Why The iPad Is Currently The Best 1:1 Solution

Yesterday I posted an article looking at the teaching and learning features and requirements that IT provision supports in schools.  I concluded that if funding can be made to work (and with creative budgeting it’s not as hard as you’d think) that 1:1 is the ideal model.

So that begs the question: What device?

We’ve looked at this in detail at my school, tested devices, read more reviews and reports than you can imagine. I’ve put together a list of technical and practical requirements that are desirable in the 1:1 device and graded various options against them.

Here’s my side-by-side analysis of the options:

1:1 device comparison

As you can see, in my humble opinion, the iPad wins this race at the moment. Without wanting to spark a ‘fanboy’ induced series of arguments, I’m intrigued by others opinions on this. Have I missed any important criteria? I’ve deliberately not included a higher-spec laptop such as a Macbook Air or Windows Ultrabook. I know some schools around the world use these, but they really aren’t a financial option in the UK state funded sector! 

Do you run a 1:1 program or are you planning one? What device are you thinking of?

This is my Google Teacher Academy application video. For more information on 20% time in my classroom please visit this blog post, our class blog and Adeel’s Rubik’s blog. Fingers crossed, I couldn’t apply last time around as it clashed with my wedding!

BYOD and 1:1 are not the same

Ryan Bretag nails some thoughts I’ve had recently on Bring Your Own Device as an IT provision in schools. It’s nice to have, and common sense in this day and age to allow learners to use their own devices in your classrooms and on your networks. But it’s no replacement or real alternative to running a 1:1 environment.

Source: ryanbretag.com

Desmos For All

I was most impressed with the Desmos Graphing Calculator last year. It’s a powerful and user friendly graphical calculator.

It’s just been re-written from the ground up in HTLM5 which means it will work perfectly on an iPad or other tablet. It’s genuinely impressive and exciting to see what magic coders are starting to weave with HTML5.

Head over to https://www.abettercalculator.com/c on any device to try it out for yourself.

desmos graphing calculator

Source: hackeducation.com

FizzBuzz CodeYear Fun #schoolstech

With todays announcement from Mr Gove it seems a good point to reflect on my first steps on a year long coding journey. I spent my Tuesday evening completing the first week of lessons on the brilliant CodeYear. It took me about an hour and a half and was a great little introduction to Javascript. First week covers defining variables, basic arithmetic, and moves on to if/then/else/while statements.

It’s an interesting learning model, there are hints at each stage and I didn’t find myself stuck on too many occasions. If you teach ICT or Maths then I’d thoroughly recommend you take a look at it. It was quite a challenge and I’ll be interested to see how far students could get without a teacher to help them. If they do get stuck, some good Googling skills would help them find a way forward pretty quickly. It’s not a replacement for a skilled teacher thought, but that’s a conversation for another post!

The final bonus challenge is to write a FizzBuzz program that writes out a set of consecutive numbers, but replaces multiples of 3 with “Fizz” and multiple of 5 with “Buzz” and of course, multiples of both with “FizzBuzz”. It’s a great little challenge that the Maths teacher in me loved!

I’ve been encouraging staff and students at school to join me on this journey so it’ll be interesting to see how many are up for the challenge.

Here’s my final FizzBuzz code in case you’re interested or stuck:

// Ask user how far we should Fizz Buzz for
var Total = prompt("How far shall we fizz buzz?");

// for the numbers 1 through to Total,
for (i=1; i<=Total; i++) { 

  // if the number is divisible by 3, write "Fizz"
  if ( i % 3 === 0 ) { 
    // unless the number is also divisible by 5, then write "FizzBuzz"
    if ( i % 5 === 0 ) {
    console.log("FizzBuzz");
    }
      else 
        console.log("Fizz");
  }

  // if the number is divisible by 5, write "Buzz"
  else if (i % 5 === 0 ){
    console.log("Buzz");
  }

  // otherwise, write just the number
  else {
    console.log(i);
  }
}

Has anyone written this in a neater, purer way? I’d love to see it if you have.

EDIT:

I have to include this, a solution in a tweet by Martyn Colliver:

#BETT2012 In Lists

For the first time in about four years I won’t be visiting BETT this year in London. For the un-initiated BETT is an enormous educational technology trade show / conference held at Olympia in London each January.

Things I’ll miss:

  • Bumping into other educators I know from Twitter etc.
  • Attending some of the fringe events e.g. Teachmeets.
  • Seeing some of our existing partners who we currently source products from.
  • Seeing the personal friends who I stay with when visiting.

Things I won’t miss:

  • Being harassed at every turn by a salesman.
  • Walking round and round and round and round.
  • Queuing to put my coat in.
  • Searching for some phone/wifi signal.
  • Buying over priced snacks.
  • Seeing the latest 3D screen / projector / TV.
  • Seeing the latest amazing developments in the world of Interactive Whiteboards.
  • Seeing the latest and greatest VLE.
  • Seeing the latest….. oh you get the idea!
  • Sleeping on a sofa-bed to save money for school (although see point 4 in the positives).
  • A bag full of useless freebies - seriously I got some 64Mb USB sticks last year - who knew they even made them so small still?!?

Things I’ll do instead:

  • Keep up on anything valuable I’ve missed via Twitter hastags and people’s blogs.
  • Ask companies to come and see me personally at school if we think we want to work with them.
  • Teach my Year 11s on the run up to their exams.
  • Save school a chunk of money.
  • Look to visit some schools that are leading on areas that we are planning to develop.

In this day and age, unless you have a bunch of projects on the go and products to buy then it’s hard to justify attending BETT. I’m speaking from the viewpoint of a teacher / school leaders / IT coordinator here, I know if you’re working in the industry it’s useful to have everyone under one roof. But as educators, in this day and age, you should be able to see and hear all about the latest and greatest tools for learning online as and when they appear on the market. And you should be able to hear this from real teachers who are really using the products with real children - that beats sales patter any day of the year!

Will you be attending BETT? What do you hope to get out of the show?

Youtube For Schools? Solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

So Google have released Youtube For Schools? http://www.youtube.com/schools. This gives access to all the videos on Youtube Edu, and also others curated by your teachers, specific to your school Google Apps account.

Well that’s lovely. But really. Isn’t it time your school just used the other Youtube For Schools over at http://youtube.com? We’ve been using it freely for years. Nobody has to curate lists in advance. Spur of the moment learning moments can happen all the time. And do you know what? The World keeps turning. Students learn to manage their own Internet browsing. They learn that Youtube comments are something you just ignore. Sometimes they listen to music when they’re working. Life goes on. 

Stop solving problems that don’t exist. Start teaching our young people how to manage their lives online by allowing them to use the tools as they really are.

Source: youtube.com

Arrington invests in Code Academy

I spotted the excellent Code Academy a few weeks ago. And it looks like I wasn’t alone. It’s received a huge round of funding including from Michael Arrington:

What really excites me about Codecademy is that you can learn almost anything this way.

All I can think of is how if this was around when I was in college I may have actually learned calculus this way. I got a B in that class but I can clearly remember at the time being completely lost, and anything I did learn is now permanently wiped from my brain.

It’s an interesting take on this form of learning and it looks like Code Academy is going to follow in the footsteps of Khan Academy et al in promoting learner led online instruction.

I think much like Khan Academy, this certainly has a place and is a fantastic resource for people to teach themselves some key concepts and basics until they’d inevitably be better off with a real teacher helping you out, setting challenges and interacting with other learners.  It’ll be interesting to see what comes from the ability for users to create their own Code Academy lessons.

What do you think?

Programming Principles

I like these analogies and principles for programming basics, nice talking points for teachers using Code Academy as a starting point for teaching programming.

Facebook: Hard-Hitting Safety & Privacy Assembly

I’ve been giving an assembly to every House in our school this week, with a focus on Safety & Privacy in Facebook. It’s gone down incredibly well with staff and more importantly students, so I figured it worth sharing. I’ve hit on some top tips to get pupils to listen on a subject that it’s oh so easy to patronise upon.

Let them use it

This began with a lesson with my Year 8 ICT class. We talked around how the pupils assessed a friend before they accepted a request, and about how they decided what to share and with who. We looked at how you changed your privacy settings. And then I let them onto Facebook. Being the man in charge of the filter helps here, instant engagement and proper discussions with pupils about their friends followed as we could actually explore there Facebook.

A disturbing discovery

Whilst discussing whether some of the boys actually knew their hundreds of friends we came across this young lady.

She’d added pretty much every pupil in our school and hundreds of them had added her back. All with an account that only opened in July, and with a sob story about being a former pupils from 2009 who didn’t attend much due to family problems. I’d never heard of her though. And some digging showed she had never attended our school. Disturbing, but a great discussion point about how to block and report someone, and gold dust for an assembly. 4 out of 5 assemblies in and nobody has actually met this ‘young lady’.

Invade their ‘privacy’

I spent my Friday evening snooping in our pupil’s Facebook profiles. Many were left wide open and many had hundreds if not thousands of friends. I wanted to point out not just the dangers of people not being who they claimed to be, but also the idea of a digital footprint. 30 minutes going through your pupil’s profiles is more than enough to find some examples of them publicly embarrassing themselves in some way. I settled on some family photos of a popular pupil and another trying to be-friend a well know local gang.

Expose their ‘privacy’

The edited version of my assembly presentation is below. The dodgy profile that many of them were friends with was a great talking point, and shocked them into just how much a teacher can nosey at in their spare time has been a real eye-opener. I’ve had pupils coming up to me in the corridor all week telling me they didn’t realise what I could see. One accused me of invading their privacy, I simply replied that was entirely my point!

Make them think about their futures

After showing how easy it is to spy on them, they were hooked for the important messages about managing your digital footprint and the idea of potential employers, colleges & universities Googling them one day soon.

Share something back

I finished with an image of my own Facebook profile, with the new timeline enabled, and a discussion of Facebook’s desire to get them to share more and more in the future.

Top tip is to get stuck in there, generic warnings and shock stated videos like those from CEOP just don’t seem to have an impact. Exposing privacy issues of young people in front of their peers does.

Facebook assembly edit