Well since I wrote my initial posts a lot has changed.

• Three members of my faculty (myself included) have had a laptop since the last week of Term 3 in the initial T1 rollout.
• WAP have been installed in parts of the school – but as yet are not working
• We have commenced working through using laptops training as provided by DET (DET Only – I think!)
• The Maths staff have started on the online GeoGeBra training course as provided by DET. (DET Only)

However some things also haven’t changed. There is still a large element of fear (in my faculty and generally) of the introduction of laptops and the impact that this will have in our classrooms.  More often than not this fear is expressed as denial – “I’m not going to use laptops – they won’t help my teaching at all”, or as an excuse “I can’t start teaching with laptops until the department provides all teachers with one”.

While I agree that it certainly would be better if ALL staff had laptops before the students so as to facilitate skills acquisition and good will, it simply is not going to happen.  In fact Dianne Marshall explained the financial reasons at the North Coast ICT conference the other day – it is linked to the financial year spending of DET as the teacher laptops are funded through the state and not the Commonwealth DER project. As educators we NEVER have the perfect environment in which to perform our duties. Sure we should always aim for the best, but have to have coping mechanisms to deal with the actual reality. Simply refusing affects our students far more than attempting in less than perfect circumstances. – End of rant

The wireless install has been fraught with glitches. Some of the information that has been passed on to our network administrator and the Head of the ICT committee by the contractors is just wrong.  Thank you to the DET online communities and Tweeps for passing me the correct information. We needed to locate our new box approximately 20 metres from the Campus Distributor – and put in the adjustment paperwork prior to install. Conduit was run to enable the two boxes to be connected.  When the IBM guys turned up 3 weeks ago to hook them up, they only had the short leads, then proceeded to spend 3 hours arguing with the network administrator that the new box and the Campus distributor would communicate with each other wirelessly! Needless to say eventually they realised that this was not the case and left….. 3 weeks ago.

On a more positive note, like many schools CHHS had only 2 of 4 building distributors with optic fibre cabling, with one BD (that serves Maths & TAS) a run of over 110m of Cat 5.  However as part of our 7.5 million Capital Works Project the Maths faculty has just taken possession of 2 new classrooms – and the Cat 5 cable that supplied the BD was replaced with Optic Fibre!   I will post some pictures of our new classrooms later!

A lack of available LAN connections in our staff rooms means that the majority of T1 rollout users have not connected at school (only at home) and subsequently the copies of Windows are now past the 30 day trial – annoying but still functional. It will take considerable time before the teachers at my school are taking responsibility for their own PL in non-school hours, there is still a common opinion that this should all occur 9 – 3 and the amount of upskilling that is required WILL NOT be possible during these hours. I have already dedicated 1 Maths Faculty Meeting to the GeoGeBra introductory course.

But I do agree with Stu Hasic – DER NSW is an awesome accomplishment thus far and it has only just begun.

Step 1 – Join.

This doesn’t work at school – Twitter is blocked. You have to join at home. I will explain later how to tweet at school.

Go to http://twitter.com Join – create a username that identifies who you are. Make sure that your profile allows someone to get to know you a bit – e.g. Maths Educator with an interest in technology (or whatever). Don’t protect your tweets, or noone will know to follow you (counter productive for a social network)

Step 2 – Sign in.
Then find people to follow – a good place to start is to follow someone you know is already on Twitter. I am SimonBorgert there is another Maths Teacher SimonJob Once you started following a couple of people look at who they follow or reply to – it gives you other people to follow as well.

Step 3 – Start tweeting.

This is where you say what you are doing in 140 characters or less. BUT for educators this is more about the sharing E.g. “Just found this really cool website http://gooogle.com“. If someone tweets something that you like you can either favorite it – or retweet it (that is where it is rebroadcast to your network). Follow more people. The @SimonBorgert stuff is where someone is replying to a user. Start replying to people that you like what they are saying. Then they will start following you.

Step 4 - To tweet from school. If you already have an IGoogle page there is a Twitter Gadget. Otherwise goto http://tweetree.com/ and sign in with your username and password.

Some Useful Links

http://www.twitterforeducators.com/

http://onlinecollegedegree.org/2009/03/19/100-tips-apps-and-resources-for-teachers-on-twitter/

An interesting compelation of tweet about the DER with suggestions for teachers (back when it was called L4L) from @darcy1968 a DP on the South Coast
http://darcymoore.net/2009/05/31/the-best-of-l4l-advice/

This last link is from @lasic on twitter
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14062777/Twitter-Handbook-for-Teachers

I will put all of this on my blog http://simonborgert.edublogs.org

Enjoy happy tweeting!

For those of you who haven’t played with Wolfram|Alpha it is a great new concept in search engines with a very worthy goal

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.

While much of the information has a decidly US centric vent it is still possible to discover some interesting information – watch the introductory video for ideas. Other people have also been blogging about it’s potential impact in education http://slav.globalteacher.org.au/2009/05/19/wolfram-alpha/

As I delved a bit deeper it became immediately apparent that it will easily function as a free CAS (Computer Algebra System) and give worked solutions to almost all routine Mathematics homework problems and you can bet as soon as the kids have discovered this is the case they will be using it. Just as many teachers in other subjects prefered setting assignments BG (before Google) because at least the students needed to read the information they were plagiarising (as they were copying it word by word from the encyclopedia), I think that Wolfram|Alpha will have the same impact on Mathematics tasks.  I know that CAS have been available for a while now – but they have not been as easily accessible or free.

For example I am currently setting a homework assignment for a NSW 2 Unit Mathematics class studying Linear Functions. Typical question that might be asked are sketch . Normally a student would have to find the x intercept and the y intercept, then sketch – a key skill that the question is assessing. However those less capable students could get this from W|A

Or if the student was asked to find the point of intersection of 2 lines
they would normally have to solve them simultaneously then sketch both lines labeling key points (once again key concepts the question is designed to assess) . Or from W|A the simultaneous solutions

and then the lines can be plotted as in the first example.

Mind you both of these simple examples can be solved in GeoGebra (free software being included on the Laptops being issued to all students in NSW 9 -12) see below

These are only trivial examples (relevant to what I am covering right now!) and are no different to issues arising from the introduction of graphics calculators in other systems (NSW does not currently allow them in 2 Unit or Extension Mathematics).  However W|A is capable of far more complex interations for example a typical Extension 2 question normally a case for integration by parts which W|A gives as:

Full working and everything!

Of course student understanding of these key concepts will still be able to be assessed using in-class tests, but it is obvious that simple drill and practice homework assignments will most likely be solved by time-poor students using technology – why wouldn’t you?  (Typical student note to conscience – “I understand and I’ll practice it later-  I’ve just got to get to work and earn money right now and the assignment is due tommorow”)

However it is not all bad!  In fact I am very keen to investigate further how Wolfram|Alpha can be used to enhance student learning of Mathematics in the same way that some (rich?) schools have used Mathematica (the big brother of Wolfram|Alpha) See http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/BySubject/Education/Precollege/ for some examples.

So as Mathematics teachers do we bury our head in the sand for a while and hope that the students don’t discover these powerful tools until later, then attempt to adjust our tasks accordingly?  Not this little black duck I’m going on the front foot and showing my students what these tools can do for them (if I can get a room with internet connection tomorrow!) and putting the Wolfram|Alpha search bar on the blog I maintain for my students

As for the Linear Functions assignment for my 2 Unit class – looks like it is back to the drawing board so I had better stop procrastinating. But it is clear – the days of traditional drill and practice homework are over!

I like this idea from Dean Grooms blog

‘Team teaching’ in the classroom (with or without an expert mentor) –  supports and allows peer observation in authentic settings. This strategy provides focus on practice, techniques and student behaviour through observation and reflective notes. It might be a focus on the way students are given instruction; they type of instruction; the time management of activities; the type of questions being asked or reactions to events. Secondly, agree some facets of their teaching that they feel they want to work on with technology. Agree some element of the class that they wish to try-out. 10 minute activities are great for focusing practice and student attention. So in an hour, 15 minutes is given to the newcomer trying out agreed methods and techniques.”

Introducing a mentor system for teachers would be of great benefit and is possibly the easiest way to support teachers that are fearful of a 1:1 laptop programme. I know that at our school we have funds set aside for team building – perhaps they could be utilised as a carrot to encourage this spirit of cooperation. It could even be extended across schools using collegiate groups.

Any volunteers?

There are several things that must be considered regarding L4L before the actual planning of specifics can start. The most obvious is: when are our students actually going to get the laptops? Will all Year 9 teachers have laptops at this stage? Will there be network/internet access in the staffroom for those teachers with laptops? Will there be network/Internet access in all the Maths classrooms for the teachers? Will there be network/internet access in the classrooms for all the students? What access to projection devices will there be for teachers? How do I inspire a somewhat techno-phobic Mathematics staff that this is all a good idea?

This post will look these issues in some detail as they relate to the circumstances of my Department, but hopefully they will allow other people to reflect and solve issues prior to them becoming a hindrance to the actual implementation of L4L.

Laptop Rollout Issues

This information is taken from the L4L intranet site today.

Staff Rollout: July 22 laptops in initial rollout
Student Rollout: August

There are 6 Year 9 Mathematics classes that all run at the same time – thus my department would need 6 laptops from the initial rollout (7 if you include me – I take a Year 9 class once a fortnight). However I have heard rumours that there is also going to be a discretionary allocation of laptops to schools initially, and it would certainly be our intention to issue these to teaching staff to enable them to familiarise themselves. Lets hope that the teacher rollout is before the school holidays start on 10 July as this would allow staff to “play” with their machines over the holidays and for the staff day at the commencement of Term 3 to be dedicated to Professional Learning on the Laptop.

The end of August is Week 6 Term 3, so for curriculum planning this is when we will plan for first implementation of laptop based activities.

Network Connection Issues

The L4L programme incorporates a wireless network rollout to all learning spaces in every eligible NSW school – eventually. The wireless installer visited our school last week but as yet the L4L wireless rollout schedule has our date as TBC.  From everything I have read the initial wireless installation will be in one central space to be followed up by other spaces later (potentially by the start of Term 2, 2010). In our school the Mathematics department is definitely not central – so we won’t be in the first rollout. However there are bigger issues for us initially. Every classroom at our school has a network point – except for the 4 existing Mathematics classrooms. In fact the switch on the network that services our staffroom is at the end of a 105m length of CAT5 network cable, and is not reliable.

Fortunately there are currently 2 new Mathematics classrooms being constructed that will have network points (and IWB’s!) albeit running from the same switch. Our staffroom currently has 7 staff, 2 desktops, my personal laptop and 3 network points. Obviously we need to ensure that all staff have internet and network access in the staffroom as soon as they receive their laptops. My current thinking is that this may be possible through installing a wireless router on one of the network points as an interim measure. I am also considering installing a wireless access point in one of the new classrooms to service the other 4 classrooms for teacher use only.

As part of the wireless rollout it will be necessary to install fibre-optic cable to the switch servicing our office which will alleviate many of the reliability issues. But at this stage we can’t really count on student access until Term 2 2010. Hopefully the above measures will allow teacher access almost immediately

Projection Issues

Currently the Mathematics Department has 1 multimedia projector. At the commencement of Term 3 we will have two new classrooms fitted with Interactive Whiteboards (Yes I am excited!). There is access to one other projector in the school (but this will possibly be in high demand). In my experience it is almost impossible to teach students with Laptops (in most cases) without having some form of projection device. Short term is that I will try to purchase another projector with Departmental funds (and look at ways of ensuring 1in every room ASAP) and to organise a roster system for the rooms with IWB’s and the departmental projector.

Inspiring staff?

So far the best I have come up with is to believe in the L4L programme myself and to take every opportunity to spruke it! (Not quite a SHOUTY ad, though). I am hoping that involving all the Year 9 teachers in the process and supporting whatever Professional Learning needs they have will help.  The Mathematics staff at CHHS are very cautious in their approach to “new” things, until a real benefit is seen they are generally not implemented. Thus it is essential for all aspects of this process to have a real value. Hopefully my reflections on this blog will be of assistance to them as well.

The primary objective of this blog is to document the journey that the Coffs Harbour High School Mathematics Department will have to undertake to be prepared for the onslaught that will be students with laptops in a few short months.

Our Maths department is filled with experienced teachers who work very hard to ensure all student achieve their best results. We are by all accounts a “traditional” Mathematics Department – which by no means is a negative as supported by a recent Mid North Coast Math’s teachers day at which Professor John Pegg presented some of the findings of the AESOP Project http://www.une.edu.au/simerr/pages/projects/3aesop.php that justified the “traditional” approach.  The majority of the staff in the Department are tentative in their use of technology and perhaps even fearful of the implicaitons of a 1-1 laptop programme. I, (the new Head Teacher in 2009) have worked in a 1 -1  laptop school in Victoria, and a school that issued staff with Tablet PC’s for use in the classroom.

At at recent Central Cluster (Mid North Coast) Mathematics Head Teachers Collegiate Meeting some of the issues surrounding L4L were raised – and I volunteered to set up an online discussion forum using our schools Moodle Installation http://www.coffsharbourhighschool.com/moodle/course/view.php?id=22

feel free to visit as a guest and post and contribute – if you are interested in having a profile contact me and I’ll organise it!

There has also been lots of discussion on Twitter about the rollout of laptops and some good blog posts

Darcey Moore’s 10 things a faculty can do
http://deangroom.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/policy-and-risk-in-11-laptops/

In the second part I will start to discuss ideas regarding planning based on our Maths sequence.