what's in your digital toolbox?

This week we're off to the On The Rise elearning Ontario conference in Mississauga.

I'm presenting Tuesday on how to avoid the pitfalls of a single online learning environment by building a diverse online digital learning ecosystem.













I'm aiming to outline what I've used and how in the classroom, then I'm hoping we can crowdsource what other people have used and create a wiki of current, useful digital learning tools with explanations written by the teachers who have made them work.









Here's the PREZI of the presentation:

What's In Your eteacher Digital Toolbox?  Prezi of the presentation.

The crowdsourced links to diverse digital tools that our presentation assembled for your enjoyment...

The ideal digital learning tool

I'm thinking about what the ideal digital tool would be for student learning.

It has to offer strong reading and browsing abilities as well as data entry.  I want the benefits of a passive consumption device (like a tablet) with the benefits of an active media production device (like a laptop).  My ideal device must have a keyboard and mouse pad, but also offer touch screen functionality.  It'll also rotate to use the screen more effectively as a reader/tablet.

It also has to be ruggedized (I have no misconceptions about how hard kids are on electronics).  It would also be built like lego (compartmentalized and accessible to easily replace failed parts).  The goal weight would be under 3 pounds.  At three pounds we'd be providing a device that can easily carry all the student's text books, binders and loose paper without injuring them or destroying the planet.

Some devices I'd shamelessly steal brilliant design ideas from:

Dell's latest round of ultrabooks with a flippable screen offer the kind of flexibility I'm looking for - the benefits of a rotating tablet screen (allowing you to turn a widescreen to a tall screen for reading), light weight, flexible, powerful...




In fairness (and because I have one), HP has been making touch screen/tablet laptops for years.

I don't care which technology gets used (which ever is more durable), but the idea of a lightweight touch screen reader AND a laptop that allows for full media creation is vital!

Horizontal wide-screens are designed for entertainment, but reading only happens well when you've got continuous text you don't have to constantly scroll through a narrow window.  These learning tools MUST allow for the most accessible e-reading experience - meaning a device that can mimic a tablet.  


The end result has at least a 128GB solid state drive (SSD), that allows for multiple OS installs if a student wants them.  The hardware would be able to run CHROME OS, LINUX, OSx and Windows (depending on student experience, preference and ability).  The choice to upgrade on-device storage would be easy because the SSD it comes with would be a standard 2.5 inch laptop hard drive bay that would take any of many choices of hard or solid state drive.

Basic connectivity to the device would be through USB3 and video out - mini-dvi (for sharing presentations).  No manufacturer specific connectors (Apple, I'm looking at you and your weird dongle fixation).

The screen would be a 13 inch unit with a standard resolution of 1366x768, though a student who wants a higher (retina) level display could always upgrade to one (since they bolt on, this would be a matter of standardizing monitor connectors and offering variations in resolution and colour quality based on cost and need.  

While we're standardizing things, these digital tools would use standardized screws and fasteners that make repairs easy (are you still listening Apple?).  Any high school would have its own genius bar/nerd cave where students in senior computer engineering can repair and upgrade equipment at minimal cost.

The compartmentalization is vital to this tool.  The screen needs to detach logically and easily for replacement, same with the memory, hard/solid state drive, CPU, battery and keyboard.  Compartmentalization allows for much cheaper upkeep.  I'd also like all the pieces to be easily recyclable as well as replace/up-gradable.

The end result would be an easily upgrade-able, component replaceable device that is operating system agnostic, highly adaptable and tough.

The idea of an environmentally sensible laptop isn't a pipe dream.

Google could easily make this happen working with their hardware partners (an Edu-Nexus?) - Microsoft and Apple seem intent on closed eco-system models, even for education, but I live in hope.

It's already the end of 2012.  I'd love to see the silicon valley geniuses recognize that digital literacy is vital for education (and for the future of industry too - we're not producing digitally literate graduates!).

If we could get our hands on that modular, easily upgrade-able/maintainable, ruggedized transformable laptop/data creation, tablet/content consumption device, we'd be one giant step closer to helping students grasp opportunities for digital literacy.

I think we could mass produce these things for $300 for a basic one up to $600 for a tricked out one.  The revolution is well underway, it's time for someone to give us the classroom tools we need to teach it.

Tablets are like high heels part 2

The original: Tablets are like high heels

A while back I tried to wrap my head around tablets and why they are so popular.  I struggled using an original ipad and eventually gave up.  A bit later I had an opportunity to use a windows tablet and almost broke it across my head in frustration.  I'm a tech savvy type, so I kept at it.  If tablets are so great, what wasn't I getting?

This past year I got my hands on an Asus Transformer - the tablet that would convince me that tablets are handy (because it also comes with a keyboard).  It only convinced me that Android has a long way to go in being a tablet OS.

I've got an ipad2 and the Asus Transformer floating around my department waiting for robotics to start, so I offered them out to my staff for test drives.  18 emails requesting the slower, lower memory, single tasking ipad, one saying either would be fine (he got the quad core multi tasking Asus).  Marketing works.  Perhaps that is the key to tablet success.

The sell on tablets is a hard one.  You're getting epic style (yes, Picard has epic style) along with interweb access.  I want to be peppy, mobile and look like I come from the future!  I want a tablet, right?

Turns out I don't.  After trying and trying to tablet up, it just isn't sticking.  It appears I'm at an impasse when it comes to tablets and how I use the internet.

When I go online it's a full contact sport.  I like to get into many things simultaneously (that knocks the ipad out), I'm constantly taking pictures from one thing and slapping them into another.  I'm in and out of photoshop, dreamweaver and other processor heavy software, I want lightning fast responses, the ability to create media on the fly, a keyboard that rewards me for years of learning how to touch type, and a screen that offers a clear view of as many full colour pixels as I can lay my eyes on.

Keep your filthy touch screens!
I want no part of it!

I expect to be able to toss something I found online onto my twitter feed or Facebook or linkedin, or flickr or evernote, or Ning, or Edmodo or any of a million other online tools without having to wonder if it'll copy and paste this time or not.

Touch screens drive me bonkers.  Until I'm getting Iron Man like performance from my 3d touch interface, I'm not interested in taking stabs at data to see if I can pick them up over and over again.  Watching people do this on tablet baffles me, they seem content to have to attempt the same action over and over again, resigned to it - the inefficiency drives me batty.  The fact that you look like a lost mole looking for a hole makes me snort in derision!

Then there's the screen itself.  I'm the kind of guy who cleans the windscreen in his car often (or his glasses before he got the lasers).  If I have to look through it, I want it pristine.  Peanut butter encrusted high def screens hold no interest for me at all.  Even a plain old finger print smudge makes me wonder why you'd pay for the high-def screen in the first place.  I'm a visual person, I want my digital window to gleam.


Tablets are for people who like to watch, spectators.  If you are a passive web media consumer, I'd suggest going back to TV, but if you're determined to lurk, tablets are a good fit for you.  You look nice, but can't do much; we're back to the high heels again.

If you're an active web user, someone who produces (and by produce I mean generate media, not merely be a retweeting machine) as much as they consume, then you're going to find that the all show

Geeky high heels.

and no go reality of tablets frustrating.

There is no single moment where I've wished for a tablet when I've had my ultrabook handy.  Light, fast and fully capable, and running on a full/real operating system instead of the dumbed down mobile OSes on tablets; that is where my proclivities lie!

If I have to have a tablet at all, it's a phone and it fits in my pocket.  It has a good camera, can get me online in a pinch, the batteries last all day and it doesn't run so slowly as to drive me around the bend.  I'll live with the lame mobile OS until they get better and it'll do everything I'd ever need a tablet for without spending hundreds of dollars on a redundancy.

At any other point, when I really want to hit the web, I'll turn to the laptop.

Tablets might be a good fit for how you go online if you're a freaky lurker, but otherwise stay clear!  You'll look great using them, but you won't actually be doing much.  If that's your M.O., an Apple genius is waiting to take your order.

Three Years Out

Here we are at the beginning of 2012.  Our board is having a learning fair at the end of the summer (9 short months away) and they are looking at 21st Century learning and technology as a focus.


My suggestion is three years of time travel.  It doesn't sound like much, but at the current rate of change, we're stretching the boundaries of reasonable speculation pushing even three years out.  What will our class rooms look like in 2015, if we moved with the technology?   Looking back might give us a clear idea of how little we may be able to guess!

*** 2009: An Archeological Review Of A Year In Tech ***

The economy was on its knees, a radical new voice was about to be sworn in south of the border, and gas prices were about to leap and then leap even higher; peak oil panics abounded.  BRIC countries were in huge growth while the old democracies fed their young to capitalist bandits.


Three years ago, Facebook was in its massive growth phase and wasn't a habit so much as a new sensation.  Tablets were an in-joke on the Simpsons from the '90s, and Apple was still a year away from getting it right with the first ipad.  There was no tablet market as such.


Netbooks (net what?) were the new and exciting technology craze, what everyone thought would make personal computing affordable, portable and available to everyone.  An obvious way to keep tech moving forward as the entire banking system fell into disrepute.


Smartphones were still half screens with keyboards, and ruled by RIM.  An exciting new phone by a company called "Palm" was the buzz at CES2009 and Microsoft evidently once made a Mobile Windows OS for phones!  The first iphone was a year old, stratospherically priced, attached to a single provider and had a new app store with no apps.  Android wasn't even a glimmer in Google's eye.


In 2009 our school was in the process of installing wireless internet, but it was still a year away from being stable enough to use (and is still a poor second place due to bandwidth issues).  Everyone in the school used a single core, IBM/Lenovo, board desktop etherneted to the wall, if they used one at all.  Less than 1 in 100 students brought their own laptops to class (though more and more were beginning to bring netbooks, though they couldn't use them online because they were allowed to plug in to the ethernet).  


Walking in to an old-school, centralized IT environment did not seem so silly in 2009.  The network ran on board owned machines in a closed system.  Other than email, cloud based storage was unheard of.  It was a long three years developing UGDSB's Google Cloud project; it was non-existent in 2009.

*** Can We Forecast a Classroom in 2015? ***

Things have zigged and zagged in surprising directions.  Game changers like ipad and Android and the abject failure of the biggest technical buzz item of 2009 (those netbooks) show that there are some changes that sweep through our digital ecosystem so quickly that they are impossible to foretell.


Having said all that, I've been hammering away at ideal directions in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and multiple ecosystem technical learning environments for months now, and think I might be able to take a viable stab at it.

I only hope my colleagues are willing to jump into mix with me.  We could contribute to yet another real step forward in our board's technical evolution:


Mini-lab: the decentralized Education Lab
The Future of Media Arts Labs
Future School
IBM's 5in5 (great example of shocking changes that are probable)

Paper is so 20th Century

@banana29 is currently taking her Master's degree. We're already 500 sheets of paper and a lot of toner and electricity into printouts. All of that paper immediately becomes less accessible once she's read it and made notes on it; it disappears into a stack of unsearchable ideas. Obviously not ideal for keeping your ideas accessible and developing them. Paper is so 20th Century.

The master's course is online, but the text book isn't available electronically. Does this strike you as inconsistent? Why would this university make a course available online and then not offer the text digitally? Money!

I'd love to move her to a digital format, where her content creation and her content consumption is entirely electronic, but text book publishers won't release their content digitally because they can only respect the money they've put into paper publication and refuse to see the digital wave happening all around them. Very similar to what music companies did a decade ago, and we all know how that turned out. Burying their heads in sand is exactly what they shouldn't do, but it's what they are doing.

The other side of the problem is a good educationally friendly digital window. Ipads are nice, but they aren't designed to show text books in their original format. With low resolution and limited screen real estate, ipads work very well as quick digital windows, but long term content contact means lots of page turning through a small 1024x768 window.

I had high hopes for the Kno tablet, but it's been cancelled...

http://youtu.be/uL-2Egqc1qc : Kno tablet awesomeness that never will be.

Is the idea of an educationally focused computer/tablet that mimics text book layout and offers generous screen real estate dead? Can we get by with an Apple monopoly? It looks like we have little choice. Microsoft has cancelled its Courier 2 screen tablet as well. For the foreseeable future, 1024x768 is the only window you're going to get into ereading.

Kno is now an ebook presentation software for ipad (ipad dominance destroys potential improvements in hardware before they can even appear). This isn't an entire loss, a piece of software that lets students organize and access their texts on a single device is great, but I think I'd prefer something web based, so I can get at my content anywhere on anything.

The fact that they are trying to force the paper based text industry into providing etexts is also invaluable. They are forcing the change that is coming anyway. Until we can pry text content control from an industry solely focused on paper based money streams, the option to adopt an etext is very limited.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/tags/kno/:

"What a student needs, according to Kno's research, is something that faithfully reproduces a full-size textbook, without compromise. In contrast, the attempt to cram a textbook onto a smaller screen is a primary reason that previous trials with replacing textbooks with e-readers such as the Kindle DX were abject failures."

I love the idea of a dual screen tablet that folds like a book. The screens are protected while in a bag, it can be opened into a 2 screen or 1 screen layout (by flipping it over) and one screen could be used as a full(er) sized keyboard, the benefits of a short interface ipad like device or a longer term dual screen interaction with content (that doesn't require all books to be reformatted).

I also love the idea of a transformable tablet, so here is my wishlist for that ideal education tablet:

• a tablet that can be purchased like Lego pieces: one screen, two screen, three screen, keyboard, whatever: you can keep joining them together and configuring depending on what you need
• the ipad2 has nice dimensions, but a huge bezel! And the resolution is too low.
• Keep the dimensions for length and width but lets aim for 5mm thick (so 2 folded together are only slightly thicker than a current ipad), and 500g (so 2 folded together still only weigh about a pound and a half)
• instead of a 9.7 inch display, an 11.8 incher would all but eliminate the MASSIVE BEZEL, making for an almost seamless dual (or more) display.
• 1400x1050 resolution on that bigger screen
• when you link multiple screens the systems work in sync to offer you a multicore, networked machine, more screens equals better performance
• yeah, it should run FLASH, and HTML5, and offer an open source, community driven OS (so I guess Apple and M$ are out)

ipad3? Not without Jobsian control. Asus, are you into this? Google? You could partner up for the OS, Honeycomb is awesome! I'd ask Blackberry but they'd take 3 years to get it finished.

In the meantime, reams of paper get printed and paper text books get delivered. Living in a hybrid time period kinda stinks. Twentieth Century, will you end already?

Tablets are like high heels

I've had an opportunity to use a Motorola Xoom tablet this week and respond to my board about how it might be used in class rooms. I've been crushing on the idea of getting a tablet for a while now. After using netbooks in class last semester, I love the idea of a rotatable screen that lets you read without over-scrolling, the super battery life, instant on functionality and the super small form factor.

Last year at ECOO I got to use an ipad for a day, but the wireless was so dodgey (not the ipad's fault), that I barely got any real sense of how it could work. This time round the tablet was with me at work, at home and everywhere in between.

The Xoom has a higher resolution, wide screen and faster processor than the ipad2, and runs on the Android Honeycomb OS (it's basically a google device). It gets along natively with any google apps and lets you access the MASSIVE android marketplace so that your six year old can play a lot of Angry Birds. It also plays Flash, so you don't get the internet-lite ipad experience.

One of the amazing things about touch screens is how quickly and intuitively people take to them. Said six year old was tossing birds at towers in moments, and skipping through the OS to watch youtube or find new software. As a tool for children, or people new to the world of digital content, tablets make a great opening. Tablets offer a great feel of immediacy, you're actually touching the content. Keyboards start to look like bars on the door to the digital wonderland. Thinking about how poor most people's typing is, this might be a tablet's greatest strength.

The android honeycomb OS works well enough, I occasionally experienced bog downs when trying to type (an agonizing process on a touch screen which I thought would be better than what happens on my touch screen android phone, but wasn't). Its biggest draw back was no Firstclass (school email) android app, so I couldn't see board email, which makes it somewhat useless as a communication device for me at work (the Firstclass web interface stinks). If our board moves to Google, as it looks like it will, Honeycomb will suddenly look like a smart choice though.

Any kind of data entry is where I fall down on this tablet thing. I've seen certain (Barkerish) people touch typing on ipads (curious to know what her wpm are), but this seems like a painful transition. My typing on the Xoom alternated between trying to thumb type while in landscape mode and not being able to reach the middle of the keyboard (and I don't have small hands), thumb text typing in portrait mode but the weight of the tablet made this uncomfortable, or trying to actually type from the home keys while it's on my lap or on a table (when it wasn't trying to re-orientate itself). The lack of tactile feedback if you're a touch typer means you're relearning how to assess accuracy (made more difficult when it pauses on you before barfing out a pile of letters). The lack of response and no tactile feed back had me deleting half a line of painfully entered text only to go back and make corrections. Trying to touch the screen and go to the specific error was pretty hit and miss, so I often resorted to the 'screw it, I'll start over again' approach.

I like to make content, especially writing. I can't imagine using a tablet for that. It was even uncomfortable for tweets and social networking, I just didn't like trying to enter data into it. I could work at improving typing on the screen, but I don't think I'll ever come close to how fast I can type on a good, tactile, nicely spaced keyboard with responsive keys, so why bother?

The other contenty side of things for me are graphics. If I'm working in photoshop, I need processing horsepower to move big files (not a tablet forte), and very fine control (a super high dpi mouse minimum, or a very accurate drawing slate). A finger print covered screen that only senses gross motor commands sets of my OCD (I HATE dirty screens, I even clean my car windshield often), and does very little for me in creating graphic content where I want fine control of the environment.

I get the whole tablet thing, I mean, who wouldn't want to look this cool? And tablets aren't without their perks. The battery life is incredible, I ran it all day at school, then it came home and got beaten up on by @banana29 and the mighty Max, often doing very processor heavy tasks - even in that consumptive environment, it took 13+ hours of constant on again off again use before it cried for a recharge.

The instant on functionality is another aspect of that immediacy that must appeal to the old or very young, it removes another barrier to access. All computers should be instant on, no boot time at all, otherwise the web isn't immediate, and becomes a secondary mental realm instead of enhancing our reality. You don't get enhanced reality after a 30 second bootup. Win7 does quite well on new laptops with this, open the lid and it's on, everything should be that instant, or it's just too far away.

As a web browser, the tablet seems untouchable. I wish they could design a laptop screen that would rotate to vertical for reading and writing, then drop into horizontal mode the odd time you need it like that; auto-rotation rocks. I think I'd keep it in portrait mode most of the time, I don't watch high def movies on a laptop, I'm not sure why wide screens are now the norm, I'd prefer a tall one.

The size of this tablet is pretty sweet too. The Xoom would disappear into any kind of bag with ease, and is very light and so thin as to be invisible.

What I've got here is a device that is only good in a few, specific situations, it fits in a very thin place between my smart phone and my laptop, a space that I suspect is actually too small for me to care about now that I've tried it.

I don't care for super small phones, and I'd be just as happy with a big 5 inch smartphone that has tablety qualities than I would with a book sized tablet that works well as a reader, but I can't seem to find another use for. If convergence is what we're aiming for, tablets are an offshoot that will eventually be subsumed by a smartphone evolution (I'd bet on build-in, interactive projectors in phones that make bigger screens moot).

The Xoom and ipad look fantastic, but the touch screen makes me nuts when it gets finger printy, and is sometimes unresponsive (though I must admit having less problems there with the ipad, so maybe that's an Android issue, or just what you get for not having to run any gadgets or flash). You wouldn't type anything meaningful on a tablet, you can't take decent photos or video with it (you'd do far better with a dedicated camera), but it looks fantastic, futuristic and makes the user look very chic.

Like those awesome Tron inspired stilettos, the Xoom is great to think about using, but after 10 minutes, you wouldn't be getting much done and it would just hurt, though you'd still look fabulous!

Tablets are like high heels PART DEUX! (complete with awesome geeky high heels!)