Tek4L

In Derek’s recent post about the launch of the Nelson Loop he wonders about the danger of under-estimating the ongoing costs of sustaining such networks. The problems he outlines don’t just apply to the introduction of high speed loops, but to the sustainability of IT infrastructure in schools in general, particularly at the primary school level.

I was talking to a principal from one of our local schools recently about this, who had three very profitable years in an ICT cluster and now has some decent network infrastructure in place, good ratio of laptops to teachers/pupils, etc. but is struggling to employ technical support in order to maintain it, both due to a lack of funds and a lack of availability of technical staff - who at present are in high demand in the commercial sector.

There would be no point adding a connection to a high speed loop on top of this without building in the ongoing technical support.

I think there are some solutions, and the cluster concept is one of them, with pooled technical resources serving a number of schools in a district. I know some schools already do this, but perhaps it is time for some sort of centrally planned/funded model. I think the introduction of high speed loops also needs to be seen as an opportunity to rationalise some of the basic application infrastructure. There is so much duplication of effort around such simple things as setting up and maintaining school websites. This sort of thing could be easily pulled back into a single central server.

As always though money is the big question - but perhaps if the Ministry drops MS Office licenses for PCs like they have done for Macs already they might at least have a bit of a seed fund to get things going

LeMill have just released a new version. If you haven’t seen it already it is worth a look. They have taken the learning object repository idea to the next level as they provide for not only content, but also methods, tools and people. This means that theoretically in one place you could find some content on basic programming skills, some methods on how to use groupwork to teach programming skills, some links to free programming tools, as well as links to other people that teach programming.
You can sign up and start adding your own content via online content creation tools, and any of the content resources you create or find can be downloaded in SCORM format.

The next feature that would be really nice to see in LeMill would be the ability to upload SCORM objects that you may have created in an offline editor like eXe.

Great to see version 1.0 of eXe available. It is an open source learning object editor. I have been keeping a close eye on this project since its inception as part of the New Zealand governments eCDF project funding. I used it in early beta mode for an online paper I teach “Web sites for teaching and learning”, which didn’t prove entirely successful due to some minor bugs - but these seem to be all ironed out in version 1. Congrats to all the people involved in this project.

It has been around for a while, but if you haven’t seen it already, and have young learners interested in computers then Scratch is a must have. It is a visual programming environment specifically designed to introduce children to programming concepts, and the people at MIT have done a fantastic job in my view.

As they say, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”, and so I introduced Scratch to my 10 and 12 year old sons a couple of weeks ago and they have taken to it like ducks to water. With very little prompting from me they have picked up the basic concepts of variables, loops, etc.

I see now they also have a ‘Scratch board’ available that plugs into a USB port and enables you to add external inputs to your program - guess what will be high on the birthday present list if the boys see that!

In my view anybody teaching primary school maths at the 10-12 year old level should look seriously at introducing Scratch to help with teaching concepts of algebra, etc. As is stated in the Scratch info

“They also gain an understanding of important mathematical concepts such as coordinates, variables, and random numbers. Significantly, students learn these concepts in a meaningful and motivating context. When students learn about variables in traditional algebra classes, they usually feel little personal connection to the concept. But when they learn about variables in the context of Scratch, they can use variables immediately in very meaningful ways: to control the speed of
an animation, or to keep track of the score in a game they are creating.”

“Well done” to the folks at MIT that have developed this and made it available.