Fotobabble

Again like last week this app is not new. In fact I have been using the web based version of Fotobabble for a number of years. But as I said in my recent article for Edudemic Magazine, this app is the kind of classroom resource that will make the technology disappear and the learning happen.

In a nutshell, Fotobbble for those of you who have not used it allows you to take a photo on your iOS device, you can then edit it, even add annotations and then you can add your voice. Then with a simple click the file, providing you have set up an account on the website is uploaded to fotobabble. Once there the file can then be embedded into the location of your choice, wiki, blog, LMS website etc. This has so many classroom based connotations that it is a wonder that it is not more universally used in class. I was working in a Year 1 and a year 3 class last week, I introduced Fotobabble to them for the first time and you can see how easily they took to the app in this video:

You can get the app here.

Audioboo

Audioboo is not a new service or a new app, but it is a good app.  It is a great tool to use on your iOS devices and also as a web based service to capture student voice.  And for that reason it is a winner, it can be used everywhere and when you do you are in good company.  Stephen Fry uses Audioboo as does the BBC.

It is not necessary to set up an account with Audioboo to record your students’ voices.  However if you do all of your “boos,” as they are known, will be collated into one place and on the Audioboo site you can create your own channel.  If you use the same account on your iOS devices the students can simply record and upload in a matter of two or three clicks, the technology and the app become transparent, which is what makes for excellent blended elearning in a class.  I was using Audioboo in a class last week and the students were working on a range of devices with ease.

With Audioboo you can use it in the classroom in so many ways that they are almost too numerous to mention.  However I have used it as a running reading record for students and also as a resource for students to listen to their own reading and to set their own goals.  With only three minutes of recording time on the free account available to you, the students have to learn not to waffle or to pause their recordings.  It is a great tool to use to capture student thoughts, ideas and concepts and use these recordings to scaffold later work.

In short this app is what good elearning tools should be, greater than the sum of its parts, simple to use, transparent.  Oh and its free!

Audioboo

Audioboo App

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Draw Something is the latest craze in the world of iOS and Android apps.  If you have not heard about it the basic premise is that you are given three words to choose from, you then have to draw the word and share your drawing with your friends, who then have to guess the word associated with your drawing.  To help, you are given a selection of scrambled letter tiles which include all the letters needed for the word you are trying to decypher from the image plus some others.  A screen looks like the following:

Draw Something Screen Shot

The purpose of the game is to earn coins which will enable you to unlock more colours to make your drawings more varied. However this is not the point for education. I think that this game, could be used as fantastic literacy warm up activity for students of any age. Students could all be able to set challenges for each other, so in one session a student could pick up a challenge from one student, guess it and then set another challenge for someone else. All of which would take less than 5 minutes. Using this game in class is a good example of using tablet devices to do more than busy work. By setting word challenges that have to be solved as an image, children are forced to think in terms of homonyms, to think of visual puns and the recipient of the challenge has to do this too and also has the added chalenge of using the letters to decypher anangrams. All of which are higher order thinking skills and make children focus on the meanings of words, great for vocabulary building and fun to boot.

As you earn more coins you can also unlock more words which get progressively harder and each challenge is graded as a one, two or three coin challenge. I have been playing this game with four others for a couple of weeks now and in all of that time I have only found one word which may cause some slight concern for a teacher and hilarity for the students. This app is a good example of how a tablet, or iOS device can be integrated into an existing class programme and have identified learning outcomes related to the curriculum and at the same time engage students in a task they will find engaging and authentic.

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Last week I was working in a school where they had asked me to help them integrate elearning into their class programme, specifically focussed around literacy.  I was working with two year 8 teachers who wanted to collaborate together on something over a long period of time, like a term.  As part of my usual ‘interrogation’ I learned that they had ordered a class set of “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins for their classes to read.  And that was all I needed to come up with a plan for elearning in their respective classes.  By the end of the planning, the work had stretched out to two terms but the teachers were so excited about the learning and literacy potential of the unit,  I have no doubt that it will be a success.  I can not wait to get back to the school next term to review their progress and to tweak the plans accordingly.

This whole unit is based on the BIAM challenge, which is traditionally held every November.

The unit of work unfolds like this.  The students will read the book as a class set, we have even ordered an audio copy for those that might be challenged by the level of the text and have also purchased copies to be read on the tablets in the class via the Kindle app.  Pretty standard stuff at the moment.

However what I have proposed is that the two classes then plan and write their own fan fiction extension, back story or parallel story to the Hunger Games.  They will have to collaborate between classes.  This will mean that both classes will have to story board the work carefully to ensure that all are clear on the progression of their story, the characters, their attributes, mannerisms and style of speech.  All of this will be researched out of the original as they read it in literacy activities designed by the teachers and I.  Plus, this same planning rigour will have to be applied to any new characters they want to introduce to their story, again we have planned a series of language based activities to enable the students to have a large lexicon of descriptions, vocabulary, moods and settings to populate their story . As the students flesh out their ideas they will put all of these on a collaboratvie mind map using Mind42.

Running parallel with this planning work,  they will have the chance to read and review other fanfiction work related to the Hunger Games.  Fanfiction has a massive following, the Hunger Games itself has 13 618 stories posted to the Fanfiction site for those fans who do not want to see the series end and want to keep the stories and characters alive.  This will provide an almost limitless resource bank of teen generated written content, which the teachers can use with their students to hone their own editing skills and also their feedback and feedforward skills, as the students will be encouraged to give feedback to other fans on the site about the work they read.

To ensure that the students collaborate, their fanfiction variant of The Hunger Games will be made up of 10 chapters, with five groups in each class being responsible for writing one chapter.   The twist is that one class will write the even numbered chapters and the other class writing the odd numbered chapters.  Therefore, to ensure that there is an overall consistency the students will have to collaborate with each of the groups writing the preceding and following chapters to ensure consistency of style and plot.  I have even suggested that for those less enthused by the writing of this fanfiction genre, these students could create their own graphic novel, using tools such as Comic Life or ToonDoo.

I have also proposed that the teachers use the fanfiction site as a space for the students to launch their draft and completed work, in order that they get feedback and comments from a genuine audience that will know the work they are studying inside out.  They will have a authentic audience  for their work and the feedback will help them to improve the work as they write it.

Finaly when the book is complete, we have planned a J K Rowling style public reading of the first chapter, and not only that the completed book will be self published to the Kindle store where anyone will be able to download and read it for free.  Our students will become published authors.

Watch this space!

I have been working with Tanya at St Joseph’s today.  Most of the day has been focused around integration of iPads into the curriculum.  Consuming content is easy on an iPad, and there are a plethora of paid and free apps that enable you to do just that, passively consume content or never get past enrichment exercises.  The trick with the closed eco system of the iPad is to find quick and easy ways for students to create content that demonstrates their understanding and to post this work to a public space rapidly.  In all of my research with apps for the iPad this is my focus, can students create content easily and how easy is it then for them to share that learning on a wiki, blog, LMS or website of their choice.

Today I worked with some of Tanya’s class to show them the ShowMe app, a free screen capture and annotation app that enables students to write and speak their thoughts and ideas on screen.  We captured a block of text from a book in the library and then had them identify the text features on the screen.  The app is easy to use and within seconds the students were proficient at the tool and were demonstrating their learning.  Now Tanya has a record of what each student knows and this work has now been embedded into their wiki page.  The ShowMe site is a whole community of teachers and you can follow the videos of others, so if you want to scaffold students through concepts that they find tricky there are lots of videos up there for you to choose from and to passively consume.  However it is better to be the ones creating the content in my opinion and sharing it with the wider ShowMe community.  Below is a video I took of the students at work.

The second edition of the Edudemic Magazine has been published this weekend. To read the magazine you will have to download the app and then either subscribe to the magazine for 6 months or purchase individual articles.

I am delighted to announce that the article I submitted a couple of weeks ago is the subject of the front cover. What is more I have been asked to submit another article for the March edition, although at the moment I have no idea what the focus for this next article is to cover. This month’s issue of the magazine has the following articles:

What Apple’s Education Initiative Really Means for You - Terry Heick

Technology: Changing the Expectations for Individuals with Disabilities - Dr Robin Parker

How Technology has Education on the Cusp of Revolution - David Kinane

iPads and Classrooms: Towards Meaningful iPad Integration - Francisco Nieto Salazar

Technology Versus the Student - Jesse Langley

New Web Tool Amps Up Google Docs and Turns Collaboration up to 11 - Erin Klein

Why All Ed Reform Fails - Terry Heick

All in all a good read.  And just to whet your appetites, here is a snippet from my article, but to read the full transcript you will have to download the February issue.

The evolving app based world we are currently entering into is enabling educators to cheaply create bespoke suites of tools that meet the personalised needs of their students. What is more, many of the apps that appear on their mlearning devices have a web based counterpart. Often the app is free as is the web based service. The benefit to learning is that students have multiple modes of access to the tools that enable them to demonstrate their learning, in this case to capture and publish their voice. The opportunities for sharing learning are becoming ubiquitous, location and time independent. School is always on, open and accessible as a result.

Enjoy the read!

I spent a good deal of the summer holidays in the South Island. It seems from the people that I have spoken to on my return, that it was a good thing that I did! The weather up here in Auckland was less than summery and was very wet. In the South Island we baked, it was great.

I have created a time lapse video from the trip and you can see it below. Why share a ‘holiday’ video on an education blog? There are free apps for the iPad that enable time lapse projects to happen in class. A web cam and Sam Animation will turn any computer into a time lapse camera. The point being that from recording how the earth rotates to watching flowers bloom, takes time.  Time lapse allows students to see what might be an abstract concept happen because this slow process can be sped up through time lapse.  Sure there are plenty of time lapse videos for them to look at on the Internet, however if they were to create them for themselves, they would have a greater understanding of the time frames involved.  The advent of digital cameras, web cams, free apps and software now make this once technical skill a simple reality in the classroom.

On a different note, each scene in the following video represents an hour of time, where I could do nothing but relax, let the camera do its stuff and marvel at the beauty around me.

South Island Time Lapse from David Kinane on Vimeo.

image sourced from: http://www.networkinghardwares.com/cisco857-k9.html

Over the last couple of years the Internet and the opportunities it offers for learning, have grown exponentially. With this exponential growth has come the parallel expectations of teachers and students for it to deliver content rich resources quickly and effortlessly. Speed as we know with the Internet is king.

The elephant in the room with this rosy view of the new education paradigm’s learning playground, is the infrastructure to deliver this content. It was not very long ago that one connection per school via a 56kbps modem was all that we had to work with, then came ISDN, a quantum leap in speed, then broadband via ADSL and now ADSL2. The trouble is we keep eating more than can be delivered to us quickly enough.

At one school I worked at we literally crashed the Internet, well the Internet connection. We had recently purchased a school wide Mathletics licence for 720 students with 180+ machines in the school and a 512/512 DSL connection to the internet. One Monday morning shortly after this 29 classes all jumped onto their Mathletics account at 9:10 and grid lock and failure quickly ensued. A classic case of expectations out stripping infrastructure capability.

New Zealand has been patiently waiting for its Government funded UFB (UltraFast Broadband) project to be rolled out. Whilst it has been trialled in some regions, the current state of affairs could not be said to be ‘universal.’ Running in tandem with this has been the SNUP (Schools Network Upgrade Project) which is designed to ensure that all schools in New Zealand have the internal capability to handle the blistering speeds promised by the UFB, when it arrives.

And this is the trouble, we know it is coming but it is taking time for both projects to be rolled out and some estimates say that the project is still 5 years away from completion, schools and students can not wait that long for a fast solution to their internet connection issues. Even two years is too long. If the potential that the Internet promises continues to fail, because of slow connection speeds or bandwidth issues, then teachers who are reluctant users of this technology will be turned away from it. Once put off they are doubly hard to win their trust again. Teacher time is precious and we do not want to waste it.

I have argued before on this blog and in Interface Magazine that THE mission critical infrastructure component in all schools is their connection to the Internet. Most schools rely on a single connection to the Internet and many are now toying with cloud base solutions such as Google Apps. If their Internet connection should fail then they will be blind. With my experience of expectations outstripping capability outlined above, I pondered what to do about this. I sat down with my fantastic tech support company and we thrashed out what at the time we thought was an elegant solution, and it was. We introduced the notion of redundancy.

Instead of waiting for the Government’s fast Internet connection, we built our own through redundancy. What we did was purchase an ADSL modem for every telephone line coming into the school. We then allocated specific computers to specific IP ranges to each modem. The overall effect was that we increased the perceived speed of the internet for an individual user by distributing the load over multiple connections. It was and still remains, an elegant and cheap solution to bandwidth whilst we patiently wait for the UFB to arrive. What this solution meant to us was that when we were ‘cabinetised’ and went from DSL to ADSL2 our connection to the internet on each circuit increased overnight to 16mbps.

This solution has now been improved. The tech company I work with have provided this same solution to another school I work in but the solution now has a ‘box’ that sits in the school’s main server rack that not only load balances all the connections for up and down traffic, but real time monitors content and viruses. The effect is that the school now enjoys a 60mbps connection to the internet for a fraction of the cost of a conventional fibre connection and all done through the existing telephone infrastructure of the school.

So is 4mbps the new dial up? I think that it is and we need to find elegant and financially viable ways to ensure that we do not let our students languish in the slow lane of the internet. The solution outlined above has several very happy customers, who are waiting with less anxiety for the UFB to be rolled out in their region at some point in the future. You can vote on whether the 4mbps is the new dial up on my Facebook page.

The Plane organisation in Australia have just posted this.  In the post is a video by our very own Mark Tredwell.  In the video Mark argues again that as educators we are at the confluence of three major global shifts and that it is our duty to prepare students for this paradigm shift.  Mark says that there has never been a better time to be an educator, I agree.  As we go into the summer vacation this video should be something that we should all watch and reflect on.  Then we should consider what changes we need to make to our pedagogies to ensure that our classrooms provide the environment where we create the life long learners that Mark talks about.  Make 2012 the start of your transition.

I have spent the day with the students of Upper Harbour Primary. We have been looking at using tools such as the iPad to capture change over time using apps such as those highlighted here.  They will be using their iPad or iPod’s next year to capture this kind of change over time.  The web cams in their computers can also be used to record time lapse videos really easily by downloading and installing the free version of Sam Animation from Tufts University.

The following site has some good examples of time lapse in the wild, to get students thinking about what they could make the focus of their time lapse work.  However, speeding up the world of the slow in the class or the school environment is made easy with the techniques I demonstrated to the students today.  Once I got home  I set up my camera and took the following study of the clouds.