Mobile phones for programming

It has been a while, wonder how many people still actually read this blog. ;-)

I know this isn't a new idea, but am interested in a slightly different spin.

Programming for mobile phones has been a discussion I have noticed in a few places, however few people have mentioned using them with input/output devices.

I am currently exploring a few options for a course next year to motivate students with programming and have been looking at robotics.

Options I have explored include Lego Mindstorms, Scratch with the optional interface or from a purely motivational standpoint Alice or a creative use of Flash.

During this exploration it has occurred to me that students have their phones.... is there a way to get an attachment for the phones that will allow input devices to be added? Can a simply language then be used to make use of these readily accessible computers sitting in kids pockets...

Another avenue to explore - not sure I will get anywhere with all those different connectors.

School Newsletter Blogs

I am presenting at a School Support Officer conference this coming weekend in the south-east of South Australia. One of my topics is blogging.

My plan is to promote how a blog could be used to present information to a school community via an online medium. I was then going to link this into bloglines and demonstrate how all school newsletters for the south-east could be made available from the one page.
This would reduce costs and mean that mail-outs to other schools would no longer be required.

Problem....
I have only been able to find a few examples online, and the quality hasn't been that high.

Does anyone out there know of any schools that have a blog that is set up for their school newsletter?
Does anyone know of any examples I can use?

Mindomo - Web 2.0 tools

With the recent activity I have had with web 2.0 tools I thought I might share an observation. (btw after the holidays I came back to school and we couldn't use any of the tools at school that we used during the holidays. :-( )

Mindomo.com - a mind mapping web 2.0 resource - excellent resource to use.

But did the creators think about the name?... or maybe they did it on purpose....

mind = brain (just go with it)
omo = a washing powder


Therefore mindomo must be a brain washing program .;-)

Local Delivery Model - Progress being made

Nothing like a two week break to bring a fresh look on things.

My last post suggested that the selection of students meant that the technology wasn't being used as it was last year and bandwidth issues were causing problems.

I guess when things don't work you adapt. During the holidays students have requested help online. This has resulted in a new "tool-set" being adopted.

Initially the students were using my school email for contact. This turned out to be problematic, due to space restrictions etc. Purely by accident we fell into using g-mail accounts and we have found that the default layout really promotes a discussion thread. Really useful when you are reinforcing a concept and having a student work through something. This has received a big tick.

I do need to encourage the use of forums again however. Email has worked fine in this case, however a forum in general is a much better tool.

For more immediate conversations we have taken to using Windows Live Messenger (Transcripts kept for historical reference - safer than a phone call really). Using this and screen captures has gotten around the issues of not having the use of Centra.
The only issue with this tool is that you need to be careful not to be "too available". I am sure people will understand what I mean here.

Although not used as the students are beyond the analysis/design stage, earlier in the piece I made use of an online collaborative space - thinkature. This was not used with students, however, I could see this easily being adopted and fitting the model.

So in situations of low bandwidth it is still possible to local deliver. One simply needs to adabt to the environment in which they are working.

Internet Management - Monitoring and Filtering

I missed the Jimmy Wales talk this week, although I feel that from the blog entries since (and talking to people) I have a good understanding of what transpired.
I was reading Graham Wegner's post on Barriers to Knowledge Sharing that led me to John Travers' article. I left the following response, but felt that it deserved to be reposted on my site.

here tis...

The management of Internet within schools comes down to two basic principles;

1. monitoring
2. filtering

Both of these have their merits and problems. It seems in South Australia we have a very heavy filtering aspect to our management process.

Monitoring of students would require evaluating sites accessed regularly and managing the results of these searches.

The monitoring tools exist, (although some would suggest they are broken) however it has been left up to individual sites to manage this with little direction.

As such the department can not rely on schools enforcing this and they appear to have relied heavily on filtering as they can manage this centrally.

This solution is cheap and easy, but realistically does not consider the needs of the learner.

One figure I heard was that 40% of websites are blocked by DECS. Even a very active person unblocking web 2.0 tools and other such services is going to be kept rather busy.

If Jimmy Wales is talking accountability, surely monitoring would take up a larger component of schools management of Internet access?

How would this be achieved? Education, after all we are schools. We need to educate the Principals, Governing council's and teachers to make this happen.

Individual schools need to be resourced to monitor students Internet use and this needs to ACTIVELY happen (Including personnel, equipment and training).

Consequence's (for lack of a better word) need to be forth coming for those breeching acceptable use and educating with counseling needs to occur to educate those students to how to use the Internet appropriately.

I am not saying do not filter. I am saying reduce the filtering and make better use of monitoring.

If we stick with the status quo then we are hampering students learning. As you have pointed out some schools are active is unblocking sites for students to use. Others are not. These students in these schools are getting a second grade education due to a scenario that was more than likely implemented as a cost cutting exercise.

Just my two cents...

Local Delivey Model - Distance Education

Last year I posted an article "practice what you preach", discussing the fact I would be launching into the delivery of Information Technology Studies through our local delivery mode.

Well after one term, I felt it was time to evaluate my progress in this experience.

To put this into context it is important to realize that this year is the first year of a new curriculum statement that has changed the assessment model for students. This has meant the production of new assessment items, and changes to the delivery of content to meet the outcomes of the course. As such many things have not been tried before and successes and failures could be just as easily put down to this as the delivery model.

Local delivery definitely has some hurdles that need to be overcome. These include coming to an understanding of the knowledge the students come to the course with, time management/commitment to studies, individual differences and group dynamics and finally distance.

Schools all run differently and provide different processes for students to select subjects. At the end of last year I had the names of the students doing the course within my site, but only had sketchy numbers for the students at the other sites. After my first session that occurred in week 2 my numbers dropped considerably.

Point 1. Ensure that management provides details the year before.

The students came from various backgrounds. Some students had done the year 11 course previously, whilst others had not done IT since year 10. In essence this meant that some students had not been exposed to databases. This has brought its challenges, especially as they would be producing relational databases within this course.

Point 2: Have a meeting the year before the course of those involved to establish prior knowledge. Give tutorials/basic knowledge required to those with limited knowledge to do in their own time (i.e. Christmas holidays) to give them an opportunity for success.

The local delivery model we use has the students meet face-to-face for one hour a week and through Centra for 1 hour. If you consider that the average school probably has the students face-to-face for 5 hours a week then this requires the students to be able to manage their time effectively between lessons to ensure success.

In essence a local delivery model requires both the teacher and students to manage their time effectively and complete work between classes. Comments that some students have already made suggest that the course is being placed behind other subjects. Why? The face-to-face lessons get priority as their teachers are there to push them.

Point 3: Set the expectations clearly the year before and ensure candidates are aware of the time requirements of the course. Make good use of various communications media to reinforce deadlines and work requirements.

Last year the group of students I had were active users of technology and made extensive use of Moodle and other technologies. This year this is not the case, with my remote students only having access to dialup at home. As such they don’t use the resources unless they have to, with email also checked infrequently. In one instance a student has not been sighted for two weeks due to sporting commitments and with dialup access at home it is near impossible to set up a centra session or something similar to check in.

This changes things considerably. I had big expectations of Moodle that have not occurred to date. Last year it would have been a different story based on my clientele.

Point 4: Consider clientele, their experiences, technology etc when setting up tools for the delivery model. On that note, delivery models need to be flexible enough to change based on the clientele.

Finally as we have an expectation that we have one face-to-face meeting per week this needs to be considered. Who will travel? Where will you meet? If students are traveling how will they be supported with this?

At this stage it has turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. Getting students knowledge levels and understandings to a point that they can apply them in a project setting is quite a challenge.

If I had my time over again I would not have chosen to do this in my second year teaching the subject and with a new curriculum statement. The combination of all three makes it quite challenging. Having said that... there is nothing like a few challenges to make life interesting. ;-)

Long Over Due Dim-Dim Post

I apologise for anyone who may have been waiting for my follow-up post, it has been a long time coming.

A few months a go I had the opportunity to have an online meeting with Sundar Subramanian, one of the developers of Dim-Dim.

Obviously we were making use of Dim-Dim, and as previously posted I got to trial the new version.

Much has changed. It has been a while since I have used it, and being away from my computer I haven't got my screen shots handy but will make an effort to explain what is happening.

The program now makes use of two-way voice communications and the layout has totally been revamped. Google is now a partner and this has had an influence with this layout and design. No longer is it a stand-alone application, it is now a web 2.0 tool with a clean crisp finish. Application share is also functional which makes it a tool that is now functional.

I found myself exploring the tool whist we were having the meeting, (I am easily distracted) and although my attention was not entirely focused on the presentation found that the potential for this and grown substantially.

The new polished look gives you the feeling that this could be used professionally and the fact that it now works within the browser means that there will be less issues getting it to work across multiple sites with different security settings.

I took some screen captures during the meeting and Sundar asked me to hold off posting these until the new version was released (This occurred along time ago). As this has occurred I will add these to my blog shortly.

In essence for the early adopter keen to trial a new technology who has some server space available, this is worth a try. There is potential for use with meetings etc to start with and in teaching longer term.

Sundar Subramanian from Dim Dim left a comment on my blog recently regarding my review of DimDim.

After I responded to his comment, I was been invited to attend an early trial of the new version early next week. It will be interesting to see how far this software has progressed since the version I trialed. This version will include two-way communication, which will make it a much more valuable product. I get the feeling it does not have two-way video, however this does not really concern me as I am not a big user of this feature anyway.

DimDim is based out of Boston USA, Ottawa Canada and Hyderabad India - I will be adding input from Mount Gambier, Australia and I get the feeling that some one from Sydney (Julian)might have been invited to attend also.

I am in the process of working out my criteria for the software from an educational and philosophical standpoint.

Interaction, Engagement, Feedback are all key items that I believe are important. I want to have a whiteboard so I can split the screen into sections and have each student answer questions or draw diagrams in their own segment.

For the two way communication to work in a class setting, there needs to be a way other that interrupting for someone to gain the attention of the teacher to ask a question. How have they handled this? It will be interesting to see in the new version.

They have totally redesigned the interface so it will be an interesting experience. I promise to report back on the trial next week.