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.

I read a post this morning that reminded me do a project I started last year. Mark Brumley has just posted about Tales of Things http://www.markbrumley.com/2011/11/05/tales-of-things-use-qr-codes-in-education/ Tales of Things is a good site and it helps to create, via a QR code, digital provenance for everyday artifacts.

Last year I started a collaborative animation project that was assigned a QR code from Talesmof Things. Now it is time to market this idea again. The post can be seen here and it would be great to see how we could develop the animation and eve see if we could create a storyboard to start with. All contributions accepted, so please get your students to have a go at this one. The original post is here: http://dakinane.com/blog/2010/10/25/qr-codes-and-collaboration-online/

Today I was working for Lifeway College again. The venue today was Kingsway College in Orewa. I contintue to be delighted to see so many teachers willing to give up their weekends to make pedagogical shifts in their practice through integrating elearning into their planning.

I have long been a fan of time lapse photography and the addition of the time lapse app to my iPad has now enabled me to take simple time lapse footage. You can see the example taken from my office window below.

More importantly this app can be used in a classroom to enable students to demonstrate change over time, such as the effect that yeast has on dough as it proves or ice cubes melting etc.

However if you wish to see some truly beautiful time lapse photography, you should also look at the You Tube video below.

Time lapse from my office window:

Epic time lapse of Ruapehu and the Milky Way…

I had a great day working with the team at Lifeway College. They had invited me along to work with their delegates to learn how to use tumblr as a blogging platform. I worked with over 80 teachers throughout the day. Lifeway have put together an elearning package for schools and they either deliver it in school or as they did today at one of their venues. I have yet to se the entire programme details butnit appears that it runs over several months and is a cumulative skills process, looks good.

They have booked me for several more days this year and are looking to do the same with me next year too. I have suggested that I could also offer courses on how to use specific tools such as the ones that I build tutorials for, but related to the integration of the tools into class programmes. The main aim with any of these initiatives is to move beyond mere use of the tools and towards seamless integration and pedagogical shift by the teachers to ensure that the tools leverage deeper learning on behalf of the students.

I have also offered to the Lifeway team my social media course. Only time will tell what they would like me to deliver for them and where I fit into their programme. All in all a good day and one that will be repeated again next week in Orewa.

One of those exercises we are sometimes asked to do is to think of those teachers who inspired us when we were students.  Often we can think of one or two really brilliant teachers who inspired us.  Of course we can also remember those teachers who we do not have such fond memories of.  But the vast majority of the teachers of our memory are grey, bland anodyne half remembered amalgamations of the system that processed us.

I have been giving a lot of thought recently to the issues surrounding student engagement and e-learning.  I have come to the conclusion that it is about time that we as a profession start to ‘market learning.’  Students want to know the relevance of what they have to endure. They want to know that the tasks are authentic to them and most of all engaging. If they do not regard what they are being asked to do as authentic, relevant and engaging to them, they tune out and as a consequence under perform. I beleive that there is a direct correlation between disruptive behaviour and student engagement.

I have said before that students do not NOT want to learn. They most certainly do, but are we helping? With instant access to the  exponential growth of information at their fingertips via Google, they are, I fear, cutting out the middle men, us.  This is why I believe that we as a profession, as an institution, we need to start to market learning.  Why should students want to be in your class, to sit through your prepared course work?  How does what you are asking them to do relate to their world, their future? Is the information you are making them ’soak up’ something that could be found via a Google search inside a couple of minutes? Is your method of delivery speaking to or past the students in front of you.  “You shout and no one seems to hear..”Does that have resonance with your own classroom experiences?

I think that we have become lazy, if not lazy then perhaps complacent.  The nub of it is that in the state run school system we have chosen to be in the classes we preside over. It has been mandated by local laws however that students have to attend or classes, our schools.  They have no choice, they are there in front of us becuase the law says that they have to be.  They may be there in body, but are they there in mind and spirit?  Becuase our students have to be in school, we do not have to do anything to keep them interested or engaged.  They simply have to turn up and we can regurgitate the same old stuff to them year after year. However, if I had to market my lessons to entice my students to be there I would have to work hard to convince them to come into my room.  My lesssons would have to  sparkle. I would have to be better than my competitor just down the hall. I might even have to offer special discounts or extended warranties to keep them.  Students would be weighing up the pros and cons of similar courses on offer, it would be akin to a decision to purchase a Galaxy SII over an iPhone4, each has their pitfalls and each has their killer apps.  In the end it would come down to personal choice on behalf of the student.

Students know who the good teachers are in a school, they have a ranking system, they know the classes where they are engaged and they know the classes where they can bunk off, sleep, disrupt or do whatever.  If your students were given free choice today, without you being able to market your lessons to them.  If they were free to move to the classes of their choice, to build a curriculum around what they regarded as relevant, authentic and engaging to them, how would you fare?  Would your class be brim full of keen students waiting for the next inspirational lesson, or would the proverbial tumbleweed be rolling through your empty classroom?  Are you one of those inspirational teachers who will be remembered clearly 30 years later, for the positive reasons?  Or are you one of the grey ghosts who is biding their time, regurgitating the same course material year after year?

We have to market learning.  Yes there are sacred cows in each curriculum that are not negotiable, but we do not explain why they are so to the students and how these sacred cows will have relevance to them in the future, if not now.  If we can not make this argument, then maybe they are negotiable.  What is true is that we are talking past our students.  They do not get, why we do not get technology.  On the whole we do not use the technology, resources and methodologies that are the very fabric of our students’ existence.  If we did we would stand a good chance of re-engaging them in their learning.

Recently in several schools where I am working, staff have raised the issue of appraisal.  As they integrate e-learning into their programmes, they are finding that they and their students are publishing more and more work to the virtual 5th wall in their classrooms.  The publishing of this work online is having an obvious effect on the amount of work being ‘displayed’ on the physical walls of the classroom.

Students like to know that there is a genuine audience for their work and prefer the virtual wall space to share their work, to the physical.  The 5th wall also creates a virtual window for parents into the class of their child which allows them to be part of the learning process of their child and their child’s class.  This clearly assists in the strengthening of the pupil, school, parent triangle.

There is however a dichotomy in all of this.  When it comes to appraisal time many teachers are complaining that they are getting feedback from their SMT that their physical environment is not as ’stimulating’ as it once was, that there is less student work on the wall.  To combat this they have taken to printing off the online 5th wall content and have started to display this on the walls of their classroom.  This is clearly a time consuming exercise for the teachers and a gross waste of paper and printing resources.  It is interesting to note that in these same schools the SMT are complaining at the increased printing costs that e-learning seems to bring, without recognising  their role in this increased cost.

It is clear that whilst teachers in individual classrooms are making the pedagogical shift to e-learning and embracing the change enthusiastically and also reporting that student motivation and attainment is increasing.  However what is also clear is that over the same period the SMT of those same schools have not made the same pedagogical shift.  If e-learning is to be a sustainable initiative in schools it is time for school leadership to shift their thinking and pedagogies too.  Work published on the internet by students has to be acknowledged with equal importance to the work in their exercise books and of that on the wall of their classrooms.  The focus of the stimulating learning environment, like so much else has moved from the physical to the virtual world and appraisal procedures need to keep up and give equal credence to the online world that teachers and students are adding content too.