It’s not television, it’s not broadcasting. It’s about harnessing the networks that are out there, virtual or real-world, and creating new models of interaction for an audience that, increasingly, is online rather than on the box.

participation culture needs to underpin our largest educational and technological ventures.

In an older post Thinking out of the (X) Box Ewan discusses some of the possibilities that gaming has to offer with particular reference to creative writing. Derek Robertson Head of the Consolarium, the Scottish Centre for games and learning has been aware of the potential of platforms such as the Nintendo Wii for some time at Learning and Teaching Scotland.

All students are involved with social networking or gaming culture at some level. They interact with each other socially through Bebo or Facebook and they also interact with each other playing “games’ on the variety of platforms available.

I spent a day looking at the educational possibilities presented by the use of a Nintendo Wii in a science classroom. These possibilities fell into a number of categories.

• The technologies used (blue tooth, motion sensors, infrared cameras etc)
• Physics engines and the need to understand basic physics in the real world before the virtual world can appear realistic.
• As a carrot… yes you can come into the lab during lunch and play with the Wii but you have to research and write a report on the technologies involved over the weekend

get your vodpod

Brainstorming indicated links that can be followed up

Apart from the obvious engagement of students (might not do boxing again as the willingness of students to virtually punch each others’ lights out looked as if it might spill over into the real world) there were some exciting developments. One student who clearly has an understanding of the technology beyond that of this humble chemistry teacher is following up a project turning the Wii remote into an interactive whiteboard. An example of gaming stimulating high order learning.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology is a United States based not-for-profit organisation which aims to inspire young people to pursue science, technology and engineering careers.

Smales Farm Technology Office Park and Massey University are developing an educational robotics programme which has been shown to double the likelihood of students choosing a science or technology career.

This was our first experience of robotics and the competition. The students had a great time, learned an amazing amount and are desperate to involve other students and compete again.

There is no doubt that the authentic learning experience FIRST NZ robotics provides has huge potential in a secondary system dominated by assessment and the need to focus student learning towards predetermined outcomes.

Students had to design a robot that could score points in a game and be capable of preventing opponents from scoring. The solution to the problem could take many forms. I was struck by the potential of the activity to foster development of the key competencies in a meaningful situation.

The New Zealand Curriculum identifies five key competencies.

thinking

using language symbols and texts

managing self

relating to others

participating and contributing.

Thinking is about using creative, critical, and metacognitive processes to make sense of of information experiences and ideas.

Students had to use all of these as they tried to make sense of the manual and develop their concept of the ideal robot. They went from zero to hero within the hour as their prototypes moved for the first time. Can’t get the same intensity in a one hour lesson somehow

Using language symbols and texts is about working with and making meaning of the codes in which knowledge is expressed.

Making sense of the drawings, instructional text and technical language was a real challenge especially when imperial units were used!

Managing self is associated with self-motivation, a “can do” attitude and with students seeing themselves as capable learners.

The competition allowed students to show enterprise in their design endeavors. They had to be resourceful as they adapted the materials provided and resilient when prototypes did not perform as anticipated.

Relating to others is about interacting with a diverse range of people in a variety of contexts.

The competition with its ethos of gracious professionalism stimulated interaction. Members of each of the two Green Bay worked cooperatively and shared ideas. In competition they had to work with a different “red team” in each round and so developed relationships with students from other schools. finalists had to chose another team to work with them in a best of three competition.

Negotiation and compromise proved to be surprisingly important where personalities and ideas clashed. One faction in the winning team wanted to add a kind of helicopter arrangement to their vehicle. The “twirly” attachment appeared to serve no useful purpose and was an unnecessary drain on battery power to their vehicle. However it did look good as the robot charged into battle.

The other faction wanted to keep the robot highly functional and saw the “helicopter” as an unhelpful addition.

Unlike the learning prescribed by tightly defined NCEA achievement.standards the outcomes of the competition could be quite unpredictable.

The decorative attachment remained part of the final design after some intense negotiation Where “gracious professionalism” became rather strained. Ultimately the twirly invention proved a match winner as it interfered with the mechanism of robots designed to lift and drop counters for high scores.

and finally participating……enough said

and more action

If you head towards the southern end of Te Henga beach the rocky cliffs are mostly quite spectacular formations of pillow lavas. They originated in the same way Kilauea produces them now.They lie on top of slightly older volcanic conglomerate.

The winter light made it difficult to capture the pillow lavas as clearly as I would have liked.

Edublogs allows you to insert widgets into the sidebar. With vodpod there is no need to tuck your widget away in the sidebar. It can be inserted into the post itself.

Registering with vodpod is straightforward. The usual email, username and password gets you started. The vodpod widgets come with a number of different skins. Copying and pasting codes for the sidebar, horizontal bar, button and video wall allows easy embedding. Unfortunately couldn’t get my preferred skin, the video gallery to embed.

Instead of asking students to do a standard experimental write up I often ask them to do a short video clip describing, discussing or explaining a scientific phenomenon. Students need to practise articulating their ideas before they communicate understanding on paper. They can give feedback as they use the video clips for discussion.

Vodpods are a useful way of collecting the videos together as a presentation to develop their thinking or for revision when preparing for exams. They can also be used to track development in understanding.
get your vodpod
Just for the record,in the sixth form unit on structure and bonding I talked about the conditions under which ionic compounds conduct electricity for about 10 minutes. Students then had to produce a video on the topic by the end of the lesson. After reviewing their work next lesson they filmed a second attempt. There are still inaccuracies but it is the development of ideas that is important.
Web 2.0 tools encourage changes in pedagogy

Sprout is another useful web 2.0 tool. I have seen the logo around quite a bit on presentations but only decided to have a look at its possibilities after reading a technology web 2.0 and general nerdery in the classroom blog

This application will be invaluable in the business world and I guess this is where the people who are developing Sprout see their market. Very professional promotional material can be produced without the involvement of expensive advertising agencies. There are a number of good examples on the Sprout beta site.

Advertisers and educators have similar problems. How do we engage our audience and keep them informed? When we have created a teaching/selling moment then our educational/promotional material has to be focussed and stimulate further interest and questions.

Web 2.0 tools like sprout allow us to build media rich learning and assessment bytes for our students. They can relive the excitement of their classroom experience online at home when they may well be awake and ready to learn.

To try it out I put together some information for chemistry students before they investigated the structure and bonding involved in silicate minerals as they made a work of art in their chem lab.

It was an excuse really to test the the mashup capabilities.

• Played an old and tired looking Powerpoint and captured it as a videoclip with Jing. Loaded it onto sprout and used the resizing tool. (A cheap version of camtasia perhaps, made by the same outfit)
• video of classwork downloaded from You Tube
• Another powerpoint turned into a video clip via jing then loaded into Sprout (this seems to be an effective way of uploading jing tutorials to the blog but more later)

Finally if you are still there Sprout is an invaluable tool for producing e learning resources

I took a class of fifth form students along to the computer room without preparing them for the activities I had designed.

• I asked them to register with Mystudiyo giving minimal instructions. students seem to be very familiar with the process (name then email addres)
• Gave them the name of my quiz (reactions of metals) and asked them to do it. The whole process took about 20 mins and they were all happily engaged.
• I set up a quiz that allowed collaboration
• Asked students to design questions based on the topic they were studying (microrganisms but genetics if they wanted)
• There was limited time left so only indicated that it would be good if they googled pictures then embedded.
• The questions they came up with were quite interesting in that they went well beyond the scope covered in class
• I initially thought I would need to give more prescriptive instructions but then decided it was better to have a bank of questions that covered a wider range.

The class enjoyed both activities and I will routinely use Mystudiyo to build up banks of questions perhaps to use in a school quiz.
Making their own questions challenged them to think about work covered in class and was just as valuable as attempting the quizzes.

The quiz has some obvious limitations. In a number of instances students simply didn’t have enough time and cobbled something together to complete the exercise. (they won a Mars bar if they completed both exercises……never underestimate the power of a bribe)

Peter Kent a former secondary school Physics teacher and Primary school DP in ACT has written a stimulating article on interactive whiteboards “See it to believe it”. Interactive Boards have been around for a number of years and my impression is that primary teachers have been faster to recognise their value in the classroom than anyone else. I visited BETT at the Olympia London while on on holiday in January this year. To quote from its own publicity blurb it was ” the world’s largest educational technology event” An army of sales people were ready to pounce on anyone who loitered near a display. As a marketing event for IWB’s it was a success but paid scant regard to the more immediate needs of the vast majority of schools. (from an NZ perspective)

Peter answers a number of questions including:

What value do interactive whiteboards(IWB’s) have in today’s classrooms?

“…an IWB can improve the quality of teaching by giving access to the potential of ICT”

I would argue that the use of ICT only makes sense within a wider discussion on 21c pedagogy. Do we need a whiteboard at the front of a classroom interactive or not? Do we need to redesign the classroom environment from scratch after we decide what we want to achieve in it? We need to put ICT into a pedagogical context.

The term interactive whiteboard is misleading. The interactive nature of the boards is limited to the teacher directing a lesson. Some control can be given to students as they move objects around on the screen to complete a class cloze or diagram labeling exercise. We should correctly refer to IWB’s as “digital whiteboards”, a helpful tool that makes life easier for teachers. We shouldn’t become bogged down in debates about the relative value of new technology tools.

What do you see as the reality of IWB usage-in terms of the way they’re being used compared to optimum use?

“….if a teacher’s underlying pedagogy is good usually their use of an IWB will be inspired…..If the teacher use a primarily didactic method…….then their use will probably be dreadful…”

I couldn’t agree more but does good pedagogy necessarily involve the use of an IWB? The real pedagogical issue in most schools is connectivity. Students are highly connected outside of school yet the moment they come through the school gates they have to power down and get the A4 writing pad out. They treat this technology with the respect it deserves by screwing up their notes to practice basketball skills with my waste paper bin.

The advert on the back page of the latest Interface is a good example of it being “about the technology” and not “about the pedagogy” Learning and Teaching Scotland first blogged about the Asus EeePC last November. It entered the market as a dirt cheap web browser (about $450 then). Since then it has grown in spec and price. It is sometimes viewed as a curiosity. How does it compare with a fully spec’d laptop and can you do without all the usual bells and whistles?

All the wrong questions are being asked again. If we move from dirt cheap paper technology what would the corresponding web 2.0 equivalent be? Probably an Asus Eee PC 900. Which brings us Back to the Future.

18c classrooms had students with chalk slates doing exercises set on a chalk blackboard. Maybe the 21c equivalent is a class of students connected to the web with their Eee Pc’s as the teacher provides skilfully enhanced lessons via the portal opened up by an interactive whiteboard. Interesting times eh, need another glass of wine now.

There are a number of features I like about this tool

• Easily embed text, images, audio and video
• Ability to create ‘non-collaborative’ quizzes or “collaborative” quizzes (allows others to add further questions to your quiz)
• Quizzes are easy to embed into blog posts

There are a number of disadvantages that cause problems for science quizzes:

• You cannot format text in the answer boxes so chemical formulae cannot be used directly
• the 60 character limit constricts the types of answers that are possible.

I particularly like the ease with which video can be uploaded in a quiz. Clips of chemical reactions can help visual learners by reducing the dependence on text or static images. Using video clips produced by the students encourages engagement.

The process of producing a quiz illustrates neatly how the use web 2.0 technologies is changing traditional pedagogy. A number of simple media tools are involved to author material that would have required the assistance of a publisher a few years ago.

• Using a digital camera to take movie clips (preferably done by a student while the teacher is drinking coffee and supervising)
• Using widows movie maker to edit the files before uploading to You Tube You Tube
• using Jing for a screenshot from a powerpoint presentation
• embedding the video files in a MyStudio quiz

I am currently trialling the quiz with students on my school blog for homework and classroom use.

Hope to start using Asus Eee’s in the not to distant future as a cheap web browser to allow students to be “connected” at school as well as home. The whole web 2.0 thing grinds to a halt while students have to “power down” in the usual disconnected high school classroom (no I don’t want another pod of computers in a room I have to take my students to)

I use it for two different types of ” 5 minute tutorials”.

• Mimio interactive whiteboards do not allow you to screencast at the moment. Using Jing to capture work on the Mimio with commentary through a microphone you can record key points of a lesson. This can be placed on a blog or server for student access at a later date. Warning the video was a trial using the cheapest microphone from Dick Smith and you can’t spell check handwriting….even if you can read it.

I was doing the usual reactions of acids (with metals, bases and carbonates). I used the video in each case to remind students of the steps involved in isolating a pure sample of the salt formed in the reactions.

• ACD chemsketch free software allows you to draw chemical structures and produce 3 dimensional models. A 5 minute tutorial is a quick way of showing students how to use it. Jing is a useful tool for creating 5 minute tutorials to train students or staff how to use software.

The original tutorial produced with Jing is fine but for some reason there is a slight soundtrack lag after uploading to youtube. If anyone knows how to fix this please leave a comment

That one keynote was the catalyst for a complete rethink of my attitudes to teaching and learning in secondary science education. Since then every time I look at classroom practice through the lens of emerging technologies opportunities arise that challenge traditional assumptions.

Blogs provide communication opportunities with and between students and stimulate collaborative learning. One of the key posts on Ewan’s blog Thinking out of the (X) Box alerted me to the potential of gaming in education.

Which brings me to my good friend Derek Robertson who is currently in charge of the Consolarium and hence the professional development in the title of the blog. Derek is passionate about lots of things including his football team Dundee United ( blinded by unrealistic optimism ). His infectious enthusiasm for the potential of gaming in education has attracted a big following. I was fortunate to spend a morning at the Consolarium in January while on holiday from New Zealand and catch up with his latest ideas. I have watched him on a number of videos recently arguing the case for gaming in schools and politely rebutting traditional methods that placed the teacher firmly in the role of the expert who had all the knowledge. Education by transmission is severely limited if the receiver is switched off or the paper storage system has been screwed up and and on a collision course with the back of the teacher’s head.

The second guest on the show played to the fears parents have of kids transfixed to a computer screen for hours. He also seemed to be concerned about the authority of the teacher being undermined . In secondary science the distinction between a gaming environment and working physics simulation has become blurred. As Derek comments good teachers have always used appropriate resources to open doors to the curriculum locked to many. The traditional Victorian classroom many of us still teach in restricts us to a limited number of learning styles and exclude many, particularly boys.

Deconstructing games and teasing out the science underneath the skin is a good start for secondary teachers. The Nintendo Wii Sports game allows you to simulate motion in a realistic way. For instance playing a round of golf you can hit the ball hard enough to land on a particular spot. You still have to judge how far the ball will carry if it is on fairway or the rough. A cross wind will also affect the trajectory of the ball. Similarly you can lob a tennis ball and observe the effect of spin. These are games but Newton’s laws of physics lurk underneath the graphics.

Cars, bikes helicopters and people move around in games like Grand Theft Auto 4 with slick realism.

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Objects that move around in the real world follow Newton’s laws of motion. To develop software that mimics the real world you need to understand the physics of motion.

Rockstar North is the developer behind Grand Theft and they are based in Edinburgh Scotland. They are currently advertising for a physicist and people to test their games to check that they are realistic! The boundary between games and scientific simulation through a physics engine blurs.
I am currently trialling the use of “Phun” an addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion. It is proving popular with boys in particular. It can be downloaded free.

Thanks again to Ewen and Derek for some of the best PD to come my way in years