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.

I'm Tired. I'm Frustrated. I'm Angry.

I can't believe it's been so long since I posted last. Or maybe I can. I'm tired. I'm frustrated. And I'm angry. I'm tired of not having reliable access to the internet at school. I have been keeping a diary for the last year of all the network errors I encounter during the course of the day, and there are so many! This is just when I actually want to use it (of course, typically when a lesson revolved around something required on the internet); who knows how much more often it actually is! I'm frustrated. I've skipped out on ICT committee meetings since this time last year, when I realised that I am the only department person who shows up regularly, and that the meetings accomplish nothing for students/staff. I attended the most recent, briefly, which mostly discussed how we're going to keep the kids from using the new high-speed broadband network. I understand that while much of this is the laziness factor on the part of certain people, a part of it is also financial, and that's frustrating too. I'm angry. Our department had a vacancy last year, and it was advertised as "leading the school in technology integration." Well, thanks for the kind words! However, the person hired was NOT impressed when they arrived (from overseas). They feel a bit hustled. I'm not surprised. I'm angry my students can neither download or upload files for their work, and cannot view youtube at all! Needless to say, this put the breaks on our film wiki project. I ripped my DVD and dumped it into the student data file instead, but what a pain! This is after we were all told off for having too much stuff in our department folders that the server couldn't handle. Well, what do they expect when students have no access? If the kids had access to youtube, they could watch the bit of the film they are analysing without taking up server space. I'm angry the network went down three days in a row during report writing week, for hours at a time (as it does EVERY reporting period). I mean, seriously. If the network can't handle the traffic when it needs to, shouldn't it be UPGRADED? Nothing like last minute pressure to meet report deadlines (NOT EXTENDED [understandably]) during exams, marking, and managing groups of boys who have sat their exams and are ready for the holidays but there's still two weeks to go! If you think I'm angry, spare a thought for those poor staff members who took time away from their own families to work on reports from home using our remote server, which promptly went down and deleted all their work. I'm angry, no, I'm still really, really PEEVED OFF at last year's frustrating episode that some of you will remember. But I feel I have no recourse whatsoever. I'm still so angry about this that I am retraining myself with the ICT curriculum (that's my PD for this year) and considering a change. A major change. This year I've had so little access that the time it takes to set up blogs, wikis, and keeping all of it updated all the time just doesn't seem worth it. And that's sad. What's also sad is how little I feel this year. I no longer go in early, and I leave every day by 4pm. It means I'm super busy when I'm there, but I'm simply not prepared to continue to give and give and give of my home time when nothing changes on the other end. I'm not attending any conferences this year, which makes me sad, but I cannot justify the expense from my household budget when there's no implementation afterwards. Guess what else is sad? I find I'm understanding more and more why other staff simply can't be bothered to get wired. It does take a lot of your time. It does require ongoing upskilling. But...they will not actually be using it in the foreseeable future. Heck, my room doesn't even really have heat, doesn't have any a/c, and definitely doesn't have any computers. I'm tired of fighting for access. I'm frustrated that people still see students using computers as "playing," and I'm angry that I'm not able to prepare my students for their futures. But heck, they can use a pen and paper like nobody's business!

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?

Network Blocking ARGH!

so, i've been so darn angry the last two weeks that i haven't bothered to write about it, hoping the situation would resolve itself. well, it's not going to resolve itself, and i just have to vent before making an appointment to speak with the headmaster.

last year i attended Ulearn08 with our headmaster and some other folks from my school. the net result was that this year we were going to have open internet access, among other cool stuff. well...

i came to school after our (too short) summer holiday and plugged in the network, used google chrome for various things, then went home. when i plugged my computer into my own modem, i couldn't load chrome, as "your network administrator has blocked your access to proxies. see him" (that's a paraphrase) came up. thinking it must be the browser i used, i tried internet explorer, only to find that the connections tab was missing altogether! i rang our NA at home, and he, wisely, neither answered nor returned my call. i was absolutely livid.

the next day i went straight to him, and was told that it was "possible" for a student with a laptop to access our proxy and use up our internet time. he added, "the ministry provides laptops for work, at work". he then tempered that with the info that he had only changed the proxy access on IE, and that chrome "must be borrowing the settings from IE, tell it to change them properly; then, d/l firefox, which should work fine for you at home".

so, downloaded firefox, which does work fine at home, BUT...

EVERYTHING is blocked! first, we couldn't access any video sites, then radio sites, now sites on metaphors, and today i couldn't even open my payslip in google docs! it's gotten so ridiculous i would be speechless if i just weren't so angry!

>>Site blocked. www.nbc.com is not allowed on this network.
>>This site was categorized as:
>>Television
>>Questions? Not properly categorized?

look, i get that school doesn't want staff hanging around on tradme, but come on! half of the english curriculum in nz is media studies! without access to media, how am i to teach my classes? and not using my laptop at home? where do they think i actually do MY work, after teaching all day?

and the idea that a student will use up all our allowance? c'mon! i've only ever seen 1 student here with a laptop, and he was a top boy! seriously, what is the percentage?

oh, and then to add insult to injury, on thursday all staff received an article in our inboxes, from the _principals' digests_, entitled "using the potential of facebook, youtube, and myspace" (none of which we can access, of course)! it carried the reports of a study, which i'm sure you've seen by now, with a vision of student today, and recommended: consideration of social networking sites for staff as well as classrooms, harnessing the educational value of chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, and wikis, "ensur[ing] equitable access", and so on. was that supposed to be a joke? were they kidding? are they laughing in their offices about how frustrated we are?

the new nz curriculum calls for teaching students how to live in their future, utilising technology students use in their everyday lives. how can we do that if we, the teachers, do not have access? while i had planned a variety of exciting units for this year, at all different levels, i am seriously thinking of bagging all of them and simply using "chalk and talk". running into gigantic problems every time i want to do something new and relevant is becoming too big an obstacle. i am very close to giving up.

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)