Fizzics

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I had a disaster just before Christmas.  My destructive pup, who had already half-eaten my firewire webcam for the iBook, wagged his tail a little too hard and tipped a drink into my laptop.  I’ve been using a school laptop since the start of term but have now finally got round to ordering a new macbook.

I can’t help thinking about it’s aluminium unibody being machined to order as I type.  I went for an upgraded hard drive and the option of preinstalled iWork09.  I had iWork06 on the iBook and, although I didn’t use it much, I loved the way Keynote could be used to export into so many different file formats.  It made uploading of files that had started out as PowerPoint presentations to my website so much more pupil-friendly.

From what I have seen, Office 2007 for Windows is awful and so I am reluctant to buy the Mac version, even at LTS prices.  Wonder if I can get by with a combination of iWork09 and OpenOffice.org?  The order status page says it will ship in 3 days.  I’m not going to tell you how long they think it will take to reach me up here though.

Following on from the comments I received after blogging about being approached to write a chapter for a book on digital literacy in science teaching, I’ve started work on the piece.  I’ve created a wiki for note taking and am now drafting the chapter.  I seem to have plenty to say, the problem will be keeping it within the context of science education.  How often does a person get the opportunity to write for an academic textbook about using their favourite web2.0 tools in the classroom?  There’s a danger that I end up submitting something too edupunk for either the editor, publisher or both.

I received an email today from an academic I know.  It was an invitation to write a chapter for a book that is being put together on digital literacy in science teaching.   I’m very flattered to have been asked but not yet sure if I should accept.

I am very grateful for the professional learning network I have acquired through my use of twitter.  Several people contacted me with advice and they were unanimous in saying I should take the offer.  I have a few doubts.  One of these is my lack of teaching experience, I am only in my 3rd year since obtaining the PGCE.  How would I be able to justify my use of ICT in the classroom with pedagogically sound evidence given my short teaching career to date?  Would the reader, or the editor for that matter, see my use of ICT be as technology being introduced just for the sake of it?

The other aspect that troubles me is how little time I have had to use ICT in the classroom.  One response from twitter captured this quite well.  He pointed out that few classroom teachers will have been making effective use of ICT, especially for 3 years – 4 if you count teaching placements where you are expected to have all-singing ICT through the 18 weeks you are in school.  I discussed this with a friend from my PGCE year and we finally agreed with his perspective.

So I’m back to the teaching experience thing.  Well, that and the lack of an accessible reference library from which to back up any arguments I might want to put forward in my chapter.   Given the remit of providing a realisation of how digital literacy is facilitated by science teachers, it is perhaps unlikely that I would find much in a book anyway.

I watched José Picardo’s excellent tutorial for interactive whiteboards a few weeks ago and finally got round to trying some of his tips today.  I thought I would try something for my S1/S2 classes and so I created two magic box Smart Notebook files.

For S1, the box contains the different forms of energy.  The screen perimeter has images representing the forms of energy and the objective is to match the words pulled out of the box to the images.

The S2 file is designed to test pupils’ knowledge of food chains.

Download the files here.

S1 energy box

S2 food chains

With so many assessments scheduled for the end of term, it’s not been the best time to try to work with the N810.  However, I put it to good use today with a pupil who needed some help with a section of work that had been missed through illness.  I updated the tablet with all of the screencasts I had uploaded to my site by resynchronising the tablet’s RSS reader with my feedburner feed.  Then a quick run through the controls of the default media player was all I needed before letting him work through the solutions he had missed at his own pace.  He used headphones to get the running commentary as they work progressed.  

Now, I could have set him down in front of a laptop.  The problem is that you can’t be very discrete with a laptop.  The tablet sits half hidden by a jotter and allowed him to catch up on work without feeling self-conscious.  Seems like it is a great tool for personalised learning.

Well, I’ve had the N810 from Nokia for a week now, it arrived last Friday evening.  I’ve spent quite a lot of time just “playing” with it to see what it can do for me.  It took a wee while to figure out how to take a screenshot but I finally managed to install something that would do the job for me.  Here are my inital thoughts.

The desktop interface is quite nice.  It has a taskbar down the left side of the screen and there is a widget facility that allows tools to be set out on the desktop for easy reference.

As you can see, there are also some handy icon along the top right of the screen to inform the user about wifi signal strength, battery life, etc.  The green circle in this shows that I am logged in to Google chat in the background, this is the chat service supported by the system as delivered.

The left menu provides access to a comprehensive series of options, as shown in this next screenshot.

The tablet runs OS2008, a Maemo linux based OS and has Firefox as it’s default browser.  The Firefox interface is clean and does not have the usual screen real estate loss due to menu bars.  These features are accessed via the lined button in top left of the browser window (the same button exists in most applications).  

The address bar lies at the bottom of the window and has minimal navigation controls alongside.  Crucial for such a small screen, there is a zoom facility available by tapping on the magnifier icon next to the navigation controls.  I’ve found the browser to be very responsive and the wifi system is good.   It will pick up a signal anywhere in my house, including places where the stone walls prevent wireless access from my windows and mac laptops.

I need to point out that the N810 is an internet tablet, not a mobile phone.  That said, if you have a network connection, voice calls can be made via a VOIP service, such as Skype.  Installing Skype for the N810 was a simple two-tap process once I had arrived at the Skype homepage.  Shortly afterwards, I was enjoying a chat with Lisa.

I was disappointed that the Skype port for Nokia tablets does not yet support video calls. Hopefully, this is something that Skype will be able to offer shortly.  During our call, the audio quality was good at my side.  However, Lisa reported that there were instances when the quality of my voice dropped noticeably.  She described it as sounding as if I had “put a huge sticky toffee in my mouth”.  This seemed to coincide with the blue corner LED lighting up and I think that this indicates power saving mode.  The only way to maintain call quality was for me to make frequent taps on the screen to keep the tablet fully active.  This was a bit of a nuisance and requires further tweaking to see if the power saving can be adjusted to fit the circumstances.

There is a RSS reader already installed.  

I found it very easy to use, my first move to was remove the subscription to BBC Sport and my second was to subscribe to my own Feedburner feed to see if I could get by classroom blog on the tablet.  It worked without a hitch, as you can see.

With screen area at a premium, a nice feature of the RSS reader is that you can swap to a single pane view to allow more space to read feed content.

The next things was to see if the files inside the enclosure could be viewed.  Tapping on the pdf icons allowed me to view them in the tablet’s own PDF Viewer, with the option to save to the internal memory card (micro SD).  The PDF viewer is pretty good, with several viewing options available.

There is the same minimal navigation that we saw earlier on the browser.  There are some extra options that allow you to focus on the text of your documents.  The first of these is the zoom option.

and a further option is to remove images using the small blue icon in the bottom right corner of the viewer pane.  This leaves you with just the text of your document on display.

You might have noticed from the RSS screenshots that some of the posts in my classroom blog contain mp4 files.  These are also no problem for the N810.  Tapping on the icon gives the option to view (stream) or save the file for later viewing.  Streaming worked well across my home wifi and saved files have the advantage of appearing in the library of the built-in media player.  I had hoped to show how clear the video playback looked but you’ll have to take my word for it as the screenshot tool was unable to capture running or paused video output from the media player, rendering the video panel green instead.

I like the size of the controls on the media player, they are large enough for fingertip control rather than forcing you to use the stylus all of the time.

The other application for looking after your audio, video and podcasts is Canola.  I downloaded this from the maemo.org community.  The Canola interface is beautiful, see the full screen screenshot below.

The player within Canola is intuitive, with simple controls.  The player picked up my iTunes podcast art and displayed it while the video file was downloaded.

Unfortunately, Canola was unable to play the mp4 video although audio performance was satisfactory.  

In terms of other applications, I hap a play around with the Maps feature.  The tablet contained a default map covering the west coast of the USA & Canada and it was straightforward to replace this with a downloaded map of UK & Ireland.  Here’s my town up close

The N810 also has GPS capabilities although it took some time to find a signal, I was finally able to get something to register.

Best of all though was the discovery of Numpty Physics.  I think it is a clone of Crayon Physics and it is very addictive!

I’m still working on how to integrate the tablet into my classroom and will write some more once we’ve had a play.

I’m a lot happier with the homework situation.  Homework submissions from my Higher Physics class have improved since my last post.  Then, this week, several parents came to our school’s senior parent evening with questions about the new system and how it works.  I suppose it shows that pupils have been talking about it at home.

Some parents were looking for reassurance that their son/daughter wasn’t wasting time sitting at a computer pretending to do homework, while others wanted to know more about iTunes so they could monitor the subscription themselves and know when an exercise is due.  I certainly hadn’t anticipated that parents might be looking for ways to keep up with the work their children were being set.

It’s the last incident that I feel is the most significant though.  I blogged a new exercise late last night just before going to bed.  After lunch, I was informed by a pupil that she had updated her iTunes library over breakfast and had discovered a fault in the latest pdf file, it wouldn’t open.  It turns out she watches the video solutions on the bus to school.  She was right, the file had been corrupted and it’s been replaced.

I’ve received an email from Nokia saying that they would like me to test their N810 internet tablet in my classroom.  I’m keen to try this out but am unsure of where I can make best use of it.  One thing in it’s favour, of course, is the fact that it is not a mobile phone – at least not unless you run Skype on it.  This should make its arrival slightly less unpalatable for school management.

It can access the web via wifi, except there’s no wifi in my school.  That might not be so much of an issue as I suspect I could sneak a wifi router under my desk for the duration of a 2 week trial as long as the ICT technician doesn’t notice an unrecognised device requesting an IP address.  I’m interested in how I can integrate the N810 tablet’s features into lessons.  For example, could I get the tablet to talk to my digital projector or SMARTboard.  I’m not sure what that would take but I guess some form of Bluetooth connection to my laptop would be a step towards achieving this.

I’ve had a quick run through this device’s specs and have read a review or five.  Now I just need to find some ideas of how to link it into the technology that is already in place and somehow extend my use of ICT by bringing the unique experience of an internet tablet into pupils’ learning.

Have you tried this in your school or do you know of a blog post about this topic?  I’d be interested to hear other people’s ideas as the tablet will only be here for 2 weeks.

I thought I would say something about my project to place homework and screencast solutions for Higher Physics on iTunes.

This week saw the first submission deadline since homework questions had been made available in the iTunes podcast directory.  My feedburner statistics suggested that just over half of the class had downloaded the homework using iTunes.  Looking at the Podpress data on my own Wordpress dashboard, it looks like the others have downloaded direct from the blog instead.  I was pretty confident this was going to work.

When Wednesday came round, I was disappointed to receive only 11 sets of homework from a class of 19.  I felt fairly miserable about that and obviously my first instinct was to blame the new delivery mechanism for the sudden fall in submissions.  I mentioned it to my faculty head, who uses my room last thing on Wednesdays and he was more upbeat, telling me he’d just had a go at his Higher Biology set for an usually poor homework response and he had heard that the Chemistry dept were also reporting low levels of homework this week.  Clearly this was something bigger than a move to iTunes.  Perhaps we had hit the senior pupils’ party season?

I went ahead and uploaded the screencast solutions.  It had taken quite an effort on my part to prepare these so I was determined to persevere.  Since the solutions have gone online, I have spotted distinct spikes in the downloads.  It looks like my pupils aren’t using the “get all” option in iTunes but are focusing on certain sections of the solutions that have given them difficulty.  This isn’t an observation based solely on this week’s homework either.  A similar uneven distribution of views/downloads exists in the original files that kicked off the project on youtube.  I am wondering if pupils are actively choosing only to see worked solutions to those problems that presented them with difficulty, rather than watching all of the screencasts to reinforce what they have learned in class?

In the past couple of weeks, a few people have expressed an interest in this idea and have posted questions on Twitter.  Joe Rowing has picked up on the idea and is also trialling it.  Interestingly enough, Joe also teaches Physics.