IWB happy accident

We operate a 1:1 tablet computer program from year 5 to 12 and have electronic whiteboards in all of our classrooms. I often take people on tours of our school and almost without exception people comment on electronic whiteboards and their suitability to modern classrooms. I read blogs, consume tweets and talk with educators and all of them have an opinion on electronic whiteboards (EWBs or IWBs).

The implementation of IWBs in schools polarises people. There are many who get very hot under the collar pontificating about whether they are teacher-centric tools or the best advance in classrooms for the last hundred years. My view, like Chris Betcher’s is a little less black and white.

IWBs certainly aren’t the first piece of technology I would introduce into a schooling environment – far from it. However I have seen electronic whiteboards used well by both teachers and students and, rather than being superfluous in a tablet pc school, they augment the environment splendidly.

IWBs are no educational panacea, no silver bullet, but they work for us and in ways we didn’t originally intend.

My predecessor implemented the IWB program at our school. We had been a 1:1 environment since 1993 and this new technology (in 2005) seemed to make sense in our environment. The implementation process plan was to ensure that an IWB was installed in every classroom as quickly as possible – the rationale being that if a teacher couldn’t rely on having an IWB at all times it would make it difficult to prepare lessons which took advantage of the new facility. This philosophy mirrors our approach to our 1:1 computer program. That is, you shouldn’t have to plan to access the resource/tool – anytime, anywhere.

The installation of the boards took place rapidly and a torrent of professional development was unleashed on staff to skill them up in the operation of these new tools.

At first, usage was difficult to gauge, apart from what you saw walking past classrooms peering through doorways. However, about the time I took over as Director of ICT I noticed something interesting in our intranet logs: curriculum development at an accelerated rate and scale and a corresponding level of use.

Since the inception of our intranet (portal as many schools call it) in 1999 our school had always had a strong culture of resource/course creation online. As tools improved and collaboration became easier, development continued to grow. What we saw in the logs when the IWBs came along was accelerated development driven by a larger group of teaching staff collaborating than ever before. The staff developed materials for use in class (on the boards), but [presumably] with the growth in confidence teachers collaborated on more and more online projects and interest in other forms of ICT professional learning increased. Like I said – not what we intended, but I’ll take enhanced interest in the use of technology to educate any day!

What I see when I walk past and peer through doorways now is a computer connected to the IWB and the wall transformed into the class’ computer – everyone on the same page. I’m not sure if that’s teacher-centric or just a good classroom dynamic which is using technology in a way that makes sense.

iPaddled

Not for tinkerers?

I was prepared, as much as anyone could be, to accept that Apple may produce something which was undeniably better for education purposes than what we are using currently and I would have to consider how we might transition to an environment which supported Macs natively instead of just as bolt on oddities.

As it turns out, the device isn’t a replacement for what we have at all. It is a media consumpt

ion device and it looks to be a pretty darn good one. The iPad may have a place in education, but it doesn’t appear to be a device for creators or tinkerers – certainly it has not been designed with the constructionist learner in mind with most avenues for “doing it my way” cut off by all controlling Apple.

What the iPad (and its pricing) does signal to me is that one-trick ponies, like my recently acquired Kindle, have a limited lifespan. I love reading from the Kindle, but Amazon are going to have to start giving them away to beat this competition. I appreciate that they are different things, but I’m not sure the buying public will be so discerning when choosing what kit to buy and lug about.

I’ll wait for Australian pricing and no doubt acquire one for review purposes, but the iPad in its current form is no replacement for the flexible devices our boys currently enjoy.

Adobe Licensing Update

Will Adobe change the EULA or won't they?

By way of a quick update with regard to the “Adobe Situation” : I received an email from an Education Marketing Manager (at Adobe) yesterday stating the following:

The education team at Adobe in Australia totally understand your frustration. We have recommended the changes but we are not getting agreement with corporate. What they don’t seem to understand is that Adobe has the highest amount of 1:1 schools globally and we need to have an offering to support this segment, they just don’t have the same issue in other parts of the world. We are building a case to hopefully change this, but I cannot guarantee anything at this point.

I did read your comments but I wanted to be able to respond to you directly. Please understand that the lack of noise from Adobe does not mean we are inactive, but working away to try and find the best solution for our market.

I will be happy to update you as we move forward so you are abreast of this, we won’t be putting this one back to the table until early next year, but I can promise you we will address it again.

This email came after some intense badgering (some thought spamming – oops!) of Adobe via Twitter before and during John Paull’s Adobe’s Australian presentation at the VITTA conference. The spate of tweets prompted a colleague (to shut me up) to put me in touch with the person who wrote the email above.

While I’m obviously disappointed at the lack of anything useful for my school (and others in the same boat) for the foreseeable future, it does at least offer some much needed clarity on the situation.

Up until now Adobe representatives and resellers had insisted that it (an addendum to the license) was “about to happen” – this isn’t helpful. We are working on our SOE for 2010 now and I need to know now what I can include and what I have to leave out. I praise this marketing manager for being up front about the situation so I can get on with my job preparing the software image and my teachers can get on with planning their curriculums for 2010 with a clear idea of what tools will be available.

It is disappointing that I ended up going to some extreme lengths to extract this tiny piece of information from Adobe and even now others like @questdig are being promised changes in January. Phil Callil tweets:

Spoke with Adobe re pricing, insists an addendum 2 existing EULAs will be in place end of Jan. Problem in US.

So consistent to a point, but the assertion that it will happen at the end of January confuses the issue and makes it hard to plan.

Time will tell – I hope it does happen in January, but until the SKU actually exists we’re all a little stuck.

Online organisation techniques and a bit of connected learning theory

In bed with Google Wave

So I thought I’d embed (ok – bad title pun) a Google Wave in this post just to see how this new tool could work as a more “live” publishing/comms tool. If you don’t have a Wave account, you won’t see it – yet – Google is working on making embedded waves accessible to everyone apparently, but this functionality isn’t quite there yet.

Here’s a screen grab of this page with the Wave:

This is what the post looks like for those without a Wave account

And for those with Wave – here is the embedded Wave:

Clearly this kind of post isn’t going to change the world, but I’m interested in how this will work and what better way to get handle on things than giving it a go. What got me so excited about Wave when I watched this video was the potential to bring all of the disparate bits of the web together in an accessible format for all.

Goodness knows where this will go, but it’s interesting to speculate and probe what the next communication platform might do/be for us all.

Collaborative Writing & Research – A presentation from 2004

Here is a “retro presentation” from way back in 2004. It is centred around a web application I’d written the previous year and some classroom trials we had done with the LOTE staff. I’ve decided to publish it here as an archive (I’ll get around to publishing other presentations soon I hope), but also because it is interesting to see how things have played out since I made the presentation. I think there are some interesting ideas in here – particularly since the release of Google Wave.

This presentation was originally made at LT04 (now defunct) and ELH 2004.

This presentation has been re-jigged for the web using Adobe Captivate 4. It is a really powerful tool, but I still didn’t manage to get the result that I wanted. Maybe next time…

Adobe licensing is stupid

I manage a 1:1 tablet computer program at an independent school in Melbourne. We have around 1100 tablet computers. Roughly 150 of these computers are in the hands of staff, the remainder with students.

We have run this program since 1993 and for a variety of reasons we have opted to maintain a student owned model – meaning parents buy a recommended device through the school from a recommended supplier. This approach differs from a school purchase model where a school buys machines on behalf of parents and passes the cost on through school fees.

The practical difference between these models to students (and the parents shelling out the cash) is nothing: Machines are used at home and school in both scenarios and software is purchased through the school via a variety of educational site license schemes. For example, we use Microsoft’s subscription license for all of our MS products – we do an annual count of machines and they send us a bill – it’s straight forward and manageable.

Why Adobe’s licensing is stupid

For several years now (I’d hazard a guess at around 5) I’ve been hassling resellers and Adobe directly about their educational site license. We own one 500 seat site license for Creative Suite CS4 (we had CS2, CS3 etc. before that and had Photoshop, Premiere and Macromedia software as well ) which we can use on “school owned computers” only. Of course this means that we are unable to install CS4 on the student machines because technically the school doesn’t own the machine. There are schools in our area that use a school purchase model for their computers and are able to buy the license and install on student machines simply because of how the device was paid for – NOT how it used.

Loop holes and crazy schemes…

There is a little loop hole which we may have been able to exploit – some (about half) of our parents lease their child’s machine with the school acting as guarantor and master for the lease – meaning the school owns the machine (on paper) for the term of the lease. Unfortunately with only half of our parents opting for this payment method we can’t offer this approach.

We’ve explored application virtualisation – streaming apps thin to student machines from the server – this has worked about as well as sucking a golf ball through a garden hose with CS4 and I’m not sure it would be legit anyway – still worth a crack.

I’ve heard another school asking parents to sign ownership of student machine hard drives over to the school so the school “owns” where CS4 is installed. Not only is this a little nuts, I suspect if tested it would breach the license anyway. Creative, but…

What do Adobe/their resellers say?

I’ve taken to asking software resellers “are Adobe still stupid?” every time I communicate with them. I get a variety of responses, here are a few:

• “It’ll [the sale of this site license] affect ‘boxed product’ sales”. – This is crazy – the one thing it might affect is the download of PhotoShop from BitTorrent sites.
• “Parents might use the software” – Frankly, so will the bogey man. There is no chance a parent is going to be able to prise their kids computer from their kids hands
• “They’ve met their quarterly sales quota and aren’t interested” – This sounds more like the truth, but in the current economic climate in the US it is hard to believe they can turn away our business
• “It’s with legal in the States” – This is a new one we’ve been hearing lately – along with “they do this already in Norway so it shouldn’t be a problem”. – Whatever – hollow promises and pathetic, spineless rot pedalled by boring software sales people – bah!

I’ve even had one reseller sell me the site licenses I’m after, telling me he had secured the addendum to the software use agreement. I smelt a rat, but let it go in the hope it would wake Adobe up to the fact that we were serious and they could be getting even more money from us. Sadly I was mistaken. I never paid the bill and the product or “SKU” never really existed and Adobe remains with their head firmly positioned up their butt.

Why persist?

Sadly Adobe makes software the kids (and staff) want and as director of IT I feel I must try my utmost to service their curriculum need. I have presented a variety of alternatives to the toolset CS4 offers, but the reality is the students want PhotoShop, they want DreamWeaver and Flash and Acrobat and Premiere and all of the other bits that are wrapped up in the suite. The software is great, the licensing is not.

So in this public forum I will make the request one more time: Adobe, please sell us your software.

Digital Citizenship Man – Righting the Wrongs of the Web

I recently received an email from someone who was at pains to highlight inadequacies of a site I forwarded as a potential useful reference. The site, www.readprint.com offers a collection of texts which are in the public domain in a tidy format. There are many of these sites around, but this one seems to have a broader collection of authors and titles than some others so I thought it worthy of sharing.

The email was particularly scathing of the grammar on the site (which is nothing short of atrocious) and went on for several paragraphs highlighting all kinds of inadequacies. Here’s an extract (there were several paragraphs) from the email highlighting some of the problems with the biography of O’Henry displayed on the site:

O’Henry:
The writer’s name was O’Henry, not O.Henry

• “When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his parental (!?!) grandmother and paternal aunt.”
• “In 1894 cash was found to have gone missing (convoluted nonsense) from the First National Bank in Austin”
• “It is said, that he met one Al Jennings, and rambled in South America and Mexico on the proceeds of Jenning’s robbery.”  Was the associate named Jennings or Jenning?  Or is this another example of ignorance of the basic use of the apostrophe?  Confusion reigns supreme.
• “The story tells about two kidnappers, who make off with the young son of a prominent man.” Dumbed down, simplistic language

Nothing wrong with pointing out problems with a site you might say – particularly a site which is directed at “students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast”. Nothing except, why tell me? I merely passed the site on as a possible reference for some colleagues – the managers of the site would benefit so much more from this feedback and they provide ample links to volunteer information to them.

The email went on to say this:

The goal is always to educate, not provide poor or incorrect examples of writing.  Regular exposure to dumbed down or incorrect examples of the English language will undoubtedly reinforce poor practice and lower standards.

The nature of the web is that we find many inconsistencies, inaccuracies and incomplete work and part of being a good digital citizen is to offer correction when needed. Surowiecki’s idea of the “wisdom of crowds” appears to be the best chance we have of keeping up [and moderating] with the vast quantities of newly created/curated ideas, text, media, etc. I agree the goal is always to educate and this example offers the perfect opportunity to educate students in how to participate - how to be good, responsible digital citizens.

We can be passengers and watch mistakes on the web, or we can be active digital citizens and right wrongs that we become aware of.

Don’t be a passenger, be a Digital Citizenship Man/Woman!

NOTE: I have no affiliation with readprint.com – They (readprint.com) appear to be a front for some kind of online coupon marketing scheme which is using public domain books as a carrot to drive traffic to their site – hardly a philanthropic venture, but I don’t think this need stop good digital citizens from righting wrongs

1:1 school computer programs – tendering pays for itself

The school where I work has had a 1:1 notebook/tablet computer program since 1993. The program has been successful for a myriad of reasons, but one contributing factor has been our annual tender process used to probe the market for the best value and service level agreement for our school community.

Yes it’s boring, but it’s also important.

Why go to tender?

There are many reasons for an annual tender, here are a few:

• Due diligence: providing the best possible value for money for the families who invest in the school program
• It provides and annual opportunity to negotiate a better deal
• It keeps the marketplace competitive – you want companies to fight for your business
• You maintain an understanding of what alternatives are available
• You keep the incumbent vendor/reseller on their toes
• You drive the agenda of needs – not the reseller/vendor
• Involving the school community in the process of selection feeds back into the program with advocates for what you are doing and champions for the technology
• You can ask for/get offered more value – whether this is in price reductions or better specs on the machine – if you don’t ask, you won’t get.

Limited or public tender?

We do a limited tender: we target vendors who have experience in the education sector or who demonstrate an understanding of the demands of the environment.

My experience with a public tender was not good. We were bombarded with responses from companies who simply hadn’t read the tender document or were trying to make our requirements fit with the product they had to sell. Not only was it time consuming trawling through the masses of half baked responses, it bore no fruit. Aside from the experience, I can safely say that I’m not missing much by limiting my tender.

Having said this, it is important to ensure that you are proactive in pursuing resellers who can serve your needs. A competitive marketplace works very much to your advantage.

The process of developing a tender…

First, the school (meaning the teaching and learning people, NOT the techs) need to decide on the appropriate device type (slate, tablet, notebook, netbook, smartphone, iPod touch, Atari…) for your environment. It is imperative that it is a curriculum decision which drives the selection of the device. This is for two reasons:

• The cart needs to be behind the horse – the curriculum folk need to know what they want and how the technology will be used to support learning – otherwise the whole thing will go pear shaped faster than you can say “disenchanted school community”.
• Secondly, when you’re explaining the device choice to parents there is sound rationale backing up your decision – a firm grounding for a program will ensure its longevity.

Once the device type has been established, specifications can be ironed out with the school’s technical people to ensure the demands the curriculum people have made can be met.

What to include in the tender:

• Minimum specs of the machine – be realistic and remember, they’re minimum specs.
• Purchase options/finance – lease/own/rent – what options are available and how will it work? Who do they prefer to work with?
• Service – how do they (the vendor) hope to meet your service level demands – this is crucial. You must make it absolutely clear what you expect – 24 hour turnaround, loan machines, onsite parts supply, paper processing times warranty/insurance, etc…
• Insurance – can be an expensive, but is necessary – what happens if one kid (or worse, staff member) damages another kids machine?
• Warranty – for working life of the machine – usually 3 years.
• The bag – the bag seems to influence the insurance – at least that’s what they tell us. The bag is a crucial aspect of the whole deal. If it is too heavy (we had a bag recently which weighed 1.2kg!) it undoes much of the good work you’ll have done getting a lightweight device – if that is what you’ve opted for. The bag also needs to be robust, streamlined and look cool – a tall order!

Responding to the tender

The response to the tender needs to ensure that you have all the information from all of the venders in a form that allows you to make a clear, considered decision. The problem with this is that companies who respond tend to do so in their own *special* little ways.

These idiosyncrasies often frustrate your attempts to distil facts in a form which affords comparison. I solved this problem by writing an online survey with nearly 50 questions, asking everything from the weight of the device with and without the battery to screen resolutions and anything and everything else I could think of. I make completing the survey a condition of the tender which ensures I get all the data in a form that I can easily distribute to the selection committee for comparison.

I’ve also learnt to add this phrase to my tender documents:

Failure to complete the online questionnaire or meet any conditions of this tender may render your submission void.

The reason for this phrase is the inability of many companies to follow simple instructions – some companies (usually the big ones in my experience) seem to respond to tenders using find and replace on an old tender response. When they do this, it doesn’t allow you to do your job properly and frankly, if a company can’t take the time to consider your tender, what hope have you got once you’ve signed?

Evaluation of tenders

The last thing I include in my tender documents is a clear timeline articulating the process from submission, short-listing, vendor presentation and then final decisions. Give companies time to respond and give time for your people to evaluate responses.

Over to you…

Does this make sense? What do you do at your school? Do you have other approaches which work? How do you get the best value for your school community? Let us know in the comments.

This post also appears in Education Today Vol 9 (4) – Term 4 2009

Cloud computing

What is cloud computing?

“Cloud computing” is a term that is new to many, but the concept is a relatively old one. Cloud computing refers to the use of a shared computer resource, provided as a service, accessed via the internet, used to manage the computing needs of many in a scalable way. Those accessing “the cloud” do not need to maintain or service infrastructure which supports their activities – all technology infrastructure is managed centrally by a provider like Google or Microsoft as a utility (similar to electricity).

How could a school use the cloud?

Cloud computing could be the next great computing tool for schools and may provide not only technical efficiencies, but also new and better ways of working. The obvious advantage of a shared environment like the cloud is the potential for collaboration. Files not stored with an individual can be accessed and edited by many without complicated merging at a later stage – everyone is literally on the same page. Conversations can take place on a virtual canvas, in moving image, in text, on a timeline, map or in music with all of the complexities of combining input left to the central service. This way of working is indicative of the 21st century skill set which schools endeavour to foster in pupils. There are also more mundane, administrative and cost saving benefits for schools. It could offer:

• massive computing power for simulations and modelling ordinarily not available to individual schools;
• scalability to accommodate state or countrywide learning management systems and administrative tools;
• reduced costs derived from a reduced school based technical support staff and less local technology infrastructure;
• a smaller carbon footprint as a consequence of centralising computing resources –  power consumption, cooling, etc;
• reduced hardware requirements for students potentially reducing the digital divide, providing greater access to more people; and
• “always up to date” software – maintained centrally by the service provider, users benefit from enhancements as soon as they are available.

Limitations of the cloud

Currently the biggest barrier to moving to many cloud based applications is bandwidth. Our physical connection to the world is limited in Australia and with many cloud services located in other parts of the world a bottleneck of internet traffic would likely frustrate users as they wait for file and instruction transfers. Domestically the federal government is applying filters to web traffic which could potentially slow communications significantly, limiting the viability of working completely in the cloud. Locally, at a school level, many do not have the connection speed they require to have their entire population operating on the web simultaneously and affordably.

Google (Gears), Microsoft (Sync Framework) and Adobe (AIR) are all tools written to facilitate operation when not online and enhance the user experience of online applications, which may alleviate some speed and connectivity concerns (data is saved on the users machine for synchronisation when connectivity is available), but these don’t yet extend to all applications and environments and have their limitations.

Privacy of information stored in the cloud is also a concern to many with a change in policies (and underlying thinking) required to facilitate movement of data backup/storage to third party servers which the school doesn’t have overall responsibility or control.

Early days, but something to watch

While I have listed some applications which make working in the cloud something worth considering, it is still very early days and many of the services are contingent on ubiquitous, fast internet access, and a preparedness of users (students, teachers, parents) to accept the limitations of the service as it stands now. The years ahead promise much in this area, but time will tell how it plays out for schools (and business) in Australia.

Examples of cloud computing to whet your appetite for the future:

• Online video editing: www.jaycut.com
• Photoshop Express, online image editing: www.photoshop.com/express
• Google apps: apps.google.com
• Online mind mapping: www.mindmeister.com
• Office applications, business tools and calendars: www.zoho.com
• Online planner/calendar: www.rememberthemilk.com
• Computer synchronization/cloud storage, Microsoft Mesh: www.mesh.com
• Amazon EC2, server infrastructure on demand: aws.amazon.com/ec2/
• How to create a server in the cloud: A poet’s guide

This article was reproduced in the Jornal of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia Vol. 34, No 1.