Schools | Betchablog

29Nov/110

My Edublog Award Nominations 2011

2011 has been an interesting year for blogging.

I feel like my own personal blogging has been really suffering lately, not just from being really busy at work, but also from the endless distractions of Twitter and Google+ which, if I let them, could easily become my sole places for sharing stuff online. Certainly, there are some people, like Mike Elgan, who use Google as their sole online presence and funnel all their other online stuff into G+. It's a potentially intriguing strategy, as the engagement factor on G+ is certainly very high. You could also argue that Twitter has replaced a great deal of sharing that was one done via blogs, and there's little doubt that between the "Big Three" of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the nature of blogs and blogging has shifted considerably since I first started using them back in 2005. I'm blogging less, for sure, and it definitely leaves a void that I miss filling.

However, this was also the year when I introduced a whole bunch of new bloggers to the wonders of blogging. At my school, I encouraged the teachers of Reception, Kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2 to give class blogs a try. It's been resoundingly successful, with the Reception and Year 2 classes in particular really running with it.

Then, our Year 6 teachers, librarian and kids took part in a well-structured blogging project as part of an AIS-funded AGQTP Action Research project. The Year 6 teachers got time away from classes to learn about the culture and skills of blogging, and then they shared it with their students, who each got a blog and used it quite extensively during the latter part of the year.

Our junior school librarian also jumped on the blogging bandwagon too, and created both a Junior School Library blog which she regularly updates with library news and information, as well as a Book Review blog that is growing in popularity.

All in all, it's been a busy year of blogging for many people I work with!

My Nominations

I would love to recognise some of these school-based blogging efforts that have emerged this year by nominating some of them for an Edublogs Award. Bear in mind that these are all brand new bloggers, people that have never done it before and were willing to get in and give it a go. I really admire their willingness to try something new and learn some new skills. I'd love to see their efforts rewarded with some recognition, and of course some additional traffic. I think they really deserve it.

So, my nominations are...

Best Class Blog: From Little Things Big Things Grow: The PLC Reception Class Blog, by Sophie McKendry and Jaclyn Casella - In their simplest form, blogs make brilliant journals, and this Posterous blog has been a fabulous journal of the year's activities for this class of 4 and 5 year olds. With 39 posts over the course of the year, they have added photos, audio recordings and writing to document the many important classroom events from 2011. The reaction from parents has been overwhelmingly positive.

Best Class Blog: The PLC Year 2 Blog by Catherine O'Doherty, Lisa Case and Katrina Avery - This blog has been used to connect, collaborate and communicate with our parent body and the world, and has generated an enormously enthusiastic response from the teachers, parents and students alike. It contains student work samples, photos, audio recordings, scans, and writing. It also documents the adventures of Cocoa, the class mascot. The blog has had 147 posts during the year and over 11,000 views. It's an amazing first attempt at blogging and deserves some recognition.

Best Library Blog: Library Matters by Sandra McMullan - I think this brilliant new library blog deserves lots of recognition. It was started by our junior school librarian, Sandra McMullan, as a way to showcase the many great things that happen there. It contains posts, photos, stories and booklists, all designed to encourage greater dialog and exposure to what goes on in the library. It's a stellar first effort at blogging, and really think it deserves some recognition. In addition, Sandra started a second blog for book reviews which links of the front page of her main blog.

After a fairly full-on year of introducing blogging here at PLC Sydney, there are lots more blogs floating around (including a blog for every student in Year 6). While they are all interesting, I think the ones listed above have been the real standouts, and deserve to be nominated for a 2011 Eddie.

Now please go vote for them!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Filed under: Blogging, Ed Tech, Libraries, Schools No Comments

24May/1139

You Don’t Have To Like It

I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology. The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don't like or understand technology (whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it...

Technology in schools is NOT a new thing.

I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it's from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important. No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to the hangar".

Computers started appearing in classrooms back when I was still at teachers college more than 25 years ago. There has been an expectation from EVERY school, school system and government policy that I've worked under in the past 20 years to embed and integrate technology into the education process. Using technology in the learning process, and having some understanding of it and what it enables our students to do, is NOT something that was dreamed up in the last few months, or that appeared suddenly with the DER/BER/<insert acronomyn here>.

I'm so tired of having the integration of technology into learning overlooked because it's "too hard". As educators - actual professional educators, who actually go into classrooms every day and teach for a living - we do NOT have the luxury of choosing whether we should be integrating technology, or whether we want to learn more about it, or whether we think it's relevant to the learning process. It is, it's part of the job and if people don't think so, then they ought to be getting a copy of the Saturday paper and looking for a something else to do where they CAN be selective about what part of the job they are willing to take seriously without it impacting on our future generations.

Your government, your state, your diocese, your school system, your school, have all been mandating this technology integration requirement for at least 20 years that I'm aware of. Every school I've ever worked for has dedicated many hours and dollars to providing professional development, training, resources and equipment to make it happen. The fact that we are STILL having this conversation about teaching professionals who are not up to speed with this stuff after all this time is downright embarrassing to the profession.

It makes me crazy when I hear people talking about using technology in the classroom as being "hard", as though it's also optional. Every job has hard bits, but if they are part of the job, you just learn to do them.

You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.

Popularity: 86% [?]

Tagged as: excuses, integration, pd, rant, technology 39 Comments

24Mar/112

The Right Direction

As a technology integration specialist my job is to help other teachers learn more about technology, but the real spillover is that I get to help other teachers to learn more about all sorts of stuff. Because of this I've come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner, to find true joy in learning for learning's sake, and to be curious about pretty much everything. I love learning, and I find it difficult to understand why others sometimes appear not to.

Many schools espouse the values of lifelong learning, but not all have teachers who live those values on a daily basis. We have a new principal in our school this year, and like all management changes it often comes with a great deal of conjecture about what might change, what new ideas will be put in place. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get an insight into our new boss and what's important to him, and to get a feel for where our school might be heading over the next few years. And for many reasons, I'm excited about it.

In particular, I was pleased to discover that I'm working for a guy who openly states that...

‎Learning to be a teacher is like all learning: it doesn’t occur in an easy linear fashion. All of us ‎are in the business of continual improvement.

Teachers are responsible to take charge of their professional learning.‎

You'd think that such statements are obvious, but so few leaders will actually say it. What a breath of fresh air.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Tagged as: pd, teacherpd, teaching 2 Comments

15Mar/110

Inventing the Wheel

Rob is a music teacher friend of mine who works in the NSW Southern Highlands, and he dropped me an email this afternoon asking if I knew of any schools who were thinking about using iPads. His school is moving forward with an iPad trial and he was wondering what resources might exist that would help them avoid "reinventing the wheel".

As it turns out, I've been seeing a lot of iPad related information lately so I thought I'd post a reply here on the blog rather than just reply to Rob in an email, just in case some of the information is of some use to others.

I'll preface it by saying that I think there are a lot of things in education that could certainly use some reinventing, and maybe this is a good chance to do it. There seem to be a lot of schools looking at how iPads might fit in so it may be a little early to avoid the reinventing and instead take advantage of the opportunity to do some inventing. While there are plenty of lessons about 1:1 learning to be gained from the last 20 years of laptop use in schools (and we should leverage everything we've learned from that history) the iPad is a different enough device that it's causing us many of us to stop and think about how we might do some reinventing of what it means for learners. I remarked to someone recently that it's interesting that nearly every school implementing iPads is still referring to it as an "iPad trial". We're all trying to figure this out. With it's unique form factor, light weight and slim design, the touch interface and thousands of apps to explore, the iPad seems like such an obvious fit in education, it's just a matter of fitting where. It's a classic "solution in search of a problem". It seems apparent that it ought to be an ideal device for educational use, but nearly everyone is still hedging about with a "trial", rather than just biting the bullet and going ahead with full scale iPad implementations. This "reinventing" isn't a bad thing, because it means we're thinking outside the box, looking for the right niche, trying to figure out how this clearly amazing little device will find the right fit in schools. Sometimes new wheels need to be invented.

We run a laptop program at my school and we had a meeting a few days ago to evaluate the progress of it. We all agree that students having their own device has caused some fundamental shifts in the way our kids learn, create and interact with content as well as the way teachers think about designing learning tasks. There's no doubt that it's a good - no, a great - thing and has opened doors to a different kind of learning for many of our students. Many students have remarked to me that the couldn't imagine going back to the non-laptop days. It's great to hear that, although I still don't think we've really begun to leverage the full advantages of being 1:1. We're still learning too.

But there are downsides to carrying technology around. The added weight of carrying laptops and textbooks (yes I know we should be able to get rid of textbooks altogether, and we will eventually, but change can be painful and we are still in transition on some of this stuff). The fragility of having a computer in your bag and the inevitable damage and breakages can be a problem. Laptop battery life is fine when the machines are new but gets steadily worse over time, which then opens a whole can of worms regarding charging once they can no longer get through a whole day on a single charge. Traditional laptops are fine, but if only they were lighter, thiner, more compact, more durable, with less moving parts and good battery life. Sound familiar? No wonder the iPad strikes so many people as an obvious solution in schools. It's has so much of what we're looking for in a device!

I love my Gen 1 iPad, but until the release of the iPad 2 I wouldn't have entertained the original iPad as a serious contender in education. It was the classic debate between it being a "content consumption device" versus being a "content creation device". I want kids to do far more than just consume content, I want them to create it, and iPad 1 lacked far too much in this area for me to take it seriously. However, with the recent addition of cameras, enough grunt to handle tasks like video editing and multitrack audio recording, display port mirroring and a number of other big improvements, it's getting to the stage where it could be a contender for a student's main computing device. Maybe.

I'm still hedging a little and saying "could be" a contender, because I think it still depends what you want to do with them. With an iPad as your primary computing device you'd still need to be able to live without Flash (which admittedly is becoming less and less of an issue thanks to HTML 5) and the limitations of mobile Safari and the very ordinary way it renders some pages. Safari doesn't play nicely with our Moodle LMS because, being Webkit based,the browser don't show the toolbar buttons in Moodle 1.x. I'm sure 2.0 fixes this, but right now, it's a problem for us. I also find Safari does some weird things with forms and text fields. Overall, I'd really struggle with it as my main browser.

There are some issues with the way some third party iPad apps interact with school firewalls and, unless your school runs a transparent proxy, there are likely to be many apps that simply cant get through to the web. This is likely to be a problem. I also have doubts as to whether the pseudo-multitasking is really good enough to be used as your primary computing device, and there are plenty of time when I feel very unproductive because of it. Sometimes, I just want a "real" computer.

There's also licensing issues to consider as Apple haven't been very clear about just how apps can be shared and deployed on a school basis, as well as a lack of what you might call enterprise-level imaging tools. There are quite a few nuts and bolts issues like this that need to be thought through if they are to be used on a school-wide basis. Apple's own view seems to be that iPads are not really an enterprise device, they are a personal device and they aren't designed to be "managed" in the same way that laptops would be.

However, all that aside, there are still enough intriguing things about the iPad, and enough potential advantages, that I totally understand why schools are running "trials" to try and figure out just where the real limitations lie and just how they might be made to fit into a school situation.

So, with that little preamble of thoughts about the iPad, here are a few resources for Rob. Hope you find them useful, mate...

Kerry Smith's blog provides a list of schools running iPad trials in Australia - http://smik.posterous.com/ipad-trials-in-australia
iPads for Learning, a website run by the Victorian government with information about iPad trials in Victorian schools - http://www.ipadsforeducation.vic.edu.au/
Slide2Learn, a grassroots conference held in April for educators interested in sharing ideas about learning with iDevices - http://slidetolearn.ning.com/
In Their Hands, an online document full of suggestions, ideas, app recommendations, as well as pedagogical models, and implementation advice. Seems like a worthwhile document to use as a starting point - http://asp-uk.secure-zone.net/v2/indexMobile.html?id=639/684/1619&lng=en#1
There's An App For That, a Virtual Staffroom Podcast episode I recorded with three teachers in schools running iPad trials. I think it's worth a listen - http://virtualstaffroom.net/2011/02/vsr40-theres-an-app-for-that/
A post by Ronnie Burt on The Edublogger about what can be learned from an exemplary iPad program - http://theedublogger.com/2011/03/11/what-we-can-learn-from-an-exemplary-1-to-1-ipad-program/
There was a really interesting thread on the OzTeachers List earlier this month about iPads. It was started by Brett Clark (zedman350) and raised a great deal of passionate debate about what we should be looking for in school computing devices - http://lists.rite.ed.qut.edu.au/pipermail/oz-teachers/2011-March/thread.html (scroll down the page a little)
I also hear that Trinity Grammar is running a fairly significant iPad project too, with all of their senior students now carrying the devices. Might be worth chatting to the Director of IT at the school... I think you know him. ;-) (For other readers, this just happens to be Rob's brother)

Hope that helps a little. Let me know how it pans out for your school, and how that wheel gets invented. You might let Kerry Smith know too, and she can add you to that list of schools running trials.

CC Image: 'iPad with Dandelion'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68217628@N00/4675262184

Popularity: 12% [?]

Tagged as: Apple, ipad, rob, trial No Comments

28Jan/117

Schooling vs Learning

I was at the always-amazing ULearn conference in Christchurch last year and got asked to do a EdTalk. These short video clips are done by the good folk at Core Education, where they essentially just sit you in front of a video camera and let you rabbit on about education and your own educational perspectives for a few minutes. My buddy Jane Nicholls was working the camera and she kept telling me to just talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. When she sat me down and said "go" I still had absolutely no idea what to say. I just did a brain dump and quite literally blurted out some of the stuff I was thinking about at the time.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Tagged as: Creativity, davinci, innovation, pirate, ulearn10 7 Comments

9Jan/112

Beautiful Growth

Pat's Cactus I was pottering about in the garden tonight and thought about a little story that I wanted to share.

If you teach long enough you eventually collect a whole lot of really lovely stories about the kids you teach. Every teacher can probably tell you about those lovely moments where a student has said or done something that makes everything worthwhile. A little note at the end of the year, a quiet word about how you've made a difference to them, or just doing something that reminds you of why you became a teacher.

Quite a few years ago I worked in a catholic boys school in Sydney where I was the head of IT. I happened to have my own office (in the same room as the servers of course) but I tried to make it a bit homely by bringing in a few plants to brighten it up. Not being the greenest of thumbs, I killed most of them. I'd replace them, but then kill the replacements as well. As a gardener, I really don't have the knack of it.

Like many teachers, I had a group of kids who liked to hang around me. Because of my role as the geeky IT guy, the kids that liked to hang around always seemed to be the slightly geeky, slightly eccentric kids that have lots of personality, and I really enjoyed their company. Many of them would just come to my office at lunchtimes and hang out. One of them, a boy named Patrick, often remarked on my appallingly bad gardening skills and noted how I seemed to kill every plant I had. I had to agree and we had a good laugh about it.

One day, Pat came to my office and presented me with an unexpected gift. It was a small plastic punnet of baby cactus plants, small enough to fit in my hand. He jokingly told me that he wanted to give me a cactus because they require almost no attention and they were probably the only thing I wouldn't kill. We had a laugh about it and it sat on my desk in pride of place, right next to my computer monitor.

Well, time marches on, and Pat eventually graduated and left the school. I eventually left the school too and moved on to other jobs, other schools. I took my cactus with me though, and put it in the garden at home where it actually started to flourish and do ok.

That was many years ago. Here I am, 10 years, 4 schools, 3 houses and 1 divorce later, and I still have my little "Pat Cactus". Except it's not so little anymore. It's grown. Like we all do. I've grown. I'm sure Pat's grown. The "little cactus" has grown and split and been repotted many times now. It now fills several large pots and a few small ones. It gets stronger and greener and every time I look at it I think about how special it was to be given something like that by a student and how special it is that it still grows stonger every day. I hope that's symbolic of many things.

In what I think is a rather nice twist to the story, I discovered recently that Pat lives in the same area as me, in fact only a few streets away. So, a little while ago, I took some of the smaller offshoots of the now-large cactus, planted them in a small pot and took them down to Pat's house as a gift for him, along with a note that said "I told you I wouldn't kill it!". It was my way of closing the loop, and, symbolically at least, keeping that wonderful circle of life going.

The story means a lot to me, because as teachers we start lots of ripples that we might never get to see build to waves and break on distant shores. As the cactus continues to flourish, I think about the hundreds of kids I've had the great joy to teach over the years and hope that they are flourishing just as well. Even if I've only ever had one student give me the gift of a plant that has grown and flourished, I'd like to think that the many students I've taught over the years have all given me the gift of knowing they've grown and flourished.

Thanks kids.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged as: cactus, gifts, teaching 2 Comments

9Jan/117

To be an ADE

I've always aspired to be an Apple Distinguished Educator, but I've never actually done anything about applying for it. As far as my own personal computer use goes, anyone who knows me knows that I am most definitely a Mac guy, but I assumed that I wouldn't be able to apply to be an ADE because most of the schools I've worked in have been primarily Windows schools. As they say, one should never assume.

While it's true that many - probably most - ADEs work exclusively in Apple schools, apparently it's not always the case. While chatting with someone from Apple a while ago I mentioned this, and they replied that the ADE program is aimed at recognising teachers, and does not necessarily focus on the type of computers used in the school that teacher works at.

To become an ADE you obviously need to be active in certain ways that help spread the message about technology and it's value for education. You need to be passionate about the ways that digital technology (and pretty obviously, Apple digital technology in particular) can make students more engaged and creative. You need to demonstrate some degree of innovative practice and a reasonable level of experience in the classroom. I hope I can do all these things. And you need to fill in the appropriate forms. I'm pretty sure I can do that part.

Oh, and you also need to make a short 2 minute video that gives a bit of an insight into who you are and what you do and what you might bring to the party. Apparently the video is pretty important. I gave it my best shot.

Anyway, I finally got my ADE application in for this next intake of teachers (a few days before the deadline too! Woohoo!) so my fingers are crossed. If you're interested, here's the video.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tagged as: ade, Apple, appledistinguishededucator, community 7 Comments

18Nov/102

Ideas for End of Year Slideshows

It’s that time of year when I start to get a lot of teachers at school asking me for assistance with creating an end of year slideshow of photographs of their classes, often with an intention to create a DVD that can be sent home as a memento of the year.

It’s a lovely idea, and I encourage it. The kids love it, and it’s a lovely way to finish the year.

To assist with this, I thought I’d offer a few tips and suggestions on making slideshows...

Start by gathering all the photos you intend to include into a single folder. It’s much easier if all your assets are already gathered in one place before you begin working with them.
Use a piece of software well suited to the task. Although PowerPoint is often suggested, it’s a bit of a dog when it comes to putting these types of presentations together. PowerPoint is the right tool for slideware presentations, but it’s actually not very good at doing “slideshows” with music. The end product of PowerPoint is, well, a PowerPoint file, and it requires PowerPoint to view it, so it can’t just be “played”in the same way a video can.
Instead of PowerPoint, try a tool like Photostory. It’s much easier to get your photos in the desired order, add music and narration soundtracks, add titles, etc. Plus, it gives you an actual video file at the end so everything is nice and self contained. It’s the right tool for the task, and does a much better job than PowerPoint!
You could also try a web 2.0 service such as www.animoto.com, which makes amazing high definition slideshows with only a few mouse clicks. Feed it your photos, choose a template and you’re done! Both myself and the school have Animoto Pro accounts, so you can use this to make your shows if you like. Just see me if you want the login details.
You can copy the final slideshow file onto a disk, either a CD or a DVD, as a way of distributing it. However, getting your video onto a DVD – that actually plays in a DVD player, as a DVD – requires several more steps and some more specialised software. Ask me for more details if this is what you want to do (and be prepared for more work to do it!)
If you want to make multiple copies of the finished disk, there is a CD/DVD duplication tower up in IT Services. If you take your master copy up there, and a stack of blank disks, that’s the fastest way to make lots of copies.

Then there is the thorny issue of copyright for the music... (sigh)

Please respect copyright when you choose your music! If you just want to make a slideshow with a music backing track, you are in a very grey area (copyright wise) if you just rip commercially available music from a CD, or download it from the web. If you were just using it in class, then you’d probably be fine, but if you intend to make multiple copies and distribute them to parents... well, personally, I think you’re taking a big risk.
While you may never get caught for flaunting copyrighted music, you never know whose parent just happens to be a copyright lawyer. And you’re certainly not modelling good ethical use of media to your students. If they see you ripping commercial music from CD, or downloading illegal music files from the net, then you’re just encouraging them to do the wrong thing. Is that really what you want to do?
There are plenty of free and legal music sources you can use, where the music has been released under a Creative Commons license, or some other Open License. Sure, it’s not going to be Top 40 stuff, but there’s lots of great musicians out there making amazing music that they quite willingly give away for free use. Why risk a copyright violation (and worse, set a bad example for the kids!) when there are plenty of legal, ethical alternatives you can use. Do you REALLY need a soundtrack by Pink?
For copyright free music, take a look at www.jamendo.com or www.freeplaymusic.com. It’s amazing what’s out there.

Photo Credit: Slide Viewer by bcostin
NB: This post is based on an email I sent to all the staff at school

Popularity: 11% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:31 — 4.1MB)

Tagged as: copyright, creativecommons, slideshow 2 Comments

23Sep/102

Good Morning Vietnam

After leaving Shanghai the other day I traveled south to Hanoi, Vietnam. My Sydney school has an "arrangement" with a Vietnamese school here. The school is called the Vietnam Australia School, or VAS Hanoi, and the arrangement is that as well as the school offering a standard Vietnamese curriculum it also offers a scaled down and modified Australian curriculum focusing on English and Commerce. This Australian component is taught by native English-speaking teachers, using courseware and textbooks developed by staff back at PLC Sydney, and the goal is to get the kids leaving school with qualifications in two languages and two countries. I've been keen to get to VAS for a while to see what it's all about, so when I asked my principal for permission to attend Learning 2.010 in Shanghai he suggested that I drop into VAS Hanoi on the way home and do some training and support for the staff here.

So for the past few days I've been at the school, seeing how it operates, talking to staff, meeting the kids, and generally trying to offer some support where I can. There are certainly places where that support is needed, so it's rewarding to be able to offer it. Now that I have a clearer understanding of what's going on here at VAS Hanoi I'd like to visit again at some point to really follow through on a few things. For now though, that's a decision that's out of my hands.

I can't say I've fallen in love with Hanoi though. Don't get me wrong, it has a definite charm, if charm is the right word. Perhaps 'character' would be a better word. The city of Hanoi is celebrating its 1000th birthday this year, so although I don't know much else about its history, 1000 years is a long time, and it's had plenty of time to cultivate that character. The people are generally friendly, the food is excellent and inexpensive, there's plenty of interesting culture, and the Vietnamese women are amongst the most beautiful in the world. So what's not to love?

While I'm enjoying seeing a new place and experiencing a new culture, there are a few things about Hanoi that I simply couldn't deal with long term. The obvious one is the traffic. It's crazy. I mean, seriously crazy. It's one of those places where people can tell you it's crazy, but until you see it for yourself you just have no idea. I made a little video below to give you a look at what I mean.

The traffic also creates another problem... air quality. The pollution from all those millions of bikes is frightening. I've had a hacking sore throat from almost the minute I stepped off the plane. At times it's been hard to speak and hard to swallow, and I really don't think I could live here for an extended period because if it. In heavy traffic, the swarm of bikes also kick up a cloud of dust that further dirties the air. I just couldn't live with it long term.

The other thing that tarnished Hanoi a little for me is the fact that my iPhone was stolen the first night I got here. I went for a walk along the streets to do some sightseeing, and a couple of rather pretty local girls pulled up on a motorcycle and asked me if i wanted to go for a ride around the block with them. Naturally I said no... I wouldn't jump on a bike with total strangers in a city with sane traffic, but especially not in Hanoi! One of the girls was standing next to me, and started to rub me on the arms and shoulders and was trying to convince me to get on the bike, while the other talked to me. I basically said thanks but no thanks, spoke them to them for another minute or so, and then started to walk away. As they rode off, I reached into my pocket to see what time it was, and there was no iPhone in my pocket. I was so pissed off!

Luckily, I'd taken out travel insurance for this trip. I don't normally take insurance, but it seemed like a good idea for travelling in South East Asia just for the medical coverage so I ticked the box for that option when I booked the plane tickets. I was a little less pissed off when I remembered that I had the insurance because it meant that the phone would probably be replaced, probably with an iPhone 4, so given that the insurance cost me all of $10, I'm very glad I took it out! However, what won't be replaced is the data added to my phone since the last sync, including a few very special podcast recordings and photos, etc. Gone for good! So annoyed!!!

The insurance company said I needed to fill out a police report before they could process the claim, so I went to the local station, conveniently just across the road from my hotel. What a pack of losers. I'm told there is massive corruption in the police force here, and while I can't personally vouch for the truth of that, I can certainly say there is massive unprofessionalism. The police on duty were a bunch of slobs; dirty, lazy, slow, unsure about how to fill out a report, and they treated the whole thing as a bit of a joke. They seemed more than a little put out that I was actually making them do some work instead of leaving them alone to sit and watch television. Of course, they didn't speak a single word of English, so I had to go back across the road and get the hotel concierge to come over and try and translate for me; this seemed to annoy them even more, since when they thought there was a language barrier they figured they could just fob me off. I think the concierge did an ok job of the translation, but really, who would know? Overall though, if that's the level of service and professionalism you got from official bodies like the police, I could never enjoy living here.

The other big reason I'm probably not enjoying Hanoi as much as I should be is just the fact that I'm on my own here. Shanghai was fun because I had so much to look forward to, meeting people that I was genuinely excited to be hanging out with. When you're "hangin' with your peeps" things are always lots more fun. In Hanoi I don't really know anyone, so it means eating meals on my own, sightseeing on my own, spending time on my own. Not a whole lot of fun really. At this stage I'm just really looking forward to going home to my Linda.

Anyway, here's a bunch of photos I took on my walk tonight if you're interested. I took them with the new Nikon S4000 I picked up duty free as I left Sydney airport, and for a camera without any manual controls (and the fact that I didn't have a tripod with me) they aren't too bad for night time shots. The traffic is particularly bad because today is the day of the annual Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, so it's somewhat crazier than usual!

Oh, and here's the video...

Popularity: 4% [?]

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3Sep/1011

Public Visibility

I have an RSS feed set up that automatically scans the Google news feeds for the phrase "PLC Sydney" or "Presbyterian Ladies College", so anytime either of those phrases appear in a news publication worldwide I get notified of it. (Which, if you want to monitor your school's online public image, is a useful thing to set up by the way!) While I do get the occasional mention of other Presbyterian Ladies Colleges such as the ones in Melbourne or Perth, and occasionally the abbreviation PLC Sydney turns up some non-related stuff, having the RSS feeds scanning the news for mentions of your school is handy.

Recently, I spotted this article in one of the local papers. It was a project that I didn't even even realise was taking place in the school so I was surprised when I spotted it. (I also like the idea that some of our teachers are now doing interesting projects that use ICT and they don't need me to make it happen! Yay! The good kind of redundant!)

What I find amusing is that the newspaper has published the name of the school and the full names of the students, along with a photo... three pieces of information that the cybersafety experts will all tell you should not be made available online. I suspect that if one of our teachers got their students to do an in-class online project that published their full name, school and photo, they would get a stern talking to. However, there is still a belief that, because it was published "in the paper" (which also happens to be online) then it's ok.

We do, in fact, have a "Do Not Publish" list of students, which is derived from a form that all parents fill out at the start of their enrolment at school. On this form they give advance permission - or not - for their child's photo and name to be used in school publications. We keep a record that covers both print and online separately, and before any child's details can be published we check the Do Not Publish list. In reality, out of a school of 1300 kids K-12, we have maybe less than 10 whose parents have elected for them to remain unpublishable.

Personally, I think that the benefits of getting some press for the students, either online or in a more traditional format, is enormous. Sporting achievements, success in interschool competitions, musical events, academic successes, etc... these things are all worthy of celebrating and telling the world about. The boost that these kids get to their self esteem, their reputation and their public visibility is a positive thing and these sorts of publications can start to form the basis of their longer term footprint, digital or otherwise. While we have to respect the wishes of parents who choose not to allow their children to be published (and sometimes those wishes are based on valid reasons and sometimes it's just paranoia and fear) the kids who do get published "in the paper" really love seeing themselves there.

In a world where being "in the paper" also means being online, this opens a real can of worms. We tell the kids one thing as we drill cybersafety into them - don't give away details like your name or school - yet we gladly celebrate them being published online in other more traditional forums using all of these very same details. It's an interesting double standard. The local paper is published to the open web with no passwords, no restrictions, yet we baulk at getting kids to publish the same information about themselves to other formats that are equally as open and public.

Thank goodness that all those fears about online safety are so blown out of proportion or this might actually be a real problem.

PS: By the way, if you haven't seen it, the students' final work is online at http://plcvasproject.blogspot.com and is worth seeing. I'm sure they'd love a comment or two if you get a chance.

Photo embedded from the Inner West Courier

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Tagged as: cybersafety, plcsydney, safety 11 Comments

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