The new role of the teacher

Watching http://blip.tv/core-ed/sharon-friesen-new-roles-for-teachers-2920007

Sharon Friesen addresses a number of misconceptions about 21st century teaching, and discusses the instructional practices and expertise required of a teacher in today’s classrooms.

Teachers still need to be part of the process.

Future Learning

I am going to have to go back through my books and find one, a post from a colleague the other day has me rethinking about future learning. This is something that we need to be reminded of and see the development of within our school.

http://stevemouldey.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/future-learning/

Some of the brief highlights of this book for him were:

• “Knowledge is innovation. Its role is to generate new knowledge, to do things.”
• The importance of developing systems level of understandings and higher order thinking skills
• A need to shift focus from skills to dispositions

Disciplining and Drafting, or 21st Century Learning? Rethinking the New Zealand Senior Secondary Curriculum for the Future, http://www.nzcer.org.nz/nzcerpress/disciplining-and-drafting-or-21st-century-learning-rethinking-new-zealand-senior-secondar

A possible future course - 3D printing and robotics

I have just been introduced to Jimmy the Robot,

Jimmy is part of the brain child of Brian Johnson, Intel Futurist. Jimmy is 3D printed, and all the

development and changes will be open source.
http://allthingsd.com/20130921/intel-futurist-shows-how-youll-download-and-program-your-own-robot-next-year/

Robotics and 3D Printing - Jimmy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAWbr3dUnhY

For more information
http://robots21.com/

"If we get this open source and apps into peoples lives, they will start to come up with the really cool stuff. They will come up with the next twitter for robots." Quote from Brian Johnson, Intel Futurist. This quote resonates with me rather well, in the age of BYOD, and the New Curriculum, is there opportunity to extend and open ourselves with new ways of teaching and learning. (Page 36, New Zealand Curriculum, 2007)

The Science Fiction book 21st Century Robot explores the fictional world of Jimmy the Robot and his human, Simon Egerton. Future release of the book will contain open source design files for you to modify your very own 3D printable Jimmy the Robot!
http://robots21.com/21st-Century-Robot-Book-Maker-Faire-Edition.pdf

Imagine this as a project for a technology scholarship or student project next year, what will the student be able to get out of it? Technology in action.

Reflection about CS standards and when to teach the course, plus fsm

Reflecting on my students and my course. My students are tired, they take a long time to do anything currently, they are being blown out. My school has them to do six subjects, something that I cannot change, as we are a state integrated school Religious Education is the extra one, and it has achievement standards attached to it. Looking at students achievement standards sheet, some are doing 138 credits. NCEA Level 3 requires them to get 60 + 20 credits from another level, so they could get 80 level 3 credits.
Leaving the computer science to the third term seems like a mistake at this current point in time. I am thinking about getting the students when they are refreshed, not tired, enjoy learning in term 1 as a possible change for next year.
So the question is, when are you looking at learning and teaching the computer science standards next year, L2, and L3?

I put this question out in our community group as part of my uni work. The response from the lecturer;

Two ideas I've heard from teachers who have had success with the standards:
- teach the ideas in term 1 and get them started, but do the write-up later
- teach some of the ideas in year 9 and 10, so there isn't much learning, just revision while doing the writeup in year 11. 

This reflects a couple of observations:
- NCEA students can get so focussed on assessment that they don't learn (just tell me what to do for the assessment, don't confuse me with interesting stuff about the subject)
- most other subjects have years of buildup, for the ideas to mature in the students' minds and build up vocabulary. Imagine if science or maths was first mentioned in year 11?! 

Unfortunately teaching a little early doesn't always fit school structures. But I would suspect that a student who did 3 hours in year 10 and 3 hours in year 11 would achieve more than one who did 6 hours in year 10.

I have just been writing reports, and one thing that caught me was when writing a students comment, he constantly asks me what he needs to do to meet the assessment. The student is not interested in learning, he is in six subjects, has many assessments, he is just looking for credits. I am thinking about what I need to do for this course right now, and I must say I probably am the same, I just want to know what I need to do just to pass. The subject that I am investigating is an area that I have had little experience with, finate state automata. Finate state automata is a device that can be in one of a finite number of states. Ok, that is simple, however when I do a search on the internet for it, I get lost in the maths symbols that follow.

An example of a finate state machine could be a digital watch, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKSuzNAiR1A

Another example is real world example of FSM in game development, http://jessewarden.com/2012/07/finite-state-machines-in-game-development.html

One of the other class members has suggested that I look at are the links for a guided tutorial on Regular Expressions is really helpful from the CS field guide when replicating real life applications. My students saw the benefit of capturing round brackets strings so much clearer after attempting the Tutorial. Regular expressions and interpreting is a breeze for my higher achieving students.

I am currently starting to investigate the resources that are listed, http://www.i-programmer.info/babbages-bag/223-finite-state-machines.html

and

http://www.ccs3.lanl.gov/mega-math/workbk/machine/malearn.html
Some of the links don't work which is causing some issues, especially when it comes to writing notation.
This is the next part of what I am teaching the students.

Started off with the Train station task, was simple and had the students interest, but as soon as they completed it they trailed off. This comes back to the statement earlier, students only want to know at this stage of the year what they need for the assessment. they don't want to learn.

Following this we started to look at states and transitions and what this means. 

Subject selection feedback

Students this year have had difficulty logging in. Mainly due to details being incorrect within our student management system. This is of huge concern.
Other reason is students not following instructions. dd/mm/yy they have been entering ddmmyy

90% completion rate.

Things that went wrong, year 11 students could not select CAL3 or STA3, as a number of students have been advanced.
Enhanced english at year 10 was not available, this is a selected number of students.

Form tutors were given a verification form on Friday, year 9, 11, 12. Looks like i forgot to include year 10, this will be caught up on monday.

Also on monday we have to import all 2014 subject selection into musac. this will allow us to start developing a plan for 2014.

Last year running this. A project that started off as an idea and so many years service. It will be nice to start looking at another project and using my knowledge and help improve an aspect of education.

coder on Raspberry Pi

I was alerted to a new development for the raspberry pi on Friday by a visitor to the school.

Coder is a free, open source project that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple platform that educators and parents can use to teach the basics of building for the web. New coders can craft small projects in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, right from the web browser.

A simple yet great idea, I have downloaded the installer and will put on a Raspberry Pi on monday to try it out.

The part I like is that it is getting students out and trying something different, a little download with a big outcome.

http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/

UPDATE: have managed to get this up and going, rather than using code.local I have had to use the IP address of the RPi to be able to access it. Password requires two Capital Letters and lowercase letters.
Interesting concepts are shown on the first screen with an introduction of how to use it.

You need to have it connected to a physical network before you can setup the wifi through the settings console.

More than one user can access the RPi as long as they have the password, but cannot collaboratively change it, you need to save the changes.

An issue: how do you add more than one page to a project? This will also impact on the css link as well.

educampTimaru

On saturday I had an opportunity to travel down to Timaru to attend a unconference. These unconferences are organised by teachers to show what they are doing, discuss, develop their knowledge on a range of topics. Almost any topic goes, from curriculum delivery, assessment, teaching and learning.
Arrive at Craighead, a all girls school in Timaru you get to see the old buildings, the park like setting and the teachers.
The start of day as normal starts with a smackdown, where people inform others about various applications, apps...

However, there was one special moment during the day, one of the teachers from the school introduced us to her work. She is a design teacher who had just been given a App Crayon and was thankful, it worked faster than her stylus. She introduced us to a couple of her recordings, which she makes available to her students. Introduction to Pinterest, dropbox and one other. Now what amazed us was the level of detail, interactions with the students, reflective on her practice. She kept talking about not being an expert. But hey, what is a expert these days. Her words were constantly, "But I have only been doing this for a year", a year of development, a year of interactions with students, a year of BYOD, a year of developing a new Level 3 programme.

Amazed at the what was happening, a number of us in the group want her to share her practice with others. This is a teacher who is passionate, developing the curriculum through the first section, developing effective pedagogy and using BYOD to enhance and encourage learning.

Her response - "But I have only been doing BYOD for a year"

year 9 students and a 10c piece

I have been busy changing my year 9 course, so far we have not touched any office products. We have been use google docs as our productivity suite. Setting up documents in word processing, sheets. It is the sheets that I have had fun with. First task was to put in cities within new zealand and then find the top temperatures for the next five days. Simple enough task, metservice, however, students have a different opinion on what a city is. Once completed, they them average the temperature, min and max.

Second task, test results for 10 students, also a good way to get to know your students. 5 Test results and leave one out due to they were "sick" that day. average, sum, min, max and count. Now they have to explain why there is only 9 results on that test and not 10 like the others. I also brought this is as error checking, starting to bring in some simple computer science into the course.

Next task, flipping a coin. Now I must admit I got his idea out of a maths book. 100 flips of the coin. Easy enough, now list the number 1 to 100. Students learn about the use of fill down. Students then go through and list Heads or Tails depending on what they tossed. Then a introduction to the COUNTIF function. And also introduction to the division (/) to find out the percentage where they get to use the % button.

Now to do the simple stuff like, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

But what amazed me was that in the 9 years they have been doing mathematics, not once had they ever flipped the coin?

Imagine what would happen if I brought a bag of m&m's to the class and worked out how many of each colour there would be in a packet?

Yes, I did get all of the 10c pieces back at the end of class.

Formal Languages

Sorry, am I am having to put my normal post on hold. Too much other stuff going on this week so far and still have the assignment to finish.

I have had a good start on it, looking at two resources, though I am unsure of how to develop my conclusion at present.

Thursday won't help at school,

Faculty meeting at 8am,
Modern Learning Environments PLD at 8:15-9:00
Non contact, fill in application for funding for 3d printer
Classes
Interval
No assembly today, instead its target forward interview will year 10-13 students
Classes
Classes
Lunch
Classes
Classes
End of school, think I may have students coming back for a re-assessment, tidy up room
Parent teacher interviews 4-7pm, 32 interview slots filled
Association Committee Meeting 7-8pm

I think somewhere in there is something else I have missed.

I have sent a draft away to lecturer, will see what returns.

Oh, I was supposed to grab the sand from my brothers and fill the cups tonight for algorithms tomorrow!

Currently doing some coding - compressing a 30 Gig video file down to 4Gig and trying to keep the quality of the footage.

modern learning environment

This week we are having some staff professional development on modern learning environments. Earlier this year core education hosted a day at wigram where they showed a floorprint of a modern learning environment as well as a variety of furniture that would make up one. The classroom environment is changing, gone are the days that a silent classroom is working well, they are actually probably on their cellphones texting each other.
Where is the front end of the curriculum, and participating with others, students will most likely not work in isolation at university or work, so why do we make them work in isolation at school. Why do we have classrooms that are rows and columns individually set-up. Is this to allow control?

This week I look forward to the speaker and what ideas he will bring.

http://www.minedu.govt.nz/~/media/MinEdu/Files/EducationSectors/PrimarySecondary/PropertyToolbox/StateSchools/SchoolPropertyStrategy201121.pdf

Core education ran a modern learning environment even earlier in the year, as well as provided some excellent speakers. http://events.core-ed.org/modern-learning-environme, Stephen Heppell provided for me
a great look at how different ideas can be incorporated into designs. As well as the need for students to be involved in the design phases. Classrooms are used by both teachers and students, yet they seem to be designed by teachers. Should students not have a say in where they will spend there time. Furniture is also something that needs to be looked at. I have been testing a Hokki Stool which is being used more and more by my students, rather than the chairs they normally sit on. Another idea that was introduced to me at the expo was the idea of whiteboard tables. throughout my classes we draw up ideas, work through problems, when we had the CRT screens I used to use a whiteboard marker on them to draw an idea or example on the glass. I am little to scared to do it on the LED monitors now in class. We have a number of whiteboards in the school that are too small for the environment that they were set up in. This has allowed me to get the caretaker to cut one down and attach it to a table. I will hopefully add an image later on how I am using it.

But back to Stephen Heppell, such ideas still have me thinking about what a classroom could look like in the future, and I hope that I will never have to work in a computer lab again. It is a lab, it is not a classroom. I would like to see how other schools are delivering digital technologies in 21st century classroom environments.

being connected

I have just read another Blogpost about being connected. Not just about being connected online, but being connected to other teachers. Through Facebook, twitter, vln and Google groups. I have been teaching now for 10 years and without the collaboration from other teachers I don't think I would be. 10 years ago there were blogs but they were difficult to use. Instead when I did my teachers practice I emailed my father each day about what I had observed, tried in the classroom and reflected back on my day and teaching. I still remember the comment back from my professional studies teacher about my reflections. From there when I started my first year I had a Linux box sitting at home running a web server that I created a MySQL/pho install that I would update with my thoughts.

Today I still reflect on my practice, professional development. In 2007 I was introduced to twitter which allowed me access to industry, teachers and other people. Through these I have found myself being able to ask questions and get responses that have added to. Me as a teacher and also provided contact with unions. Having a teacher ask a question and know who to get the immediate response from has been a great way to solve issues within the workplace, yes it was done through direct messages.

Collaboration through Google groups. I belong to three great groups, techies, mle reference group and the digital technologies teachers association. In the early days of the mle reference group it was a direct connection to the ministry, so much information, being able to ask questions, get feedback, introduced to other teachers and technicians. The added value I had from this group. )no longer does it have this pass through of information) Allowed me to become the ict innovator within the school. Myportfolio, single sign on, Google apps for education and the early days of live@edu. It gave me access to the right people at the right time for me, but the school was not ready for it, it needed the infrastructure, faster connections and pld.

The association listserve has been a way for teachers to talk about unit standards in the beginning, it started change, from computing unit standards, to information management standards and the issues of generic technology. It brought a massive number of teachers together, although sometimes it went bad with people either getting angry that they were wrong or that people did not have the same ideas on where computing/ict needed to go. Nzist was introduced to me when I was at teachers college, it provided me a way to see where things were at, what was working within schools and what wasn't. It also allowed me to feel part of a community, a community that would support me through my first few years. Since then I have been posting and sharing, and collaborating with the new association listserve since. I have now posted over 700 entries into the new listserve, be it articles, ideas, professional development or what is happening within schools. It has been amazing how many people have emailed back saying thank you, these people have got to a point where they needed help and within minutes they had an answer and were able to carry on. Without this group I do not be live we would be where we are currently. It has allows people to talk about the new standards, what was wrong with the draft standards, as well as what is wrong with the current standards. It has allowed for friendships to be made.

Through going to a education event I wrote a Blogpost about the event and the lack of education and technology that was part of it, the next day I had a comment asking to contact the venue and help assist with the educational reference group to help plan the next couple of years development. It also allowed me to go to a couple of other events where I stood up to explain that education needed to have a space and that it had been left out of the models that were being presented to the community. Yet another reason to be connected.

One would say that ulearn would be a way to get connected, I have been to three ulearns and many more through online environments, one year I think I was one of the top 15 twitters at the event, and I wasn't even there. Being connected is a part of my teaching practice, through pd at school I am online looking for articles or tweeting the personal learning network I have on some of the ideas that I am getting so they can be involved.

It also moves into my area outside of teaching as well. Through meetups in Auckland as well as being part of a brand that I like, we have been able to communicate directly with customers, inform them of stock levels, create a hype and make them feel part of the experience. Being connected is a way of my life.

Being connected has had a profound effect on what I do in the classroom and how I do it.

How do others in other subjects areas without groups or communities develop their understanding of the curriculum, assessments and ideas?

Looking at the computer science standards

It has been interesting doing the course to date. Maybe I have been thinking about aspects that are complex and difficult, however through the work of Tim and others I am now realising that the majority of the course is available through csunplugged.com. This is providing an opportunity to take some aspects out of a computer lab. Through a discussion last night students like to work with big pieces of paper, do a physical activity rather than on the screen.

Do we as digital technologies teachers think that everything has to be done on a computer? Do students expect that everything has to be done on a computer? 

Last year I did an exam problem, the seven bridges problem. Drew it on the quad at school in chalk and had the students running around for half an hour while they tried solving it. In a classroom they would have had it on paper, drew some ideas and told me 5 minutes layer that it isn't solve able. Sometimes I wonder what they will remember the most?

Its always the big activity :)

Coding

Interesting lecture tonight. Coding is now used to represent programming, code.org, coder dojo and a number of other sites related to teaching students programming techniques. However the word coding means something different for those in Computer Science. It is error detection, compression and encoding.

Checking parity bits (interesting that I was introduced to this through my certificate in business computing through data transmissions, we knew them as the "party" bit could have been some confusion here) though in the context that we are looking at we are checking wether is byte has been sent right. Introduce csunplugged activity here http://csunplugged.org/error-detection. 

In the compression we looked at a variety of compression techniques though lossy was shown as an example and probably as much as students need to know for there assessment. Students being able to compare a variety of compression techniques and what it does to an image. Imagine one if the high quality photos converted to a low quality jpg, gif, png with various changes made on quality, introduce grey scale as well. Simple activity that students can gather so much from.

Also look at what happens when you zip, what's happening in the background.

The last one we looked at encryption or encoding. Why do we want to encrypt a message, could be an interesting task in a class for students to encrypt messages and pass them around and have the teacher intercept them not knowing what the message is. Who is going to give up the cipher?
A possible activity could be http://csunplugged.org/public-key-encryption

The different types of attacks were takes about. An attack is a way of solving a cipher.

Brute force

Introduce the rest of the attacks.

A great lecture plus I also was able to talk about the assessment with the lecturer. I have started well but need to rein in my quotes and not get lost in the work. This is about resources and wether they would be good for teachers. Don't forget heading and sub heading.

Updates may happen tommorow as I read back through my notes

christchurch mashup

This weekend was the first Christchurch mashup, a mashup is a webpage or application that integrates complementary elements from two or more sources.

There were seven. Business scenarios that we could choose to develop, the students started off by selecting one rather than developing ideas for each of the seven. Although this takes up time, one of the mentors suggested that doing this allows for more than one idea to develop and combine with another. This allowed the students to look at two of the scenarios and be able to bring the ideas together. The two days have been busy with more business development, normally why I would call brief development, concept development and planning, though the planning was done for is really, but students had to work to timeframes, complete progress reports, as well as still work on their development. It is a pity that we could not really work through one of the main aspects of the mashup which was prototyping

Prototyping was 15 points, it may not seem much, but to have something working is better than nothing and could assist with the way this was run.

I had a great time during the two days, first working with students providing some advice and ideas, but also working with technical mentors as well. Something that I need to get more. I need to work out how to
: get access to I data
: work out how to get the data I want/need
: export the data in a usable form
: get the data into an application, be it leaflet or ArcGIS
: integrate another set of data to make it more valuable.

This to me is where digital technologies starts coming into play, as well as geography. I med to chat with my Geography teacher on how to present this data in a more useful form.

Though it great for my students to do well, one prize for best entrepreneur, and another one for Best Public Safety and Community Partnership Mashup.

Thank you for making the data available, ecan, linz, data.govt.nz, cdc and transportforchristchurch, without your feeds we would not have been able to do what we did.

For more information about what happened this weekend, see http://chch.mashup.co.nz we look forward to next years one in march, which has another positive for us, it means that this could be project for the rest lf the year based upon generic technology.

Steeping back I would like to see a couple of the ideas that we came up enveloped, as I think they are feasible, however, as it came out this weekend, what is the funding stream?

Coding homework

Have been given this for homework

http://computerscienceclub.org/raidarrays/raid.html

This is a simple game that asks the user to change the status of a image, the aim is to make the black boxes even. This is a simple parity check to see wether there is issues with a hard drive or that data has been transmitted properly.
The following are screen shots of the game in action. It starts off getting the user to interact to provide an experience of what is required, This requires two clicks, to change the state to black and then to white.

Then please respond to the following questions

1: Do you think your students could play this game without prior instructions?
Yes, as most games on mobile devices now show the user how to interact, there is not much difference between this and other applications

2: Do you think your students could learn from this game, if accompanied by an appropriate discussion?
The error checking is simple, being able to quickly compare data.

3: Do you think your students would find this game motivating?
At the start, but there is a logical conclusion. You can only run the game so many times before you cannot get any higher on the best score. But will they realise the final outcomes,

The education at the start: This might seems like a strange thing to do, but it is a technique used in major data centres like Google and Facebook... Carry on to find out more

At the end there is text at the bottom which reads, Big data centres have thousands of hard disks in the, and each day several are likely to fail.. carry on to find out more.

This is not clickable, or does it take you to any more information to allow it to be used as an informative way.

4: Do you (did you?) think this game is easily accessible, or would you prefer a different format, such as an unplugged game?
Easy accessible, and runs quickly. responsive. For me personally its does look csunplugged already with the simple graphics. It already looks like the parity game.
One thing that I found with it was that it was easier when the questioned block was beside the black squares than when it was further away. Also within the first three questions it provides you a easy way to figure out if they are right.

Yet later in the game the even section is removed

5: This game Teaches a bit about raid arrays, however the gameplay may outlive the educational content. Do you think the game's replayability should be artificially shortened?
Yes, add in more hard drives to check, bigger raids, how many drives could you check before it caused issues?
What is the differences between RAID levels?


Right, just worked out what this is for, http://computerscienceclub.org/ which is also in development.

Year 9 reflection

Over the years I have been doing reflections, however I have now started to reflect through different ways. Year 9 trimester 2 has just finished and I asked some questions about the course.

What did you learn that was new?

Certainly interesting that programming came up quite highly, as well as learn. Student learnt how to program in scratch as well as through there robotics unit. As it is an introduction course, students worked through digital information skills, email, and internet searching skills through the innz natlib challenge, as well as fireworks, mindmapping and robotics. It has been a pretty full on course. This trimester I used more online environments as well as changing the course. Though we could not do this with all the classes as there is not enough robotics kits for the students to use.
Group work also became a focus during the trimester as students has to build, program and test the robot. This has also been a challenge as what happens when a group member is at music or sick.


How do you think the course could be improved?

Interesting that students want more challenges in their work, maybe they are so used to do the same thing or doing the same type of task over and over. It is also interesting that time and think also come up. Time to grasp a new concept, or to much time given to a concept.

Should we go Google?

Almost every day I hear at school, why can't we access our documents on the BYOD wifi, this is due to protection to stop virus' and being a drop box for school as we can't store all the students data. I understand this, however, why can't we move towards google docs or skydrive, because we need to store the students data.  Hang on, we need to store students data? Why is this? I understand some of the data that we need to store, certain application require data to be store within My Documents, however students documents, spreadsheets, presentations are something different. Large photoshop images ares something that is just too big, but with fibre now and the uncapped connection, is it not possible to make a folder, or folders sync up.

Have the tools been created to allow a better syncing method as students don't sit on the same computer, is there a tools that allows a sync to happen to the server?

This would allow students to access data at home, work on essays both at school and at home. I use dropbox a lot, it alllows me to edit documents on my mac and save them, then access the same docs at school to allow me to continue editing.

What is annoying is that I can't use dropbox sync on my Chromebook or surface.
I can't use google drive sync on my surface.
I can't use skydrive on my chromebook.

I wonder what would happen if I installed all three systems on my mac to sync the same folders?

What sync do you use?

careers evening

Last year we had introduced a careers evening for students and parents to be able to come in, listen to presenters, providers and teachers about possible careers so that students have a better picture of the subjects that they require, better choices, and also what is required of them through the achievement standards. It was interesting that the conversations I was having with parents was more around the front end of the curriculum, yes skills and knowledge are important, but so is managing one self, participation, using language, symbols and text. Informing students that they will probably not be sitting in a room by themselves, that they will have to work as part of a team, develop good communication skills, be able to put your ideas forward are important to employers.

It was also good to talk to them about the changes that have happened with digital technologies, and that we are required to do the technology curriculum until year 10. It provides them an idea that we are developing knowledge and skills, rather than just skills.

Sometimes I think these careers evenings are like speed dating, you have such a shorteriod of time to impart so much information, that at one stage I was interacting with four groups, informing them about the subject, what ideals we are looking for, what the different codes means in the upper levels.

It is now such an important part of our job, to help inform students about what possibilities there are out there. Though I did like to use the information from seek and trade me, that there are 3508 it jobs currently, and that there are 108 science jobs.

HCI reflection

Today we had Jeff Johnson present to use again, A great talk, some parts I took away was the that amount of definition that we have in front of us, vs what it is on the sides. If you think about putting your thumb outstretched in front of you, that is high resolution, but on the peripheral it is basically 3 pixels per foot, i.e the size of a lettuce.
We looked at the nzacditt resource around HCI, great to look at how Heuristics (Nielson) are used through various examples.

It was also good hearing Jeff talk about the concepts in his book, the brought a few things home for me.

I plan to do the HCI stuff earlier in the year next year, so students can bring in ideas throughout the year so they have a good student voice example for their external report.

We also got to try out the new widget(app) tonight for HCI, it is a tile game where you click again on a tile if you perceive there has been a delay between your click and the tile showing. Interesting looking at the graph at the end of the test. I like how it follows the idea of a science experiment, we need to use ideas from other curriculum areas to help develop context and terminology as well as literacy.

Also used the csanz.ac.nz brochure tonight at career night, parents seem happy to be able to take something away to read later, refer back to.

As I said throughout tonight, through seek and trademe jobs, there are 3000 IT jobs currently.

Hci vs ux

Looking at an email in my inbox from smashing magazine, it talks about ux issues and provides an example of a Skype dialog box, do you want to reject the file, however it is the language in the dialog box that makes what you are trying to do confusing. This is part if the hci paper i am writing at the moment. Product design is just one part of the process, how is it going to look, what function does the device do, but the ux is especially important.

From the email:
Yes. No. OK. Cancel. Whenever you're designing an interface, you don't only have to thoroughly think about the visual style of your buttons, but also about the microcopy that will be displayed on those buttons. What words should you choose for the confirmation buttons? What about the checkout buttons, and even the alerts?

There has been a lot of discussion whether more general or more abstract terms should be used as labels on buttons. The more precise the label is, the better. Also, it might be a good idea to use meaningful verbs like "Save" or "Confirm", instead of "Yes", "No" or "Cancel". Mailchimp, for example, prompts users to actually type in the word "DELETE" when deleting their data and confirm it with a button also labeled "Delete".

What has worked best for you? Do you have any general tips, ideas or thoughts for button labels? Please share them with us on Twitter using the hashtag #smlabel.

P.S. And if you'd like to learn more on how to design better UX, we've got just what the doctor has ordered: Two brand new eBooks on UX, which are also available for free download for our Smashing Library customers.

— Vitaly (@smashingmag)

Science curriculum, the e in science

I have been reading a number of papers lately, not the ones i should be reading though,

http://www.nzcer.org.nz/research/publications/science-new-zealand-curriculum-e-science-0

This report explores innovative possibilities for e-in-science practice to enhance teacher capability and increase student engagement and achievement. It provides insights into how e-learning might be harnessed to help create a future-oriented science education programme and puts forward a possible framework.
The report draws on four focus groups and two case studies. It is part of a Ministry of Education project investigating e-learning in science education (e-in-science). The project is one of three strands in a larger programme of work.

It fascinates me, that i have heard no Science teacher talk about this work, even when I posted it on twitter to a science teacher i got back "Thanks for the link. Will have a good read of that tomorrow. I hadn't seen it before but it looks valuable on 1st glance"

In the report it talks about Principles for future oriented science education

In considering how future-oriented education (including science education) might be supported, Bolstad and Gilbert (2012) identify six emerging principles:

1. personalising learning 

2. new views of equity, diversity and inclusivity 

3. a curriculum that uses knowledge to develop learning capacity 

4. rethinking learners’ and teachers’ roles 

5. a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders 

6. new kinds of partnerships and relationships between schools and the wider community. 

The majority of these principles relate to how the teacher thinks about the purposes of 

education, and how these purposes might be realised. In the sections below, each principle 

is explored in the context of the data we obtained from the focus groups and case studies.

Interesting to note is the how the teacher thinks about the purposes of  education, and how these purposes might be realised. It's not the school, curriculum, or other factors, it comes directly on how the teacher thinks about the purpose of education. Something that we need to look at a bot more within our schools.

Looking at the first principle, 

Several of the focus group teachers saw moves towards BYOD (bring your own devices) as opening up opportunities for greater customisation of learning pathways. Others were exploring the use of Moodle to offer multiple learning pathways to students. Isaac reflected on this becoming more possible with changes in technology: 

Sometimes something happens which enables you to make a jump in terms of your own teaching strategy. For example, Moodle … When we went to Moodle 2, all of a sudden, for me, it becomes personalised learning. You can do conditional pathways. 

Within the current schooling system, it is difficult to envisage deeper levels of customisation, where students or the community, or both, might shape the direction, scope, content, and contexts for learning (Bolstad, n.d.). Hipkins and Spiller (2012) also note that, in instances of innovative curriculum design which they identified at the senior secondary sector: 

[T]eachers worked hard to make space for students to learn about themselves and their own potential—to bring something of who they were and what they were interested in learning, and to build from this positive, more personalised foundation. (p. 38) 

Alongside this is a need, in science education, for students and teachers to be thinking about what science learning is important, and why. 

Principle Two notes in it

Clearly, however, system-wide change is likely to be needed before teachers are able to fully engage with what alternative views of education might actually look like—and how they might be enacted.

While the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) signals opportunities to do this, current NCEA assessment tasks do not go far enough in valuing the multiple skills students would need to bring to such a task.

How can we as teachers change the way we assess multiple skills through our assessments when NCEA won't allow it?

Principle Three: I look t this with my technology hat on,

Education for the knowledge age must prioritise developing learners’ dispositions, capacities and competencies to deal with new situations and environments, including those with high degrees of complexity, fluidity and uncertainty. This does not mean that knowledge no longer matters. Rather, a more complex view of knowledge is adopted, where knowledge is not “stuff” but something that 

“does stuff” (Gilbert, 2005).

Giving students skills is simple, but giving the student to knowledge behind the skills, the knowledge behind the way the computer works, computer science is a great avenue of this, its not skills, it is knowledge that they will be able to work with, think about data, algorithms into making a program better, thinking about what makes up a good design, a good interface. How Artificial Intelligence works and is going to be used in their work and world. 

Through the paper we see 

In a similar vein, several secondary school teachers reported using forums within Moodle to facilitate learning discussions among students. In some cases, these were related directly to content-rich NCEA-type questions. In other cases a socio-scientific issue was used. For example, Chris talked about his Level 2 biology students debating the pros and cons of IVF on Moodle. This latter use hints at what might be possible when the focus of science education shifts from access to a fixed stock of knowledge to “equipping people to enter and navigate the constantly shifting networks and flows of knowledge that are a feature of 21st century life” (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2012, p. 32). Such a focus will also need to include greater connection with views and expertise from outside the class and school, and ICT has significant potential to help mediate this. Although Chris’s class had not invited external input in their Moodle discussion, he was keen to explore this possibility. 

At the senior secondary level, NCEA assessments in science, by and large, also continue to rank content knowledge highly. Schools, teachers and students are under significant pressure to “conform” to these priorities in order to “do well” under the current assessment regime. Despite this pressure, some secondary teachers are able to envisage ways to develop future-oriented learning within and around existing assessment approaches (Bolstad, 2010; Hipkins & Spiller, 2012).

How do we envisage future oriented learning within Technology?

Do we need to make more reference to the Nature of Technology strands in our area?

Principle Four: Rethinking learner's and teacher's roles

e-Learning is a whole new environment. The whole pedagogy of teaching needs to move away from what has been the traditional industrial model of teaching, to the student at the centre. Because now the student is able to have far more up-to-date information. That is itself should provide some changes in what we do. 

The teacher described a shift in her practice so that her junior secondary students had far greater control in choosing the questions they would investigate for their science-fair projects. She talked about running the science lab and computer lab at the same time, and reported that: 

Some of the research that’s being done, by quite limited pupils, is quite amazing. They have an idea, and because they don’t think the same way as we do, rather than me directing them to a traditional project, they’re going off in some quite interesting directions, and they’re actually researching stuff that’s actually beyond my knowledge. They’re coming out with quite in-depth studies, and linking the whole thing together. I think we have to accept now that we’ve got to go in a student-directed direction. 

In each example, there are glimpses of teachers seeking student “voice” and input into their classroom learning. It is far more challenging, however, to move beyond notions of “student-centred” pedagogies to thinking about how teachers and learners might work together in a “knowledge-building” learning environment. Within this context, roles and relationships are structured in ways that draw on the strengths and knowledge of each in order to support co-learning. For example, while teachers often reported learning IT skills from students, a future-oriented interaction would involve the students and the teachers working together to maximise opportunities for co-learning in other areas as well.

In this environment, where the Internet is used for production of information in addition to retrieval, an effective teacher is a facilitator of knowledge acquisition and manager of the visible interactions among members of the learning community (Haythornthwaite & Andrews, 2011). This is likely to be an unsettling and challenging role for teachers, particularly where they are uncertain about what knowledge will be needed—and need to be developed—to pursue the task that has been agreed to. 

Principle Five: A culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders

Change can be difficult to articulate and implement. The transformation to a more futureoriented, participatory learning framework will not be easy for many teachers and educational leaders—in part because most have been socialised into educational ideas and practices common within 20th-century education systems. 

How are we being shown change in our school? Do we still see examples of educational ideas and practices common within our school?

It is important that the professional development is appropriate for teachers’ current stage and interests.

One aspect that some teachers considered to be particularly intimidating in the context of professional learning related to ICT use in their teaching was the over-emphasis on how technology literate students are. This appeared to have two foundations: first, it made them feel less than competent, and that the students were “way ahead”; secondly, they quickly discovered that the students needed a lot more “education” about digital literacy than they had expected. As Glenis reported:

I do find it surprising that, at my age, I am teaching a lot of students how to do this—the [digital skills] they need for what I’m doing. While it may not be first nature for me to do all this, and I’m learning as I go, a lot of our students don’t know how to do it. 

The theme of teachers needing to see themselves as learners was raised in each of the four focus groups. It also seems noteworthy that many of the participants had entered teaching after a first career doing something else. Perhaps these participants have an intrinsic belief in on-going (lifelong) learning. 

Many also enjoyed “playing” with ICTs—which ties in with Wagner’s (2012) view of innovation requiring play, passion and purpose. Many teachers considered that learning about and playing with ICTs was intensely time consuming. For the most part, this was offset by the benefits that resulted for their own learning, and the ways in which they were able to incorporate ICTs in their teaching and learning programmes. However, any resources to help circumvent the time-consuming process of searching for relevant tools were appreciated (e.g., lists of appropriate apps for different science concepts). 

The problem with IT is it is presented as a solution to the problem. Now find me the problem. 

Whereas we need to come from, ‘This is what I can do. Where’s the solution that will fit it?’ 

Similarly, Sam lamented: 

That is where technology falls down. Too often, it’s ‘Let’s take the gee whiz gizmo aspect’ which is passing and fleeting … You have to go to what is the fundamental purpose of what you are trying to achieve, and how is this best supported by ICT? 

Principle Six:

The future-oriented literature drawn on by Bolstad and Gilbert (2012) suggests that schools, as they are currently set up, simply do not have the resources to provide “in house” all of the very different kinds of expertise needed to develop 21st-century learning experiences in which students contribute to the development of new knowledge. Futureoriented teachers require strong pedagogical knowledge, but they also need to be able to collaborate with other people who can provide specific kinds of expertise, knowledge, or access to learning opportunities in community contexts.

I love this quote, Once it’s in a book, it’s dead information. We’re teaching artefacts of stuff we once thought was important. What’s happening now is changing at such a rate that they need to be part of it. 
(Tim) 

Insights into e-in-science 
This case study offers a range of insights into how digital tools might be harnessed to facilitate the development of learning communities supporting future-oriented science education. In particular, it offers an example of an education programme that:

• has potential to support both teacher and student learning 
• relies on and is developed in conjunction with community participation 
• has potential to support peer collaboration and knowledge co-construction 
• has potential to explore complex, open-ended, cross-disciplinary problems. 

These are explored in greater detail in the full report.

I now starting thinking, are we really doing the tech in technology justice?
The following is a link to the Nature of Technology Achievement Objectives
http://technology.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-support/Explanatory-Papers/Nature-of-Technology

Though as I read the information on the technology site, one thing hits me, The explanatory papers for the Nature of Technology and Technological Knowledge are still under development.