Teaching Generation Z

Teachers Golf Day @ Victor Harbor

2005-10-09T22:28:00.000+09:30

Off to the final Teachers Golf Day for 05 at the scenic but challenging Victor Harbor Golf Club with my good friend, Lindsay. The opening tee shot is meant to be the most picturesque hole in the southern hemisphere. What do fellow teaching golfers think? Scores (if they are any good) later!

ActivBoarding Post

2005-10-06T22:12:00.000+09:30

Just posted to the team blog at ActivBoarding. Thought it needed to be here as it is really from my own unique standpoint!

Well, we started off the term with the promise of our interactive whiteboards and we've ended up with something with more potential and scope then we could have hoped for. We held a very successful Staff Development Day where the team members drove the day (see my post A Highly Productive Day) and we scratched the surface of the possibilities our boards could give us in the classroom. So this post is to touch on some of the milestones throughout this term and put my spin on them. Maybe team members might feel inspired to post a comment, put me straight on a few things or blog their version of events.
Actually getting the boards installed was a major undertaking. I had to liase with the ActivBoard suppliers at Commander, the installation company while considering the aesthetic and technical requirements to make the whole scenario work. Remember, no-one really knew what this would look like. When I described to Steve, our on call technician what I wanted as a working solution for the laptop set-up, he was also using intelligent guesswork as he hadn't seen a school with ActivBoards before and didn't know how the connections to our network should be made. The laptops also had their fun moments especially when I thought they were defective but I just hadn't stumbled onto the correct resolution for the data projectors. Note to any schools going down this path and you want to use notebook/laptops for your computer link to the ActivBoard, don't go for widescreen. Well, the first one was installed into Learning Area 21 and we had our training from Peter Kent and I know my head was buzzing from that session. I think the frustrating part was that most of you guys didn't have a board yet or the ActivStudio software to play around with. Then it turned out that the laptops needed insurance before they could leave the school grounds! Anyway, looking back at my digital notes from that day I recalled the following points:
- configure USB port (this process is actually on the CD-ROMs that came with the board)
- board calibration (once every two or three months)
- ActivStudio toolbar - TRAINING BOOKLET learn the software go through the tutorials to gain a specific level of competency
- stores a history of sequential flipcharts
- ideal viewing is Yellow font on blue background - minimum font size 24.
add ons for the AlB - microphones, multimedia speakers
The USB port isn't an issue that will bother most teachers unless they stick the USB link to the board in a new port. The board calibration is an important thing to remember as I've a couple of callouts where the flipchart window couldn't be closed but on close examination the cursor was about 2/3 cm away from the point of the pen. That's a calibration issue and you just re-calibrate using the appropriate tool from the palette. Now the availability of the tutorial booklets has been a sticking point - we only got two (or three?) and I've had plenty of requests for extra copies. I was assured that a pdf copy would be e-mailed to me last week from Commander so you could print or use it from the file. Personally, the lack of a tutorial/ training manual isn't an issue as I can learn a heap more from playing with the ActivBoard, but I realise not everyone prefers or learns that way. The preferred colour note is interesting because I trialled a few colour combinations with my Maths Group to see what they preferred. They ended up telling me that lime green font on a black background is superb to look at but it could be just that is a cool colour combination that doesn't measure up optically! Also, I bought a pair of multimedia speakers which have been trialled by a few teachers. Annabel was less than impressed when she viewed a German DVD with her class but a "digital native" informed me that the sound was down because the laptops sound settings were set too low. See. we're learning from them all the time.
Anyway by mid-term we had all boards installed and all but Meredith's in the Science Room up and running. Hers turned out to be a connector problem, sorted out eventually by the installers. This was frustrating for her as we were looking forward to our Staff Development Day, she was under pressure to report back to the powers that be on the progress on her Science Grant and she hadn't even conducted a working lesson involving the ActivBoard. Team members, don't forget to support her via her blog New Wave Science - post a comment, give her a link, offer to review some of her research.
One big issue I touched on the training day was the need for us to show the way for our fellow staff members. Some of them are still unaware of how the whole interactive whiteboard thing works (can I come and play with it sometime?), some want to be ready for the next rollout in 2006 and a bit of awareness raising on our part on how big and steep the learning curve won't go astray. They are watching us with interest and we have that responsibility to keep them up to date with realistic, not idealistic, information. We have to think of ways to give them hands on experiences which we, in a lot of ways, didn't get. We are the digital pioneers and I have seen a lot of really great stuff from all of you just in passing or in professional conversations around the school.
One last thing before I finally wind this post up. I think that being accountable and documenting our learning journey is really important as we go. Being time poor, I think this blog is the best way for all of us to have a conversation that is not dependent on all of us being in the same room at the same time. I am really thrilled to see that several of us have started their own blogs and can see value in this two way technology tool. Our colleagues can then read up on our findings, frustrations, check our resources and be part of documentation that is living. Please contribute any little bits you can to ActivBoarding and make it part of your week to either post, read or comment on this blog. My thoughts and ideas will get pretty boring after a while if others don't put in their point of view. As Marg has said in her blog digital immigrant - It certainly was food for thought pointing out that it wasn't much good if we used technology such as the active boards to produce vamped up versions of old curriculum.
Thanks, Marg - couldn't have put it better myself.

Yet Another Buzz Phrase

2005-09-29T22:07:00.000+09:30

Here in South Australia, we've had Learning To Learn, and now I think I'm experiencing Blogging about Blogs. In the blogosphere at the moment, I would be like the new kid at school trying to work out who to be friends with (via Bloglines and the Blogrolls of those kids who've obviously been out in the yard playing for a fair while). There is still is a fair bit of novelty involved in checking feeds and assessing if each blog author's voice resonates with me. I enjoy clarifying my thoughts via Teaching Generation Z but I spend a lot more time reading other blogs, searching for new blogs to read, downloading podcasts of interest (sometimes I even listen to them) and then reading some more. And maybe it's still because I am still finding out about web 2.0 tools but it seems that every second blog I read is about blogging. Now in my job as an ICT coordinator, my job is to lead the way for my staff and make sure that we don't have students using computers to learn word processing, or learn Powerpoint but using the tools to solve problems or create content documenting their own learning. So, if a blog is a tool for learning and connecting, how come there's so much discussion about the tool? Isn't it a bit like a group of builders discussing their hammers and saws instead of the projects they intend to complete!

Singing The Praises Of The Pocket PC

2005-09-23T14:25:00.000+09:30

One of my favourite tools in my life has to be my Pocket PC. I would highly recommend it to anyone in education as a way of organising and keeping on top of things throughout the school day. In my role as a coordinator here I am not in one location throughout the week so the mobility the PPC affords is excellent. If you already can run Outlook on your PC at home or at work, then using the basic functions of Calendar, Tasks and Contacts is a cinch. There are reportedly better software packages out there but it came pre-installed and it works so why pay for a third party software package unless you can justify it (or claim it on tax). So it has become my diary and task planner but as Tim Shaw says, "Wait, there's more!" The Windows media player is great as I can upload mp3's and podcasts (also in mp3 form) and listen to them at my leisure with a set of ear buds. The one thing I do think is missing but will be addressed with the introduction of Windows Mobile 5.0 is the lack of Powerpoint support. I've downloaded and currently trialling a program called Pocket Slides but whether I will use this feature enough to justify the cost is still up for debate. I viewed a couple of ppt presentations from Will Richardson which was handy but they were limited when the font was too small and unless you are connected to the Web, the links don't function in a offline format. By the way, the ppts from Weblogg-ed were fantastic - would love to have been there in person to hear Will speak. Bit difficult geographically - I wonder, Will, have you ever been to Australia? Blogs focussing on Web 2.0 have really got me thinking about how I can use my PPC in this capacity and I suppose more tools that have offline / online capabilities will become available. Some tools like Skweezer which re-formats webpages for easy reading are great but still involve me doing a lot of the checking and sending to the PPc via Mobile favourites. Less enthused people might not bother but reading web content offline is a fantastic feature. I can be semi-sociable at home (not totally tied to the home PC to read posts) by reading blogs in the comfort of the lounge chair while my wife enjoys the latest episode of Lost or Boston Public (not many shows about teachers!)and create content that can uploaded later. A good blogging tool for PPC is still to be found so I'll keep looking or be open to suggestions. If I can get Inspiration for Pocket PC then I am pretty well set with a highly powerful tool that enables me to do a lot of stuff that frees me from even the weight and size of a notebook. Not that I'd knock back a Tablet PC if someone offered one to me!

A Highly Productive Day

2005-09-20T14:49:00.000+09:30

Wow, what a great day yesterday. I helped facilitate our ActivBoard team's training day and although my proposed outline of events didn't really last for too long, I think everyone got something out of it. Teachers got to play, really play with their boards and were ready to share some exciting things at the latter stages of the day. We had an good lunch at Liquid Espresso (great steak sandwich with wedges) and we created a team blog! Yes, ActivBoarding is the new place for our new little learning community. I was worried that having a blog might have been a bit geeky for my colleagues but when I framed in terms of documenting our learning, avoiding unnecessary meetings and having easy access to online resources, they were super keen. The teacher in the next room even started her own blog so I will have to encourage her to really push that along as well.

Training and Development in New Technologies

2005-09-14T21:57:00.000+09:30

It's always a challenge to plan for and implement new technologies in the school scenario. That's been my role in the purchase of our school's new ActivBoards. Well, I know that interactive whiteboards are hardly a new technology in the scheme of things but they are a relative newcomer on the Aussie primary school scene. There are a few primary schools here in Adelaide who have got SmartBoards throughout their classrooms - Hillcrest and Ingle Farm come to mind but we are the first to purchase and install the alternative, ActivBoards. To me, the two options are a bit like comparing PCs and Macs. Both provide educational benefits but are significantly different, doing various things better than each other. I've detailed the decision making processes in an earlier post.

So, my next move in my role at work is to stay ahead of our dedicated group of ActivBoard teachers so that I can offer both support and direction to them. This Monday, we have a Student-free Day for staff development and the team have chosen to spend it getting more familiar with their new ActivBoard. So it's been my job to concoct a plan of attack and compile a program that will blend some basics with some vision. Here's what I came up with:-

Welcome:

Trouble shooting – where to get help, how to solve your own problems, accessing and using the Promethean website.
What’s cool? A sharing time where each team member can show something (it doesn’t have to be spectacular) that they have done with their ActivBoard.
How do we document our students’ improvement, how do we document our own learning? Introduction to the ActivBoarding wiki, get everyone’s permissions covered, possible use of blogs as reflective journal, links gathering and posting tool. Use of Schoolblogs as possible forum.
Hit the web. Exploration of posted links, discovery of new links. Go to the Computing Room or plug in shared laptops in venue. (LA22 ? Printer, bring in scanner, cameras etc.)
Personal planning time. In partners, teams or solo - time is put aside to develop lessons, resources etc. for Term 4 and beyond. Graham available to troubleshoot or walk team members through various steps etc…
Future directions – what have we achieved today and where to from here? What are the various directions that we would like to pursue and what support will be required to work towards them.

Recess and Lunch breaks to be negotiated along the way. This is a flexible timetable and can be altered along the way. Feedback to me:

graham.wegner@lnps.sa.edu.au

Visit the wiki prior at http://www.activ.schtuff.com

Revisiting Teach 42 (in time for School Council)

2005-09-12T22:18:00.000+09:30

I've just revisited one of my favourite blogs Teach 42 where I posted a response to Steve's entry on Would you want a computer without internet? Here it is:
Mate, you are dead right about the web connection being the most critical part for a classroom teacher now. I had to present our new Activboards to the school council tonight and my flipchart presentation was unavailable because our local network was down and I couldn’t get to my folder where I’d stored it. What to do - go online, go to the Promethean resource website and download some samples (enough to show the parents) and some other online bits and pieces to get me through. It worked - without the web, they would have been less than impressed with the school’s new investments but when they could see the internet content coming through on a big screen and how I could interact with it, they were sold. Heads nodding, great job, Graham, no curly questions. Great observation, Steve.

Literacy and Numeracy Week - Visual Texts workshop

2005-09-06T09:12:00.000+09:30

Well, the school has released me fom my classroom teaching duties to spend some time sorting out teacher issues/ questions with our ActivBoards. Part of the deal is getting to go along with my bosses, Jo and Mary to this EDC presentation by a teacher, Alison Sutcliffe. The full title is "Visual texts: a journey of discovery by our Year 2 class." This came out of a research grant and Alison if explaining how the use of visual texts is totally different from their use. She talked about how our kids spend more time viewing than reading - she spend some time talking about the Disneyification of their content and how narrow their range is. (Certainly made me think about what my own two boys spend their time watching!)

She talked about using her interactive whiteboard to explore the text "Custard the Dragon" and the role colour can take in a text. Challenge and complexity were the key elements she measured the students' progress achievements in powerful recognition of literacy/elements of visual texts. This was mainly an exploratory activity.

Once she'd addressed the various challenges that some of her "focus" students (research terminology), Alison started describing a unit of work focussing on aspect - she used hero Web pages and a book, "Just Another Ordinary Day" where the students drew pictures to demonstrate their understanding of aspect. Now I know Alison was talking about this in the context of research, but I think my own class could easily benefit from a focus like this to extract more meaning from any texts we examine. Just a footnote about the ICT tools used - Netscape (Composer, I assume) which I used back in 1999 before I got the hang of FrontPage and Safari which is the Mac standard browser. She points that Macs are limited in terms of software for an interactive whiteboard. She also talked about the fact that a SmartBoard is touch sensitive and kids have to adopt a new way of holding the pen. This is not an issue with our ActivBoards (not all interactive boards are created equal!)

ActivBoard reflections

2005-09-03T21:49:00.000+09:30

Well, I've managed to get on top of the teething problems associated with the school's ActivBoard installation - laptops are now communicating with projectors, USB ports are configured to communicate to the ActivBoard and I'm now confident enough to start exploring the new ways in which I can present lessons to my class. When Peter Kent spoke to our staff, he talked about moving beyond using it as a regular whiteboard. He also stated that he didn't encourage us to use the board as a giant touch based computer screen although that is another way to impart explicit digital ICT skills before moving the class into the computer suite. No, the term I really like the sound of is digital convergence - where the ActivBoard could be the central focus within the classroom for viewing and interacting with a class blog, viewing breaking news items of interest via RSS, annotate and critique pieces of work for within the class, using real stimulus photos from photo sharing websites for active conversations and reflective writing. That students become self motivated towards improving their literacy skills because of the real and public ways their work can be viewed by their peers. Now I don't know how the pieces all fit together - that will be the real focus of the learning journey. My own start in the blogosphere is still in its infancy - I still spend more time reading and scanning other people's blogs than working on my own but having my own class blogging would be a real near future goal to work towards. The ActivBoard would be the perfect venue to model Read/Write technology and use it to track learning. Plus any learning, long term task criteria, assessment could be ''pushed" out to the students' personal blog space. Lessons missed are kept in flipchart files that are posted on the class blog for students to utilise. I think internet access at home is around 80% with my current class so I have to be mindful of the 20% without and allow them priority access to the classroom pc's. But this is a real start in the right direction for using technology as the tool to promote the learning process. It backs my feelings about the appropriate use of ICT in Australian schools. I get worried when I hear fellow coordinators in my cluster talking about the proposed state wide testing of ICT skills and being supportive of the notion. I feel they are missing the whole point. We have some of the most fantastic, interactive, dynamic learning tools ever and open source applications are taking educators into places where you don't want to box yourself or your students into product specific skills. I don't want anyone to learn Powerpoint just so they know how to put a digital slideshow together. Make the whole thing purpose driven and the learner will engage. And to tie this whole post together, it is the very fact then is no blueprint on how to specifically teach using an ActivBoard that makes its use so exciting.

Frustration Levels Rising

2005-08-29T21:48:00.000+09:30

Implementing new technology is not always easy -but, the teething problems will usually be worth it. Witness my current frustrations with our new ActivBoards. (Last one finally installed today-hooray!) See my link here to our team wiki, ActivBoarding for the full post.

Frustration Levels Rising (wiki version)

2005-08-26T21:48:00.000+09:30

Team members will either be heartened or dismayed by my rising frustration with the install of the ActivBoards and their associated peripherals. The big issue is the way our laptops are communicating (or failing to) with the projectors. At present, only one team member, Suzanne, has a laptop that will get a display through to the projector. And considering that most of our laptops started off in a promising way, who knows what the final outcome will be. At first, I was convinced that it was the VGA outlet that was faulty and so I took the offending laptop back to its manufacturer (just got to love those back to base warranties!) and sure enough the guy behind the warranty counter plugged it into a flat panel to test my claims. It didn't work so he told me that the chassis would need to be replaced. It turns out that everything in a laptop is interconnected which means that basically the whole thing needed to be replaced. He said to leave it with him so that all of the data would be transferred to a new machine AND that he would ring me the next day.
Well, the installers started putting in the ActivBoards and problems started emerging when I tried connecting other laptops. So, today I hauled all of the laptops back into town where it was demonstrated on all of the laptops that they were fine, accepted a signal to an external monitor (same deal as a projector) so I brought them back, none the wiser. My next move will be to contact the ActivBoard vendors to get one of their techies out next week to sort though the issue. So, I've done as much as I can with the limited technical knowledge I have - it's time to consult some experts so we can get on with using the ActivBoards for their intended purpose, teaching.

The ActivBoard Is In!

2005-08-22T22:21:00.000+09:30

I've been a bit slack of late and I know that a blog is only as good as the contributions that are put in it. It's nearly been a week since the ActivBoard has been installed in my classroom. It's a first on a few levels - one, it is the first one of six here at our school and, I'm prepared to be corrected, it is the first ActivBoard to be installed in a state primary school here in South Australia. We did a fair bit of research before settling on this particular model as most interactive white boards here in Adelaide are of the SmartBoard variety. In a quick history thumbnail, I received a phone call last year from a guy at a company called Electroboard who distribute SmartBoards in South Australia to come and do a demo at our school. Our education department DECS had a deal with them as the preferred model to support our internet provider Educonnect with their video conferencing capability. Well, he came out, did his demo to me with our teacher-librarian checking in from time to time. Based on that, we decided to put in a submission for the 2005 school year budget to use with our Problem Based Learning program. My boss came back to me and said, "What is this interactive white board thing you want here?" It seemed most of the staff were oblivious to the world of interactive whiteboards until ...............
Earlier in 2005, our school leaders were invited to Canberra to accept a $20 000 National Excellence In Schooling award. While the leadership team were there, they got to check out the name most dropped in the Australian world of interactive white boards, Richardson Primary School. Finally, they knew what I was talking about. But my boss was talking about ActivBoards, not Smart Boards. It turns out that school started with SmartBoards but nowadays, all of their classrooms sport ActivBoards. After viewing a presentation from Peter Kent (Richardson's deputy on leave - currently working as Education Consultant for Australia's ActivBoard distributors) they were convinced that a board in every classroom at our school was a perfect way to follow our school vision of "using up to date technology" for learning.
So the rest are getting installed later this week. Keep watching this spot for more information as we travel down this very exciting road.

The Magic Of RSS

2005-08-12T22:29:00.000+09:30

Wow. Sitting here on a Friday afternoon at this three hour workshop with Yvonne @ tsof. There's only about four of us here who actually come from schools - quite a few attendees from tsof itself. The workshop is all about RSS and how we as educators might be able to harness its power to sort through the overwhelming resources of the Web. Now I know who Vonnie from SouthOz E-Learning is. Blogs are a very crucial part of this whole picture as that's where this whole Social Bookmarking aspect of RSS comes into play. She's shown us a Powerpoint that she already showed @ CEGSA State Conference this year. If I didn't have a knowledge base to go from, my head would be spinning right now from information overload. Now we are watching a future Flash movie about how the Web is evolving. Check it out @ http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic I'm too busy scribbling notes on my Pocket PC to really take it all in. I'll have to rewatch it to really take it all in.

Yvonne's talking a lot about the rss and xml labels for want of a better word. A big question for me right now when Yvonne is talking about Web 2.0 - Does that mean any website will be ignored in Web 2.0 if RSS is not a feature in the future?

We're looked at a couple of explanations of rss on the web but now we are going to look @ a Feedreader in action. Starting in http://www.edna.edna.au and I've done a search on Interactive Whiteboards. I then look through the hits for websites with an indicated RSS feed. We've planted that in the FeedReader and played around with that. A little bit later, Yvonne is taking us on a Web tour - looking @ Tagcloud, deli.cio.us, Technorati. After a while I've lost my concentration and start playing around with deli.cio.us, don't get me wrong, Yvonne has been a fantastic presenter but it is very late Friday afternoon, school issues from earlier in the day have been playing on my mind, so my mind drifts away for a bit. One classic moment towards the end when Yvonne is showing us her tags and does a search for "interactive whiteboards" and what pops up as the number one hit? My blog Teaching Generation Z! On that note, I've got a lot of social bookmarking to do..........

Where To Begin?

2005-08-09T20:48:00.000+09:30

Wow, I've been trawling the web checking out blogs of an ICT educational bent and I don't know where to start. I am very comfortable with ICT tools but I feel like everyone who is worth reading has been doing this stuff for a fair while already - so who will be interested in reading this? I suppose we all start out small, get a few colleagues to check it out and go from there. The first good education blog that switched the light on for me was Teach42. If you haven't checked it out, it is really great. Anyway, to really get my head around all of the concepts that are emerging technologies like rss and podcasting, I'm off to a training session here at Technology School Of The Future here in Adelaide on "the Magic of RSS." I'll make some notes and post them up here for future reference - it'll be a good benchmark to see whether what I think I know matches the reality! Until Friday.

Activ Wiki Link

2005-08-08T22:14:00.000+09:30

My school is having 6 ActivBoards installed and the pioneering teachers need a ICT Learning Community where we can exchange ideas as they happen without the need for extra meetings. Check out the wiki I am proposing that we use at ActivBoarding

Introduction Day One

2005-08-08T22:05:00.000+09:30

I'm hoping that this blog will be a workspace that I can use as an evolutionary tool in my role as an ICT Coordinator here in a South Australian school. I have a number of key factors I want to keep a tab on via this blog so I'd appreciate any contact if you are an expert, know something about or can point me in an interesting direction!! The factors I'm interested are:
Interactive Whiteboards in schools
Problem Based Learning (or inquiry based learning)
Blogging as an educational tool to build learning communities
Training a staff in ICT with a broad range of interests, motivations and confidence levels.
Cheers - keep watching this space.