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Having spent the last three days in a state of mind akin to an excited teenage trance over the purchase of my new toy, I have to finally sit down and reflect on how it is going to change (and not change) my life at this point. Many technology-minded teachers are now going down the path of the smart phone and I think the implications of this for students in the classroom are significant. At the same time, it’s important to have a healthy scepticism about where we’re going as a technology-driven society and recognise the limitations of these devices.

For me, the impact of the iPhone on my life is astounding. Having clung to my Nokia E61 ‘nerd’ phone (great for easy SMS texting with the QWERTY keyboard but bad for just about anything else) for the last two years and missing out on both the first and second generation iPhones, I was keen to jump on the third generation bandwagon with my Nokia phone contract nearly up. Like an excited teenager, I raced to the shops last Friday to speedily purchase the 32GB 3GS model. Within an hour, I had synced my contacts, set up four email accounts, had live feeds for Twitter, Facebook and Myspace and was just about as connected as I’ve ever been while sitting on a park bench shooting the breeze (or twiddling my thumbs… literally).

While waiting well over an hour at a medical centre yesterday morning, and after leafing through a few uninteresting magazines, I decided to catch up on some social-networking. Now, despite the fact that I consider myself highly tech-savvy and a frequent user of the internet, social-networking has to rank very low on my list of priorities. Teachers these days are among the world’s most time poor, and navigating the highly complex and often problematic relationships in the classroom (I work in a girls’ school – so believe me, this is no mean feat) is hard work enough. I come home exhausted and the last thing I care to do is jump on Facebook!

Ah, but there’s the rub. Often when waiting for things to happen – such as for a doctor to see you – we end up with highly unproductive time on our hands that might well be better used doing things like the pocket-sized social-networking that iPhones enable. How much better to say to ourselves, “Well… I had to wait ages, but at least I managed to tell my 193 friends all about it and post a really cool picture of the waiting room too!” But I digress.

Being so heavily connected in such a new way, I find myself starting to see the worth of the ‘technology-free day‘ that many psychologists and technologists alike are advocating. Trouble is – once I get started with this toy, will I be able to stop? Several million teenagers would cry a unanimous ‘no way!’

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, some schools are issuing new iPod Touch devices as part of our government roll-out of computer funding to all Australian schools. Apart from an exercise in Apple branding (which Apple have done so well in schools over the past thirty years) I have to wonder whether the money wouldn’t be better spent on netbooks or low-cost laptops. After all, even though the iPhone/iTouch devices are sophisticate pocket-sized computers, they’re still pocket-sized – and writing a 500-word blog post, while slightly fiddly on the reduced-size keyboard of my ASUS eeePC would be painfully annoying on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

In a web-driven world of instant messaging and flashy videos of dancing pandas – where the iPhone is king – we need to remember that it is part of a complete technology breakfast. We also need to be emphasising the value of taking time to write, create and reflect properly. Sure, micro-blogging has its place, but if that were all I ever did, I think I’d start to see my life as disparate tiny fragments. Which reminds me – I better go and check whether Dave is still mowing the lawn or Jane is still drinking a cup of coffee. Which button do I press for that again?

Postscript: due to formatting problems from Pages to Word, I had to do the guide and blank summary scaffolds as PDF files. The storyboard is still in Word format.

Many teachers have come to me lately asking for ideas on how to get started making movies with kids in the classroom. As part of my school’s Year 8 project-based learning unit for English – and because I couldn’t find any decent versions pre-existing on the web – I prepared the scaffolds attached to this post.

The Storyboard Scaffold includes some boxes for scene sketching and general shot summaries, including voice-overs, dialogue, titles, costumes, etc. etc. You can adjust any of these criteria to fit your project easily by editing them in your word processor of choice.

The movie summary scaffolds are suitable for writing initial proposals of ideas, brainstorming approaches or documenting other aspects of the movie-making process. The guide scaffold models what you want in the scaffold and the blank scaffold is for students to fill in. If you’d like it, I have done an example of an appropriation of Cinderella which I’m happy to email to you.

One request: if you do make any changes to these scaffolds, could you pass on the new versions to me? I welcome any other scaffolds – the more the better for all of us on our movie-making endevours! Alternatively, if you’ve got some great movie scaffolds, drop me a link to your site!

Like most teachers, I’m constantly driven by the need to be as productive as possible, as much of the time as possible (is it little wonder that we so often compare ourselves to machines?) So, when I look at the end of the holidays back on the last two weeks, I have to ask myself: have I used my time productively? This time round, I’m glad the answer is ‘yes.’

One of the big achievements of this holiday has been getting my little school netbook project off the ground. It’s been great to read about all the other projects like this happening all around the world as schools gear up to make the most of these ultra-portable, ultra-cheap devices with so much potential. In case you haven’t been following the trends in this area, here are a few:

• In Australia, the Victorian state government is launching netbooks in all public schools down in Victoria.

• Tony Vincent and other bloggers have been discussing trials of netbooks in schools – check out this podcast for an in-depth focus on some real case studies.

I think this has to be the closest we’ve come so far to the goal of one-one laptops in schools and it’s exciting to see so much unfolding – not just in our own backyards, but in developing economies too.

As of a couple of days ago, I’ve set up a few Acer Aspires and EeePC 701s with some customisation of the default Linux distros. The goal was to have machines that could boot up quickly, access the net and provide basic office and multimedia functionality. What amazes me is that for less than AU$300, you can set up such a powerful, tiny machine. What I’ve discovered is that aside from editing slabs of audio and/or video (for which you do need some processor ‘beef’), there’s very little that these things can’t do. Here are just a few examples:

• Basic audio recording, mixing and editing for podcasts with Audacity

• VoIP with Skype

• Office-based editing with OpenOffice 3

• Google Earth and Second Life

• Any thing that a web browser lets you do

And with the focus now squarely on the ‘cloud,’ a decent browser and a few web tools goes a long way. So now I have a strong case to get a full trolley of these – watch this space!

As netbooks continue to soar in popularity and we look at the issues surrounding bringing them into schools, I feel that one particular issue comes to the fore: the choice of OS.

For many people, this isn’t a choice at all. Most are happy to use XP (which now runs as standard on over three quaters of the netbook market) and are at least a little afraid to explore other possibilities.

Having had my own (Linux-based) ASUS eee PC for some time now, I’m starting to direct my school  towards buying some netbooks for our kids. To begin with, we have bought five Acer Aspires pre-loaded with XP. I’ve been interested to see how they’d perform, specifically in relation to the basics of boot time, connecting to the internet, opening a document and so on. Needless to say, XP’s performance was lacking in all of these areas, taking a whopping two minutes to load and being bogged down by the usual anti-virus software and other RAM hogs.

As an experiment, I wiped the hard disk of one aspire and replaced it with Acer’s custom Linpus – which boots up in about 15 seconds and points you straight to the basics of Firefox, Open Office, etc. on the one screen. Most kids and teachers I know who have never used Linux are able to do the most common things with this distro fairly easily. The same could be said of eee’s Xandros. The opening screens in both distros are extremely simple to follow – and when your main focus is the web, there’s little more you need to worry about other than clicking on the ‘web’ icon:

I think bringing Linux into the mix is – part and parcle with netbooks generally – about focusing on the ‘less is more’ principle. Seeing that all the applications are mostly web-based brings the focus on collaboration.

At the same time, focusing less on say making a song or editing swathes of video makes you appreciate simple things like online forums, RSS feeds, wikipedia pages and so on. There’s so much to be gained from the simple things on the web, and the more we look at the simple things, the more we realise how sophisticated those things can be.

Finally, I’d like to suggest that bringing Linux into a school and/or individual classroom is to some extent a political choice, regardless of our views. I think there’s a lot to be gained simply teaching others about the world of open source especially given that the vast majority of computer users don’t really know what the term is and have been reared on Microsoft or Apple products from day one. The fact that open source represents a viable and powerful alternative to proprietry solutions is amazing in itself – not to mention the fact that Linux is the technology backbone of the developing world.

For more thoughts on Linux in education, check out Clarence Fisher’s post in Remote Access.

Being an occasional blogger, I struggle with the pitfalls and perils of not maintaining an online presence as frequently as many of my blogging colleagues. Perfectionism is always a dangerous thing for bloggers, is it not?

But when I hurled myself headlong into our new Connected Learning (an integrated curriculum) program and introducing Google Docs to over 180 Year 7 students last month, I thought I had found a worthy topic to resume my online pedagogical ramblings. For anyone who is unaware, an integrated curriculum usually combines several subjects into one large subject, which is often team-taught in larger classroom settings and may focus on themes which connect skills and content from the different disciplines being combined. Our integrated curriculum combines the subject areas of English, History, Geography and Religious Education.

We are currently in the throes of a unit entitled ‘My World’ which is mostly skills-based. What a good time, I thought, to introduce Google Docs?

Word to the wise: never assume that junior high school kids are capable of: (1) starting a Google account and verifying their email address; (2) spelling their email addresses; or (3) remembering their passwords. Had I the time over, Google Apps – which allows a teacher or education administrator to set up a school domain name and bulk email addresses – is a  good option for getting kids online, especially when trying to work with 180 of them at once in a large learning space. But at least our kids learned that when you don’t spell correctly, verify an email account inquiry or remember your password (or any combination of these), you can’t expect to get on and start an assignment. Such learning curbs – priceless though they may be – also leave many a teacher with a hankering for ‘a valium sandwich,’ to quote one of my Connected Learning Colleagues.

Nevertheless, after about 4 50-minute lessons, much moaning, groaning and gnashing of teeth, we had our entire Connected Learning cohort online, Google Doc’ing and collaborating in a real time frenzy of creativity.

If you haven’t had the chance to trial collaborative writing with your students, I thoroughly recommend it. If you have, I’d love to hear about some of the activities you’ve tried.