walled gardens

It has been a long time since the last entry here, and that’s probably just because it has largely been business as usual, ie the usual mixture of success, frustration and things being just about ok. So what has that mixture of experience taught us? Well, at the risk of being unsurprising, that, to be useful, a classroom device needs to be …..

….. fast. It needs to boot up immediately. No hesitations. Just press the button, and we’re up and running. So we’re into SSD territory there, then.

….. robust. It will be knocked about a bit, let’s be honest. And if it can’t put up with a bit of rough and tumble, it’s not going to do well in a school environment.

….. reliable. It just needs to work. And carry on working, no questions asked. And no IT support, even legendary übertechnicians, having to pop by most lessons.

….. long lasting. That means a more than decent battery life between charges. So no need for chargers plugged in in the classroom, with wires stretched across that gap that Mr C will inevitably try to squeeze through, ripping the plug from the socket.

….. simple. To do most of the things you actually want to do in a lesson or for homework, you don’t actually need many, indeed any, bells and whistles. Most activity will be done online.

….. integrated. And this is the key one. The more experience we get under our belts, and the more I reflect on it, the more I come to believe that the device must be integrated into a structure, into an ecosystem. We’re talking Google, iCloud or Amazon here. Possibly Office 365. It pains me to say so, as I hate the way these big outfits try to tie you into their particular brand of straitjacket, to lure you into their own little walled garden, but I suspect that this may have to be the price we pay to get the simplicity and dependability that an educational context demands.

Grudgingly, therefore, I feel I am going to have to look at the various merits of Chrome books, iPads and the like. Sigh.

happy ending

The tension has been unbearable, emotions have been running high, but I am pleased to report that the happy ending posited (if with a good measure of optimism) in the last post has indeed materialised.

Thanks again to the legend that is our übertechnician, access to the mail server has been restored. Don’t ask me how, I just know that it has. The solution to our other issue, not being able to access Acrobat.com on the team’s netbooks, was frankly a bit weird. The problem seemed, according to intensive research and testing, to be confined to those specific netbooks and seemed to be related to IE8, the browser installed on them.

The answer? Download the Google Chrome browser, and all is back in working order. Mr Übertech stopped me in School today and asked if I was happy. And yes, I think I am, I replied. For the moment, anyway.

brick wall

Yes, sometimes it does feel like our heads are up against a brick wall. Nobody’s fault, really, but there are times when the technology just seems to want to impede what we are triying to do (ie learn German) rather than facilitate the process.

The IT guys, to their credit and no doubt ultimate beatification, have been, and are, brilliant. They, and here we particularly mean übertechnician Joe Muscat, are ever prepared to set aside more important things to rush to the classsroom in which we are having our latest crisis.

The most recent of these seems to have been a side effect of changes to the wireless network in School and has left us without access to Acrobat.com. Bit of a problem, that, as all the team’s work lives there.

Will there be a happy ending? You will have to weait for the next episode to find out.

everything is broken

Now it’s not entirely true that the title of this post is just an excuse to mention Ben Sidran’s very different and very amazing version of the Bob Dylan song of that name. But it is mostly true, so here is the link. Enjoy.

However, something is indeed broken. Namely the netbook as used by one of the team. Suffice it to say that, following a relatively minor incident in another lesson, the screen on the netbook is a goner and the whole machine is write-off. The moral of the story is that it doesn’t take much, and that a netbook is a tad pricier than an exercise book.

Another lesson learned on this little journey of ours.

 

testing

Now, it is well known that one of the beefs that I have with our education system is that our assessments – GCSE and A level, for instance – are largely paper based. This means that, however imaginative and reflective of the real working environment we might be through use of technology in our teaching and learning, our students end up pushing a pen in the ultimate test of what they have done. That can’t be right.

So it is with a guilty conscience and a due sense of irony that I have to report that our recent unit test was – whisper it only – paper based. And all because MR C couldn’t find the time to ensure it wasn’t. Oh the shame of it!

wirelessless

No, not a typo. Rather a statement of the position we found ourselves in during our last lesson of the half term. For some reason the wireless network went down and we were left without a connection. As it happens, it was a lesson when quite a few vocabulary notes needded to be written up. Ouch. There was a division in the team’s response to this, either good old paper or the installed version of OneNote. Either way, some copying up will be required. Just as well we never expected it to be easy, this paper-free malarkey.

onenote

Following on from the reservations expressed in the last post about the effectiveness of the web-based version of OneNote, we have, well, still got reservations. Just doesn’t seem to work too brilliantly, with the cursor sometimes having a mind of its own about where it wants to be within the text being typed in.

So today I had to venture into the IT department, cap in hand, and ask if we could install OneNote, the real live full-fat version, onto the team’s netbooks. It will still have all the advantages of online saving, sharing and so on, but might just work better. Roll on Friday when the install is booked.

slow

There are times when doing things the hi-tech way is actually slower than more old fashioned methods. Things like pen and paper, for example. And today seemed to be one of those times, when a fairly simple task, such as taking a few notes about gender in  German, ended up occupying too great a share of our precious 50 minutes.

Not that it was technology per se that was to blame, but rather that the web-based OneNote app (a) just seemed to be rather sluggish, and (b) started to do strange and confusing things with the on-screen cursor. Not on my netbook, as it happens, but on the other team members’ machines. Is it just an Acer thing? Or was using the online OneNote app not such a good idea after all?

unplugged

Unplugged. Well, that’s the only way to be truly mobile, isn’t it? And our little Acers (and my little Gigabyte) can be just that for quite a few hours, as it happens. Provided, of course, they start off fully charged. So, another lesson in the blindingly obvious to be learned by one of the team in our most recent lesson. No names, no pack drill. Just remember to plug it in the night before!

where’s your book?

Or rather, where’s your netbook? As I had to ask one of the team today.

Is it worse when a student leaves their netbook at home rather than if they had forgotten the books it replaces?

I think it probably is. Sure, you can share a screen just as you can a textbook, but somehow writing up vocabulary notes on paper to transfer later into Excel just negates the whole principle of being paper-free.