I listened to VR, the metaverse and education by Edtech Innovators which interviewed my pal Ian Stuart.

Apart for a little dip into Google Expeditions a few years back (eek!) I’ve not really paid much attention to VR.

Of course I’ve read a lot of tweets from Ian who is now working in the VR field, but not dug in. So I was interested to listen Ian talking on this podcast. It is well worth a listen, a quick 30 minutes.

I liked the way Ian linked VR to his previous use of technology. Ian insisted that the technology should be developed in response to classroom needs as opposed to the repurposing of business software. Ian had some nice examples of the use of VR and touched upon its use as part of project based learning.

Ian also mentioned an experience from his Islay past, when project based learning needed a fair bit of scaffolding to get off the ground.

VR does not come naturally to me. I did see how engaging it was for my class using Google cardboard back in 2016. We didn’t have the time to get past engaging to learning but Ian explained some of the ways it could be added to real learning.

Ian pointed to Eduverse The World’s First K-12 Metaverse where there is a fair bit of free content to explore even without a headset. I’ve only had a short browse in my browser, but I think I’ll see how well it runs on our iPads on the school network.

Side notes:

  • One of the things that puts me off is word Metaverse, it is so linked to Facebook I naturally balk.
  • Anchor/Spotify is a pain to winkle podcasts out of. I add episodes of show I want to listen to, as opposed to sub to the whole series, with Huffduffer, it relies on an mp3 being linked to in the episode.
  • Ian should have had a blog for all these years he has been involved in interesting things.
Replied to The startupification of education (werd.io)
But not everything has to be scalable; not everything has to be venture scale. There are a lot of public services, technologies in the public interest, and fully-profitable businesses that benefit by not trying to reach scale. Relationships are the building blocks of society; eradicating those in favor of analytics, in education of all places, is counter-productive, to put it charitably.

This is a wonderful post Ben, thanks you.  It speaks, to me as a primary teacher, to more than just EdTech and startUps. The big internet beasts have some claws in education and seem to be working towards what you call the  rat-maze simulation of intimacy. Governments seem bent on datafication.

Technology can be part of informal & formal personal relationships. The technology I find interesting is messy engaging and has not much to do with scalability & market share.

In my tiny world, I hope technology helps inclusion, engagement, diversification of approaches and fun. The presentation & recording of learning in a useful way by learner that is still individual, not auto analysable and open to conversation.

Interesting & scary thread for those at BETT and other education events. Linked abstracts worth a peek.

Reposted a tweet by Ben Williamson (Twitter)

This piece on edtech during Covid was written for a wide audience. Edtech can do good, but also anticipates big changes for education long term. Should engage teachers, parents, students, not just developers and investors etc, in this discussionhttps://online.ucpress.edu/currenthistory/article/120/822/15/114546/Education-Technology-Seizes-a-Pandemic-Opening

Lots to think about in the linked article: Education Technology Seizes a Pandemic Opening | Current History | University of California Press

An algorithmic worldview now permeates education systems and is encoded into the digital platforms that proliferated during school and college closures in the pandemic. COVID-19 has been treated as an experimental opportunity to scale up the use of algorithmic technologies, generate fresh forms of capital investment, and grow market share—while presenting a model vision for the future of the education sector itself.

Replied to a tweet by erin glass (Twitter)

for the launch of @ProjectReboot, i wrote about how edtech trains students to accept an exploitative, surveillant web, and how we might use it instead to cultivate critical digital citizens capable of shaping the tech they use https://thereboot.com/edtech-needs-recoding-to-transform-student-users-into-digital-citizens/

The linked article, Edtech Needs Recoding to Transform Student ‘Users’ Into Digital Citizens – The Reboot is interesting.

Institutions have chosen to submerge students in a culture of computing that normalizes surveillance, exploitation, and control as if these were the objective features of computing itself. Can technological practice within education look any different?

A part of the suggested solution

supporting students to collectively design and govern their educational tools. There’s no better way to show them how tools can affect their thinking and social interactions, and to prepare them to critically shape the technologies that in turn shape our world.

I wonder how this can be addresses in primary & secondary education. The normalisation of the culture begins, surely, in the home & early education. I wonder if many educators even start to consider this problem. In my own sector, primary, where would we start?

This post has been brewing for over  three months now. I think I just need to post it.

More and more of our computer use involves networks and cloud storage. A while back I was joined on Radio Edutalk by Sarah Clark who spelt out the benefits of the cloud in the classroom.

This is great if you have the connection and bandwidth. Some folk do not. This was brought to the front of my mind by a tweet by Andrew Jewell:

Thankfully I am not in that position, but although my class are 1-2-1 iPads we don’t have the broadest band in the world. I do a few different things that mitigate against poor connectivity that I though worth sharing.

I want to cut down as much network traffic as possible so that when we use the internet we get the best possible connections.

We Don’t do iCloud

Out of the box iPads want to use iCloud for storing files. For my personal and school devices I would not be without several ‘clouds’, my phone uses dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive. I use iCloud and OneDrive on my school iPad and desktop too. As I am lucky enough to have a mac in my classroom I sync somethings with iCloud so they are available on both devices, mac and iPad. This is very handy. I can write a note on my mac in the Notes app, it syncs to the iPad and I then can drop it to a group via the Classroom. I can edit pages and keynote files on both devices seamlessly. I keep a lot of materials in OneDrive and the app keeps my home computer and school one in sync.

However I get my pupils to turn off most of the iCloud features. Since they do not use multiple devices with the same account they don’t need all their photos and documents syncing. Opening documents with the native iOS apps such as pages and keynote is a lot faster if the documents are local.

A couple of years ago I centred our document Workflow around O365, OneDrive and OneNote. OneNote especially is marvellous for this, the Class Notebooks in particular give you a tremendous amount of organisation. Unfortunately we spent a fair bit of time waiting for things to open and lost a fair amount of pupils work in OneNote 1 so don’t use it anymore. I will keep an eye on the app and out network and return to it if conditions allow.

We do do AirDrop

The answer to my handing out and gathering in of digital assets is now AirDrop and Notes. Notes has really matured over the last few years and has managed to keep its simplicity and gain features. I send out a lot of ‘tasks’ or success criteria via notes. I use it to share audio files along side text and pupils can send me notes easily. My pupils send me finished work, for example, recording of their reading alongside their self assessment2. If I had to guess the most use apps in my class would be Notes and Photos.

AirDrop is a really good way to distribute large files. A bunch of pupils watching video on the network will really slow things down. I can drop the same video to my class or a group amazingly quickly.

AirDrop avoids the cloud sending from device to device directly.

Apple Classroom

Airdrop is much enhanced by using Apple Classroom, this allows you to set up classes and groups of pupils, you can Airdrop to the whole class or a group. More importantly the teacher’s iPad can receive files from pupils without intervention.

Of course classroom does some other things but I love AirDrop the most.

What I miss from this system is the organisation that is built into multi-user cloud solutions. Reviewing pupils work and giving feedback was easier in OneNote. I may get the class to turn on iCloud for Notes at some point and see if sharing notes is practical for me. I suspect that the amount of data used by notes will be a lot less than OneNote.

A Cache in Hand

Here we are entering geekier territory, and you need a mac (there might be other ways I don’t know about). You can buy, in the mac app store, the Server App. Or if you have a newer mac than mine you can use the built in Caching Service.

The Server app can cache content locally so that if more than one device is downloading the same content the later ones can get the data from the local cache rather than going out to the internet. This seems to help installing the same app across multiple iPads. You can see from the screenshot that a lot of the data reaching our iPads comes from the local cache rather than from the internet. In my experience this seems to speed up updating a bunch of iPads or installing a bunch of apps.

A Web of One’s Own

Hand in had with the caching the server app can do it can also serve webpages locally. This is a good alternative to AirDrop to share piles of photos. Rather than send them all to all of the iPads I can set up a web gallery on the mac and pupils can visit it via their browsers. This is probably beyond what most teacher are willing to do but if you can it is a good way to distribute files where pupils can choose form a range of images. Better than giving them all 100 images to choose from and fill up their iPads.

Once you have turned on web-serving it is just a case of building a website in the same ways as you would create an external site. It would be very useful do be able to do that automatically. The local urls will not be pretty or easy to type, but the pupils don’t need to as I will AirDrop the urls to them.

I’ve briefly tested the wiki server that comes with the Server app, but I am not sure it is happy with several folk adding content at once. I believe the wiki server has been dropped from later versions of the Server app.

None of this is ideal compared to a fast connection and a cloud solution but in the meantime it lets us get the job done with the minimum of waiting for the network. When we do need the internet, and we do, we get as much goodness as possible from it.

This is temporary and experimental

For all the reasons Sarah went over, the cloud is, long term, the way to go. I hope these things help make the technology less visible in my classroom in the short term. I’d also be interested in other and better ways to improve my classroom connectiivity.

 

see: OneNote Help Wanted
Notes and Airdrop to the rescue  

You can’t do without an RSS reader, for the last few years I’ve liked Inoreader.

Surge is a useful tool to play about with making webpages. It is aimed at developers but I think it is handy for dabblers too. Works for static sites. A lot of the documentation is for things beyond my ken (Grunt, Gulp and other things I do not recognise). You can however build la local webpage and easily push it online. Here is a very silly one: Sounds Bad!.

The Daily Stillness | daily small exercises to help you find stillness: a bit like the daily create on #DS106 or this #dailyponderance bu for thinking about your relationship to technology and life.

FlickrCC Stampr This is one I built myself for my primary pupils. The idea was to make it really simple for young children to attribute but ‘stamping’ the attribution onto the image.

Liked Read Write Review – Voices from the Village in 2017 by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
Maybe there were some things that I would have changed, however considering the current state of things, I was again pretty lucky this year. Personally, our children have continued to grow up. The youngest has progressed from learning how to climb the ladder to get on the trampoline to now utilisin...

A great read and review of Aaron’s year. Just following the links from his newspaper will take some time, but it will be well spent. Aaron’s take and his pull quotes make fascinating reading.