subject choice

Version 5.a
Add junior functionality, have added a table called subject_jnr

need to add junior export of data as well as change the export scripts not to export junior data just yet.

some extra functionality of exports is required

Wii Interactive Whiteboard

We have it working, the IR's arrived last night and the electonics were hooked up in the pen today.

Connecting the wii remote to the bluetooth is a case of pressing the 1 and 2 button on the remote at the same time to put the remote into discovery mode.

Needed to install .net framework 3.5 to get the wiiwhiteboard software working,

Students have been having fun with it, thoufh we found the whiteboard that we have it too reflective for it to be used like a normal pen, instead we turned the marker around have been using in reverse with great response.

Other issues have been the wii turning itself off after 10 minutes of inactivity.
This requires you to re sync up the bluetooth and restart the wii whiteboard software after it has crashed out.
Also where the wii is placed, at the moment it is on top of the datashow, which is in a difficult place to get.

Maybe using velcro we could make something up that connects to the light fitting that is near the board to be able to hooked it up.

Students have been getting up and using it as I have had google earth running to show them what they can do, they then ask how is this working, the cannot see the other two interactive whiteboards within the school. I say I am using a wii remote they don't believe me, as they cannot see the wii. Thats one of the things I like about this, it makes them think about what they can do with accessories at home, why are they just used with one device, why not many devices.

Will look at creating another pen that we can use in reverse.

3d visual tour

Amazing software that I want to play with, might make a special trip the museum to try some of it out.

Microsoft just released some cool software to mesh photos together. After taking several photos, the array of photos stitched together to recreate the scene.

in three dimensions. It's one of those deals where you have to see it to believe it.  The product is called photosynth and you really need to think out of the box and be created to mesh your pictures together. The site has existing projects to view along with a blog.

This information is from the site:

You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark. With a nothing more than digital camera and some inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your synth is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.

Subject Choice .4a

Year 9 moving onto Year 10

Option lines have bee added to the specific subjects to be in certain areas.

If I want to I can place subjects into option lines and display.

Code for this is in my book.

So it can be done, just need to develop database to take note of the change and carry them through to confirm and finish pages

At the moment this is on the usb drive 2008.4a

Problems getting this developed, because I do my best coding at night, information is not available straight away from people.

Taster courses and pre ncea course information from year 9 to year 10, at the moment they are 10jap and 10jap1, this breaks my schema of varchar(5). Don't believe I should have to change all of this to varchar(6)

Need to add import csv feature for students update. This is causing me a few problems.

Nieuan and kapa are in because they have standards attached. This has been an issue from day one of the development of this.

One of teh issues with year 9 to year 10 has been 

Question: what do we need to export, what information use to be entered in the past.

Every student need to take english, maths, science, pe and social studies, they only need to choose their language, arts technology options. 

This is the only stuff that needs to be exported.

subject choice .3d

Changes to report systems in teacher part to allow for list to be printed in year and house order, and by form class order.

Also looking at being to integrate year 9 into the system, working out how I could work through the 19 subjects some of these students have into the 8 subjects that is currently in the students imported database.

got ahead of myself with the post, should have been .3d

technology integration into the museum

While doing a search on what the museum has to offer in the way of technology, I came across this, it is a blog from the NZ Herald website that has peoples views on technology

http://blogs.nzherald.co.nz/blog/your-views/2008/2/11/should-auckland-museum-stay-traditional-or-be-more-like-te-papa/

Wii Interactive Whiteboard

I had emailed to me this morning was a movie of a TED talk.
the guy has developed a wii interactive whitevoard. I had seen something through the internet earlier in the year about this, however I thought, no way, whatever.

Today, i have been down and brought a couple of wii controllers to play with and get going.
You dont need a complete wii, just the controller, yay

The talk that has inspired me is located at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

Johnny's website is located here, this is where you can access information about his wii hacks and what his next developments are.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/

for the specific wii information that I require is available here.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

i have to wai for my electronic supplier to get me in some iR LEDs

Also, there is a forum on tki on teh development of this
http://www.tki.org.nz/r/discuss/showthread.php?t=45&page=2&pp=10

subject choice

version 2.0c
fixing up spelling errors,
entering in last peices of text to help students, though i do need to modify one more part, they don't have to choose in options lines, there are no option lines.
Fix up list of subjects displayed for this year, subject 1 was shown twice, instead of subject 2.

and graphics as well as css updates.

It's Live Day

Today is the day that we go live with google apps, what a shame it started off with a 502 error.
Also subject choice system is live today as well. It is all setup ready to go. Pity i won't be at work on Monday, I have some Professional Development I have to attended to.

xbox 360 lessons

we have been working through the lessons by Rob Miles author of Microsoft® XNA® Game Studio 2.0: Learn Programming Now! and www.verysillygames.com. The students are loving it. Today we played around more with vibrating controllers. This bring me to todays work. We have 20 students in the class, 10 wired controllers, now that I have this class going they are starting to bring their own wireless controllers in and hooking them up. But how, they expect to be able to come in a get them going. They had yet to realise that they need a connection into the USB port on the computer. I am heading down to Dick Smith Electronics tomorrow to get some Wireless Adaptor for windows to be able to connect them up.

But now they are after some more competition, they want to be able to use these in different ways. I have looked through the book and we are looking at the first xbox 360 Gamepad racer. We are even going to dress then up in jockey uniforms.

This is something we want to emulate and put up on our website. Come on it would be something cool and different.

Also I have some students who have picked up on this so quickly, debugging, they can pick apart any program and explain what it is doing, capture the bugs that I put on the screen in an instant. It is fantastic to see students motivated and interested in something that they love.

Once we have worked on importing graphics into our XNA programs we will look at something I found at Brian Scarbeau's blog which was http://blogs.msdn.com/dawate/pages/let-s-make-a-game-with-xna.aspx written by Dan Waters

is this what it is about?

I entered a competition to take a group of students down to the New Zealand Army camp for some rugby training. It was to write 150 words on why rugby is important to them. I asked the sports coordinator if I should enter and he said go ahead. Now I face a trip with 23 students down to Palmerston North to take part in the two days training session. But as normal politics are involved. What students to take, do we take the current team, the ones that deserve to go, and leave the ones that will now turn up because we have this opportunity. the hardest part is that I cannot tell the team yet because we have to sort this out. I see students working hard at training but not on the field... argh. But what do i mean by the title. Education and opportunities, This is a great chance to get the students out of our area and away from the pressures of family and friends and take them down to a whole new environment. It is an opportunity for us to see what these students are made of and what they will take out of this. I can see them reved up and itching to go. How many of them have not been on a plane, someone else in the island. How am I going to sleep tonight, too many things going through my head. I still have the subject system to finish, working through the bluetooth soution and my year 12 and 13 achievement standards projects. What a job.

What is involved in the trip
Day one, Welcome Brief, trg session 1, Lunch, Nutrition Brief, Trg Session 2, Admin, Dinner, Team- Building / Leadership Session
Day two, Recovery / Nutrition Lesson, Confidence Course, Game planning / Rugby Tactics, Lunch, Unit Visit, Depart and travel to home location.

I have also broken out the xbox 360 controllers in my classroom today. Year 13 programming are starting development of XNA. This has been a long time coming due to various issues, problems, and virtual machines not working with the states that they need to be in. But they are now controllers colours with there controllers, and getting the vibration to work. One student was heard saying "My mac made the Microsoft controller vibrate". It is great to see students having this much fun and realising there potential, it is this easy to get able to create something which has this much fun.

Now I need to get some wireless adaptors so we can have a wireless controller race.

Concept

I have been working on this for a number of days and today i have a solution working, well a trial solution.

One of the problems I had was that I needed a bluetooth module which I found at Dick Smith Electronics, I came back to school and installed it with the software. First Mistake, don't install the software that you are give with the module, a number of the applications developed for bluetooth hotspot and bluecasting wont be able to use it.

Once I had sorted this out and destroyed a one of my virtual hard drives I was away.

i started off with Proxmity Marketing Light, and managed to send a picture out to my phone, though I found this rather difficult and too locked down as a trial to use.

Next I tried out BlueMagnet and this is great I have managed to get mp3 files sent out to phone, though some phones it does take a rather long length of time to push out a 2 meg mp3 file. The best thing about this is that i have been running it for an hour now and students have been accepting the file. which is kinda bad. But so, so, so cool. i can use this trial for seven days at the moment.

All in all I managed to capture 48 blooth devices, I love being in an environment full of technology and stduenst are always willing to get involved. out of the 48 cellphones, the mp3 was sent to 9 of them. Your phone does not make a sound which is a bit of a problem, you have to be aware that content is being "pushed" out to you.

But is there any NZ company using blue tooth marketing.

Bluetooth

Things you can do with a Bluetooth proximity hotspot?
You can allow people to share files:
What files can I send through an Hotspot ?
Images as .gif or .jpg files
Text as .txt files
Animated images as animated .gif files
Audio as mp3, mp4, wav and ringtones
Video as 3gp or mp4 files
Macromedia Lite as .wmv files
Java Applications as .jar files
Wallpapers
Business Card files and Calendar Event files (.vcf , vcard)
And any file supported by a mobile phone (even .xls, .doc, .pdf ,etc)
Applications (.sis)

Open source bluetooth stack

http://www.bluez.org/

This was found at http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/become-your-own-mobile-marketing-agency-part-two/

juts nee dto find some documentation on how I can use this to integrate it into what I need

one system I found is http://proxiblaster.com/

software

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/AreaBluetooth-Light.shtml

what I am looking has been done before

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1080730.1080736

more on what we are trying to do

Specific pieces at the museum that you would wish to provide more information about, like text about each piece, include a sound clip from the battlefield or maybe a short video of the production process of a piece. The user takes the information with them after leaving the Museum and can enjoy a 're-visit' by viewing files received or share the experience. Information provided adds another dimension to Museums and their exhibitions.

Secrets revealed - the mysteries behind the museum

In the right place at the right time?
We had a mass email sent out to us staff at school where it had in it that Auckland Museum were going to have the behind the scenes exhibit and that staff were invited to go along as a preview to this. So I jumped at the chance, one because I had never been to the museum in Auckland, and two, because I am starting to think how can I be a part of the integration of ICT in the New Zealand Curriculum.
While going through the exhibit I was approached by one of the staff who I got talking to, I got talking about the exhibit and what I found interesting and spooky, I hate loud clocks ticking and they have one.
i also started talking about what technology they had for the exhibit and other exhibits around the museum and this lead to a very interesting discussion. They have just created one of their first interactive/multimedia websites, so I talked about what I had seen at other places and how they used podcasts to describe artists impressions and how the galleries were using that information to educate their customers. Auckland museum have just started to develop these with this exhibit and are looking at furthering these with other educational aspects of the museum. But I started asking and TXT and BlueBlue and how PXT technology couldbe used. I was then asked if I was interested in becoming a member of a educational advisory group that will be meeting at the museum on the 4th September, hey, rugby will be finished around then, so why not.
Then we started talking about how students come in, are there for a day, doing reserach or something to that fact, have a looked around and leave, then teh next class comes in the next day and does the same. Why not introduce electronic worksheets that the student scan use, most have digital camera and work with them, why not use that information so they can take it away in a more useful form. This lead to how this could be carried out, My favorite app at the moments is google apps, Online documents and sites the students can create about a topic and post it up on the museum site so they can use it at school and the museum can use it to show other students what you can do. Its nearly and Virtual Learning Environment which could be another aspect that they could go down. I found out later that they are thinking of this.

But this brings me to my notes,
Use Bluetooth to send out instructions and exercise sheets to the students, pointsof interest, stories, digitial story of peron or object that they can listen to one their phone.
Use Digital resources to record experiences, upload to a VLE so students can take away their day and experiences, share with others.
SMS - ask questions, find a code and txt a number to gain more information, maybe link with telecom/vodafone.
Virtual Museum, when you go to a museum you can't go to everything or to some museums, you can't take a group of students to Invercargill to see the stuff they have down their on the whalers or anything like that. Develop some interest from schools on what you are going to see, "Virtual Field trip" 3D models, objects to take another look at.
PXT gallery, send your photos through
They have some smart boards at he museum in the learning classrooms, how could these be made more use of? How to integrate them with the museum.
how to create an instruction environment for an exhibit,

The secrets revealed
It is a staged walkthrough
What do you do when an exhibit ends?
How can people see past exhibits?

Linking in with other curriculum areas?

Bluetooth options or SMS?
Field trip to the museum to try those experiences out with Year 9/10?
Most schools send classes at a time and then the next class the next day. How can we create a more interactive/developed programme with the technology.

how can we get information on ipods/cellphone through the use of podcasts?
ways of getting podcasts out
Wellington Art Gallery uses podcasts to get information out on exhibits and information on various artists, how could we use the same technology.

Then there was a more detailed explanation upstairs in one of the Learning Classrooms
It is a temporary exhbition
It has learning potiential
Elements - designed
-engaes
-imagination
- threatre set
-uses diaramas?

They use traditional worksheets, workbooks.
Who (were), What (we do), How (we do it) are some of teh questions that this exhibit tries to answer.
There is support material,
They want to retain part of the website for eduction purposes.
Usability
Looking at students creating their stories
Secrets, within secrets
Postcard element on the website that students can create a postcard with various elements on it and email it home so their parents can look at it.
- labels, language that is used.
-expand create their own exhibition, unpack
-make more use of podcasts
- bring the community into the museum
-workbook
-building the exhibition, uses the technology curriculum to create a ICT version.

There are also competitions.

The Secrets revealed website

Google apps in schools

We have been using Google Apps for education for a term now, and have been finding it rather good, our biggest problem is not training or support, but rather our Internet Connections. We are a school of over 1800+ students. 

We have three ADSL connections into the school, all three are locked at 50 Gig of data a month. We constantly hit this with all three accounts and are trying to figure out ways to reduce bandwidth. 

We are on the lookout each day and week for the top websites of the day. Most of these are google sites but it is interesting how many of them are proxy sites for the students to get around our filters. These are a constant problem with student addicted to bebo. But that is another matter. 

It is great to see so many collaborative works in progress. With the ability to share documents the social studies department has become a hive of activity as students work in groups. This has not been able to be handled to great in the past with Microsoft ability, or non ability to do collaborative documents. Also the use of the google apps sites program, to create websites/wikis on topics and have other groups post information on topics they have worked on or provide questions and answers to topics. We are looking at how we can use these in other departments within the school. 

Staff are looking at a 21st century learning environment that is different. 

The ICT committee at school are looking at how to create a combined solution that uses Google Apps for student support - applications on tap but also KnowledgeNET for courses, tracking and support. KnowledgeNET is our Learning Management System. 

Some of our draw backs have not been at school, but more at getting the infrastructure in place. getting our domain host company to create the MX and CNAME records, total of 3 weeks to get done. Getting Google to recognise the K-12 status of our school, took a week and a number of emails back and forth to explain to them how the New Zealand system works. 

Also the management of students, google do not provide a facility to place extra information rather than first name, last name, login name and password, you cannot create extra field like a ID number or year level. 

So it has meant that we do not remove students that have left until the end of the year, it also means that we have to individually find each student at the end of the year and delete the account. So for a roll of 1820+ we have 1950 accounts created on google apps.

programming

I have been getting my year 12 programming students working through Microsoft's code rules, which is a self paced e-learning resource designed to build them from development through to production of application using visual basic. It has been interesting as it requires them to work through prove its and challenges, normally they were able to get through a section of work quite quickly, however they have been slowing down as the information they are required to use gets harder. However, this is not the reason why i write this blog post. 

It because of a comment one of my students said today while trying to sole this problem

Look out! You almost hit that Jack Rabbit crossing the road! 

Do you suppose that rabbit thinks it can live forever? Say, that gives me an idea. 

Suppose rabbits did live forever. Let’s say that there is an island somewhere with lots of vegetation for rabbits, and no predators. 

Suppose two rabbits are placed on the island and that every pair of rabbits has a litter of 4 rabbits. 

So after 1 generation there would be 2 + 4 = 6 rabbits. After two generations there would be 6 + 12 = 18 rabbits.

Show the generation number, the number of rabbits, and the number of rabbits per square foot, assuming the island is one square mile in size and that there are 5280 feet in a mile.

Allow the user to choose the number of generations to show.

How would the rabbit population grow with each generation?

"I hate algebra, but I had to use it to solve one of the problems today. I hate it but it helped me." It enabled him to put what he was working on in class into a more practical use. This is what I like and one of the reasons why it is stated in our programme statement, you need to have good math skills, yet no one believes it, due to they are used to end user programs. They think that computing is word, excel, publisher and powerpoint. Some of them still don't believe that they are the ones that are creating the program, it is because they have not crossed that divide. It is too hard is there favourite saying, but break it down for them, "Paint" the form, define what it is you want each element to do in English, then work on the code and debug the code if need be and then test the working program, it can be that simple. Just do one step at a time and don't look at the large picture.
I have also made a little competition with the students, they were to develop a random generator program, which we used to show how it could be used, it was an interesting lesson, then getting the students to get there random number generator working so they could all have an individual number caused some headaches, as normal, not all students follow instructions at once, which caused a few problems. Next comes the chocolate fish awards for most creative use of the button. I am still thinking about how I can do this but it should be fun.

Education Google Apps

I have been working on this for over a term now, first starting to get people in the school to see that google apps was a good alternative of providing email to students. Then getting a pilot group together to trial and use the google app environment within the school and outside.

I looked around at a number of  alternatives of providing student email. Exchange, live@edu teh microsoft branded site and google apps. I think it was that google was providing this and that most students are used to using google's environment took my liking.

But this is not why I am writing this. It has been three weeks since emailing our domain host provider for changes to be made to our domain. After three weeks of emailing them back and forth last night I check the DNS system to find that our requests have been made active. We can now provide the students with a simple web address and away they can go. Now I just need to go through and find the old csv file with hopefully a last name so I can go back and find the student ID number that is associated with it and import from there. 

But we need to start getting this out at school, I am thinking of writing a php file to offer this to year 13 students through the intranet homepage through a banner ad, it is a simple way of getting a year group to work with it and find any problems. But we also need our network use agreement to go out to parents. 

Success

The first trial test was a success, with the 15 students that managed to bring their student ID cards to school. Though i now realease I may need a complete class to push the maximum connections that site5 allow.

two issues that the students brought up, index page only had DD/MM/YY listed as their password, however it is in as DD/MM/YYYY
Year 13 studenst cannot login in, however I knew this as they will not be here next year.
Also they have suggested teh teh list of subjects be in alphabtical order.

And need to check speeling through majority of the page for simple spelling mistakes, like chocie = choice

Programming problems in High Schools

We use a managed network system at our school which limits the students ability to run .exe files.

I have been using gamemaker through a virtual environment and discovered problems that would not allow students to run the executable in the virtual environment, due to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 would not allow a graphics card greater than 16meg to be created, gamemaker requires a 64 meg graphics card or greater. We solved this by enabling an area on the network to run .exe files so the students could test.

The other programming software environments we teach run fine in virtual environments, visual basic and visual c# run well in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, but this does not have USB support.

When my year 13 students asked whether we could create games for the xbox 360 through the XNA creators kit using the skills they have gained in Visual C#, I thought sure, this sounds like something we can do and works in well with Achievment Standards and the competition/learning resources for STUDENT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DESIGN COMPETITION located at http://www.nzfact.co.nz/education.html.

After a couple of months figuring out that Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 won't run the xbox 360 for windows game controllers, installing vmware player and getting all the systems working and testing we have encountered our next problem, vmware player does not support directx3d, there is no drivers or solutions around.

We cannot create the exectable file and copy it through to another area as XNA reequires you to debug the program first. How are other schools providing computer programming experiences, do you dual boot, run liveCD's run off USB sticks? have a complete computer science lab that is setup just for those classes?

Your help would be appreciated.

Note: 28/7/2008 While reading Lance Armstrongs book, it's not about the bike I came up with the answer for my troubles, give the students privileged user rights on the machine. they cannot access anywhere else or so anything on the network due to permissions, but user rights on the machine might just work. I just need to work out what machines they privileged  use and grant them access, no messy creating different user rights or anything like that. Why did I not think of that 6 months ago. I think it because I had my mind on something completely different. Shows what reading a book can do for you. Also we can test out the web browsers that we are going to create...

todays meeting

Todays meeting went well, noone has any serious problems with the system and what it is doing. Just need to go through the whole list of subjects with the deputy principlal and weed some of them out.

There has been questions asked whether I can export the returning, not returning, not sure details out of the system and into KAMAR, I looked at this after school and have figured out I can export the details out, will just come up with the csv import. I'll just try and do a test import tomorrow with some year 9 data I have to put in from last term.

I have been told I still have to apply some lip stick to the program just to make it a little bit nicer looking.

Also I was asked to get some software working for the food technology department. We have a multimedia CD from vegetables.co.nz in reference to the education section. 
http://vegetables.co.nz/resources-index.php

I had been asked to get this working on the school network, the Link from the main application on the root folder on the CD loads straight from the CD, however when you go more in depth in the folder then you can get the program going by running master.exe I love shockwave flash multimedia development.

subject choice bugs

working through the bugs in it, testing to see whether I can take subjects that i know are hidden is one of the bugs

SELECT code, name FROM table where year = " .$year." or year = ".$prevyear." and hide = 0 order by year desc

shoudl have worked, however it ended up to need some () in place to help with the and or statement

SELECT code, name FROM table where (year = " .$year." or year = ".$prevyear.") and hide = 0 order by year desc
is correct.

Now 13STU (13 Study) is hidden so they can not select it more than once. :)

I have a meeting with the development team tomorrow at lunchtime. This I hope will go smooth and they will come back with a few modifications. If they don't come back with modification I know that I have done something wrong, as they should be asking about features or they have thought of something that I haven't.

One of the issues that we have is that the curriculum guide has been developed without listing the subject codes that I use throughout my program, these are five digit codes that will go back into the student management system. What we are going to do is print a list off.

Also required is a list of the hidden codes so we can hide the information. However we need a way of getting the deaf and richard centre students in.

A check of all the information that we have in the subjects table. The problems we have faced the most is around 12 science with two 12SCI subjects, and 12 technology apparel which has two cost listings in it.

It needs to be pointed out in the system that this is preliminary and not the final subject choice as they may not have the conditions of entry, there might be a clash, class sizes might be too small or too large. This statement is being written up tonight and will be implemented into the system tomorrow morning during the ICT PD development time.