eLearning Infusion

Had a good discussion recently with my old principal at Russell Street School. We were talking about where to next for the school in regards to elearning and supporting infrastructure.

Like many schools, Russell St is exploring the potential of iPod Touches and iPads to support learning. An interesting question was raised in relation to the current and future software agreements. For those of you who are not sure what the agreements are all about, the Ministry of Education negotiates on behalf of schools in NZ, licenses with software vendors, to provide schools with computer operating systems, office suites, anti-virus and web filtering software at no cost to the school.

Before the question is posed, let’s take a moment to look at the anticipated changes to the tools that students and teachers will learn with, moving away from desktops and laptops to smaller mobile devices and increasingly BYOD.

The Horizon Report:

Immensely portable, tablets serve as e-readers, video repositories, and web-browsing devices with instant access to thousands of apps…

CORE’s Ten Trends:

The available choices for staying connected while on the go are many — smart phones, netbooks, laptops, and a wide range of other devices

UNESCO:

…it is likely that mobile devices with internet access and computing capabilities will soon overtake personal computers as the information appliance of choice in the classroom.

So the question is…

When the next software agreements are negotiated, will the increased use of mobile apps be recognised and included in the deal?

Why? Let’s put that question in a context:

A school has trialled the use of iPads and iPods in their school, has realised the potential, seen the impact on teaching and learning, and has aligned their strategic plan and infrastructure purchasing around this. The purchasing over the next 3-5 years will take the school to a position where these devices out number the desktops and laptops in the school. They would like students to be using iMovie, GarageBand, Pages, Numbers & Keynote on these devices (totalling NZ$54.95) i.e. the mobile app equivalents for the same applications the school receives now for no cost  under the current software agreements.

What do you think? The solution of course is complex and is simply not a case negotiating with the Apple reseller here in NZ. Issues already surround  licensing of any apps for NZ schools with a lack of volume licensing among other things, ably outlined in this blog post by CORE colleague @warrenhall.

I know that plenty of you out there will be saying things like Android… Google… open source… and fair enough to in a number of respects.

The point is, new software agreements should reflect current and planned usage and recognise what is clearly an increased use of mobile devices in NZ schools, especially the iPad and iPod Touch.

Last term saw a focus on building vocab understanding and use with all students across our senior team based on the results of our PAT Reading Vocab test which weren’t quite as sharp as we wanted.

One could take the traditional route to building vocab which is generally done through the spelling or word study classroom programme but to be honest the old spelling notebook home on Monday and back by Friday for a spelling test with word activities in between does not really engage me or my students (and also is not pedagogically sound according to this).

I immediately thought of an old favourite I have used for the past 7-8 years, Hot Potatoes, a suite of six applications “enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.”

Hot Potatoes, available for Mac, Windows and Linux is not free (but will be from September 01, 2009) however educational and not-for-profit organisations can apply for and receive a licence for free right now “on the condition that the material you produce using the program is freely available to anyone via the WWW.”

So we have used JMatch, JCloze, JCross and JQuiz this term as part of the literacy/reading programme. Students selected reading material based around our context of ecological sustainability, read and discussed the text, drafted and then created the hot potato quiz, published it to their eportfolio and then it’s ready for others to solve, including teachers, peers and parents.

Here are some to try: JMatch, JCloze & here, JCross and a JQuiz. The last example shows the flexibility of Hot Potatoes to embed web content, such as a YouTube clip, to add interest or for future projects where the quiz questions relate to the embedded content.

As we all know there are plenty of web based tools for creating similar puzzles and quizzes online and then linking to or embedding them in your site. However the degree of customisation you can have with a Hot Potato makes a great all round solution.

Admittedly, it is not without a few issues, the main one being that within the save dialogue box on a Mac, you can’t save directly to a networked folder. This creates an extra step when students save to their folder on the network. Also, making the files available to link from the student blogs, required the files to be FTP’d to a directory on our school’s web site due to our blogging provider, and all file hosting sites that I tried, not allowing .html uploads and links. Neither are big issues, but it would be great to see the saving and exporting directly to a networked folder, or even FTP’ing to a remote server, made possible.

Download it and give it a go.

Thanks to Frank who blogged about this funky little tool for creating photo galleries on your own website.

TiltViewer is a free, customizable 3D Flash image viewing application. A simple upload to your website and a quick configuration of your Flickr username and tags and you are all set to go.

Feel free to have a play on my gallery right here.

• Click images to zoom-in, click again to zoom-out.
• Move mouse to pan and tilt in 3D
• Click the ‘reload’ button (below the image grid) to load a new set of images.
• Click the ‘flip’ button (bottom-right of a zoomed-in image) to see image details.

Best of all is a right click to select fullscreen mode. Cool.

I feel a TiltViewer gallery coming to our school site very soon.

Timez Attack is the “ultimate multiplication tables video game” brought to you by BigBrainz.

Available for both Mac and Windows, you can download a free version to use or invest in the fully featured version or school wide licences.

Have a go and it is indeed a completely different way to practice your multiplication basic facts.

But to be honest, pricing at US$10 per year per 3rd Grade student (other grades are free) or a US$795 site wide licence for a large school, it ain’t cheap.

Wordle has been blogged about on almost every educational technology/elearning blog site you can think of. I wont go into describing what it is and how it works because that has already been done. Go here, here, here, here or here, to link just a few, if you are not familiar with this tag cloud tool.

Just out of interest I pasted in my eFellowship research plan with the following result. My purpose was to find out whether or not my core concepts would indeed be the words that were enlarged as their frequency assumes more importance.

Let’s look at the largest seven words:

feedback, eportfolios, learning, students, formative, assessment, teachers

With my research question being, What are the formative benefits of eportfolios? I think that these seven key words do highlight this and more specifically, the teacher‘s role and the impact on students.

All interesting stuff. It will be interesting to see what my literature review turns up when it is also pasted into Wordle. Will it compliment those key words above or contrast?

If you are a teacher or regularly run workshops for other teachers in using new technologies and software, you can be sure that you have spent hours putting together how-to sheets or screencasts using a variety of different tools.

Included are Apple’s well known screen capture keyboard shortcuts or Grab, or a selection of other tools including iShowU, Snapz Pro, the more Web 2′y tools like GrabUp, Skitch or Screencast-O-Matic.

Jing is another tool and a free download. It is able to capture your screen, or a selection, as an image or movie and upload them directly to a location of your choice for embedding in to blogs and other web pages, or simply to store online for future use or sharing.

The process is simple and with the concept of  ‘Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere’ this app certainly makes it easy…

1. Select the option from the Jing menu.

2. Drag the cross hairs to select the screenshot area. This is one of Jing’s best features – the fact that all of the selection box lines extend right to the edges of the screen.

3. Selection the from the options of image, movie…

4. ..and then annotate with text, arrows, drawing or shapes and select from uploading to your free screecast.com or flickr, ftp’ing to a remote location, saving as a file or copying to the clipboard. Further options include uploading to use as link (URL) or to embed in your blog, the option used throughout this post.

5. The file will then upload and inform you that the code for embedding on your site is ready for pasting in. Very handy.

It is as simple as that.

If you choose to upload them to your free trial screencast.com account (easy to create from the Jing preferences – no need to visit screencast.com) you are able to upload 2GB of movies and images and have 2GB of bandwith available per month. More info on that here.

I have found that giving teachers and students screencast how-to movies instead of paper step-by-step guides has reduced time spent on preperation for teaching these skills as well as reducing the time spent going over skills with individual teachers. Just make them easily available on the web available and remind people how to access them.

Rating:  out of 5

Pros: Free, integrated upload and embeding, easy to use, intuative, supporting website

Cons: Weird default ‘sun’ controller (thankfully you can change this to the input menu), no moveable (follow the mouse) movie capture