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- Mar 05, 12
Use of iPads in Schools
Just after the launch of the original iPad, our chair of governors came to me with a plan to get every child in the school an iPad. I’m sure many other schools have considered something along these lines, and many schools I know have purchased large numbers of tablets in some form. This proposal really tore me in two directions; my gadget-geek self wanted to make this happen straight away, but the educator and realist in me couldn’t quite justify the money without ascertaining the educational benefits.
We had various meetings where we talked about using iPads for writing, presenting work, etc, and this seemed to be the main use that people could see for them – a direct replacement for the laptop.
However, whilst the iPad is not a bad tool for content creation, it’s an awful lot better at content consumption. Some of the best lessons I’ve seen with the iPads have been where children have been writing down information on something revolutionary called paper, often using an equally magical device called a pencil. The iPad has taken the place of the library, encyclopaedia, video library, teacher, etc, and allowed our pupils to find information for themselves, in the way that we always envisaged they would
be able to do through IT use, but rather than having to go to an IT suite or at least leave their seat to go work at a computer, they now have it on this little, unobtrusive device sat next to their 21st century analogue capture device (we like to call them exercise books, though I’m not sure the name will catch on).Back in the dark ages of my school days, and probably yours too, the teachers had the information, and it was imparted to us in chunks that they thought we could handle and memorise or apply in some way. If you were very lucky you might even be asked to get some further information from a book.
These days, the children we teach find us less credible than the internet or television, and they are not used to giving undivided attention to a real person. I experimented with this earlier this term; I had two year 6 classes of mixed ability – for the first class I taught my lesson as normal, but recorded my delivery of the “teach” and instructions for the lesson using a Flip camera. For the second class I played back the video instead of delivering the lesson, and observed the differences.
The desired outcome of the lesson was that each pair would have created a fairly simple geotrail in Google Earth and then measured the distance of that trail. Hardly taxing stuff.
The first group, whilst I worked hard to keep their attention, were not always 100% focused during the 4 minutes I was showing them some of the skills they needed and explaining the task, and the end results showed that not everyone had concentrated as well as they might. The second group, however, who were taught by watching a video of me teaching another class, were rapt; their attention was total and effortless – at no point did I have to ask for someone to pay attention, focus, etc. The outcome from their task was demonstrably better, too; clearly everyone had listened and
listened well.I think it’s clear from this experiment that my teaching and classroom management skills need a bit of work, but that I can bypass these shortcomings of mine by harnessing the children’s ability to focus on a computer screen.
The tablet computer, with the iPad currently the forerunner of the breed, is ideally suited to allow us to take advantage of all the good things the internet and information age can offer our children, without all the faff and disappointment that the previously generations of promised revolutions (e.g. an interactive whiteboard, a computer in every classroom, a class
set of laptops, the netbook, etc) have brought us, but only if we realise that they are content consumers primarily, content creators a poor second.Note
Throughout this article I’ve talked about the iPad. I love my iPad, but I don’t think it’s the only device that fits this category. However, I do think it currently offers the best experience for our children, largely because of just how well made it is, and how well perceived it is (yes, the cool factor comes into play), how many of our parents have them at home (so an app that is popular at school can continue being used at home), and the range and quality of apps available. The iPod Touch is a viable alternative too; in some ways it’s a better option given the cost and size and the better camera on them. I’ve not yet seen an Android tablet that offers as
good an experience as the iPad, though the Asus EEE Pad Transformer offers some interesting additions and could work well, and the cunningly priced and sized Amazon Kindle Fire is going to be worth watching in the next few months. Its size, weight and price will certainly make it an interesting proposition for schools.
- Jul 22, 11
In my last post, I outlined why I felt uncomfortable with my shiny new Android phone.
I’ve now consigned the ‘droid to a drawer for 7 days to see if there’s anything I miss. If there isn’t, it’ll go on ebay, and hopefully the proceeds will go part of the way towards an iPhone 4.
Why have done this?
A combination of poor battery life, numpty applications and it just not being an iPhone.
If I’d had an Android phone all along, I think I’d have been reasonably happy with the Desire HD, apart from the battery life. I took it to London with me yesterday. I took it off charge at just after 9am, and made NO calls with it. A couple of texts, but that’s it. I also used it for about 5 minutes with Google Maps to try to direct me to Kingston-Upon-Thames station, but as the ‘droid thought I was about 10 miles off the coast of St. Malo, it wasn’t a lot of help. Come 10pm, and the phone was absolutely dead. Not really good enough.
Ok, I can make it go longer with doing things like turning off mobile data, etc, but that’s hardly the point of a smartphone. I have found myself over the last few months consciously NOT using the phone to look something up on the ‘net because I have been worried that the battery won’t last long enough.
Numpty applications – by this I mean that none of the applications on the ‘droid look or feel complete or polished. Every man and his dog can publish to the Market, and they do (yours truly included). I found two apps on the ‘droid that I thought were really very good, as good or better than their iOS counterparts – Do it tomorrow and Evernote. But, the only reason for using Do It Tomorrow was because I couldn’t find ANY other half decent GTD-esque task manager on ‘droid that’ll sync with anything. Do It Tomorrow isn’t GTD at all, but it looks pretty and it syncs. I don’t need the pretty, but it helps, I find with me WANTING to use an app to keep track of stuff I have to do.
The music players and browsers available for Android are numerous, but none of them come close to being the complete package that “iPod” and Safari are on the iPhone. So much choice, yet actually no choice – nothing fits the whole bill. “iPod” is a fantastic implementation of a music player, no surprise, but Safari isn’t exactly the greatest web browser, but it does just work. If it doesn’t work in Safari, it doesn’t work on an iPhone, full stop. Unlike on the ‘droid where you think, I’ll just try Dolphin or Firefox or Opera, just in case they work.
So far (day 1), I really miss the speed of the Desire HD (but comparing it to an iPhone 3G is hardly fair), but that’s it. I do love Google maps on the Android, but that’s not enough to tempt me back.
Let’s see what happens over the next few days. Meantime, anyone who’d like to buy a mint HTC Desire HD with 32Gb SD card, let me know. Even better, swap it for an iPhone 4
- Jun 02, 11
I switched from an iPhone 3G to an HTC Desire HD just over a month ago. Basically for two reasons: curiosity and cost. The iPhone 4 was going to be £140, the HTC £0. Curiosity because I’m an OS geek, and Android appeals to the Linux/Open geek within me.
However…
There are some great things about the Android platform. I can write code for it (badly) easily. I can customize seven kinds of hell out of it. I can get random apps to do all sorts of things.
But, I can’t get anything that says “quality”. I’ve not yet found even one app that looks like it’s spent more than 2 minutes having its UI worked on. They’re all functional, but all ugly, unpolished, and everything works differently. For example, the back button (god knows why you need one, but apparently you do) – sometimes it goes back to the previous pane in an app. Sometimes it takes you back to the home screen. Sometimes it does something else entirely. There is no consistency. The most obvious example of this is DoubleTwist – sometimes I press back and expect to go back to the Library/Album List, yet I end up back on the home screen. Other times I get to the Library. I think it’s to do with how I got to DoubleTwist in the first place, through menu or notifications.
Another thing that stands out – iPod vs a million and one different music apps that look like they’ve been designed by a death metal loving teenager. The iPod app has evolved over several years and just works nicely. All these Android apps are lacking in some way. I’ve only managed to find one that actually lets me sort by Composer (well, Writer, but it’s close enough) – Meridian. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but this kind of thing really highlights the difference between Apple and Android and I think that for me, the Apple way is better – Apple is no choice, you take what we let you have or leave it. Android is have any old crap that someone feels like writing, see if you can make it work. With the Apple way, you tend to get a quality product, and in the “core” functions of the smart phone; phone, mail, messaging, music, camera, the iPhone wins hands down.
Other things that suck; HTC Sense accounts for facebook and twitter as well as normal accounts. The amount of polling the thing does unless you stop it. The mediocre exchange support; it mostly works, but things like having multiple calendars in one exchange account (I have Personal and School) just doesn’t work.
BATTERY LIFE. If I don’t give my phone a short burst of juice in the day, it’s dead come evening.
The killer – the lack of a decent GTD app. I’ve been spoilt by OmniFocus on the iPad and iPhone. Nozbe’s also very good. But, Nozbe on Android is fairly pathetic (it is only beta, so watch this space), and everything else just sucks. I’m back to using Remember the Milk, which isn’t my favourite, but at least it talks Android/iPad/PC/Mac.
Ok, things I do like. Notifications. HTC Sense/Launcher Pro with their multiple home screens and widgets. Very nice. All the google sync, the facebook integration. The Gmail application. Tweetdeck and Evernote are both decent apps.
Things that surprised me (good and bad):
- FlipVibrate – turn the phone over to put it in silent/vibrate
- I have yet to find the ability to have Flash useful. No website I’ve visited has *required* it.
- Uninstalling applications is rather more complicated than on the iPhone – having to go to settings, applications, etc. And I’ve got an app that won’t uninstall…
- The quantity of apps (and sometimes system functions) that crash
- How much I miss visual voicemail – thank goodness for HulloMail
- The difference in audio quality of the built in mic vs the iPhone. I recorded myself playing the organ with both devices. The HTC version is absolutely hideous, painful on the ears. The iPhone version is quite usable.
- WiFi Hotspot – fabulous. Obviously I didn’t have a 3GS or 4 so I’ve never tried it on the iPhone, except through MyWi.
- Even after a month, I find typing a most frustrating experience. I’ve purchased SwiftKeys (and the new beta), but they drive me insane; even though I’ve told it that my typing preference is to be accurate and not use completions, it insists on inserting words when i press space (and yes, I’ve changed that preference too, no avail)
- Having a choice of browsers to use is more frustrating than liberating, as none of them render anything particularly well; built in “Internet”, Dolphin HD, Opera, Firefox have all been tried and found wanting when held up against Safari.
So, you can probably tell what my answer to iPhone vs Android is – if you’ve been an iPhone user, stick with Apple. Going to Android will feel like wearing someone else’s dirty underwear. If I didn’t have an iPad too, this thing would have gone straight back. It was not a good decision, but at least I now have some experience of the “other side”.
For me, the sheer amount of choice on the Android platform just doesn’t work. Choosing between a mediocre app and another mediocre app isn’t much of a choice. I’d love it if someone (however unlikely it is that anyone reads this blog) out there could recommend just ONE app that really shines on the Android platform. Go on, please?
- Sep 02, 10
For some reason, since I got SSO up and running a while back, an annoying problem hit; new users were not syncing over to Google, so Google was throwing up a SAML Invalid e-mail error, Please try again later.
Fortunately, it’s an easy fix (I can say that now, having spent ages trying to diagnose) – go to your LDAP authentication settings in Moodle, and, under the Bind section, turn Hide Password to No.
Then, delete all the users from mdl_block_gdata_gapps in your moodle’s database that have status = ‘accountcreationerror’ – connect to the moodle sql database – on my system it’s called moodle, then type:
mysql> delete from mdl_block_gdata_gapps where status = ‘accountcreationerror’;
NOTE: this doesn’t delete your users from Moodle, just from the gapps synchronisation database. But, if you’re not confident about it, don’t do it, and the usual disclaimer (if anything goes wrong, don’t shoot the messenger) applies.
Then, get your broken users to login to Moodle afresh. They should sync over just fine.
- Aug 13, 10
Our school has a history of using MS Office, as do many. It’s expected. It’s normal.
It’s expensive. It also, with the age group we teach (7-13 year olds), gives the kids too much flexibility to fiddle; they like to create pretty instead of content. And their idea of pretty really isn’t pretty!
So, I want to replace it with Google Apps. We’ve got a Google Apps domain, and this is the only thing I’ve been using in IT lessons for the last 12 months.
The time has come though, to just not install MS Office on pupil accessible computers. I’ll give them OpenOffice available as a just in case, but the default option will be Google Docs.
I’m considering turning off logins too; given that all the kids’ docs are going to be in the “cloud”, there’s not much point in logging in. They’ll authenticate to the web proxy so I’ll know who they are for naughtiness purposes, and I’ll give them the ability to connect to their home directory for saving other work, e.g. sketchup, audacity, etc.
I just hope it works – I reckon it’ll take a year before they’re completely happy with the move, but I also reckon I’ll be able to save nearly £5000 a year on licensing fees.
Time to get writing a whole bunch of documentation.
- Mar 11, 10
Google Squared is a search service that groups together related things, e.g. Conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot.
If you search for, say Sedimentary Rocks, Chemical Elements, Poetic Meter, it’ll go off and look for everything that might be related to that search and stick it in a “square” that shows the relationship between items.
Why not use it to build up a square for your current unit, then share the link with your pupils?
How? Go to http://google.com/squared
Tags: tip, tow, squared, google
- Oct 17, 09
I’ve been trying to get a working build of Linux for our new Dell Vostro 1520 laptops, and have hit on three problems (which I’ve now, I think, resolved)
1. Frequent keyboard/mouse lockups under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
2. ActivStudio locks up under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – no mouse clicks accepted
3. No wireless support under Ubuntu 9.10 or Fedora 11I started with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) as this is an officially supported release by Promethean.
Hit a problem where I’d boot up and the keyboard and/or trackpad were unresponsive. Normally just the trackpad.I managed to work around that – it’s well documented in various fora – by adding irqpoll to the grub boot options (/boot/grub/menu.lst) for the current kernel. (2.6.29, I think it was, from memory)
Got ActivStudio installed. All seemed great. Until I tried to teach a lesson. The board was very sluggish, stubborn to respond to writing, but only occasionally. I put it down to it being an old board. But then I found I could write on the board, but not click on any of the icons, or even close windows, etc. All very odd. Couldn’t find an obvious fix.
So, I tried to update to kernel 2.6.3x via several routes – first, just downloading a deb and installing on Ubuntu 9.04. No wireless support, and the promethean module wouldn’t compile either.
Ok, tried 9.10 beta, with 2.6.31 kernel. No wireless. Grr. Tried Fedora 11, still no wireless. I can’t say I was surprised, as they’re all based on the same kernel, and the change of behaviour is down to a rewrite of the wireless code in 2.6.3x, and NetworkManager, apparently.
So a bit of digging… And it looks to be a Dell specific bug – the wireless kill switch (rfkill) is reporting an incorrect status to NetworkManager, which assumes that therefore the wireless is disabled.
Well, that lead me to a Dell Firmware update for the Vostro 1520, to A03 – bugs fixed? “Fixed incorrect WiFi kill switch status”. Sounds promising. Oh, but you have to run the update from Windows… grr. So, I re-imaged my machine from our standard Windows build, which, fortunately, only takes 6-7 minutes on a gigabit connection. Installed firmware update.
Re-installed Ubuntu 9.10 beta.
Got Wireless!
Went to Promethean, added the Ubuntu 9.04 deb repository to /etc/apt/sources.list
Installed activdriver, activtools, activinspire, activresources-core-en. Sat back. Rebooted. And then started using my whiteboard.
All seems good so far in iwb on Linux land, with a few tweaks along the way to deal with my hardware oddities.
- Oct 14, 09
This last week I’ve managed to get all my groups from year 3 to year 6 signed up for our Google Apps domain, using the Moodle SSO to create the accounts.
Mostly, this has been a straightforward exercise, but every now and then, an account pops up that just won’t create in Google. If I go to the gApps control panel, and try to add the user manually, I get “the user already exists”, but it doesn’t appear in the user list.
Solution – GAM – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/
I can create the problem users in GAM, and suddenly everything works. How odd!
Some examples of GAM usages – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/GAMExamples
- Sep 30, 09
This weekend, after much geeking, I managed to get our Moodle, Mahara and Google Apps for Education systems all talking to each other. Fortunately this is all fairly well documented on the web, so it was just a matter of following instructions.
What does this achieve?
My students can now login to Moodle, and once logged in, they have links in their sidebar (Blocks, as they’re really called in Moodle) which allow them to click through to Mahara and Google Docs WITHOUT HAVING TO LOGIN again. Even better, the SSO (Single Sign On) system automatically creates user accounts in Mahara and gApps if they don’t already exist for the user.
I know what Moodle is, but what’s Mahara?
Mahara is an e-portfolio system. I must admit to having completely dismissed it when I first read about it. I just didn’t get it.
But… Imagine each child you teach uploading the finished versions of their essays, projects, etc to their own webpage or portfolio, so that, at the end of the term/year/school, they have ALL their work collected together in one portfolio. Imagine other children or teachers being able to comment on and assess the work in that portfolio. Imagine being able to share that portfolio with the outside world, e.g. parents.
That’s what Mahara can do for you.
Why would I use Google Apps/Docs instead of Word?
Lots of reasons!
- It’s online – no more do students have to e-mail docs to themselves, or use USB sticks, etc.
- Collaboration – up to 10 students can work on a Google Document at the same time. Up to 50 can work on a spreadsheet. Each document has full revision history so that you can see exactly who contributed what. YOU could even collaborate on that doc with them – live marking, for example.
- Forms. Google Forms are absolute genius. Design a Form for gathering data using their friendly designer. That form is then published on the web, and any data entered into it is inserted into a row in a spreadsheet. All those ICT lessons where you wanted a dataset and had to contrive one are a thing of the past. Want to do a Geography survey? No problem. Want to do a poll of opinion about the quality of food at school? How about some AfL? All easily and beautifully handled by Forms. Check out Tom Barret’s 10 Google Forms for the Classroom at the bottom of this post for more ideas.
- Cost. It’s free, apart from the domain name (£10 a year?).
Yes, Word has more features. Yes, Word’ll let your kids generate prettier documents (and uglier ones too). But, to my mind, content is more important than “prettiness”. Collaboration is the new learning nirvana. Google Docs provides.
What do you need to get it going for yourself?
- Moodle install (ideally 1.9.5 or later)
- Mahara install
- Google Apps domain
- Administrator access to all the above
- Ability to upload files to the Moodle installation directory
The technical side of things is pretty straightforward – just remember to follow all the steps in the following guides to the letter.
Documentation:
Some tips:
- Google Apps requires passwords to be 6+ characters. If your student passwords are shorter than this, then their accounts will not be created.
- If you find that when you try to login to Google via Moodle, you get a “Invalid credentials” error, the chances are that you’ve not followed the instructions about certificate installation accurately.
- When filling out the Google Apps SSO setup page, upload your certificate FIRST – those URLs that you’ve just typed in will disappear, so why duplicate the work?
- Create local administrator accounts in both Mahara and Moodle just in case you mess up the authentication system – if you don’t have local (i.e. non-network authenticated) admin accounts, you could get locked out of your own systems!
- If Mahara authentication stops working a few months down the line, check the expiry date on the SSO certificate. If it’s expired, copy and paste the key from Moodle into Mahara again. All fixed, hopefully!
So, what to do with your newly integrated apps?
Check out the following ideas:
Marking Work in Google Docs
10 Google Forms for the Classroom
21 Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the classroom
Using Mahara
