I have spent the summer creating the first tranche of resources for an integrated elearing planner for teachers.  The resource is web based and is designed to be stored on a school’s intranet or LMS.  It is designed to be adapted to the individual needs of a school and is not an off the shelf resource.  We will adapt it to mee the specific needs of any school.

As part of my facilitation work I see that the biggest stumbling block for those teachers who are not those at the leading edge of elearning is making the conceptual/pedagocial leap into elearning.  For this strata of the teaching profession they have adopted the strategy of regarding ICT/elearning as an extra, almost a treat for the students in their classrooms.  What is more, when the going gets tough, ICT activities can be withtdrawn, shelved, put on ice etc.  In addition the classroom strategies adopted by these teachers ensures that the type of ICT work that they have the students do is almost always enrichment type activities.

The resource I have created is designed to scaffold these teachers in thier journey towards elearning integration in their classroom.  The image above is a screen shot from just one of the pages.  I have taken an existing units of work and have created age appropriate, curriculum specific learning activities that include suggested elearning tools that teachers could use (Arrow A).  In the next column (Arrow B) is a list of suggested elearning tools that teachers might like to consider using, each has their merits and the idea is that a teacher will select a tool to achieve the learning goals, based on their own comfort levels.  In the third column  (Arrow C) there are links to interactive tutorials that I have created, that teachers can use to learn how to use the tools suggested in the second column.  I have always said to teachers that it is not important whether they can use the tools I suggest that they might like to use in class.  What is important is that they know what the learning potential these tools can facilitate and plan accordingly.  So equally this column and the interactive tutorials they point to, could be shared with students so that they learn how to use the tools.  The final column links to other documents to demonstrate the integration potential of the activities highlighted.  At the bottom of each learning activity I have also coded the  activities as being E, P, C or PS for Enrichment, Publishing, Collaboration or Problem Solving activities.  The purpose here is for teachers to be able to monitor what kind of activities predominate in their class and to set goals to make the elearning a richer experience in their classes as a result of their audits.

Over time I will add another column to this resource, one which links to videos of best practice; best practice with specific tools being used in classrooms by teachers.  I have long been a champion of schools retaining their Intellectual Property and think capturing teacher best practice is a good way to ensure that this happens.  The added benefit of doing this, when combined with the resource that I have created is that not only is IP actively farmed, schools create an induction pack for new staff that can be used by individual schools to project a philosphy of how they do elearning.

Perhaps the best beneift to schools is that over time they are creating their own training resource, specific to their school.  It will be a truly JIT (Just in Time) training resource for new and existing staff.

I am happy to talk with you to discuss your individual requirements for this resource to work in your school.

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.

The annual Ulearn conference has started with pre-conference workshops happening today and the main conference starting tomorrow. I am presenting all day on Thursday and am looking forward to the networking opportunities that this conference always offers to delegates.  If you are not attending you can follow proceedings on twitter by using the #ulearn11 tag.  I will be updating regularly via Twitter, Facebook and here.  It is always fun, stimulating and exhausting in equal measure.  Due to the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch the conference is being held in Rotorua for the first time.

I discovered from one of my various feeds yesterday about the new ‘Helicopter View’ option in Google Maps.  So I tweeted it out yesterday:

Today I have had a play with the feature, it is great especially when combined with Jing, so that you can capture the video of the virtual journey.  I would have uploaded an exmple, but the screen shot will have to suffice, the journey I captured with Jing was 916mb in size… To activate the Helicopter view is very simple.  All you have to do is to put in a start location and a destination point in the get directions option of Google Maps, once the route has been calculated, a small “3-D” graphic appears to the right of the first direction, simply click on that and the animation plays.  Depending on your internet connection it may take some time for the information to load, but it is worth the wait.

This is a great feature from Google and I can see so many practical uses for it on websites, in the classroom etc.

I have been working with Helen from Woodford Schools, Plymouth, UK for a number of years.  Back in 2007 we started to collaborate between our schools in New Zealand and England.  We used tools such as Skype, Dim Dim, Skrbl to collaborate and I spent many late evenings remote teaching her students in the UK from my desk via web cam here in New Zealand.  The students were not at all phased at being taught in this manner, it was the adults in the room in the UK observing this who had the hardest time!  The collaboration only worked because the two of us at either end of the asynchronous communication plan had energy, vision and drive to see it through.  We had never met, but decided to write and present a paper on our collaboration.  We presented at the VIASL IFIP3.5 conference at the Charles University, Prague in June 2008.  You can read about that here. We wanted to prove that remote teaching and asynchronous collaboration between students could work in a meaningful manner.  I have always been and remain fascinated by the potential of remote learning to reach out to students in remote locations to enable a rich, bespoke and meaningful curriculum for them.  I am currently working on a side project to facilitate such opportunities for students, I am currently dubbing it a school of passions.

I am now about to embark on another round of  remote collaboration with students.  Again I am working with Helen and this time Megan from Wakaaranga School in Auckland.  Our aim this time is to see if students can collaborate, negotiate, design and construct a game in Gamemaker.  They have already been organised into teams of four, two students from the UK and two from NZ.  This team of four will be designing and collaborating asynchronously.  A wiki has been created for them as a staging post for them to share their work.  It is from here that the students will collaborate.  The students will work on their Gamemaker program once they have agreed the objectives and plans for the game, locally on their computers, then usin tools such as Jing or Cam Studio they will take screen shots of the work they have done and submit those to the wiki.  They will then communicate with each other using Talkwheel to monitor what the other groups are struggling with, to share ideas and successes.  However, rather than typing their messages the students will be recording their messages using Audioboo so that they will in effect be leaving ansaphone messages for all to listen to via a hyperlink.  The project is all prepped and is about to commence.

I have to say a big thank you to Patrick at Talkwheel who has been very supportive in setting up student accounts for us and providing me with some training and also to Kate at Audioboo who has offered her help towards this project too.

I have been working with the Intermediate team at Waiau Pa School all year and in term 2 and 3 they have been building an epic marble run that runs around the entire class.  The class was split into four teams and each team had was responsible for the marble track on that wall.  They had to design a track that linked in with the other tracks on the adjoining walls.  This is their end product:

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