Category: Apple

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A Little More Scratch

Towards the end of the 20 minute video I made for K12 Online, Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch, I very briefly mentioned two other things that I would have liked to say more about but simply didn’t have enough time in the time allowed.

The first thing was the use of Scratch on the iPad and the iPhone.  I mentioned that there was a Scratch iOS app, but didn’t have time to elaborate.  Since then, a few people contacted me about this app and wanted to know more, telling me that the couldn’t find it in the Apple App Store.  The reason you can’t find it is unfortunately quite simple… it’s been removed from the App Store and is no longer available so unless you got a copy of it prior to it being removed, you’re out of luck I’m afraid.

So if you missed out, sorry… but if it’s any consolation, the Scratch app only allowed you to browse the Scratch website and then execute existing Scratch projects.  You couldn’t actually manipulate code or use it as a tool for creating programs, so all those schools implementing iPad programs and getting all excited about the possibility of doing Scratch on the iPads… sorry, it was never a possibility anyway.

But the main thing I wanted to follow up on was the PicoBoards.  I was put onto the PicoBoards by my buddy Martin Levins, and they are proving to be a fabulous extension to what you can do with Scratch. Essentially they are a circuit board  with a bunch of sensors on them that you connect to your computer via USB so that Scratch can directly address the sensors on the board.  With a rheostat (voltage slider), microphone, light sensor, button, and four resistance circuits, the Picoboards open up all sorts of possibilities for creating software based programs that interact directly with the real world.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah… there’s lots more I could say about them, but just watch the video. And then go buy a few.  Your kids will really like them.  Trust me.

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You’ve come a long way!

I remember back in the mid 90s I started to hear more and more about this upstart operating system for computers called Linux. It was an alternative to Windows and Mac, and was based on an open source project started in 1991 by a student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds.  I thought it sounded like a fascinating project and I liked the sound of it, since any alternative to Windows had to be a good thing.  In about 1997 there was lots of talk about this new OS and its potential so I wanted to give it a shot. I originally tried to install it on my trusty old Thinkpad using a copy of Redhat Linux that came free on the cover of a computer magazine, but I didn’t have much luck so abandoned it at the time.

Not long after that I heard the infamous John “Mad dog” Hall speak at a computer show in Sydney, where he passionately and logically espoused the virtues of open source software as a legitimate alternative to commercial software such as Windows and Office.  I recall he made some really compelling arguments because I came away from that talk determined to get this Linux thing working so I could try it. I stumbled across a set of SuSE Linux CDs and tried again to install it, but again without success. At about that time, one of my Year 10 students mentioned that his dad worked with Unix and so volunteered his dad to come give me a hand.  Despite the fact that this guy knew Unix (and by extension, knew a lot about Linux, since that’s where Linux evolved from) we still could not get it working.  We kinda, sorta got it working, but the screen was all weird and there was no sound and definitely no networking. There were all sorts of driver issues, and since I was a relative n00b at using the Linux command line, I really didn’t get very far with it.  However, I did at least try to learn some Linux commands which, although I’m hardly an expert, have come in very handy at various times in my career working with computers and networks.

I really wanted to like Linux. I principle, I really like the concept of an open source operating system, built by a community of users and freely released to the world.  I like the ideology behind Linux, for much the same reason that I like the ideology behind Wikipedia. The world is a better place when we openly share with each other and together we are better than any single one of us.  But no matter how much I wanted to like Linux, the fact remained that I just simply could not get it working with any degree of satisfaction on any hardware I owned. Either the network wouldn’t work, or the sound wouldn’t work, or the screen would only show at 640×480… but I never seemed to be able to get a fully functional system that presented a credible threat to the commercial OSes.

Gradually though, things began to change, and I watched Linux take a big hold in the server space. I ran a school network for a few years and we had a number of Linux servers running various parts of the network. These servers were doing backend webserver work and ran without the need for a GUI… they were ridiculously hard for me to work with (I guess I’m just not that geeky!) but they were totally bulletproof as servers. They often ran for months without any issues and really showed me that Linux was a powerful, stable OS, even if I did find it quite unfriendly to work with.  I just found that terminal a little too intimidating and hard to use, and although I could work out the commands to type in when I needed to, it was clear that I was just not ready for Linux in my day to day desktop existence.

Things really started to change when I saw Ubuntu.  The wonderful Pia Waugh showed me Ubuntu in a workshop and it was a massive improvement over any previous Linux distribution I’d seen. It had a drop-dead simple installation process, lots of apps included and had a GUI that was quite intuitive to use. I installed it on a few machines and it was almost, nearly, but not quite there. I still had minor issues with getting wireless to work, and a few other little things, but mostly it was clear that it was a massive step forward in ease of use.  By this stage, I’d dumped Windows from my day to day computing existence and had moved back to a Mac. The Mac’s ease of use, reliability, speed and performance was like a breath of fresh air… everything, as the ads say, just worked.

I still love my Macs, and along with the iPhone and iPad, Apple are obviously producing some very impressive, game changing technologies these days. But the more I hear and see about the closed world that Apple operates in, the more I’m feeling troubled. I get it, I understand what Uncle Steve is trying to do, and really I don’t think there is any intention to be evil about it. I realise that Apple’s thinking is to produce a platform that just works and is as reliable, stable and functional as possible, and I get that the only way they can truly do that is to control the experience from end to end. When you make the hardware, and the software, and the services and the content… well you get total control over the user experience.  That’s the genius of Apple’s approach. They can give you an elegant, robust, delightful usability experience because every piece is designed to work with every other piece.  It is the reason why I found Linux so damn difficult to use back in the early days, because the environment of Linux was a complete free-for-all, and there was never any guarantee that any hardware or software would play nicely together. It explains why all that early Linux experience was just a painful series of missing drivers, incompatible hardware, a confusing array of software choices, and lots and lots of of frustration.

Having said that, Apple’s approach does bother me a little because it conflicts with my core philosophy of openness and my belief that there should be certain freedoms in what I use and how I work.  Despite the incredibly good user experience that OSX provides, I do sometimes feel the frustration of working within the limitations (or is that the safety?) of the Apple cocoon.  The world grew very sick of Microsoft when it tried to own the entire game. Apple may be working on a much smaller scale than Microsoft was, but it is more aggressive at the same tactic.  Unless they soften their approach a little I’m concerned that here could be a real backlash against Apple as their market share grows.

Overall, I’ll probably stay with my beloved Macs for a while yet since they I still think they are the best overall choice of computing platform.

But back to Linux for a moment. Maybe it’s old news to some people, but I’ve just lately discovered and have become quite impressed with a Linux distribution called Jolicloud.  Jolicloud is a project started by Tariq Krim, the original founder of Netvibes, and is a Ubuntu Linux-based OS made especially for netbook computers.  Jolicloud is completely optimised for netwooks and just goes to show that those underpowered little laptops can actually be useful little computers when they have the right operating system software on them.  I’m running it at the moment on my Lenovo S10 netbook, which until recently was running Windows 7. Jolicloud seems much better suited to the purpose, and runs faster and snappier than 7 did.  The user interface is based on the Netbook Remix Project, but is tweaked in all sorts of added ways for better performance.  I particularly like the “cloud” concept behind it, with the Jolicloud App Directory playing a key role in the overall ease of use. You can browse the App Directory for extra  software (there are hundreds to choose from!) and with a single click they are added to your computer.  All the updates are automatically taken care of through the cloud service too.

The installation was super easy, just download the Jolicloud ISO file, along with a small USB key creator file. Although the ISO took a while to download (it’s about 690MB), once you’ve got it the bootable USB key is made within minutes. Insert it into the netbook, restart and boot from the USB key and the system is installed in less than 15 minutes.  Best of all, every device on the computer works like a charm… sound, screen, network, webcam… everything just worked right out of the box.  I added a few apps (well, ok, over a hundred so far) and it’s turned my netbook from being a device that was easy to carry but painful to use, into a computer that could competently become my regular travel buddy.  There are even two different modes, a Netbook Remix interface, along with a more traditional desktop menu interface.  I think it has great potential. And of course, it’s 100% free.  Free as in beer AND free as in speech.

It’s really shown me just how far Linux has come as a computer for the average person. My mum doesn’t know much about how to use a computer, but I think if she was interested in having one, I would probably give her a Linux based Jolicloud computer in preference to a Windows machine.  She’s probably find it more intuitive, more stable, and overall much easier to use than Windows. And that is a claim that I don’t think I could have made 10, or even 5, years ago.

Linux, you’ve come a long way baby!

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Reshaping Conferences

<understatement>I’ve been to a lot of conferences lately.</understatement>

The Champion Schools Conference in Wellington. ACEC in Mebourne.  ITSC on the Gold Coast, then Adelaide, Sydney and Perth. They’ve all been very good and I’ve gotten something from all of them.  They’ve all had slightly different angles and focuses, but it’s pretty clear that any worthwhile education-based conference these days tends to have the same consistent underlying message, one that most active members of the edtech community would have heard many times before… The world is changing, technology is helping drive that change, and schools need to move with that change if they are to remain relevant.  That’s it in a nutshell.  Of course, there are many much deeper conversations we need to keep having about the how, why, what, when and where of enabling these changes, and we need to keep pushing the message out to those teachers still unaware that these fundamental changes are shifting the ground beneath them.

I have a friend who used to work in the newsroom of a major television station. He once explained to me how, when a really big story broke, the newsroom’s job would be to tell that story over and over for the next few hours or even days.  There would be the initial newsbreak, but then it would get spot coverage each hour, followed by continuous newsbreaks, a piece in the nightly news and then again in the late news, and so on. I once asked my friend why they saturated the media so much with news stories like that, and questioned whether it was overkill to keep reporting the story ad nauseum, to which his reply was “In a newsroom, we know that when we are thoroughly sick of hearing about a particular story, the general public is only just starting to understand what it’s all about.”

So, as much as I might keep hearing the same fundamental messages being relayed over and over at most of these conferences, it’s still true that there are lots of regular classroom teachers for whom many of these ideas are quite a revelation.  The impact that digital technologies are having on our students, the need for a shift in the way we approach the design of learning tasks, the imperative for offering students choices and options as a means of maintaining engagement, and the general idea of teaching less so students can learn more… these are still totally new ideas for many educators.

While conferences might try to promote these ideas through the lens of educational technologies, the true importance of them is firmly rooted in pedagogy, not technology.  While we talk a lot about how digital technologies are a useful tool for “21st century learning”, technology just happens to be a powerful enabler for these new pedagogical approaches.  It may appear that we edtech types are constantly promoting the use of technology just because we happen to like technology, but it runs deeper than that. We promote the importance of technology because, if you have been embedding technology into your teaching for any length of time now, you’ve seen first hand just how effectively it can start to shift the way your classroom operates.  You know it can increase engagement, raise the quality of the work, make the learning more authentic, more on-demand, because you’ve seen it.  And while you might value the role of technology in enabling all these things, you also realise that it’s not really about the technology, but rather the learning.

One of the great frustrations for those of us “in the echo chamber” of edtech is that, while we can see the value that technology brings to our work with kids in classrooms, we sometimes appear to just be enthusiastic about technology for the sake of it. We implore our colleagues to try blogging with their students, or to give wikis a go, or consider allowing that boring essay task to be submitted as a podcast.  And so often our enthusiasm for the power of these tools is all too easily perceived as technological zealotry, and the promotion of technology as a solution to every problem.

So, back to these conferences, and their intended purpose of shifting the participants understanding of 21st century education.  It’s been really interesting to see the lights come on with many of the participants. It’s really gratifying to hear teachers say things like “I’ve never even considered many of these ideas before, but I’m going to take them back to classroom and give them a serious go”.  For at least some of the people I’ve been meeting at these conferences over the last few months, they left excited about the possibilities and felt inspired to learn more and to apply their newly discovered ideas back in the classroom.

One of the ironies of most conferences is that they are so often based on the idea of having someone stand on the stage or at the front of a workshop and simply talk at the participants… ironic because that’s usually the very model of teaching that the speakers are saying we shouldn’t be perpetuating. (For the record, I stand accused… as someone who has delivered some of these talks, I’m as guilty as the next person)  In slight defense of this sage-on-the-stage model though, in some circumstances it’s still the most efficient way to share ideas with a large group.  It’s just ironic that we still design conferences to help us learn what a 21st century classroom should look like by doing exactly the opposite.

It’s not all like that though. One of the standout conferences I’ve attended is the Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple. While it still has some elements of people standing in front of the whole group and talking at them, it also has a significant “unconference” component, where teachers work in small organic groups on passion projects that deeply engage them as learners.  It’s been great to see a conference attempt to model itself on the principles of open discussion; of offering choices, options and highly personalised learning pathways; of forming groups based on the interests of the participants; of giving the necessary time to allow participants to create and change. And of course, of enabling all of this with the rich use of technology. In short, of treating the conference participants as actual 21st century learners rather than just attendees. The ITSC event stands out to me because it tries to actually BE the way it claims education should be, and in doing so it offers the participants a chance to actually “walk the walk”, rather than just “talk the talk”.  Quite a few participants remarked to me that the penny finally dropped about the way education could be different because of the way the ITSC conference itself modeled how that change might actually look.

There was also a real focus on the creation of an appropriate learning space for participants.  Rather than the typical conference situation of having rows of chairs all facing the front, ITSC had a range of flexible seating and working arrangements, with lots of round tables, leather couches and beanbags.  It had large plasma TV screens around the room where groups could gather and share. It had powerboards on every table, reliable open wifi, and a wiki server for participants to create collaborative digital workspaces on demand.  These are the sorts of things that we know 21st century classrooms should look like, and can really help create an environment where the learning really hums along.

Importantly, participants were also asked to actually make something during this conference that they could both share with the group and also take away with them. Even more importantly, they chose what they made based on their unique interests and what would be useful to them. They chose who they teamed up and worked with. They decided what they needed to learn to complete their task and they learned it on the fly. They used technology in authentic ways to enable the process. It was genuine 21st century learning in action, and it was quite a powerful conference experience.

There are lessons in the ITSC events for all conference organisers.