Chartle - Great online charts

Chartle can deliver a wide range of charts which you can then embed in your website.

Here is an example of the type of chart that Hans Rosling has made famous in his analysis of UN data on his awesome gapminder web site. This simple data set looks at 4 sets of English and Maths scores over 4 years for 3students. The dynamic way the data points move make this type of visualisation quite useful.



I'm thinking of using this to do my annual analysis of achievement data for students over time - so hope that I can find an easy Excel import option. Looks to be a useful tool.

K-12 Online Conference 2009 Keynote

This online conference kicks off today with a keynote by Kim Coffino. Kim currently teaches at International School Bangkok and has been on the international school circuit for around 8 or 9 years. Her keynote Culture Shock, Convergence and the Future of Education is a 39 minute scene setter. I've only listened to the first 14 minutes so far - the section on Culture Shock. But Kim has made a few points that I'd like to comment on.

Firstly, she makes the now well made connect that many of us (western teachers) live and breathe what we know. Our view of the world is heavily influenced by what I refer to as our own KER (knowledge, expertise and reputation). She points out that her eyes have been widened to the richness in other cultures only through the contact that her travels have permitted. (So I can see the connection coming that I'm sure she will make between the power of technology to connect students globally and the growing desire to make these connections by both students an teachers.)

Once Kim gets past the introduction she hits on a number of the issues - those of mobility, customisation, 24/7 always on, tradition and new co-existing, just in time delivery, flexibility, collaboration, adaptability. She uses the backdrop of everyday life in Asia to good effect to make her points. The metaphor of everyday life and how education should be part of this and not stand apart from it.

At one stage she alludes to iTuneU and other online course availability to allow students (and teachers) to develop personal learning networks. I've often referred over recent years to the "long tail" economics approach to K12 education - I firmly believe that Chris Anderson's concepts of long tail economics can and will apply to K12 education - and quite likely in the realm of private education first. (Memo to self - finish listening to Chris's book "Free" - there is a powerful message for education in the first message that Chris delivers about the Monty Python experience of "free" with their Youtube channel!)

OK - lots more to pick up I suspect in the rest of Kim's presentation. But for now - off to class!

Sir Ken Robinson extravaganza

I've been a fan of Sir Ken Robinson for a while. He's just updated his web site and has a number of videos on his site which are all examples of digital stories of our time, and the time of the near future for our students. Here are a couple that have some appeal ...

1. Trailer for Lord Putnam's new film



2. Speech to Hammer Museum at UCLA about his book "The Element" in Jan 2009 (1 hr 20 mins)



3. Q TV Interview about The Element (17 mins)



4. 6 minutes of student interview at the London International Music Show 2008.
(If you last to the end, the girls have their own reflections on what SKR had to say, and about their "education" and music. [There are no wrong ways ...]



Thanks for sharing your ideas, Sir Ken.

New Streaming Video for Schools

Over 90% of the bandwidth used at my school is accounted for by streaming video. There is no doubt that streaming video is a powerful learning tool, but there are also huge diversions available to students in this environment. So, it is with great interest that I followed the link to http://www.watchknow.org/ that I received in a recent ISTE email.

This site looks to deliver what I have been looking for for a long time - an organised way of getting access to some of the rich content on the likes of Youtube and Google Video without all the junk. I'll quote from the press release in the ISTE email ...

WIKIPEDIA CO-FOUNDER DESIGNS WIKI-STYLE DIRECTORY OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS FOR CHILDREN

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (Nov. 12, 2009) - Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has launched a new website designed to gather and organize educational videos for students ages 3 to 18.

The site, www.watchknow.org , launched in October and currently features more than 11,000 videos across 2,000 categories on subjects such as math, science and history. The nonprofit site features new software, specially developed for the site by Dr. Sanger, which allows wiki-style collaboration among users.

"Think of it as YouTube meets Wikipedia, filtering out everything but quality educational videos," says Dr. Sanger. "WatchKnow.org links together content from traditional sites, and also allows users of the site to improve the organization of the video categories, which makes finding the video you need much easier."

The site, which features videos from National Geographic, YouTube and Google Videos among others, took more than 18 months to develop and has been endorsed by educators from schools including Harvard, Stanford, Brigham Young and more. WatchKnow.org is designed to complement and enhance the traditional learning experience for students as they study concepts that are traditionally hard to learn."

So, I've created my account (free of course) and I look forward to both helping students and teachers explore it in the new year, and contributing to the community as well. WatchKnow.org is funded by the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi (CFNM), which has set the goal of offering more than 50,000 videos on the site by the end of 2010. The site offers tips for video searching, separate pages for students, parents and teachers, and a guide for contributors.

What are your best applications for use with students?

I wonder what are the applications that you use with students that make a difference for them? Here are some of the ones I use that students seem to enjoy.

Edmodo - terrific tool for managing a class in a "school sponsored bebo" (as one of my students called it) format. Nice functionality for handling assignments, polls etc. Students love it.

Voicethread - terrific tool for sharing all kinds of data from video to still images, with comments via a wide range of options.

Wikispaces - very easy way to get a web site up and running -the free ones for educators are a real bonus.

Google Apps - while very bandwidth hungry these tools offer great flexibility for collaboration and communication. Google Sites is the best aspect of this suite in my view.

Google Sketchup - what a fantastic 3D visualiser this is. A real favourite.

Delicious and Diigo - great tools - work well together.

iTunes - the best way of organising audio and video

Youtube - there is so much quality and education specific stuff that it is worth putting up all the rest of the rubbish that people want to share.

TED - you can always find really cool stuff here for use with students and staff.

Jing - screencasts and captures

Prezi - very cool presentation tool - makes an audience stay awake!

Aviary - awesome suite of online editing tools - students love Phoenix (photo editing) and Myna (Sony Acid lookalike) most.

Livebrush - very cool graphics program.

Google Earth - you can do so much with this great tool - always a favourite.

Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe - not a software tool per se, but a combo of a pen, microphone, camera and software. If only it had OCR ...

K12 Online Conference - not long now!

Now the dates for this are Nov 30 – Dec 17, but don’t panic – on the 30th one keynote talk gets posted, and you’ve got a week to watch it. Then over the 2 subsequent weeks a series of other videocasts/podcasts/ presentations are posted – and you can pick and choose how you want to watch/listen.


The rough schedule for what is on and which weeks is here http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=389 and you can watch the stuff either on the site here http://k12onlineconference.org/ or on the ning site here http://k12online.ning.com// [If you are not a ning member, sign up. This social networking tool is used by vast numbers of educators and students world wide – it is like facebook or bebo, only seems to have found a niche with educators].

If you want, you can gain a teaser of previous years k12 conferences – another power of the web is that the 2006, 2007 and 2008 conferences are still available here http://k12onlineconference.org// - just use the navigation on the rhs

Note that many/most of these presentations are available as a download – I generally download the iPod version and watch them on either my Ipod or iTunes on my laptop.

You gotta love the web – so many options...

How hard is it to sell a new idea?

Thanks to Ollie Bray for bringing this to my attention.

Awesome 3D Visualisation Tools

I had the pleasure today to spend a few hours with Brenda Fisk at nextspace looking at the new version 6 of Right Hemisphere's 3D visualisation software. In particular we looked in detail at the free DeepView Viewer product and the very impressive Deep Exploration Creator product. In particular, both were their new version 6 offerings. To be fair, I had spent a little time with the previous version, 5.7, but v6 is just awesome. Version 6 offers HDR (high dynamic range imaging) which offers unbelievable photographic realism, especially where lighting is a bit of an issue. I'll cover the Crreator product in more detail once I download the new version and can produce some HDR samples.

But the free DeepView Viewer also offers incredible functionality - on a wide range of image formats. I like the fact that it reads Sketchup files as we use this with many of our students. But what it can do with these files is just amazing. You can measure distances and angles, you can cross section, produce orthographic projections, line drawings and a whole hjost more. You can "pull apart" a 3D image created anywhere and label vaious parts - you can also comment on parts of the diagram and share these comments with others. There is another cool function - it embeds into MS Office products so that you can use the 3D viewer for any model that you have included in a Word, PowerPoint or Excel file - very, very cool.

The following images are from a standard house file grabbed from the Google 3D warehouse and opened within DeepView.

You can "pull apart" the model and look at how it was assembled in the first place.

You've got options to measure parts of the image.

DeepView is certainly a fantastic bit of code, very easy to use and affords some very cool functionality for students and teachers - in fact anyone wanting to visualise in 3D.

Seriously cool. Try it. Soon.

Why Social Networks Are Important

The power of visual story telling and the power of social networking. Why they both matter. In a simple presentation.

A colleague asked me recently for a reason she should sign up for a social networking site. The best response I could mutter was something along the lines "Well, this is why I use ...." and proceed to try and show how I find some social networks better (for me) than others.

Now, I've always liked the CommonCraft videos - they do a great job of explaining web related issues, and thanks to following CommonCraft on Twitter, I found this today - a great explanation of just why I find value in social networks. Wish I'd seen it before I tried to stumble over my explanation!

Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

So, thanks Sacha!

TED India Live - See Hans Rosling and Pranav Mistry live!!!

Now - this should be very cool for anyone interested in data visualisation and the power of technology to increase learning opportunities. In my inbox from the great people at TED this morning

Dear TEDsters -
We're thrilled to announce that Day 1 of TEDIndia and the closing session on Day 3 will be webcast live, to the world, for free. The webcast is hosted by the Times of India, TEDIndia's online media partner.
On Thursday, the first day of the webcast, you can watch at ted.indiatimes.com (note that this page is not yet live).
Read more about the TEDIndia speaker program.
Webcast schedule (all times are India Standard Time , GMT+5:30):
Thursday, November 5
Session 1: Fast Forward -- 11am-12:45pm
Session 2: Not Business as Usual -- 2:15pm-4pm
Session 3: Wonder. Wonders. -- 4:45pm-6:30pm
Saturday, November 7
Session 9: Within You, Without You -- 11am-12:45pm
Want to watch the stream on your television screen? Download instructions for connecting your television to a Mac or a PC.

So, why am I excited about this? Two immediate reasons -the first is:
Hans Rosling is presenting in the first session. I have mentioned his awesome GapMinder web site and talks before. The opportunity to see him present his latest live just seems like any mathematicians or social scientists dream come true. His session is set to go at 11am Thursday 5th in Mysore India - so by my calculation this is 6.30pm Thursday evening NZ time.

The second is Pranav Mistry - Pranav is a student at MIT and is the brains behind a project that goes under the name Sixth Sense. If you haven't seen Pattie Mae's TED presentation earlier in the year then make sure you have a look at the video below - it'll give you an insight into the work.



Pranav's session is due for kick off around 12.15am Friday morning - so might be a bit of an ask - but if you're a night owl ...

And there are a host of other peple delivering inspirational talks too - you never know - you just might find something useful.

You can watch these at this site http://ted.indiatimes.com/ - it is not live yet.

Enjoy!

The Power of Self Directed Learning - a Passion for Writing by Young Authors

How many 13 year olds write this to a teacher?

"I have written a book and Georgie is starting one (Sian is our helpful editor) so we all came up with an idea to make a website about writing and reading since we realised that not many people have set up sites where young writers can join and read other peoples work and put up their own. We added a Review page because we want people to be inspired by famous authors. We want everyone to be inspired by the heap of work people have put up. Hence the name Exploded..

The website was created out of pure self interest. We also want students to gain knowledge about writing paragraphs correctly, hence the reason we will be adding a Paragraphs page where people can see how to write a paragraph using the structure TEE."
(The emphasis is mine)
Every so often you get to see something that makes this teaching lark just all the more worthwhile. These instances are always student centred. This is the story of one of those.

I received an email from a Year 9 student, sent during her Art class. It read
"Hello,

Mrs xxxx saw our website that we put together and wanted you to have a look at it.
The site is targeted at young writers and readers and it includes forums on different topics to do with books and movies, tips for young writers and ways to gather ideas. It also has a book of the day page, reviews and advice from famous authors. And lots more!
Its up and running, with 34 members on last count. Many of them are Dio girls, but there are 3 from Sydney and many others from around Auckland.
Here is the link: www.explodedbookshelf.webs.com
We created our site using Webs.com- which was quite simple and easy to use- though perhaps limited in options for the site.

We hope you enjoy browsing."
So - I went and had a look - WOW! I continue to be blown away with what students can do!!!
And immediately I had a number of questions: So I emailed back the student with a few questions - have a read and enjoy the students' responses!
1. Why did you create the site in the first place? Was it part of an English project? Or an ICT project?
"Thank you for emailing us back! We have discussed and read your questions and have some answers!

1. I have written a book and Georgie is starting one (Sian is our helpful editor) so we all came up with an idea to make a website about writing and reading since we realised that not many people have set up sites where young writers can join and read other peoples work and put up their own. We added a Review page because we want people to be inspired by famous authors. We want everyone to be inspired by the heap of work people have put up. Hence the name Exploded..
The website was created out of pure self interest. We also want students to gain knowledge about writing paragraphs correctly, hence the reason we will be adding a Paragraphs page where people can see how to write a paragraph using the structure TEE.

2. How long did it take you to do it?
Georgie and I came up with the idea during art whilst talking about our novels. Sian agreed and gave us some tips. It was just an idea until that night I figured might as well give it a go. I found Webs.com over the internet and then created the website in less than 90 minutes. But considering I made a couple of mistakes and had to restart probably about 2 hours. However ExplodedBookshelf.com is continuously growing.
3. Why did you choose webs.com as your hosting site? What other ones are you aware of?
I am not sure of many hosting sites but I did search up ‘make a website’ over Google and Web’s looked like the best one. From the easiness to the creativeness. I thought it would help us make something amazing.
4. Did you enjoy it?
Yes! ExplodedBookshelf has become one of our biggest hobbies, you could call it an obsession! It’s lots of fun and we get the opportunity to meet other young writers. Sian is our editor and her job apart from the site is to help go over Georgie and my writing to spot mistakes that we have missed
5. What are your plans for ongoing development of the site?
We check it every-day! Updates and new discussions get submitted at least once a day and we plan to keep developing it in the future – to take it from a amateur website to a full-thrown international site!
Thank you so much! This is extremely appreciated by us all.

If only they knew how much it is me that appreciates what they have done.
Now - there are some key points this little episode has highlighted - wonder if you picked them up?
1. most of the discussion around this little venture happened in art class. Not english, not ICT. Art. Highlights yet again to me the folly of a secondary timetable - you simply can't dictate what people will think by ringing the period bell.
2. Created out of pure self interest. So, not a teacher in sight? How much powerful learning has been going on during this little exercise? Plenty.
3. One of their biggest hobbies. An obsession! I wonder how many students say their regular learning is an obsession!  They yearn to see the site used and built on.
4. No experience building web sites of any kind before. Shows how great some of the free tools are these days.
5. If the web wasn't around - just where would these girls go to try and realise their passion?

I suspect that if they persist, they may find some issues around managing their site, moderating comments and dealing with unwanted members - but I hope they get some traction on what they are aiming for.

The joy of writing. By young people who have a passion, and want to share it. Visit their site and give them some encouragement. They deserve it.
http://www.explodedbookshelf.webs.com/

Yet another cool tool - Livebrush

Thanks to a heads up by Andrew, I had my Year 8 students download the free version of Livebrush today.


Now, I'm no graphics person, at least from a design perspective, but what captured my attention from the Livebrush site was a couple of their sample files. I know I've always wanted to have an idea of how to so some of this stuff - just lack the motivation to actually do it! Once I showed them to the students, well, in less than 30 minutes there were plenty of "ooohs" and "aaahhhs".

But there were also the "how do I do this?", "Where are the colours?" and the usual response from me "no idea" (which is true), "but you find out and create a short Jing cast to let others know." Within minutes huge learning of several new tools (Jing is still new to this class, as is the notion of an e-portfolio which they are creating using Google Sites).

The power of digital technologies to ignite learning experiences with students, and the occasional old teacher too!, never ceases to amaze me. We are so lucky to live and work in education in these times - we owe it to students to keep pushing the boundaries.

So thanks, Livebrush. Keep up the great work.

Golf, Sunshine and no kids!

With special thanks to nana and the sister-in-law who looked after the four kids while Ronnie and I had our first real break in 12 years! We disappeared for 5 days to the new Intercontinental at Natadola Bay in Fiji. Only open a couple of months, and in the downturn and poltical unrest in Fiji, well, despite the staff telling us they were "fully booked", there were very few people at this fantastic place - making our stay even more memorable. We had a great time and I had my first round of golf for 21 months on the brand new Natadola International Golf Club. While it has been publicised as the equivalent of Kauri Cliffs, it isn't. It is far better than Denerau, but not a patch on Kauri Cliffs - still these photos will give you a better view. Well worth playing and the resort is fantastic.

Check out my Flickr set for Natadola.

Prezi version of 2009 Horizon Report

I've used Prezi a couple of time for presentations and people have been pretty enthusiastic about the tool as a way to keep the masses attentive to a presentation. I also use the Horizon Projects reports in some of my class work and presentations. Totally by accident stumbled upon this Prezi on Horizon 2009 - not only is it a cool way of putting the Horizon Project across, it is a great example of how to deliver a prezi. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks to Rachel Smith!

Data Visualisation, Authentic Learning, and Why the Web is so Cool.

Two years ago I had no idea who Hans Rosling was. Then I happened upon his first TED talk where he floored me with the way that his software gave a powerful visual meaning to the wealth of data that was, at that stage, locked away in the archives of the United Nations. 


Hans' first TED talk was inspiring - as is his second.

Now that all of the UN data is available, you have an incredibly powerful tool to work with students of all ages when considering many of todays major issues. All available at Hans' web site http://www.gapminder.org/

What is really cool about the software is that it tracks data over time and plays as an animation. There are much more powerful and important data sets than the one I have used here - I chose education (Yr 8 Maths grades) and compare against a technology indicator of internet users per 100 people. Now of course, there was no web before 1995, so that's where this data starts. The two images show starting and end points.

So, if you are looking for statistics with impact and real meaning, or are looking for a discussion starter for a Religious Studies or Social Studies or Geography or Business or anything lesson, then use Gapminder - and use the talks from Rosling - truly inspirational, all due to the power of the web and the awesome story telling tools it provides.

Interactive Whiteboard Conference Day 2

Day 2 of the conference saw David Seedhouse deal to the values concept in the new curriculum. Severely. And he makes a good case - there is no supoporting evidence for the current approach that every school and curriculum decision must be based upon an analysis of values - and the list of values that the MoE has identified. Seedhouse maintains that values are nothing more than a mix of evidence and opinions - everyones will be a little different. The role of the teacher is to expose students to the thought processes through discussion of appropriate "values" questioning. To this end his web site is a cool tool for developing this notion. A great start to the day!

Chris Betcher has been one of the stars of this conference. Every show has its star presenters, but this one has had one. I've seen four of his sessions - all delivered with enthusiams and clear passion for what he does. His session today looking at putting the interactive into the IWB has reinforced my view that in the hands of a good teacher, these boards are a "table stake" for the classroom. The interactivity doesn't really come from the board, it comes from what the board lets you do in the class. So, my task now is to re-energise our push with these technologies and light those fires again!

It's been a few years since I played with Turning Points v-pad software for student polling in Powerpoint, so I was pleased to catchup with KeePad out of Oz and look at how this has developed. Still expensive for what it is, so I think I'll head to the likes of PollAnywhere to get a look at how this might deliver some formative data. It did however give me the chance to have a play with the eBeam system - one of those devices claiming to give IWB functionality on a standard whiteboard. After having a play, I think that if you are strapped for cash, then maybe these are an option - but my preference is definitely for a "board". And while on this - I remain quite impressed with the Promethean ActivBoard. Kind of think that maybe they are just a little better than SmartBoards?? Just.

Having had my main reason for attending the conference satisfied, I spent the rest of the day in sessions looking at software options to make classroom life that much more fun. That's always a great part of these types of conferences - you always find some new stuff. There are a few that I thought looked just fantastic - I'll save them for another blog or two.

Now - how to bring some of this conference, plus a whole lot of other stuff I've accumulated over recent months, to our staff? I'm looking forward to it!!

Interactive Whiteboard Conference Day 1

Today was Day 1 of the IWBNet conference in Auckland - the first time this has been held in NZ. Thanks to them for bringing their conference to NZ and to Westlake Girls High School for hosting it. It was nice to hear Alison Gernhoeffer make few opeing remarks which indicate a major problem we have in secondary schools - that of a teaching profession that really has no incentive to change while there is still such an emphasis on external examination results at the last 3 years of education.

But - to the conference - opened by Steven Jury, a senior executive (OK the vice chairman) of Promethean. His presentation was generic and didn't say much that was new - did quote some research from Robert Marzano and published on the BECTA site that shows some significant gains in student learning with IWB use. You can check out the research here on the Whiteboard Blog.

What else did I get from the keynote? One thing was that my Pulse SmartPen caught the entire presentation perfectly in the school hall - without using the special headphones. That pen is just awesome! So, not only do I have the notes I took, but the whole audio to review. What I need now is the promised version of the Pulse software that will convert my scribble to text - that will be a challenge for the OCR/AI software they need to decipher my scawl!!

Chris Betcher (from PLC in Sydney) gave a useful session on possible futures. Nothing to do with whiteboards per se, but everything to do with just how fast stuff develops. Cool 3D book stuff and augmented reality - must check out the site he used.

Robyn Garden from the Invercargill area (where the local trust put IWBs in every class in every school) gave a very practical session which, to be brutally honest, restored my faith in this type of technology. Thanks Robyn for the great reminder that you can provide ICT skills and IWB skills to teachers that don't have them - but to give great teaching skills to someone who doesn't have them is much harder.

There was much more to take in - not all was great, but much was good. Of course you meet new people and old friends too.

But I went along to this conference with a big question. Are these IWBs little more than an excuse to leave the teacher in control of the classroom? I came away from the keynote and the session with Robyn with the belief restored that in reality, a large interactive touch board of some type is the way of the future. So yes, can't wait for tomorrow and more learning.

Aviary - my find of the year?

I'm on a bit of a crusade at the moment to see what open source or web 2.0 options exist for a wide range of applications that we use at school. Now, apart from the likes of the standard OpenOffice or Google Docs, more "exotic" options for video editing, photo editing and audio creation online have been varied in quality- and in the case of video editing the landscape has changed a lot this past year. Today I ended up at Aviary via a tweet from someone (it's alzheimers I tell you). While it doesn't boast video editing, the rest of the suite looks awesome.

Here's the intro video from their main site

...and this is the one that caught my eye from their new audio tool, Myna




I'll be using these tools with my Year 8 Digital Technologies class in Term 4 - that'll give me an idea of how they perform over a wireless network and how 12 and 13 year olds respond to this software.

But if it works half as well as the demo's suggest - we'll have a ball. It looks a cool tool.

Resizing a Jing cast to fit your blog

Editing a Jing screencast to fit a smaller window has been a bit of a challenge. But it can be done with no (or very little) HTML knowledge - just a little bit of mathematics. Here's how ...

I have set my screen capture for full (1280 x 770) resolution, but I want to play the resulting video here on my blog at half this size - this is the maths part. So, I want to replay it as a 640 x 385 pixel video. So - if I know where the 1280 x 770 code is in the embed code from Jing - I can simply overstrike them with the new values and they should work. I've done this in two stages - to show you the capture of the embed codes, and then in part II how to edit them. NOTE: that in the video I got my maths wrong! Half of 770 is 385, not 365! Hah! hard to find a good maths teacher these days.

Part I - Getting the Code.

Part II - Now that we have the cast up on Screencast.com you make the necessary changes to the embed code. Jing is seriously cool software for creating quick screencasts. It's a pain you have to do this to get it to play as part of another product (ie your blog or web site), but at least it works.

Sir Ken Robinson Interview on TED

Sir Ken Robinson has become a bit of a folk hero in educational circles over recent years. His inspirational TED talk from 2006 on schools "killing creativity" is as close to I guess an education video will get to going "viral" - if you haven't seen it before - here it is - take 20 minutes to watch it - you won't be disappointed.


But what I found today was that Sir Ken, again via the TED website, has answered a number of questions about his talk and these questions and his answers are posted on the TED site here.

You will find some good questions and some very detailed answers, including his advice for what teachers can do to make a difference. Perhaps this is best summed up by a question that ends with "

"So what three things should I do in September to foster creativity? I'm talking about definite, in-the-one-hour-lesson things I can do to my classes to change their experience." and the first part of the reply ... "To me, the heart and soul of education is pedagogy. There are three components to education, as I was saying earlier. There is curriculum: what students are supposed to be learning. There is pedagogy: the actual teaching. And assessment: the process by which we form judgments about how well they're done, where we make comments about student's progress. But the heart of it is pedagogy." He goes on to give some practical solutions - which is great. But bringing the focus down to the individual teacher is important - plenty of research points to the importance of what the teacher does and the rapport with students.

So, if you are not a Ken Robinson fan, or have never heard of him, and you are a teacher - then after watching his talk and reading the interview, I would be surprised if you weren't motivated to change. And soon!

So, what is fundamental?

I'm at the stage of trying to reinvent our strategic and tactical planning at school - we need to move forward from where we are and have been for the last couple of years. While sorting out my research I found an article I wrote a couple of years ago and thought I'd share it here...(I wrote this before Seymour Papert has that terrible accident in Vietnam)

People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational projects on every continent, some of them in remote villages in developing countries. He is a participant in developing the most influential cutting-edge opportunities for children to participate in the digital world.

In 2004, Papert addressed a conference in Sydney where he made the observation that too little time was spent in schools discussing “what constitutes fundamental?” By this he meant what is important to include in the learning opportunities that students are exposed to. He made reference to a key point – most of what is included in current curricula is the result of what can be written down in books. How relevant is this as we move at exponential pace into a world where writing on paper is not the main means of communication? Blogs, wikis, podcasts, email, social networking websites, instant messenger are all new modes of communication that no one had heard of a few years ago, let alone used. Today, sites like MySpace claim to be signing up 250,000 new users every day, and have over 200 million registered users. In addition to this, they claim that the average time spent by a user once logged in is around two hours.

A leading group of computer research scientists met in Washington, USA, in October 2006, to share their views on where they saw developments in technology moving over the coming years. In a summary of their meeting published in the New York Times and titled “Computing 2016: What Won’t be Possible”, the scientists shared their common view that the changes to science, the economy and to society that have occurred over recent years are minor compared to what will happen in the ten years ahead. Developments will impact on all areas in a far wider and deeper way than they have, and there will be significant social policy that needs to be addressed as a result of this.

This month (November), 250 delegates from 48 countries met at a conference held at Philadelphia's School of the Future, where all students have laptops, there are few books or pens, and teaching is done in multidisciplinary projects in which academic skills develop through work on real-world problems. "Education for most people doesn't promote creativity," said Sir Ken Robinson, a British educational consultant. "It actually stifles it." He cited research showing that 98% of children as young as 3 – 5 years showed divergent thinking, and that this dropped to only 10% of 15 year olds and 2% of 25 year olds.

There is a constant theme in each of these stories. Technology, in particular the personal computer, has brought unprecedented power to the user. Information is no longer the domain of books. The power of the press is no longer with the press. For the first time in history the access to information, and the ability to create and publish information, is with the individual.

We are at one of those points in history where fundamental change is taking place. Not just incremental change, but fundamental change.

Research from the USA (PEW Internet Group, 2005) is starting to show the preference for 8 – 18 year olds to get the information they want from an online source rather than in the traditional classroom or from their parents. They get information in a manner and a time frame that suits them. One reason for this is that irrespective of whether the learning style is visual, auditory or kinaesthetic, the individual can find something on the web to suit them. Technology is unique in this way – targeted carefully, it can reach any learner.

The implications and challenges to education are vast. None more so than at the “high stakes” testing we still engage in at the senior end of the school. We continue to assess knowledge in an unnatural time frame using anachronistic tools. The International Baccalaureate (IB) is currently trialing electronic assessment, and this is at least a step in the right direction. Internal (moderated) assessment is another step in the right direction, and both NCEA and IB have significant components of this. [ASIDE: it is not uncommon to hear questions regarding the use of technology in learning when assessment of learning is still carried out with pen and paper. There is no research that supports the premise that student achievement is diminished as the result of significant use of technology in the learning process. There is a growing body of research that supports the use of technology as an element in the improvement of student achievement in standardised testing. The UK is well ahead of New Zealand in the deployment of technology in state schools, and over recent years they have experienced significant increases in student achievement in all subject areas at GCSE and A level, despite their examination processes being even more formal than NZ.]

The New Zealand Digital Strategy states that “New Zealand will be a world leader in using information and technology to realise its economic, social, environmental and cultural goals, to the benefit of all its people.” (Ministry of Economic Development, 2005)

If we are to deliver on this objective at a macro (or micro) level, we have no choice but to deploy tools that will enable the student to successfully participate.

Creativity is a highly valued characteristic that employers seek in future employees according to a 2003 Victoria University study. Searches of the research literature into the use of technology in education frequently highlight creativity, problem solving and collaboration as key outcomes from successful use.

If Sir Ken Robinson is correct, if Seymour Papert is correct, and if the collective intellect of the top IT research scientists is correct then we have a duty to be pushing the boundaries of the “education system”.

We are at a place in time where change is occurring in an exponential manner. Change, by its very nature, threatens the status quo.

We must continue to ask ourselves “just what does constitute fundamental?”

It is a question that we will ask a lot more over the coming years. We are at the most exciting time in history.

A weekend away with 12 year olds - a learning experience

Number 1 son turned 12 yesterday. Now, in itself that's not a major for the planet - but for his mum and dad, well for us - pretty special. We ended up taking him and his 8 year old brother, plus two of his cousins, away for 24 hours in our motor home to Waingaro Springs where they have a pretty good water slide and where, in the middle of winter, not many people go. Great!

Josh had taken his Playstation along so that they had "something to do at night". I took along my iPod Touch to provide the music. The boys are usually not allowed to use my iPod, but being a birthday, well, I let them. What transpired was interesting. You see, I had downloaded a couple of free games and thought they'd be spending their time playing Star Wars Force Unleashed, or StuntCar or Waterslide etc etc. But what did they play?

Lemonade Tycoon - the iPod's version of Lemonade Stand. And did they play it for long? Well for two complete battery cycles! They loved it, were totally engaged. I asked Jord, our 8 year old, why he seemed to like it. "You need to use your mind" he replied. "But don't you need to use your mind on those other games too?" I replied. "No" was the response, "they're just games. In Lemonade Tycoon you need to make all sorts of decisions ..." he went on to tell me what he'd found out about how the game worked. His brother was just the same. "Well, you are in control of what happens" he said.

So, rather than play a pile of graphically awesome fantasy games, Lemonade Tycoon was their choice because they felt they were in control of what was happening.

So the lesson for me is quite clear - the choice of activity does not need to be the flashest looking - but it does need to give a sense of being involved - "to use your mind" as Jord said.

Great Resources for Educators II

Continuing to highlight useful stuff where I find it ... this month 2 sites from NZ that are worth viewing no matter where you are in the world. Derek Wenmoth and Andrew Churches are educators who share good stories and ideas.

Derek Wenmoth's blog is a resource that will get you thinking about what you do and why you do it in your classrooms and schools. Derek is the Director of e-Learning for CORE Education in NZ. He's been a teacher and principal so knows the hard stuff. His interest and ability in questioning practice for the 21st Century is what brings me to his blog regularly. Here's an example of what you'll find with Derek - this is a reflection on a day spent with a group of teachers from a few schools sharing their learning - a great example of the power of web 2.0 stuff for sharing ideas. Having just read Scott McLeod's latest on why we still don't get it right with PD (amongst others), this entry is a little refreshing providing concrete examples of what does seem to work for staff PD.

Just where Andrew gets all his time to both write his blog entries and update his Edorigami wiki site is a mystery. Andrew Churches is just prolific. He talks from the heart in a lot of his blog stuff, but also deals with the practical side of using ICT in class. I've recommended to plenty of people that they read Andrew's stuff - he makes a real positive difference to what we do in this ICT and use in class.

In particular, on Andrew's wiki you'll find a host of resources for integrating ICT in all areas of the curriculum, but Andrew has a passion for connecting higher order thinking to his work, so if you are a Bloom's person, you'll find some great stuff here.

So, thanks Derek and Andrew. Keep up the great work.

DimDim for Videoconferencing

Have been on the lookout for a desktop videoconferencing tool to use for groups of 10 - 15 teachers scattered around the country. I have known of DimDim for a few months now, and though I have recommended that some of my students check out it's feature set as part of their project on emerging technologies, to be honest I hadn't taken the time to check it out myself. Until last night, that is.

At first glance, DimDim looks just what I am looking for. It's free for up to 20 users, and has plenty of low cost alternatives if you need to go further than that. It is entirely web-based, so no downloads and the like. Last night I shared a 12 page PDF file with my test buddy, and even without using a headset and microphone, communication was OK - though I'll use them next time.

DimDim looks to have all of the usual features (whiteboard, chat, desktop, web and slide options), so at this stage I'm reasonably impressed. We'll give it another once over from school next week, but at this stage it looks like it could be a goer for our application. If you are on the lookout for a videoconferencing tool, check it out.

Next Horizon Project starts tomorrow

Going to start with Kate from Landco to help set the scene then run through this Slideshare deck with the students. This slideshow has two extra slides that I usually don't use with this age of student - I have tended to just draw these on the board as I go. Slides 3 and 4 show the growth of information over time - the exponential nature of slide 3 is usually enough to convince most people that something needs to change, and quickly, with respect to what we try and teach and how. But it is worth going back to the overall view of all of history - I've just used since 0 AD - the graph is startling - we go "vertical" with our change of volumes of information - or knowledge. Just how do we cope with this with a society at large that is often blissfully ignorant of just how significant these times are in the history of our planet.

Horizon Project 5

View more presentations from Rob Mccrae.

Google Apps, Video, Sites, Reader and Gears

We've trialled Google Apps for one of our Horizon Projects at school recently. Our projects run for four weeks and over this time our students explore the K-12 2009 Horizon Report and work with a number of outside experts in design and education to design a school for the future.

One of our motivations for setting up our own Google Apps domain rather than allow individual students to set up their own Google Docs account was to make life easier for students and teachers in collaboration and communicating. From this basis, Google Apps is quite good. It allows simple collaboration and sharing of documents well. The ability to upload Office documents is good. Unfortunately it doesn't allow sharing of Acrobat documents in an easy way, but this too can be done if you are prepared to spend the time typing individual email addresses. To date, haven't found a solution to publishing in foreign languages - haven't looked that hard, but if anyone reads this and has a solution, then please let me know!

Perhaps two of the unheralded features of Google Apps are Google Sites and Google Video. Google Sites gives you an excellent tool for building web sites, similar in some ways to the likes of Wikispaces. It integrates well with YouTube (as you'd expect) and it is pretty simple for students to build a nice looking site without much help. Google Video as part of the Apps suite allows you to upload video of any length (up to 1 GB), and this gets over YouTube's 10 minute limit and Fliggo's 25 minute limit. We video our outside experts so that students and staff can look back at the presentations for information they may have missed - and several of the presentations are 45 minutes in length, so not having to break them up into 2 sections is a real bonus.

But using Google Apps has not been without difficulty. We have a pretty strong bandwidth available (supposedly), but at times with as few as 30 students connecting simultaneously to our Google Apps site, the response has been not much short of atrocious. As anyone teaching will know, letting kids loose on laptops when they have to wait minutes for relatively short documents to load is asking for trouble. Further investigation has involved our ISP and at present we still await the results of a number of trials which from where I sit seem to indicate that our bandwidth within NZ and across to Australia is OK, but we are missing out badly with traffic from the USA and Europe. We will certainly need to get more response to the desktop than that we have had till now if we are to seriously consider Google's cloud offering.

As an RSS aggregator or subscription reader, Google Reader is my tool of preference for a couple of reasons. Firstly it has a gadget for iGoogle making it easy to see what is new, and secondly, the ability to take it offline via Google Gears makes it easy to catch up on reading when away from a network - like we were last week when away on holiday in the motorhome. In the middle of nowhere (well, Waingaro Springs to be exact) there is no cell coverage and no wireless, but I was able to deal to 50 or so blogs that I was behind in once the kids were asleep.

Google Gears also makes it easy to read documents from some of the applications in Google Apps - most notably word processor docs. So, if you have student work shared in this manner you can read and comment back offline, and once reconnected, can synchronise back to the cloud and everything is as it should be. But Gears needs to offer more functionality in relation to creating new documents and editing existing ones, plus it would be good to have Blogger compatibility built in.

So, at this stage in our trials, its a big thumbs up for Google Sites and Reader, limited thumbs up for Google Docs and Gears. If we can resolve our bandwidth issues and Gears allows a little more interaction, then Docs will be useful contender for replacement of Office applications for students.