I just read this on the Teacher’s TV website. Seems like a good idea, the only problem being that our lunch times simply aren’t long enough.
I run a lunchtime Teachers TV club. A group of staff gets together every Tuesday to watch and discuss a Teachers TV programme. Staff get a lot out of the programmes. I benefit too because I can use the meetings as evidence when I go for HLTA status.
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Posted by richard
If we could teach kids to keep their schools free of litter we would solve global warming in a generation.
Global warming seems to be such an insolvable problem but getting a group of children to keep their school free of litter seems to be, albeit not easy, at least possible if we paid it enough attention.
But in fact a solution to litter in schools would need to involve all members of the community, it would need activists and belief, compassion and non aggression, making of rules and policing them sensitively, collaboration at a local, national and international level. All these characteristics are essential components of a solution to global warming.
Try solving the simple problems first. By empowering our communities to do something possible, we might just be able to tackle something that at the moment seems impossible.
image: creative commons licence – http://flickr.com/photos/mbrownstone/2043006071/
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Posted by richard
I got Asus EeePC to play with today from School. There is talk of giving them to Y7s, hopefully one each rather than shared machines. As Papert always said something magical happens when you go from shared machines (any ratio) to one-to-one (see here – listen here).
The machine is cute, and really handy to carry around. It seemed quite rugged but the space bar was already lifting off, and thats before the kids have touched it. However get messenger open and start surfing on wifi and I was hooked. I’m sure that the kids will love them, if not for the sheer portability, for the fact that it will be THEIR machine.
Power Struggle
Battery life is supposed to be 3 hours and I think that seems realistic based on one evenings use. Charging seemed to take a long time though. 2 Hours plugged in only took it up to 60%.
One little stated fact of Apple Macs laptops is that the power consumption is so good (cooler, quieter & better sleeping) compared to PC laptops. With no hard drive and a small screen the Asus unit does last longer than an average PC laptop but its Celeron Chip and fan is noiser and pumps out more hot air than the MacBook than I am used to.
So classrooms would need to have ample power sockets. And that will mean all classrooms that Y7 use and then next year all that Y7 and Y8 use, etc.
The screen is small but useable for surfing, the resolution is an odd size 800 x 480 and the lack of vertical height (the 480) could pose problems for some menus eg. on the GIMP (Photoshop replacement software), but who would want to edit photos on such a small screen anyway?
There is a VGA Monitor out, so a normal monitor could be plugged in. But I would rather give the child the extra power of a desktop machine too if the extra screen size were necessary for the task.
Not a Desktop Replacement
This brings us on to teaching ICT. I wouldn’t want to teach my lessons with children on this machine. This is because of performance and screen size. The processor is supossedly 900Mhz but is not being fully used according to wikipedia. The machine feels much slower than 900 Mhz machines that I have used with the same amount of RAM – 512 MB.
Thus there will be issues of Children doing work at home or in other classes on Linux or Open Office and needing to transfer between the schools windows machines, either by memory stick or via a portal – not insurmountable but will need to be thought through. That said, I am a believer in children learning different operating systems and programs, it teaches ICT capability and flexibility which are vital skills.
This model has just 2GB of flash memory, which sounds small, but even with Linux loaded leaves magnitudes more than the 15MB that the kids are allowed on the school network. 3 usb ports for memory sticks etc. is generous.
Get Creative
There is a built in mic and camera on some models (not this one unfortuneately). I think a camera would be highly recommended from the purpose of creating videos and the unit could be taken outside and used for filming quite easily if it’s not raining.
To summarize I love the idea of kids using machines like these for cross curricular ICT, but poor performance, battery life and screen size means that certain lessons will need desktop PCs.
Just carrying the machine around school and showing it to kids and staff showed there is a great deal of enthusiasm for the machine. And this seems to be reflected in the shops: they are selling like hot cakes.
However, it might be an idea to check out the original One-Laptop-Per-Child OLPC laptop that the ASUS is trying to emulate; and actually beat to market. Note the ASUS machine is much less ambitious in what it is trying to achieve.
Windows on Eee PC?
There will be Windows XP versions of this machine coming out, but I don’t like the idea of this for 2 reasons. One, why increase the price of the machine by 50% for XP and office when Linux and Open Office will do the job. Two, All the software they put on the Windows machines to lock them down will slow the Eee PC down to a crawl.
2 Comments | Education | Tagged: olpc, y7 | Permalink
Posted by richard
Today is BBC News Day. Kids all over the country have been producing reports for TV radio and websites. I hadn’t heard about this before and I’ve registered to be involved next year. Thanks to Deepak (pictured), our trainee from last term for letting me know. He has been involved with Patcham High in Brighton, his new placement school.
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Posted by richard
I haven’t programmed in php (or anything for that matter) for 3 years. So when I tried to get some of my old code working recently its been very frustrating. I had to rebuild it all from scratch.
All my data entry forms validate themselves with if statements that decide whether the form is asking for or receving data. It turns out that you can’t write if(submit) anymore you have to write if($_POST["submit"]).
Plus the use of “” and ‘ ‘ in SQL statements has changed. I haven’t managed to workout exactly how – I just did it by trial and error (bashing my head against a wall method). No wonder WordPress keeps breaking.
Any way I needed to get my programming head on again. Its good to succeed in a task, even though it took a day instead of an hour.
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Posted by richard
We had training (non contact time) today to brainstorm what to do with the new changes in the National Curriculum. I enjoyed it.
Over the summer of 2006 having finished my training, I had time to explore lots of educational podcasts and blogs. Amongst the obviously techie edu bloggers, it was felt that one of the best ways to get entrenched education departments to think about how new technologies should be changing education was to use China and India or the competitive threat that they pose to Western countries in the 21st Century as the wake up call.
I followed Karl Fisch at the Fischbowl as he went to NECC in San Diego and we traded blog comments. Close to that time, Karl produced a Powerpoint called entitled “Did you know?” containing, amongst other things, facts relating to China & India’s educational growth and he used it to start the school year in 2006 by showing it to the whole school and then doing Q&A sessions both physically and electronically. As I listened to these enthusiastic people half way around the world, and the silence from the UK, it felt that in my small corner of the world so few people in education were aware of the changes taking place in the world, they were stuck in the 20th Century. it was a lonely feeling. But I got on with learning to be a teacher.
Today, 18 months later all our staff watched the Shift Happens video as an intro to the new curriculum and then we did some of brainstorming activities to see what this meant for our school. It seems that the original Powerpoint was so well received that someone else polished it up and turned it into a snazzy video renamed after the slogan on the final slide – a great example of the collaboration of the web.
I am not about to moan about how long it has taken for our school to get to this point. On the contrary, I am impressed that this is a govt. initiative and only, only 18 months after Karl, every teacher in England & Wales (I presume) will be going through this kind of process. For a big clumsy apparatus like a govt/education department, I actually think that this is an impressive performance which displays a certain single mindedness. I’m used to people being more than 18 months behind.
With apologies to those who actually know about UK education politics – I’m new to education and I listen more to the technological evangelists on podcasts and edu blogs more than I read the Guardian, I think that the Government has got the strategy right.
Of course implementation might be a completely different story.
I presume that departments and teaching have got better (read tighter) over the past 20 years of the NC as they have been exposed to external scrutiny. To pursue the more inter-departmental project based learning that the New NC advocates, without dropping the external scrutiny, more planning time will be needed as will smaller classes. This means more money. And, until the money is on the table, nothing will happen.
At the weekend I downloaded the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from Audible.co.uk. I’m really blown away by the experience. I love the writing, the observations, the humanity the characters and the authors voice (but why is the main character such a coward?) . I love listening to it on my ipod. I’ve managed to listen to about 2 hours a day, in the car, walking and cooking.
For £8 a month I’m a happy customer. I’ve been a regular podcaster listener for as long as podcasts have existed, but listening to novels – rather than tech news – is a revalation for me. Of course it was audible’s sponsorship of TWIT (tech podcast) that persuaded me to try.
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Posted by richard
I found some forgotten blog posts of mine from 2004 sitting on blogspot.com in a blog I called Net Effect: An economist’s take on technology. I was covering Skype, Google (especially Mail) Open Source, and my first experience of Wikis. This was the time of conversations and “We The Media”. Then I started richardradio using wordpress and started experimenting with podcasts (Reminder: audio files need restoring)
Any way hooray for interoperability. I pressed a few buttons and hey presto they are now in richardradio.com 24 posts from March 11 2004 to Nov 2004 Its nice to consolidate everything here on rr.
As an aside, despite publishing on the Net over the past 5 years, for me, overwhelmingly the person that I really seem to be writing for and having a conversation with, is myself.
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Posted by richard
