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Funny Name, Great Tool

Ecto ImageI’ve shifted houses recently and my access to good quality broadband has been a patchy, which explains why I’ve been a bit sporadic with these blog posts. I’m not always online when I get the urge to write. I could write it in Word and do a cut-and-paste I suppose, but I just don’t seem to like doing it that way.

Enter Ecto. Ecto is an offline blogging tool. I bought a copy a while back, simply on the basis that it was a damn good idea, even though I didn’t use it all that much and tended to just blog directly into WordPress or Blogger or whatever. But with my sporadic broadband lately I’ve rediscovered just what a cool tool Ecto is. It let’s you write your blog posts offline, with all the features you would get when online. It even handles Technorati tags directly in the application (which makes sense since the author of the software apparently works for Technorati Japan.) It has great support for linking and embedding stuff into your posts, including iPhoto and iTunes integration, time stamp adjustments, word counts, draft and publish control and so on… my only complaint is that I’d like to see better support for image alignment and text wrapping options, but maybe I just haven’t found that yet.

I never understood the name, but according to my dictionary the word Ecto means outer; external; on the outside, so I now see how that concept relates to an offline blogging editor. It’s available for both Windows and Macintosh, and you can check it out at http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

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Life in the Office

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office.  As a teacher, I think it’s hard to avoid.  Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids.  I even have a few “qualifications” in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence, and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program.  I mean, if you’re going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right?

I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007.  Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite.  The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them.  Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them.  I even had an semi-heated discussion with a guy at a technology trade show once who was telling me that certain features would be really neat to have in Excel, and when I told him that everything he was wanting was already there, he argued back that I was wrong… these tools simply didn’t exist in Excel.  I showed him, he was amazed that he had overlooked them.  even though he considered himself a “power user”, he had never found some of these must-have features, some of which I thought were pretty obvious.  After I showed him they were there, he was a happy camper again.

So the goal in Office 07 was to bring as many of the available tools right out to the front of the interface.  That’s a big ask, since there are literally hundreds of tools and features in there, and while there will still be people who criticise the new interface for being too cluttered, too different to the previous versions, too whatever, I must say I think they’ve done a pretty good job of taming a rather big animal.  I found the new Office easy to learn (though I will confess to being a power user of Office software to start with) and the new Ribbon UI seemed pretty intuitive to me.  I’m really looking forward to see what they do with the Mac version…

The only thing about Office that is irksome is the price.  At around AUD$1150 for a full copy, it’s just way too overpriced, and it  is little wonder that piracy is such a huge problem in the home market.  Fortunately, there is a Student and Teacher edition (which is basically the same as the full version) that can be had for a few hundred dollars, and there is even a promotion happening at the moment over at It’s Not Cheating, where Australian university students can buy a copy for only $75.  Not a bad deal, and probably well worth it for a clear, piracy-free, conscience.  Makes you wonder about the sort of profit margins in the software though when you see these sorts of discounts being offered.  I guess Bill became the worlds richest person for a reason…

The other interesting development in the Office space is Google’s recent announcement to add a presentation module to the already existing word processor and spreadsheet modules in Google Docs.  Sure, it won’t have all the bells and whistles that MS Office has, but like I said, most users never use the more advanced features anyway.  For the majority of users, if they can type and format a document, calculate some numbers or keep a list in a spreadsheet, and do a basic presentation for an audience, that’s most of their computing needs right there.  Add in the Gmail and Google calendar features, and Google Docs is starting to look like an interesting proposition.  It also has two nice extra features… it can enable online collaboration on documents, and of course it is free.  Free is good.  Free is hard to beat.  At school, we just renewed our Microsoft licensing agreement for the year and it cost us about $18,000.  That’s every year.  As I say, free is good, and Google Docs is starting to look very attractive, especially now you can even brand it with your own domain name using Google Apps for your Domain.  I’m sure Open Office and some of the other open source office stuff is also worth a more serious look these days.

The downside of Google Docs of course is that it requires a user to be online all the time, with a fairly fast connection if it is to be at all usable.  But that’s becoming more the norm, and is probably not a big issue.  The flip side of that is that it makes all your documents available online, anywhere, anytime, which can certainly be a good thing in a Web 2.0 world.

For me, I will keep using Office for now because I do tend to regularly tap into many of its more advanced features.  But I can see a day in the not too distant future where even I might start to seriously rethink my attitude to the alternatives.

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Stuff and Nonsense

I was watching a Toronto breakfast show the other morning called BT, in which they ran a story about a school being selected to be part of a $15,000 classroom makeover competition. The school was Philip Pocock Secondary School and the live cross to the school on the morning show presented the story in a typical teaser fashion… you know how it goes, “coming up after the break, we show you the amazing results of a classroom makeover…”

Of course, this caught my attention. As an educationalist, and particularly one who is interested in the ways in which schools need to change to become more relevant to our 21st century students, I was keen to see what sorts of things had been done to give this classroom a makeover. As the show cut to an ad break, my mind was running wild with questions… What sort of cool, innovative things have they done to this classroom? What could you do to a learning space that might better engage our digital natives in the learning process? What cutting edge technologies would we see built into the room? How would they take the concept of digital convergence – bringing together audio, video, the web, interactivity, and all the other digital technologies that our students need in order to function – and bring these together in new and amazing ways, helping to define the direction of the classrooms of the future.

After the break, they showed a bunch of photos of the classroom in its old, industrial age state… it looked much the same as so many other classrooms around the world. Rows of desks lined up facing a blackboard. No digital tools embedded into the architecture. Just a typical boring classroom that most baby boomers would instantly recognise as their version of “school”. The TV cameras showed Janina, the host of the live segment, standing outside the room building up the tension and excitement with a group of students who waited anxiously to enter the room and experience this bold new learning environment…

So, what would you expect if you were to enter this classroom? What types of tools, toys and technologies would YOU want in there? If you accept that technology plays a part in learning, what would you require in the room to ensure you could deliver the very best 21st century education to your students? How would you want the classroom technologies to enable that room to extend beyond its own physical boundaries and let you and your students tap into cultural diversity, live global information, expert opinion and authentic learning experiences? There is SO much that could be done to a classroom these days that would move it towards these end goals… I was really interested to see what they’d actually done.

There is always a lot of talk about the sorts of roles that technology can play in creating “the classrooms of tomorrow”. And although the real benefits of any sorts of learning technologies will come from the ways in which insightful and creative teachers are able to use these tools to engage and inspire their students, I am just as intrigued by the part the actual physical learning environment plays in achieving these goals, and the drivers behind the design of schools. So it was with some interest that I watched as the BT reporter flung the door open to reveal the magical classroom makeover.

What I saw made me both sad and angry. Sad that a school had a chance to make a difference to a classroom – even just one single classroom, and they blew it. And angry because the pathetic excuse for a “makeover” was getting so much hoo-ha on TV, and that the people behind the makeover were obviously so damn clueless.

The revolution in the classroom at Philip Pocock school? They painted the walls a nice lime green colour, got some new furniture from Ikea, replaced the blackboard with a whiteboard (not an interactive one, just a regular whiteboard) and stuck a TV/DVD in the corner of the classroom. Oh, and put a computer on the teacher’s desk. I was stunned. They had to be kidding me… This 21st century classroom was just an 18th century classroom with a coat of paint and some new furniture! the desks were all still arranged in rows facing the teacher at the front of the class. The technology was still not in the hands of the students, and the classroom was just as isolated from the outside world as it was previously.

The reporter started interviewing the kids about their reaction to the room and they all were saying how “cool” it looked and how much “better they would be able to learn”. Pleassse!!! I could not get over how shortsighted and silly they looked as they waffled on about how wonderful it was. Nothing had changed, not in any sort of fundamental way. It was all just cosmetic. Nothing would change in that classroom with regard to learning or teaching.

I’m telling you, we need a bloody revolution!

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