion of those who followed a different technological route for whatever reason and are therefore iPod have-nots. ‘twould be terrible to create a further subdivision even within the “Digital Divide”.

However, without innovation there’s no progress so more power to their elbow, I say. We might see an explosive growth in handheld quizzes, and as long as they add value to the educational process (I suspect the one on their site called “Beer” might not) then everything’s good.

The next thing, of course, is to get non-e teachers engaged in producing quizzes so that the medium becomes widespread enough to become worthwhile. My pragmatic side wonders what reactions might be in school if a teacher tells the class that their parents need to buy them an iPod to be able to access the funky online quiz that was vital to their success at GCSE.

Back to marking coursework…

Time to consolidate that revision you’re doing for the ICT GCSEs. Now everybody can listen to revision podcasts on their mp3 player. To get the ball rolling here’s a podcast about email. Many thanks to the guys at ICTGCSE.com for some excellent resources. You’ll recognise their posters in our main ICT room.