Year: 2012

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The reader, who asked not to be identified, is an ICT co-ordinator at a secondary school. He tells how his “image-conscious” headmaster was seduced by a scheme that allowed all the school’s staff to replace their laptop computers with an iPad 2.

Our source says staff were initially thrilled at the prospect. “Most staff are IT illiterate and jumped at the chance of exchanging their laptop for an iPad,” he writes.

Now, however: “the staff room is full of regret.”

What’s gone wrong? The biggest obstacle is that staff still cling to old documents and resources created in software such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and of course there aren’t fully-fledged versions of the Office apps available for the iPad as yet. “Some staff are needing to produce documents and resources by remoting in [to a PC] on an iPad,” our source reveals. “Trying to operate Microsoft Word using a remote app that dumps you out of the connection is a nightmare.”

from: The school that swapped its laptops for iPads… and wants to switch back | PC Pro blog

There is at least a The iPad experiment hasn’t been a total disaster paragraph and a good number of comments explaining correcting and discussion.

It looks like the school jumped into iPads without doing any research to see if iPads fitted their needs. Staff welded to MS office for essential tasks will struggle with an iPad. Most of the problems could be surmounted with a bit of research into replacement apps (pages, keynote, Haiku deck and many many more) and distribution (dropbox, which they use, and webdav (Otixo adds webdav to dropbox) and some staff development/training.

Personally I would not yet like to give up a desktop/laptop for an iPad in all circumstances and certainly would have hated to be pushed into making that jump without training and practise.

Sidenote, One of the commenters remarks that tablets are for consumption and not creation. This was I though buried. From a few visits to the primary classrooms piloting iPads in North Lanarkshire I see a whole lot of creation by pupils going on.

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David Baugh points to Pinnacle studio iPad video editor.

I was delighted to find a more feature rich video editor for free in Pinnacle Studio and even better – for now it is free.

from: Learning in Touch » Blog Archive » Free Video Editing iPad App from Pinnacle Studio with multi layer video David has a great Digital Storytelling page too.

I’ve mostly though about MOOCs as cpd , but…

So, what does this have to do with K-12? Everything. Or at least a lot. If this is the wave or a wave of the future of learning and teaching then this is something that we need to pay attention to. If the job of parents, K-12 educators and the public school system is to prepare students for the environments they will be expected to work and learn in, then we ought to pay very close attention.

from: What is a MOOC? The Canadian Connection.

This and the others in the Honest Logos set made me laugh, but perhaps an interesting take on the design a logo activity?

Mcdiabetes

image Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported — CC BY-NC 3.0
from: Honest logos on the Behance Network

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Yesterday I went to eAssessment Scotland at the invitation of Kenji Lamb, @kenjilamb. Kenji appeared on Radio Edutalk, Radio #EDUtalk 18-4-12: Kenji Lamb on Open Source Technologies – EDUtalk, and kindly asked David and myself if we would like to do some recording at the conference.

I am taking a wee break from organising show notes for the posts to jot some notes down. Ian Guest In the pICTure and Colin Maxwell have already posted about the conference E-Assessment Scotland 2012 in more depth and detail than these random notes.

Similarities

Most of the attendees were from Higher Ed rather than school, but my main takeaway from the conference was that there are remarkable similarities between the different sectors of education and many similar explorations going on.

David Boud kicked off with the first keynote talking about feedback which became, for me, the lens that I looked at the rest of the day through. Giving learners ownership, worthwhile feedback and the difficulty in doing so appeared in many narrative and conversations during the day. I was surprised that the phrase formative assessment did not come up frequently as it seem to me it was part of what every one was talking about.

David Boud 1

I was expecting a lot more about automatic computer generated assessment and was delighted not to find any.

Radio EDUtalk

I was sort of expecting to be trying to grab folk in corners and record short boos with them, in fact Kenji had really sorted us out. We had a room with several ethernet points and more importantly Lynn Boyle, @boyledsweetie, had the role of childcatcher (or Roundup Girl) organising presenters, keynote speakers and others to come to our booth.

I started out feeling a wee bit out of my depth in such higher ed surroundings. I was soon very happy as it became obvious that all our interviewees were gracious and generous. I’ve started to post the series over at EDUtalk tagged ‘eAS12’. This will take a couple of days as I’ve decided to make a bit more effort than usual with the shownotes. I’ve spent a fair portion of yesterday hunting down links and trying to avoid reading too much on the blogs I am finding. My gReader account has bulged again..

WordPress, wordpress, wordpress…

I was surprised how often educational blogging came up. Lots of interesting projects, open and closed are happening in higher Education, this parallels (again) schools. One of the seminars was directly about schools, Alex Duff of education scotland on Enabling Pupils to Record and Reflect on their Educational Experiences using WordPress. I am very familiar with the glow blogs as eportfolio system, having spent a fair amount of time training teachers in setting them up and working with classes to do the same. It was still well worth listening to Alex, it made me again appreciate all of the work done to make the blogs server the purpose of Building the Curriculum 5 and local authorities, creating a profile from a profiling blog. This is done with some wordpress cleverness. Considering the Glow install of wordpress is hampered by being an old version and the lack of opportunity to add plugins makes this even more impressive.

Later in the day Alex was presented by a well deserved eAssessment award.

Alex Duff 1

I was interested to hear how Alex had evaluated various portfolio solutions before plumping for the blog and that Education Scotland are open to improving these as glow changes.

Links

As I continue to work my way through the shownotes for Radio Edutalk I am gathering some great links adding to the folk I follow on twitter and the list of blogs I follow. Here are a few that were new to me:

There are a lot more links in the EDUtalk – Filed under ‘eas12’ posts and I’ve collected them all together: eassessment scotland 2012 · linkli.st. At the time of typing this I’ve not uploaded all the audio or posted all the links. I hope to finish later today.

Connections

It looked like it was going to be one of those bump into folk day when I met Derek Robertson between the station and university. Derek was introducing the second keynote of the day and took us out of Highrer Ed into the infant room with a tale of 5 year olds creating instructionla videos with very little support!

As I walked into the conference I immediately saw Malcolm Wilson the first of many online pals. Malcolm is ICT Curriculum Development Officer for Falkirk Council Education Services and produces one of the most valuable blogs for using ICT in the classroom: ICT for Teaching & Learning in Falkirk Primary Schools which is useful well outside Falkirk. His recent post on Microsoft Office 365 for Education looks like saving glow users a fair bit of spadework.

I met for the first time Ian Guest (IaninSheffield) on Twitter. Ian has been an EDUtalk stalwart tagging his boos for his 366 Web 2.0 – A Web 2.0 tool-a-day for 2012 project with edutalk.

Alex Duff, whose seminar I attended was another grab a few words meeting. All three of these folk I would have liked to spend more time with as I have a pile of conversations and questions for them all.

Another quick chat with Colin Maxwell whose presentation on Investigating MOOCS sounded as if it would have been fascinating. I was glad to see is tweet:

Edtechcc Again

I’ll be recommending that to teachers interested in ICT if it comes up again.

Finally David and myself grabbed a bite to eat with Doug Belshaw, Doug now works with the Mozilla Foundation where he heads-up their work on web literacies. There are probably not enough hours in the day for me to badge him about Hackasaurus, Open Badges and the like. I was disappointed not to see Doug’s seminar on Are Open Badges the Future for Accrediting Skills? I caught the last couple of Q&As which only made me more curious.

Many thanks to Kenji Lamb for inviting Radio Edutalk to attend. If you didn’t make the conference you might enjoy the archive from our live stream: EDUtalk – Filed under ‘eas12’

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I am having an early start today. A while back we had Kenji Lamb on Radio EDUtallk. He kindly invited us to the eAssessment Scotland 2012 conference to do some recording.

The conference has a really interesting looking program. Some of the participants joined David and I for our regular live show earlier this week which was fascinating. We hope to be broadcasting live on Radio EDUtalk throughout the day of we can. Hopefully we will tweet: #edutalk the segments as they go live.

If you are listening live the quality may be better with iTunes, WMP or other non browser method as we will be switching between live and Auto DJ regularly.

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Haiku Deck is

the simple new way to create stunning presentations – whether you are pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, telling a story, or igniting a movement, it’s fast, fun and simple for anyone to use.

Says Haiku Deck. It is an iPad application for making presentations. Very simple to use and the defaults look nice.

That took about three minutes to knock up. The main feature, based on three minutes use, seem to be a nice search to find images to match your words. Looks like it searches Flickr and some other sources. It does some sort of cc search. I don’t think it quite respects the license though. This image:

Winner

By David Muir is licensed under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. Unfortunately the app does not seem to do the attribution for you.

Haiku deck says:

Where do Haiku Deck images come from?
Haiku Deck finds images from across the Internet that photographers have licensed under the Creative Commons license. Some Creative Commons images carry a “not for commercial use” restriction. If you’re making a Haiku Deck for commercial use, please be sure to turn the “commercial use only” filter.

I am not sure that is in the spirit of the attribution part of the license?

It does however make a very presentable presentation pretty quickly, saving to the web, announcing by twitter and providing an embed code. It also exports to PDF via mail.

The price is right, free with some paid for themes, the app is extremely easy to use and if they added attribution to the images it would be even better.

Update, my bad: I had adjusted the embed code to fit the iframe into my blog the attribution appears on the Haiku Deck website: Radio #EDUtalk – A Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell and on the embed if you don’t mess about with the code to resize the iFrame. Apologies to Giant Thinkwell.

So here is the attribution copied from the Radio #EDUtalk – A Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell page:

Much to my embarrassment I asked about this on twitter: Twitter / kleneway: @johnjohnston @HaikuDeck you …

Update 2: I’e also noticed a nice feature, republish a slideshow with an extra slide updates the original and the embed.

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Classroom ideas

I want all the children I teach to develop a love of learning, not for ticks, badges or scores, but for the buzz of learning.

from: Robert Drummond » Blog Archive » 20% time Robert is giving his pupils free learning time in the same way Google developers get to follow their own interests, I am looking forward to see how this goes.

Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers.

from: Seth’s Blog » Blog Archive » Tyler Cowen’s Unusual Final Exam I guess it would take a bit of work to get this going in class, but echo the 20% for me.

When you click on ‘Sign in with Glow’ you will be taken to the Glow login page. Here you can login to Glow using your usual username and password. At Glew we won’t know these details and they stay secure with you.

from: Using Glow to make a Glew Account | Glew.org.uk Charlie Love makes Glew an even more interesting choice. If I was in class I’d give it a go.

Online learning

“Mechanical MOOC” – a free and open introductory course in the programming language Python that weaves together existing resources (content, Web-based study groups, quizzes and so on).

from: The Mechanical MOOC Audrey Watters point to this new MOOC, No degrees or credits or certificates or letters of achievement will be awarded, if I though it would only involve a couploe of hours a week I’d join up.

Mozilla wants to create a generation of webmakers.

from: What we’re up to with Mozilla Webmaker (Open) badges. | dougbelshaw.com/blog Doug now works for Mozilla Foundation. I am all for making more webmakers, and am interested in how badges play out, less sure of badges effectiveness (see the first quote in this post). I suspect badges need to be augmented by personal or social media, I didn’t find codeacedemy badges much of an incentive. I am looking forward to seeing Doug speak at eAssessment Scotland this Friday.

An introduction for new programmers
So easy your human companion could do it too!

from: JavaScript for Cats looks pretty useful, I think I am involved in an intro to HTML, CSS and baby steps JavaScript for computing teacher later this year.

Odds and Ends

Alan O’Donohoe who has produced some great AudioBoos (some of which he kindly tags EDUtalk), is looking for donations to get a pro account:
Audioboo Appeal « Teach Computing.

What I am questioning, however, is whether the logic of Capital and private enterprise should be applied to the institutions of our state. Some things, after all, are public goods.

from: Some thoughts on time, performativity, and the State. | dougbelshaw.com/blog a good question.

Tuttle SVC: Should Teachers Consider TED a Reliable Source? Why, Exactly?

Techy

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Jaye commented here:

My other thoughts are about the need for anything at all. Are we past the age of intranets? Should we concentrate on disseminating good practice and let teachers use all the miriad tools available now and in the future

(Jaye had already expressed this sentiment on her blog).

It is a compelling idea. If I was still in the classroom I am pretty sure I’d be happy with using some of these tool myself rather than a set of nationally provided ones. When I was in the classroom I tended to use unconventional tools, self hosted pivot blogs and a pmwiki for example. I was happy researching and choosing what I needed.

However there are a couple of problems with this approach.

  1. Services are often blocked in schools. I recall building A flickr CC search toy so that my bloggers could easily attribute pictures for their posts. Unfortunately I could not persuade the Local Authority that Flickr was a suitable site for children.
  2. time: I was naturally inclined to spend a lot of time on the web, researching, setting up and playing around with the tools. Many teachers do not have that interest, time or sometimes the confidence in their ict skills.

These two problems were partially tackled by Glow. Glow provided a set of tools, eventually including blogs and wikis, that were otherwise unavailable in some Local Authorities. Glow also did. A great deal to encourage the penetration of ICT into the curriculum. Partially by giving teacher access to the tools but also by proving a fair bit of cash and other resources for training. The national push to get folk using Glow filtered via the Local Authorities into schools and classrooms.

I also believe that being a member of a community can be useful. A sense of being in it together, helping each other and having fellow practitioners with similar experiences and challenges could be provided by a national intranet. Although I am fairly indifferent to political nationalism I do feel identified as a Scottish educator.

Jaye also commented:

So far though, I can’t see how we could better Glew, or something similar.

No argument form me there.

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Over the next few months, our focus will be on setting out the user requirements for Glow Plus and understanding the platform requirements that will underpin it.  The members of the Group bring a wealth of experience but others will have important views to share too.  You can follow and contribute to the discussion on Twitter using #GlowPlus.

Professor Muffy Calder
from: ICT in Education Excellence Group – The view from the Chair

I’ve made the odd #glowplus tweet over the last week or two, rendered useless by: Older Tweet results for #glowplus from:johnjohnston are unavailable. Luckly, if you want to pay attention to me, I’ve also saved them on pinboard. Given the focus on user and platform requirements I though I might expand a bit on the links I tweeted:

We need teachers

Left to its own devices, the mob will augment, accessorize, spam, degrade and noisify whatever they have access to, until it loses beauty and function and becomes something else.

from: Seth’s Blog: A tacky mess: the masses vs. great design

For me, this post points to the fact we need teachers in the system, giving pupils, or even teacher-learners, an online space is not a solution to anything. In these spaces we need teachers to be actively involved. This is what seems to separate the likes of ds106 or Colin Maxwell’s Ed Tech Creative Collective from more automated, impersonal or self-services courses: the online involvement of the leader/teachers with the learner. We need spaces that are designed to make interaction between teacher and learner as easy as possible.

For example, glow provides wordpress blogs, the wordpress technology can tick many boxes (see again ds106). Unfortunately the implementation in glow excludes the use of RSS and aggregation that would allow teachers to keep up with a class full of e-portfolios without many many clicks.

Watch your users

You don’t need to guess what your users might want or how they will experience your product. Just watch them.

from: Shane Pearlman Help Us Help WordPress | Smashing WordPress

This posts is for developers working on extending wordpress, I feel it will fit with any system, the main thrust of the advice is to watch your users, in our case pupils and teachers, using the system.

Most days of my working life I watch teacher, pupils or both using glow. Even watching experienced users I see their mice move to where they expect the next click to be, this is consistant, they are often disappointed. In setting out the user requirements I hope the ICT in Education Excellence Group will be able to take the time to watch users, not just relay on what their knowledge and assumptions. From the example in this post and my own experience, this need not be many users, and not take too long.

Learners owning their own spaces

I want to think of education using a vocabulary of creating, shaping, discovering, sharing, imagining and adapting, not one of owning, selling, earning, adding, collaborating, or marketing.

from: Personalization and Responsibility ~ Stephen’s Web

This, in my mind goes along with:

I’ve been blogging here for over 10 years. On my domain, running my software pushing out HTML when you visit the site on any device and RSS or ATOM when you look at it with Google Reader (which 97% of you do.) I control this domain, this software and this content. The feed is full content and the space is mine. Tim nails it so I’ll make this super clear. If you decide to use a service where you don’t control your content, you’re renting.

Own your space on the Web, and pay for it. Extra effort, but otherwise you’re a sharecropper. – Tim Bray

In a time where we are all gnashing our teeth about Twitter’s API changes that may lock out many 3rd party developers, Google Plus’s lack of content portability or lack of respect for the permalink,

from: Your words are wasted – Scott Hanselman

Which I quoted in a previous post.

Jaye, a member of the Glow – Schools IT Excellence Group, blogged about facebook replacing websites, and

Do we need to spend millions developing intranets like GlowPlus when platforms like this are or will be available.

as I commented I find this

a depressing thought. FB is a closed system centralised , easy to get info into but hard to get it out. There are a lot more interesting and exciting ideas out there. See for example this oldie: http://bavatuesdays.com/a-domain-of-ones-own/

Learners keep ownership and can enter co-operative spaces via aggregation.

I am much more excited about the possibilities the Charlie Love demonstrates with glew where sharing out as well as aggregating in is easy. The potential of using wordpress with the feedwordpress plugin, which is already a glew feature, is huge. Teachers could set up projects where pupils could join in by signing up and tagging posts on their own blog, FeedWordPress pulling together everything in the one place even though it is published in the learner’s own.

I also imagine a learner at some point, exporting their glowplus blog at some point, moving it to a domain of their own, this surely could be part of the picture of a successful Scottish life long learner?