Tangled up in Purple » ICT_PD

Rest, Recuperation and Resurrection

nix — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:54:52 +0000

My catch of the day at the Huka Falls Prawn Park

A new decade – a new start?

It would be nice to be able to resurrect this space and do some “fun” writing again. The pressures of the last eighteen months have meant that, apart from tiny Twitter-bytes, I haven’t done any real writing about the things that I care about. These holidays have been tagged for a bit of R&R&R – Rest and Recuperation and Resurrection.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing the things that I love. We’ve done a lot of travelling around the place recenttly and I have uploaded a ton of photos to my Flickr account. Visits to Wairoa, Hastings and Wellington have been photographed, tagged and put online. I’m uploading some shots that I took around the lower Kaipara Harbour after an amazing cruise we did on Thursday. There are family photos too.

I’ve been geeking around too. Dropped 500GB hard drives into my laptop and netbook and upgraded them both to Windows 7. I’ve been playing with some Linux and Windows PE live CDs and looking at how these environments can be used in my world. This week I finally got around to setting up some extra network stuff so that our whole house has the right kind of internet access. Benn and I have taken on the task of stripping down all of our old junked computers and sorting out which parts go to TradeMe, which we can use and what just needs to go to someone else to recycle. Our home network is pretty shoddy at the moment – I need to think about placing our equipment more efficiently so that it serves us rather than we serve it.

We bought ourselves a Wii for Christmas and have really enjoyed playing some of the games and activities. The Wii Fit is getting a daily workout too! I’m planning to have a play with the ideas behind the Wiimote Project.

Porthole to history at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea

This year sees a bit of a change in direction for me. I’m going to start my post graduate studies. After several years heavily immersed in the educational ICT arena it’s time to step back and take another look at the world of silicon, ones and zeroes. I’ll still be doing my schools’ tech support work, my websites and looking after my business clients, however, it’s time to get thinking again and to think more widely.

The world of educational ICT is a great place to visit but it’s not the world that I want to stay. There are a lot of amazing thinkers in that world but unfortunately there are also a lot of people who can’t see beyond their own sphere. I think that it’s time for me at least to break out and to see if I can get a wider perspective on things. So that’s what I hope to do this year. I’ll still be on the fringe of the education world but by being outside of the ICT PD network, hopefully I’ll be able to see things with more clarity.

No related posts.

TUANZ

nix — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:15:06 +0000

My first experince at Eden Park was about twenty something years ago. I was a young Mum with a bunch of kids and we were not attending a sporting event. We were however sitting outside in the stands. I vividly remember being whipped around by the cold wind.

Today brought back some memories of that first experience. It’s been pretty wild, wet and windy here in Auckland and that weather has brought chaos to the traffic. It also brought a bit of chaos as we looked for the driest route to the conference breakouts today. At least once in the sessions the rooms were warm and dry!

I particularly enjoyed the keynote speaker’s first breakout session today. Miguel Guhlin’s session was about using opensource tools to create a safe, “walled garden” for teachers and students to collaborate and network. I have been playing with Mambo, Moodle and Elgg recently and Miguel’s work has given me some more ideas to play with.

I think the funniest
moment came late in the day. Like the good conference attendees we all are, several of us stayed for the prize draw. I was sitting next to a teacher who appeared to do some sort of worship maneouver at the first draw. He was repeating his “I never win”, mantra so loudly that I don’t actually think he realised that he had won a prize until the rest of us errupted beside him. Go Owairaka District School! Go Nga Taonga Cluster!

The next prize, the ‘man bag’, went to a teacher from Parakai School (Kirikiri Mangu Cluster) so I was pretty happy about that. Then they did the draw for a copy of Kidspiration. Some one else did the”I never win” mantra (see the photo to the left) and the name of another teacher in the cluster was called. The trouble was that she’d gone home. The mantra started again … and it was … another Owairaka teacher! Fabulous!

I wish I’d remembered my camera – the lighting in the conference hall wasn’t great for the camera phone!

In the mean time here’s one last little gem from the trade’s hall!

Don’tcha just love a good ICT conference?

Need

nix — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:50:56 +0000

I’m working through a half baked concept about learning. Something along the lines of the Just in Time idea.

Last week I absolutely needed a way to import a lot of records into a database. My database skills are legendary – because I have none. I created the tables in Excel and did what I should and tried to import it all into the database. It didn’t work. I tried again. I tried several different ways. Then I decided that I needed some extra help. I emailed the database programme author and over the course of a few emails and a couple of hours he updated the programme so that the data would import properly. Job done.

I was talking to a sounding board about this experience and she said to me that she would have given up at the point where the data didn’t import. I couldn’t afford to give up because I needed to import the data and I needed to get it done efficiently. Time is money and all that.

So what was the difference (tipping point?) – I needed to get the job done.

When I work with teachers and they say … I want to make a movie … I want to make a PowerPoint … I want to do Keynote … I want to learn to make a webpage … sometimes I get just a teensy bit difficult. Because if they want to learn to make a webpage, a movie, a presentation on the off chance that they might use it next term it’s not going to work. They won’t remember how to do it. Framing it inside an existing piece of work or a absolutely have to may just work but that’s not always guarranteed. To learn how to do something – to actually be able to engage with the process and really want to be able to do? it – requires a need. Is this where authenticity steps in?

People often say to me that they envy the ease with which I get around my computer. They should see me with a guitar.

About 35 years ago I ~~asked~~ begged my parents for my first guitar. They got me one of those plywood half size jobs that you give to kids. I think we left it behind when we moved to New Zealand. Shift forward about six or seven years and I remember buying an ancient nylon stringed guitar through an advert in the Hawkes bay Herald Tribune. I read every book in the Hastings Library and attempted to teach myself to play the thing. I got to a D and and A7 but I could change between the two. Not with any degree of accuracy or speed anyway.

Move forward another few years and I had another el cheapo second hand guitar. I took some lessons and actually mastered a 12 bar blues progression. I could even do a B7. But those damned barre chords threw me.

I managed to get a beautiful steel stringed guitar and some of the elusive barre chords fell into place. My guitar teacher gave me quite a bit of help to get my head and fingers around some other guitar sounds and I could throw out some passable renditions of some of my favourite music.
After that beautiful guitar disappeared from my life a few years ago (left in a classroom, lifted by a stranger – I will probably never know ) I occasionaly stummed an old cheapie that floated around the house.

I bought a new acoustic electric last year and took some more lessons but I’ve never really got back to being able to play like I used to. Now I stumble my way through a set playlist, occasionally scouring the interweb for the chords for the latest radio tune. I can play just enough to amuse my self but not enough to satisfy myself.

Half baked post about Just in Time? I don’t even think this one made any where near the oven!

Yesterday’s Post …

nix — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:16:50 +0000

… was written when I showed some teachers how easy it is to use WordPress (or a similar application) to keep a website up to date. Specifically an interactive school website. Far away from the traditional website that gets designed, half built and never updated (because the geeky teacher moves on or into other things) a school site based on blog software comes alive and gets messages out. Sure, have a static front page if you want! But consider a site that is as dynamic as the school that it represents.

We had a bit of an all sorts day yesterday. We went back to our cluster philosophy and looked at our mission statement and also at our key vision:

Footprints into the future

Our vision statement encompasses so much of the essence of our ICT_PD cluster. We want learning to stick like the black sand out at Muriwai; we want to develop our leaders and chart a course through the tides; we want to feel the sands of ideas between our toes; and we want to have fun in the sandpit.

Our lead teachers are a crazy bunch of people. They sat around in silence getting their heads around Centre4, our online environment. Then they let rip in the chatroom and blogs. We are going to have an excellent year with some very out-side-the-box-people.

Lead Teacher Programme

nix — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:34:24 +0000

We’re at Wainui School today, looking at our cluster programme for 2006. Related posts: TUANZ Yesterday’s Post … Celebrate! Related posts:

Celebrate!

nix — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:56:58 +0000

I wore my brand new thinkgeek.com t-shirt today. It said, “I’m blogging this.” And so I am.

The six schools in our ICT PD (Information and Communication Technology Professional Development) cluster got together tonight to show off some of the things that we’ve been doing, thinking and learning about this year.

The teachers in the schools showed off Powerpoints and movies, Kidpix slideshows and lots of examples of what the kids had been doing.

The best thing was hearing the words … thinking … process … ideas. And those words came before skills!

Our kids are much better at making movies than we are. They are heaps better at Powerpoints (mind you, watching those transitions, I have to wonder ). They are so much more on to IT. But, every step along the way, I heard the moderation voices of the proud teachers. They showed off the kids work and said, “this is the process, this is the thinking.”

I just loved it.

But wait, there’s more.

Mark Treadwell came along as our invited speaker and he talked about the “media-tion” of society today. I always enjoy listening to Mark and he made some excellent points. He talked about our kids having access to so many new ideas and technologies, but still needing the filters to sort everything out. He talked about sharing our learning with the extended members of our communities – even, shock horror, the parents .

So, been to the cluster celebration. Got the t-shirt. I blogged this.

Waioneke