Had some negative opinions expressed today when I raised the possibility of going to a DER PL session. It is increasingly becoming obvious that the digital divide is causing a large amount of angst amongst some staff and this is exposing itself as anger against the provision of new technology that will upset the status quo.

How do I convince / cajole someone who believes that laptops will have absolutely no benefit for his class and does not want to even open his mind. Hmmmm…. a challenge. I don’t want to just give up on one of my best Mathematics teachers!

As the rollout to students at our school moves closer those with their heads in the sand are realising that it will actually happen soon! HELP!

As most of my staff are digital immigrants (not yet arrived!) they claim that it is useless to teach them a software program (e.g. GeoGeBra) when they won’t use it for several months – they will forget it. On a more positive note – one of the faculty who was issued with a T1 laptop used it today for the first time with a projector to show the Yr 12 class past examiner comments!

Any suggestions that are left of centre would be greatly appreciated

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!