Yahoo – what’s up?

Blanche from TVNZ flicked through this link today (20 February 2009) from www.yahoo.co.nz

Most popular searches

• Speights Coast to Coast
• Jetstar
• Mathletics
• Top Gear
• Air New Zealand

More from Yahoo!Xtra Search

The Human Calculator

I was privileged to meet Scott Flansburg aka the Human Calculator this week in Sydney.

I was not only impressed by his mathematical abilities but also his skill at communicating his concepts to audiences, whether they were students, teachers or our group of skilful programmers.

Scott has also announced that he is joining 3P Learning’s World Maths Day Education Team putting out a challenge to students around the world to unite to beat last year’s record of correctly answering 182,445,169 questions in one day.

The World Maths Day site opens for registrations on 15 February for practice and World Maths Day is on Wednesday 4 March. bbbb

Stop Press – BETT Award!

Congratulations to Jayne, the UK Team, and everyone behind Mathletics on gaining the 2009 BETT AWARD for Primary Digital Content.

More later ….

Reading Eggs

There’s a great new site out there in the big www that is teaching kids how to read in an engaging and effective way. The site is Reading Eggs from Blake Publishing in Australia.

You can try out some free lessons here and even sign up for a free 14 day licence.

I have mentioned this site to many schools and new entrant teachers and the response is always the same – they love it and want it! I note that they have now brought out schools pricing for Australia and a CDROM version when you don’t have a broadband connection.

The graphics are bright and clear, the characters are fun and funky and the lesson structure is clear and well-paced. I wish we could get the books in NZ too!

Congratulations Blake on taking learning to read to this new and exciting level. 

Give it a go!

Up there with the Jonas Brothers and the Hadron Collider!

More exciting news for Mathletics!

Google have released statistics for the top searched for terms in New Zealand for 2008.

The year’s fastest rising search was for the Olympics reflecting the interest the New Zealand public had in the performance of New Zealand athletes in Beijing but coming in at number 17 is the Mathletics website.

From the PC World Magazine -

“The year’s fastest rising search was for the Olympics, reflecting the strong performance of New Zealand athletes in Beijing. But, showing that New Zealanders are into brain as well as brawn, the large hadron collider and ‘mathletics’ also made the top 20.”

Fastest rising searches of 2008
1. olympics
2. facebook
3. youtube
4. lotto
5. wiki
6. seek
7. miniclip
8. asb
9. tvnz
10. large hadron collider
11. heath ledger
12. obama
13. gossip girl
14. jonas brothers
15. miley cyrus
16. euro 2008
17. mathletics

Mathletics NZ recently hosted the 2008 NZ Maths Week Challenge when over 20,000 Kiwi kids went online and solved Maths problems and competed against other students in online challenges. This generated an enormous amount of interest in the site as students discovered that Maths was enjoyable and fun!

A New Frock for Jayne!

Congratulations to 3P Learning UK and also to the development and publishing team at 3P in Gordon, Australia on the announcement that Mathletics has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Primary digital content section for the annual BETT Awards to be announced in London in January 2009.

This is a prestigious award and can be described as the Oscars of the educational technology world.

Jayne Warburton, the UK General Manager, and the UK 3P team are also exhibiting at the BETT Conference at Olympia in January culminating in the awards at the London Hilton Ballroom. It totally warrants a new frock!

“The awards recognise outstanding education sector products and learning solutions, and judges review the entries based on criteria including design, cost-effectiveness, support of higher-order skills and effective learning and teaching styles.”

 

The 4P’s of Tech Support

Its been a long time since I ran the Edcom Boot Camps for school techies and teachers with technical responsibilities but I was reminded the other day how that although technology has advanced considerably the basic principles remain the same.

We used to discuss the 4P’s of tech support so its quite funny that I now work for a company that is called 3P Learning (totally different P’s but more on that later!).

In no particular order the main technical problems that occurred in schools could be categorised under four headings – Power, Printers, Passwords and People.

Power
A keen new staff member in the office reminded me of this when she left for the day and switched off all the power switches – disconnecting me from the internet! We’ve all read the stories about cleaners unplugging servers to plug in vacuum cleaners and calls to help desks compaining of computer failures during power outages. I’ve had my fair share of teachers not realising that their computer wasn’t just “the TV bit” and pushing the power button on the monitor and telling me it went “green, green, green, orange”.

Printers
This used to be such a fraught area! They were expensive and (I’m showing my age!) very few of them were networkable so we used to set them up as shared printers. Folk couldn’t get their head around actually choosing the right printer to print to. Generally these were the same folk that “lost” documents that they’d saved as well. Shared printers were the bane of our lives as well meaning folk moved them from PC to PC as they did some housekeeping in their classrooms and then complained that ever since you installed Encarta on the server they hadn’t been able to print to the printer – forgetting they’d shifted the thing!

Certain InkJet printers with design issues (a vertical paper intake) were receptacles for bits and pieces in junior classes that used to make their way into moving bits and render printing impossible.

Now – its bliss! When you choose Print it goes off into the ether and you can go to any printer which is also a photocopier and retrieve your job.  

People
Sometimes we’d have to tell people that their computer had a PEBKAC error. They’d nod sagely, not wanting to admit that they had no idea what we meant.  You can find its definition on Wikipedia! – Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. Check out the PEBKAC videos on YouTube as well! User errors are responsible for most computer problems. It can be the personal user of the computer (whether teacher or student) or the inadequately trained techie that set up the system/network! 

Being able to describe what has gone wrong simply and accurately is often the key to resolving the problem. “It doesn’t work” just doesn’t cut it! Think about what you’re trying to do and describe what happens. Most of the time the operating system or application tries to tell you what’s wrong so read any messages dialogue boxes that pop up. Its actually a great practical application of thinking skills! 

Passwords
Pre-PINs and and internet banking this was a fraught area. Teachers really objected to having a password and really, really objected to having to change it regularly! Some teachers still grumble, but having your personal files accessed and deleted or some other horrible experience soon changes your perception and practice. Its really helpful to know and use the quick keys to lock your computer. In the Netsafe ICT Manager’s workshops we’d tell the story of the kid who took off out of the classroom and the teacher that took off after him leaving his laptop fully accessible to the other students who then wreaked merry havoc. Its as simple as choosing <flying window> + L (for Windows users) to lock your computer.

Actually there are 5 P’s. The 5th one is related to Passwords, because passwords give you access to your privileges, but the 5th P deserves its own space.

Profiles
Profiles can be so frustrating if set up incorrectly or if the user has been granted inadequate rights and privileges to do their job. If profiles are set up well they’re wonderful!

There seem to be two schools of thought when granting rights and privileges to teachers. The first (and worst IMHO) is “lock down, lock out”. If teachers want to try out a new piece of software on their own laptop they have to contact the service provider and pay for them to install something they were perfectly capable of installing themselves. The service providers’ rationale is that if the teacher (or anyone in the school) has administrative access they’ll muck things up and the service provider will have to fix it up. What they’ve actually figured out is that if you have admin access you may need to call them a few times but you’ll probably learn how to do things properly for yourself and won’t need to call on them so often (less $$$’s). If you need to call them for everything – more $$$’s! What actually happens is that teachers get frustrated and negative (and why wouldn’t you?) and the integration of ICT is severely compromised in the school.

The other philosophy is “empower the user”. Give users the privileges. If they muck up encourage them to ‘fess up (you’ve got to break some eggs to make a cake) and after you’ve fixed it, show them what when wrong and why, and show them how to fix it if it happens again. Believe me, you’ll never be without work to do – the only thing is you won’t be stuck at changing print cartridges and installing programmes the rest of your life! Its all about education – let’s make sure our service providers are education providers rather than education stiflers!

And the 3P’s of 3P Learning?

Play + Practice = Progress. Isn’t that just what I’ve been writing about?

Thinking Critically about Learning Tools

Top 100 Learning Tools

This report has been linked to in many edu blogs. There are some cool tools listed and the links are taking me off to lots more interesting places!

However let’s be a bit more critical about the statistics and who the tools are appropriate for.

I’ve done a very quick analysis of this report. The sample group was so small it meant that a product only had to get 3 votes to be in the Top 100.

109 people were surveyed; therefore 1090 tools were submitted producing a list of just over 400 tools. The Top 100 were collected from those that were listed 3 times or more. Not a large survey and not a lot of tools. The top tool (Firefox) was mentioned 61 times. Most items were mentioned less than 10 times! The list creators are quite open about the statistics and I do not for one moment think they intended the list to be quoted in the way that some are quoting it – as the definitive list of Top Learning Tools. Its an interesting list of what successful people are using.

The contributors were mainly from the corporate/business world and in some cases were the developers of the programs they listed (well, why wouldn’t they?). The next largest groups were university employees and education/ICT consultants. I found around a dozen contributors who were employed in secondary schools, one at middle school and none at primary or early childhood level.

I got suspicious when I read that PowerPoint was at #5 and Inspiration was 72nd equal (with 3 votes!) and that site performance monitoring tools, anti virus programs, mail clients, FTP apps and HTML editors were listed among the tools. So are they Learning Tools or tools useful in the implementation of learning?

The site obtains revenue from Google Ads and Amazon and there are also a number of “sponsor” ads for products that are listed. Developers and promoters of products in the list are now using this list as a reference in advertising their products on their own sites. There’s some communal back scratching going on. That is all fine, they’re not trying to deceive us – it’s the way that other folk are using these statistics that concerns me. Reading the data first hand you can make the connections but quoting them out of context can be misleading.

Is it an interesting list? Yes. Are the products that are listed good? Undoubtedly. Is this list an indication of the best that’s available out there? No. Is this a list of the best tools a teacher could use in their classroom? Definitely not. In fact it’s totally disingenuous to advertise a product as a world leading elearning resource for use in schools because it appears on this list – with 3 votes!

Let’s be a little more critical about statistics. Let’s have bigger sample groups. Let’s have sample groups that have no vested interests. Let’s quote surveys that relate to our field of operation.

Let’s ask classroom teachers for a list of their Top 10 Learning Tools.

Maths and Spelling Challenge

NZ Schools are invited to join the Aussies to celebrate the Australian Numeracy and Literacy Week by participating in an online Maths and Spelling Challenge. Schools can register online at www.mathletics.co.nz/challenge

“More than 100,000 students in over 2000 schools across Australia and New Zealand will participate in real-time battles of mental arithmetic and spelling using the renowned Mathletics and Spellodrome eLearning products which are currently used by more than 500,000 students in over 10 countries.

As well as enabling students to have fun, the Maths and Spelling Challenge aims to improve students’ literacy and numeracy skills significantly by engaging students and empowering them to strive for their personal best. The Maths and Spelling Challenge carries on 3P Learning’s tradition of organising and hosting compelling events. Late last year more than 150,000 students were united for the Trans-Tasman Challenge where students correctly answered over 2.5 million questions using Mathletics, registering average improvement rates of 76%.”