Technology – Page 17 – JAMES MICHIE

I’ve Been Chromed!

As Google Chrome comes of age (in beta at least) I have kicked Firefox to the kerb, an act that I thought may never happen, for 95% of my web experience. The only thing that is keeping the Fox in my life at all is the poor integration Chrome offers with Moodle which is my schools VLE of choice. More info on Chrome’s shortcomings with Moodle and how to get past them (unless you only run Apple products like me) can be found on “Changing The Game” a Moodle-oriented blog written by @iusher.

I’m not going to dwell on Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari for very long. It’s a simple matter of security + usability + reputation that turned me into a Firefox user in the first place. IE as has been widely written about is simply not secure enough. On top of this it is a Microsoft product so is automatically put in the do not use pile for me. While I consider myself to be something of a geek, Opera is one step too far as Browser’s go; in much the same way as Linux is in terms of operating systems. What did surprise me was the fact that I didn’t turn to Safari as my browser of choice. Having started life as a Windows user Firefox came more naturally into my web based experience – or in other words the Fox did a better job of marketing itself.

When I started using Firefox, its reputation was already well established as a stable and secure browser. Then “add-ons” were introduced there was no turning back. Firefox was simply awesome contributed significantly to my “geek” development. As I sought ways to make my web browsing experience better the Fox taught me about user scripts via Grease Monkey and how to edit its’ functionality itself. See this guide on how to speed up Firefox. What I ended up with and used for the past couple of years never considering alternatives was a very fast, very user friendly (due to add-ons), very consistent web browser.

However the Fox had its limits. There were so many add-ons that I would want to try them all out. But Firefox was not always up to the task. Install more than 10 add-ons and even with the tweaks that I had made to speed it up it became more like “Smokeyfox” than Firefox – the metaphorical smoke pouring out when it fired up or tried to load a page with a lot of info. The experience that many of the add-ons were supposed to offer became limited when they were all packed in together. I ended up stripping Firefox back in the end to just a few add-ons and scripts. This made the browsing faster but the experience less rich.

Chrome on the other hand is faster than Firefox even with “extensions” and scripts installed. I was sceptical at first but I (like a good geek) did several tests to see if the claims were true. And yes, they were! My take up of the browser was stalled though as functionality was limited in its initial release for Mac. Bookmark integration was not fully sorted and there were no extensions available. I bided my time and waited for the first stable release to really get to grips with it. I fell in love immediately because Chrome embraces the true aesthetics of Mac – clean simple design. Use Chrome for a few minutes and I fail to see how anyone could not like the simplicity of the interface, it is beautiful.

Look closely at the picture above. What you see is what I want to see. I have a variety of scripts and extensions installed but many remain invisible working from within the browser itself. There is no need for clunky menus and the tab positioning and functionality is great. Chromed Bird, Instachrome and Delicious all use pop-out windows that float in front of the browser when you click on them. Finally, the Omni-bar is truly great – search, history and my delicious bookmarks are all integrated into one space. This makes the use of the browser so much smoother and cleaner.

I am currently using the development channel, this enables me to not only use extensions but also to install scripts from sites such as Userscripts.org. Chrome extensions make the experience as rich as Firefox but they have almost no impact on operating speed. User scripts load directly in to Chrome without the need for an extension such as Grease Monkey. The installation process of all extra Chrome features is very smooth and there never a need to restart the browser. Below is a screen grab of just a few of the extensions/scripts that I have installed.

Sites that I frequent load as fast with the extensions enabled as they do disabled, making the Chrome experience truly worthwhile. Whether a solution arrives through Chrome first or when Moodle 2.0 (Check out this brief tour here) is finally released I will kick Firefox to the kerb permanently. Until that day, the Fox will still play a small part in my life.

It will not be long though and the time will have come to say “goodbye old friend”.

Browser button image courtesy of Dekuwa on Flickr

Connecting With Parents Online

Last night I delivered an online presentation to parents of Year 11 English/English Literature students. 50 parents were in the room as well as myself and a colleague from the English department. We had numerous e-mails from parents who wanted to get in to the meeting but couldn’t due to the fact that we were over capacity. While that is frustrating, it is also very exciting. The highest number of participants in previous online meetings had been a little under 40 – a new record for the school. We are going to look into the capacity issue so it can be resolved for future events as the Science and Maths departments are due to do similar meetings in the very near future!

Link to the Online Meeting. (Link removed at request of school SLT)

A little background on CCC and its use of online conferencing:

At my school we have been using Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro for some time; video conferencing having become “a part of what we do”. Our most prolific use of Connect Pro can be found in our delivery of an “Online Games Design Course” that is attended by Creative Media Diploma students and any other students who have an interest in games design. This is currently running on Thursday nights between 7:00 and 8:00.

The meetings are led by @rhadad who is a teacher/games designer from Chicago. She beams in every Thursday at 7.00 along with a guest presenter (Moses Wolfenstien, @camaxwell, @gtrefry) to teach the students about games design.

This was pioneered by @greghodgson and @hstower last year and is now set to become a yearly course. I (@jamesmichie) have been supporting the delivery of the meetings this year along with @iusher who continues to be an invaluable resource to us, in all of our online endeavours – including the session with parents last night.

Right, back to last night’s meeting!

The parents were invited to attend the meeting in a multitude of ways: text message, e-mail, postcard – each one had a link to the meeting room and brief explanation of how it works – Connect Pro install a patch the first time you run it. As far as I am aware the parents had no problems with this. We also put a banner on the front of the school website as a reminder.

We received many e-mails in advance of the evening from parents who wanted to be there but had prior arrangements . As I mentioned earlier, after the meeting we received numerous e-mails from parents who could not get in and many e-mails also from the parents that did get in for a copy of the PowerPoint presentation that I used to show useful ideas, web links, our VLE and an iPod touch app (Flashcard Touch).

The number of parents online (or who wanted to be online) is amazing. It felt during the presentation and afterwards that there was a real buzz – which continued throughout today. Most importantly the response demonstrate that parents want to be involved in their child’s education and they want to be informed. Below is the PowerPoint presentation I used in the meeting:

[Update]: Presentation is no longer available.

[Aside] I also learned that I need to find better lighting for future meetings – I look too much like some strange lurker in the dark!

In conclusion:

It was a great experience! The buzz throughout the day has been great. Since I began writing this post I have had over 20 more requests for a link to either the presentation or for copies of the PowerPoint. The school switchboard has had a similar number. Adding the total number of participants to the number of e-mails we received from people who could not get into the meeting, we could have had over 90 participants – which would have been a third of the year group!

As a colleague put it: “We do all this hard work throughout the year but it’s just 20 minutes on a Wednesday evening that could make the difference.” Hopefully the “difference” will be seen in the students results this summer!

If you would like to know more about what we are doing with online conferencing you can e-mail me or tweet me @jamesmichie.

Image courtesy of Toni Blay on Flickr.

Assessment For Learning With Twitter

There is a lot of discussion within the #edtech community about the value of using Twitter within the classroom, which is, in turn, followed by a second conversation about whether educators should be using Twitter in school at all.

I personally believe that Twitter has the potential to be invaluable within education as long as the right safeguarding precautions are taken.

The most obvious use for Twitter I feel is to utilise it as a tool for giving feedback as part of assessment for learning. Therefore, I decided to start there and trial this with one of my Year 10 classes. Why Year 10? Mainly due to the fact that I believe they are mature enough to handle the use of Twitter sensibly and that if successful it could become part of our working process; having time to develop its use through to the end of Year 10 and beyond.

My students set up their accounts with me in the classroom. I gave them a clear set of instructions about how to set their account up – most importantly that their account name be created in such a way that they can not be personally identified by it and that their account is locked so that they can control who is following them. To make the “following” aspect even more straightforward I followed (with a specific Twitter account I set up for use in school) all of them and created a group “list” that they could then follow. It meant that they were not searching through lots of other people to find each other and possibly coming into contact with people and tweets that they shouldn’t.

I wanted to be sure that they looked on this as an educational tool – although that was not too hard as some of them were quick to tell me that: “Twitter is for old people like you sir and Facebook is for us, teenagers!” – thanks a lot I thought to myself.

The group of students I decided to trial this with were my Creative Media Diploma students. They are a small pilot group so provided a situation that was manageable to try out a new form of Assessment For Learning. Here are some examples of tweets by the students:

I feel that the 140 character limit was actually one of the most effective aspects of the process – the students found it challenging at first but once they got over the fact that they were being allowed to communicate as they would in a text message or e-mail with friends they quickly adapted and began sending very short but constructive comments to each other. The unit had culminated in the students creating a multi-media presentation (animated still images and audio) comparing BBC Radio 2 with either Capital FM or XFM. The students were required to evaluate both the analytical content of the presentations and the visual/auditory features.

To facilitate the process each student was assigned a hash tag which was made up from the first three letters of their name and then the initials of the course “cmd”. This allowed for easy searching and provided some uniformity and structure to the task. I asked them to make one positive comment and one comment that offered some constructive criticism. This was handled fairly well and only one student on one occasion wrote something about another students work that the rest of the class and I felt was not appropriate. Due to the public nature of the process the students were quicker than I in picking up on it, making the student who sent it send a tweet apologising and for them to delete the offending tweet. You see it is about teaching the responsibility. If we treat what we do online seriously they will take it seriously.

Each hash tag ended with cmd as an identifier of the task being evaluated.

After the evaluations were complete the students were asked in the following lesson to use Twitter Search to locate all of their tweets. They printed out a copy of all the tweets that contained their given hash tag for their portfolio and read through them reflecting on the positive and negative points that they had been given. They then set themselves two targets. One target explaining how they could improve the content of their presentation and one target as to how they could improve the visual/auditory features. Here is an example of a students targets which they submitted to our Virtual Learning Environment (moodle), printed out and stapled to their tweets inside their portfolio.

This was an enjoyable and (I feel) highly effective process. It certainly was for me as a teacher, being able to offer feedback and advice instantly but in an alternative way to the usual verbal approach. The 140 character limit helped I believe as I had to get to the point rather than waffling on! There was a record of it all, just as if I had filled in some laborious assessment sheet. And they were able to respond to the feedback and they got to not just know what I thought but what their peers thought as well.

Furthermore, it was helpful to me to see what the other students were saying – giving me an insight into the way they saw each others work at the same time I was assessing and evaluating it. This made me stop sometimes and re-evaluate what I was saying in terms of feedback. As the process developed, being able to read each others tweets, we all got better at it – providing better and better feedback for the student being evaluated.

While Twitter remains available at school I will definitely use it again for this process and hopefully for others. I have considered using Twitter to help develop my Y10 English class’ writing skills – a story or poem developed tweet by tweet! I also saw, just today, as I was working on this post that @tombarrett used Twitter in his classroom today using his PLN to tweet what the weather was like in different parts of the country. I’ll say no more as I know that he plans to blog about it himself! This to me was a fantastic use of Twitter in school and exemplifies the value of it being left open and free for use, not shut down (behind a firewall) like so many other great social learning tools seem to be.

If you would like to know more about this project or other ways I plan to use Twitter in my classroom please feel free to tweet me @jamesmichie.

New Blog! New iPod! An Update!

Since this whole blogging thing started with my new iPod touch I thought that it would be fitting to make my final post for week one of “James Michie…a 21st Century Educator” an update on my progress learning to use it, the apps I’ve added/deleted and my first game download.

The image above is my current set of apps and the layout that I am currently working with, since my last post I have done the following.

I realised that apart from “Tasks” there was no major benefit to me having each Google feature as a separate button – I can access them all from within the “Google Mobile App” and once I am in I usually leave them loaded up so that I can simply return to them at leisure within Safari.
Instapaper is even more useful to me now that I have access to it on a mobile device. I have been reading even more, increasing my productivity and in turn filling up more of the free space in my “brain-attic“.
Having moved from WordPress to Blogger I have installed but not used the “BlogPressLite App” – it has gained mixed reviews but I will try it out sometime in the near future.
I have read two whole books, downloaded with “Stanza“.
I have used the Notes App twice when asked to go pick up some odds n’ ends from the shops.
I have gotten somewhat annoyed by the fact that if I check my mail using the Mail App that it leaves a copy of the message in the All Mail folder after I have deleted it from the Inbox.
I have watched bits of programmes on both BBC iPlayer and through “TVCatchUp“. Although, I have not settled with myself the idea of watching a whole show on such a small screen – after all I am at home and have a 17” Macbook Pro that serves my online viewing pleasure very well.
I deleted “Wikipanion” after I realised that learning the touch-screen finger swipes to move, zoom in/out, select all, copy+paste was not that hard, using Wikipedia on Safari was not that difficult after all.
I am going to stick with “TweetDeck” – it is working as well for me on the iPod as it is on my desktop.
Finally, I downloaded my first iPod touch game. I have not really played a computer game since university so this was a treat. My first computer when I was just five years old was a “ZX Spectrum 128k” (the one with the built in tape deck) – its bread and butter was platform games. So I went for “Ghosts’n Zombies” a single player-platform game with plenty of shooting, lots of bleeps and squeeps and nice cartoon-styled graphics. It makes good use of iPod touch’s “accelerometer” and I have enjoyed playing it – while it’s a new game to me and the input method is very different to using a joystick or joypad it was an almost nostalgic experience.

Well, that is all for this week. I have enjoyed exploring and learning to use my new iPod. Being back at school next week will give me the opportunity to push one or two of its features further inside the classroom and during meetings. It is my hope that it goes someway to furthering my efforts to be paper-free! I can’t really call myself “…a 21st Century Educator” if I’m still reliant on pen and paper, now can I?

New iPod! New Blog!

I have been thinking about creating a blog, not for my Media classes or English classes but for me; about me; my thoughts on education, media and technology. A place where I can wax lyrical on the joys of my job, the love I have for learning and the path that I am forging – seven years into my career as a “21st century educator”.

What finally tipped me over the edge? My new iPod touch! Having finally bought one after clinging to my iPod classic for some time now made me think that I need to set-up this blog and jump right in. The simple fact of the matter is this, the iPod touch is like all good learning, in that to really get to grips with it you simply need to download some apps and experiment; see what works and what doesn’t. I have decided to approach this blog in the same way! For a while, it will go one way, then another (changing themes, adding/removing apps and widgets) but eventually it will find a form, some sense of structure and hopefully a sense of self.

Since it was my iPod touch that caused me to be writing this post, I thought I would add some info on the progress I have made in getting to grips with it over the last 48 hours. Below is a picture of the apps that I have already installed on to it. Underneath the picture I have tried to offer some explanation as to the reasoning that went behind my decision to download and install each app.

I was a good new iPod user and began by syncing my Google account with the iPod – linking my mail, calendar and contacts. My next priority was to pick a Twitter client. This is a very important decision as Twitter is to me: the most useful and invaluable communication tool since the invention of e-mail. I have been using Tweetdeck on my Macbook Pro for some time now, so I naturally gravitated towards their iPhone/ipod app and I am reasonably satisfied. I did briefly (45 minutes to be exact) try Twitterrific but I really did not like the GUI at all. Next I wanted access to the rest of my Google stuff, I say stuff because I use so many different Google features that I have lost track. I knew that I definitely wanted to be able to access/read/update my tasks, docs, reader and photos, so I installed the Google mobile app for iPhone/iPod. It works, like Google products usually do, beautifully.

With the most important features sorted yesterday, I spent today focussing on the other things that would make my use of the iPod touch the experience I hoped it would be. I knew that I would want to be able to store, read and transfer files. This is quite important for me as an educator and life-long learner. Having gotten a £15 iTunes gift card free when I purchased my iPod touch I was prepared to pay for the right app. I went for Files in the end, the GUI is simple but clean and the process of copying files on a Mac is simple and clean also. I went for the pro version as I did not want adverts and I also wanted plenty of storage capacity. Next I installed the pro version of Instapaper as I use this almost as much as I use Google reader. I read a lot! And I don’t always have time to read an entire article right at the moment when I find it. Furthermore, I spend a lot of time in front of the screen so I wanted to be able to take stuff away and read it at my leisure – able to take breaks when I want to help with my eyesight/headaches and I also wanted to be able to read offline. Instapaper for the iPhone/iPod touch does of all of this with ease. Installing this app also led me to learn more about the functionality of the iPod touch; learning to install “bookmarklets” into Safari in order for me to be able to copy web pages to Instapaper from with the iPod touch’s web browser. I used the same process to add a bookmarklet that allows me to save web pages to my delicious bookmarks as well.

After I had added and set-up those apps I set about looking for and adding some apps that are simply for my pleasure. I added BBC iPlayer as I was extremely impressed by the pixel quality of the video, streaming it on the iPod touch. Then thanks to Doug Belshaw (more about Doug further down in this post) and his post here (very timely indeed!), I added TVcatchup which allows you to stream live British TV including BBC 1, Channel 4, E4 and Channel 5 amongst others – the quality is again awesome over a wifi connection. Finally I two apps that reflect my thirstfor knowledge. I added Stanza so that I could download and read books. I found it after looking for apps to read pdfs on. And I added Wikipanion so that I could search Wikipedia in a more user friendly way than through Safari which on the iPod is not bad but does have its limitations. Come on Google, I want Google chrome for the iPod touch and I want it now!

There, I hope that was neither too painful or too boring. It was a little self-efacing but hey this blog is about me so I’m not going to appoogise too much. Before signing off I need to say thanks to Doug Belshaw for some sage like advice. As I am want to do nowadays, I consult before I do and I have admired Doug’s blog for some time now – he answered my questions with interest and honesty. For this I am grateful. He is always the provider of excellent ideas and useful information, his blog is well worth following! You can also buy or download for free a really useful book that he, I and many other members of our Twitter network collaborated on called “#movemeon”. The original blog post suggesting the idea is here!

Well that is all then, I’m off. I may not blog every day but when I do I intend it to be with purpose and hope that others find it interesting and useful.

Goodnight!