Movember

Hi,



I am growing a moustache this year for Movember. I have decided to put down my razor for one month (November) and help raise awareness and funds for men’s health – specifically prostate cancer and depression in men.

What many people don’t appreciate is that close to 3,000 men die of prostate cancer each year in Australia and one in eight men will experience depression in their lifetime - many of whom don’t seek help. Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved and I am hoping that you will support me.

To sponsor my Mo, you can either:

• Click this link and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account
• Write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 143555 and mailing it to: Movember Foundation, PO Box 292, Prahran, VIC, 3181

Remember, all donations over $2 are tax deductible.

Movember is now in its sixth year and, to date, has achieved some pretty amazing results by working alongside The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCFA) and beyondblue: the national depression initiative. Check out further details here.

If you are interested in following the progress of my Mo, click here. Also, this link has heaps of useful
information.

Thank you

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd Drops In

This week during Kevin Rudd's visit to Lismore, he made time to come and visit OLHC Primary to have a look at the school's netbook program. He arrived without any fanfare (and with a surprisingly small contingent of security personnel) in the front seat of a sedan. He was very relaxed and made time to stop to speak to any children who wanted to meet him and was very friendly and interested in what they were doing. The Year 5 class he visited have been doing a unit of work on genealogy and using the Internet to research their family tree and to plan a virtual trip to the countries of their ancestors. He was very patient and considerate in all his discussions with the kids and laughed and joked with everyone. One of his aids was joking and teasing him and he gave back just as good. As he was walking around the classroom he noticed one student using the web cam on a netbook, so he bent down and put his head on the child's shoulder so the student could take a picture with the web cam. It was really a kind and considerate gesture and something the student will never forget. The PM commended the kids for their work and said he wished he had a computer when he was at school. It is a great testament to our country that a leader can stroll in to a school and listen to kids without pretence, scripting or the need for a huge security apparatus. I couldn't imagine it happening in many other countries. In all the excitement we forgot to take Kevin down to the Kindergarten room. Perhaps this was one place his security had advised him not to visit. I know through personal experience of the security dangers. Kinders also have the knack of asking very tricky questions. I am proud to say I survived as a Kinder teacher for one year but constantly having kids pulling at the hairs on my ankles while reading stories to them can wear you down. This was despite placing a security cordon on the floor around my chair with masking tape. What hope would Kevin have if I couldn't keep them in control?

Netbook Project Progress Report

Since May this year I have been working on a project with OLHC Primary School, South Lismore, NSW. The project is seen as an important trial for other schools in the region for many reasons. It is the first large role out of netbooks in the primary school environment where each child has a computer on their desk. Each of the 60 year 5/6 students has a HP Mini 2140 Netbook for use during the school day.

The netbooks are charged each evening in lockable trolleys (PC Locks). Each trolley hold 16 netbooks and only require one wall socket to recharge all 16. The Netbooks are fitted with 6 cell batteries to provide longer battery life between charges. Despite being used solidly for 3-4 hours a day, the netbooks are yet to run out of charge during a school day. This includes other younger grades, starting to make use of them during down time. The netbooks run a version of Linux called Edubuntu instead of Windows and are connected to the Internet using a Cisco wireless network.

So far the project has surpassed all expectations. The HP Minis seem very robust and we haven't had a hardware fault with one of them. The students took to the new operating system like ducks to water and already know more about it than the teachers. There continues to be bugs in some of the open source software that we are addressing each week, but overall Ubuntu seems at this stage, to be more than viable alternative to Windows. The ability to add programs across the network at will, without the need for expensive licences and time delays alone has many advantages. Added to this is the knowledge that reducing software costs has allowed the school to put more computers in front of students.

All of this is of no use, unless the focus is on learning rather than the technology. Although it early in the project, the devices are opening doors to learning that were not accessible before. Both teachers and students are beginning to see that they are now learning in a community not a classroom. I have been co-writing learning activities with teachers at the school and delivering these activities using Learning Management Software (LMS) called Moodle. This has allowed me to expose teachers to new pedagogy and web2 tools that they are incorporating into their teaching repertoire. This LMS is also allowing students to access learning activities and upload their assignments from anywhere that they have Internet access.

My advice to anyone embarking on a similar venture is to be ambitious and aim high in terms what technology can deliver in improving learning outcomes. I can also now see that the continuing reduction in price of the netbooks means that parents should be more than happy to co-contribute to such a program if it means their child will have a netbook of their own to use at both home and school. After all, students spend only 20% of their time at school and 80% outside and as adults we don't like sharing our computer with anyone else. Edubuntu also makes such an idea easier in terms of management and security. The infrastructure costs and overall planning is very important but a 1 to 1 netbook program should never be about money, but improved learning opportunities for students.

Open Office Wins

I have been using Open Office (the free and open source office suite) for 6 months and am a convert. There were some annoying differences about the product that reminded me how set in my ways I am, but I am totally sold on it now. Small, sleek and powerful. If you want to know why you should give it a go, you can check out this link. Features such as being able to create PDFs from your Writer documents or exporting your slide presentations as Flash SWF files are enough reason to interest many. I have collected a list of links for you this week to help you jump in. The suite doesn't have a good clipart collection packaged with it but you can easily add open source collections. The pick of collections for schools is WP Clip Art which includes instructions for downloading and installing the collection into OO. I have found some problems opening word.docs in OO, particularly where tables and marcos are concerned, but the problems are not major. If you are concerned about compatibility with Microsoft Word, You can set Open Office Writer to save all your documents as word.doc by default or download and install the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office which allow MS Office to open ODFs . But I feel once you start using it, as I have, you won't go back to MS Office and you will soon convert your friends and colleagues as well. As for students, they don't have the same hang ups as teachers. They won't even think about the differences. Do your school a favour and load it on every machine and then send kids home with a copy to install at home. If it doesn't work out, just uninstall it.

Educational Technology Brain Food

I had a request this week from a subscriber wanting some links for a parent who requested that her child not use computers at school and that she would prefer her child be given worksheets when the rest of the class where using computers. The teacher wanted some information that would convince the parent that computers are an essential part of education at school and home. The argument is moot because computers are pervading more aspects of our lives. How many handwritten letters, for example, have you received this year? Is learning handwriting more important than learning touch typing? I try to respect others when their opinions differ, and I can see some truth in the belief that we may be becoming slaves of Information Technology rather than masters. What happens for example, when the power fails and you can't use your Interactive Whiteboard? For this reason I have tried to air the views of both sides of the debate in the links I have prepared this week. My stance in terms of Educational Technology has always been that no gadget can be a panacea for poor teaching. Rather than trying to win arguments, a more productive use of time is be the best teacher you can be using ED Tech and let it be a case of the "proof in the pudding" with the achievements of students in your class. One way to improve your knowledge and skills is to engage in some professional development by subscribing to Educational Technology Blogs where other educators share their ideas and experiences. I hope the blogs I have collected will help and by all means, please send me links to ones not on the list that you think are worthwhile and I will add them.

Teaching Writing: You Be The Expert

The theme of my newsletter this week is Teaching Writing to Year 1-2 and I have to admit that the process of learning to write remains a mystery to me despite teaching for 25 years. Teaching kids is not like fixing computers. There are no zeros and ones, just a lot of shades of grey. My error rate in teaching writing would obviously be lower say, than in performing brain surgery, but there were always kids in my class that I couldn't motivate no matter what I tried. For this reason I am quite wary of Literacy experts (or any experts wearing ties for that matter for it was their sophisticated models that provided our present economic mess) telling me what works. So please take my suggestions with an equal grain of salt. There is no one solution suitable for every student. One tip is to try as much as possible to provide kids with an authentic and meaningful purpose for writing. Telling them they have to write because they will need it when they grow up just doesn't cut it any more. Plumbers earn as much as doctors in Australia and I don't know many who write poetry in their spare time. There needs to be a more immediate reward. Why not try publishing student writing in a book or on the Internet? Why not appeal to their egos? Advertisers do it to us every day. And finally, get the kids to write copious amounts every single day and don't worry if you can't correct it all. You don't have the time. Better to let them write more, than hold them back until you covered it in red ink. My writing improved significantly when I was writing essays every night. It took my a while to work out that it is like learning to surf. You have to do it every day if you want to improve. Have strict rules for editing work that is to be published and don't worry about what isn't published. Reflect also on how many hand written letters you have posted this week. The sooner the kids have computers on their desks the better. Have a look at the links I have provided for you this week and see if you can find anything that might work in your classroom. Keep an open mind and keep trying out new ideas. It is more art than science. You be the expert.

Find A Kid To Fix It

I finally handed over netbooks to each of the year 5 and 6 students this week and it was a momentous occasion for me. I have dreamed of what it would be like if all the kids in my class had their own computer on their desk since the day I started teaching 25 years ago. All those years ago I had one Microbee computer with a cassette tape drive in my classroom that took 30 minutes to load a simple program. This week I was in front of a class of students who were all connected to the wireless network, accessing the Internet, shooting and editing video and emailing their work to their teacher to mark. I had spent a lot of time preparing an image for the netbooks, making sure all the software was working and ironing out security issues but I knew that there would be problems bound to surface. I also wasn't sure how the kids would go navigating the Ubuntu interface that is slightly different to Windows. I decided the best approach was not to spend too much time talking to the kids about the computers but to let them explore the new machines, stand back and watch what happened. I handed them out, fully charged with a 5 hour battery life and told them to try everything out. Within about 5 minutes some of them had worked out how to use the built-in video camera, change the wallpaper, customise the desktop and discover nearly all the bugs that I hadn't anticipated. I realised I should have given them the machines sooner rather than trying to work out what the bugs where myself. It was really amazing when you consider that they had never seen Ubuntu or any of the software programs that came installed. If I had done the same thing to a group of adults I am guessing there would have been frustration and people giving up because the software wasn't exactly what they were familiar with. So if you can't work out how to use something on a computer, hand it over to a 10 year old for five minutes and then beg them to teach you.
Am I worried that I will have to make changes to 66 new machines to fix the problems that the kids found? Not at all. One of the many great things I am finding about Ubuntu (yes it is free as well) is that I can make changes to the one master copy of the software on their netbooks and as soon as they restart their machines, the changes are automatically installed and enabled.