Developments

We are currently working a number of projects at school to help assist our students in their digital life.
We are looking at a IdP solution to link in our schools active directory, knowledgeNET, Google apps, myportfolio, and access-it. The reason for this is these are the four products that we are starting to use most within our learning.

Developments are working steadily and we have now been approached by our school LMS to be one of the pilot schools to get this going. This for me is great, but for our technician is a struggle as he is starting to find a number of things getting taken away from him, or is he. I see this as a free up of time to develop valuable resources, maybe I should get him programming in php and mySQL so I can leave a number of the projects that I run each year up to him. Option selection and our inquiry based learning are two that I can think of, though I am starting to wonder if we will need these developments anymore with the latest google apps that are being offered now.
 
I am also aware of what is required to get these things up and going and that it requires multiple parties to be talking to each other, just when one of the cogs drops things do go stale.
I need to get a meeting with our paperCut expert to go through and tidy up our printer costs.

I am also working with the integration of our schools SMS into access-it library which has been an adventure, the latest update was supposed to allow this to be an easier experience, but the developers have now removed the latest update from the site as they work through a number of issues, I don't think we have emailed them this much before. Currently having issues with the xDBC drivers?

Clickview is currently processing all of our videos and making them available for wireless computer use, which is going to take approximately 3 weeks to go through and convert our database of resources.

The other parts of my teaching are currently looking at the literacy requirements of the students, the year 13 web design students are currently developing a resource to assist students in doing there reading logs. One of the things that I liked is the idea of facebook to show the number of books that a student has completed as a way of getting students to compete against each other to get it done, will have to look at the code that will be needed to do this

e-asttle, import issues, we are currently working through an issue with e-asttle. We can not import our students correctly at the moment, this went from being a first level helpdesk inquiry to a vendor issue within 15 minutes. It has been an issue for a month now and still things have not really progressed.

Though on another tack with e-asTTle, I have been in contact with the bridging projects person at the ministry to investigate Single Sign On as an alternative login method than what we have now which is tricky and for the staff involved difficult to manage.

When will the Auckland Museum make there PUBLIC SSID open for people to use, make your website freely available for people to use within the museum as a way for the public to find out more about the exhibits and the collection that is housed.

I will stop there for now, just one thing more 67 does not equal 95.

Marc Prensky

The author of digital immigrant, digital native which I talk about earlier in my blog. This was the topics of todays Professional Reading Professional Development. We had a presentation by the principal about the slide show the marc prensky presented at the international principals conference earlier this year in Auckland. Now the reading part was reading what was on the powerpoint. The discussion grew throughout the topics on the screen. Some of it was light hearted, others were more thoughtful and though provoking.
Are we made to feel that we are out of date with the technology and not keeping up with the play.
Who used email in the last 24 hours, why, because todays digital native either IM's or TXT's, I like when he asked this question as I had just emailed a student back about the homework he submitted last night. But i was made to feel that I was out of date with todays technology. Maybe I should have been doing it through a blog or wiki. Hey, I have only just got my students creating a blog and gmail account so they can do this as part of there assessment. You cannot change the world in one day.
Also when they started talking about TXTing and using the mobile phone in class, a few topics came into my head, credit in the way of who pays for this, because tone comment I hear from the students quite regularly is that "I don't have any credit on my phone", The teachers credit being used, so I asked, "Are you looking at putting in a server for this so the txt messages can be sent and received a little cost", ok this is over the head of the principal. What about the students who do not have a cell phone, after a bit of discussion and things, I found that three of my Year 13 students don't have a cell phone, they don't need one.
Ok, interesting.
How can todays technology be used, hell I would like to see students with a email account at school, it would make dealing with somethings a little bit easier, no gmail account for one reason!
Also what about using the videos and images that students have on there cellphones, teachers are taking there cellphones out on duty and taking PXTs of disruptive behavior and students giving false names. Students don't know how to deal with it, how are teachers to cope?
How about increasing the students network storage space at school from 30Meg to at least 100 Meg, it would help with todays media and content rich environment.
That will do with todays rant and rave. Tune in tomorrow when I visit a intermediate school to see what they are doing with ICT and why are secondary schools teaching microsoft word basics.