I wasn’t too keen on the RM Notebook 320 – mainly
because it didn’t have a touch screen and Windows 8 needs a touchscreen. But I
did like the Asus W510 and I gave it a pretty robust test over the Christmas
holidays when I was away in the Alps.
Shape the Future is now in Edinburgh and
Glasgow and I’m hopeful that other Local Authorities might start to follow
their examples as it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
"Shape the Future is an innovative, simple and cost effective way to get all students using 1:1 devices at home and in the classroom. The affordability of this device and software package is supported by Microsoft's global digital inclusion programme, in collaboration with RM Education and Intel. Exclusively available from RM Education, this has been specifically designed to help you provide a great value 1:1 device programme for all students and their teachers."
This
is part of a series of posts that document some of my personal thoughts on some
of the myths surrounding 1:1 learning(one device per learner)and 1:1 deployments in schools and
school systems.
--------------------------------------
Myth 3 – 1:1 Computing Improves Standards
Nonsense! Only good learning and teaching improves standards.
A poor teacher
with great technology will still not deliver the results that our children
deserve.
However, I truly believe that a good or excellent teacher, who is
committed to professional learning and who is supported by great technology has
the potential to transform lives. It is also important
to remember that technology is only part of any model for educational
transformation.
Now, there are lots of models of educational
transformation available, they are all high level and they are all useful up to
a point. Lets take the Intel model of
education transformation as an example – as this is the one that I have
been working with the most recently.
In this model for
transformation to occur a number of things need to exist in equal parts.
First you need
good policy (at national, local and school level) this is the bit that gives
teachers and school leaders permission to transform education. A key failing of
most education policy is that people don’t actually understand the policy or
have time to read them. Good education policy must contain specific objectives
as well as higher level strategic advice. In short, people need to know which
way they are aiming!
Good policy also
gives permission to develop the curriculum
and assessment methodology. Again the two must match up. You can’t have
high level policy that talks about preparing children for life in the 3rd
millennium and then develop a curriculum that re-invents something from the
past and its only way of verifying children’s learning is by a hand written
assessment when they are about to leave school – this just does not make sense.
Policy,
curriculum and new assessment methodology must be based on sound academic and
action research. But it must also be
based on local need.
Evaluation must
be on-going at a system, state and local level. Most of this type of resource
should be put into evaluation at a local level – rather than a state or system
level that it is at the moment. While comparing one country to another country
through standard measures such as PISA
might be important to politicians – what
is actually going on in the classroom must remain the most important thing.
Technology integration should be seen at a number of levels but
also people need to understand it can fulfill a variety of purposes. The
following purposes are not inclusive but people need to understand that
technology has a number of roles in educational transformation.
Firstly, the use
of technology as a pedagogical methodology to support teaching and learning
across the curriculum. Good technology integration is not just about up-grading
computing labs. See my work on Exciting
Learning.
Secondly, the use
of technology to track learning, report to parents, improve the productivity
& running of a school and to share data with others. Working at a
conference with Michal Fullan recently
I heard him say he thinks that school improvement can be sped up by at least
20% through good technology integration. I think he is right.
Thirdly, the use
of technology to deliver appropriate rich digital content to learners. This
content, where possible, should support local curriculum and national
standards. Modern IT delivery systems should allow for personalization, guided
learning and structured courses – all of which are appropriate at different
times of a learners journey.
Fourthly, the use
of technology to support assessment and evaluation (see above). Unfortunately, many technology solutions only cater
for summative assessment. BUT, good technology integration can also be
incredibly powerful in supporting formative assessment as well.
Lastly, the use
of technology to support teacher professional development.
Teacher Professional Development (or Professional Learning) is another
important aspect of educational transformation. In some systems technology
integration (particularly around 1:1)
have not been as successful as they could have been because of a lack of
training for teachers (Thailand
for example). Where others systems, such as Macedonia,
built in robust training programs from the start.
It is also
important to remember that professional learning doesn’t have to be
face-to-face. Good professional
development like any good learning needs to be blended and should include a
combination of face-to-face, online, large group and personalized learning
experiences. It is also important to remember that learning and teaching
looks very different in a 1:1 environment than a traditional classroom
environment. Educators need early support here to stop the technology becoming
a distraction to rather than an improvement to learning.
In short, before
any major investment in technology you need to be absolutely sure what it is
you are trying to do. If your aim is to
raise standards – what standards are
you trying to raise and why? If improved use of technology the best way to
do this do you have the policy, research, curriculum, assessment methodology
and professional development in place to reach your objectives. If not your project is likely to fail.
I was really interested to read about the latest Google Map Android developments last week. Basically they have made it very easy to create indoor maps within Google Maps. You simply up-load your floor plan and then locate the floor plan within the Google Maps Satellite imagery.
It is surprising easy to do as long as you have a good floor plan! I’m sure it won’t be long until you can also add directions within this feature. That of course leads to all sorts of possibilities to help search for things around buildings and to help you get to places within large open spaces. This of course includes schools and learning spaces.
Possibilities include:
Mapping the inside of your school - scope for transition activities, new students or visitors to the school (eg: to attend sport fixture)
Parents night app - to help parents find there way around
Your school timetable as a map (linked to the calendar functionality and other features of your device)
More about indoor maps in this YouTube Video below or visit the Google Floor Plans Page:
Now if your really interested in what can be done with Maps then you need to make sure that you watch this 8min TED Talk (February 2010) from Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Microsoft augmented-reality maps. The second half still blows my mind!
Here is a nice little video from Stocktown Productions titled Mobile Technology 2011. The version of the video embedded below is the ‘clean version’ there is another version with a few swear words in it.
The statistics mentioned in the video are:
Since 2008 mobile data traffic has ballooned by 3000% - It is expected to grown 40 fold in the next 5 years.
90% of the worlds population has access to a mobile network.
2/3 of Americans get news on a mobile.
Reading from the mobile web is now more popular than reading books + magazines + newspapers.
Say goodbye to digital cameras and video cameras. 76% of pictures are taken on mobile phones.
Over 100 million YouTube Videos are played on mobile devices every day.
A mobile phone isn’t just used to make phone calls.
In just two years mobile ready sites have grown from 150, 000 to 3 million - that’s 2000%.
10.9 billion Apps downloaded in 2010. Estimated to grow to 76.9 billion in 2014.
Consumers spent $6.2 on apps last year this is predicted to rise to $35 billion by 2014.
In 2013 more people will use phones than PC to surf the web.
By 2014 over half a billion people will use mobile money transfer services.
Mobile Add revenue hit $3.5 billion in 2010 and it is estimated to hit $24 billion by 2015.
(just wish the video contained a link back to the sources of the statistics?)
p> This is part of a series of posts showcasing some interesting infographics that are available on the web. For more information on infographics have a look here and for some of the problems with using infographics graphics have a look here.
Today's infographic compares two Android phones to the iPhone Four (source):
p> This is part of a series of posts showcasing some interesting infographics that are available on the web. For more information on infographics have a look here and for some of the problems with using infographics graphics have a look here.
Today's infographic is on what happens if you loose your mobile phone. A nice little infographic resource from McAfee useful for Internet Safety and Responsible Use Lessons - what do you think?
This is part of a series of posts showcasing some interesting infographics that are available on the web. For more information on infographics have a look here and for some of the problems with using infographics graphics have a look here.
Today I've posted two infographics both looking at QR Codes. I've been playing with QR Codes since 2008 (which even made an entry in the 2009 Horizon Report!). Anyway, the first infographic looks at what are QR Codes (source) and the second (keep scolling down!) looks at who is really scanning all those QR codes (source).
UK youth communications company Dubit has completed a country wide survey on teenage QR Code awareness. 72% of 11-18 year olds did not have or were unaware of QR Code scanning apps. When shown an image of a QR code only 43% correctly identified that it could be read by a mobile phone while 19% admitted they didn’t know what it was. 33% of those questioned correctly identified the image as a QR code, with 22% believing it was called an RFID tag and 12% labeling it as an infograph. Of the 19% of teens that had scanned QR Codes 74% said it was worth doing so.
This is a fourth of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinions and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.
Augmented reality (or at least my understanding of it) is a way that we can lay virtual data or images on top of real images. It has been around for years but again has only recently become more robust and cost effective. I mentioned augmented reality recently in a post about how such technology may allow relatively unskilled people to easily do the jobs of people who currently need to be skilled.
Have a look at the BMW Research Concept Video (YouTube Video below) to see what I mean:
I think that this type of technology may be particularly appealing for some industries as it could be more cost effective but also safer and less of a risk for employees.
We are still a little way off Augmented Reality glasses – this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist (they do!) they are just a little bit expensive at the moment and normally have to be plugged into a computer to work robustly.
However many people have an augmented reality viewer already in their pocket – their mobile phone (a recurring theme of this mini series!).
Modem smart phones know exactly where they are because they have GPS in them. They know which way they are facing because they have an accelerometer and / or digital compass in them. They also have a camera and large viewing screen so you can easily see the world though them. Finally, as long as you have a 3G signal most modern smart phones are constantly connected to the Internet – making them very powerful mini computers.
There are already lots of augmented reality / layer apps available for the iPhone and for the android platform. The new Android commercial shows some of the possibilities of this technology (YouTube clip below).
The potential is huge. Imagine walking down the high street and you are looking for somewhere to eat, you walk past a restaurant, hold up your phone to the restaurant and the latest customer reviews appear around it. Or, you go on a history field trip to a famous battle field and by holding up your phone you can actually see a re-enactment of the battle take place. Or, what about if you visited and extinct volcano (such as Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh) and you hold up your phone to see the geological information about the volcano or even what it might have looked at millions of years ago.
The potential for augmented reality in gaming is also huge. As part of out work at Learning and Teaching Scotland we have already put Sony Eye Pets for the Play Station 3 into a number of Early Years establishments(more about this in a separate post) and also have Invizimals and second sight for the PSP ready to go out to some partner schools early next session. The interesting thing about all of these games is that they use the ‘real world’ as the backdrop for immersive game play.
I’m convinced that these ‘real world’ augmented games will be the big thing of 2011 – 2012 and devices like the Parrot AR Helicopter will add to this new phase of game play. The Parrot helicopter is a hover helicopter with two cameras on it so that you can see what the helicopter sees. The amazing thing about the Parrot helicopter is that you control it over WiFi with your iPhone (and probably other devices as well).
All of these applications are interesting but the real point of my post is to think about what will happen when you combine augmented reality technology with facial recognition software.
Facial recognition software has been around for years and just like all technologies its got better and cheaper over the last few years as computing power has increased. If you’re a mac user facial recognition has been built into the last few versions of iPhone (that ships with all apple computers).
Google image search also now includes an option to search for just faces and Google Picassa allows you to do the same thing with your own photos that you have up-loaded.
In fact Google has had a real interest in facial recognition for years – this is one of the reasons why they bought Neven Vision back in 2006.
Now lets take all the parts and add them together to think about what will be possible in the not to distant future.
There are lots of people globally up-load pictures of themselves to the Internet, these pictures are often associated and tagged with the persons first and last name.
There are also a number of websites that allow web users to aggregate all of their social content to one place (Google Profile and Facebook are both good examples of this).
There are already websites that can build a profile of you from an email address, depending on what you have published about yourself on-line. If you don’t believe me check out spokeo – it scares me!
Also, in the UK (and probably other parts of the world as well) unless you are ex-directory (which we recommend all teachers are) then your address and phone number (including your mobile phone number) are all stored online.
What is my point? Well, very soon you will be able to run an App on your phone , hold it up to a group of people in a room and facial recognition software will be able to recognize their face (cross checked against images that they have on-line) and augmented around the face on the phone screen will be links to the persons likely on-line presence. This will probably include things like Facebook profile, Slideshare account, Flickr page, newspaper reports, LinkedIN profile etc…
The data displayed might also include links to their home address and / or phone number. The App will be able to make educated guesses about some of these things because it will know where it is (eg: its geo-sensitive). For example, just because there are tens of ‘Ollie Bray’s’ living in the UK there is only one (to my knowledge) living in the Edinburgh / Lothian region of Scotland.
Now here is the really interesting thing, this fictitious App that I am describing relies on their being a picture of you on the Internet and then linking data to other on-line sources. When I describe this to people the first reaction I often get is, ‘thank goodness there are no pictures of me on-line’. Of course, these reactions are normally from people who don’t actually have a clue if they have pictures of themselves on-line or not. What they mean is that they haven’t put any pictures of themselves on-line but that doesn’t mean that other people haven’t. You see privacy doesn’t really exist anymore (I’ll come back to this in a separate post).
Of course all of this is fictitious at the moment, but all of the peaces are in place so it won’t be long (I think 12 – 24 months maybe less?). In fact MIT already have a working prototype.
So what does this mean for schools and education? A few things I think.
First of all, more than ever, we need to make sure that we educate our children and young people about what they put on-line. This has to include very young children (I’m talking from 3-11 year olds) and most importantly the teachers that care for them. For far to long we have concentrated our efforts surrounding the Internet safety and responsible use agenda on children that are already too old to really have any worthwhile impact. In short, rightly or wrongly we have been far to reactive and now with the technologies like I have described above just around the corner we need to be far more pro-active to ensure our children remain safe and secure.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think we can stop the above. In fact I think there will be a whole generation of Young People who tick the box (or just ignore the box) on their social networking profile and volunteer their data to be given away in the in the way I have described above.
What ever we do we need to make sure that we raise awareness for both children and education professionals.
This is a second of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinion and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.
The second technology that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is voice to text software for mobile devices. I first talked about this in my Learning and Teaching Scotland Literacy Co-coordinators keynote presentation in February 2010. Let me explain my thinking.
If we consider the history of human communication it probably evolved something like this:
We learned to communicate verbally
We developed written language
We developed electronic communication (with a keyboard)
We developed smaller more ubiquitous forms of electronic communication with mobile (keyboard input changed)
And now we are in a situation where mobile devices (computers) can be controlled by voice
Of course, technology manufacturers have been working on software that allows you to speak into a computer and then it turns your voice into text for years. I first started using it properly when I had my first Windows tablet PC back in 2005. I wrote a set of school reports by speaking into the software rather than typing them by hand. It took a long time because the software wasn’t particularly robust at the time – but in the end I eventually achieved my goal.
Speech to text software is not new to education it have been used in special educational needs for many years. The problem in the past with a lot of this software is that it is not always particularly reliable and it can also be very expensive. But like any technology it gets cheaper and more reliable over time.
Now, here is the interesting thing. Android powered mobile phones have voice to text recognition software already built in – this was first live demoed with the Nexus One mobile phone handset. Have a look at the video showing voice input for Android in action below:
Also, Android Powered Mobile phones outsold the iPhone OS in the US during the first quarter of 2010. One of the reasons for this is probably because Android phones are cheaper and they compare very well to the iPhone in terms of performance and functionality.
I am quite sure that we will see a wide new range of Android mobile phones available for Christmas 2010 and all of them will have the built in voice input to text recognition.
So what does this mean? Well, I’m not sure. But I know that very soon whether it is an android powered phone, an iPhone or a Windows phone most smart phones will have the capacity to translate the spoken word to text with a high degree of accuracy (in fact they can already do this).
If we accept that most mobile devices will be smart phones in the not to distant future and we also accept that most young people in Europe, North America, Australia, parts of Asia and a lots of other places in the world have mobile phones. Then we must also accept that it won’t be long until young people realize that they only have to speak into their devices to get them to write for them.
What’s my point – well if you’re a teacher and you currently struggle to get the children in your care to write with a pen or a pencil. Then it is going to be even harder post Christmas 2010 when lots more children have devices like I have described above and will be even less motivated to write with a pen or a pencil.
Technology like 'voice input' adds to the debate of why we get children to write with a pen or pencil in the first place. One of the reasons that we do in the United Kingdom, whether we like it or not, is because that is how we test children at the end of high school. They sit down and do written exams – but why else do we teach the process of writing with a pen or pencil and is this still as important as it once was?
What seems clear to me is that never before in the history of communication during the last 100 years has it been even more important than ever to make sure children have a real grasp of the spoken language. This is one of the reasons why I am delighted that our radical new curriculum in Scotland includes the spoken word as a type of ‘text’. Thank goodness it does as it is the only way, that I can think of, to really future proof language.
As with all of the posts in this series, I could be wrong about the above. I don’t know what the answer is and I don't think we can stop or should even want to stop this evolution in technology. But I do think we should, as educators, be thinking about how technology such as voice to text smart phones may impact on teaching and learning (in both a positive and negative way).
I think this will be a significant paradigm shift in the way children engage with text and we are within 12 months of the tipping point for secondary / high school students and maybe 24 – 36 months away from the tipping point for elementary / primary school children. Teachers and leaders in schools need to be ready embrace change and not
be reactive to it or fight it (you will loose). Soon most children will have one of
these devices and we can't stop it. Things are about to move very quickly, are you, your school and your authority ready?
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