Egham

LISA conference – International Schools Conference 2008 at TASIS London

Another training day, but with so much to do was it worth it? Well yes in many ways these days can seem less that useful, but in terms of meeting and discussing with other teachers about what they are doing; it either gives you a few new ideas or makes you wonder why so many teachers are so inadequately trained. More about the workshops I went to a little later, but first to the keynote.

The keynote was by Dr Robert Evans, a psychologist specialising in school change and reform. A fantastic speaker who from obvious extensive experience discussed the issues with which schools no longer face problems they can solve but dilemmas they can only cope with in the long term. He described many funny anecdotes of the expectations of our teaching profession often likening it to the work of monks or other religious based employment. His book – The Human Side of School Change, was the obvious starting point to discussing how society has changed so much that its expectations of a school are now much more while at the same time the difficulties for children to leave school with adequate qualifications get more and more difficult. As such he suggested that school communities almost are representing a counter culture of values compared to everyday family life, and often are expected to instill these morals and values with little backing. I would suggest for more information you read around hid ideas, a good starting point would be Kathleem Cushman’s article.

So to the workshops, which were ran well by both leaders:-

Research Methods Using the Internet – was an interesting workshop with may ideas to resources, of which a great deal I had heard of. However the most interesting point, came from the ideas of how swamped teachers are with resources and websites these days. How do we cope, and if I ask that question how do students cope? Often I am swamped even though I use techniques including del.icio.us bookmarking, and reading websites via bloglines clipping all essential posts.

First Robotics Competition Workshop – was a wonderful presentation into participating in the First Robotics student robot building competition. Looks like an excellent opportunity, but very difficult to run with such a small Design and Technology department at my current school.The American School in London ran the workshop who have been entered in the competition for the last few years, they even have a website called the Griffins. Over the next few months hopefully we will research into the idea, and maybe with a few keen students branch out into the world of First.

So an interesting day in all, and great to be able to look around another private American school in the shape of TASIS. Which has a wonderful campus, but most useful was to meet the IT staff and chat through their experiences of areas including laptop program, VLE’s and much more. It is unfortunate they do not run the ITGS course at Diploma level as this might have been the perfect opportunity to collaborate with their students.

The MAC arriveth…Digalo and E-Facilitation…

Well a big cardboard box popped through the school letterbox today with a shiny new mac inside it. So the revolution has continued although my first step was to use BootCamp to install Windows XP on the Mac as well – it felt a little rebellious in a sad geeky way. As I am sure I have said before there are pluses and minuses to both systems, but when you mix them together if you are not careful if it can get into a right mess. Although maybe that will teach me, to so early set up BootCamp and then Vmware and then start altering the boot setup until I could not boot in either Windows or OSX. Lol….well you live and learn.

Eventually with a bit of Linux on board it should be the perfect setup, although after one failed try have put the idea of Ubuntu on my Mac on hold for the time being. I must say however that Leopard has won me over to some degree with its ease of use; their are still the old niggles including the lack of a maximize window and that media player wise the Mac suffers dreadfully in comparison to XP’s surfeit of media players with every codec known to man.

Over at the Thinking Stick Jeff, has created a really interesting series of articles on the issue of school wide information systems, that do it all from assessment, reporting, course management, parent involvement, teachers websites and weblogs and much more. The article is interesting as ACS-Egham is about to begin a review to incorporate a school wide system called Ultranet. Ultranet being a new word in my vocabulary but generally meaning that the Intranet and external websites are connected in one whole management system, so as not to duplicate information and to give access to wll stakeholders in the system. A search on the word shows up a few Ultranets the most interesting being in New Zealand. I think these developments will be extremely interesting as I am almost pessimistic that all that a total system do is restrict the users and different stakeholders too much and so ends up not being used, along with the fact that it is often management centred rather learning/student centred. This could be a route I take for my Critical study, especially as setting up Social Networking for the language department is going to take a long period of time due to issues of time within departments for such initiatives and developments.

Finally in this rare round up the web facilitation course at Exeter University is beginning to take shape, however discussion are often stilted within WebCT although maybe my inability to follow threaded discussions is to blame. The introduction of a guest lecturer is interesting – Professor Robin Mason of the Open University. Some interesting discussions have begun, and the ideas about whether online learning communities can be as effective in a face-to-face classroom environment as much as a distance learning environment is an interesting one. As I have mentioned if I remember correctly I have been using multi author weblogs (with students as the authors) in an IT IB course, which works effectively as the discussion through both posts and comments is often different and adds to the discussion held in class. Also the course is meant to focus on global issues, and finally we have begun to find that other students from IT IB courses around the world are looking into our weblog and we are now looking into theirs. Students are now beginning to get the idea of what is all about, and love the idea that typing into google will come up with their article or discussion, or embedded slideshow…etc

The issue of assessment raised in the paper discussed by Mason is a crucial one, as on the recent Masters distance learning I have done. It was obvious that the discussions were interesting but never assessed, and also any collaborative activities were never assessed – so as a consequence it was noticeable that most collaborative activities which take so much time and motivation soon shattered and that discussions were often used by a certain style of student while others popped by on occasion. And as said for a Masters course with adults 100% participation is not needed but for school and sixth form students it is – which can raise issues unless areas such as assessment are addressed. The comments raised about a course being problematic if their are too many messages, was interesting. Maybe is it not to do with how these messages are shown e.g. these threaded forum messages are a nightmare in WebCT (and why do they give you such a small box to see your message in as you are writing…lol) – I find it desperately hard to follow and might indicate why my messages often seem a little incoherent.

My final thought is in agreement about the “the value of building up working relationship” within a distance based learning environment rather than trying to mix everyone around. A facilitator’s role to judge this is crucial as otherwise a student who maybe is contributing well through knowledge of his co-students can end up back at the start of Gilly Salmon’s model…

Beware of the Mac…

Well now that my web-tools are ready for the new season of football and school, it’s time to brush up on the world of MAC. Yes Egham-ACS is all apple-mac and the last time I really touched one of those things was at University during my Architecture degree so it was time to brish off the cobwebs and see the differences. I only have at my fingertips a Mac OSX 10.2.8 which to apple aficionados as Jaguar, which is over four years old I believe.

It is actually weird how the simple differences are the most confusing, take the following:-

  • Installing programs – I finally think I am getting the hang, but dragging the programs to the relevant area is a little weird…and I must say with the amount of revisions that the OSX operating system has it is incredibly confusing to find what programs both open source and paid for, work on which OSX O/S? Although I must already shout out to Version Tracker which does a great job of sorting the programs out in to which versions of Mac OSX that they work within!
  • The right click, how weird is that …although with in minutes the Control-Click action becomes second nature…but….
  • Opening programs and then it seems all the preferences on within the O/S rather than the program…lol…again something you quickly get used to.

More confusions will follow tomorrow when I try to install some other open-source programs to see if OSX Jaguar can stand up to my XP’s (yes very old as well) flexibility? Although I must say there are many bloggers out there trying to help those wandering over form Windows to Mac including the unofficial Apple Blog – which has things not to do which I am trying to follow. Who knows in 6 months time I will be a convert or might end up like Stephen Downes complaining all I can say at the moment is thank you Mozilla for making sure Firefox is available on the Mac!

New Webtool Development and Finally That Assignment

Things have been very busy recently, moving schools has led me to havign to revamp my web-tools for learning, and its actually been quite fun. Now there exists the following web-tools which will hopefully expand on the successes and failures I had at my last school in Cairo:-

  • Techbribe – A weblog for MYP technology, to act as a portal and publishing site for students project work in design and technology as well as IT.SplashPic
  • ITGSonline– A weblog for Information Technology in a Global Society students, who will also have permission to post their work and relevant stories related to it.
  • hURL– A trial site based on Pligg, which acts as kind of a mini DIGG site – not sure about this one as whether we can get a critical mass of students posting and voting on sites?
  • IB Egham – Moodle– Aaahhh yes a revamped Moodle, which will need a variety of new courses, when I get organised but will mostly be used for ITGS students in the first instance.
  • Wiki and Eghs– Finally managed to install MediaWiki rather than TikiWiki to my server, and although Tiki was very flexible it seems that MediaWiki is much more stable and so should be able to be used for a collaborative project in the near future, although still like Pligg thinking that maybe a Web 2.0 version would be better.

Very busy indeed, and there is still a bit of skinning and quite a few courses ot iron out in Moodle to keep me busy but hopefully all will be up and running for the 23rd of August.

As promised last post here is a link to a very large .pdf –Social Networks in Language Learning – of the final assignment document. Still waiting on the result from Leeds University, but I cannot grumble after havign a two week extension.