Turning the Supertanker

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.

I was on the phone today to the guys at Novell, letting them know of our open source plans, they were very keen to hear more and we discussed options for “…getting the word on the streets.” We are pushing ahead. After I put the phone down I ordered 22 HP small form factor workstations. 5 of these will go into our new library and will represent the first of our true open source machines in school. Our library software AccessIT is based on an open source database and so the OPAC machines will be swapped over to the new system one at at a time and then the two issues machines will follow. The remaining machines are all destined for our ICT suite and will be dual booted in the first instance. However on the Windows partition I will load up all the open source windows variants that will be on the other Linux partition.

I am hoping to actually link Open Office Writer to the MS word icon and see if anyone notices the difference! I will simply package the new software as the latest update and see who squeals. I suspect that not many will. The biggest issue will be the actual swap from a Windows interface to the SUSE desktop environment and getting these Windows users to stop thinking like a Windows user to get things to work.

Today we got our first server built with SUSE server 10, early days yet and it has no function on the domain other than to be a Linux machine! We have also dual booted another couple of legacy laptops without any bother. We would have done one of the AP’s machines, but she was out on a course. She will be our first advocate in the field to run with our dual boot platforms.

Today has also been good for other reasons to. I have been hatching a plan to share our wonderful gully online for a while now. You can see it from Google Earth and in this video I made last year to let the students at Woodford know where we are in the world. It is my intention and has been for a long time to get a wireless gimbaled web cam set up at a bird feeding station somewhere in the gully so that we can share our wonderful resource online. I will stream live to the web and record the feed of Tuis feeding or whatever aspect we decide to record. The live stuff will be played via Mogulus and the recorded stuff will be played while we are offline and asleep, again via Mogulus so that the Northern hemisphere and other time zones can share in our bounty. Today I hope to have convinced one of the teachers on the supertanker to design a G+T course to create feed stations to attract the birds to the camera and in addition to investigate the potential to create a solar panel array to keep the camera charged all the times without the need for cables everywhere.

Finally today marked the start of this year’s robotics challenge. The students are excited and I am raring to go. This years challenge is designed to be a display at the art exhibition at the end of term three. The students have to build a standard NXT out of the box robot and then design an arm that can carry a whiteboard marker pen. The pen has to be able to be lifted and dropped so that they can control where the pen makes contact with the drawing surface. They will then have to write a program or programmes that create art, watch this space as I upload videos of their progress. Thursday afternoons have never been such fun, that is since the robotics programme on Friday mornings last year!

image ref: http://www.ssmaritime.com/ss.oriana-telegraph.jpg

Term two is starting the way that I had wanted term 1 to begin. I have finally got the timetable that I want so that I can now work closely with the digital classrooms. I spent yesterday in 6 of the ten classes and will get to the other four later this week. What we will be doing in these classes with regard to ICT is really exciting and indicates a further shift in heading on the Supertanker, long may that continue. The term is panning out like this:

Several classes are investigating the potential of Voicethread, one in particular is investigating it as an assessment and feedback tool for teacher and student alike, this looks particularly interesting as what we have planned seems to really be smart way of using an ICT tool to enhance the conditions of learning. One of the classes is using Voicethread, a wiki, a blog and Inkscape to work collaboratively with the students at Woodford Junior school in the UK.

Our Podcast radio station will be relaunched this week, one class has taken on the challenge of being the station managers, researchers, anchors, reporters and show producers. We have set the challenge to produce a five minute show every week… the first production meeting is this Friday.

Another class is still working on its TV studio and is doing a visual version of the radio station. Yet another class is working on creating podcasts to embed into an enviornmental blog. The list just goes on and I have yet to get to all of the classes. Wikis are proliferating, the digital cameras are being booked out more regularly and earlier in the term, the video cameras have already got a regular block booking for Thursday mornings.

I shall be starting, at long last, my lunchtime activities and like last year I will be running Game Maker sessions on Tuesdays and on Mondays there will be lessons in Inkscape. On Thursdays I will be running a photography class and we shall be entering a competition. Finally there will be my robotics programme on Thursday afternoons.

So a full on term. Watch this space for developments and sharing of what has been produced. It will be a challenge, it will be exhausting some weeks, but setting high standards means that we make great leaps forward all the time. Never settling for second best, brings out the best in all of us, students and teachers alike. All this innovation and interest in all things ICT is a very positive indicator of changing attitudes towards integration and has a lot to do with the Cluster momentum that is gathering. Long may this be maintained and built upon.

The following are the three core focus questions from the Sustained Maungarei Kaitiakitanga cluster, of which the Supertanker is the lead school and I am one of the facilitators of.

Three Key Cluster Questions:

If we are “To give the leaders of tomorrow the knowledge they need to operate in a world rapidly running out of resources and facing the challenges of climate change.” MoE SOI 2007 what learning experiences should we include?

What are the conditions of value in teaching and learning that will support these learning experiences?

How might ICTs enhance or betray these conditions of value?

The second and third ones are the ones that have been rolling around in my head for the last couple of days with regard to using You Tube tutorials as a teaching and learning resource in the classroom.

Over the last few weeks I have been really surprised at the feedback that my own video tutorials posted to You Tube have been getting. This feedback has had the effect of making me re-consider the skill levels that exist out there in cyberspace. You Tube seems to come with such a ‘youf’ tag to it that I assumed that my little videos would not excite any comment from the wider You Tube community. Yet You Tube users, who by my own default perceptions I have assumed to be a savvy bunch of IT users have really liked my tutorials on Excel and Publisher. And this is what got me thinking, after all how many of my intended target audience for the videos I embed into our cluster wiki have heard of or even use You Tube?

These apps, MS Office suite et al, that have been around since Adam was a boy and I have considered it a given that all computer users have a basic proficiency in using them. After all word processing, Spread sheets and desktop publishing in varying guises have been around since before Windows 95 and the general public’s knowledge of and mass access to, the Internet. I therefore have assumed that everyone knows how to use these applicatons, including the You Tubers, because we have all used them for years, long before the advent of the mashable world of web 2.0… Clearly not.

I cut my teeth on these apps with Aston Tate’s MultiMate back in the mid 80’s. I was, I recall, trying to create a searchable database for my huge library of photographic images so that I could set up a photolibrary, the software was not up to it and my programmer friends could not see the possibility and now we have flickr… The roll of the dice eh? I could make an excellent database for recipies I recall, of no use to anyone considering the size of the machine the database was stored on and where the machine was located! I digress.

So it seems that the You Tube community have a use for my videos. I produced them with teachers in mind, but could a video tutorial or a resource video of ideas stored on You Tube or Teacher Tube enhance the conditions of learning in the classroom? After my personal use of the Blender tutorials, my initial reaction is yes. (Providing of course that schools permit access to this valuable resource and Keep Tube is a great way to manage access if they don’t but heavy on teacher time to download and store for easy access by students.)

Whilst I was on my Blender training rampage, I watched several videos over and over again to get the key strokes and the buttons being pressed just right, it was repeatable and that has always been my intention with the training resources that I have created for a number of years, a repeatable teaching moment indepedent of the teacher. A lesson is a once off. But if you record it in someway and providing the lesson is relevant and well paced then it can be re-visited many times over to re-enforce points or to support learning of a new concept, especially with regard to the acquisition of IT skills. So a recorded lesson with voice and action clearly visible to students, that can be paused, re-wound and re-played in class and without the need for teacher input, would enable the teacher to work with other students, whilst at the same time knowing that the students on the computers had the relevant support right there for them too.

Once a student has learnt the IT skills that support the true learning intention of the teacher, then the IT becomes transparent and a tool that facilitates learning and not act as a potential impediment. This for me is the Holy Grail of using IT in teaching, liberation for student and teacher alike and fostering independent learning. I believe that training videos in the 10 minute format of You Tube will be one of the ways that we can enable this to happen.

In term two I am taking a G+T class for robotics I will be applying the You Tube learning principle in these lessons. For those of you who are intereseted the students will have to build a robot, they can copy the examples from the Lego booklet if they wish (I would prefer that as it gets the building out of the way really quickly.) The real challenge, the real learning, the problem solving is for them to program their robot to draw an image using three colours… You Tube might just come in very handy for them. One thing is for sure I will video their results and post them to You Tube. Watch this space.