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

Today was the day for two training sessions.

Firstly, I ran ‘Digital Storytelling" workshop, sharing the online platforms of Voicethread, Teachertube, and Slideshare.

I always enjoy running these session because I find teachers bring just as much to a session as I do. We began a voicethread… My first really proper one and it is oh so basic but I am hoping that others whole attended the session will be adding there thoughts about it. The cough at the beginning of my talk is not me but an attendee who shall remain nameless.

Cliotech was good enough to allow me to share some of the input from her slideshare .

Second up was Stop motion animation. Some folk from this morning stayed into the afternoon. We played around with webcams for a while and discussed the usefulness of animation creation to support not only the literacy programme but also it solidfy learning in other areas, for example creating an animation to illustrate life-cycles in science. We even had one uploaded to www.teachertube.com by the end of the session. It’s entitled "Mr Mouse" Enjoy!

ps. It was also great to know about a couple of sound wikispaces today. One of the attendees has been struggling with establishing her class wiki on wikispaces. I would have loved to sit down with her and assist in creating her class wiki, but that would be another 3 hour session so I pointed her in the direction on Wonderfulworldof.wikispaces.com and encouraged her to look through the material there before she gave up. Often I find its better to have the pointers than to be able to ‘Fix it’ then and there. Thanks Chrissy

pps. Thanks Derek for sharing this . What a powerful illustration of Storytelling in the 21st Century

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?

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

The Place of Most Potential

What does it look like?

Kevin Rudd  is just throwing digital whiteboards at secondary schools, this is a good thing. But so much is dependent on the teachers involved. Some boards are going to be used well, some are going nowhere. It has nothing to do with the board and everything to do with school.

Some research stated (could find the source sorry) that ‘Technology made NO difference to student learning’ . Peter said that if we as educators are going to challenge this statement then we must address 3 key issues:

People.

Video- Escaslator. The biggest constraint is what people think they can and cannot do. We need to invent the new teaching. Those who invent don’t get stuck on the escalator. Blockers in a school are not blockers but they which remain unconvinced. We must not label people blockers, they are interested in teaching and want to know how technology is going to help them. They are the ones which challenge our own thinking, causing us to justify why we do what we do with technology.

Pedagogy.

How we are doing the teaching and learning. If a kid is going to read then they read. If a teacher is going to use technology they need solid blocks of time to USE technology.

NSW Quality Teaching ,

Productive Pedagogies,

Principles of learning,

Authentic Pedagogies.

Can we generically describe both inspired and terrible teaching- technology is simply an amplifier- good GOOD, bad BAD.

Quality discussion- Teacher asking questions of the students, Students questioning teacher and student to student- How you get this is to give incomplete information- make them ask questions. High level of ambiguity . Raising significance. Content can move around and be more child centred (everyone is interested in themselves) Personalizing the learning contexts, and Differentiation.

Technology.

What technology we use? IWB are the place of most potential. IWB are the bridge to make other technologies to work in the classroom setting.

Paradox of choice

“ When you look about the variety and depth of the presentations available this morning we really are competing with the Interactive Whiteboard conference in Australia, so thank you to those who put up their hands to present this weekend”

I am honoured, humbled to be working with such a humble company and such a fantastic group of educators from around New Zealand. Sometimes I think we don’t give credit enough to the teachers throughout the country who are impacting so positively in students lives.

Rest assured I did find Allanah. Though the arch, turn right and she’s staying at the AMBASSADOR!

What a great session chatting first thing this morning. Can’t talk about the content… We’re all under gag orders but just to say it’s IS good to talk and share our experiences and thoughts.

Thanks for breakfast. We should do it again….. In fact we should all ‘do’ breakfast one morning, maybe at ULearn.

I would like to say what a good time I’ve had here even though I have been stuck on my ’stand’ for large periods of time. I have really enjoyed talking to folk and appreciated the fact that so many of you stopped to chat. Note to self: I just need to arrange for the stand to be a little closer to the Blogger’s Cafe and I’m happy.

Podcast :  On the Road