The Power of Three

At the recent 5th Leading a Digital School Conference, John Pearce presented a session on Evernote and Diigo called "Never lose a document again".

It's a great summation of the usefulness of both services. I use both with my students, but in conjunction with a third - Moodle.

Now I know that some consider Moodle a little bit 'last year'. And I have read a number of edu-bloggers who have questioned the "walled garden" approach that they feel Moodle embodies. But using Moodle in conjunction with Evernote and Diigo works really well for me.

My students and I both use Evernote for note-taking - I love being able to progressively construct diagrams/mindmaps on the whiteboard as we discuss a topic and then at the end just take a snapshot on my phone and send it straight to Evernote - if I manage to keep my scrawling reasonably legible, Evernote even lets me do a text search on it. I can also share key diagrams and notes with my students.

I have Diigo groups for my students, who can then see the webpages I have flagged for them to read or refer to - so much simpler than copying URLs and pasting them into something else for the students, not to mention being able to highlight the particular sections I want them to pay close attention to and add comments they can read in-place. And they are now finding other related materials and bookmarking them for the class to see.

Where does Moodle fit into this picture? Being a content management system, Moodle allows me to do the following (and more):

• create a page where students can upload assignments/projects and I can mark and comment
• provide links to materials that are not on the web - python files, screenshots and movies I have created, assessment tasks, course outlines, etc.
• provide a place where they can post questions
• build quizzes for them to test themselves on

There are other ways to accomplish these tasks, of course, but Moodle provides a convenient way of doing these things and also monitoring what the students have and have not accessed. So I end up with the following:

• a way for the students (and I) to take notes from classes (Evernote)
• a way to flag items on the Web for students to refer to (Diigo)
• a way to provide items not on the Web to students (Moodle)
• a way for students to send items to me (Moodle)

Others may be using other services, maybe Ning or Edmodo, to achieve similar ends to what I am doing with Moodle. I may change to something else in the future. But right now, Moodle fits in nicely.

Point of Inaction

I recently attended a day at UTS for high school science students with my older daughter. Run by scientists from ANSTO, it was a fun morning where segments of various sci-fi films were shown, followed by a series of questions for the audience, then one of the scientists discussing the actual science.

Part of what made this a good experience for the audience was the use of a KeePad system for getting the audience responses to the questions. Response systems, when they work well, are great - everyone can participate, no one has to feel conspicuous, you can put up on screen nice graphics to show response patterns, etc.

But as we all know, things do not always work well.

One of my colleagues earlier this week pulled out the response system (not KeePad) that was bought for the school a couple of years ago, and started asking questions about its use.

I don't use it. I don't use it for a few simple reasons.

It caused me no end of grief trying to get the software installed, mainly because the driver install program simply refused to do what it was supposed to do. Once I had found a way around that problem, I then discovered that the software wanted to work with a version of Keynote that was older than the one installed on my laptop. So I had to save my presentation file in the older format, only to find that it still would not work properly. (My suspicion was that the software had been written for an older version of the OS.) So I didn't use it.

One of my colleagues was a bit more persistent than me, and kept trying to find solutions to these problems, checking the developer's website and forums, downloading the latest version of the software, the latest driver, etc. He brought his PC laptop from home and installed the Windows version, which apparently worked somewhat better, but not long after, he stopped using it. The time and effort involved in getting it to work in the classroom was too much.

So now another colleague wanted to try it, and it occurred to me that some time had passed, and maybe the developers had updated their software and drivers, and these problems had been resolved. Err, no. Apparently not.

It's a shame, because response systems can be excellent. But the experience with the software has to be smooth, easy to work with, and time-efficient. And in this case it's not. It's actually easier to wheel in the laptop banks and get the students to work with an online polling system.

The end result is that bag of remote clickers is just another item on the pile of technological deadwood that accumulates in every school. The sad part is how much of that deadwood needn't be so.

To Word Process Or Not To Word Process?

I came across the blog of Fraser Speirs the other day some time ago, and in one particular post found this interesting statement:

We are also focusing heavily on presentation skills using Keynote on the iPad. It is my personal belief that Word Processing - setting text on a computer in preparation for printing on paper - is a skill that will wane in value over time. [Emphasis added.] Communicating your ideas to an audience is a skill that is already a clear competitive advantage for those able to do it effectively. Few skills demand the development of confidence like public presenting. [link]

Word processing is one of those areas that has become regarded as a quintessential IT skill in many areas, including education. It has always been the first application covered by the ECDL/ICDL, for example. It is specifically mentioned in the new National Curriculum 18 times. It's part of the Computing Skills test my Year 10 students do as part of their (soon to be defunct) School Certificate exams.

However, Speirs' statement got me thinking – has word processing been over-emphasised?  Are presentation skills more important to focus on, as Speirs seems to suggest?

What is the point behind teaching word processing anyway? A search of the new National Curriculum reveals something interesting - while word processing is referred to multiple times, nowhere does a rationale for teaching it appear.

A search of the Web leads to a great many items that discuss how to teach word processing, but very few that discuss why. Those that do address word processing as a means for teaching writing and composition.

But does that require a word processor? Can the same objectives be achieved through blogging and other online activities?

Thinking a bit more about Speirs' statement, it's the bit about printing on paper that I keep coming back to. Do we only do word processing in order to print stuff? In my own work, preparation of documents remains an important skill, but a large proportion of those documents do not get printed - they get turned into PDFs and emailed or put on a server.

On reflection, I think Speirs' definition is the problem - if we think of word processing as only 'setting text on a computer in preparation for printing on paper', he probably has a point, but if word processing is about composition and its visual presentation (and obviously I think it is),  word processing will be around for a long time yet.

On the other hand, what should schools be teaching? Writing and composition? Definitely. Presentation? Certainly - but in what format? Does blogging meet our educational requirements? Or does word processing remain part of the picture?