New Laptops - An Update

well, after 5 long years of lobbying for more resources at school, we have      

finally received a set of new laptops on a nifty, purpose-built trolley! it's taken this long to work through the "red tape" since my last post, but i have used them this last week, and the kids are pretty rapt. i was "lucky" enough to be away on an emergency overseas trip when they arrived, so i missed all the teething problems!

unfortunately, no one was interested in getting a set of chromebooks, even though it would have meant we could have bought several classrooms worth for what we spent on a single set, but beggars cannot be choosers. and there's also something about looking a gift horse in the mouth...

the only drawback was that at the oh-so-excited announcement to our department that they were coming, some people were not nearly as excited, but you can't please all the people all the time, right?

in short, this trolley represents, to me, 7 years of forcing kids to use substandard equipment so that i could demonstrate need. 5 years of going to meetings, begging senior management and the BoT personally, struggling to complete multi-media projects (no word processing for my students!) without the resources required, making enemies (because i don't tolerate bullshit well) out of those who should have been helping our school be a leader in edtech. i guess that's a pretty heavy burden for one set to carry, even in a nifty trolley. and the movement for wireless is still ongoing.

that aside, i am very pleased that we can ease the incredible stress on minimal resources. my students have just completed the new standard, 3.9, using them, and we will be using them for three weeks next term as well with our clockwork orange collaborative presos. but those are other posts. in the meantime: HOORAY!

Some Good News

I am pleased to say that our department has been approved to purchase a set of laptops! That's the good news; now for the hard yards.

My biggest problem is what to get!

Tablets?
I really enjoy my own tablet, but use it mostly for reading, browsing, or quick social media responses. The onscreen keyboard is a drawback for me (in a pinch I use a USB one), but the biggest drawback for the secondary English classroom, I think, is that you are limited to doing one thing at one time. This drives me crazy when I'm cooking. I like to follow a recipe and listen to youtube at the same time, so I break out the multi-task Chromebook. Plus, I don't think they'd wear well in an all-boys high school.

Chromebooks?
I'd love to get a set of chromebooks, not the least of which because I could afford two sets of them. At $249/ea you can't go wrong. However, my own students spend computer time creating - using audio/visual tools to create and edit video and sound that they can use and/or embed as presentations and case studies. I'm not sure the Chromebook will allow us that ability - what do you all think? Anyone with some experience here who could chime in with an opinion? Are there online audio/video tools that are of good quality?

Laptops?
I think this is probably where the money will be spent. We can get decent 8-gig Toshiba laptops for a reasonable (for NZ) $600, excluding our multi-purchase/school discount. Laptops have the advantage of multi-tasking with tools on the HDD. The drawback, of course, is the price. When you can buy two Chromebooks for less than one laptop, well...

I'd like to hear what you have to say, so please leave a comment about what you're doing and how it's working for you.

Technology in 2012

Summary of technology used this year:

As you can tell from my last 2 posts, it hasn't been a banner year. I have tried, within the limitations I have, to utilise as much tech as I can, but the students themselves have so little access, that of the time they spend trying to create a project, I spend twice as much time having to create/upload/download/convert their work that it's a major turn-off. We have had very little access this year, including a 2 week period where one teacher booked our only resource for four weeks straight for word processing, and another closed their lab for an entire term so the THREE students who put together the yearbook could have the whole lab.

Ok, enough whinging.

This year, my year 13 students have utilised Prezi (for the first time for them - so proud!) to present their oral presentations. they did a great job! what wasn't great: my laptop not connecting to the data projector, the network going down during their presentation time (several days in a row, and several times in a period) and the load-time for any embedded audio/visuals.

My year 12 students have created a film study google doc for the tv mini-series they studied. This involved me having to watch several hours out of class to rip stills for them to use to illustrate their points, which was fine by me as long as they were using them. I found using google docs for collaborative work better than a wiki, because they can all create in one place at the same time.

My year 9 students have created a film wiki. They didn't enjoy this as much because 1) they couldn't access the film shorts on youtube while working on their pages, 2) only one person per group could post at one time, and 3) they couldn't upload anything to the wiki themselves; they had to wait for me to do it. What was really cool was that we were able to ask Simon Pegg questions!

My year 10 students worked with Fakebook again this year. This will be the last time I use Fakebook in class. The site requires a number of steps to be done in a certain order before the page can be saved (and edited), and they struggled greatly with this, constantly losing their pages and having to start from scratch. The student who persevered won a coveted twinkie.

Right now, my Year 9s are working on a project that our Librarian and I collaborated on. They are creating book trailers for their chosen texts. Once completed, I have to upload them to google docs myself, then email them the link so they can create a QR Code. The code is then printed for 1) the cover of the library book and 2) a space in the library that the Librarian has prepared. We decided to do this project to increase literacy, always an issue in a boys' school, and to present to the BoT what students can do when they have access.

I've also had the boys prepare a 30-60 second speeches where they state what they expected to be doing in high school (technology-wise) and how those expections have been met. I'm going to edit these speeches into one video.

When the tasks are complete (had hoped this would be done by the end of the term, but it takes me 15 minutes on our network to upload each trailer to youtube, sigh), the Librarian and I are going to request to be on the agenda at a BoT meeting and have a 2-part presentation: 1) this great project, and 2) what's really going on at our school tech-wise and a plan for what can be done about it.

And that pretty much sums up this year.

So...What Happened?

backstory in a nutshell: we started the school year with more internet blocking than ever, thanks to a new non-school internet blocker that blocked everything by category, so we had no access to news, media, music, radio, etc.

we finally had a meeting at the end of week 3, with our headmaster and all the people concerned about the problems with access at school, which totaled about 12(on a side note, i have spent 2 days now helping a senior master get his laptop working at home!)

our headmaster is so good; he is serious about our needing to be part of the 21st century and not the end of the 19th. he asked everyone what we cannot get to that we need (HUGE list!), and what we thought we should do about our current lack of access (at least go back to last year's settings). he also asked if students could be hurt by unlimited internet access, which, of course, is yes. the internet, like everything else in life, needs to be taken with moderation and a grain of salt, and exposure to porn, whether wittingly or not, is abusive.

the net result is that we have our access back, mostly. there are selected sites blocked, such as trademe and facebook and bebo. while i would prefer total access (trademe's message board is a great way to reach a wide variety of people to fill in student surveys on surveymonkey; students' own facebook or bebo blogs would be convenient for blogging, as well as teaching them that their online profiles affect their lives in more ways than the obvious), i can live with it. we are also installing a programme (forget name) on teachers' computers so we can see what are students are working on; essential when you can't be everywhere at once.

my question at the end of the day is: if watchdog, the school internet blocking tool provided by the ministry of education, is doing *its* job, why is it our individual school's responsibility to do more than the ministry by using a second blocker that blocks everything else via tags/categories? and why does the it tech have say about what teachers teach? what do you think?

Getting the Techonology We Need

so, i 've just come from a meeting with our headmaster about availability of technology.  i've written this before: our school blocks heaps of useful websites (bbc radio?!) and student computers have java blocked, which means, of course, that many many activities are simply not do-able.   for example, i recently designed a level 1 research unit (year 11) on careers that included a surveymonkey online survey as well as future course planning using successmaker at kiwiquals. students could do neither of these things. the survey we had to forgo altogether, and the course planning had to be done via pen and paper (and yet more photocopying.  sorry trees).

our headmaster is more than amenable to making changes, including students logging on to computers under their own log in rather than an anonymous "research" one, which involves having to save any online research to a shared folder, log off, log in again with a personal log in, then drag files out of shared into personal folder. if it hasn't been deleted by some knob in another lab somewhere on campus. which it often has, since they can do stupid things anonymously. however, we are now going to have a larger meeting with several staff, and i know that some of the long term male members will be reluctant (to put it nicely) to make the changes. i know, change IS scary. but it CAN be managed.

please, if your school offers free internet access and/or your students have java enabled on their computers, leave a comment below. any positive feedback would be very helpful. or, conversely, positive stories of dealing with the naughties would be helpful too!.

have a great weekend :O)