Category Archives: Technology

Year 10 Transition Activity at Gungahlin College

Welcome to our Year 10 transition day, and more specifically the IT Class we’ve got prepared for you.

One of the subjects we offer here at Gungahlin College is an introductory programming class that teaches you the fundamentals of how to program computers to do what you want them to do. We explore a number of different programming languages over the two years, and we’ll program a range of devices from desktop computers through to smartphones and embedded systems. The programming you do for each is a little bit different, and today we’re going to look at some of the intricacies of embedded systems programming using Arduino.

We’ve issued each pair an ed1 board, the details of which you can find here. It has been developed by National ICT Australian as a teaching tool for a couple of competitions and programs run by the National Computer Science School, and contains a whole heap of input sensors and output components that you can interact with directly. In today’s lesson, we’ll be exploring the:

To get started, you’ll need to open the Arduino IDE – you’ll find it in the Start menu under Arduino. It has been pre-installed for you and contains everything we need to program our boards. You’ll also need to collect a board and USB cable from the teacher.

When you get back to your computer, plug the board into the USB cable and the USB cable into the computer. It should light up and the board will start running the last program that was uploaded onto it. The way embedded systems work is that they store a single program that executes continuously once it has been loaded, so when the power is cycled to the board it simply restarts the program. There is a reset button on the board that also restarts the current program – find it now and press it to start the program again.

Back to the IDE – the first thing you need to do is use the Tools menu to select the:

  • Board -> Ardunio Duemilanovae w/ ATmega328
  • Serial Port -> COMX (where X is the highest number available in the list)

This ensures the computer knows how to communicate with the board, and does so over the right connection.

Now that’s done, we’re ready to start writing our first program. We’re going to start by loading a pre-written program that writes custom characters to the LCD screen – it allows us to draw whatever we want by lighting up the individual pixels on the screen. Delete everything in the Arduino IDE window, then copy and paste the code below into the window.

// include the library code:
#include <LiquidCrystal.h>

// initialize the library with the numbers of the interface pins
LiquidCrystal lcd(6, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 5);

// make some custom characters:
byte heart[8] = {
 0b00000,
 0b01010,
 0b11111,
 0b11111,
 0b11111,
 0b01110,
 0b00100,
 0b00000
};

byte smiley[8] = {
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b01010,
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b10001,
 0b01110,
 0b00000
};

byte frownie[8] = {
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b01010,
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b01110,
 0b10001
};

byte armsDown[8] = {
 0b00100,
 0b01010,
 0b00100,
 0b00100,
 0b01110,
 0b10101,
 0b00100,
 0b01010
};

byte armsUp[8] = {
 0b00100,
 0b01010,
 0b00100,
 0b10101,
 0b01110,
 0b00100,
 0b00100,
 0b01010
};
void setup() {

 // create the heart character
 lcd.createChar(1, heart);
 // create the smiley character
 lcd.createChar(2, smiley);
 // create the frownie character
 lcd.createChar(3, frownie);
 // create the armsDown character
 lcd.createChar(4, armsDown); 
 // create the armsUp character
 lcd.createChar(5, armsUp); 

 // set up the lcd's number of columns and rows: 
 lcd.begin(16, 2);

 // Print a message to the lcd.
 lcd.print("I "); 
 lcd.write(1);
 lcd.print(" Arduino! ");
 lcd.write(2);

}

void loop() {

 // read the potentiometer on A0:
 int sensorReading = analogRead(A3);

 // map the result to 200 - 1000:
 int delayTime = map(sensorReading, 0, 1023, 200, 1000);

 // set the cursor to the bottom row, 5th position:
 lcd.setCursor(4, 1);

 // draw the little man, arms down:
 lcd.write(4);
 delay(delayTime);
 lcd.setCursor(4, 1);

 // draw him arms up:
 lcd.write(5);
 delay(delayTime); 

}

Assuming you have now completed all of the above steps in the order specified, you should be able to click the Upload button (The little sideways arrow) and you’ll upload the program to the board. You’ll see when the program is uploading because you’ll see a progress bar on the IDE and you’ll see the little Tx/Rx lights (near where the USB cable plugs in) flicker to indicate data is being transferred and received.

When the program is finished, you should see a message on the LCD screen, and a few custom icons like a heart, smiley face and man. That’s what your program does!

But, you can also interact with it. The dial on the bottom left of the board (called the potentiometer) can be turned, and when you turn it you should see the speed with which the little man flap his arms up and down change.

Let’s take a look at the program in more detail:

// include the library code:
#include 

// initialize the library with the numbers of the interface pins
LiquidCrystal lcd(6, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 5);

The above code block does two things – it includes the library (the pre-written code that defines what the LCD can do) so that we can make use of it to manipulate the LCD screen more easily. Without this library, writing to the LCD can be very difficult to do. Once we’ve included it, we then initialise the LCD panel by connecting the pins on the board up correctly – this makes sure the computer knows which signals to send to which pins that connect the LCD to the rest of the ed1. The code above is only ever run once – and needs to be done first so that we can make use of the LCD throughout the rest of our program.

// make some custom characters:
byte heart[8] = {
 0b00000,
 0b01010,
 0b11111,
 0b11111,
 0b11111,
 0b01110,
 0b00100,
 0b00000
};

byte smiley[8] = {
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b01010,
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b10001,
 0b01110,
 0b00000
};

byte frownie[8] = {
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b01010,
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b00000,
 0b01110,
 0b10001
};

byte armsDown[8] = {
 0b00100,
 0b01010,
 0b00100,
 0b00100,
 0b01110,
 0b10101,
 0b00100,
 0b01010
};

byte armsUp[8] = {
 0b00100,
 0b01010,
 0b00100,
 0b10101,
 0b01110,
 0b00100,
 0b00100,
 0b01010
};

The code above creates all of our custom characters using arrays of bytes – groups of single bits of information that can take on the values of 1 and 0. Here, a value of 1 indicates that the display should show a black dot, and a value of 0 means the display should leave that pixel clear.

You’ll notice that all of the bytes in the arrays are made up of 5 bits, and that each array has 8 bytes in it. This means that each character is made up of 40 individual pixels in a box that is 5 wide by 8 high. If you look closely, you’ll see how the patterns of 1s and 0s create the shapes we’re after – the heart is probably the easiest one to see, but the other shapes are also visible now that you know what you’re looking for.

We create the custom characters at the top of the program so that they can be used everywhere we want them to be used.

void setup() {
...
}

The setup() function is run as soon as the board is turned on, and is only run once. We can put any code we want to inside the curly braces (where the … is above) and that code will be run in that order as soon as the board has power. Let’s see what we do inside our setup() function:

 // create the heart character
 lcd.createChar(1, heart);
 // create the smiley character
 lcd.createChar(2, smiley);
 // create the frownie character
 lcd.createChar(3, frownie);
 // create the armsDown character
 lcd.createChar(4, armsDown); 
 // create the armsUp character
 lcd.createChar(5, armsUp); 

First, we create the characters by assigning each of our patterns to a single integer value (a number). You’ll see that the lcd.createChar() function requires 2 parameters – the first is the number you want to use to represent that character, and the second is the character itself (so in our case, 1 will be for the heart we created earlier). We assign all 5 of our characters to a number.

 // set up the lcd's number of columns and rows: 
 lcd.begin(16, 2);

This code tells the program that the LCD has 16 columns and 2 rows.

 // Print a message to the lcd.
 lcd.print("I "); 
 lcd.write(1);
 lcd.print(" Arduino! ");
 lcd.write(2);

Using the lcd.print() command, we can write text to the LCD. The print command understands how to display each of the standard symbols on the keyboard (letters, numbers etc), so we can specify any words or phrases we might want directly to print(). Notice how we use quotes (“) around the words? That’s so the program knows we want to print those actual characters to the screen.

You’ll see that we then use the lcd.write() function, and that corresponds to our heart on the display. By specifying a number inside the brackets of the write() function, it tells the lcd to draw the custom character we set up earlier to be assigned to our number 1. Notice also that we don’t use quotes this time – the value 1 will be substituted instead of the array of bytes we made earlier.

You can mix write() and print() statements together to print a combination of custom and regular characters to the screen. It will print them in order from left to right.

void loop() {
...
}

In addition to our setup() function, we also need a loop() function to be written. The loop() function runs as soon as the setup() function finishes, but unlike the setup() function, the loop() function repeats forever, so when it it finishes it starts itself again.

Let’s see what happens in the loop function:

 // read the potentiometer on A0:
 int sensorReading = analogRead(A3);

 // map the result to 200 - 1000:
 int delayTime = map(sensorReading, 0, 1023, 200, 1000);

The first two lines of code read from the potentiometer (it is on pin A3) and map the result of the reading from a number between 0 and 1023 to a number between 200 and 1000. What this means is that when you turn the potentiometer to a zero value, the program sets the delayTime to a value of 200 (instead of 0), and when the potentiometer is at 1023 it sets delayTime to 1000. This makes it easy for us to convert one range of numbers to a more useful one. The computer automatically works out what values the numbers between 0 and 1023 take on by breaking the range up into equal parts.

 // set the cursor to the bottom row, 5th position:
 lcd.setCursor(4, 1);

 // draw the little man, arms down:
 lcd.write(4);
 delay(delayTime);
 lcd.setCursor(4, 1);

 // draw him arms up:
 lcd.write(5);
 delay(delayTime); 

}

By writing the above code into the loop() function, the program will repeatedly perform the following code:

  1. It will set the cursor to the fifth position on the second row (we count the first row/column as number 0, so the second is 1, third is 2 and so on…)
  2. It will then draw the armsDown character (character number 4)
  3. It will then wait for the delayTime worked out by the potentiometer (i.e. it will do nothing for between 200 and 1000 milliseconds)
  4. It will then set the cursor back to the fifth position on the second row, and…
  5. Overwrite the armsDown character with the armsUp character (5)
  6. Then wait for another 200-1000 milliseconds

Since the reading is taken each time that block of code starts, every time the loop gets run a different value can be read from the potentiometer, which is what allows you to alter the time that it takes for the man to wave his arms up and down.

So, thats what our code does – cool, huh? Now its your turn to do something of your own using the bit of knowledge we’ve given you today. Here are some tasks you can try for yourself, and don’t forget, ask for help if you need it:

  1. Write your own message to the LCD screen, and try centring your top and bottom rows;
  2. Make up your own set of custom characters, and write them to different locations around the board;
  3. Use the potentiometer to change between different custom characters/numbers on the screen;
  4. See if you can make the potentiometer move a character across/around the screen; and
  5. If you finish the above, ask what other activities you might be able to do.

Online platforms for personalisation, analytics and immediate feedback #fliptm #TMACT

Last week I presented at the Gungahlin College Flipped TeachMeet on the topic of personalisation, feedback and analytics. The format of the TeachMeet was a bit different to the usual – presenters recorded their presentation via video and posted it online prior to the event, so the focus of the sessions was on discussion around the ideas. My video is embedded below and explains some of the tools I’m using to personalise learning, provide automated feedback to students and analyse data about student achievement to help identify where additional support is needed.

In the video I talk about a few platforms I’ve used extensively in class:

  • Grok Learning – Learn to program in Python, and get instant feedback every time you attempt a problem. For teachers, the dashboard really is an excellent tool that gives you an overview of student progress and helps you identify what topics students need extra support with.
  • Treehouse – This platform contains guided lessons and activities that help you learn a range of topics. For us our focus is on Web Design/Development, and it allows students to pick and choose individual paths to help them learn the skills and knowledge that is most suitable for where they’re at. Like Grok, feedback is given in browser so you can quickly see if you understand the material being presented.
  • Schoology – Our LMS provides us with automated quiz/test tools that give us a way of quizzing students and checking that they are grasping the material. Since students are provided with feedback on their progress, they can use this to identify their areas of strength and weakness and seek targeted assistance from teachers.
  • Oppia – A new open-source platform that allows users to create “explorations” that provide guided, personalised paths through the learning of material. Explorations can direct students to different activities depending on their answers to previous questions, which better targets the individual needs of each student.

There was a lot of enthusiasm on the night from teachers of many disciplines and school levels for Oppia in particular due to its flexibility, and I’m looking forward to working with some teachers at my school to see just how powerful it can be as a platform. I’m even thinking I’d be interested in contributing to the codebase as the group of us identify features we see as integral to it becoming a useful tool.

The K-12 Horizon Report 2013 lists learning analytics as a trend we’re likely to see having an impact in schools in the next 2-3 years, and its clear based on tools like Oppia and some of the third-party proprietary tools I’ve seen recently that data is becoming increasingly important in education circles. Being able to harness that data to better meet the needs of our students won’t put us out of a job – what it will do, though, is allow us to utilise our time better and focus on the things that are important to our students, rather than what might be important from our curriculum authorities.

Digital Technologies: Now a Subject in the Australian Curriculum

I was thrilled to see that the Australian Curriculum: Technologies has finally been made available online for all teachers to see and begin using in their schools. Sure, it is currently marked as “awaiting endorsement”, but that’s largely due to the Curriculum Review that has been instigated by our current federal minister Christopher Pyne. We’re now at a point where educators can get moving on implementation of the F-10 curriculum.

What excited me about the Digital Technologies curriculum in particular is the way that it has embraced the Digital Technologies as a way of thinking and a tool for creativity. The problem I’ve always had with the teaching of ICT in schools is that it has largely been seen as a tool that should be integrated to assist the teaching of other subjects – that’s fine, but that’s captured in the ICT General Capability in the Australian Curriculum and is very different to the study of ICT as a discipline, sometimes branded as Computer Science, Informatics, Computing or similar. Given the ubiquitous nature of ICT in our world today, it has always struck me as odd that we’ve relegated the understanding of ICT to being all about its use, rather than how it manages to achieve the “magic” that many people mistake it to be.

So finally we have some guidance for teachers, especially in the primary years, about what to teach to impress upon students the fundamental knowledge and skills required to be a developer of ICT solutions. This doesn’t mean we have to make students in Kindergarten write code in Java or anything – in fact, the Digital Technologies curriculum for Foundation to Year 2 instead focuses on pattern recognition and the classification of data in contexts that kids can understand. A significant amount of time was spent during the writing of the curriculum looking at how what students need to know to develop a strong conceptual understanding of the Digital Technologies could be integrated with what they are learning in other subjects. That’s important – it validates what teachers are currently doing to teach these ideas, or provides explicit advice to teachers about what they need to address when they design new lessons.

I accept that not everyone agrees with me – here’s a post from the Conversation written by an academic from the University of Newcastle – but on reading the article (which was forwarded to me by someone I know who has an interest in the DT curriculum), I felt the need to respond to some of the statements being made.

You can see my post in the comment thread at the link above, but I feel so passionate about what I had to say I felt the need to post it here, since I believe it stands on its own.

As an IT teacher who has the skills and knowledge to deliver this curriculum, I get a little bit frustrated about some of the ongoing concerns people keep expressing with the curriculum, largely because I feel like many of the criticisms are being made with underlying assumptions in place that need to be challenged.

The Digital Technologies curriculum does not insist that students become programmers – at least no more so that the English curriculum insists they become authors, the Mathematics curriculum insists they become mathematicians or the Science curriculum insists they become Scientists.

Many of the same arguments and/or questions about the relevance of some of the content included can be asked about other learning areas – such as the need for students to understand stem-and-leaf plots in Mathematics, or the structure of multi-cellular organisms. Look at all of the curriculum documents (and it is important we differentiate the curriculum from a syllabus – they are different things) and you’ll find that if it really came down to it, you could question the inclusion of many of the skills and/or understandings that the writers in each area have decided to focus on.

That aside, the other major consternation people have about it all is the time / crowded nature of the curriculum, however this all comes about because many commentators still insist on looking at the subjects as being independent of one another. We look at the Science curriculum and then, at school, we teach kids Science. We do the same with Maths, English… Why? How many times in the real world do we look at a problem and say “oh, that’s a problem that can only be solved by mathematics, I’m not going to consider any of my scientific or social understanding to come up with an answer”?

The curriculum has been written with the interdependence and relationships between the learning areas in mind – or at least that is my understanding. We talk about falling levels of literacy and numeracy, and then argue that this is a case for eliminating non-critical subjects from the learning of students? Surely the reason they are not engaging with school has to do with the fact that the way they are being taught isn’t working for them? It is possible to teach many numeracy and literacy concepts using much of what has been included in the Digital Technologies curriculum. Similarly, you can teach programming within the context of mathematics, algorithms as recipes in a kitchen, and data representation as an exploration of pattern recognition and language translation.

To simply look at the fact that programming has been included in the curriculum and then dismiss it due to the fact that not every kid needs to be a programmer completely fails to recognise the importance of logical reasoning and the methodical development of algorithmic solutions when faced with complex problems – a critical skill that can be developed through learning computational thinking. Not every student will end up being a mathematician, so why do they need to know about polynomials and parabolas?

And I also don’t think it is sufficient to argue that a lack of trained teachers is reason enough for the subject to be relegated to a position of less importance. The curriculum should be both aspirational and intended – it is up to schools, society and teacher-training programs to find reasons to encourage people with the skills and knowledge required to teach the curriculum to consider joining the profession. The same argument would not be applied to any other learning area – we would never say that not having enough English teachers would be reason enough to stop teaching English, would we?

The use of technology for the “thrill” of using it is fine – I’ve got no problem with people making use of the great technology available to better their lives etc. But accepting technology as “magic” is not acceptable in the longer-term if we want to continue to develop as a society. Would we be where we are today if we had simply accepted the idea that rain just happened and didn’t instead seek out a reason for it? We have the technology that we have today because people who found the passion and excitement to learn more about it did so through curiosity and interest.

We can make the Digital Technologies curriculum interesting for all students, just like we can for every other learning area. The first step in making that a reality is to stop artificially segregating the subjects and to emphasise the interdependence that exists across every discipline of knowledge. When designing a lesson or unit of work, what we need to do is look across multiple learning areas and find ways to engage students with lots of different interests – to connect what they are learning to their world.

Does this mean every child will like learning every aspect of the DT curriculum? No, just like not every child will enjoy Maths, Science or other subjects. But we can at least develop in them an appreciation of the value each discipline has, and the impact of each on their way of life now and in the future.

Oh – and on the last point re: not including Scratch (or anything else) in high school – the curriculum doesn’t do that. There is nothing that precludes the use of visual programming to teach concepts from any learning area. What has been expressly mentioned is that students learn about general purpose programming languages. These languages are different when compared to drag-and-drop type visual languages because they allow us to perform significantly more computation than is possible otherwise. They are important, but that doesn’t mean that other, more familiar platforms or languages can’t be used to address other aspects of the curriculum. I use a similar technique to explore recursion with my students, producing fantastic looking artwork using Context-Free grammars and exploring randomness as well (which is a nice way of visualising genetic mutation).

We need to stop looking at movement through the bands as discrete periods of learning – it is a continuum and the learning that takes place in earlier bands should be used as the foundation for learning in later ones.

I’d be very interested to hear the thoughts of other educators of all disciplines on this issue and those like it. Please join the conversation and post your comments below – this is one of those topics I’d love to see start a very interesting, ongoing dialogue.

Why communication is hard

I’ve spent this weekend and the week leading up to it thinking about the various ways we, as a school, can improve our communication methods. I went through this process at my last school as well, and after consideration of the problem again I’ve come to this conclusion – setting up the channels with the technology available is easy, but making sure it is both sustained and valued by the community is hard. We’re constantly fighting the battle of content that dates quickly, and the increasing demands on teacher time that ultimately mean a reluctance to write-up content, especially if it needs to be done multiple times for multiple publications.

To combat this, we’re going to be using a set up that I’ve had in place in the past and ties everything we use together very nicely. The school has a number of tools at its disposal*:

  • The school website
  • Schoology (our LMS platform)
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google +
  • A mobile App (for both iOS and Android)
  • An online calendar (powered by Google calendar and Outlook)
  • A WordPress installation
  • Digital displays throughout the school buildings
  • Regular pastoral care sessions with students

* I should point out that for the purposes of this discussion I’m leaving out direct teacher-parent or school-parent communications over student-specific issues – that still tends to occur via email and phone calls and can’t be beaten when there is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed.

Interestingly enough, of all of the above tools the one that is the least flexible for us is the website, and yet for many prospective families looking to enrol their kids it is the website that is likely going to be their first point of contact. So I feel that whatever the strategy, what we need to ensure is that the website doesn’t get neglected – it is the one place where content is most likely to date quickly and become less relevant for our school community.

As we redesign the website, we’ll be making sure that those parts that don’t tend to change often (such as our Principal’s greeting or the rundown of our timetable structure) are kept to a minimum, and instead aim to feed as much of the regular activity that takes place in the school through to a regularly updating news feed that is front and centre of the user’s view.

To integrate all of the above into a single communications channel, here’s how I intend to set everything up:

How the various channels are linked together

How the various channels are linked together

As you can see, when the tools are all linked together data only has to be entered into one of two locations, either the calendar (for dates and events) or the WordPress blog (for news articles/information). The information is then fed, via various plugins, application integration tools or RSS feeds, into our other communication channels, many of which families can then subscribe to in their favourite social application.

Right now there is no easy way to push the updates from WordPress to Schoology, nor is there an integrated solution that I like for a calendar/news solution (although I will be looking into that – a single point of data entry would be fantastic). However, one of the great things the Schoology developers have done is they have made an App API available for other developers to use to integrate their applications into Schoology. I haven’t investigated it in detail yet, but I’m thinking there may be an opportunity to at least bridge one of those gaps in the chain.

So now that everything is linked up, the next step is ensuring regular content is published to keep our community engaged. We’re tackling this by providing every teacher with an account to the WordPress blog with authoring privileges, and providing some professional learning to hep those for whom blogging is new to learn the ropes. Since we need to ensure we’re publishing accurate and quality articles, teachers will submit their items for review, and identified staff in the school will then become our sub-editors, reviewing the posts for any errors, omissions or anything else that may need to be fixed up before publishing.

We want the articles to be both reflective and forward-looking – we want celebrations of the great things the school has done in the past (posted within a day or two of the event), and posts about upcoming events and activities we want the community to engage in. In that way we give everyone a reason to visit, whether it be hearing about an event they were unable to attend or finding out about an activity that is approaching and needs their involvement to be successful.

However one of the criticisms of this kind of approach that I have had directed at me at the past is that there are many families that don’t want to have to visit the website every day, or to subscribe to the site and get a barrage of emails or posts on their feeds each time a new article is posted. Some people still prefer the good old newsletter – either an email or printed copy. Thankfully, there’s a WordPress plugin for that, and we’ll be ensuring that for those people who prefer the good-old-fashioned fortnightly email everything that gets posted to the blog (it’ll do tweets as well!) in the previous two week period is bundled up and sent to their inboxes.

So that’s a run down of our strategy from a technical standpoint – to eliminate the need for extra work required to draft additional items for a newsletter and reformat existing content into a different publication. The idea is that a write-once, publish everywhere strategy will mean staff are more willing to contribute regularly. With the number of staff we have and the number of events that happen at the school, I’m thinking that if each staff member posted one article every month, we’d have a vibrant, regularly changing online presence that will keep all of our parents and community partners interested and engaged in our activities at the school.

Hopefully, and I’m feeling pretty optimistic, we’ll be able to overcome the hard point of communication – the regular updates and ongoing engagement – and take advantage of the power this technical setup provides.

My TEDxCanberra Audition: Learning for the Real World

I’ve spent the last few days putting together a brief audition video for TEDxCanberra – it was suggested by another teacher that I give it a shot, and I figure I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve been doing a lot of investigation and work recently around a model of education that has students working directly with the community through projects that are interdisciplinary – an approach similar to Challenge-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning and similar models.

The audition video is on YouTube, and a quick search for TEDxCanberra will show you other potential speakers and topics.

While it’s not the greatest piece of video I’ve ever done, I think it gives a good enough picture of the message I’m sharing. I’ve seen too often in classrooms and schools activities and lessons that just don’t engage kids, but if you talk to these same kids about what they do outside of school and why they enjoy it, each time one of the key things they mention is the fact that they are involved in something. That aspect of being a part of something bigger is severely lacking in most classrooms, and there’s no excuse for that anymore. With near ubiquitous Internet access, mobile computing and information at everyone’s fingertips, we should be challenging our students to be solving big problems, and helping them make sense of the world around them to formulate answers that consider their values and ideas.

To do this effectively, we need to stop working within the artificial boundaries created by subject disciplines, learning areas or year groups. I hear colleagues saying that the Australian Curriculum prevents us from being able to do that, but that’s a narrow view of what schools can do. We have significant flexibility when it comes to implementation of the Australian Curriculum, and nothing published by ACARA suggests that subjects need to be taught in isolation. In fact, reading the curriculum documents, it is fair to say that there is an expectation that teachers look for links across subject areas to create richer educational experiences for our students.

So, it’s my hope that I get the opportunity to expand on my audition further, and to share that message with as many people out there who’ll listen. The research supporting more collaborative and holistic approaches to education is everywhere, yet high schools on the whole are reluctant to consider structures or models that vary from the existing rigid, timetabled structure of single subject courses. No one learns like that in any real world situation I can think of.

I challenge you, the next time you’re reading, watching videos or anything else, to switch off after an hour and do something else, and not return to any thought-provoking ideas that may have been stimulated previously. You’ll realise pretty quickly that sometimes you need more than an hour to really engage on any sort of real level with that topic, and in other situations, 15 minutes might be all you need.

Our students know this, yet we force them to work with a system that is older than most of our grandparents. It’s time to change – it’s been talked about for years, but talk without action may as well be silence. We do a disservice to the youth of today and the future of civilisation by refusing to consider alternative approaches to “school”.

MOOCs: How good are they from a learning perspective?

I’m currently working through my 3rd course no a MOOC – a Massively Open Online Course. This one is hosted on the Venture Lab platform and is called “Designing a New Learning Environment“. Prior to this one, I’ve completed two on the Coursera platform – one on Cryptography and the other on Gamification. Based on these experiences so far, I thought it was time to reflect on the effectiveness of these environments as learning tools.

I should start by saying that as far as motivation for learning is concerned, I’m pretty driven. I don’t need a structured course to get me interested in learning about something – just an interest or desire to want to know more about it. The problem is that its easy to want to know a lot about lots of things, and you tend to get distracted by others as you’re trawling through the wealth (?) of information available to us now via the the Internet. So I jumped into these as a way of providing some focus for my learning – in that regard, they’ve been pretty successful.

I’ve managed to make the time in my already full schedule to spend a few hours a week working through the materials. I’ve identified topics of interest to me, and devoted the time necessary to get my head around the concepts. Some have been pretty challenging (it had been a while since I’d done any real mathematics, and while the Crypto stuff wasn’t overly complicated, it required getting my head back into the notation peculiarities of the discipline), others pretty cruisy (I never really felt “challenged” by the Gamification course, even though it was interesting). It’s my feeling that there’s something available through these MOOCs that will be of interest to everyone.

The big plus of these platforms is the access it gives you to world class academics. They allow leaders in their fields to present materials to anyone from anywhere, and that’s great for everyone who gets involved. It’s also great marketing for the Universities involved. Actual interaction with the professors is virtually non existent, but given these courses can upwards of tens of thousands of participants, what more can you really expect.

And while there are capabilities in the platforms for people to engage with others (the usual forums, peer assessment tools and the capacity to comment on other people’s work) I have to admit that I haven’t felt the urge to engage beyond what I’m required to do. Perhaps I’m just too busy to do so, but I can’t help but feel that ultimately it comes down to the way the content is being delivered.

You see, it is still based on the lecture-task-evaluation paradigm – sure, evaluation may be by peers, but once something is submitted and assessed, there’s no real reason to go back to it. And given the assessment tasks are primarily individual (there are group tasks coming in DNLE, but we’re not there yet), there’s no motivation to collaborate on them in the lead up to submission either. It is essentially about watching/listening to the lecture, applying that to a problem, then moving on to the next one. All pretty low on the Bloom’s taxonomy classification scale.

The DNLE course is attempting to go beyond that with an emphasis on teams creating a design for a new type of learning. The goal is admirable, but so far I’m not feeling it. I don’t want to be too critical given there’s still a while to go yet, but so far I haven’t really felt the mechanisms for true collaboration have existed in the platform or the method of delivery.

I’ve formed a team with colleagues I know through other means (the OzTeachers mailing list), and we set up a Google+ hangout to throw around some ideas for a team-based project initially. Apart from that though, there has been little collaboration. There is a video-chat capability in the Venture Lab platform, but because of the way we’ve built our team up, I just haven’t had the desire to use it.

For someone like me who is happy to work alone on things and doesn’t require a stack of extrinsic motivation, the existing MOOC structure is fine – it provides a scaffold for me to keep my learning on track, and that’s what I need to keep from getting distracted. However, for people who want to engage with others in meaningful ways (and I enjoy doing this too), these platforms seem to be a bit too disconnected from the networks we already engage in heavily.

MOOCs in general, and platforms like Venture Lab in particular, are still very much in their infancy. But My attitude towards them so far is that if they don’t evolve quickly to offer more than online courses have since early LMSs launched in Universities and Schools in the early 2000s, their appeal for may people won’t last. As a cost cutting measure for universities they’re a great tool, but as they currently exist they use the same methods of teaching that have always existed, and that’s not advancing learning like it needs to.

We know that models of learning and teaching have to change. Moving what we do now into the online space is hardly sufficient to advance things further. We need to see some truly transformative education platforms and tools – MOOCs (at least for now) do not fit that profile.

 

AppleTV in Educational Settings

Recently I’ve been experimenting with configuration and use of Apple TV in the classroom as a means of providing teachers and students with wireless projection capabilities for their supported iOS and Apple devices over AirPlay. This came to a head for me when I heard the announcement from Apple in late September that the version of iOS for Apple TV (v 5.1) included support for connecting the Apple TV to enterprise networks that use the WPA2 / Wireless Certificate / Radius methods for authentication. In the ACT, the public school system uses such a configuration, and until this recent update Apple TVs could not be connected to the wireless network.

So I investigated the process and found that is is actually a relatively simple one. The requirements are:

  • A 2nd or 3rd Generation Apple TV;
  • A Mac capable of running the latest version of Apple Configurator (available through the Mac App Store)
  • The certificate file for the wireless network to which you are connecting
  • A Micro USB cable (available from all good retailers, or perhaps as an inclusion with a mobile phone you have had over the past 5 years or so)

With those 5 things, the process became fairly simple to setup. The steps are all essentially laid out in the following three Apple Hot Topics from their support website:

  1. Apple TV: How to configure 802.1X Using a Profile – this can be used for setting up a profile for any iOS device, including iPads, iPods and iPhones so that the user doesn’t have to manually enter configuration details.
  2. Apple TV: How to configure a proxy using profile – again, can be done for any iOS device. You can even set these profiles up using iPhone Configuration Utility, but Apple Configurator may be required for Apple TV support (at least at the moment)
  3. Apple TV: How to install a configuration profile – This is the final step once you’ve built your profile, and ultimately is the way you prepare it for deployment.

There are a couple of gotchas that you ultimately need to be aware of when you do this, and a few steps involved specifically for connecting to the ETD network:

  1. The EDU network uses different settings to the STU network – this is in place at the moment but will, after the move to SchoolsNet, will no longer be in place, making things a bit easier. For this to work at our school, I needed to use STU (since students cannot connect their devices to EDU).
  2. The credentials for connecting to the STU network need to be present on the AD server for your student network – teacher credentials won’t work, so you need to have an account on your student server and use that one.
  3. Proxy settings for STU are required – make sure you use the same settings that are in place on your STU desktops and laptops (I won’t publish these settings here – if you’re a teacher in the ACT ETD, you’ll be able to look them up at school). You should be using the Automatic Proxy settings (not auto-detect).
  4. You will need to get a copy of your wireless certificate off the student server. You can export a copy of the certificate from your server so that you can put it on the Mac that will be running Apple Configurator.
  5. When transferring the profile to Apple TV, you MUST have the power cable plugged in – the HDMI cable isn’t necessary (I found that I couldn’t plug both HDMI and USB 2 in at the same time because the cables I had were a bit fat) but can remain plugged in.
  6. Finally, your STU wireless network needs to be able to support AirPlay – this requires multicast/Bonjour to be active. It is active on our network due to it being used for wireless printing for our Cafe App.

Other than that, it is a pretty painless procedure. Once the profile is installed as outlined in the third Hot Topic, all you need to do is double-tap the home button on your iOS device, tap on the AirPlay icon and select the device from the list of AirPlay devices on the network. If you’re using an AirPlay capable Mac, the AirPlay icon appears in your toolbar at the top of the screen when an AirPlay capable device is present.

There are a couple of settings you’ll want to turn on for your Apple TV:

  1. Consider setting an Airplay password if you want to restrict use of the Apple TV to a few people. This might be something you want to do, but it does limit the way you can have students use the device.
  2. If you want to allow anyone to connect via AirPlay, it is a good idea to turn on the setting that requires you to enter a 4 digit passcode to connect. This way, students or teachers need to be in the room to connect their device, and you won’t get students from the other side of the school throwing their display up without you knowing.

For the cost of a big screen TV that supports HDMI (< $1000) or a HDMI-capable projector (< $1200) and an Apple TV (about $100), you can have the capability in your classroom for anyone with a capable device to display their work to their peers. This gives the teacher the flexibility of demonstrating something from anywhere in the room, and for students to do the same. When you compare this setup to the cost of an Interactive Whiteboard (in the order of $4000-$7000), the potential for deploying this on a large scale is pretty significant if money is tight and doesn’t carry with it the restrictions of having to plug yourself in via cables in a specific place in the room.

I’d be interested to know what you think of this set up, and am happy to help you get yours up and running if it is something you’re interested in pursuing.

Way too long between drinks…

I spent a bit of time tonight looking back at the stuff I’ve done this year and realised that it has been way too long since I’ve given a rundown of my experiences with education or technology here on my blog. I’ve made some minor updates to my website, but no real post to capture what I’ve been doing. So, this post will just lay out some of what I’ve been up to this year, and it should start me on a more consistent and regular posting run from this point on (at least, that’s the intention…)

  1. Re-design the system for reporting at school so that we generate all of our course documents from a single database – the same one we use for reporting and assessment;
  2. Win a CS4HS Grant from Google to deliver some PD to teachers – in the ACT and in Bendigo, Victoria – on integrating Computer Science into the curriculum through mathematics, english, art and other subjects;
  3. Founding President of InTERACT (Information Technology in Education and Research ACT) – ACCE affiliated professional organisation for educators in the ACT;
  4. Roll out a dual-boot image for MacBooks to all teachers at school, allowing them to use either Mac OS or Windows as required for individual lessons or classes;
  5. Apply for and be appointed to the ACARA Advisory Group for the Australian Curriculum: Technologies for the writing phase, working to advise the writers on the content that will ultimately become the Australian Curriculum;
  6. Begin developing a course for iTunes U that allows students to learn programming on an iPad – still in development, but excited by the possibilities of using this (and iBooks Author) as a means of deploying content to iPads;
  7. Accept a position with the Inspire Centre for ICT Education at the University of Canberra / ACT Education and Training Directorate to develop the capacity of schools and teachers to utilise Apple Technologies effectively in the classroom;
  8. Complete online courses in Cryptography and Gamification through Coursera – a free, online educational platform supported by world class universities;
  9. Enrol in a class on Designing a New Learning Environment through Stanford University’s Venture Lab platform;
  10. Work closely with the organisers of the ACCE Conference on their ACCE Unplugged hangout sessions to get people excited and ready for the ACCE National Conference which took place in Perth in early October; and
  11. Set up Apple TV as a wireless projection solution for iOS and (new) MacBook devices for use in the classroom on HDMI capable projectors and TVs, with the intent to roll this out to many more classrooms in the future (the setup costs under $1000 per room, compared to $7000 for an IWB).

They’re the highlights at least – I’m sure there have been other things, but that alone has taken up large chunks of time this year. Now that I think about it, I really have been busy, so it’s no real surprise to see why the blog has been quiet of late.

Still, I’m making the commitment now and everyone who ends up reading this post will be my witness – I’ll post regularly, and use this as a way of keeping track of what I’ve achieved and where I’m going. I hope you’ll join me on the journey!

The Google Algorithm Change – How It Affected Me

If you haven’t heard, Google made changes to their search algorithm recently that apparently led to some pretty significant changes to search results. Interestingly, it appears to have had a positive effect on my presence – fuda.me now appears at the top of the Google search listing for my name (whereas previously, it was on page 2). This is a great thing for me, of course, but it isn’t without its downside.

Whilst it means I will hopefully see more hits to the site and blog from people who are intentionally seeking me out, over the past few days I’ve seen the number of “comments” submitted for approval on my blog posts sky-rocket. I say “comment”, because 100% of them have been spam with links to random places online, or sites like Facebook or YouTube.

It is times like these I’m glad WordPress gives me the option to approve posts when a user first comments on the site – thankfully it means I can prevent the spam from rearing its ugly head. Still, it’s just more proof that every benefit brings with it a cost, although in this case I’m happy with the net outcome.

Barriers: What we need for success with Technology

I spent two days last week at the IWB Solutions conference hosted by IWBNet in Sydney and it’s got me thinking again about the increasingly complex puzzle of true integration of technology into learning within our schools. One of the things that is finally becoming clear to many teachers is that the greatest barrier to successful use of technology is not the costs associated with it, but the failure of schools to change the way they operate to fully leverage the benefits.

My observations based on some of the sessions I attended over the conference:

1. Teaching and Learning ARE different, and BOTH are valuable

As Chris Betcher kept emphasising in his Keynote on day one, there is value in differentiating between teaching and learning. There are times in every class (and I don’t care what you teach) where standing up the front and giving your class some factual information or demonstrating a skill IS the best way to introduce or explore something. You CAN do this in interesting and exciting ways – ways that engage kids with the ideas you are presenting – and this can still be defined as teaching. You are the focus and in this case you need to be – you remain the person with the knowledge and it is your role to impart that to others.

In other situations, the students are actively engaged in learning – they are seeking answers to problems, questions, issues etc either individually or in small groups based on what they have previously been taught, what they have previously learned and what they want to know more about. The teacher in this case plays a facilitator’s role – we guide, nudge, encourage and nurture without giving away the answer (if indeed there is one for the issue under investigation).

It is useful to keep these practices separate – both require different pedagogical approaches, and each is supported by technology in different ways. An IWB may not be an effective learning tool in a classroom, but it can be an effective teaching one – just like a 1:1 program will not necessarily improve the teaching capacity of the teacher.

2. Technology is an amplifier

Following on from above, it should be noted that what technology does is amplify the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the teacher. A good teacher will be a good teacher regardless of the technology they have access to, but a good teacher who knows how to use technology has increased capacity to be much better. Likewise, someone who’s pedagogy is not effective will not improve when you provide them with technology – it will become another tool that is used poorly and fails to improve the learning experiences of their students.

For this reason, we must continue to ensure that teachers are trained not just in the technical skills of new technologies, but are shown how to either improve or enhance their existing pedagogical knowledge to leverage them effectively. The investment in staff is more important than the investment in the technology – something our politicians might need to think about…

3. No single piece of technology is a silver bullet, even for a “good” teacher

Since a good teacher uses multiple teaching strategies, pedagogies and tools to keep students engaged and active in the learning process, it should be evident from the above that no single piece of technology will lead to an improvement in the outcomes of their students. Instead, multiple technologies need to be made available that support each of the numerous teaching methods employed by the teacher and the learning activities that students are participating in. This requires a massive investment if every student is going to have access to every tool in every classroom – something not possible in most schools in the country.

4. Schools as we know them are becoming irrelevant

Which raises the question – are schools as they currently exist still relevant in society today? If students can walk out of the classroom into a world where their access to information and learning opportunities is increasingly growing, is the classroom a productive place to be spending a third of your day?

The evidence is clear – that the single biggest factor effecting the performance of students is a good teacher – so the classroom still has its place. What needs to change is the approach we use when students are in our classrooms with their teachers. Teachers must be more open and flexible; be more willing to adapt and allow the lesson to evolve as students become caught up in the experience of learning. Our current systems with structured timetables, concrete curricula and fixed hours are no longer appropriate for how our world operates, and the schools that begin changing some of these “ancient” practices will be the schools that groom the most successful citizens in our future.

Nothing I’ve mentioned above is new or ground-breaking, but in the hope that my voice added to the many others will help make these points heard, I felt the need to get them out there, as it were.