Cut the wire

I'll start off by saying that I hate wires. With now 31 internet connected devices in my household, I've made a conscious effort to ensure as many of them are wireless as possible. In fact, of the 31 internet connected devices in the household, only 5 of them use are wired standard. Still, if I never have to run another Cat 5e cable again I'll be happy.

Actually, I hate all wires. Especially when I consider the constant battle involved in keeping mobile devices charged. Personally I use 5 battery operated devices in my daily life (two phones, two tablets and a laptop). They use four different types of chargers and it is a constant battle when I am on the road to keep them charged and working.

So you can understand why I hate wires of any sort. Cut them I say ...

So what about wireless technology then?

Well WiDi turned out to been one of those game changing technologies that just never got enough traction. The fact that I could be a teacher operating in a classroom with a tablet and have full HDMI-equivalent control of my projector or television screen in the classroom seems like a brilliant solution.

I mean, consider that you could:

• Better manage a classroom by being present and mobile
• Better address the challenges of direct instruction
• Provide immediacy in student feedback (I remember the joy the first time I took a picture of a student piece of work and annotated it on the screen for all to see)
• Speed up the logging in and logging on processes of going into multiple classrooms

Ultimately, however, WiDi just hasn't taken off with most practitioners. There are innumerable reasons why, but many of them are issues to do with the complications and limitations of wireless technology. However, in the second half of this year the wireless world is going to change just a little when it comes to these wireless technologies

Here are two trends and the reasons why you might want to watch this space:

• Wireless standards - many of us know of 802.11ac, the new (faster) iteration of the longstanding 802.11 wireless standard. Broadly speaking, 802.11ac offers significant bandwidth improvement over 802.11n (the most common standard). However, it is the new 802.11ad standard which I am interested in. This standard is  also known as Wireless Gigabit (WiGi) connectivity. WiGi operates in different bandwidth (60Ghz) than the other 802 standards. And it has a specific purpose - wireless docking. Wireless docking will be an interesting new tool for teachers battling the cable. Consider this scenario:

Jane goes to her classroom. As she enters the room her tablet wirelessly syncs with the projector, keyboard and mouse in the room, as well as the printer. Jane can immediately start her lessons and make use of any USB tools in the room without connecting a single wire. Jane can now be mobile in her classroom while still wirelessly connecting to any television, projector or other device connected to the dock. 

Abby arrives in Industrial Technology (Multimedia) class and pops her tablet on the table. She syncs wirelessly with her allocated work station, equipped with a large format monitor, full sized keyboard and mouse. She is able to use these to work on her major project for her her HSC course. 

So what? We've now made docking a simple single solution that requires hardware specific to the chipset rather than the device manufacturer. This means that you can dock any device that is 802.11ad compliant with a 80211ad compliant dock. Like WiDi it is likely that the dock will be the key, with desirable features like password protected docking being favoured over open devices. This has the potential to save hundreds of dollars in cabling, as well as the concurrent clutter and potential electrical dangers.

• Wireless charging - I've used Qi wireless charging for a few years now on my Nokia Windows Phones. It was great to simply drop my phone on my desk and have it charge without worrying about wires or cables. However, QI isn't the only solution on the market with another interesting offer being Rezence . Rezence is a wireless charging solution promising amongst other things - fast and efficient wireless charging, real world charging (i.e. ignoring cases, keys, other devices, etc), multi device charging. More importantly, almost all the big chipset manufacturers are on board for this standard. Consider this scenario in schools:

Jane goes to her desk. She puts her tablet on her desk as it wirelessly docks (see scenario above). As she does, the tablet starts to wirelessly charge via the wireless charging mat on her desk. Within a few minutes it has quickly restored the bulk of her batteries potential thanks to efficient charging techniques. 

Abby's tablet battery is low as she forgot to charge it the night before. At recess Abby goes to a special charging station in the playground, a solar assisted gazebo with a wireless charging surface. She, like other students, spend recess charging their devices at the solar-powered charging station. While she eats her recess her tablet quickly gains 

So what? Charging has been a misshapen and haphazard affair with multiple cables and requirements. If Rezence or one of the other formats can become standard, we can simplify charging down to a wireless desk space. This will improve safety and reduced cabling costs.


Where to next? Well, WiGi offers some tantalising future potential. Here is just one scenario.

Jane is a teacher of Industrial Technology Multimedia and although her tablet does a good job at most tasks, it struggles with the processing required be some of the software she uses. However, when Jane gets to her desk her tablet wirelessly docks with an external graphics processing unit which houses a fast desktop-oriented graphics card. Also connected is a large format screen and other input peripherals. Jane now has the capabilities of a high power desktop unit, utilising her existing tablet. All the while the wireless charging pad keeps her tablet topped up. 

Abby likes playing computer games, but her mother doesn't like her playing them in her room. Abby's tablet isn't powerful enough to run the games itself, but when connected to the WiGi dock in the family study she is able to use the dock to boost her tablet's processing power and enable her to play her favourite MMORPG game. All the while the wireless charging pad keeps her tablet topped up. 

Get me point? How long before our phone is our access point and different physical locations are designed for different purposes. I can sit at my desk and without removing my phone answer communications and collaborate with others. I can then move to a workshop and use the increased processing power and input peripherals to design and create. My device never changes, but uses other technology to boost its capabilities for the purposes of that task.

It's a brave new world kids! Now ... where did I put my wirecutters...

New Horizons

The New Horizon mission is the stuff of science fiction. It is truly a remarkable achievement that I have been monitoring since it blasted off in 2006. Effectively a collection of old space junk with an ambitious mission goals.

New Horizon's 175kgs of human engineering is now well over 7 billion kilometers away from Earth. Think about that for a second. It is 32 times the distance from the Earth to the sun away.

But it is the technology that amazes me. Given the distance and the time, the fact that it is still sending a data back is amazing. And particularly given how primitive some of the onboard technology actually is.

Here are some stats:

The CPU that powers New Horizon's is the same as the one that powered the original Playstation. A Playstation! The current Galaxy S6 has 350 times the processing power. Think about that. The Nintendo Entertainment System (1986) had twice the power of the Apollo Guidance Computer (1966). Yet the Galaxy S6 (2015) is 350 times that of the onboard computer of New Horizon (2006).

The data returns to earth at 600-1200 bits per second which is a fraction of modern bandwidth. That is similar speed to a 1200 baud modem (circa early 1980s). But here is the thing, it is achieving that bandwidth over billions of kilometers. Just remarkable! But to put that into perspective, our humble Galaxy S6 would achieve about 6 billion times that speed at the maximum throughput of the Telstra 4GX network. As one person involved in the project pointed out:

“At the data rate we have … it takes over 2 hours to downlink a standard picture from your cell phone! That means we will spend the next 16 months transmitting all the data down to Earth,” Curt Niebur, a NASA program scientist, wrote during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread.

For those of you who remember downloading images in the early 1980s, this should bring back some traumatic memories of images that appeared line by line (leave your jokes and anecdotes in the comments!).

Power wise, the whole system was unsuitable for solar panels - I mean it's Pluto after all. Instead it is powered by a single plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generator able to produce 200 watts. This is more than enough for the three optical instruments, two plasma instruments, a dust sensor and the radio science receiver which all account for a tiny 28 watts. But that's nothing compared to most modern smartphones which sip only a watt or two.

Lastly, LORRI (the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) system that has been used in the early stages of the journey is very humble 1 megapixel camera. 1 megapixel! The two year old Nokia Lumia 1020 was 41 Megapixels, and most smartphones are 10 or more.

Ultimately New Horizon's has taught us several things about our galaxy. However, for me it is also a lesson on technology. The technology in New Horizons has been superseded by many generations in the short time it has taken to get from Earth to Pluto. A sub $100 smartphone would be significantly faster and have more sensors and better camera than New Horizon's.

And although none of this should be surprising, it begs some questions about those of us working with technology in education:

• What kind of technology advances will occur while we are busy on our own journeys? 

• What kind of world will 10 years from now look like?

• If technology is accelerating, how do we accommodate that in our education environments? 

For now, I am just going to enjoy the images that arrive ... every couple of hours.

IWB's - a mystery to me!

I'll put it out there - I do not understand why people would use an IWB. I had one in the mid 2000s and never used it as an interactive board.

To honest I didn't see the point.

Sure, I've read the literature. I just feel like I am missing something.

And now, with the push for 70"+ interactive televisions and the subsequent cost...

You see, the reason I don't understand IWBs or why you would replace them with an interactive TV is just this. They are not student centered learning.

There. I said it. I'll wait for the howls to settle down. However, to partly prove my point just Google IWBs and see how many promo images look like this:


That's right. A teacher out the front doing what she/he would have done before. That's the 'S' in SAMR.

So I'll be clear... I don't like a board in any sense, black, white or interactive. I have no prejudices, I hate them all.

I don't like a 'front' to a room.

I don't like fixed single learning spaces.

I'm one of those types.

Give me a room with no front or back, with modular furniture and a sense of the unexpected.

Give me noise and chaos and students taking ownership of the learning.

Give me multiple learning spaces, both physical and digital.

And when those DI moments have to occur, change them!

I have been lucky enough to teach in a 1:1 environment for the last several years and here is my response to DI:

• If DI is known and can be planned for, it has no place in my room. Good chance it is only remembering and understanding. Flip it and get it out of here. 
• If DI is ad hoc or pro re nata , it is important and necessary. Good chance it is applying, analysing and evaluating. Use a collaborative learning tool already in the student's hands (I like OneNote) or software to assist (e.g LanSchool). 

See - no front of room required. Sure, a whiteboard is handy (Office Lens straight into OneNote) but it doesn't have to be at the front of the room. It doesn't even have to be a whiteboard - butchers paper, giant Post-it notes and even gloss paint or glass surfaces will suffice. 

In a 1:1 environment I just don't understand a 'front of room' concept. And with almost all our secondary classsrooms now 1:1, why are we going that way? 

Someone let me know what I am missing? Please! 

Moonshots or Radical Incrementalism

Moonshots or Radical Incrementalism

If you do something remarkable, something new and something important, not everyone will understand it (at first). Your work is for someone, not everyone.

Unless you're surrounded only by someones, you will almost certainly encounter everyone. And when you do, they will jeer.

That's how you'll know you might be onto something.

-        Seth Godin

Esther Wojcicki, in her book Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom, suggests that education is “stuck in the past” and requires a moonshot.

What is a moonshot? Well, Esther and her partners at Google define it as:

“A moonshot is an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term success or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of potential risks and benefits."

The term itself, derives from the ambitious Apollo 11 spaceflight project, and the driven and ambitious vision of John F. Kennedy to put a man on the moon no matter the barriers.

Wojcicki’s vision is one grounded in using blended learning – a term for the mixing of traditional and digital learning – to radically change what education looks like. She advocates student voice and involvement in these blended environments. Wojcicki’s encourages transformation through the concepts of TRICK--trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness.

Wojcicki’s vision is revolutionary rather than evolutionary. It assumes that currently there is no trust in education, that there is no respect for education, that teachers and students have no independence, that collaboration has been blackballed as cheating. Finally and most strikingly, she claims that there is no kindness in classrooms.

This is provocative stuff indeed. No wonder it requires a revolution!

Wojcicki isn’t alone in promoting a revolutionary stance. In fact, many prominent educational thinkers are saying that the current rate of change in education is entirely insufficient to deal with the challenges it faces, and recommend the kind of transcendental paradigm shifts that make leaders everywhere shiver in their change managements plans.

But is it all gloom, doom, and burning the place down?

Simon Breakspear defines himself as a learning strategist and researcher. He is the founder of LearningLabs and a common figure on the touring circuit of educational. He is, also, one of my educational heroes – mostly because an egoist like myself appreciates hearing his own words echoed by the man on the stage.

Breakspear’s thrust is that education needs to become more agile. What he mean by agile is distilled from the principles of the agile approach to software programming. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development changed the approach to software development, specifically making it more ‘iterative, incremental and evolutionary’. It is this approach that Breakspear means by the term ‘agile’.  

Becoming agile is the basis the change management that Simon is talking about for education. To improve on what is already good in our schools by small and quick iterative steps, otherwise known as radical incrementalism.

He presents five principles for agile schools: that everyone is a learner, that radical instrumentalism is the best mode of change, that any innovation has to matter, that we need to put a human face on change, and we all need stay nimble and responsive. His catchcry’s include “fail fast” and a favourite of mine: “the future of education is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. Simon sees educational technology as a conduit for radical incrementalism. At FutureSchools he said that schools need to commit to only one thing: getting better all the time.

It might sound like Breakspear and Wojcicki are saying different things. But they aren’t. They are saying very similar things about the need for education to change, the reasons to do so, the resources and means at our disposal, and they are especially in tune regarding the human elements of change. The only area they differ is in the mode that that change should occur – revolution or evolution.

If we accept Wojcicki’s sentiments that there is something wrong in the state of Denmark, maybe we need a George R. R. Martin inspired response. If we accept Breakspear’s more optimistic view, we need to make our schools trust building enterprises because, as Breakspear is at pains to point out, radical incrementalism is a relational exercise that moves at the speed of trust.

I think I’m more a radical incrementalist than a revolutionary. Perhaps it is my constructivist upbringing, or my cultural bias against revolution

All this sounds inspiring to hear, but the realities in our still Tayloristic work environments and similarly the structures, policies, five year plans, visions statements, audit and compliance cycles, and everything else which prop up a organisations do not allow either moonshots or radical incrementalism. Rather, what more often than not happens is that moonshots and radical incrementalism have to face off against the four horsemen of organisational change, Kotter’s Delay, Confusion, Ridicule and Fear-Mongering.

A long time ago, I read the allegory “Who moved my cheese”. It came out when I was 18, but it took me a while to get around to reading it. It is a simple allegory for business. It, like Breakspear, state that change is both the cause and the solution to the difficulties that organisations and individual’s face. So while Kotter’s horsemen can ride roughshod over the moonshots and radical incrementalism in many organisations, it cannot run roughshod over a single unyielding fact. That fact is that change happens, even if you don’t want it to. Or as Ian Jukes loves to promulgate “Shift happens!”

Now, has somebody seen my bloody cheese?

Hands Free Homework

Last week I on the blog spoke about some of the frustrations of homework and some of the concerns I had as a parent.

In it, I suggested that we "attempt to make it [homework] the kind of work that suits children and families during busy afternoons and evenings".

After a week or so of conversation in the Cornwall household, I've come to the conclusion that I would like to launch the following campaign!

What is hands free homework? It is a movement toward a student centered homework model that requires little or no additional parent intervention.


Focus on... Home-work 
All parents do things with their children at home. These things are often educational and informative and compliment the activities of school. However, we are often asked in homework to undertake activities that are in addition or replace these household activities.

For example, the school supplied homework might ask a student  to observe a local park or sporting facility and how it is used and who uses it (Stage 1 Science ST1-14BE I am guessing). Meanwhile in our household we might be working on designs for a new chicken coop and considering the needs of the chickens, building materials, etc.

There is really no need for the first homework, because there is work being done at home that mirrors it. And this happens all the time. What if we recorded this work and backward mapped it to the syllabus, rather than attempting to do the homework?

The home-work model, therefore, is about taking those natural learning activities at home at giving them a link to the syllabus. This requires parents to be more informative regarding their children's curriculum. This could be done by supplying the syllabus documentation for that Term/unit to parents and let them consider how the homework best suits what is happening at home.

If I could find activities that involved Lego of Minecraft we'd be set!

Focus on ... KISS
The 'keep it simple silly' model is widely known but poorly employed. I am very lucky that one of my children's teachers works from this model. My daughter is expected to read daily and watch a once-a-week flipped video. This still requires intervention very minimal intervention.

Similarly, too often homework involves fifteen disparate tasks, even in the early years. This is somewhat hard to change in high school, but it can be done. Trying to get homework down to 1-2 focused and important tasks makes life far easier for students and parents.

Focus on... DIY
As per my previous blog post, homework needs to be as DIY as possible. The less I, as the parent, have to be directly hands on the more it supports working parents, the busy-ness of home life, single parents and students living away from home. For this reason I loved flipped learning. If a child's homework involved watching some short videos and reading, it is effectively hands-free even from an early age. Where possible, all homework should be DIY by the student.


In summary
So what does the confluence of these three focus areas look like?

• Simple, easy to access and complete tasks
• 1-2 tasks per night maximum
• Activities that require little or no parent intervention
• Ideally, the ability for families to substitute or come up with their one home-work that fits in with the curriculum

I've got to say, I cannot wait until ST1-5WT gets started on building that chicken coop!

I'd love to hear how you (teacher) simplify homework - especially if it uses technology - or how you (parents) try to keep homework simple!

Making old things new again

Last month my parents dropped off a box of 'stuff' that had obviously been sitting at their home for a long time (circa 1998 at a guess).

Inside was an assortment of sporting trophies, keepsakes and even a few school textbooks.

I was reminiscing over my sketchbook when I remembered an impulse purchase I'd made a few months ago.

Rocketbook is an Indiegogo funded project. It isn't anything particularly innovative. In reality it is just a notebook and most people would think it was a standard notebook. However, it has two really cool features:

1. It uses the Pilot FriXion pen which is erasable using a microwave 
2. It has icons around the outside of the page borders

So what is so magic about that I hear you say?

Well, using the Rocketbook app the icons around the page border quickly converts your handwritten notes and drawings into digital images and stores them in pre-determined cloud locations.

This means that I can write meeting notes and save them directly as minutes. Or create visual representations and have them emailed directly to my class. 

Image from the Indiegogo campaign site

Pretty cool huh?

While I worry about the cost of the FriXion pens, and I'd have liked a Windows based app as well, I can see this being very useful.

Image from the Indiegogo campaign site

How useful? Well, I still think that Office Lens will be my tool of choice. It doesn't require a special pen or an OS specific app. And it works with whiteboards and pretty much any surface. Mostly, however, because I am a user of Microsoft OneNote and it is the tool best suited to that application. 

However, I could certainly see the Rocketbook trying to merge the best of old and new technologies. And I am happy to spend a few dollars to support this! 

Note: The Indiegogo campaign is finished, but it is anticipated that further sales will occur due to the considerable interest during the campain. 

Homework and technology

I'll go on the record and say that I have never had a great love affair for homework.

Homework is:

• Difficult to set
• Hard to mark
• Challenging to manage
• Often disconnected from regularly classroom activities

Don't get me wrong, homework has it's place. However, as a parent of two primary school aged students I recognise the frustrations of parents everywhere. Here is a typical afternoon timetable.

5:17pm arrive home and tag grandparents

5:18pm attempt to turn off televisions and iPads

5:23pm set child #1 to Task A of homework that requires least supervision

5:24pm convinced child #2 to do some chores

5:27pm start prepping dinner

5:27-5:35pm start and stop dinner prep to answer questions from child #1

5:36pm realise that child #2 has absconded with friends and have argument about returning to do jobs and homework

5:38pm give up on dinner and sit with child #2 to start tasks

....

You get the picture!

When I moved to a flipped learning classroom, one of the first positive comments was from a parent who applauded the ability to set homework which students could literally do anywhere, anytime and pretty much anyhow they liked. And most importantly ... without their intervention!

And I understand the point. As parents we need to be multi-disciplinary. We need to be a reading coach, a maths checker, understand the tensile and compression properties of paddle pop sticks and so on. It can all be ... a little too much.

I think one of the reasons that homework gets such a hard wrap is exactly that, it is HARD. 

And think about this for a moment. Would we, as adults, leave the HARDEST part of our working day until the evening when we were tired, cranky, over it, and having to contend with dozens of other priorities (well we do, it's called children's homework)? No, we would leave simple tasks for the afternoon or evening or, better still, nothing at all. 

So, in an ideal world we wouldn't need homework. But I think we do. What we can do, however, is attempt to make it the kind of work that suits children and families during busy afternoons and evenings - like a short video al la flipped learning. 

In my next installment I will attempt to do homework in the morning.

5:17am wrestle children out of bed

5:18am attempt to prevent the turning on of televisions and iPads

...

I would love to hear more about how people are using technology to better handle homework!

Office Lens - the only scanner you'll need

Have you ever been to one of these...



Any when you look around you, everyone is quickly taking pictures of the screens around you.

Or have you ever been at a presentation and quickly done this:

Welcome to Office Lens, an app for iOS, Windows 8, and Android phones.

Office Lens turns your phone into a document scanner, screen capture device and whiteboard scanner.

It's key features include:

• Integration with OneNote meaning you can capture material directly to your OneNote Notebooks.
• Integration with OneDrive allowing you to save captured material directly as PDF, Word or Powerpoint documents
• The ability to capture multiple pictures in a single session (e.g. the twenty slides of a presentation.
• The native ability to crop and clean up images

It is this last feature that makes Office Lens such a downright useful tool. If you are seated in the cheap seats like I did at EduTech a few years ago, you can use Office Lens to straighten the keystone effect in the image. Similarly, it will flatten the image, remove flash glare and other features common of pictures taking at conferences, presentations, and professional development days.

You can see below a recent picture I took on my phone on the fly (before). Then you can see how Office Lens processed this information (after).

Before	After

Of course, you can also do your own drawing on these images once they are in OneNote which makes annotating presentations a breeze!

And if, like me, you don't have a handy scanner at home, consider:

• Scanning your receipts for tax time or warranty purposes
• Keeping records of files and bills so that they are available in the cloud
• Keeping evidence of awards and certificates you've received

As you can imagine, this is a handy tool for both students and teachers. The best bit is, you don't have to even have the app handy at the time. You can take the pictures and then process them later. 

What I discovered at FutureSchools

In 2013 I went to EduTECH for the first time. I loved it.

I went with a specific project in mind. I wanted to delivery a blended learning option for my HSC students at St Mary's Maitland. I had already done my research and broadly knew what I was looking to find out. I spent two days investing myself in learning and walked away with direction, purpose and a number of ideas.

In 2014 I went to EduTECH for the second time. I enjoyed it.

I had flipped my classroom. I'd blended my learning. I was a master of online content creation. I went to presentations and thought 'I'm doing that'. I spoke to a few vendors, caught up with colleagues and came back with a few ideas, but no real desire to enact change.


In 2015 I thought I'd try FutureSchools for the first time. I was in a new role, with a much wider scope and far greater focus on technology in education.

And I loved it. I really did. But ...

There is something to be said for conference burnout. That apathetic feeling that you can get when you hear the same presenters tell you the same things that they have done each year. When you stare at presentation slides you've seen before.

It isn't just conferences and expos, but even professional development. I once attended a workshop for a large provider of PD, having enjoyed their previous offer. New presenter, apparently a new topic, but the same slides and - here's the kicker - the same bad jokes!

Here is what I am learning. Conferences, expos and large workshops serve a singular purpose - to raise awareness and present new ideas. When the ideas are no longer new or relevant, they become redundant and unnecessary. Similarly, if they don't match the frame of our own interests they can become useless ventures.

Next year I am going to have a purpose. I promise.

Apologies and multimodal interfaces

Firstly, apologies for a delay in the next post. It has been a rather busy time in the Hunter Valley! 

Exhibit A - "rather busy" in the Hunter Valley

Today I'd like to talk about one subject which makes for interesting discussion, yet remains a fairly dry topic: learning to type.

 Now, hear me out...

Late last term I was in a staff room where a teacher lamented that a particular boy had terrible handwriting. Two things immediately come to mind - would said teacher be equally critical of a student's ability to use other forms of communication and, secondly, I was and remain that boy with terrible handwriting.

Yep, that's right ... my handwriting has the style and form of a GP with a broken thumb. It is barely intelligible to me, let alone others. This is as good as it gets:

Exhibit B - my terrible handwriting

 However, I can proudly say that I am pretty good at gesture interfaces. I am also fairly handy in voice commands and voice-based communication (shutting me up is the trick). And with a fairly solid ego, I think I do well in person and and over video.

And though not stylish, I can solidly function at 65 words per minute (wpm) and 95%+ accuracy when typing.

Here's the kicker though... I almost never use a real ink pen at all.

Alright, alright ... so I hear you dragging out the Mueller and Oppenheimer research saying that typing is bad. First of all, that's not what it says. It states that students who use laptops (and specifically the keyboards) to record notes tended to be more likely to record verbatim, and had reduced factual and conceptual recall.

Sharon Oviatt, however, paints a much richer picture. She draws a landscape that identifies that different modes of communication suit different activities and, there is specific benefits in a multimodal interface.

It makes sense doesn't it?

If I was undertaking a design project, typing wouldn't suit. The process of ideation requires one to use non-linguistic forms, such as drawings, diagrams, sketch and the like.

If I was undertaking a creative writing project, typing would suit. The process of linguistic construction is well suited to the keyboard interface for speed, accuracy and the secondary but more important benefits of creating modifiable product.

Further, Oviatt cites what is called the "Performance-Preference Paradox", which whereby there is mismatch between the interface people say they prefer (e.g., keyboard) and what best supports their performance (e.g., pen).

Sharon's work is well suited to start and form a discussion of BYO and 1:1 device programs and learning space design. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

I want to get back to the issue of learning to type.

The same teacher who had lamented the handwriting of her student, then proceeded to type an email with the style and form of a drunk heron. Her single index fingers dived one at a time, only to miss repeatedly (acknowledged by the irritated smacking of the backspace key).

See, once upon a time we did explicitly teach typing. But then it disappeared. Meanwhile my schools have free access to LUX Typing, an aged by serviceable product, and there are wonderful newer educational products like Ultimate Typing Tutor which are affordable (a few dollars per year) and powerful tools to improve typing.

That still doesn't address all the other forms of interface. For example, in many cases I hear a negative response to Windows 8 tablet devices. Yet I see dozens of touch based devices with mice attached to them. How many iPads have mice attached to them?! There are other ways to get around...

What about keyboard shortcuts? Windows 8 is arguably the best Windows for keyboard shortcuts ever made - just try smacking the ÿ key and a random letter and you'll find a whole lot of goodness. Meanwhile, if you have ever seen someone use something like Adobe Photoshop using keyboard shortcuts it looks like Clarke's Third Law in action.

Meanwhile gestures are increasingly commonplace for all mobile devices. Samsung's flagship phone includes multiple gesture points. The Kinect has for years used body movements as an input source. And there is no doubt that the next stages of augmented and virtual reality (tomorrow, not the future kids) will use advanced gesture interfaces.

And never forget the pure power of the voice. Civilisation started with the spoken world and is still, in many ways, ruled by it. Voice recognition was the wild frontier a decade ago filled with dorky headsets and US-centric voice algorithms. Today, Cortana and Siri are able to translate and communicate the world for us while the aforementioned Kinect and its Playstation rival, as well as a swatch of televisions, use voice controls.

And to be honest, we've always used different forms to communicate. Writing, in and of itself, is purely a linguistic communication. However, many areas of knowledge are not communicated very well in purely linguistic forms - especially the ever touted STEM subjects. Just as I might lament my skills in writing, I also lament my inability to sketch and draw. For ultimately, ideation is about the best of both linguistic and non-lingusitic forms. Even with a pen, the process of moving up Bloom's taxonomy requires more than just words (see Exhibit C).

Exhibit C - I cannot draw either

The simple fact is that most students use a range of interfaces for learning. Increasingly, students are using multimodal interfaces like smartphones where voice, typing and gesture interact. The stunning world being opened up by augmented and virtual worlds will tip the scales in favour of multimodal interfaces.

And while Oviatt and Cohen might state that “multimodal interfaces have eclipsed keyboard-based interfaces as the dominant computer interface worldwide (2015, p.169). Keyboards remain well suited for “relatively mechanical tasks, like email, text editing, and information search via the Web (Crowne, 2007; Oviatt et al., 2006; Oviatt and Cohen, 2010a)” (Oviatt, 2013, p. 39). That is, keyboards remain well suited to those tasks that each of us does on a regular day.

So I agree with the teacher who laments poor handwriting. But I suggest that poor handwriting is as equally problematic as poor sketching abilities, poor typing abilities, poor understanding of gesture based inputs, poor understanding of keyboard shortcuts, poor mouse function and use, poor understanding of voice commands and a general inability to interact with modern technology. Or, as a better litmus test, who is more employable - the person with fluency and accuracy when writing, the person with fluency and accuracy when typing, or the person with fluency and accuracy when operating in a multimodal environment?

References

Mueller, Pam A.; Oppenheimer, Daniel M.,  “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” Psychological Science, June 2014, Vol. 25, No. 6. doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581.

Oviatt, S. L., & Cohen, P. R. (2015) The Paradigm Shift to Multimodality in Contemporary Computer Interfaces, Morgan and Claypool.

Oviatt, S.L. (2013) The Design of Future of Educational Interfaces, Routledge Press.

Disruptive Innovation and the challenges of technology integration

Disruptive innovation is a buzzword these days.  Wikipedia remarks that:

"A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market."

The term was originally coined by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Christensen used the term to describe innovations that create new markets by discovering new categories of customers. They do this partly by harnessing new technologies but also by developing new business models and exploiting old technologies in new ways.

Disruptive innovation has become a popular buzzword and it's application has widened to include all forms of organisation and social systems.

So what?

In last week's newsletter I reminded schools how far we'd come in a decade. A decade ago we didn't have iPads, iPhones, NBN, DER (or post DER), 1: and BYO(D), Facebook, Youtube, IPTV, 3D Printers, tablets, eBooks or the cloud. A decade ago Kodak, Blockbuster and Borders were all visible brands.

Can you imagine going back to 2005 and trying to explain to your colleagues what changes are ahead of them?

If we look at some of the top ten disruptive innovations of the last hundred years, odds are most of them occurred in the last decade.

And the rate of change is not showing any signs of slowing. Self-driving vehicles will change how we transport ourselves in ways that we cannot possibly imagine. Drones will no longer bring death and invasions of privacy, but goods and services. Meanwhile augmented reality will entirely reshape the way we see and interact with our work.

Yet here is the kicker which every educational presenter worth their salt will tell you for a princely sum and transport expenses ... WHAT THE HECK ARE WE GONNA DO ABOUT IT?

How do we prepare students for a future world when the scope of our vision has been trimmed by accelerating innovation and change to a point where we are unable to even envision society a decade ago?

I am currently writing a position paper on technology integration which reviews the past, present and possible future.

I've suddenly got writers block!

I'd love to hear about the disruptive innovations that you know are right around the corner. Add your suggestions to the comments below.

To LMS or not to LMS, that is the question!

 The eternal question! To LMS or not to LMS.

A Learning Management System (LMS) is software (or a software package) or Web-based technology used to plan, implement, and assess a specific learning process. Typically, a learning management system provides an instructor with a way to create and deliver content, monitor student participation, and assess student performance.

With me so far? Good chance that if you're  viewing this blog you've had experiences with an LMS of some sorts. Good chance if you have, you've got some mixed feelings about LMSs.

The question of whether to LMS or not has long bugged me. Why? Because when you stack up the reasons for and against there is no clear winner.

Reasons FOR	Reasons AGAINST
It helps manage everything in one place It can often automate workflows (e.g. self-marking quizzes) You can provide a single training and support model You often get vendor support for an LMS You can share objects with others using the LMS You can have connections with other school software (e.g. timetable data) You can have single sign-on options and ease of use opportunities.	You are locked into a single system for managing files and workflows There are often better tools for workflows It makes people reliant on central training and support models You have to pay It stifles people with technical abilities who want to explore beyond the LMS The LMS often drives the pedagogy and not the other way round

So where do I sit? 

Well, let me tell you the story of the last LMS I implemented.

I wanted to do something different with Stage 6 Studies of Religion. I went looking at contemporary models of pedagogy and got stuck on the idea of delivering a blended model that employed flipped learning. So I then sought out an LMS which suited the pedagogical model I was attempting to employ.

That is, my pedagogy drove the LMS decision.

And that is not always the case. Actually, that's almost never the case. 

Very rarely do educators say "That's what I want to do!" and backward map to their reality. The start with "That's what I've got!" (often in exasperation) and move forward to their dreams. 

I am a firm believer that as educators we are, as Ian Jukes and Simon Breakspear were at pains to point out last week at FutureSchools, 'future makers'. We have an eye on a possible future and an eye on the ground in front and we map out the path to the future. 

However, when that eye on the ground in front recognises that not all educators are ready for a post-LMS world, the question of how to get there often brings us back to an LMS reality.

My hunch is that the LMS is the scaffold upon which a digitally rich pedagogy can be built. The question is how comfortable educators are to unlearn an LMS when it is time to leave the nest and fly solo. And of course we could add the further question of how willing systems, like mothers everywhere, are to push them out the nest when the time comes. 

Working with surveys

Surveys. Love 'em or hate 'em, they are everywhere. In way of a disclaimer I previously worked for a very large multinational cooperation that was arguable the largest private industry collector of data in the country.

In schools, surveys seem to pop up frequently. Yet more frequently than not the survey represents a destination rather than a question. And therein lies the problem.

Surveys are a form of quantitative data collection. Even in their simplest form, they are a form of research. And research is be definition a process of three steps

1. Pose a question.
2. Collect data to answer the question
3. Present an answer to the question

Creswell, J. (2012), Plannning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Pearson: Boston

The issue is that so many surveys are about "getting support" or "receiving a mandate". Perhaps we should blame federal politics...

The point is, all research - even the information question to parents, students or staff - should start with a question.

Collecting the data is the easy bit. However, this is also an area where people struggle. For most schools they can use the paper format, but today I'd like to look at SurveyMonkey. Its a fairly simple tool to use, but does cost around $300AUD for its most useful plan.

Alternatively, things like Google Forms are available and offer a simplistic yet effective way of collecting data. And there are several free online survey tools available. You can even create forms in emails (difficult) or use the paper based option (simple!).

Just remember the the following:

• How will your data be collected? If it's only online, will that create a selection bias?
• How will your data be stored? How long for? How will you maintain confidentiality? 
• How will your data be used? Is data aggregated or will individual data be used (E.g. comment data)?
• To whom will the data be send? What is the intended audience?
• Who is responsible for the data?

All of this needs to be clearly communicated to participants before they commence a survey. 

Furthermore, when creating your survey consider:

• The wording of questions and how that impacts an audience's perception (referendums!)
• The pacing and order of questions (consistency and clarity)
• The scales used (consistency and clarity)

There are plenty of online resources to help you out!

How fast is your internet?

In the increasingly 1:1 environments of our schools there has been a whole sale adoption of cloud based storage. While this presents a plethora of opportunities for security, safety and collaboration, it also has a few downsides.

Currently in Australia, if you live in a town like I do, the NBN is a distant dream. While I achieve slight-better-than-the-rest speed of 11Mbps, the national average is 6.9Mbps. What is worse, is that this figure is based on combined metropolitan and rural/regional data. Why is it worse? Is because the NBN (fixed line) and 4G (wireless) density in urban areas is significantly higher. Many students in our diocese are unable to get any kind of service that would qualify as broadband.

Late in 2009, an IT company in South Africa sought to point out the sorry state of affairs, It loaded up a carrier pigeon with 4GB of data and flew it 60 miles to its destination. In the same time that it took the bird to complete the journey, only a quarter of the data had arrived via the internet.

To put this in perspective, At the current 6.9Mbps that Australia 'enjoys', that same carrier pigeon would be neck and neck with the same 4GB at 60 miles.

Yet this isn't 2009.

And SD cards are no longer 4GB or even 128GB. They are 512GB!

What does this mean for the carrier pigeon flying 60 miles? The humble carrier pigeon has a transfer speed of over 800Mbps! That's well over 100 times the speed of our current internet.

Or better still, if you had 512GB of data to transfer, you could either use broadband to transfer it taking 6 ½ days or you could get the card, pop it into the new Australia post two-days-later-40%-more-expensive letter delivery service and still shave days off the trip.

Ok, all of this is just funny analogies. However...

This is the reality - long or short term - in Australia. Our average internet speed is 44th in the world, about where Thailand is. Even our cross-Tasman cousins enjoy better speed. What's worse is its slipping rather than gaining.

If you are expecting your students in your 1:1 device program to be able to be effective learners using digital tools and online storage and workflows, will the internet that they have be able to cope?

Equally, what structures and process will you have in place for students unable to access the internet or unable to access it in a suitable fashion?

And just in case you were wondering, if you were attempting to send that same 512GB data file(s) from Sydney to Melbourne, the carrier pigeon would complete the task in a touch over 10 hours. This is 108MBps, or 8 more than our current fastest NBN broadband.

Side note: The reason for this widening gap isn't bad policy. The bulk of the different is that internet speeds have not increased at the same rate as storage capacity. Storage capacity has been roughly working at Moore's law (doubles every 18 months) while internet speed is far more incremental.

Plagiarism

Image stolen from Mike Reading who borrowed it from Flickr where it was placed by somebody.

Plagiarism. There, I said it.

It’s not a new problem in schools. In fact, in the late 90s I can remember checking work that teachers thought were suspicious. 9/10 of them were. And what I did - simple searches online – must have seemed liked magic in those early days.

Flash forward and we are used to using tools such as TurnItIn in tertiary environments, and we all know about All My Own Work (or should).

Yet what is the system at your school? 

How would your school respond to the following questions?

• How many students plagiarise?
• Why do students plagiarise?
• How many get away with plagiarising?
• What policies and procedures are in place to deal with plagiarising?
• Are they effective and enforced in an even way? 
• When students are caught plagiarising, what are the consequences?
• Are all HSC issues recorded in the BOSTEST malpractice register?

My hunch is that the average high school:

• Has many students who plagiarise
• Who plagiarise because they can without fear of consequences because...
• They almost always get away with it because...
• There are no or minimal policies and procedures to deal with plagiarism or...
• They are ineffective and rarely enforced and...
• When they are caught there are minimal consequences and...
• Little record of these incidents are formally kept

As Mike Reading pointed out in a recent blog post noted that “a[n] ethics survey in 2010 looking at student cheating found the following: 

Rampant cheating in school continues. A majority of students (59 percent) admitted cheating on a test during the last year, with 34 percent doing it more than two times. One in three admitted they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.”

And yet, as Mike points out, teaching students about copyright and ownership in the Australian Curriculum starts in Kindergarten! 

Mike goes on to point out some tools that can assist teachers. I've used a few myself. However I think the best six tools for teachers to combat are:

• Well defined policies and procedures that are evenly enforced
• Education and training (not just All My Own Work) from K-12 which develops an understanding of ownership and copyright
• Good workflows which centre on student learning (the higher up Blooms taxonomy you are, the harder it is to plagiarise)
• Getting to know your students and your student work so that you are familiar enough to spot when plagiarism might occur
• Using tools to assist you e.g. TurnItIn (though when you’ve done the above, generally a quick Google search will suffice)
• Provide a framework of consequences that encourages growth and awareness rather than punitive sanctions

Too much change?

Recently I was talking to a teacher about her new Windows 8 tablet-hybrid. I asked how she was finding it.

"I hate it," she stated bluntly, "all the menus are different and I cannot print."

And therein lies a problem. Our teachers are not technological experts and sometimes we assume too much about their capacity to understand the technology that they are using.

What do I mean?

Well the comment from the teacher seems to be about the device (hardware). But it was in fact about the operating system (software). She was blaming the laptop for what was essentially a Windows 8 learning curve.

So what?

Well change is often about familiarity more than anything else. Regular incremental change in devices and software breeds more comfort with technological change. Meanwhile irregular large-scale change causes stress and creates barriers and blockers.

What then?

All change needs to be managed. Change management is not a new part of business theory and discourse, but change theory in education is an area where academic discourse and research hasn't filtered down as effectively to middle management. Technology leaders in schools could do themselves a great service in understanding what changes means for an organisation, how they can plan change and how they can effectively sustain change. This is, perhaps, the leadership issue in contemporary education.

From my perspective, the best type of the change is that regular incremental change.

Change the device first. Then change the hardware. Then keep changing in little steps until change is the norm for schools.

The reality is, that is arguably what schools are all about.

Postscript: I will attempt to add some work on change management in Learning Technology when I am not otherwise occu

SAMR

SAMR is a model designed to help educators integrate technology into teaching and learning. Developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, the  model guides educators in how to best integrate technology into their learning.

The model has close alignments with Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (and that makes sense). Kathy Schrock (a US educator) adjusted the map above to reflect this alignment. 

SAMR provides a solid framework for assessing the level of integration of technology.  If you want to know more, a quick Google search will show you plenty of information or go to Kathy's website. 

Who drives the agenda?

One of the more interesting questions is who drives the technology agenda in our schools? When asked, and I am not certain it is asked often, the question is often quite challenging.

1) Is it driven by technology?

Technology itself is not the solution. It is a part of the tool-kit. If there is one takeaway from the DER, it is that hardware and software are not sufficient to drive change.

2) Is it driven by individuals?

We need technology leaders in our schools, of that there is no doubt. But they are no sufficient in and of themselves. I once heard a technology leader being described as a lighthouse. Though an apt description, it highlights why a lighthouse is not enough - a lighthouse shines the way, but does not move the boat. That requires a ship, an engine, captain and crew.
The real danger here is that individuals who are technology leaders can get burnt out, ostracised or disillusioned if left to lead alone. More importantly, what happens when they leave?

3) Is it driven by principals? 

Principals are the true everypersons of schools. They swap from WHS leader to curriculum leadership to human resources to any number of other roles... all in the space of a single staff meeting. To assume that they technical knowledge and time is sufficient to implement change is impractical, and as above, to leave it up to a single individual is fraught with danger.

4) Is it driven by systems?

A running joke in IT is the programmer who is asked how long a project will take. He thinks three hours, says three days and by the time it is on the strategic plan it's three months. Systems, due to their nature, are slower and more difficult to respond to change. More importantly, should systems drive agendas for change in school? This is the tension of good governenace that plays itself out in all organisations with a governing body. Particularly, in our Catholic schools, the concept of subsidiarity plays a central role.

5) Is it driven by research? 

Researchers research. However, educational research... well... as the saying goes: "Everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere". Therefore, as Dylan William rightly points out the right question is, “Under what conditions does this work?”. Assuming that all research is easily generalisable is a poor application of the research. #Mr_Cornwall if you want to fight me on this one.

6) Is it driven by what others are doing?

My wife tells a humorous anecdote. When we first were dating she made me roast lamb dinner. As part of the preparation she cut about 1cm off each end of the roast. I was curious as to why. She said it was what her step-mother did. Later we asked her step-mother why she did that and she replied that she had done it because her mother always had. When we asked nanna, the response was as hilarious as it was illuminating: her butcher's rolled shoulders were always a little bit too long for her little oven at the family home, so she had to shave the ends off which she cooked separately as sandwhich meat.

The often quoted line "The most dangerous phrase in the English language is 'we've always done it this way'" should have a companion line that says "The second most dangerous phrase is 'Well it worked for them'".

As the comments for educational research indicate, generalising research is fraught with danger and equally generalising experiences has the same issues.

7) Is it driven by other considerations?

Do parents drive the agenda? How much is the cost to parents involved in the decision making of BYOD? Do students drive the agenda? How much do we consider their needs? Does funding drive the agenda? How many technological purchases were made by the need to utilise available funding?


So what then?

I would propose that there is a model that is both aware and agile. I would nominate context as the crucial issue for any school. Schools that say "my school couldn't" are working from a context-aware framework. The challenge is knowing what is real and what is not.

Some important question for context are:
* How do our current learners learn?
* How do our current teachers teach?
* What is the TPACK of our teachers?
* How supportive is our community to change?

From here important questions become:
* How do we want learners to learn?
* How do we want our teachers to teach?
* How do we increase the TPACK of our teachers?
* How to we build a more agile community?

There is no part of this process that is about a principal, a technological leader, an agenda, a system, a research report, a parent, a student, or a different context. Simply put - it's about all these things.

Furthermore, inquiry needs to be disciplined. This isn't singularly the field of educational research. Every teacher is a leaner and a researcher-in-action. Everyone needs to be disciplined in their inquiry as to what works best in their context, be it the context of their school or even as narrow as the context of their classroom. This may mean breaking down the questions above until they are specific to the classroom and the individual student.

We know that technology should be integrated into learning. Any discussion regarding technology in schools should equally be integrated with the context of the school.

Untethered Teaching (and Netgear Push2TV review)

I was recently inspired by an article discussing the untethering of the teacher to relate my experiences in a classroom.

We’ve all been in one. You know them. Long rows of tables and chairs facing the well-used whiteboard that also serves as a projection screen.

As teachers we tend to be tethered to the front of our rooms. Even if we attempt to actively avoid the ‘sage on the stage’ mantle, invariably those explicit teaching moments require us to roll up our sleeves, grab a whiteboard marker, and go to it.

Perhaps it was due to my incompetence when it comes to writing on a whiteboard, or my own nerdy pre-disposition, but I started tinkering with ways to untether myself many years ago. However, it wasn’t until the Collaborative Teaching project at St Mary’s Maitland that I was able to bring it all together.

The Collaborative Teaching project at St Mary’s Maitland saw the old hospitality room – all 115m² – stripped back to a bare classroom. It still had at the front of the room a whiteboard and projector – albeit a little larger than the norm – and the teacher’s desk. And to that we added 48 students to a flipped learning pedagogy with high amounts of collaboration.

We also started to use of the projector manufacturer software on a tablet device to control the projector. Now the explicit teaching could occur from any part of the room. PowerPoints could be delivered from anywhere by anyone.  It was possible to look over a student’s shoulder, see some good work and send it to the screen via the camera. It was also possible to write in OneNote all those mindmaps and visual tools that are so prevalent in the HSC, or to demonstrate in real time the ideas students were putting on paper. It was even possible to throw the tablet to a student to present, control or use for small group purposes.  I was able to change the way I taught as well. Everything could be recorded. This was really the first step in the flipped learning approach I employed for my teaching of Studies of Religion at St Mary’s.  

As we became untethered I started to notice a change. I didn’t have to stop a lesson and address the student talking at the back. I could now continue teaching and simply draw near. Many of those oft-disruptive moments disappeared. In addition, the Alt-Tab game became less and less as students realised I could see their screens and if they were off-task. I referred to it as proximal behaviour management. Remind me to trademark that.

Almost any classroom teacher can untether themselves, though some will find it easier than others. Teachers with newer tablets and laptops which have WiDi can use a range of WiDi connectors to transmit information wirelessly to the projector. Some newer projectors and televisions are already WiDi compliant. I’ve used a few  products to connect via WiDi, and it’s a seamless connection once you’ve ironed out a few bugs.

Untethering yourself is not always a simple process. However, to be free to teach from any part of the room is often worth some of the initial hassle.

In the video below I review the Netgear Push2TV device that provides a $60 option for connecting yourself wirelessly to a projector or television. 

Secondary Learning Technology Blog - Netgear Push2TV from Andrew Cornwall on Vimeo.

Video Conferencing (Office Mix Hands On)

Well, it was very stop/start, but I managed to use Office Mix to create a video. You'll note that the audio on the 'how to's is fairly poor. It is the laptop's default microphone and it just really isn't up to task - the clarity is ok, but it doesn't have the noise cancelling features of a proper microphone.

The rest of the presentation is using an external Logitech (C920) webcam microphone. As you can tell the quality is far superior.

Meanwhile, if you are wanting to know the ins and outs of Video Conferencing, please see the documentation attached. I'll likely replace this with something more formal over the coming weeks.



Slot 1 2015 - Video Conferencing - 05-02-15 from Andrew Cornwall on Vimeo.

Office Mix

It's rare that I get excited about Microsoft products. Generally I am more into new hardware than productivity tools. However, with the release of Sway and Office 365 there are some real potential for Microsoft to change the way we do things as teachers.

One product, however, has gone somewhat under the radar. This is probably as its not an app or tool or even an upgrade, but an add-on for PowerPoint called Office Mix.
(Edit: Hopefully we'll see some more of this with Office 2016)

We've all sat through death by PowerPoint and even the most innovative educators use PowerPoint or something similar. However PowerPoint is a tool designed for synchronous learning - where the learner and teacher are co-located in time and space. This has worked well in classrooms up to now, but things are changing. The flipped classroom movement, MOOCs, Khan Academy and other attempts to leverage technology to delivery education typically demand that learning become asynchronous. To do this, you need technology that means learning anywhere, anytime.

As a flipped advocate and a flipper myself, I am excited about a tool like Office Mix. It allows me to do, in a very simple way, what I used to have to do with Camstasia. It is no where near as powerful, but nor is it as difficult to learn.

Microsoft's innovative educator program has brought together an ebook about this and other topics. I'll let you read it for yourself. Hopefully I'll have a hands-on review of Office Mix soon!

Using Office Mix to Improve Learning from Microsoft Education UK