ICT and Computing in Education
Will Lion
For those not in the UK, this is the end of a half term week – a week with no school.
So what do I do? I spend several days building up resources for new units of work. It’s official – I have no life.
But enough self-pity, I’m here to tell about the new course. For some years now I’ve been both reading to my children and listening to audiobooks. This unit takes that idea and asks students to a) write their own short story and b) record it as an audiobook and add audio editing elements using either Audacity or Garageband. I think it would work well as an ICT project, English, MFL or Primary – so everyone’s a winner!
Unusually for the mukoku site, I’ve not field-tested this course prior to release and so I can’t guarantee it’ll work perfectly. If you’re interested though, check out the course and the resources therein.
As mentioned in a previous post, I have been working on a 6 week Scheme of Work aimed at introducing Year 9 students to programming, specifically with Alice for 5 lessons out of the 6. I’ve run this unit this term and have made minor changes so I’m pretty confident that I could use this ‘off the shelf’.
As always, the materials are provided with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license and there is a full Moodle backup of the course available so you can drop it straight in if you’re Moodled up yourself.
This course (and several others) is now available at
http://mukoku.vl3.co.uk
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I’ve been using Edublogs to host this blog since October 2006 (almost 3 and a half years!) and a couple of people have recently asked why I’m still using them.
The truth is it’s probably 60% habit and 40% avoidance of hassle plus having to redirect people to any new hosting solution. On the other hand, the adverts, nag screens ever-approaching image-hosting limit and lack of customisation are all motives for moving on.
In particular it’s definitely time to sort out my categories (as my focus has shifted massively since my M2 year!) and a redesign is probably long overdue. This I could do here easily enough, but maybe it’s time for a fresh start…
I’m not really wanting to spend any money on hosting, so as I see it I have a couple of options:
I already host 2 Moodles on there that aren’t strictly part of my schoolwork (although I do consider them helpful as part of my CPD) and don’t want to overload bandwidth or annoy TPTB if I can help it.
Thoughts, as always, very welcome!
I’ve done this about 3 times now, but this is the one I’m happiest with. Having just taught a 6-week unit using Alice to help students gain an appreciation of programming I’ve written what I think is a reasonable SoW. Feedback would be great (particularly in regard to the homeworks) and the course should hopefully be up and ready at Mukoku by this time next week.
I’ve been doing my best with my laptop, but I’ve never been entirely sure on the best strategy for looking after your laptop battery. Keep it plugged in? Discharge it daily? Keep it in the fridge? People seem to support strategies for battery care like they support football teams.
Yesterday, after 20 months and 515 battery cycles, my Macbook Pro’s battery health dropped to a lowly 4% (which equates to about 7 minutes with the wifi and bluetooth turned off and the brightness down to minimum). As is the nature of things, it jumped back to 22% today, but I figured it was about time to bite the bullet and order a new one.
As it comes out of their budget, I went to see one of the techs and asked his advice. He said that 20 months and 515 cycles is not bad for a battery, especially given how heavily I use the thing. We discussed the various theories for a while and he went to look at the Battery University. Having done so, we’ve settled on a new strategy.
I’m a little worried I’ll forget and pull the plug out without a battery in place a few times, but other than that I’m reasonably hopeful.
No, not some witty, metaphorical lead into a great pedagogical insight today, this post is actually about the Fetch-Execute cycle. Or at least the 4th paragraph on is. This, and the next 2 paragraphs are a little less geeky…
I’m enjoying (nay, loving) teaching AS Computing, having had no intake for the course last year. At the moment we have 3 students (down form the 5 we had in September) and with the new AQA course I’m covering topics I’ve not looked at since my bachelors, back in 2000-3.
Even better news, having just surveyed our Y9 students as part of their Options procedures it seems that around 30 (of a cohort of 235) are interested in the new GCSE Computing which OCR are piloting from September. Of course the figures may well drop once they realise it will probably have to run after school, but it’s a very positive start – and if only a dozen take it then we’re likely to have a much more healthy uptake in Computing in the future.
So anyway, back to the geekiness. Having joined the Computing At Schools Google Group some time ago, I posted there that I was looking to get back into Assembly (last tackled 9 years ago – eek!) and someone posted a link to a KS3/4 friendly Little Man Computer simulator, and a slightly more powerful browser based Little Man Computer simulator.
Both allow you to use machine code write small programs for a notional hardware platform and to test the finished program. The first is great for introducing the concept of the stored program concept and the fetch-execute cycle, whereas the second is great for actually creating something, and you can also write the commands in a form of Assembly and you can see the assembler actually convert the mnemonics into opcodes.
So yes, I spent a large part of my Saturday evening writing a tiny program that will multiply two numbers (using loops and conditional statements to count down the iterations of adding the first term to itself repeatedly). I’d forgotten just how much I love being a computer nerd some days 
In Y8 our students do a web design unit. We do a little HTML, introduce Dreamweaver, plan a 4-5 page site and build it using templates and tables. The end result is, largely, not very good. We’ve tried a range of contexts; ‘choose your own’, ‘rock bands’, ePortfolio of DT work – and the result is always a plain looking website that isn’t finished and students that don’t really understand what they’ve done or how to do it again. Those that have their own website outside school generally use a website builder to do it, and feel a lot more ownership of it (that said, they’re also not very good in general).
On the other hand, what I do in terms of web design usually involves Moodle, WordPress, Joomla or some other CMS (Content Management System) in which the design and the content are separated. I hack a round a bit with CSS, I change images, I install the odd widget or external module. The individual content blocks (like this) are either written in a WYSIWYG editor or done quickly in Kompozer and the HTML cut and pasted in. Although I both have and do write website from scratch, it’s pretty rare these days.
A third option would be to us an online website creator – Google Sites, Wix, whatever else is equivalent to Geocities. The students use these as easy ways to quickly create a website – the reason being that they are easy. The problem with that is that the underlying skills are not being taught and there is little or no understanding.
So what skills do we want the students to pick up? HTML coding, how to set out content (whether through CSS, DIVs or tables), the nature of embedding media (tags linking to images, videos, etc.), hyperlinks, design principles…
There’s no reason why you couldn’t do this with WPMU blogs. Students choose their own theme, customise the layout, change the banner and add the bulk of content as pages rather than posts and use the blog feed as ‘news’. The hardest task would be the logistics of setting up the software on a server and getting the LDAP authentication working.
Any thoughts?
You’ve seen the TV show (if you haven’t, it’s a documentary following people building their own houses), now you can do the unit of work!
At the start of Year 9 we do a full term (12-14 weeks) based around the designing and promoting of a new housing estate. The students plan the estate, design the houses in Google Sketchup, do some financial modelling, create some form of advert and finally present their work to a board of directors (because only 1 proposal will be successful and only one student will be paid!). There are also easy tie ins for data handling and even sequencing (using some of the house-based Flowol mimics).
If you’re interested, you can see all of the resources and even download them as a full Moodle course at Mukoku.
I’ve seen a couple of really good sites over the last few years that allow users to suggest improvements and vote on the ideas they like the best, allocating maybe 10 votes as they see fit (3 votes here, 1 vote there, or 10 all in one pile). Sadly, I can neither remember nor find any of them!
Having spent an hour or two searching I’ve come up with a few possible alternatives. I’ve not yet done a great deal more than exploring the sites themselves and/or their live demos where available.
Commercial Services
Hosted offsite, with limited (if any) branding options and price tags ranging from free to $90/month there are a whole range of options. You need to ante up if you want any moderation of the suggestions and/or more than 100 users/suggestions. That said, you get a slick, professional looking site, managed hosting and presumably decent support. The sites I like the look of are suggestionbox, crowdsound, userecho, getsatisfaction, VoxPopuli, UserVoice (which has the coolest live demo) and IdeaScale (which looks to have by far the best free plan).
Free Online Services
An alternative might be to pick one of the totally free services. Generally less slick, with fewer features and often with no official status for most of the suggestion pages, I don’t think this is my preferred option – but it’s certainly worth a look. Examples include featurelist, and fevote.
Question & Answer
Not quite what I was after, but there are a few tools out there for asking, and answering, questions using a broadly similar format. Although they’re not right for this project, they’re worth looking at as a potential add-on for student-student support. Examples here include Stack Overflow, SOclone and CNprog.
Open Source
Last, but by no means least, comes OpenMind – an open source Ruby On Rails implementation you can stick on your own webserver and use as you see fit. It looks pretty good and has the flexibility and price tag I appreciate. It would mean more work than a managed service and arguably wouldn’t be as ideal as the best of the paid for tools, but it’s currently my front-runner.
One feature I’d really like to see is LDAP authentication – meaning students wouldn’t need another logon to remember other than their usual computer/VLE/email details – but that isn’t worth $90/month.
If anyone has any suggestions or experience of any of the above tools, or if they know of any other brilliant tools I’ve missed, then please let me know!
Update 24/1: Prezi today announced an educational licensing package – and a well priced one at that (Prezi blog post). Kudos to Prezi for both listening and responding to their end-users.
Update 7/1/10: Please don’t send Prezi any more emails! Read the comments for more details.
Original post:
I’ve run into a little problem with using Prezi of late – and it doesn’t just relate to Prezi, but to a number of online tools.
The problem centres around licensing tools for individuals, at a set monthly or annual rate. Now while this would be fine if it was a personal subscription, or even if it was for a team of people in an office to share the account. It is, however, frustratingly difficult for teachers.
I’d quite like my students to be able to create accounts, make as many Prezis as they want and not have to pay $159 per student per year(!). I had a similar problem with Waybe(1), a plugin for Google Sketchup that lets you create 2D nets of 3D models that can then be printed. Because the idea is to install it one machine in an office, the pricing is pretty steep. To install it across the site we were quoted over £20k. Per year. And that’s with a bulk and educational discount.
I’m not suggesting that we should get these tools for free because we’re educators (although when people such as the team at Animoto and Glogster do offer that then I’m not going to complain!), but a sensible pricing policy that reflects the different needs of a school environment makes it much more likely that I’ll be able (let alone willing) to stump up the cash.
A particular problem with Prezi is that we are unable to upload any content from within school. Apparently this is to do with the flash uploader and the proxy server not getting along and I’m told that it can’t be helped. Thankfully I was able to use PreziDesktop with the free account – but alas no more. Now I need the full pro account. And if we want to let all of the students (1500) use it then that’ll be $238,500 or £150,000. Per year. And this problem is only set to increase as we make use of more and more online tools and technologies.
The solution? Well I intend to contact Prezi and put forward the case of the educator. I’m going to ask that they make a 4th type of account – an educational account. One that we might be charged a reasonable fee for. One that would allow us to use Prezi Desktop on multiple machines. One that would allow us to either create multiple (unlimited?) accounts – perhaps with a fair use policy. Or failing that, have them set up a number of accounts that we can ‘lend’ to students rather than them having an account each – or having to share one account between them.
What do you think? Is this a reasonable proposal? Are there any key features I need to include? If I/we knock up a standard email can we get a number of us to send it?
(1)Waybe did later offer me 2x 12 month trial licenses, but you really need the software installed when building your model in order to continually check that it ‘works’ as a 2D net – and I’m still not prepared to pay £20k.
Update 7/1/10: I added an email I had written to Prezi’s CEO and asked people to send a copy themselves to make sure Prezi realise how serious we are. The response was overwhelming and Prezi responded within a number of hours.
Here is a copy of the email I sent – but please DO NOT send any more copies as Prezi are well aware of the situation now. And a massive, massive thank you, both to all those who emailed Prezi and to Prezi themselves for responding both quickly and positively.
Dear Peter,
As an educator, Prezi is a really powerful tool and a great way to create exciting presentations. I also appreciate that there is a free, basic account that will let me create presentations without having to worry about the cost.
One problem I (and a number of other teachers) do have, however, is that due to proxy server issues I am not able to upload any content – a problem that was easily solved using the Prezi Desktop application. Since you have now limited this to just pro account users this means that in order to allow all of the staff and students at my school to make use of Prezi I would have to purchase 1600+ pro accounts, at a cost of over $250,000 per year or alternatively force users to share accounts which would lead to huge logistical problems.
While your licensing system seems fine for private or corporate users, it is not viable for educators who will have a large number of potential users who would provide relatively little load overall. My proposal is that you allow educational users to make use of the full pro account in the same way that Animoto offers free ‘all-access pass’ accounts.
This would surely create very little extra overhead as the desktop application is already written and the educational accounts would almost certainly not lead to any significant bandwidth or storage requirements over and above the equivalent number of free basic accounts. You would also be gaining a lot of users – users who will not be students forever and may well want to continue using the service once their educational accounts have come to an end.
I look forward to hearing from you.
