So today Google announced that they will be introducing their very own Google Chrome OS.

This follows in the wake of excellent the Google Chrome web browser which was released last year.  Designed initially for netbooks, it appears that the OS will effectively be little more than a web browser.  The beauty of this is that it will be incredibly quick and run on relatively underpowered/old hardware.

As I am getting my head around the idea of managing a whole school’s IT budget next year, a FREE and quick OS to load onto older machines seems like a great idea.  Whether it’s ageing laptops or desktops, hopefully this could extend their useful lives by some years.  Sure we won’t be able to fire up Photoshop on it, but over the coming years I foresee the majority of pupils work taking place on the Internet.  This could be just great for running your VLE on.  There will always be a need for one or two clusters of bang up to date desktops, but hopefully more innovations like this will help stretch our budgets.

So that’s two exciting looking new products from Google in the last two months (after last month’s Google Wave), can they do no wrong?

Technorati Tags: chrome, Google, Internet, laptops, netbooks, online, VLE, Web2.0

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The fantastic Manchester collaborative of teachers I have been working with have finished our final set of rich mathematical tasks. I previously blogged about the work we had been doing and provided links to some zip files with the resources.  These seem to have been really popular judging by the traffic on that post.

Read the last post to find out more about these resoruces.

Here is a complete download list of the tasks that we’ve produced:

Y7 Core, Y7 Support, Y8 Core, Y9 Support, Y9 Core, Y9 Extension.

If you find any of these useful then please leave a comment and I’ll pass it on to the rest of the team.

Finally, these are hosted on the fabulous Dropbox.  My account is nearly full, if you want to sign up for 2Gb of free online storage that automatically synchs with your computer then could you please do it via this link, it’s a great service and everyone who does so via that link will give me an extra 250Mb of storage for free – thanks in advance

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Not all online learning networks actually thrive, here’s a tale of a failed attempt by myself:

I have been involved with a couple of projects in Manchester as part of a collaborative of schools from across the city. Part of this was the continuation of the LEMA project and the creation of some great resources that I have discussed elsewhere.

During this work the idea of an online space for sharing links, ideas and resources was mooted.  I jumped at the suggestion and went to work looking for a solution.  A Ning was the first obvious idea, I’ve been part of some excellent examples over recent years, although my use of them has dwindled since Twitter invaded my time.

One of the key requirements for the website was the ability to store files, Ning can’t do this inherently.  We could have used another online file hosting service and linked to it, but many of these are blocked by school and LA filtering systems.  Having ruled out Ning, I found a similar competitor called Grou.ps .  This startup seemed to offer all that we needed, a space for sharing links and resources, a forum and blog posts if things really took off.

I floated the idea with the group of Maths teachers I had been working with, they were all keen so I went ahead and spent some considerable time setting up our very own grou.ps group.

Unfortunately the day it came around to launching the site, I was busy at parent’s evening and couldn’t attend the collaborative meeting.  None-the-less it was launched in my absence and requests to join starting to come in.  I put up lots of posts with links to resources and examples of how each section worked.  We made some good old-fashioned paper booklets to distribute to schools and waited for the site to take off.

But it really didn’t

I think the main problems were two-fold:

Grou.ps is just too slow.  The technology behind it may be sound, a clone of Ning with some extra features, but it takes an AGE for pages to load.  I had noticed this during my building of the site, the  Grou.ps forums had reassuring messages from the owners saying that they were working on the problems, but things didn’t really improve.  I suspect that this put a lot of people off before they had even got started.

I’m in a minority, as are most of the people reading this blog.  I don’t think the teaching community at large is yet in the habit of making time to go online and share the work they’ve been doing.  I certainly don’t think they’re selfish, I just don’t think those habits have been formed yet.  A learning community is only as good as the time and resources people put into it.

If we’re going to encourage more people to share their time, expertise and resources online then the spaces for this to take place need to be well designed, efficient and enticing.  In this case I don’t think my end product ticked all these boxes.  You also need a core of dedicated users, it’s a shame I wasn’t at the launch of this, I think I needed to encourage a couple of people from other schools to have the share enthusiasm for the concept that I myself had.

As I look at the job of choosing and launching a VLE at my new school in the next school year, these are important lessons.  The system will have to work well and reliably and I must ensure there is a core of VLE ambassadors, from both staff and pupils.

I hope the group takes off next year in my absence, I think they will try relaunching it in September.  I will have moved to Trafford LA by then, I’ll miss working with such an enthusiastic bunch of teachers and I’m sure they’ll have many more successful projects in the future.

Technorati Tags: grou.ps, network, ning, PLN

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This sketch from the always excellent Gaping Void got me thinking, are there some teachers you shouldn’t bother pushing even the best technology at?

Technorati Tags: EdTech

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As net-books continue to outpace the rest of the PC industry, prices falling and specs improving, are they ready for prime-time use in schools?

I have dallied with eeePCs back in the day, I was impressed then, unfortunately school didn’t back that up with a permanent wireless network and they have been little used since.  Back then the main issues were small screens, small keyboards and small batteries.  All of these features have been greatly improved over the past two years.

Last week two stories came through my RSS reader, one from The Register and one from my new favourite blog, The Angry Technician.  Both were focused on the new Dell Latitude 2100.  A 10″ net-book designed specifically for school.  I was going to speculate on it’s advantages for school use but then found that Mike Herrity had beaten me to it.  Rugged design, options for large batteries and touch screens, and a specially designed charging station make it an attractive proposition.

Next year when I take up my post of my post of E-Learning Director I hope to have far more involvement in the designation of ICT budgets and the ICT direction of my new school.  My question is, are net-books now ready for mainstream use in secondary schools?  There is obviously still a use for old fashioned computer labs with more powerful desktop PCs, but are net-books now a suitable supplement to this, to act as mobile class-sets?  Has your school had success in this area, or are you planning a roll-out for September?  Are you going the whole-hog and rolliing out 1-to-1 net-books for all your pupils?

EDIT: Forgot to add this link to Lifehacker’s 5 best netbooks, not education focussed, but interesting none the less.

Technorati Tags: 1to1, EdTech, eeePC, laptops, netbook

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Google announced a new product to the World at it’s Google I/O conference yesterday, Google Wave.

There has been much written about it around the Web, by folks more intelligent than I, so if you want to catch up on the intricacies then read some of these sites:

Ars Technica Tech Crunch Tech Crunch again LifeHacker DownloadSquad

You can sign up to be informed about Wave, and hopefully get involved with the beta at the Google Wave website: http://wave.google.com. If you’re lucky the video might be working on that site too, it was temperamental at the time of writing.

This looks very exciting for school use.  Many seem to have dubbed it the ‘new email’ already.  The collaboration possibilities in and between classrooms look fantastic.  I’ve been a big fan of using wikis as collaborative documents and this looks like it will take the concept of a wiki to a new level.  The ability to drag and drop files into a collaborative document in a browser for instance lowers the technical skills required for working with these kinds of technologies considerably.

This got me thinking back to a conversation John Sutton and I were having about the current state of VLEs.  I have yet to be impressed by any VLE I have seen, the majority appear to be a number of tools welded together into an expensive and ungainly lump, each of which has a better, free alternative available online.  We both thought that in a few years time they would appear so obsolete comapred to free online tools that a lot of the UK education sector would be wondering why they made such a fuss about them.  If Google and the other online players continue developing at this kind of pace this will happen sooner rather than later.

I would suggest already that you could meet the majority of BECTA’s VLE requirements with a combination of Google Apps for Education for communication and collaboration, SIMS Learning Gateway for online reporting and perhaps Edmodo and some blogs.  All for considerably less than the price of a commercial VLE.

Still, exciting times, roll on Autumn/Winter when we might be able to play with our own Waves.

EDIT: There’s a great round-up at Mashable, check out the full article, but here’s a snippet:

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Technorati Tags: BECTA, Collaboration, Google, Google Doc, Google Wave, online, VLE, Web2.0, wiki

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I’ve been playing around with two tools for mapping data onto Google Maps.  They both have potential in and out of the classroom.

First is MapAList, I came across this after it was discussed on the last TechChickTips podcast.  When you sign up for an account, MapAList will link itself to your Google Docs account.  You can then feed address information straight from a  Google Docs Spreadsheet onto the map.

Below I have mapped the address data from the survey I conducted during my E-Learning Interview.  As the data I collected was from an open ‘Where do you live?’ question, I had responses ranging from country through to street level accuracy.  MapAList did a fairly impressive job of converting these into points on the map.  It converted over half of them successfully, having more success with American data.  If you collect more detailed data with different address lines, city, post-code etc., all of this can be input, greatly increasing accuracy.

Mapalist Map

You can set up quite complex rules so that each piece of data is plotted with a certain marker, they were done at random on the map above but you could easily set certain colours to represent certain values.

I think this is a great tool to use in conjunction with Google Docs Forms & Spreadsheets.  As I previously discussed, there were excited woops around the classroom during my interview lesson while the data was arriving from around the world.  Plotting this info on a map will only bring it more to life.

Second is SpatialKey, this is a more professional piece of kit, and I suspect it will have a cost involved once the beta is over.  SpatialKey is capable of some powerful visualisations.  Unfortunately it only accepts US location data at present so I’ve only had a chance to play around with the sample data.  To get a better idea of what it is capable of, have a look at this video from their site:

Technorati Tags: Data, Google Doc, Google Spreadsheet, MapAList, mapping, maps, Maths, SpatialKey, visualising

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I’m trying out new themes at the moment, so if the site looks like someone has broken it – it’s all my fault!

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All schools I have been to have a rewards system in place, the yin, to the sanctions system’s yang. I think it’s about time school rewards were dragged into the 21st Century, and I have a few thoughts…

Yin & Yang

My current school is doing what most schools do every few years and discussing how we deal with behaviour: good and bad. The focus, as usual, has been mainly on the bad and associated sanctions rather than the good and their rewards. We currently use Capita’s SIMS as our information management system, within this is a behaviour module. Through this we can assign good and bad points to students. We call the good points ‘merits’. At present these count for little, a certificate at the end of the year if the pupils are lucky. Although not valued by many pupils, many will still strive to earn these merits, despite the fact they rarely even see the total they have earned. This has always puzzled me, I guess these merits also represent my approval of pupils, and this in itself is enough for some pupils. But still, I felt I was missing something.

I have been reading ‘Everything Bad is Good for You‘ by Steven Johnson. In the book Steven goes about explaining why much of popular culture, so often derided as increasingly vacuous, is in fact good for us, particularly the complex mental challenges it demands.

When discussing computer games, Steven looks at the seemingly dull, repetitive tasks we often complete within them and wonders why we bother at all. Steven puts the case that games tap into the brain’s natural reward circuitry. The small rewards that usually make up each step of a game, stimulating a dopamine response in the brain.

This got me thinking about the role of games in education, I’ve had great success with the wonderful TutPup last year. Starting a craze with our younger pupils. TutPup was bought out by the team behind Moshi Monsters earlier this year, I believe it will be integrated into the Moshi Monsters world some time soon. If you’ve not seen Moshi, check it out, filled with games and puzzles it encourages you to complete these in return for points which can be spent on customising your monster and it’s house. Mathletics operates on a similar principle, successful completion of the maths games give you points to spend on ‘pimping’ your avatar.

I consulted my faithful Twitter network about rewards systems and during the discussion Greg (twitter.com/futurebehaviour) pointed me towards the ‘Stanford Marshmallow Experiment‘.  This fascinating study put 4 year olds in a room with a marshmallow.  They were told if they waited until the person conducting the test returned they would receive an extra marshmallow.  Those who ate the single marshmallow straight away, demonstrating a lack of impulse control were found to do considerably worse in their SATs 14 years later!  Doug (twitter.com/dajbelshaw) asked whether reward systems on the micro level were pointless and counter-productive.  We discussed long and short term rewards.  I think that a majority of pupils who I teach would probably have taken the first marshmallow.  Many of them are impulsive and do not have the natural patience to wait for delayed gratification.  I think this is down to many influences, their background and social situation will have a large effect, as will their media and entretainment.  The computer games, instant messaging, reality TV and mobile phones that our pupils live with have, I think, made us more used to instant gratification.

PS3 Trophies from MNGilen on flickr

My Moshi Monster

If this is the case, then this is something we should take advantage of in schools.  Let us make more of the micro level rewards, in conjunction with longer term ones such as reward trips, and of course, the more intrinsic rewards of succeeding and doing well.

I would like to see a reward system linked to online monsters/avatars as described earlier, or even a system like that found on current consoles: PlayStation Trophies or X-Box Live Achievements.  Staff would be able to award ‘points’ to pupils for whatever good behaviour the school decides is appropriate.  This could be all electronic or via codes/stickers in a system like this one.  The pupil could then see these updating on their electronic system.  Imagine either your own, in-school ‘reward monster’ or a trophy list like the one above but with games swapped for good deeds.

This would allow pupils to quickly get gratification and feedback from their rewards, and would hopefully foster competition between pupils.  The system should also be able to total points by different pupil groups, e.g. Form Class, Year Group, House System etc., this would allow competition on a larger scale.

Longer term rewards could be rewarded for those with the highest points score, biggest improvement, best Form, etc. etc..

Finally on my wishlist would be the ability for pupils to embed their rewards in other websites.  The use of ‘widgets’ is increasingly common across the web.  If pupils could display their rewards on their personal VLE page, Facebook or their own blog it would only add to the value in the system.

So what do you think?  I am sure our school would pay a modest fee for a professionally done system like this.  Should we be focussing on such short term rewards?  School Stickers, Mind Candy, do you think something like this is easily doable?  If there is anything in the pipeline I’d love to be involved.

I think this would work well at Primary School, and at KS3 in Secondary School (11-14) after that pupils tend to have developed more intrinsic motivation and can work for deferred gratification.

A final thought:

Greg Perry via Twitter

Technorati Tags: Behaviour, education, Everything Bad is Good for You, Facebook, Moshi Monsters, Rewards, school

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Well today the sun shone down on me and I got a chance to experiment with ‘spaced learning‘ as planned.

photo credit: tamakisono

Initial gut instinct is that it was a success. Pupils were engaged in the entire process, made clear progress throughout the lesson and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. At this late stage in their school life that in itself is a good thing. Historically this class has been capable of forgetting or confusing the area and volume formula within a week of covering it last. So I’ll do some work with them next week and see if this has improved…

As I stated in my previous post, this is FAR from a scientific experiment. Doug asked in the comments how I would measure success and avoid the Hawthorne Effect. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t really considered this, it’s 3 weeks until the first GCSE and that’s my priority right now. I’m going to run with gut instinct with this one, and if things look successful I’ll try and organise a more detailed study later this year.

EDIT: I’m guilty of not leaving blog posts for a little while before clicking post – I get over excited! I should have included the following:

The PowerPoint presentation seemed to work well, it fitted the time perfectly, on the second run through I paused before revealing each formula and asked the class for the answer, upping the engagement a little. Final time we just whizzed through the table of formulae and then got to work on some GCSE past paper questions. These are being finished for homework, so that will be the first feedback. The proof will be in the exam next month though.

Technorati Tags: education, Experiment, gcse, Schools, Secondary, Spaced Learning

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