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.

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/

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.

I have had a great month of June.  I have worked non stop, even through the weekends.  The highlights have been the tutorials site going live.   I have also been working with osteopaths in Auckland and with tourism operators in North Canterbury working with them to show how social media tools can be used to reach out and inform their target audiences.  The schedule has been punishing, but the outcomes and rewards have been more than worth it.  Finally, today I have learned that I have been accepted to present at the ITOC conference in August.  Hopefully this will open up a whole new avenue of opportunity for me in the coming weeks and months.

As we come to the end of the academic year, teachers who I have been working with all through 2010 at Wakaaranga School are reflecting on their personal growth with e-learning this year and the effect that this pedagogical shift has had upon student learning outcomes. In this interview with Megan, she also sets herself some interesting targets for 2011. I will be working with the staff at Wakaaranga again next year and as a result will be tracking this continued progress.

Tweet

In my latest article for Interface Magazine I make the case for e-learning sustainability, principally around the notion of IP.  The true cost of the IP locked in a skilled teachers head has huge financial implications for schools.   I believe the impact on a school from the loss of IP, especially e-learning IP,  is not fully appreciated or even understood by many schools.  It is not only the financial impact it is also the momentum loss that also severely hinders and even kills e-learning initiatives.  Creating a climate of sustainability, actively creating strategies to add to a growing database of skills and knowledge are key for maximising the financial return on the massive investment that schools are making in e-learning.  Actively protecting IP in an organisation also creates a resource for new inductees to the school and helps to inculcate an e-learning philosophy within the school that is robust enough to withstand any member of staff, including the SMT leaving.

If maintaining your IP and e-learning momentum is important to you, I am happy to advise you on how you can go about this.  Please contact me.

Remember Wordle?  The following site is like Wordle only pumped.  You can add words or link to sites or RSS feeds and you can arrange your tag cloud into a range of masks.  The example here is has been created from the resources page of my blog.  Simply go to http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html Once you have created your tag cloud you can then save your work as either a .jpg or .png for downloading and saving.  No bothersome screen dumps and image editing as was the case in Wordle.  Thanks to http://digitalgoonies.com for the link.

In a shameless attempt to share the ever growing list of free e-learning tools on my resources page, I thought that I would create an occasional ‘Delicious moments’ post.  The purpose of my post is to remind us all of the myriad of wonderful tools that are available for us to use.  It is also a plea to not continually follow the new, there is so much great stuff that already exists, that we could probably spend several lifetimes using all that does already.  This occasional post is also aimed at bringing awareness to my delicious account and the links that I place there, not all of those links are on my resources page, so you need to visit both.  Finally, the ‘Delicious moments’ posts are a chance for me to trawl through a range of the tools I have collected and collate them into similar groups.  This first post is music, not a strength of mine, but I am sure that there are many of you out there who will be able to make more of these tools than I ever could.

Freeplay music:  this site has thousands of tracks from different genre’s that are free for school use.  Please take the time to read their licensing page, as you can not publish their music in any capacity other than for school based activities.  Despite this, this is a great resource for schools and students to use.

Listen music:  This tool allows you to search thousands of music artists, even really obscure stuff, find their back catalogues, sample some tracks from albums and even listen to whole albums in some cases.  The site links you to the appropriate download sites to purchase the music and also has links to the biographies of the artists, album art and lyrics for every song.  A great site.

Mynah:  This is one of the suite of tools in the Aviary collection.  This tool is rather like Garageband in look and feel with pre-recorded loops for you to experiment with, multi track recording and mixing capabilities, except that this tool is on the net, enabling anywhere working and entirely platform independent.

Audiotool:  This tool must  be the best music creation tool on the net.  It allows you to create and mix your own music, generated from a range of tools that you select and plug in, complete with cables.  Each tool looks and operates like its real life counterpart, enabling great levels of control and creativity for your students.

There are many other tools for music creation and recording in my various repositories of data, I hope that this has whetted your appetite for more and to take some time to look through the lists and in the first instance spend some time with the four above.

I have been working in this school since the middle of last year and in that time some tremendous changes have started to happen.  E-learning is starting to put down some strong roots and is well on the way to being an integral part of a significant number of the classrooms there.  There is still plenty of work to do, but the images above demonstrate one of the techniques that I use to foster a climate of independence in students so that they can achieve their learning goals.  To manage the different rate at which students master different tools at their disposal, I encourage the development of a class experts system.

In this particular year 2 classroom the teacher has adopted this idea and  made a wall display where students can pin their own images against a range of skills that they have mastered, it is in effect a community bulletin board of the type that you see in a supermarket.  Look at the range of skills these students have mastered in the images above.  It is a visual guide for other students who need additional support, they know who to go to, other than the teacher, to seek help.   It is an e-learning equivalent of  the”See three before me” classroom management strategy.  The bulletin board process creates a conveyor belt of skills acquisition, so what happens when everyone in class can do the same skill?  The students take a photo of themselves with ‘thumbs up’ and pin that photo by the now redundant support service on the bulletin board, this particular solution was devised by the students in this class themselves.

Running in tandem with this in class initiative, other students within the school have created their own ‘Yellow Pages” adverts and have put them into a binder.  These adverts again advertise which e-learning skills an individual student is willing to offer support for.  The key difference here is that this binder is displayed prominently in the staffroom.  These adverts are aimed directly at the staff and staff are seeking help from their students.  The benefits of this role reversal can not be underestimated where learners become teachers and teachers become learners.

As July approaches and New Zealand can finally get its hands on an iPad, videos like the following allow us to plan just how we might use it.  Just think of the classroom applications too!

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.