John Key came to Owhata Primary (Rotorua) on Thursday 12 March 2009. He spent some time in classrooms seeing what the children are doing with Interactive Whiteboards.
In the brief time he was in classes, he learnt how to draw, write, freeform capture, record himself and insert a sound file into an interwrite document. This shows how easy the programme is to use and how many skills our 6-8 year olds have acquired in guiding him through these processes. He was impressed with the level of technology these children were using.
A fantastic experience for our children and staff.
- Robyn, Owhata Primary School
I’ve hit the road again today, spent all afternoon travelling from Hastings to Tauranga. I forget how beautiful NZ is and its not until you spend sometime on the road and actually look around as you go that you fully appreciate the scenery.
But that is not why I’m posting today. It is the middle of the school holidays and I have Breathe Technology Staff meeting in the morning. I’ve spent a lovely evening with my boss, her partner a colleague of mine and the Easiteach trainer. More of that tomorrow I guess. Sometimes it is really difficult to get out the conversation about Education but we did hit upon the topic of internet dating.
From what we talked about it seems to be;
a) a) a lot more common now and
b) b) a lot safer.
I was wondering if that were true or not or whether it is just our perception of it? If anyone has facts and figures on such things please comment.
My other question was surrounding cyber safety and the ‘internet dating’ thing. I fear that the Internet-dating will be the sex-ed of the cyber safety education programme. I remember the thoughts of:
‘Let’s not talk about sex in the classroom.’
‘If we start talking about it, more students will experiment with it and we’ll have a bigger social problem than we already have’
So my question being where in the ‘cyber-safety curriculum’ does internet dating appear?
Below is the contents of an emailI recieved today regarding computer collaboration in the workplace:
Listed below are some applications of computer collaboration that I have been involved in.
1. Remote PC Control – Software Vendor Debugs their program – 1998
An engineering application was crashing unexpectedly. After going through all helpdesk options, the problem could not be solved. The software developers got involved to try and understand why the problem was occurring. They had not seen it before. The software developer was in India and had contacted me on a number of occasions to get more information.
In the end – a PCAnywhere session was set up so they could take control of the PC with the problem. This took about 5 attempts from my companies IT department to setup my computer with a static IP address inside the corporate network. Once it was set up – I was able to talk to him on the phone and demonstrate the problem so he could see it happening. Then I left him to solve it. When I returned, the problem had been found. It was to do with the NZ time regional setting that was at +13 hours (daylight savings) which was causing an overflow error in the code. We were the only ones in New Zealand using it which is why they had not seen it before. Note: during the time he was on the computer he could have got access to a number of detailed and sensitive IP documents – because the PC was logged on under my account. A certain amount of trust has to be involved. See problems section below.
2. Sharing a PC session – Software Vendor Debugs their program – 2007
Again, a software company (in Israel) was struggling to solve/understand a problem we were having. By using LogMeIn a session was created where we could work together to demonstrate and understand the problem. The client companies IT department needed to be involved as well – as security settings were suspected as part of the problem. Three people were able to share the same computer session. I was on a VPN connection using MS RDP in Havelock North, the IT person in Christchurch was on the same computer using DameWare. The software developer was in Israel was also on using LogMeIn. We were able to demonstrate the problem first hand. It eventuated that the feature we were using and having problems with was not widely used and I suspect not properly tested before release of the software. The software developer was now forced to release a new version since it clearly did not work. Because we had all people present at the same time, they could not hide behind a ‘try this, try that’ stalling tactic as is often the case with really tough problems.
3. Sharing a computer session while on the phone.
Applications such as DameWare, RealVNC and others can often be used to control the same PC and enhance an otherwise ‘voice only’ telephone conversation.
Problems
Problems I have encountered using computer collaboration.
- Time Zone – difficult with New Zealand in particular
- Firewalls, proxy servers, routers and other network equipment that gets in the way. Setting up a session can take a long time and involve IT departments – which makes it take even longer. Often it takes several attempts to get everything going. Companies are worried about compromising network security.
- Collaboration often leads to poor planning and understanding. People can become overly dependent on other people to solve their problems (i.e. quickly contact person xyz instead of nutting through a problem and learning the hard, but often better, way).
- For meeting environments (my experience is with standard multi-location video conference) communication style is often different than that for a traditional meeting. Normally paper documents, whiteboards, clear meeting leadership, body language and facial expressions are very important for complex topics and tricky negotiations. Things will no-doubt improve in the future as technology improves and travel becomes less acceptable because of cost and environmental concerns.
- Some breaches to company security policies are often inevitable as the ability to diagnosing a problem under ‘live’ data conditions is often the key to success.
In summary, I have found the best use of collaboration is as in the examples above where little bugs and other particular issues are demonstrated first hand, rather than trying to describe them using traditional emails. They can then often be solved right there and then.
Umajin is an innovative, easy, engaging application that has been introduced at the conference. It has been specifically designed to support digital storytelling and oral language. If you want to trial it you can find it here and I have to say I love it. Breathe Technology has negociated the exclusive training rights for it too. So if you down load it and you want some training just leave me a comment 
