Twitter in Education

Below is a Prezi on Twitter in Education. It looks at 3 aspects:
a) What is Twitter? - a brief overview including Tips for Teachers by David Hopkins
b) Twitter for Lifelong Learning - emphasising the benefits a PLN (Professional Learning Network) and how much educators can learn from and share with each other
c) Twitter in the Classroom - examples of how Twitter can be used in a classroom including 'Thirty Interesting Ways* to use Twitter in the Classroom' by Tom Barrett et al.

Twitter in Education on Prezi

Cool Fun Web 2.0 Stuff

Here is a Prezi on 12 cool fun web 2.0 applications for the classroom. Some are classics and some are rare gems!

Cool Fun Web 2.0 Stuff on Prezi

'The Role of Interactive Whiteboards in a 1-to-1 Environment' Presentation from ISTE2010

This June I was honoured to present at ISTE 2010 in Denver. My presentation was entitled 'The Role of Interactive Whiteboards in a 1-to-1 Environment'. A SMART Notebook version of the presentation is available here. As I was sponsored by SMART (which I'm very grateful for and through whom I met some wonderful SMART Exemplary Educators) there is a bias in terms of IWB brand and some product placement which was unavoidable. However, the underlying message I hope has total integrity as it is based on the beliefs and experiences of myself, several colleagues and other great educators who chipped in their penny's worth.

As with any presentation, a full appreciation after the event is not achieved from a simple file unless you have a video, podcast or transcription to go with it. To this end a PDF version in Scribd is below plus a transcription for each slide within this blog post. Some of you may also gain amusement from an interview I gave, courtesy of Dr Ray Heipp and SmartEd Services.

The Role of IWBs in a 1-1 Environment.pdf

Slides:

1. My contact details also contained within the QR Code (my first attempt at QR)
2. My 16 (+1) schools in South and South-West Sydney
3. Video (not available unfortunately) - proof that I actually was a Physics teacher utilising an IWB day-to-day
4. Video available on this link - IWB being used in a Primary context
5. Video available on this link - the Australian 'Digital Education Revolution' - every Year 9 student receiving a laptop from the Federal Government
6. As you can see, these Year 10 students have laptops, Macs or PCs, with SMART Boards in some rooms
7. The main question behind this presentation
8. {drag the picture down} = NO
9. {drag the picture down} = YES
10. {drag the picture down} = YES
11. Demonstration of a Year 11 Physics experiment where a volunteer whistles into a microphone; the wave trace on the oscilloscope emulator is captured with the SMART Capture tool; the SMART interactive ruler is calibrated against the oscilloscope grid; the length of e.g. 8 cycles is measured e.g. 8.8; the length of 1 cycle is calculated e.g. 1.1; the time period is calculated by multiplying with the time based e.g. 1.1×5ms = 5.5ms - this experiment could be performed on a laptop but not collaboratively as is achieved on an IWB.
12. Another activity, Year 12 Physics, best performed on an IWB (and specifically designed for use on an IWB. I know because I designed it). However, students can take it away after a group experiment to further investigate themselves on their laptop.
13. I had posed the question of this presentation via the IWB Revolution Ning and received some great responses including Chris Betcher's straight-to-the-point remark from a chat we had "Don't apologise for teaching!" i.e. an IWB can and should be used as an effective teaching tool, it is not simply the domain of kids doing cute things on a board e.g. senior Physics is not intuitive; I have to introduce new material and explain before students can grasp it to then perform some activity on an IWB, laptop, where ever.
14. {drag the picture down} = YES, as previously explained, a concept could be introduced by a teacher through an IWB, given to the students to work on on their laptops, then possibly feedback interactively through the IWB
15. {the first 2 columns are 'infinite clone' so each word could be dragged into the 3rd column}
    IWB + 1:1 = More than the Sum of the Parts
    
16. SMART Notebook file (unavailable as yet) - Year 10 Commerce - students receive random occurrences to simulate what life might be like when students leave home e.g. flatmate moves out so they have to pay double rent and hence budget accordingly
    
17. Video (unavailable unfortunately) - shows a similar activity with the students each spinning the interactive random wheel in front of each other. Easily done on a laptop but performed on the IWB allows the students to understand that some people are lucky in life and some aren't. Students can then go back and work on their individual projects and budgets on their laptops
18. Predicting the future (slightly gratuitous SMART product placement) - smart tables will soon be upon us (not just in school but in our local coffee shops) and iPads have just arrived. What technologies will we have in the future and how will they work together?
19. Explained in an earlier blog post
20. IWBs are not environments in their own right, they are part of a larger learning space that is hopefully flexible. Introducing laptops into the space again demands that the space is flexible
21. Some examples of contemporary learning spaces
22. Video (not available unfortunately) - shows the mini-ampitheatre (carpeted) within a double 'classroom' with glass partitions at Parramatta Marist High School during a cross-curricula lesson of RE and Technology!
    
23. Research paper I co-wrote on contemporary learning spaces
24. Explained in an earlier blog post
25. Thank yous. Note the final paragraph- Special thanks to the following artists for giving written permission for use of their music in the opening video: Sneaky Sound System 'I Love It' and The Grates 'Science is Golden' (get students to seek permission to use music rather than copy it illegally!)
26. Obligatory SMART slide
    

'Aristotlean' Model of Contemporary Learning

There are many models of contemporary learning which have the student at the centre such as the CEO iLE@RN Model. Building on this, as part of my ISTE presentation on 'The Role of IWBs in a 1:1 Environment', I wanted to come up with a contemporary learning model, again with the student at the centre, but this time looking at the physical location (as opposed to the philosophical position) and the technologies that could facilitate this. To this end I came up with what I've termed the 'Aristotlean' Model of Contemporary Learning.

The term 'Aristotlean' was chosen with reference to the appearance of Aristotle's geocentric model of the universe (you can take the teacher out of Physics but you can't take the Physics out of the teacher!)

Taking this a step further, I wanted to emphasise that with 1-to-1, students could be learning at school, home, even dare I say it McDonalds, all the time working within the cloud via wireless:

Obviously with mobile learning this opens up so many possibilities for students to access anything, anytime, anywhere. Even with fixed devices such as IWBs in certain learning spaces i.e. school, students are still able of working within the cloud. Yet, whatever the scenario, students are always at the centre of learning, both physically and metaphorically.

Knowledge Consuming or Knowledge Creating?

Supposedly I shall be receiving an iPad to 'play' with shortly, prior to some trials in some of our schools. Am I excited? More curious (I have to support schools with Mac or PC so have no zealous affiliation either way) yet I'm excited about the possibilities in schools. However, in conversations, blogs and tweets I am hearing and reading lots of naysayers harping on about the iPad's shortfalls. Problems with school wireless, security breaches and not being able to edit in Wikispaces I'm sure will be sorted out in due course. A bigger issue for me is the problem with Flash (I'm a big user of Prezi for instance) but maybe such applications with migrate to HTML5? However, I can't buy the argument that is now almost a cliché: "its for consumption not knowledge creation". More and more we are moving to 'cloud computing'. We can create and collaborate on documents, audio edit, video edit and more all within the 'aether'. The iPad is a Cloud device. It is not a problem not having a USB port, use dropbox.com. The biggest problem, particularly in Australia, in the short-term is bandwidth. In a few years time we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about. Everything will be in the cloud and we won't need tonnes of ports. The one thing missing in all of the posturing by adults is the students' opinions. They will love using iPads and similar devices in the classroom and will find ways of achieving many of the outcomes we adults say are impossible.

Latest Research on the Impact of Technology on Student Performance

With the Australian Government giving every Year 9 student a laptop and some of these students now in Year 11, I am forever being asked how this 1:1 program will affect student performance in various subject areas. Accordingly, I'm about to embark on postgraduate studies to investigate this. As part of the preliminary Literature Review I have focused particularly on the Becta Harnessing Technology Review 2009, JTLA 2010 report One to One Computing:A Summary of the Quantitative Results from the Berkshire Wireless Learning Initiative and the OECD 2010 publication Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade?. My superiors were very impressed with the evidence, particularly from the Becta report. To this end I have made a Prezi (of course!) summarising the findings:

Becta, JTLA and OECD on Prezi

Jing, swf and Prezi

I've been enjoying a lot of success recently with Prezi (as you can probably tell from my various Prezi posts). However, I've been wanting to jazz them up. Then I came across the following Prezi by Balázs Turai on 'Animations in Prezi'

Academy: Inserting Animations in Prezi on Prezi

This highlighted that Prezi loves .swf (Shockwave Flash) files, often simple, yet fun animations.

This started me looking for fun swf animations to put in my Prezis. The easiest thing to do is copy and paste from other Prezis (using ctrl C and ctrl V on your keyboard rather than right-clicking - Prezi works on Flash which doesn't like right-clicking) such as the one above e.g. the Scientist with the microscope. I then started looking further afield and came across a few problems:

1. Trying to insert swf files I already had from e.g. student projects didn't seem to work
2. Using swf files obtained via Firefox as explained in Lancelhoff.com didn't seem to find their way into Prezi
3. Doing an Advanced Google search for swf brought up pages that were totally Flash and I couldn't use Firefox as described in #2
4. So far I haven't found any decent creative commons banks of cool swf animations either.

If anyone knows the solutions to any of the above please let me know.

However, then I remembered Jing makes swf files in video mode. Fantastic! Jing will screen capture a particular area as an instant image (jpeg) or over time as an animation (swf). Now for example I was able to capture a Voki (animation not sound for some reason) as a swf and insert in my Prezi. (In my ineptness I can't seem to upload my swf into Blogger, so see final product at the end. Of course it would be easier if one could just embed a Voki (or anything else for that matter) in Prezi as you now can with YouTube). The great thing is swf animations play in a loop so they are great to have as introduction shots in Prezis (so not having sound via Jing for whatever reason is a good thing otherwise there would be various looping audio too).

So until I find a great bank of swf animations I'm making my own using my on screen action and Jing. Here is my latest example including swfs via Jing from Voki and a student sample of work:

iLE@RN Day 1 on Prezi