THIS BLOG IS MOVING!!!!

Soon we will be moving this blog onto another domain and onto our own servers so we can enjoy all the other features and benefits of wordpress…. polls, more multimedia, podcasting, etc.

You can get a preview of the work in progress and update your blogrolls and feeds at: http://blog.prometheanplanet.com

Can I use more than one pen at the same time?

There has been very little written about this concept, and I wrote this, at the end of last year, by way of an article to support a product which is to be released by Promethean in early 2009.

Cooperative learning encourages children’s interpersonal skills which can be especially helpful in enhancing children’s cognitive development.  Asking children to actively exchange ideas and to share different points of view is likely to be most effective when the right environment/platform is offered. Collaboration skills are not inherent in children and the skills needed to work together in pairs or small groups are quite distinct from working alone.Situations such as these are not easy to set up and to be able to add an element of technology will be an engaging catalyst to these objectives.

During early childhood, children often act first and discuss later, a teacher can play a vital role by helping them clarify their goal before they attempt to solve the problem. The sharing of ideas amongst group members is the underlying premise of collaborative learning in contrast to competition in which individuals are driven to win.  The level of interaction is helpful to children in developing their social abilities and developing mutual respect for each other.

Collaborative learning has been proven to increase children’s engagement and offering children the opportunity to use two pens simultaneously opens up a whole new world of interaction.  Not only can the children work together on a problem, they can also respond immediately without having to take turns or impact on their partners’ interaction. Very young children often work along side each other, needing to feel accompanied in their activity but still needing to feel in control of their own actions.  Collaboration is something which children need to explore to enable them to develop their social skills and appreciate the value of a friend’s opinion.Using more than one pen at the same time, means that spur-of-the-moment opportunities present themselves allowing for adult intervention when required to ensure that the opportunity is maximised.  Encouraging this type of activity can be planned for or can be part of independent activity where children can access the board throughout the school day.By providing an interactive ‘Arena’, where pupils can collaborate more easily, learners are encouraged to interact with each other, not just the whiteboard.

Working together on tasks has been shown to improve children’s understanding and retention of knowledge. In addition, there are social benefits – collaboration encourages development of communication skills and enables students to take a more active part in their learning.  

Google Earth and Google Maps; Ultimate education resources?

Google Earth continues to expand in power and usefulness and is awesome on the Activboard.

The latest version is now supported by an increasing number of immensely useful features, many organised under a section called “Geographic Web” – when photographs and wikipedia articles relating to the places you are flying over can be accessed with a simple click. Special links to video clips from sources such as the National Geographic or Discovery mean that the experience is completely multimedia.

Many 3rd party “layers” can also be downloaded – and these can overlay Google Earth with live weather information. historical features or create virtual tours charting the life and travels of famous individuals.

If you have Google Earth installed. here is a great example – a tour of the ancient sites of Rome.

Another impressive feature of the web based Google Maps is ‘Street View’ – once you find a city (currently US) – you can transform into a pedestrian and enter a virtual world where you can travel along streets in a fully photographic way. With full image panning and zooming – it is true virtual reality…. walk along the streets of New York to visit Times Square or any of the many historic places – and shift between, map, image and street views to fully reinforce the understanding of maps. Awesome! Why not visit Disney!

On my one visit to San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge was shrouded in thick mist – now I can see what I missed!

Are these tools the new ‘digital atlases’ that children need to be using in the age of GPS and anytime, anywhere connectivity?

Teaching Programming with Alice on an Activboard

If you want to teach computer science principles to kids – do try and check this out…

http://www.alice.org

From here you can download a free program from Carnegie Mellon Uni. that lets you create and control objects and characters in 3D worlds.

It is clearly very powerful for teaching the fundamental basics of computer programming (if you do not know about geeky, programmer type things like classes, events, properties, variables, parameters, functions and methods – you will after an hour or so with Alice). Being completely visual it helps make complete sense of the basics of programming – and is stunning on the Activboard – it really make kids want to jump up, interact with it and make it all work….

For example, in one scenario there are characters such as a Pharoah (such an object is called a Class) and in that class are all the bits that make him up – e.g. Head, Body Limbs, Crown, etc. With a combination of drag and drop and pull down menus, all operated easily on the Promethean Activboard we could program the Pharoah to do almost anything…

There are even special ‘methods’ such as ‘think’ or ‘talk’… so that it can be used to create an interactive storyboard like a movie.

Within minutes, seven year olds had mastered the basics and created their first adventure. The software even lets you save your work as a webpage so others can see it and see the code that was used. Here is the first attempt (for some reason the speech and thought bubbles are not working as we expected online – but they will in your class). You can also see the programming used on the web page

http://www.zen57329.zen.co.uk/Pyramid_Adventure/Pyramid_Adventure.html

You may need some extra plugins to download to view it, but the webpage has all the details and they are fairly straightforward.

Interesting use of Activboard, Activslate and Activote in HE Art and Design

Leeds College or Art and Design (where Damian Hirst first threw a dead sheep off the roof in the name of Art!) has taken on Activclassroom technology and found a range of very interesting ways of using it in a HE context.

Already a leader in innovative use of learning technology – the college have their own Private Second Life learning island – they have innovated in their deployment of the Promethean technology and looked at how the technologies can work together. They have even developed a “Virtual Activboard” and response system that has proven immensely popular among the many educational institutions using Second Life as a collaborative Learning Environment.

A key idea has been in making the Activboard part of the student’s “creative toolkit” – providing focus groups and teams with a “shared digital surface” to brainstorm ideas on to storyboard ideas. Critiques and peer review of student work – a key element of the learning process – is greatly enhanced with Activboard’s 96″ Widescreen display and great use is made of the screen recorder and annotation tools to capture feedback from the group and lecturers live and make them available online for on iPods for student review minutes later.

Much of their work is blogged online and  there is a great example of an Activboard being used to control an immersive 3D environment using the pen and students describing the design decisions they made at the DDM Collective blog.

Annabeth Robinson at LCAD highlights the value of “authentic feedback” – She says; “The screen recorder makes for a clear capture of the whole critique – everything from the voices, demonstrations and questions is captured so that students have a far richer report on which to base their responses. A paper critique is open for subsequent interpretation and misinterpretation. Capturing the group discussing the work live, digitally is a massive benefit for learners.”

Handheld Learning 2007

One of the key events of recent years has been the Handheld Learning event. Focusing on mobile learning with devices and the opportunities presented by ubiquitous access to the internet, it raises and explores many issues that educators will have to deal with in coming years.

I was lucky to be able to present at this event with a Promethean colleague and we ran a workshop that covered all the ways that the Promethean Activboard could work with devices. Many of the ideas in the blog made it to the presentation – using images from phones to using the Activsoftware on Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs)

As well as the technical tricks and techniques some other interesting Promethean technology was presented – incuding the ‘VR’ versions of Activote – basically Activate that floats on the screen of a laptop, PC, UMPC or Nova5000 student computer.

Google Docs – Live Document Collaboration on your Activboard

This neat video (a lesson idea in itself) highlights how the latest Google docs application offer a way for students in a classroom with net access and an e-mail address can collaboratively create a document on the Activboard.

After the lesson – the students can continue the activity, perhaps collaborating with each other at home (the Google Docs has a secure chat room built in) to construct a presentation for when they next get together as a group.

Activboard Tips on iTunes….

Want to have a neat way of getting ideas for using the Activboard! Get the tips and tricks as a podcast!

If you have iTunes installed – you can simply click this link and it will open and go straight to right place!

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=260527899

EDAs and ‘Beaming’ files in class… blending personalised and group learning

I have been having a great few weeks since my last post…

We have immersed ourselves in the ‘mobile learning’ agenda over the Summer break – and armed with two Fujitsu-Siemens EDAs, and a mobile phone with a camera we set out to see what approaches and ideas we could discover that we could apply with the Activboard for when term time came round.

In a previous post we had been discovering ideas for student phones.. but these EDAs really take it to a different level.Some of things we have been doing…

• Setting a series of tasks to do ‘in the field’ – the kids tick ‘em off as they complete them (they loved this and have not tired of it yet!) – and it beats a clipboard and soggy, ripped photocopy sheet anytime in the coolness stakes.
• Interviewing people (audio or video).. default 30 second time limits really focussed the conversation
• Photographing specific things in ‘photo scavenger hunts’,
• Drawing maps and diagrams of ‘real things’!,
• Setting waypoints and points of interest using GPS then estimating and working out distances between places,
• If we were near home or a WiFi hotspot – getting online to use Google maps or to answer questions as they arise… (we now know that Quinine comes from the bark of a tree – courtesy of Wikipedia – as we sat in a restaurant pondering what was it in tonic water that apparently had something to do with preventing malaria and my son says – why not find out now!)

All I would add though – is that the device itself does not magically make them start thinking of things to do with it… It was clear that without guidance and set tasks – kids see little use other than playing ‘Bubble Breaker’… The role of the teacher is most definitely safe! But what was surprising though was how often they were the ones who prompted us when we should use it to solve problems and questions as they arose as we travelled around…. ‘Why not use Google maps’ (when I got lost in the car), ‘why not go online’ – when we were intrigued by a rather bright and colourful caterpillar we found (apparently it was a tussock moth) – The kids were thinking ‘mobile connectivity’ as the norm – I was still having to remind myself!

So back to the Activboard – armed with a memory card full of stuff!

Wow… Bluetooth rocks… if used appropriately!

I have used a Bluetooth slate in the past and was pretty unimpressed with the performance in the classroom - it would suddenly decide to stop working or would have seconds where it would just go really sloooooowwwwww – but clearly the real benefit with Bluetooth is quickly and easily transferring files between devices. Pairing the EDAs to the laptop connected to the activboard was effortless.. and a simple click would see a file beaming its way to the screen.

What really made this so great was sending the incoming files straight to the Promethean Collections folders… When an incoming beam was detected – you are prompted to choose a location – just choose the Documents > Promethean > Activstudio3 > Shared Collections – and everything beamed to the PC can be found in the AS resource library for instant use in flipcharts – neat! The pocket painter app was particularly powerful – kids can create their own drawings, images, concept maps, etc. and simply beam them to the board as images… ready to drag and drop into the lesson.

Of course – with the Activboard working with devices that allows kids to contribute content – a whole new pedagogy is revealed… by beaming work to the board – THEIR work becomes the focus of discussion, group tasks such as making a flipchart magazine become easy – EDAs can get all the image and text work done independently and a few minutes beaming files – and you can organise all the content in a flipchart!

All those Export options in Activstudio suddently come into their own too… save the flipcharts as a powerpoint or PDF and you can view it in alls its glory on the EDA.. Go to Google Maps and focus on an area for a fieldtrip.. annotate a path on it using the activpen in desktop mode and save the combined page as an image – beam it – and on the EDA the kids have a simple map to follow!

The future is not personalised learning, with no class or group work – it has to be a clever blend of these amazing technologies!

Museums go virtual…

 The Exploratorium – a popular museum with a renowned web presence, is moving into the world of Second Life. Forget old fashioned web pages and images banks of artefacts  – this is how kids will explore museums in the future and you can try it out now!

This article about the project says….

“Brick-and-mortar interactive science centers offer fun and educational experiences for visitors of every age. But in a virtual world, many of the constraints of the real world can be overcome, offering experiences that transcend reality. Exploratorium staff members have created just such a space in the massively multi-user, three-dimensional world of Second Life. In the virtual museum called the ‘Splo, we’ve been experimenting with the social, contextual, and educational possibilities of a world in which people can fly through the solar system, scan their own bodies, and change gravity so they can bounce off walls.  In mixed-reality events which combine live media programs with the virtual world, visitors can watch a solar eclipse while sitting next to someone on the other side of the earth.

If you have Second Life installed you can get to the virtual exhibits from the links on their website.

What does this potentially mean for educators and the creation of digital learning resources for classteaching?

As teachers we can sometimes think it is quite cool and sufficient that we can cut and paste an image into a document or browse a website and make a presentation from the things we cut and paste or download …. We have done that for a few years – it works, it is simply what we do… a habit.

But why just ‘present’ when you can actively enter a Virtual Museum and interact directly with the exhibits. A web page or Powerpoint type representation will never match that level of involvement!

If you have an Activboard you can control Second Life all from the Pen – activating the Head Up Display (HUD) provides on screen buttons to move around (no more using the keyboard!) and the Activpen Right Click button and hover functions offer all the function of a mouse necessary to operate the virtual objects.