glennmalcolm
The EdTechLounge's Tumble Log
Simply that
9 posts
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Last Seen Blogs
euejc
제목 없음
deansonofabitchwinchester-blog
Dean SonOfABitch Winchester
warrenkavinsky
Warren Kavinsky
desiree610
Not Much To Say
bigreddad
Perverted In The Heartland
Text
Professional Learning for Future Readiness
About a 3 minute read.
What is on The Horizon within the Professional Learning Space for Educational Technology?
Modernity in the technological sense is such a movable beast that the age of an application, process or piece of hardware has a lifespan of around 2 years before a newer more socially connected version takes hold. In educational cirlces this timeline is somewhat longer.
To this end, we all carry with us between 1 and 4 constantly updating devices to divide work, play, entertainment and other digital lifestyle corners of our lives. This may be a phone, laptop, tablet, watch or fitness tracker that have similar lifespans. The newness of our personal devices outstrip what we use day-to-day in the classroom. This has always been the case, yet nowadays these are increasingly becoming attached to us and smaller still in the form of nanotechnology.
This inter-device refresh is a relatively new paradigm with as many pluses and as minuses. One major aspect for teachers and students is how we understand the seamlessness of how this hardware ‘talks’ to one another and how one piece of media interacts with the software across all the others. This ‘talk’ is of great interest for me. As for all of us with a multitude of linked devices we are creating masses of ‘talk’ in the form of data points that lives in various guises. How these devices interact with one another is called interoperability and as our students get older, their understanding of this process is paramount in terms of this inter-device data transfer that carries their identities with it.
Reading this, you may reflect on your own arsenal of technology and ask ‘how is all this interlinked?’ Some of you may already know and utilise this data to embetter your family’s lives. The Technology Department, on the other hand, is exploring data as a mode to streamline a school’s day-to-day processes with an eye on successful interoperability of sotware and hardware.
The outcome from a recent meeting made me reflect on this general understanding of data flows within school because a key phrase in educational technology that is taken from broader industry is something called ‘Future Readiness’. Just how ‘Future Ready’ are our classrooms? And, looking into how we can manage and simplify data streams in school is one of those ideas that can be applied to the likes of assessment and ‘on-demand’ target setting.
This data management brings me full circle to my role at Patana. If we are not exploring the future possibilities then how can I offer a learned answer as to what is current? If we haven’t explored the cul-de-sacs as well as the roads to success, how can we know how data interlinks? How ‘future ready’ are we as a community?
Understanding Interoperability Allows Creative Freedom Regardless of application or platform
Lately, educational technology companies and the education branches of the big tech firms have all built very solid accreditation services and qualifications with different creative pathways. Over the last few years at Patana we have focused on the Google Educator Certification and across the school we have seen 26 staff members achieve level 1 with 4 of us at level 2 , 1 as a Certified Trainer and 1 as an Innovator. This year we have a huge boost with a further 19 signed up to become level 1 by Christmas - the largest cohort so far.
The process this year is to set clear targets for technology advocates as well as those with an interest in educational technology to achieve accreditation in one of the 4 strands below by the year’s end. How can we achieve this? We will have a rolling programme for staff to attend both for advocates and interested parties for the 4 main areas:
Google Certified educator Level 1, 2 , Trainer and Coach(numbers above)
Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE & MIEE (MIE Experts of which Patana has 2)) and another 5 signed up so far this term.
Apple Teacher (currently 4) that utilises the #EverybodyCanCreate resources in iOS and iPadOS with another 3 this term in primary.
Adobe (3 and an AEL: Adobe Education Leader). A further 3 signed up this term for Adobe Creative Educator.
The interest is growing at a fantastic pace.
In the primary school there are also individual programmes for Seesaw where Ambassadors lead the use of this data-rich platform to provide intrinsic support for all staff.
For what purpose do these qualifications help Patana, the staff and the students?
It all comes back to data, interoperability and ‘future readiness’. All these programmes are designed to be used on multiple devices across the age ranges on different platforms and for different audiences. Therefore this level of cross-platform use requires teachers to test their knowledge and understand the best methods of application within the classroom. It also trains teachers to re-evaluate paper-based resources, digitise them and bring collaboration to the forefront alongside the likes of automation to individualise learning journeys.
The other long-term goal would be to use the outstanding professional learning resources from Microsoft to bring the number of MIEEs to such a level that Patana can apply to become a Microsoft showcase school. This would be an almighty milestone as it would mean we would be the only school to have achieved this in Thailand. With the school’s recent investment towards Data Insights we are in a very positive position towards bridging the interoperability gap and bringing the understanding of future readiness to the fore.
0 notes
Text
Oculus Quest - Room-Scale VR For Schools - A Full Review
Since the original Oculus Rift was launched several years ago, I was converted to the use of VR. There was so much potential out there for VR for the forward thinking technology departments to drop into. As I learned more about the modification (or home brew) scene in VR I was hooked on the Oculus Rift Developer kit - even when there was only 4 degrees of movement and the tethering of the HDMI cables meant you were attached to a laptop or desktop and usually seated because there wasn’t and Z axis tracking.
Then came the addition of things like VorpX. This allowed you to take a first person type environment and then transpose it into a VR game. Driving, roaming, exploring and being part of a game became a truly immersive experience. I loved it - even on the mediocre screen back then.
Then came all sorts of varieties and news in the tech media of what was technically possible - Leap Motion was one of the main ideas of this time - the mapping of hands and limbs within VR. There was a very positive outlook for VR back then. Then came the HTC Vive. Wow. A standing, ‘outside-in’ trackable environment that ran on a beefed up PC hardware pushing the realms of a not-too-distant future of VR for the masses. Along with this came the Leap Motion clip-on module, the additional ‘pucks’ for tracking and backpack PCs for untethered outside in tracking.
A little back story: the phrase ‘VR for the masses’ has been around since the mid-nineties when I remember seeing an advert for Sega and Nintendo VR. The snag is that VR has been around a while and the mantle for which VR type, style and format is best. The real bone of contention is, if it’s for the masses, then it really needs to be pared down because not everyone has a PC with a (now aging) GTX 1080 to provide room-scale grunt for their VR realms and the floor space to create the ‘Guardian’ that is required for room-scale VR.
The pared down version comes at a cost to the user, I feel. Namely the appliance-like nature of the device so that the mass-produced all-in-one case can provide a three-click platform: turn on, choose game, hit go. The appliance also pares down what the ‘user’ should be able to do. I find that this channels the user into what the appliance’s designers want you to use and how you should use it. Think of it like an IKEA type VR. You shop at IKEA and all you can do is trundle through the alleyways following the arrows pointing you to checkout and exiting with items you never came in for. The format and style of current titles is also of a low poly nature, that to be frank, surely cannot keep going where every title has the same blocky nature.
That is where I feel we are at with the Oculus Quest. This takes the room-scale usership to a simplified level - albeit a well crafted one. Unlike the IKEA analogy, the Quest is very well built, offers a robust material set and has very ergonomic controllers that offer a some hand tracking that seems (at the moment at least) to halt at finger pointing to turn switches on and off in-game. Here the Quest’s controllers are AA style removable batteries. Knowing how fast the Vive’s paddles are depleted I think you’ll be looking for something like Sony Eneloops to get all-day longevity out of these. The same goes for making a hack for the headset’s USB-C battery bank connection as I had gone through half the battery in about an hour of intermittent use. In school though, I think most tech departments are looking for internal rechargeable batteries where a power bank can be USB connected and recharged.
The well-built nature of the headset means that the phone-like innards (Qualcomm 835 (3years old equivalent to a Samsung Galaxy 8), Adreno 540 GPU and 4Gb RAM run the device pretty well. The heavy coating of the Quest, combined with the screen means this thing is pretty heavy on the face after about an hour. Other people have said they get tiredness around two hours however I have a gigantic Roman nose that felt like it was supporting the entire thing after a while.
When you put the headset on, I like the way it recognises the headset is on your head and uses similar sensors to that of the eye-piece of a digital camera to turn the LCD off and turn on the viewfinder. This presents you with a lovely screen and decent adjustable lenses to view content. The controllers are simple to find (they light up on screen when the headset is on which is a nice touch) and the pass-through camera lenses on the front of the device also highlight the controllers which is similar to the more high-end Vive where searching for the controllers/ searching the room is needed.
The interface is simple and has a store that seems to be filled with large number of apps and games (50at present). Now, I was expecting a lot more from this section for both apps and games. I was kind of expecting something similar to the Oculus, Vive and Steam stores. Lots of people have said that this has plenty of games starting with 50 for this specific Quest store. This is where people get a bit miffed in terms of ‘content’. If you are a Steam user then you know that there may be 5,000 games and apps in the store, yet there will only be around 10% of those games that have good reviews or good enough for you to start there. Then there will be only about 30% of these top rated games that are to your taste and of those about 10% are affordable. I think you get what I mean here, there are only about 5 of those games that I would like to play yet this is not what I’m after in this instance. What I'm after is creative or story telling experiences that wow the user...
You see, the apps needed in a school are creative, world—builder type apps that put the controllers front and center and the device set to its limits. I want it to allow me and my students to create and build something then export it somewhere to be used elsewhere, say, in TinkerCAD and 3D print it. There is only Tilt Brush by Google that I can see in the Oculus store and this was $30 (around 1000thb here in Thailand -that's way too much). TiltBrush on Steam for the full version on the Vive is much cheaper. Also, I say ‘full’ because there is no way that this phone could cope with building the scale of the models you will end up creating and exporting from a whole class - especially if you are making a walkthrough gallery of models.
The next part is looking for experiences for my students because the creative angle is blocked within a single mainstream application. I looked for video and 360 degree environments either from YouTubeVR or from sites that offer the experience from the site itself. In this regard, I tried out FirefoxVR - this has potential however as of yet there’s not much difference to a phone VR experience. What I wanted in this realm were the types of environments such as Allumette that guide you in room-scale via sound or trinkets and want to immerse you within the story itself. No such luck. Maybe there’ll be some ported over.
I also searched for apps similar to Google Expeditions, Google Stories and places to build or explore such as Museums. Sadly there isn’t really anything that stood out as something I would use a Quest for in my classroom other than what I have used previously with Android phones and Google Cardboard (or Cardboard-like headsets). These offer the same experiences as on the Quest for students that teachers always ask for, and, more importantly class teachers need to be able to search for content to splice into class projects. Having Android phones as your class set of VR devices also allow you to log into a single Admin user on the Play store and wirelessly push out the apps to each of the phones.
The other snag I felt that limited the use in the primary classroom especially is, should you work in a large school such as mine (8 form entry and a total of 2600 students from 3-18), having just one Quest in class, where usually two lessons of specialist provision or eight classes are running simultaneously, how can you reasonably use something like Tilt Brush, Blocks or should it ever arrive: Co Spaces, and include all children. In my school I only see the children in the 16 Junior classes once a fortnight for an hour at a time. It would require 8 devices per class set minimum with a teacher’s unit to get close to coverage.
The next item to think about here is the overall cost of a class set of Quests versus a class set of Android phone based class sets. Even if it was a set of 6 Quests, these 6 a need an additional phone for ownership for each seat in the app store (or users in the Oculus store per app per device) after the initial $500(+pp +duties) each. (The ones we have are 128Gb models the 64Gb models are $400 each) - that makes a class set cost of a minimum USD$3000 (for the models we have) before shipping and import duties.
Compare this to my previous set up of:
13 Xiao Mi Red Note 6’s with jelly-like cases =13 x S$230 (2017 models) = S$2990
2019 Mi RedNote 7 (3Gb, Qualcomm 632, 6” , 4000mah, ) similar pricing here
14 iamcardboard headsets (spare included): 14 x S$ 322 + S$50 shipping
6 Anker 10000MiA battery packs = 5 x S$55 = S$330
14 Sennheiser HD202 headphones (spare set) 14 x S$54.99 = S$769
Grand total for 1:2 class set of VR headsets: S$4488 = USD $3243.48
We can easily skin this total down by not purchasing battery packs or the Sennheiser and only buying Apple style earbuds ( I prefer these hard shell earphones for their durability). Cheap copies are available on the likes of TaoBao, Ali express or Lazada for a lot less. However, for this comparison, I’m going with the Oppo/ Huawei standard 3.5mm type that come in at S$19.
13 Xiao Mi Red Note 6’s with jelly-like cases =13 x S$230 (2017 models) = S$2990
2019 Mi RedNote 7 (3Gb, Qualcomm 632, 6” , 4000mah, ) similar pricing here
14 iamcardboard headsets (spare included): 14 x S$ 322 + S$50 shipping
14 Oppo/ Huawei earbud type earphones: S$19 x S$266
Grand total for 1:2 class set of VR headsets: S$3628 = USD $2619.42
With import duties and shipping, the Quest set works out roughly the same for a 1:2 class set (our classes are capped at 24 children ) of devices that, in my experience are simple to manage and above all else, provide a bookable resource of mobile devices that are not locked down in the same way as the Oculus Quest and provide all the functionality of a phone: video, stills, editing, QR and other apps too. The locked-down nature of the Quest where there needs to be another phone attached with a person’s Oculus account to release the developer mode really is a bind that you don’t really experience on Android devices, nor do you want to experience this as a class teacher with your students. Unless, of course, you have a teacher cohort at your school that frequently flash custom Android ROMs on their devices. However, I doubt this very much.
The thing I’m going to lead onto here is that the need for another phone’s Oculus app to pair the device for the Quest to enter Developer mode really is a step too far by comparison to a standard mobile phone for general class use. This enhanced mode allows you to you sideload apps from your Windows computer which, as a stand alone R&D device is perfect. The real stickler here is twofold and this is part and parcel of it being a great R&D device for honing staff member’s understanding of what technology is just around the corner. What I’ve learned from this type of R&D is that when single units like this are dropped into classrooms they spark so many ideas and lead-in for new wild projects or add-ons for already outstanding projects. What they don’t do is shape the current use and ready-planned resources within a school, the working, easy-to-use devices do this. The Quest is a fabulous device for future planning and aligning budget cycles especially if you run a 10% R&D already or are about to.
The two fold nature of this device is that, yes, you can mirror your computer with Riftcat and run Steam VR from here. However, I found it sketchy at best and, in school environment this has a ‘faff-to-success’ ratio of about 2:10 which, is how I found the HTC Vive originally but the ideation that came from that HTC and all the teachers who used it was astounding. The other issue, and this is a big one in terms of school use, is the tethering of the Quest to another mobile phone with the app on it. This makes it instantly a 1:1 device or in an environment such as a school is a put on/ pull off situation where there is limited time to actually make anything, say an .OBJ, for something such as Co-spaces a very tricky thing to achieve with a large proportion of kids younger than 13 or 14. Time constraints and, subsequently the exclusive nature of the device is difficult to bring into a specialist lesson. An all day round-robin cycle of activities that had this as a 20 minute building set would also hone the ideas for what we can do with the class set of Android phones for VR. The bigger social issue with this is that a single VR device, while that one kid is using it everyone is looking at that one kid wondering what the hell they are seeing. It is possible to cast the screen to another computer however, again I found the picture quality contained a lot of artefacts that may have just been the setup of our school network. This was certainly the case for streaming Steam content and to remote desktop. The ‘faff’ scale was hockey stick shaped with this endeavour.
Back to the tethering. This is mandatory for developer mode (why this isn’t a toggle on the device to begin with I don’t know as it’s an eight tap sequence in Android settings) which in turn is needed for the creation of the business account at Oculus.com. Once this is done, you can install the ADB drivers, Powershell script and then you can add other free VR apps from the Sideloader platform. As a serial tinkerer, this had me very much tempted into the ‘what if...? idea stream in my mind’. I was thinking along the lines of ‘what if we can build something and export it. Can we make a simple video compilation or edit game streaming as stories” for example. As it turns out, not really, maybe we will have this soon. Remember, the original Rift was like this and the Quest is a similar informant.
Now then, the Sideloader games and apps... as with any communities such as this, you need to be sympathetic to the wants and desires of devs and tinkerers, and the unstoppable desire for nostalgia. I’m talking really about the porting of games such as Quake into a VR headset such as the Quest. Sadly these don’t really work, but the desire is there to produce these kinds of channels for once champions of the gaming world. In fact, I’m still searching for a port of a game where the parabolic head movement combined a similarly moving horizon doesn’t induce instant nausea. On the other hand, these kinds of apps and games are for niche elements of school life and are a far cry from being useful for the layman - such as the painting polygon app in Sideloader. It’s an early start, yet these are not built school use in mind.
The final note here is to do with the trajectory of VR for schools versus the path VR is taking. The types of kits and the resources that are available for schools is fantastic. Something so simple as the Tuscan villa or Google Earth VR is an exceptional example of how children can be inspired to write or experience a scene that inspires other aspects of our curricula. Google Earth VR has a real Gulliver’s Travels feel about it. The snag is, harking back to the phrase ‘VR for the masses’ earlier, means that the likes of Facebook need to earn back their investment and to gain a profit by securing users to a platform. And to do this, they need to make the devices locked down and appliance-like. The games need need to be just that, games where eyeballs are on the screen as much as possible and to serialise these mini franchises. Google Earth et al is not going to do that job. Ever.
In essence, schools need to think and research very carefully how they are going to incorporate these types of devices into classes, to include as many children as possible because the learning experiences to be had from VR, as much as I’ve experienced with my classes, provide a primary source knowledge base for nearly all students, that has an outstanding knock-on effect, especially in areas such as creative writing and as I mentioned above, ideation.
0 notes
Text
Believe Me, This is Clickbait: Should Students know the difference between the effects of Mandela and Meme?
"You are young yet, my friend," replied my host, "but the time will arrive when you will learn to judge for yourself of what is going on in the world, without trusting to the gossip of others. Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see. Now about our Maisons de Sante, it is clear that some ignoramus has misled you." -- The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether Short story by Edgar Allan Poe 1845
History repeats itself in a way that the meaning behind the latest educational buzzwords seem to as well. One week its paradigm shift the next it’s collaborative learning. A teacher friend of mine told me that collaboration and the term ‘collaborative learning’ is a misnomer because we’ve been collaboratively learning for millennia. And, I suppose we have - cavemen, while they weren’t exactly pack animals, wouldn’t have tracked and killed larger, tastier and more agile animals alone without the inherent fear of being a raw and bloody garnish themselves. Much like the traps they would have set wouldn’t have improved over time without discussions on how to improve the efficiency of the kill or the depth of the hole to entrap the beast. However, what he really means is the term ‘collaborative’ is misplaced in today’s digital context because of the use of ‘real time collaboration’ as compared to synchronous and asynchronous protocols of, say, Docs Vs Email. Or, on the network drives we’re still using in 2017: editing files one. person. at. a. time.
Much like this little history snippet addressing technological conventions old and new, current affairs (the news - fake or otherwise), has, ever since moveable type became popular in the 18th century, changed over time ( in the Chinese timeline even more so). Not so much of course, in its purpose more so in its delivery. In some way or another posters, articles, flyers both on parchment and now direct to your feed in the palm of your hand, have tried to persuade us in as many ways as possible in some form or another. All the time mislaying fiction as facts much like Dr. Billy Bob’s Snake Tonic of 1912: “Gives you a boost to see the day through!” In 1912 it was probably the cocaine in Vin Mariani that gave you the boost.
Its modern equivalent has a very sharp blade in the hands of creatives who’ve honed their skills at the school of Ogilvy and Mather et al ready to carve the easier, if not the easiest, meat in existence. If you teach primary school children as your profession, one of the merits of good poster work is to persuade you to understand something to almost believe it regardless of your original stance. One thing to remember here is that no matter how much you call yourself a ‘free thinker’ you’re not. None of us are. Take a general understanding of global warming melting the ice caps to the point where individual pieces of ice are floating about with a sole polar bear atop this ever decreasing island. You know this imagery. We all do. Thank you Al Gore. How inconvenient is this if you’re trying to get your students to critically question headlines when the imagery is so much stronger? Is it deliberate trickery to induce a Mandela effect?
Should Students know the difference between the effects of Mandela and Meme?
Schools should teach children how to spot fake news. How very modern. One of my earliest memories of making persuasive imagery at school was one about not smoking and the other was on the effects of acid rain across european forests. Now, there are merits in both of these posters that, while they both are there to do good and teach the evils of the world to eight year old children, the sentiment behind both can persuade people to adopt the opposite of the message in hand. With selective imagery, careful copy and a poignant, catchy tagline the semi-believable becomes fact as if Groundhog Day shifted to April 1st. You, too, will have made something very similar when you were at school while still innocent and malleable enough to get fully behind the not smoking lark and thinking acid rain was about to decimate that apple tree at the end of your garden. It never did. Clever marketing and that human urge to be attracted to knowingly dangerous activities still led me to take up smoking at fourteen; I still touch wet paint. Mind you, I still ride my bicycle to work because, you know, fossil fuels and my love of apples. And, should you have had the gall or the wherewithal to question such ideals, then you would be quickly put on the right track by your teacher. Today you would be lambasted online as a denier much like you would have if you were a Christian in Rome 2000 years ago.
You see, both posters, while there to represent my understanding of the persuasive genre in the English language as a year four student, have this strange synchronicity that only now as I reflect as an adult can trace the routes back to their origin: advertising campaigns from the tobacco industry to make a few million bucks; the other a governmental campaign from lobbyists aiming to make a few million/billion bucks. And there we were blindly emulating the ‘facts’ in a similar medium to an already believing crowd from a very select source - our school library. The books of which were sourced by people who in turn were there to get us to emulate the ‘facts’ ad infinitum. Sound familiar? It’s a modern set of social networks in microcosm. At our school today we have 50m x 2.5m wall hand painted by street artists in a similar vein to those posters I made when I was eight years old except this time it’s not acid rain it’s drilling for oil in the Antarctic in 2041. However, is this just raising awareness for kids? How much will they take in? Will any of them, come 2035 think “wait a second. There’s 6 years until the Antarctic is about to be handed sole sovereignty to the oligarchy, I should do something about it!” It’s more likely they will be a cog in the machine and the organisers of the 2041 project would have disbanded ten years previous; their pensions paid for by the numerous speeches and school visits dried up in 2025. Our students can question this type of preaching however compliance is so much easier. Sometimes school less thinking and more thought.
All this sounds like the 2030 agenda for sustainable development set out by the UN which in turn sounds like Agenda 21. In the classroom it doesn’t take that much effort to guide students to search a little deeper and more precisely. Search techniques are becoming more and more important in the EdTech curriculum and beyond. Please, if you get you and your students collate your news from theGuardian.com or the BBC, cross reference the articles with Russia Today, Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, NY Times, the Washington Post or NHK to see how the stories differ from sources with different advertisers. Each one has a different narrative to protect based on who are are the main sources of income. This is especially important where search is involved for any students Key Stage 2 and above.
The modern equivalents of this process are prevalent in ever sneakier ways. And, while this post may get a little political in places, it has a very distinct reason because quite often the article you’re reading is, unbeknownst to you, sponsored by a very large company who’s name is synonymous with spreading broader memes and, sometimes, have very dark methods of operating (Compare Hollywood and the recent spate of terrorist's videos for example: make believe is the core model - have you seen Wag the Dog?). One of these companies for example is The Clinton Foundation (here at the bottom via Adage). And this brings me to the first modern mode of duping our everyday student (and teacher) reader or viewer: Native Advertising.
Do Our Students Know What Native Advertising Is?
Native Advertising is, for a teenager (that 13-18 bracket) and slightly beyond (18-30 too) where advertised products mean something to them as they hold social status. Take for example one of my first jobs in a school in Sandwell (the Black Country), UK. At this school I was a P.E. teacher in a relatively rough area of the Midlands. On day one the kids eyed me up and down trying to size me up to the point I was told ‘at this school we beat teachers up’. Delightful. Another lad, who had the same ‘close talker’ syndrome as Judge Reinhold’s character in Seinfeld, was several inches from my face and about to tell me (while at the same time I thought it pertinent to explain the virtues of dental hygiene) what he thought of me when he spotted my Nike Air Max 360s, stepped back to admire them and smiled. Then it was the turn of all students in the class to regale how they owned blue ones, the red LE versions and every kind of Nike Air variant for the last eighteen months. I was set. And this is the point: We’re easy prey. All of us. We believe every story that we read and hear of the artist wearing the Air 360 Limited Editions and how he or she made it to the top of the charts and then the associated links are made that the two are one of the same ideal.
The groundwork for this process of advertising and public thinking begins over a hundred years ago with famous versions such as the one for Guinness by Ogilvy. Copy cats drilled down into what worked and what didn’t and here we are - links to pages that describe experiences with carefully entwined text containing the product’s name that reaches many more eyeballs than TV and radio ever did. And that’s the crux of the matter - the methods have pretty much stayed the same but the medium has changed. The snag is, nowadays the medium is ever present in our lives because it’s constantly in our hands from inside our phones. And, it’s the same for every child who has one too. More importantly, as our example above illustrates, this is the most impressionable market to educate and understand how advertising works in the modern age.
Is there a solution to this? Yes. As any top bracket football team knows: Catch 'em early. And I mean really early, like Nursery age early. Children of this age know boundaries of what affects them directly. They know if they are getting a raw deal - just watch them react if you tried to tell them that a piece of artwork on the wall is named with someone else’s name in the class. Now, you try selling the idea that it should be Arlo’s name on that artwork over Sophia’s or marketing anyone’s name on any piece and you’d have a mutiny on your hands. If you took this further and had an ‘Editorial’ from the the headteacher selling the virtues of a new policy of ‘free naming’ all work on the wall and see what would happen. I bet you’d get some very precise language from children who are usually typecast as finger painters explaining exactly why the product have transparent ownership.
"It’s no great mystery. It ain’t like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. (Although BuzzFeed is kinda like the Bermuda Triangle of the internet.) Clickbait works because it (a) appeals to your lizard brain and (b) tickles your innate desire for curiosity." -- adespresso.com/
Do Our Students Know What Clickbait Is?
In a similar vein, clickbait is as instinctive (persuasive) but a way more impulsive process. The heading, title or thumbnail of a link is such that its sole purpose it to generate clicks or advertising revenue by misleading you to believe that there is something else to be gained. The way to think about this in an educational setting is with the persuasive language of not just posters but product packaging and understanding the age-old trick of product placement. Kids understand this only too well. Remember kids TV? Remember the targeted adverts around holiday season with those catchy tunes. What a way to learn about why this is made in such a way and why it’s on the TV at this time of day. The music, the colours, the taglines even. They’re all crafted to close in on what children of a young age are naturally and psycologically geared towards. A carefully planned couple of lessons would take, what? An hour each? Scale this over a few year groups and you could be onto a winning formula to combat the deliberate enticement of advertisers and, in some respects, steering them away from Buzzfeed’s nonsense and their kin. The whole project could be making games out of those list links and ‘Why Kardashians use coal to brush their teeth.’
The added problem is, of course is that I think our attention span has shortened. I mean, I have no proof of this except a little search here and there and I find that that I am searching for my own answers that suit me. I am merely watching my own habits over time, applying them to my habits now and comparing (amplifying) them to a teenage student. I think that if students do something similar then they might fall into the same trap. However, I look at my own trajectory in this digital age and find that my reading, my viewing and listening habits have all changed dramatically in the last 10 years. No, this isn’t age, creeping up on me, this is where my job and hobbies cross over. I am in front of (probably the main cause) at least two screens from morning till evening. I bet you are in a similar situation if not for work then without knowing it at some point in your daily/weekly routine. Do you have a phone? A smartwatch? A TV? Games console? Etc, etc… The screen list is extensive. We are all bombarded with content from our screens all the time and our students are no different. The list of items that digitally capture my attention in the last ten years are this in a roundabout list of time taken to use them:
SMS (in the early days this took a while if you all had beepers)
SMS between 2 to 30 mins
Email - it took an age to sit down and compose an email.
Facebook (the introduction of streams)- it used to take all my time up - 15mins +
Instant messaging - 3 seconds to 5 mins if in group chat.
Youtube (Russian Dashcams and Lastweek Tonight notwithstanding)
Reddit - swipe to clear function renders posts be gleaned from 2 seconds to 5 mins.
Twitter - 140 characters.
Instagram - can consume 30 mins if you’re dawdling about. But to post, 2 mins.
Snapchat - for the 8 second generation aimed at kids.
And I think we’re there. Eight seconds seems about the average time it really takes to skim a post, the related hashtags and gauge the viewership. Has it had the right number of reposts? Likes? Eyeballs? Did it have the right appeal? Was the camera set at 45° to hide the imperfections? Hell, even as I post this I’ll be sure to look over (and lament) over what I could have written better. Then I’ll put the pomposity aside and write something equally annoying probably about Apple and their mom-friendly ‘Clips’ for iOS because, you know, the older generation needs to be saturated with eight second sound bites of flannel too.
This is all part and parcel of the clickbait posterboy lifestyle and it’s one giant plug hole that honestly, our students need to be directed away from at a very early age. The tech for building and creating imagery is in their hands - it just needs a curriculum to demonstrate how the two worlds are inextricably linked and how one emulates the other. How is this proved? The changes in attitudes to recognition and their status online is a huge factor. The fear of missing out is a somewhat real thing because nobody advertises their life as an out of control downward spiralling mess on the public loudhailer that is social media. If you’re 13-24 years old (and younger of course) then there is no way that you are going to be doing this. If you’re in this age bracket then you want to have some kind of popularity in your circle of friends and, online, beyond into some kind of Instagram/ YouTube navel gazer. This recognition of ‘being there’ (basically saying, you’re not so try to one up me/us) is evident in recent purchasing trends. Younger people are apparently eschewing products over experiences. And there we have it, we’ve gone full circle on the customer being the advert themselves - Katharine Hamnett will be proud.
Students know the game, they know how it’s played therefore it’s high time to put this into a format to learn and teach from. The problem of course is that teachers have no idea how this works and this is the new frontier of tech in school. Tech in school is no longer about the device or the app it’s about the quality of the content and the psychology behind it.
As Poe once wrote “you can only believe half of this [post], unless someone speaks it to you, then you can’t believe it at all.”
0 notes
Text
Why is iPad is no longer the king of 1:1 devices?
The iPad. In 2010 the iPad was the revelation that educational technology sort of needed at the time - think about the devices we had at our disposal. It was the book-sized iPhone/iPod Touch that allowed us as teachers to allow students to document learning in a way that laptops could not. The rear-facing camera alone was the gateway to many apps that allowed students to create, edit, produce and share learning to a stream (social or otherwise) of choice. The speed of this process was astounding to many who had been using PCs or Macs to record learning. Remember, the device of this size at the time that would come close to similar portability was the dieing and quickly defunkt netbook (intel celeron, 2Gb RAM, 180Gb HDD in a 10” form factor).
Since then, the iPad has gone through various iterations increasing to the Air 2 and now the Pro. We know the benefits of the Pro: Pen enabled, four Speaker setup and a keyboard dock. The Air 2 is no more as of March 2017. In its place there is the remaining iPad Mini (who in the hell uses a Mini or even iPod touches any more?), the Pro and the ‘iPad’. It stands alone as an amalgamation of the original Air and the innards of the Air 2 - it’s a step backwards in terms of what I would expect Apple to offer in terms of choice for Schools considering their constant marketing.
If you look at what this newer version of the iPad is though in terms of the education market, what the iPad has actually turned into and how we are using them, the price point makes a little more sense. However, if you are a teacher or a tech leader in your school/district then you know that this iPad makes actual little difference unless you have a BYOD/BYOAD (bring your own advised device)/school-owned programme.
The problem I have with this iteration is the lack of keyboard dock and lower grade screen. Why have Apple not put a dock connector on it? Well, they want you to have the perception that the lower cost is a bargain at $110 per year (we run on a 3 year life span or planned obsolescence 3x$110=$329 MSRP). This time Apple, this is not a plan I want to engage with for several reasons.
That screen. The original Retina screen became a laminated and glare resistant beauty. This allowed students to read text for prolonged times under classroom strip lighting with ease. The resolution is the same as any retina however we all know that not all screens are born equal - that coating made a difference.
Keyboard. Want to secure a place at the wider education market Apple? Then offer the keyboard dock. We can’t continue to use on-screen keyboards that take up half the screen while menus take up a top third. That 9.7” screen is almost obliterated. And yes, Logitech et al may make a fantastic few Bluetooth keyboards but this adds another cost. And bundle the goddam thing with it. I mean the iPad keyaboard is no great shakes to type on but it is far better than an on-screen version taking up half the screen.
iPads are fast becoming single use devices and Apple knows it. This is why they are try force us to buy into the Pro lines of iPads.
Apple classroom is a maelstrom of protocols that shared devices don’t need to go through. Offer multiple logins from the ‘swipe to unlock’ screen that offers access to apps each user/students/teachers need without the need for a teacher’s device to control this or to jail break them.
Apps. There are 1.1Million apps in the App Store that are iPad optimised. Let’s be honest here and say that maybe 20 or so are ‘Core’ apps for school and the rest are niche for specialist learning.
Apps 2. The other side to this coin is the basic apps list that families with children have or older parents need to remain in contact with their grand children’s development: Mail/Gmail, browser, iPhoto (maybe Flickr), Google Photos, Netflix permanently on Kid mode and possibly a shopping/A.N.other app. Thesa
The death of multi-use iPads. This is where the iPad comes to see out its time as a computer: the single-use appliance. The iPad, as you may have seen in many an outlet (mine was at the hospital two weeks back) where an iPad has taken the place of an everyday item: Kiosk, A/V outlet or controller, menu and ordering device, voting device such as toilet cleanliness voter or other convenience where paper or a resistive screen was once being used. A terminal neither intelligent nor dumb.
So a rethink of the use of the iPad has prompted me to really question and evaluate the actual use within school of the iPad and is it really the actual device we need for us to be 1:1? We also need to evaluate the effectiveness of the apps being used and can they be supplied by another OS?
The reason I am questioning the iPad is that we see that it's not going to evolve much more than it is right now in any short timeframe. After seven years the thing has only just acquired a stylus/Pencil, a few speakers, fingerprint reader and you still can't use it like a regular desktop, no matter what the marketing will have you believe, it’s certainly time to look at a much broader more innovative picture beyond a solely mobile device.
What are the pros and cons of the iPad as a 1:1 device? Well, portability is one massive plus. The camera is the single best attribute. AirDrop is a Godsend when we need to transfer masses of video during film projects. The App Store is another bonus especially if you're after a creative outlet to maximise the camera or quickly document something. Art and music are a fantastic combination on the iPad and there are a slew of apps that can facilitate this. However, that's about it as far as I can see and, in a primary school, we need a see all, do all device due to six specialist and four core curriculum areas. And, with the exception of iMovie and GarageBand I'm stuck as for what else we really need it for. Hence this huge rethink.
Let's take a look at the things that we need the iPad for that are unique to the iPad: iMovie, GarageBand, Airdrop and few iOS only apps like Paper53. However, for every Paper53 there's Wacom Bamboo, Adobe or an AutoDesk thing. So that's about it. The Pencil has its competitors in the Surface/Wacom line and now the Chromebooks from Samsung and the functionally these new styluses offer wipe the floor with Apple’s single use stylus. The App Store argument hits a wall because, well, Windows Store isn't going to get busy with mobile/ touch- friendly apps any time soon (just dig two layers down into Windows 10 and you soon hit Win XP menus) and with Android Nougat making its updated guidelines for App developers to focus on larger screens for Chromebooks, I'm afraid it scrutinises Apple’s pertinence for the education market even further. The new NAN (Neighbourhood Access Network) protocol (a sleeping giant of an update) means that the AirDrop argument is no longer strong enough. Even Windows is struggling with this one even though pairing is kind of working for anything other than Windows Phone OS.
iPads, much like Apple’s laptops/desktops in schools, prestige only pays for prospective parents’ eyeballs as they walk around school. They see the logo glowing or gleaming from the backs of them and it shows that the school must put technology high on the agenda. This is no longer the case - it only means in the current climate that money is being willingly being thrown away where, it once had a strong argument due to ease of use and processes such as AirDrop. The iPad (Macbooks too) now have serious competition and I think that the once scoffed at Android/ Chromebook combo is making a lot of ground.
0 notes
Text
Everything STEM. Do All Methods of Learning to Code Require a Device and an App?
Coding in schools is big business. Everywhere you turn there's a STEM organisation vying for your attention alongside Barack Obama himself. With STEM, or it’s brethren, STEAM, covering all bases from ex-MIT students and employees through to a multitude of KickStarter campaigns it seems that if you have an idea for children to learn to code you'd better get busy and sort your Chinese manufacturers out, STAT.
STEM + Device. What's the real goal?
With this influx of coding opportunities for educators, parents and children alike, there's almost always a 'thing' attached [a ‘thing’ in this case is defined as an attachment by which the application that controls it makes the money]. If your product doesn't have (and I need to try to differentiate this from Nursery ages and up) an iPad 'thing' to connect, a wooden 'thing' to control, a blue plastic 'thing' to program, a stand alone robot 'thing' to learn from an app (though not strictly coding), Raspberry Pi 'thing', another Pi 'thing' or the many, many, many Arduino 'things' that range from the brilliantly simple to the absurd then children will simply not be able to learn to code in the way POTUS once directed. Then there's the premier league trio: WeDO, LEGO and Tetrix. All Hail!
Something’s not quite right. If your students are learning about instructions then all is good as too, if your students are below seven years old. But what about further along the track? If you are learning to program, do you need an attached 'thing'? LittleBits for example, lets you work only on the 'thing' because it is the thing.
What I really do like about these ‘things’ is the engagement they offer. What I don't like about them is that there is usually little to no support for the average layman teacher, the expectation that you 'just gotta tinker and you'll understand’ and, in some of the cases, where to give a class worth of kids the experience of 'hive' learning, they are exorbitantly expensive for what they really are. And, if you want to be trained or a club for your students, then you'd better be prepared to fork out a lot of cash for, in my experience, very little in return.
This is an age old situation though: have idea, prototype, build, take to market and sell to an education department of unsuspecting heads of school for an unnecessarily high uptick (TTS Bee Bots for $70+ we're looking at you). The other side to this is that the coding aspect to them is now 'appified'. Appified is a disgusting term however needs must.
Apps for this, Apps for that
There's an app for everything. I understand that control is necessary for these types of devices. However, the snag is there is another fork to this dilemma of learning alongside these devices. The fact that many now come with a game. It's almost as if, collectively, we assume any child can't learn nowadays without instant gratification within a linear trajectory. There are a number that fall into this kind of trap. It's also happening where learning programming structures natively is becoming a game too unless it's a Scratch-like platform and even these are being morphed.
The apps usually work a little like this: offer an example of a few steps, child copy steps (no or few deviations) and then, if it's correct then a bell goes off or an animation lets you know you're a winner or loser. This is also happening on Hour of Code. It's nice to dip your toe but the learning beyond this is thin. It enthuses our students however, wouldn’t it be great to have a Khan’s Academy type approach minus the app and let my students work in the browser.
The Walled Garden
Nothing is more prevalent than this is Apple's Swift Playgrounds. While I really like how enthralled our kids are with it and, if you have an iPad, then it's readily available. The problem is that it's Apple's ecosystem and that tight grip on what you can, can't and how you're allowed to do things is there for all to see. I find the learning path to learn programming is basics is patchy.
Questions I always ask every time I look into Swift Playgrounds are: Can you do this in the browser? No. Can you freely make errors? Yes and no. Can you fix errors? Sometimes. Can you make your own fixes? Sometimes. Does the learning progress depth and breadth in equal measure? No. Do I build anything ? Not really. Can I learn loops? Yes and no. Can I freely apply these loops? No. Well yes, if I complete the game and open XCode. When do I learn how lists are applied? Right after the exhaustive learning of nested loops. Is this the right spot without allowing me to apply in my own way? And, can I make an App directly in this?
If you look here at Touch Develop you can use all languages in one place all in the browser. You have tutorials and, you showcases of other designs and builds to edit much like in Scratch. Wouldn't it be nice if Swift Playgrounds was like this?
It is this aspect that is rather frustrating as a teacher of computing and IT. The unifying problem with coding like this in schools and education as a whole is that it has no real goal or end product beyond something akin to a high score. At this sort of level of understanding, you would want your students to apply their own thinking to a goal, say, a simple game with scores and an array of non-playing characters.
As we know with successful apps such as this is that they are copied and replicated with little change to the outcomes. Children still plough through them thinking they're coding when in reality they can't apply this area of learning to another level of logic on another platform - seldom have I seen a child move from this to XCode smoothly.
Appification Versus Open Standards
I think the level of learning to program and build simple algorithms is lost because of this as children have some level of expectation that the app, whatever it is, will guide them from A to Z and kind of do it for them. And, sometimes with an arbitrary score along the way: Well done, you've won a badge for making Mr. Blob move forward and turn through an orchard seven times.
The gold standard here for primary aged students is of course, Scratch. We all know and love Scratch. It's based on SmallTalk an open source platform and it remains open because its very foundation is to 'remix' whatever you create - whatever you make is open by default. There's a version 2.0 that is web based making it immediately linked and cross platform. There are open plugins for devices. There's even Scratch Jnr. on iOS which has one tiny foot in my gripe above (however this is not as guilty as that Daisy programming app for the under 5’s). It's just a shame that the original Scratch 2.0 is built on Adobe Flash/ Air. Nevertheless, its level of accessibility is very low and its level of complexity can be very high (Universities edit the source for robotic control).
It's accessible for one reason and this will fire a few people up: You explore based on an introduction by someone who has previously used and successfully built with it. As a seven to ten year old it’s extremely rare for a child to just discover it by chance. If you did then you were already looking for this kind of thing and all hats off to you - we need more of your kind! If you are at this age and you 'just found it' then I'm intrigued as to how. And, that person who introduces it shows you, nay, inspires you to try out a series of loops and controls to make a sprite around a screen.
Beyond this, Scratch has a fantastic help section (and community) that guides you with a vast array examples. Want to build your own Pac-Man? no problem. Want to build your own version of Minecraft? Then start that journey. This is how it works for the large part and without an app to offer you a badge, score and yeehar along the way.
Sonic Pi
Programming Music
There is, I believe, a third way though and that is Sonic Pi produced by Sam Aaron. Sonic Pi is a fantastic platform for coding music, and not just plinky plink piano synth stuff, real live and in time beat and melody mixing. It too is open source, available on most platforms (no mobile just yet) and is based on assisting children to try things out for themselves with text rather than blocks. The syntax is basically Ruby and the console you type into recognises grammatical errors should there be any. The saving grace here is that you have four areas in front of you and one of them is an examples and working glossary section all written in jargon-less support. An ‘Runtime error’ tells you what and where the error is. And, should you be mid mix, then it continues to play the musical loops and doesn’t just stop. And the premise? If a ten year old child can’t understand the individual processes (just like Scratch it can get very, very complex but each part is very accessible) then it doesn’t go into the next update.
The way Sonic Pi works, is that you code music in real time. You can be as basic as you wish. There is not real formatting rules as such. You could, as in Scratch, make very lengthy strings of instructions to make a musical algorithm. It may look completely bonkers, but, as the opening splash screen points out ‘there are no mistakes, only opportunities’.
The real selling point of Sonic Pi is that it codes music IN TIME. This is huge. The mechanics behind this is kind of lost on the layman, however the timing aspect of this is the reason it actually works. Just think about a MIDI keyboard and its scale. Each key is numbered and the numbers either get higher or lower. Musical notes do the same. When you play each note is up to you - this is time. How you do this is up to you, your mood and, as you sell your final album to go platinum, your hopes, dreams and fears. I jest. However, even as your first production piece ends (it may sound like Ross at Central Perk) you will have something approaching an accompaniment.
Where Sonic Pi differs though is how you code. You code beats and samples in time making live shows of coding. This is completely different to nearly any other type of programming. Think of a programming sequence that is not HTML or Javascript (HTML is not strictly programming) as you can see this in modules such as web emulators or something like Mozilla Thimble. With these languages you have to build then hit run and see if it works. The end result is one of three things: it doesn’t run, it runs but has errors strewn across it or it runs. You don’t run the code and see it actually working or in this case, hear it working. You physically play the code. This is a magnificent method to help kids see, hear and learn to code through text because they are free to type without being disappointed that their code is broken… for the third time this hour. This is the App-less safety net of discovering. No high scores. No badge-like fads and no bling, bling doo dads.
As and teacher and leader of technology I firmly believe that the STEM wagon is bloated with money grabbing devices. They are synced to game-like apps that in the long term apply little to no success for children to understand programming practices. And these practices require a blend of self discovery, support and rote learning. I understand the benefits of inquiry based learning and the merits it returns however, in this realm, you, as ‘guide on the side’, had better know what to do when that app can’t provide that solid goal the children are seeking and teach how to program the behaviours the device requires. Because, if you can’t support in this way then you are either resigned to allowing the children to use it like a remote controlled toy or quickly move on to something more in-depth. Tamagotchi, if you remember, was a passing fad but then Barack didn’t globally address it.
Be inspired and watch Sam live coding.
0 notes
Text
Sonic Pi - Making, Mixing and Live Coding Music
"Two performances did seem to transcend the present, with artists sharing music that felt like open-source software to paths unknown. The first, Sam Aaron, played an early techno set to a small crowd, performing by coding live. His computer display, splayed naked on a giant screen, showcasedSonic Pi, the free software he invented. Before he let loose by revising lines of brackets, colons and commas, he typed: #This is Sonic Pi….. #I use it to teach people how to code #everything i do tonight, i can teach a 10 year old child….. His set – which sounded like Electric Café-era Kraftwerk, a little bit of Aphex Twin skitter and some Eighties electro – was constructed through typing and deleting lines of code. The shadowy DJ sets, knob-tweaking noise and fogbank ambient of many Moogfest performers was completely demystified and turned into simple numbers and letters that you could see in action. Dubbed "the live coding synth for everyone," it truly seemed less like a performance and more like an invitation to code your own adventure." -- Sam Arron @ MoogFest 2016 via Christopher R. Weingarten Rolling Stone Magazine
Music. Code. Art. Sonic Pi is all of these.
Sonic Pi. What is it? Where can you get it? What can you do with it in your class?
Get it here: Sonic-pi.net
Sonic Pi allows you to make music with code. It's a seriously simple peice of software (to begin with) that allows you to program loops and samples all in time with one another. It also allows you to keep things simple by emulating musical scales either with midi or regular notation. The way you expeirience it should not be how we think about traditonal instruments it's way beyond a single instrument with a single range of sounds. You pick up a guitar and you pluck the strings, then you press down on the frets and the length of the string that you re-tune defines the sound that comes from the strings. This is something you can do in Sonic Pi however Sonic Pi goes way beyond this.
In a nutshell, you can mix samples, live mix samples, splice sounds, edit them, bend them, break them and reattach all while keeping each 'Live Loop' in sync. This is the big deal: it's all in sync whether you are using a BPM counter or the rhythm of the sample you're using. And, if you're making music on a Raspberry Pi then you can pretty much make an accompanying video in Minecraft. Amazing.
The session I'll be leading at Fobit 2017 is an introduction to what is possible using text to code. Sadly, we were not able to get Sam Arron himself (@SamArron/ @Sonic_Pi) the creator of Sonic Pi over or his counterpart who I saw live demonstrating at Bath Ruby, Xavier Riley (@XavierRiley). Alas, we tried! Even so, we have people here who are ready to run additional workshops, Sam's write-up in MagPi Sonic Pi Special Edition and attendees to produce fine, fine tunes and compete too.
The main reason I like this is that Sam and his team specifically laid out the vision for Sonic Pi that if an addition to the application was beyond the understanding of a ten year old child then it was not to be added. As a tech integrator in the primary school this is, quite literally, music to my ears. We have been after a text-based language to peel our kids away from Scratch as I feel we use Scratch to death. I also feel that there is a lot of learning that takes place in coding that really has no real goal attached and Scratch can fall into that category pretty easily. Where as Sonic Pi doesn't. In order for Sonic Pi to be successful there needs to be an instructor present to guide students towards their goal. Scratch can be a little wishy-washy at times unless there is a very specfic goal such as producing game or animation (minus that Cat or its ilk!).
So what can we do with Sonic Pi?
The beauty of Sonic Pi too is that within the application there is jargon-less support and tutorials all the way through. Heck, while I was running the session for FOBIT, Tine Pendred from Garden International School, KL tweeted Sam with praise and for support. He tweeted back with directions on which tutorial she needed to sync buffers!
This session was by no means a masterclass and, when you are being watched while typing, it's rather off putting to the point where I forgot a load of syntax and my code didn't play. The competition got people motivated and the chance to win an Rapsberry Pi 3 meant people took this seriously with great results.
Several people from the conference have taken this on where students are using soundtrap to collaborate and build their musical creations from there. You can hop on over here to see what Jonathan Kitchin is doing with with his classes and their soundtrap project.
Below are a few of the links I posted out including some very basic level intros from a guy named Dave Conservatoire, the most amazing Bath Ruby set and walkthrough by Xavier Riley and, finally a live set by Sam Arron.
Enjoy.
0 notes
Text
Using Flipboard to teach Minecraft and other things
Contemplating the idea of how to refresh the resources we have in school, it dawned on me after a short conversation with Jay Atwood at the Singapore American School, that with the creating of your own magazines in Flipboard could be the solution I've been looking for.
Flipboard has been around a long time and in mobile only format until recently (they took the unusual turn of going from mobile back to the web) when most people think that the web is on it's way out. Hell, some folk even think that the browser is on its last legs. Well, that's been a long poke in the eye of IE anyhow.
View my Flipboard Magazine.
If you're not aware of what Flipboard is, then I'll quickly elaborate: Flipboard allows you to curate content much like a magazine for RSS. Excep there is no RSS to control you select content like you would have in the old days via RSS and read it later as it updated. Instead, the collection is based on topics than actual sites. This gives you a flippable magazine of content you want to read on your phone or tablet. Simple, right. You choose and a collection of articles appear.
View my Flipboard Magazine.
As Flipboard evolved, you could search before long and Flipboard began to add features such as custom topics and-the-like and then, the newest of features was a make a your own magazine (this has been out a while now and not really the newest at all!)
The nice thing is that the people you follow in your network of teachers et al are can now be followed on Flipboard. Many of these people make smaller curated magazines and some with original content of their own. This content can be drawn from all over: other social areas like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc and individual URLs.
It's this custom URL addition that makes it really handy for a teacher to build their own magazines for any topic they desire. Flipboard has its own online editor at editor.flipboard.com where you sign into a 'dashboard' of sorts and rearrange tiles on the page. The tiles being the pages of your content.
The real beauty of this is that you can do this live while the students are in front of you. It's a bit like Nearpod except the presentation is a bit more organic that Nearpod's ultra linear feel. The tiles you can see below are in lesson format. The '1' you see is the introduction to Ancient China topic and the inventions the Chinese founded many moons ago. These lesson pieces can be swapped out to suit the classes or the students you are aiming it at. You could divide this up into different magazines for groups or even as a research exercise prior to the topic.
Lastly, to make these numbers I simply built a doc on Google Drive and made it publicly available after 'publishing it'. This turn the doc into a webpage for the public URL to be added to the Magazine. Swapping out the tiles and rearranging them made a chapter by chapter magazine.
The other nice thing is we can use this for parents too. Many of our parents want something quick to browse that doesn't necessarily mean logging into the school portal. This is a handy way of sending the info to them without having to resort to email. We even successfully used it as part of a CPD exercise.
View my Flipboard Magazine.
0 notes
Text
HOW CAN WE TEACH CODING THROUGHOUT THE PRIMARY SCHOOL?
After Reading this article by Marc Scott entitled: Kids Can't Use Computers... And why It Should Worry Tree House TechYou, its caused me to sit up and think a little bit about the state of what computing I've really taught and how to quantify it. An excerpt:
"Windows 7 and MacOSX are great operating systems. They’re easy to use, require almost no configuration, include or provide easy access to all needed drivers, and generally ‘just work’. It’s fantastic that everyone from the smallest child to the eldest grandparent can now use a computer with absolute minimal technical literacy, but its also a disaster. It didn’t used to be like this. Using an OS used to be hard work. When things went wrong you had to dive in and get dirty to fix things. You learned about file systems and registry settings and drivers for your hardware. Not any more."
According to Ian Livingstone (and any teacher who teaches ICT) there are all manner of abilities, experiences and modes of technology that children bring to school. They know how all the peripherals work and if they don't they soon learn from their peers of it's basic operation. They are expert consumers of technology as we once were. But this is the key aspect isn't it? They use technology but they don't know why or even how it really works.
This cauldron of one or two aspects of technology though that has been bubbling away for some time now and that is something akin, if you will, to consumerist coding. A platform of any kind that allows the average person to pick it up and build. This filtering and approachability, much like any aspect of tech, reaches out to inquisitive minds and especially kids. This is where it's our job turn these consumers into creators and support them in designing and building something fun and meaningful for them - much like Marc is atributing to.
In January 2012, I think Neil Lynch (an ex-colleague for ICT in Vietnam) and I had been teaching coding in various forms to primary aged children for about 6 -7 years and it was a key moment (it wasn't really a key moment but it's hit an apex somewhere) when Mayor Bloomberg announced his new year's resolution was to learn to code. In that time I think we've both been collecting links and resources to allow our classes to create with code. And, in that time our bookmarks folders have been overflowing.
Much like yours I am sure, my bookmarks folder for links to coding aimed squarely at the 7 -12 age range is now full to bursting and there needs to be some kind of scaffolding within this menagerie of Apps, kits and platforms so that we, as tech leaders, can cherry pick and run a series of lessons and projects. In this collection I am going to outline a series of resources and within that try to stick to my old ethos of 'free for all'. Although, I am of the opinion that supporting those who create these amazing applications deserve recompense and I, personally don't mind forking out for a paid service, when it comes to offering this to parents and kids free is usually a healthy way forward. More-to-the-point, your school may not be anywhere near as well resourced as others, say, in the international community or after school club where class numbers are lower and there is an expectation that additional payments are the norm.
I will apologise up front that some things are paid for and my ethos that 'free is sometimes better' and I'm staunchly in favour of Open Source but where we sometimes need a 'straight out of the box' lay persons piece of sotware we have to pay. And pay through the nose and more often by each user. But, where possible I have stuck to cross-platform variants as we need to set homework tasks and not everyone is stuck in the Microsoft rut. Also, I'd like to think that if you're reading this then you too are of a broad mind and don't want to repeat the atrocities handed to the curriculum way back when. But I digress...
So, to begin.
Infants or Ages 5-7.
This is where I'd generally start with the logical processes of instructions and directions, then on to basic loops and repeats and then onto 'if this', 'then that' type understanding where remote control within code really turns heads. I would begin with mini robots (like these Bee-Bots and the accompanying Apps both for windows andiOS) first then progressing to simple in-game situations and backed up with role-play.
A nice idea here is using mini mobile phones (such as these from the same company. And no I'm not sponsored!) and something like Facetime or Google Hangouts so, while you're on the 1st of second floor of your building (or back in the classroom - best if you can see the outbound group below and them not in ear-shot) then you can direct your children around the a series of obstacles (P.E. Barrels, hoops, quoits etc) in the playground from up above. If though, you're a single floor building then, as long as you're connected in some way you can communicate via iMessage/ Chat on the iPads/ iPod Touch. The great thing about this is it can be turned into an amazing treasure hunt via the IWB. The Facetime chat (iPad/ iPod/ tablet screen can be displayed via Apple TV or AirServer or even ChromeCast (if you're on Android) if you have them already onto the IWB allowing the whole class to mark their preemptive directions correct or not. Corrections can be offered over WiFi.
The purpose of this is to talk about directions and instructions with 5-7 Year olds. The video allows you and your assistant (who is with the group outside the classroom) to hold up the 'Left, 'Right', 'Back' and 'Forward' cards (that you can actually buy along with the Bee-bots) so that the children in the classroom know what you are doing and what they are marking. Did they take the correct turn? etc.
This leads onto directions with the Bee-Bots or Pixie bots (if you have these still?). The great thing about the Bee-Bots is that this 'Remote-ness' of letting the robots 'go' and following their instructions can be incorporated into other areas of the curriculum with ease. And, the maps for the children can be made into anything. And I mean anything. Take a look at what we made with them this year...
Onwards and upwards. To take this a bit further within Reception and Year 1 we can create some abstraction to it is to offer some free and paid for services that allow the children to use the computer or iPads and actually input commands and program a sequence. I've seen a great way to make the children think about what they're doing before they run the program and doing the 'old hit 'n' miss dance'. Use the language 'Command' and 'Run' by wearing 'Commander' and 'Programmer' hats. It alleviated a lot of tension in the end and promoted discussion especially where the heavy-handed boys are concerned. Trouble is in a couple of 45 min. lessons it's a bit of a chore to get them to adhere to bringing them along. But I'm sure you'd have another solution - coloured/ traffic light fans might work I suppose.
1. Tizzy's Toybox is aeons old and still allows kids to control the clowns (any kids in your class afraid of clowns? Head on to the next offering) to collect the fruits from the garden. Simple and differentiated for Reception age. It allows kids to add the blocks for Tizzy to water the strawberries in different squares.
2. Charlie Chimps Modelling Party is a great place to get some programming done. It's actually a favourite of mine and the kids too. There are settings galore (a royal pain if you teach lessons back to back) so the groups can be differentiated and you can assess easily with a simple traffic light system - even on large numbers of students.
3. If you have students that struggle with these two options then NGFL make a series of flash animations that, I have to say for $50 (35UKP) for a full suite of resources not just EYFS, allow the children to use and record instructions (You'll need an assistant for this one) by sailing a boat. It's not strictly programming as it goes on instruction at a time. But this offers a solid stepping stone to the Bee-Bots (as these CAN work one step at a time!
The great thing about these two apps is that they are easily adapted with key questioning and honing of skills as a whole class. This is easily a term's work and I used to run this in the term running up to Easter and then just after Easter as a refresher. Much to the chagrin of my assistants! All good fun though.
Next, Year 1. As always a refresher. We found that running the above sessions were, not only re-using a great resource and was fun, but as the children are that much more mature are able to cope with turns. Some of you might say that directions are kind of lost on Reception aged children and certainly this conversation has been raised many times with my assistants and class teachers. I would like to point out that when you're teaching in Asia in an international school setting, I find their general ability to grasp these concepts is several stages higher than that of similar aged childen back home.
An aside here: I've seen many children pick up the Bee-Bot and, while following the track they have made with the obstacle course and pieces pictured below, have programmed the directions into it and set it off without any mistakes. This was at the end of the instructions unit and the children were very familiar with the robots. But, they do get it. And with squeals of joy when it works!
iOS now has a plethora of simple programming apps for children to have a go at in much the same vein as the Bee-Bots above. Of course TTS make their own but these are good free and paid for options. I have used these and below I offer a quick review of how I rate them in terms of classroom use and not personal, sit with your own child type of view.
1. Daisy the Dino:Daisy the Dinosaur
Game -like and very much with the children in control. Easy to assess as you can grade the kids based on where they are at. Then, on the IWB, the kids, after one session, can't complain with who they're grouped with. I would do this in pairs (if you have the devices in these kinds of numbers) else make it a bit of a competition on your tables in your classrooms. The controls are much like Tizzy and Charlie Chimp. They nice thing about this is that the controls also mimic Scratch and it's brethren: Hopscotch, Kodu (to an extent), Bloxer (have I made this one up?) and design blocks. Also, later on I use Sploder as a homework task
2. Hopscotch
A great app. A great introduction to the way Scratch works and in simple to speak syntax. This is the killer aspect about this mode of programming is that you can speak the code in simple to understand English. Hopscotch goes a little further by kind of reducing the options and making it somewhat more accessible to younger audiences. It also adds friendly sprites much like Moshi Monsters. A differentiator too for Year 3 and Year 4 classes for those kids who can't quite grasp the abstract-ness of it all.
So, Year and Year 2 depending on where you want to introduce programming. Scratch as we all know is great in that you can make pre-made templates of any size and proportion for short focused tasks. At this stage, making things move and paint on the IWB in large denominations causes side splitting hilarity. Especially if a flashing cat is doing it on its own no less. It enthralls the class immediately.
Where I've fallen down in the past is allowing them to blast away and dragging and dropping and seeing what they come up with. I find this has mixed results. We've all read about the teacher who says "Allow them to discover the controls. They teach themselves!" This is code for something I'd rather not repeat here but when unleashing them on this automated paint-a-thon. Give them a guide sheet, video or pictorial. They may only look at it twice but there will be more kids thankful for it then you realise.
The lovely thing about this is that it differentiates very, very easily. You're in control.
Alternatives to this are: LOGO, Star LogoTNG (not really suitable for Year 1) and on iOS there is Hopscotch, Move the turtle (reviewed here by Wired Magazine's Geek Dad) and Kodable (Pro version too).
LOGO (built in 1967). LOGO is fine for simple shapes, directions, repeats (complex shapes) and a history lesson of when we moved from green (orange?) screens and beyond CRT but by comparison to the Scratch introduction and subsequent follow-ons it doesn't hold a candle to anything any more. Sorry LOGO. In my day it was the bee's knees and me made all sorts of things like this and this and, even music. Nostalgia. But, there is a iOS app for it to carry on if you so wish. Available here. It's actually not too bad.
3. Kodable is a great way to mix and match with Daisy the Dino in terms of game style learning and Kodableabstract programming (that moment of 'let it run' that sometimes kids don't get). Kodable is also of the Tizzy's Toy box style that can reassure the children where the program runs from left to right instead of front-facing like the TTS Bee-Bot and the lesson-ruining moment when the robot is facing you and you need to re-teach left and right all over again. Kodable is geared towards teachers too with a helpful guides and resources that get you started. The only thing I didn't like about it is the App's polish. I'm sorry guys but unshaded elements and standard gradients give it a basic Flash game feel. As a classroom app for 5- 7 year olds though, purchase.
4. As a bit of fun and ending with some game elements I love Tom and Jerry's Trap-o-Matic a gentle nod to programming and can also reverse the transition and start your topic off with this as the WOW! factor.
On to Juniors and Years 3 to 5
I'm going to leave Year 6 as a separate group as I tend to find that the ranges in mathematical ability and scope are far reaching where kids are capable of regular Year 8 and 9 levels in a few cases. What this means is that your differentiation can be off the scale especially if you have SEN, ESL or you're part of an inclusion programme. In which case I've found in the past that spending a few hours over a few weeks with my assistants teaching them how to code simply
Within the Year 3 to 5 age-range
At this stage I think it's apt to think about mid-range LEGO programming and Pro-Bots where respectively you can build your robot and run a mechanism and with Pro-Bots you can make your mechanism draw with a Berol marker akin to LOGO commands on large A1 sheets of paper. The great thing about the Pro-bots is that the software, as with the Bee-Bots, is pretty robust and this allows you to download the instructions to the pro-bots and run the program.
The big downside to these are the costs involved. LEGO education packs are astronomical in price and the Pro-Bots' batteries whittle down in a matter of sessions. Get these batteries from SONY if you're serious about these kits. Regular rechargeables don't cut it where classes amd kids are concerned.
As a fun way to keep the programming and instructional aspects going at home and to keep in touch with my game-based methodology are these two gems:
1. Light bot (light bot has been around ages both online and now on iOS as a paid for and free version). It's a bit of a cheek to be asked to pay for this in my opinion as it's been around for so long. But then, hey so's Sonic and SEGA are still milking that cow even if emulators do just as good a job.
Light bot is great in that the commands are simple, the character approachable. The only downside is that the jumps in ability from stage to stage can be somewhat erratic. But, then that's half the fun. Send the links to parents and have a show and tell after the weekend.
TIP: if you're sending SWF games home as links. Remove the adds like this tutorial. Else you could have irate parents knowking onyour door come Monday!
2. Differentiation on this theme for the less able is to offer the classes an introduction with another olde favourite:Colin's Coffee. It's simple, effective and has variables within a very easy to understand theme: making coffee. A three step process of design, process and output and easy relay to whole-class or individuals who need support. It does cost though and is part of the simulation series of NGFL. As above it's about $50 a year. Worth it though especially for the Year 5 RPG game resources alone, i think.
3. Crystal ICT (Rainforest V2). Some people may groan at this and others may say it's a simulation rather than actually programming/ computer science. Well, yes, I agree with you all and it's a valid point but my goal here is to offer a broad cohort of children a chance to access and excel at programming hence the scaffolding in place.
Crystal ICT and the similar variants offer in-game (instant feedback) environments and it packs in several options not just the simulation but LOGO in a graphical format that you can set from teacher options. It's a touch expensive as a site license but per child is relatively cheap.
At this stage I like to keep things very jokey and fun. It's important not to ostrecise the girls in this arena and I feel that the slew of robots and their ilk turn the girls against coding in their droves.
So, we like to create scripts for the children to animate characters over a pre-made mp3. The end result is theCake or Death lego animation sequence from Thorn2200. Now, a word of warning here and a disclaimer: We don't mention Eddie Izzard, YouTube or anything related. We also have a separate clip and script ready made for the kids and we tell all parents that we are doing this well ahead of time. All we use is the stand alone film and .mp3 rip of the script. This so that they don't go off watching material for a more mature audience.
The parents find this hilarious as do we and the kids. The end product is a coded animation of their making that uses the sequential purple blocks text and the blue movement blocks.
The project homework that lasts 3 weeks is something we call "Boom Chikka Chikka Boom" and is an animation of their vocal performance. Like this:
4. Towards the end of Year 3 we introduce 3D game making in Kodu. It's very simple and free. This is only a taster for the following year and nothing is assessed. The reason for this is to show that there are many elements to coding. It isn't all pretty blocks and this scratches the itch for something a little more concrete. What we do is purchase XBOX controllers so that they can input commands with something other than the keyboard and mouse. It's also a promotion for after school Game making club to get those who are serious about learning coding to create with other like-minded children.
By the end of this year the children should be able to tell you about a sequence of events where they may not be ale to use the terminology of "if this then that" but in their own words explain a process of making things happen with keys and buttons. They should also go so far as to explain by how much which, in essence, is the beginning of variables.
With the release of iOS Scratch clones and to enhance the children's understanding of events in their creations I would now offer the Dynamic Art app. It's in need of a few tweeks here and there but once Dynamic Art (Scratch Clone)the children are familiar with the way that Scratch works in class then they can revise their learning in Year 2 and 3 with this app. It's free and paid for.
Year 4
Now the real fun begins. In the past we've touched on sequencing text, colours being effected by hitting other colours and sprites and now we are ready to go further with true control.
In Year 4 we like to mix and match the 3-D and 2-D with Kodu and Scratch. 3-D is optional for lunchtimes whereby they replicate their learning of the Pacman in 3-D. It's a but like Wolfenstein minus the gore. We set them off with a simple maze building series and then as they understand the walls' colours are the parameters and, also, the next level triggers this is where we introduce broadcasting - a very abstract event to a 8 and 9 year old child. We role play this first by pretending to telephone one another and telling them to do silly rhings. But, it's a very big hurdle to traverse especially as the next level in Year 5 is making a platform and/ or side scroller.
This year though, I am very interested in getting more children on board with this abstractness by utelising Makey Makey. This, I feel, would help hugely in allowing children to understand how the inputs really work. And they make them as you can see in this video.
The next stage, if we had the staff to help out with would be to use the Kinect and build some games where there is an Augmented Reality element to it. But, I feel this is some way off yet.
Game homework I set for the parents to help out with their kids at home is a game called Robozzle. It uses functions as repeaters and it promotes the thinking of parentheses in mathematics. A great game but still a little too boy-ish for my liking.
Makey Makey
Year 5
Year 5 is by far the busiest year in ICT and it's where I like to really push kids with their thinking. We run 4 major projects (Imaging, Media, Presenting and Investigating and Control leaving modelling to Year 6) interspersed with in-class projects too. I usually set a homework task with each project so that by Christmas they are usually prepared for a coding project. In Year 5 they are expected to finish any projects at home so it's quite important to have a cross-platform application at hand -this is why Scratch is so handy.
At this level the children must utilise the broadcast to both influence sprites and the stage. They must also add scores to their games and make the screen scroll along the X-axis. It's put together piece by piece with each 40 minute session offering short focused tasks on scores and variables. What's surprising to me is that when you show the children a finished game and they see th ecode blocks for the first time they all gasp in horror. But, by session 3 or 4 they are reading through the code like they are born programmers. As they understadn the blocks more fluently, they should by now be able, in part at least, understand how the green and red blocks work together.
In this year group we also demonstrate what the code looks like as they have to be familiar with this in their Presenting and Investigating topic through website building.
To accomplish this we spend two weeks on RoboMind (free to begin and $15 per seat. For education it's $1 per child) that allows the children to compliment their understanding of AND, OR and NOT that they had to understand via the various inputs form bradcasts etc. Robomind is good in that it is differentiated by the remote control panel as seen here:
As you can see in the panel on the left the code looks a lot like C++ and works in the way that we have been teaching throughout the year groups - via a LOGO-esque manner. RoboMind really offers you an avenue to teach to a audience who want to progress in this manner. And, more importantly, it allows you as a teacher to manage your classes with true differentiation. Top level ICT children can progress with this more 'Pure' coding environment wile your less able progress with Scratch and KODU and all the time you can set homework as they are all Cross-Platform.
Years 6
Years 6 and 7 I will write about what's online and newer with things like Kidsruby, Codeacademy and HTML via Mozilla Thimble and compile a list of all the links in this article. Also, these past few years I haven't had the pleasure of running an after school club with NXT let alone classes. It's a shame really but it's so expensive that we had to purchase other key pieces of kit like iPads and their apps. Soon though it'll be back on the radar.
0 notes
Text
Setting Up Guide for Class Sets of iOS Devices
Cloning iPads or iPod touches isn't illegal. This note from Apple iTunes Support tells you that you can sync 10 devices to one account per authorised computer. If you read here you can see that iBooks is somewhat different. As too iCloud. If you have a home account for the iOS devices in your home then you obviously sync to that account. Your child, brother, sister, aunt, dog, cat, husband or wife all do the same. This amounts to a lot of copying of data and contacts (Can you see how useful that is for school? Not so handy for family though. I'm not sure your 14 year old child would want his/her contacts syncing to your iOS device!) to many devices on the same account. Is there a limit? Well, yes and no. I point this out below too. The limit we find is about 20 restores. Then it becomes a little sticky and we have to use more than one Mac to finish completely. Hence, below you see we use 5. I am not using Windows PCs with iTunes as you can't sync multiple devices at once with iTunes on Windows. See below from the Apple discussions board.
The rest is over here
0 notes