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Thanks James

Kudos to James Farmer, who runs the Edublogs service. He has outdone himself.

The server was upgraded last week and the new functionality is fabulous. We can now easily embed Flash, Director, YouTube, Google Video, and iFilm files directly into blog posts, which is a greatly appreciated feature. As well as that, he has installed additional WordPress plug-ins which enable us to do a heap of cool stuff, like the “listen to podcast” option through Talkr, and a link to easily add photos directly from your Flickr account, like so.
Playing the didj and Carmella and Doug's place On Lake Koshlong More Huskys

Thanks James for continuing to make Edublogs (and I’m hoping Learnerblogs too!) better all the time.

By the way, all this funky Web 2.0 spelling of words like Flickr, Talkr, Frappr, etc is making me wonder if I should start spelling my own last name as Betchr?

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Window to the World

Even though I’m just outside Toronto, Canada, I just a fun little chat with a Year 7 class at a school in country Victoria, Australia.

Anne Baird is a teacher from this Victorian school. Anne and I have been exchanging a few emails and Skype calls recently to share some blog and wiki ideas. Anne noticed I was online and buzzed me to ask if I’d like to talk to her Year 7 kids. I said yes, and the rest was easy. From my place in Canada, she was able to have my voice and video image magically appear on the board in a little school in country Victoria, and then Ms Baird and her kids were able to chat to me about life in Canada.

We spoke for about 25 minutes, and the kids asked me a bunch of questions about Canada, what it was like, the weather, the food, the people, and so on. Then my daughter – who is in Year 6 here in Canada walked past the computer so I put her on for a chat. Kate told them about school here, what it was like to live in a different country and so on…

Here’s the thing about this… the time taken to organise this event was about 2 minutes. The cost to make it happen was zero. The effort of taking part required a single mouse click on the Accept button.

It made me wonder… why don’t we take more advantage of these technologies in schools? We so often want to expose kids to bigger ideas and to let them ask questions from people who are outside their own little world, and the technology to do this is right here, right now. The technical barrier to using this stuff is ridiculously low. It requires very little special technical skill or know-how, and is not difficult to set up, and costs virtually nothing. We really should be using it more than we do.

And why don’t we? Too often the barrier for real-time collaboriative tools is that school systems block such traffic from their networks. Administrators unthinkingly deny access to collaborative technologies like Skype, MSN, and so on, because they think that if the network enabled kids to talk with people outside the classroom it would be dangerous or distract them from the work they should be doing, so they just turn it off.

But the way I see it, the value of being able to connect to the outside world could be incredibly valuable if we just manage it the right way. Of course you probably can’t just give open Skype access to every kid, but in many school systems the one-size-fits-all approach to online security is so restrictive that it stops anyone, including many teachers, from using these powerful learning tools with their kids.

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Missing Logic

We had a staff meeting yesterday and I couldn’t get over how much of it was just “administrivia”… Stuff that could have been just as easily done using email. You know the sort of thing… “this event is taking pace at such and such a time. That event requires people to do XYZ. The deadline for so and so is on some particular date…”

I was trying to figure out why we bother holding meetings to tell people stuff that could be done so much more effectively and efficiently using email or other electronic means. Then they have it in writing. They can refer to it at anytime. And we don’t waste an hour waffling on about this stuff when we could actually be doing something constructive.

For a few brief minutes a colleague gave an excellent SMARTBoard demonstration and the rest of the staff were actually engaged and interested. Then it was back to the usual stuff that goes on in most staff meetings in most schools I’ve ever worked in. Dates, events, blah, blah, blah… just email it to me, or better yet, put it on the intranet.

When I asked the obvious question today, “Why don’t we use email for this stuff?” I was surprised by the answer.

“Because not all staff use their email.”

Obvious next question… “But it’s a school email… don’t they HAVE to use it in order to perform school business?”

“No.” Apparently, forcing staff to check their school email is against union policy as not all staff have their own computer. Huh? There are computers in every staff area…

Perhaps there’s logic in there somewhere, but it’s escaping me right now… If schools are going to continue to do the same old things in the same old ways and not take advantage of the benefits of electronic communication right across the board – and that means one in, all in, so everyone is using it – then they could save an awful lot of money by not putting such systems into place to start with.