It was good to see that our own blog post on Evernote showed up today in the Zite magazine. The truth is that the magazine searches for articles that relate to the tags we have said we are interested in, so it is inevitable that our blog posts will show up. But what is pleasing is that clearly our blog is now part of their crawler engine. Long may that continue.

I was working at Bailey Road School today and it is really pleasing to see how far the school has progressed with its integration of elearning into the daily programme for students.  Indeed I spent all morning working with students showing them how to create, edit, upload and embed videos.  How to add images, videos and voice to Wallwisher stickies and then working with their respective teachers to ensure that the teachers could harness these skills and integrate the learning potential these tools and skills offer into their planning.

I had the pleasure of spending a part of the afternoon in Nat’s class.  The school was running its three way conferencing and Nat has set up system where she is using Evernote with every child in her class and they are using Evernote as an LMS with every child responsible for uploading at least three examples of good work to their Evernote site every week.  In addition in their notes are their test scores their AsTTle results as well as examples of their own work, their goals and evidence to demonstrate that they have attained their goals.  The students then ran their three way conferences and were able to demonstrate to their parents what they had attained and where they were going next.  Each parent has also been given the link to the Evernote site related to their child so that they can continue to drop in on the results and progress that each child will continue to make throughout the year.  The beauty is that as it is a cloud based solution, each student can take their documentation to their next school.

An elegant solution, well done Nat.  The video below shows one of the students running their conference and speaking to their Evernote hosted resources.

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!

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.

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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.