David Hill is a wonderfully natural story-teller. He has just finished a series of visits to schools in the Hawkes Bay, finishing here at Hastings Intermediate .
I would love to tell you of the great tales he told, but I really couldn’t do them justice. He first tried writing when he was 16 or 17, trying to impress a girl. Then he leaves it alone for a decade until he finds some old notes he made…. Now 23 chapter books later and still writing, in fact we were honoured with the first public reading of his, yet to be published, next book.
If you ever get the opportunity to invite David Hill to your school, take it. He is well worth listening to.
I began my first day at my new school today. Every Wednesday I will be working with some students in need of assistance with their writing. They are a great lot and I had a fun day, but that is not why I am posting.
At lunchtime today some Japanese students from the International Pacific College turned up at school and blessed, and blasted, us on the Taiko. These were fantastically talented students who had been playing for between one and four years. There was a audible ‘Wow!” from the audience when the answer to “How often do you practise th be that good?” came back- “Twice a week, for 3 hours.”
These students are dedicated and talented. What a treat. I managed to take a few pictures and a short video (60 seconds) before my memory card was full- doh!
I was privileged enough today to observe a music session with some Intermediate students. I call it a ‘session’ because it felt more like a session than a lesson, with students recording tracks, dubbing, mixing, jamming and rehearsing and not necessarily in this order.
The end product apparently is still 2 weeks away. They will be recording their own version of ‘Hotel California’ or some such.
The teacher was clearly a talented musician, but then so were many in his class- Vocalists, bass players, guitars, drums to name a few.
I can’t believe he handpicked his class and pulled out all the ‘budding musicians’ from the year group. This is much more a powerful demonstration of the passion of a teacher impacting on and inspiring his students.
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.
I have been really finding the teaching of oral Language skills difficult over this term, particularly in the ‘using technology to enhance…’ sort of way.
But today I was teaching in an Intermediate (Y8) class today in Hastings, New Zealand who were working on ‘projects’ on oral language-
One group was practicing and a play, another looking a Shakespeare’s Macbeth. But the group I was most interested in were considering Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. They have to go on Youtube and listen to the footage then they accessed the ‘script’ via the web.
They had to identify the techniques MLK used in his speech to connect with the audience and then answer some questions independently.
David Hill is a wonderfully natural story-teller. He has just finished a series of visits to schools in the Hawkes Bay, finishing here at Hastings Intermediate .
I began my first day at my new school today. Every Wednesday I will be working with some students in need of assistance with their writing. They are a great lot and I had a fun day, but that is not why I am posting.
I was privileged enough today to observe a music session with some Intermediate students. I call it a ‘session’ because it felt more like a session than a lesson, with students recording tracks, dubbing, mixing, jamming and rehearsing and not necessarily in this order.
The teacher was clearly a talented musician, but then so were many in his class- Vocalists, bass players, guitars, drums to name a few.
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