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!