Gone Fishing

One of the great things about teaching in Greenwood, Wisconsin, has to be our outdoor classroom. I grew up surrounded by forests as a kid—named trees, watched birds, and fished in rivers. When Greenwood Elementary was built, an administrator with some forethought fenced off a small pond, planted some fruit trees and allowed the area to go wild. Protected by the fences from deer, a nearly perfect example of Wisconsin wilderness exists right behind our playground.

Went fishing with my students the other day in our little pond. Now that springtime has sprung, our little patch of wilderness is home to a brood of ducklings, a great blue and small green heron, a clutch of rabbits, a red fox, a few kingfishers, and more noisy warblers and testy red-winged blackbirds than can be counted. We made fishing rods out of sticks, used bent pins as hooks and hot dogs as bait. Before long we pulled in dozens of bullhead cats and one very upset turtle. I know that I am a technology teacher, but there are days when I am glad to be unplugged.

Please note: You can now find me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/LeeBriggsTech

Skype

Skype is the most popular teleconferencing platform in the world. Developed by (allegedly) former online media pirates, Skype is seen as an alternative to long distance calling, providing free voice and video communication over the internet from anywhere in the world. In the past few years it has exploded, to the point that I spent last Christmas at my in-laws as they received video call after video call from family in Trinidad, Florida, and England.

Skype is behind most of the live news broadcasts that you see from remote areas of the world. Anyone with an iPod and an Internet connection can connect in real time to anyone else.

What are the educational advantages to Skype? How about connecting with a teacher in Peru during a unit on South America? Have your students talk—really talk—to their students. Have your class and their class do a math lesson together. Have wireless? Take the other class for a field trip around the school. While we are the subject of field trips, why not have ‘embedded reporters’ in your class report to another grade, live from their field trip?

How do you connect to these schools? Since becoming more mainstream, Skype has set up an education portal designed to allow teachers to connect with one another and collaborate using teleconferencing. Just make sure to clear it with your district’s tech support first; Skype is blocked by most filters, and modifications might need to be made for teacher use.

Finding Great iPad Apps

The iPad is an amazing device. If you don’t have one, it’s hard to describe what having one is like; the closest thing I can think of is what life was like when [the Internet/cell phones/wi-fi/automatic transmissions/wheels] first came out. You have those yet to make the switch wondering what the fuss is about, and those who made the switch wondering how they ever did without it.

I believe that this will be the case for schools in the next few years. Apple is betting on it with its educational push, and schools are doing their best to figure out best practices for these devices. What kinds of activities do we want to support? How will we authenticate and distribute purchases? In their own way, each distinct seems to be answering these nuts and bolts questions. But it’s all just so new! And finding educational resources for the iPad, while not impossible, is often a slow process. You can wade through dozens of apps; some are good, some not so good.

Which is why it was great to find this site. The author lays out 14 best practices for the use of the iPad and includes a shopping list of apps that help meet those needs. Each one is reviewed briefly and labeled in terms of difficulty. After mucking around in what passes for an education department in the App Store, it is nice to see something put together by a teacher that lays everything out so clearly. Thank you, good sir!

Futurecade and the Science Museum

I got a chance to play with a really nice set of games created by the Science Museum in England. They have developed a set of really fun games called Futurecade. Some of these games are based some of the real problems of the future. For example, removing land mines using robot drones you have to program (dealing with the real issue of mine removal) or creating strains of e-coli that can clean up oil spills. Others involve teaching genetics by having students care for, nurture, and breed ‘Things’ in the game Thingdom.

Many educational games are little more than regular arcade-style games with some math facts thrown in. These games were created to promote issues in math and science, but also to develop thinking and problem-solving. These could easily be adapted to lessons on global warming, energy, genetics, food distribution, and natural resources. What really makes them great is the optimism that science can solve these seemingly overwhelming problems, and that they allow your students to stand in the shoes of the problem solvers of tomorrow. Good thing too, since they will have to fill that role in the future.

Hear That, Kids? It’s the Sound of My Mind, Blowing.

I am teaching my sixth grade students conversions from the customary system (inches, feet, miles, cups, ounces) to the metric system (liters, centimeters, grams) and for these kids it is a pretty hard sell. In my classroom, the metric system is condemned because it is associated with an object of universal hatred: My Toyota. I then explain that Canada uses the metric system and if any of them want to go fishing or hunting there they are going to need to know what a kilometer is. Teaching in the country is full of these kinds of accommodations.

The hardest part of teaching the metric system is that most of these kids don’t have any concept of how big a centimeter is, or how far a kilometer is. They don’t have a reference for it. They often make the argument that the customary system is fine; after all, aren’t fractions of an inch small enough? Why do we need to measure anything bigger than a mile?

I found a website that puts all of these arguments to task: The Scale of the Universe 2

The Scale of the Universe is a neat little Flash app. Zoom in and it shows you the smallest things in the universe—smaller than atoms, smaller than electrons—and their metric measurements.

That's tiny.

Zoom out, and it shows you humans and animals. Zoom out even further than it shows you planets, stars, and eventually the size of the observable universe.

That's huge.

In minutes you can compare the size of a person to a bacteria and the united states to the moon, and our sun to the galaxy.

There are many fantastic applications for this tool, but the one I used was this: Look at all the important things smaller than an inch. At some point fractions of an inch become too complicated and fail you. Miles are even worse. Try using miles to measure the distance to Alpha Centuri, our nearest star, and the numbers are truly astronomical. No, the metric system is shown to be useful because the same measurement is used for all of these things and it works.

Give this website a spin. It’s a…humbling experience.

Brilliant BBC

I am a huge BBC nerd. My wife and I watch episodes of “Top Gear” every Sunday when we have our pancakes and I am eagerly awaiting the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special. (Last year had a flying shark. This year they parody Narnia!)

But our friends across the pond have also made some fantastic educational resources that could add a lot to your classroom, provided that your students don’t giggle at the accents like my students did.

Learn a language: The BBC provides lots of great language lesson for free, they make a great tool for students wanting to work on their own or as a supplement for an foreign language course.

Learn to type: A great (but personally annoying; make sure your kids have headphones) website for learning to touch type, Dance Mat Typing teaches students to type using funny songs and typing lessons that work similar to Guitar Hero or Dance, Dance Revolution.

Know the news: The BBC World Service is a national recognized source of quality journalism.  They also produce a short, daily podcast that updates schoolchildren on world events.  A great way to start the day and serve as a global current events.

Bedtime stories: The BBC produces a great children’s program called CBeebies. Part of the show, called ‘The Bedtime Hour,’ involves acclaimed actors (including the 10th Doctor, David Tennant) reading bedtime stories in the manner of Reading Rainbow, but incredibly relaxing. Search YouTube for “CBeebies Bedtime Stories” to see these delightful clips.

Fun With Hyperlinking

I am running into a problem with my technology classes. The problem is that I have had my current sixth grade students for three years straight now. Three years where technology has been a priority in their education. In those three years I have managed to teach them quite a bit about the Big Four: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and the internet. Finding ways to keep things fresh has been a challenge for these kids.

One way I am overcoming this is to try and boost the creativity that I am asking of my students. Instead of my old lessons that focused on teaching a skill objectively and out of context, I am instead teaching them a skill and letting them run with it.

Take PowerPoint, for example. I hate PowerPoint because it tends to suck the creativity right out of a presentation, especially if all the presenter does is read what is on the slide. Instead, I had my students use hyperlinking in PowerPoint to link one slide to another, basically making a boring presentation into an interactive game. This hopefully teaches my students how to make a more interesting presentation, teach them what a hyperlink does and provides groundwork for computer programming, something I hope to introduce them to later this year.

Here are a few examples of ‘games’ created using PowerPoint.

Could You Be a Zombie? (PDF)

How Well Do You Know Mr. Briggs? (PDF)

Let’s Take a Starwalk

I held my second astronomy night last Thursday, and despite a table giving way and causing two gallons of hot cider to spill, everything went very well. The massive 8-inch cannon of a telescope, on loan from our local CESA cooperative, gave us great views of Jupiter and its four moons. The fancy (i.e., complicated) telescope that I purchased last year gave us good views of the moon and my two smaller (i.e., a lot simpler to aim) telescopes gave us views of the Galaxy in Andromeda and the Great Cluster in Hercules.

But the real star of the night (pun intended) were the two iPads that Scott Schiller and I had on hand. The app Starwalk was heavily featured in the original iPad commercials and for good reason: It’s fantastic. Hold it up to the sky and it shows you in real time what constellation you are looking at. Do the pinch-zoom thing and you can see deep-sky objects visible in your telescope. Adjust the clock, and you know what will be visible in a few minutes or a hundred years from now.

My students and their parents huddled around the screens looking up at the sky at stars they had always seen but never known the names of. The real fun happened, as predicted by Starwalk, at exactly 7:36pm. That was when the International Space Station flew overhead as a bright orange spot in the sky, it and its three astronauts flying cruising at 18,000 MPH. My students and their parents were in awe as it cruised by. Its square shape could be made out through binoculars. Exactly 7:42, as predicted by Starwalk, it passed again under the horizon.

Keep it Simple

I am head of the Elementary School Science Club in Greenwood and this week we started one of my favorite units: computers.

The goal of this unit is to show students the overall theory of how computers work. Many of these kids don’t see the computer as anything special anymore; it’s an appliance like a lamp or a toaster that simply works. The concepts of hardware, software, memory, and RAM are all lost on them. The best way to show kids how computers work is similar to teaching them how an engine works: take it apart, rebuild it, and make it work better than before.

Last year I did this for the first time and nearly tore my hair out. I had two pretty well-equipped machines, older but not ancient, and I loaded them up with the excellent Ubuntu brand of Linux. Now, Ubuntu runs like a dream on newer computers, has great components, installs quickly, and if I were so inclined I could probably cut the cord and use it day to day if it were not for a few Windows/Mac holdout applications. That said, these older machines are now, well, old. Period. Two even OLDER machines were then donated by our music teacher, who wanted the computers retired and put to good use. A whole wall of my classroom looks like a junkyard.

As it happens, all four computers are too slow to load Ubuntu. I tried a few alternatives, but most Linux installs are very complicated (at least for me) and require you to know at least some code. I don’t know code. I don’t have time to learn, and expecting that from my students is crazy. Luckily, I discovered this man’s best friend: Puppy Linux.

As its name implies, Puppy is very small and very friendly—129 MB in all. It installs onto a CD or flash drive very easily. Then, just insert your disk, reboot your machine, and within five seconds (really, it’s that fast) you have a slick little operating system complete with web browser, word processor, spreadsheet software, and even a few multimedia programs and games. And it does this all WITHOUT INSTALLING OR ERASING ANYTHING! Any changes or new software you add are put on the nearest disk (hard drive, flash drive, or CD) in a hidden file without affecting your main OS.

Good Puppy.

Everything is very, very easy to use—easy enough for my 5^th graders to go it alone and learn the ropes of what an OS does. All the network settings are easy to find and we managed to get our proxy settings and a new browser installed in a few minutes. I found myself excited over a yellowed, 10-year-old tower; in short, this amazing OS really breathes new life into old machines, making them great again.

One student took a disk home; she and her mother got it running on her laptop, connected it to wireless, and checked mom’s Facebook. Two boys who live only for tractors and hunting are excited by installing network printers. One even wants to see if he can use Puppy Linux to fix up his grandma’s computer.

Here’s what my students had to say:

“Some of the computers were slow, but we got them to run. It was surprising that all that could run off of one little disk.”

“I asked my mom if I could try something, and she said ‘Sure, just don’t break anything.’  I had some trouble at first, but my dad helped and when we restarted, it worked.”

Puppy can be used to teach computers to students, or to refurbish an old lab with a basic browser/word processing setup. I am a Mac user now, full of smugness over the stability of my machine; but seriously, if I still had a PC I would keep a Puppy disk around just in case I got a virus or the machine died on me. Within a few minutes, I could pull off my files and check my email using this adorable life raft of an OS. If you want to have a little geeky fun, download this Puppy. It is a great way to explore Linux without compromising your machine.

Join.me

I spend a lot of my time in our school’s computer lab teaching students the ins and outs of how to get the most out of their tools. Often, I have to demonstrate how to perform different skills on the computer and I have found that there are three ways to accomplish this.

The first is to somehow describe perfectly what you want the students to click on or do. This is very difficult, mostly because it involves describing clicking one icon of hundreds, usually by saying something like, “Click on the little arrow pushing a bunch of lines. That’s your increase indent button.” I avoid it when I can because often, it means having most of my students getting hopelessly lost.

The second is to have a projector in the room. This is slightly better, but it still means that your students’ attention is in two places, on their own screen and on yours, and they can’t always see the projection screen.

This leads me to the best option of all, which is screen sharing. There are whole classes of programs that usually operate over networks that allow you to do this, basically either take over a whole lab of computers or demonstrate to whole labs. Many of these programs require installation on a host machine and viewers installed on every other computer in the lab. Many of them are also very expensive because they try to do too much. They demonstrate, administer, oversee and share files throughout your lab—basically making you the all-powerful overlord of your lab (moo who ha ha).

We have such an installation in one of our computer labs, and I would not mind having it installed on all my machines, but price and the complexity of the install get in the way of that. However, I recently came upon a great solution for teachers, a service called join.me.

Join.me is not the first screen sharing service out there; others such as GoToMeeting have been out there for a while. Others might note that setting up a VNC or remote desktop system has always been an option as well. But join.me is extremely easy to use. I timed a machine and it took only 40 seconds to get to the site, run the helper program, and start sharing.

Sharing screens the easy way.

Install is a snap; run a small host viewer on your demonstration machine and it gives you an Internet address for anyone who would like to see what is on your screen. That’s it. Your students just type in that address and they see your screen from their browser.

Included in the free version is the ability to send your files and chat with your students. The pro version gives you a personal address and the ability to have students switch with you and present to the rest of the class. So far, I have used it to demonstrate to my class, but the control sharing feature would also allow students to ‘come up the board’ and interact with the screen that everyone else is seeing.