Turning the Supertanker

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I was out and about in Judges Bay today and a car not unlike the one above, I think that it was a VW Polo, drove past.  It was a Google Streets survey car.  So when the Auckland Google Streets images are released and you happen to be using the tool on the Judges Bay section, it was me standing by a red car in Judges Bay Road with my back to Dove-Myer Robinson Park and my face all fuzzed out for privacy!

I commented on Allanah’s blog last week that I am looking forward to creating virtual ‘Amazing Journeys‘ with this tool when the Auckland streets are finally released, now I will be in one of them.  I suspect that the car was out surveying today because of the fine weather and the quiet streets.  So if you happen to see a car with an odd looking aerial sticking out of the top of it over the coming weeks and months it will most likely be a Goolgle Streets survey car.  It is not hard to miss it has Google Streets on the side as an additional clue!

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I have just been reading through my latest copy of New Scientist and I came across the following article. (Unfortunately you will only be able to read the start of the article unless you subscribe.) New Scientist 2 August, 2008 No2667 pp26-27 if you want to get to your local library to read it.

The article is about Scratch and how popular it has become in Europe and the US, 300 000 downloads since its launch in May 2007.  The program was showcased at Ulearn07, unfortunately I did not attend that session, but one of the teachers on the Supertanker raved about it and had it installed in her class.  Unfortunately that teacher has left now, but the article has spurred me on to look at it further.

One of the great things about Scratch, according to the article, is its modular approach rather like Lego bricks.  I have been thinking about that today and that approach is why I think other programmes such as Lego Mindsotrms and Mark Overmars’ Gamemaker are also so successful.  Students do not have to get their hands dirty with programming and coding  in order to get a result.  For me my perennial favorite is that other MIT stable horse from the 80’s Logo.  Logo is not as popular as the others these days it seems because of the coding element, although I still love it.

Gamemaker and Scratch are both free and that makes them a valuable resource for collaborative projects.  The New Scientist article highlights the trading in blocks of Scratch code that students from different locations enter into as part of their own collaborative projects.  John Rowe the headteacher of St Mary’s School in the UK who has been using Scratch heavily commented on the benefits of Scratch collaboration this way.

“Having an audience for their output is really important because it provides context and engagement.  Once you have got that half of your job as a teacher is done.”

Isn’t that the case for anything that we do in the class?  Programmes like those mentioned above should be widely used in the general class environment, I believe, and should not be seen by teachers and students alike as the preserve of geeky boys.  The quality and depth of thinking and problem solving that I see each week in my robotics class is argument enough as far as I am concerned to make Scratch, Gamemaker and Lego Mindstorms core elements of every classroom curriculum.

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I was reading the following post from Wesley Fryers blog recently.  The blog was about mini computers and as I am trialling the eeepc 900 at the moment it was interesting to see a range of other products that are out there that are not currently available in New Zealand.  If they are I have not seen them.   Wesley also mentioned a free remote storage and back up service offered by Mozy.

The remote storage aspect of his post in particular  caught my eye.  I have mentioned in a recent post about oodesk that distributed storage, on-line programmes and even OS in the case of oodesk will increasingly become the norm.

Mozy offers 2GB of free encrypted storage for non-commercial users and offers unlimited storage for $4.95US per month.  What is involved is a test of your Internet connection speed and the install of a little program that enables you to select and upload your chosen files to the remote storage server.  It appears that initial upload of your files is done whilst your computer is idle so this is an ideal task to be done overnight.  I have already started to upload my precious graphics files and photos, having said that my initial selection put me something like 1000% over my current allocation of space, so perhaps I had better purchase some more space!

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I found an e-mail in my inbox on Monday from Rochelle Jensen from the University of Waikato.  she had stumbled accross the Tohatoha blog that Helen and I have been collaborating on.  She wanted to include it on her wiki.  This wiki is a place where all kinds of innovative ICT practice has been shared by New Zealand teachers not to mention some international initiatives that Rochelle has put up there too.  You can visit her blog and her wiki of collected resources via these links.  Check them out, there are some neat ideas.

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I have created a short video using Google Earth, illustrating the kinds of ideas that I have discussed in previous posts.  This video has been created to illustrate to junior students on the Supertanker exactly where in the world the Olympics will be taking place from Friday.  I went further and created a flypast of the Olympic venue buildings that have been created and in Google Sketchup  and placed into Google Earth.  I could have added additional information like the names of the buildings and could have juxtaposed it with other buildings in Beijing that have been created in Sketchup.  You will note too that I turned on terrain so that the horizon is not uniformly flat!

Stumble It!

Eeepc at home

Last Friday evening I was given an ASUS Eeepc 900 to play with for a couple of weeks.  My task is to evaluate it and write a review for Interface Magazine.  I have been playing with it all weekend and will take it into school over the next few days and get some students to evaluate it too.  My initial reaction is that it is a well made and thought out product that has huge educational potential.

My biggest challenge so far has been to wrestle it away from my own children.  We are not exactly short of computers at home, we cover the bases with three Windows Xp machines, two Macs, three pda’s (one Palm and two HP’s) and a Linux SUSE desktop 10 machine.  With only four of us at home it is not the fact that my family have to fight to get Internet access that has caused the interest, nor is it the novelty of a computer at home!  However this machine has caught their imagination and that will warrant further investigation as to why.  The version that I have is the open source version (of course!).  I have found some interesting links on the Eeepc on the net and I share a couple with you below.

I particularly love this next video….  It appeals to my sense of humour and my desire to burst the OS hype bubble!  They are just plastic and silicone guys, what matters is the Internet and your access to it.

Image source: http://www.hydrolance.net/common/OceanBowPlow.jpg

Here we are in the second week of term 3 on the Supertanker, the year is already well past the halfway point and I have had some time for reflection.  The first two terms were stress on legs for me, there was Prague to prepare for and then there were the technical issues of the network, I have said before that we have had  a run of technical bumps with network performance.  The nett result has been that terms one and two could be described as a PR disaster in terms of ICT.  The upside of that is that we now have a more robust network and normality has been resumed, now I can go on a charm offensive to win back the hearts and minds of the waiverers on the Supertanker.

Yesterday I spent my first day on the Supertanker wearing my facilitator hat.  It was my role to work with teachers on rotation throughout the day helping them with ideas, solutions and giving some helpful suggestions to further integrate their ICT ideas into their planning and therefore their pedagogy.  To my delight, I left the Supertanker last night with a very healthy and positive view of the ICT within. I spent the day with 16 teachers, just over 50% of the staff.  It seems that despite the technical bumps the staff have been quietly getting on with it, this is fantastic news.  True the initiatives I worked on yesterday represent exactly where on the integration continuum the staff are.  There are some staff just making tentative forays into integration and the ICT skills and activites and their ambitions reflect this.  However,  there are staff doing some really ambitious and really challenging activities at the other end of the spectrum and the remaining staff are occupying all the shades between the two extremes.  Some of these activities will really be enhancing the conditions of learning of their students and I am looking forward to seeing the end products.  I think that it is fair to say that the Supertanker has made a further bearing change even in a choppy and disturbed sea.

Some of the programmes and utilities that the staff are currently using in their class programmes are: blogging, wikis, Photostory, digital cameras, Inkscape, The Gimp, Google Earth, Google Sketchup, Mogulus, Movie Maker, video cameras, Voicethread, Podomatic, Bubbleshare, Mindstorms and so on.  There is a good spread and the staff are very positive about their own progress and not a PowerPoint in site! Great news indeed!

We are on a new bearing of 230 degrees and are at full steam ahead!

I have just found and am experimenting with another really cool online tool.  It is an online virtual desktop that has all the utilities that you would expect on your desktop only it is entirely online and therefore accessible from any Internet connected device.  The screen shot above is my online desktop.  It is a place where I can upload files, programmes, images, video and music.  In addition it has its own mail client, its own document writer, a presentation creator, a spreadsheet program and a plethora of other utilities that you can add to customise your desktop.  It has Google and RSS feeds embedded the list goes on. You can change the theme and background and it has a start button type browsing toolbar.

I mentioned a few posts ago that pretty soon we will only need Internet connectivity to access all of our files, this utility is the start of that trend.  Soon the Internet will be THE application to have and all that will matter is the speed with which you can access the Internet.  I am about to see how the desktop looks on my phone and on my PDA.

I can hear some of you saying so what?  If I have a laptop then I am good to go.  Well this is true, but I have so many different accounts and machines and as a facilitator different venues to work at, that I can often find that I only have access to 90% of the resources that I wish to get to.  This utility is providing the start of my quest to create an entirely online presence, the plastic boxes that we sit are rapidly becoming dumb terminals, what goes around comes around.

I am going to test this more over the coming days and weeks and will post my findings.  I will want to test document compatibility, storage capacity and speed of access once files have been uploaded.  From what I have seen so far, it is looking like it will be really worth while uploading and experimenting with this.

You can check out and sign up for your own virtual desktop by clicking here: http://oodesk.com

I had one of the guys from Connector Systems come aboard the Supertanker today to make a site survey for a WiFi project I have had on the back burner ever since I arrived. For those of you who are not quite sure where the Supertanker is, I suggest that you take a look at a little video that I made well over a year ago, called ‘Where in the world is Meadowbank School?‘ To date nearly 9000 people have asked that same question and have used the video to find out.  The most obvious and special part of the school is the stupendous gully that bisects our site and the entire school into two separate sites.  It has been an environmental reclamation scheme over the last 8 years or so and today it is a wonderful resource that the students and teachers use regularly.  A connecting foot bridge spans the gully at canopy level and provides great views into the bush clad gully.  It is a special place indeed.

When I joined the Supertanker I decided then and there that this resource was too special not to share.  I have been slowly inching my way to that goal ever since.  It is my aim to set up wireless access points in the gully so that I can have several cameras set up to stream live content to the web in order that others can benefit from our good fortune.  At the moment I want to set up an ‘eelcam’ in the creek, a ‘fungi cam’ by the rotting logs in addition to that I want to set up feed stations with a camera at each so that students can monitor how and what different native birds eat.  Steve at Connector Systems now knows that we have a large technical issue to solve.  He has gone away scratching his head, to get what we want will not be cheap and will take several iterations to afford and roll out.

Once the infrastructure is in place I will be using a resource called Mogulus to capture and record the streamed video, so that even when we are offline or at night, others in other time zones will be able to see and share our resource. This is all mangaged by the multiple camera facility and the ability to record live streams and build storyboards within Mogulus. Mogulus is a really cool resource that I will be presenting on at Ulearn08, I have just discovered today.

In the meantime we have to rely on static images to share the flora and fauna of our urban Eden.  Currently one of the ornamental cherry trees is in flower and the Tui’s have gone mad over it.  It is not unusual for 10 or  more of these birds to be feasting and squabbling in the same tree.  Take a look at some of the images that I took a couple of weekends ago and imagine what a live feed of the same thing would mean to your class.  All donations to the cause gratefully accepted!

I have been working with my Robotics team for a few weeks now.  I love Lego Mindstorms and am of the opinion that every class should have one box.  They are such a wonderful tool for getting students to think and problem solve. 

The challenge this year that I have set for the students is to get a robot to draw.  The challenges so far have been these.

1. Build a robot by copying a design from the manual ( I have stressed to them that it is not a building exercise but a programming exercise.)
2. Design and build an arm to hold a whiteboard marker
3. Ensure that the arm can be lifted off and be placed back onto the writing surface with the use of a motor
4. Ensure that the robot and pen holding arm can draw a circle (easy programming)
5. Ensure that the robot and pen holding arm can draw a square (harder programming)

Most of the groups this week have hit the programming wall of creating a sequence of moves to make square.  One set have created a lovely pentagon another a triangle.  One group has managed to rip up the paper as the robot writes (they have an additional wheel, that serves no real purpose and they have yet to evaluate that element of their design, as they continually chew through paper they will make that conceptual link!)  One group has just got the to the programming stage and one is still in the design and build stage.  Finally one group has discovered the ‘repeat’ function and has made a square.

Now that they can create arcs, lift and place the pen and draw angled turns, they are now free to program their robots to draw something.  One group is going to make a stick figure, I am really looking forward to that.  I had envisioned a choreographed dance of five robots each with their own pen colour all collaboratively working on one element of an overall drawing.  We will see if the students have the same vision.

One thing is for sure, the 90 minutes ends for teacher and students alike, we do not know where the time has gone and lament that we have to wait another week for the next session.  These students are really motivated to work through these problems.  We celebrate being stuck each week and relish the pit of despair as they have to think and problem solve their way out of the quagmire in order to solve the problem and move on.  As I say every class should have a set at the back of the room.