Which Devices?

I have been asked which devices a school should buy and am trying to formulate a list of questions that the school staff can work through to decide which would be best for them. There is no way I can simply guess what they need so I want to make something useful that anyone can use in any educational establishment.

Questions to consider

1.     Does the infrastructure have the capacity to add a new class set of devices?  (In the UK many networks were installed in the early 1990s and have been added to and bits replaced on an ad hoc basis ever since. It may be time to upgrade the whole wireless system before much more can be added to it.)

• Who is going to add the devices to the network and provide passwords?
• How to you plan stop outsiders using the network if a common password escapes into the community?
• How often is the techie on site to sort out wireless access issues?
•  What about filtering?

2.     Are pupils allowed to bring their own devices or technology (BYOD / BYOT) or not? If pupils bring all sorts they will not be compatible but each one will be able to add something, some maybe good for photographs, audio work, music, video or text, is the teacher happy to combine all offerings? Is school going to restrict the type of device so that only iPod Touches or iPads can be brought to and used in school?

• Phones are an extra considerations – are pupils allowed to bring in their own phones? What are the rules for using phones in school?
• How is their use going to be monitored?
• Is there a policy in place? Does that cover insurance, e-safety, expected behaviour and sanctions?

3.     Is the staff confident about pupils using different devices and how to manage their classes using them?

Does the staff know how to combine all these different offerings?

• Is staff training needed?
• Has training been budgeted for in the cost?
• Have you talked to prospective trainers to find someone happy to try to train teachers in using all of the different devices they may get in their class?

4.     What about equality and families who can’t afford their own devices?

• Is school going to provide devices for those pupils who can’t afford them?
• Is school going to allow school devices to go home with individual pupils?
• Does school insurance cover home use / transportation? The school filtering will not work at home, and some homes may not have broadband. How does school intend to address that issue? Will filtered dongles be provided? Who is going to set them up and pay for the usage?

5.     If you are planning to use sets of iPod Touch or iPad devices

• Do you intend to use apps?
• How will you purchase the apps?
• How will you synchronise the devices?
• Will school purchase the apps for home devices?
• Will schools ask parents to buy the apps and provide money for those who won’t?
• How will you charge the devices? If you have a Parasync suitcase or similar for the class ones, how will you charge the home devices?
• What about pupils who forget to charge their device or bring their charger?
• Do you need more electrical points / sockets? Are trailing wires going to be a health and safety issue?
• Do you have a budget for apps? A set of 30 devices even at a few pounds each is a considerable expense over a year or two.

6.     Are the devices going to be used by one class, so one per table, pair or child, or several classes?

• Where are pupils going to store their work if being used by several students? Is there are master computer with storage that they all link to?

7.     How do teachers want to use the devices?

• For photographs, video or animation work?
• For digital art work to be printed and put on display or displayed on an electronic photo album, Smart Screen, plasma screen, signage screen?
• For music lessons?
• As shared research / collaborative projects in groups or pairs?
• Just for Office applications - Internet, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and e-mail?
• For research using CDs or DVDs?
• For watching video clips or listening to podcasts?
• For using IWB materials such as SMART or Promethean Active?
• For audio / SMS / photographs / Skype / internet research / note taking?
• For on the spot, use as needed dictionary checks, fact checkers and searchers?
• To access lessons after the event for revision, shared resources etc?

This is just a few questions, I guess there are lots more!

My recommendation would be for teachers to try to use what is already available really well, go through the cupboards and dig out the older sets of unused bit and pieces and see how they work. Incorporate them into lessons and encourage pupils to bring in their devices too, see how useful they are, see where there are gaps and look to buy to plug the gaps – but – I am a "play with techie stuff" sort of person, I don’t mind investigating, pulling bits together and making things happen. I like doing that! For teachers who can’t be bothered with that, have not been using the school digital cameras, video recorders, sensing equipment, IWBs, visualisers for years, bringing together a host of “odd” technology with little common software may be a nightmare.  I would be really worried about buying a class set of anything – unless the teachers really wanted them and planned to use them.  

On my actual working document I have added loads of links to hardware, synching devices etc., but have left them off here as they may considered advertising. If you have any essential questions to add to my little list though please do add them as comments, I do not mind bringing them altogether later and sharing the final doc with anyone who may find it useful :-)

On-line Courses - the sublime to ridiculous?

I have just finished my second on-line course. The first I really enjoyed, I found it a very valuable, pleasing experience and I would happily repeat the same course any time, so when a very sudden change of career
opportunity arose I had no hesitation in signing up for a second on-line course to acquire a bit of paper necessary for the job. I found a course, signed up, paid up and got stuck in.

I have just completed it, I have spent 18 days, almost non-stop, working on an advanced TEFL certificate course.  I have now received my certificate, I passed by a wide margin thank goodness, after being a teacher for most of my life, the bit that was new was teaching English as a foreign language rather than to native speakers.

What struck me as very strange though, was how difficult it was to try to guess what the required answers were. A huge proportion of the course dealt with the sequence of teaching all four language disciplines for various different types of English learners.

A typical sequencing task

Sometimes course recommendations were clear and sometimes not.  For all the teaching sequences, whether there were any hints of the expected order or not,  I could imagine situations where I would have done things in a different order to meet the needs of learners. I often changed the order several times having no idea if what I was doing was right or wrong and if I got one wrong then it is likely that the whole sequence and subsequent set of marks would be wrong.

In the following screen shots, apart from the unnatural language for example in the first sentence, two options are almost equally valid. Maybe there is a hint that three and four are the wrong way round with the repeat of the word individually and individual but in the light of the unnatural language I encountered in many questions I was not positive that would hold true.

There were things like this true or false set of questions:

Though I did not go back and check I am pretty sure that the last sample, "Walkie-talkies can be used in dialogue practice to mimic the sound of aviation equipment,” is “True” though trying to imagine a mobile phone producing the noise of a jet engine and many more aviation equipment sounds stretches the imagination somewhat.

Then there were things that I simply did not understand, I spent quite a lot of time in one exercise trying to work out how the word ‘assage” fitted in, it did, but it seemed so far removed from what I was studying it had me puzzled – suddenly I realized the p was missing and it was passage and the context and content of the question became clear.

I did not work out what the following actually meant and guessed it was right or wrong, true or false on a whim…

“Listening sections can have students write specific information they hear.”

Almost every time the word “example” appeared on screen it had a capital E – interesting…

Many, many screens told me that I would be marked on the answers I offered on this page – but there were no questions…

I was about half way through the course and had felt several times there was lots of missing information. Suddenly I found out that in some, though not all explanation pages, some words were hyperlinks to glossary type of entries, but there was no way of guessing, they were black typeface, the same size, not underlined... there was nothing to hint at a link! It was only when I ran my mouse over a couple of statements trying to decide something about the answer to a question that I found them. 

I came across many questions such as:

“Whereas uninterested students usually respond well to general chat at the beginning of class, students who are actively trying to avoid course material should probably not be asked such questions at the beginning of the lesson.” 

In light of that is the following true or false?

“It is best to avoid general chat at the beginning of class with students who are uninterested in studying English, because they will become even less motivated as the class goes on. “

That bit was fun – I chose true but was I right or wrong? I am still not sure! They make the case for both starting with general chat and not starting with general chat, I changed my decision from true to false several times, knowing that once I could get a student talking I am pretty confident that I could inspire something constructive in the learning field but decided eventually that the course writers decided it was best not to start in this way J

During this totally on-line course I encountered missing words, wrong punctuation, missing letters, instructions to do something that was not there, subjective answer sequences to guess and ambiguous statements.  Before anyone points it out – I am completely capable of committing any and all of those crimes in everyday texting, chat etc, often when I am mindlessly chattering, mutli-tasking and the like but I do know the difference and if I am writing for public use I would expect to proof read it and hopefully get someone else to too after I have finished proof reading! If I was the only proof reader I would leave it a week between proof reads so that I did not read what I had just meant to write instead of what I had actually written – there is a difference!

This was an English course leading to a professional qualification, not necessarily for native speakers; I paid for it! I can’t help but feel that it should have been better!

And guess what,  there was no opportunity for feedback , maybe that says it all J

Reform Symposium

Test the highlighter tool

After reading about a blog highlighter tool on Nicky Hockley's  blog: http://www.emoderationskills.com/?p=594 today I decided to try it. I went to the website  http://highlighter.com/ and signed up, got my code, embedded it in the page where it is supposed to go... and it does not work!!

I went back and read the instructions for Blogger - they are the same as for everything else...

So - does it work on a new post and not the old post? No!

Back to the drawing board ;-)

Hmm - come back to it and used two different templates....
driver touble - again!

ePub - Children's St Lucia

I attended an Apple Regional Training Centre conference last week and was introduced to the ePub (short for electronic publication) format. It is an open source book format accepted by many reader apps. Apple iBooks will use it, so apparently will the Sony reader and apps such as Stanza and Kobo, hopefully loads more that are listed in Wikipedia though I have not started trying it on anything other than the iPad and iPhone yet. The file extension is .epub.

I have seen lots of a huge range of genre adult literature for all of my book reading apps, some free, some paid for and definitely in large numbers but have not seen loads of children books available. Admittedly children’s books need much more in the way of images and video, maybe sound files to make them interesting but unless they work out to be massive in files size so that they are hard to download I can’t understand why!

I decided to try to see what the benefit of using the ePub format instead of a website is. In the dim, distant past, I wrote several websites for schools.  These days however, I wonder if a format suitable for use on personal devices may be more useful - still undecided on that one as this is my first experiment. Also, looking towards the future I am not sure whether I should try to start developing apps or books! I have not worked out which is the best format for what.

This is a short account of my issues, if anyone is making an ePub book there may be bits here to help!

Very early Yesterday morning I started an ePub book on a topic which I created a website for years ago. I still have suitable images and video, so in theory it was going to be a quick test... I soon discovered there is no such thing as a quick test!

Having done the hour training session on my Macbook I needed to replicate the set up on my iMac - first problem how did I import the template into Pages! Having achieved that I started writing.

On the course we were told clearly to have one image and one lump of text on the page then move on to another page... I did that! No-one could say why, the tutor just said that that more “went funny, err did funny things.” I imported images and wrote a few words about each one. Next I added video files and a link to a Google map. I set the floating bits to inline - was told that is essential!  Saved - exported to an ePub - No, no, no you can’t do that! No clue why, but it was not acceptable.

I guessed that it may be the video format, so imported the videos into iMovie, exported to Quicktime and, success, my ePub book exported.

I synchronised my ipad to see it - hmmmm - okay but it neededs loads more work. Most titles were on the wrong page, there were huge gaps and an empty page. It had doubled the content on one page and that looked good.

So - back on the computer I doubled the content on the pages, two headings, two images, two bits of text. It looked better, a bit more like a book.

I added it to the iPad - and - it still looked dreadful and the titles were still on the wrong pages. Pictures or videos were placed inside text and all sorts of strange things. Half pages were mixed up on the wrong pages, something I would have thought was impossible.

So - back to the drawing board. Version number three was back to very short pages, as recommended, just a photo and some text, but, it still failed.

I realised that at the end of a passage of text the cursor needs to be on the next line down or it thinks the picture, video, link or whatever goes at the end of the line. Hitting the in-line status for a picture then places it in the middle of the last line of text, if there is not a new line after the image it carries on the text from below. I also thought that as the pages were short to have them centered was really going to look better. So I added a few space at the top and between items, it all looked lovely on Pages - but disastrous in ePub...

I decided that as several of the headings were on the wrong pages it had to be something to do with page breaks, took them all out, put them all back... experimented with space, took them all out, put some back - tried all sorts. By this time I had probably published it 20 times and nothing improved it.

I knew it was driver trouble - though I was getting cross with the software by then. I was telling myself to think logically - I had homed in on spacing and line breaks but nothing made a difference, text from the next page entered the bottom of the page before the line break in several cases.

I was on the verge of giving up but thought of one more thing - I started to check the styles of each line - and - though my headings on two pages were the same size and colour as the other headings, they were called something different...

The styles are the key! As soon as each line was the right style it published and looked reasonable on the iPad - not nearly so good on the iPhone and the videos that play on the iPad don't play on the phone.

So I have my first short ePub made, it is called Children’s St Lucia, it is 12.3 MB.
Each time there is a line under a photograph saying who took it and it is on the left, it should be centered, each image should be centered. I have tried everything I can think of - centering the line before and after as well - nothing changes them.

At this point I am giving up for a while. The software is flaky! It is not just driver trouble.

However, taking into account it is never going to look like I want it to look it is still an easy way of making books for the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone. It should also work on other devices...

If anyone has time to test it on any device and tell me which ones it works on, which it doesn’t etc., I would be really grateful. We could all learn whether it is worth developing books for children with it or whether or wait ;-) To download the book Click Here, add it to your book library and synchronise with any device having a suitable reader :-)

The Apple RTC Summer Conference

I have just returned from the Apple RTC Summer Conference, my head is absolutely buzzing with ideas.

I was particularly impressed with the workshops and need to practice and get to grips with so much!

ePub - Today I made my first ever ePub book, not to share as it is rubbish but to learn the techniques. I have so many ideas of ePub books to make I don’t know where to start! Embedding video, audio and images in a book is just such a wonderful way to make teaching resources available to pupils and for pupils to share information. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4168 Many thanks to Oscar Stringer for the ePub session and his patience :-)

I have made my first iphone app with Dashcode - it is far too simple to be worth having, but it is a starting point. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/Dashcode_UserGuide/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/MakingaWebApp/MakingaWebApp.html . I have started working on an app in Quipper.com but I think this offers more functionality - the downside is that I need a developer’s license to move forward...

I saw a demonstration of, and want to investigate Hype - it is a flash type of program, far more intuitive than the others as it is basically drag and drop, simple logic but no programming :-) It is built in html 5 so should play a website on virtually device -  we shall see. Not sure that it is an app maker though, it may just be for making web sites in html 5!
http://tumultco.com/hype/ .

Also Padilicious looks to be a very useful app making site! Can’t wait to try them all. http://www.padilicious.com/index.html

David Baugh lead the Make an App sessions and he is going to add the workshop information to his wiki http://www.makeanapp.info/
I have ideas, too many probably - and not enough time. Roll on the summer :-)

The easiest workshop for me to keep up with an understand was GarageBand on the iPad.
GarageBand turns the iPad into a recording studio, so anyone without any musical knowledge can make music but with just a little knowledge masterpieces can be made!  There are a selection of pianos, organs, guitars, drums, and basses which sound amazing, Joe Moretti lead us through making a piece of music in an hour - not bad going by anyone’s standards!! It was great fun. Thanks again to Joe for the session.  I am tempted to subject all to my first effort - but like my app I am sure no-one would appreciate it :-)

An ePub book for children first I think!

Having logged into Blogger for the first time in ages I am delighted to see a mobile template available - so - to view my blog on my phone now and see what it looks like :-)

How useful an iPad?

I have been asked - on Twitter - "How useful is an iPad to an ESL teacher?"    A strange question! How useful any device is depends on what you want to use it for…

I should probably first clarify that I am not an ESL teacher, not even much of a teacher these days, but...
My iPad is most used frequently by myself to
    •    check and respond to e-mail and Twitter whilst I am away from home
    •    make notes in meetings, seminars and more
    •    listen to podcasts or videocasts
    •    read from RSS feeds, websites, news and books
    •    play on the Garageband app - current favourite
    •    play silly game apps whilst travelling or wasting time
    •    currently - whilst trying to get thinner and fitter it sits in front of me on my exercise bike so that I can read and exercise - takes my mind off the exercise bit ;-)

My iPad is in demand almost the second my grandson arrives in the house with a "Can I play on your iPad please nan?"
Woody uses it for loads of games, books, painting and music apps - he even investigates those I have downloaded for myself, once he hands it back apart from having a depleted battery (he does like the sound up full)  it has many apps still open. He flits from app to app trying them all out and having a fun time. He will happily play with it or on it whilst the adults are doing the boring coffee and talking bit, until someone offers to play with him!

We have not had a set of iPads in a school situation but there are many similarities with the iPad Touch which we have been using for a couple of years. The web access, apps, instant accessibility and long battery life makes them a huge success in the classroom.

If I was wanting to use mine for teaching there are a few things that I would consider…

• unless I "jailbreak" it I cannot share it with a class though a projector and screen
• if I make great use of an interactive whiteboard and have made lots of interactive resource with the IWB software I can't load that onto my iPad
• I can't share the games or websites created in Flash with my class
• The camera flash card, USB type of added extra is underpowered - I was not particularly successful at things I wanted to do with it.

Compare with a laptop or netbook - that you can do all of those things with, and lots more…

The iPad is a lovely device with loads of wonderful apps for group work such as making stories, recording narrations, making animations, videos and other things with various different sorts of apps.  It is a delight to use. I consider it a personal device rather than teaching device, if wanted something to use for teaching I prefer a laptop…. but that is just me and my preference others would say otherwise!