now this looks cool - lots of uses for school.

iChat and bonjour have their limitations, I find Skype doesn’t always work …. being able to drop stuff to peoples desktop would be great!

From the Lifehacker blog:

Mac OS X only: Freeware app DropCopy provides a quick way to share files across your networked Macs.

To use DropCopy, just run it on all the Macs on your home network. What you’ll get is a mysterious gray circle - or wormhole, if you will - called the drop zone. When you drag a file over the drop zone, you’ll see your other networked computers running DropCopy pop out to the side. Just drag the file to the computer you want and release; DropCopy will send the file to a user-defined folder on said computer. Simple and clean, just how we like ‘em. DropCopy is free/donationware on up to a 3-computer network, $25 for 4+ networks, Mac OS X only. — Adam Pash
DropCopy [via TUAW]

In the far future, your computer will be able to read your lips. That is, if researchers at the U of East Anglia are successful in their three-year project. The idea is sound: using technology similar to character recognition, a computer can take input from a video camera, for example, and parse the position of a person’s lips at specified intervals. It then uses algorithms much like those that your phone uses for predictive texting, trying to fill in the blanks before it gets to them. This way, the computer can put together phrases a persons (or “perp”) is likely saying as text.

If the researchers can get the bugs worked out, and the reliability is sound, then it would make a powerful crimefighting weapon. Detectives in the FBI often use lip-reading as a way to stealthfully steal information for unwary suspects. Digitizing and automating the process means that any camera anywhere might know what you’re saying at any given time. Scared? Then you must be a criminal.

Crime-fighting potential for computerised lip-reading [EurekAlert!]

source: Crunchgear blog 

 There was a question asked about this sort of technology at David Warlicks seminar over the weekend so this post prompted a few thoughts.

I like the quote from ian Jukes last year …"the difference between science fiction and the real world is that science fiction has to be believable!" 

love this …

thanks Jane

It has been a busy week with lots of things going on.

I have been at a full day seminar with David Warlick all day today.  We managaed to get him to spend the day with us tacked on to his time at the Learning at School in Rotorua.  It has been a fun day …. a bit frantic this morning with the wireless finally being sorted 5 minutes after we were supposed to be beginning.  But the content of the day has been Davids usual stuff (usual in that I have been subscribing to his blog for ages and have a pretty good idea of his ‘content’, rather than decrying its value!) and it has been good to  see people challenged and getting ideas to use in their own classsrooms at the same time.

A broad audience today with early childhood teachers to those from secondary schools.  Something for everyone though and I had good feedback from a number of people.

A fun week at school as well as I have been back in front of kids again.  It has been really great to be working with kids again …. It did feel really strange not sitting down with my own class at the start of the school year!

I feel like I am beginning to get more of ‘a feel for’ things at school.  There are lots of really fantastic things happening at our school and I am only just beginning to get any real insight into how the place works below the surface like:

* the very strong vision for learning based on  empowering children and their creativity

* the really neat visual reminders for ’stages’ of writing in the junior classes.  These are a great idea and something I have never seen before - coloured dinosaurs (etc) that represent different ‘boxes’/levels in the rubric for writing skills for the kids. 

*lots of ideas and supports available for integrating ‘thinking skills’ into programmes.

 fun, fun, fun …

I’m playing with the "what first?"

The "whats on top" is pretty imperative in the Office isn’t it!  Staffing - payroll ’seeking clarity’ on the last three faxes; meeting new parents; dealing with someone needing ‘a chat’ about behaviour on the school bus; trying to find  new stereos for the classroom with line-in jacks so we can use them as external speakers for our laptops; getting someone to kill the huge wasp nest we have just found in the hedge; checking the old classroom does have a fire exit; finding somewhere the councellor can work without being disturbed; finalising the budget; chasing up the sunhat order; meeting the new Speech language Therapist; review meeting for the new ORRS child; interviewing for a new Teachers Aide; meeting the painter, the photocopier salesman, the insurance broker, the BoT chair, the staff who have the wrong hours on their payslip, ….. Never a dull moment.

Strategic thinking is the next thing …. when it slows down a bit …. HA! 

As the new chum in the school there are any number of things that I could dive into and change.  I have spent last year advising people to follow the 80/20 rule …. choose the 20% of things that will make 80% difference. Now I have to walk the walk ….

Staffing, professional learning structures?  Technical stuff, digital cameras? School wide structures and consistancy?  Things to think about but lots of time… hasten slowly (as my dad used to say).  I am also conscious of what is normal for me after a year in the National Facilitation Team is quite different from how most schools operate …. noone else here has their bloglines as their homepage!  Building on strengths that I want to focus on … NOT turning the place upside down.

I need to listen, learn and get my head around the culture first.  After all (I believe) change management is all about cultural management.  I can’t, and indeed really shouldn’t, change what I don’t understand. 

 What I have done so far is set up a wiki for all our meeting notes, brainstorms, syndicate and drive team meetings, etc.  With the notifications set I automatically get updates as people add stuff to it and no-one has to remember to pass on minutes.  On the strength of 8 days it is working well.

 I have also set up a wiki for the class I am working in on the term topic of The Brain.  Only questions at this point but the kids are really enthusiastic about it.  I also showed them the Google Sketchup video from the Macbreak Video podcast - I am hoping to use Sketch-up to make a virtual tour of the school buildings.

Lots of fun …. lots of watching, listening and learning. 

I like this from Dean Shareski’s blog:

In the past 5 days here are three videos impacting the world.

• The Machine is Us…read Jeff Utecht’s take
• Brian Crosby’s class….this is what technology is for
• Franklin Police…to catch a thief

If we still think reading and writing are the cornerstones of literacy, you might want to rethink that

These videos have been mentioned in a few places but I have pasted his entry in here so I have the feeds in one place.  One just for me really …  :-) 

from David Pogues New York Times blog

"For an industry that’s built on science, the technology world sure has its share of myths. Thousands of people believe that forwarding a certain e-mail message to 50 friends will bring great riches, that the gigahertz rating of a computer is a good comparative speed score, or that Bill Gates once said “640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody.”

Skip to next paragraph

Illustration by Stuart Goldenberg

Shawn King, a library patron in Westport, Conn., examining photographs shot using various pixel levels. Few could discern differences.

But one myth is so deeply ingrained, millions of people waste money on it every year. I’m referring, of course, to the Megapixel Myth.

It goes like this: “The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.”

It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.

A megapixel is one million tiny colored dots in a photo. It seems logical that more megapixels would mean a sharper photo. In truth, though, it could just mean a terrible photo made of more dots. A camera’s lens, circuitry and sensor — not to mention your mastery of lighting, composition and the camera’s controls — are far more important factors.

I can show you plenty of enlargements from a 4-megapixel camera that look much sharper and better than ones from an 8-megapixel model. Meanwhile, a camera with more megapixels usually costs more, and its photos fill up your memory card and hard drive much faster. And more densely packed pixels on a sensor chip means more heat, which can introduce speckles into low-light shots.

But you can repeat this lesson until you’re blue in the newspaper column, and some people still won’t believe you. They still worry that their 5-megapixel camera from 2005 is obsolete. They still feel sales pressure when shopping for new cameras.

So as the host of a TV series (“It’s All Geek to Me,” to begin in April on Discovery HD and the Science Channel), I thought I finally had a chance to settle this thing once and for all. At the climax of the camera episode, I would test the Megapixel Myth on camera, supplying visual proof for the world to see.

I created three versions of the same photograph, showing a cute baby with spiky hair in a rowboat. One was a 5-megapixel shot, one was 8 megapixels and one was 13.

I asked 291 Digital, a New York graphic imaging company whose clients include ad agencies and fashion companies, to print each one at a posterlike 16 by 24 inches. (They were digital C prints, printed on Durst Lambda at 400 dpi, if that means anything to you.)

We mounted the three prints on a wall in Union Square in Manhattan. Then, cameras rolling, we asked passers-by if they could see any difference.

A small crowd gathered, and several dozen people volunteered to take the test. They were allowed to mash their faces up against the print, step back and squint, whatever they liked.

Only one person correctly identified which were the low-, medium-, and high-resolution prints. Everybody else either guessed wrong or gave up, conceding that there was absolutely no difference."

Well the first week of school is finished.  I still feel like a new entrant!

It is amazing how much that happens in a school is just second nature for those who have been there for some time! I have spent the week getting amused smiles as I ask all sorts of questions like "how does duty work?", "where do the kids sit to have lunch?", "what time is assembly?".  School culture is a strong and wonderful thing.

We had a session with Joan Dalton and David Anderson after school on the first day which highlighted this as well.  One of the staff commented to me this afternoon how lucky we are that we all work so well together, honest forthright debate is a strong feature of our professional learning.  This will make working together on the things we have decided on as whole school development focuses a lot easier.  The ‘buzz’ after the session was very cool!  Ideas from the session have been topics for staffroom discussions ever since.

 One thing that particularly struck a chord was the notion of school culture and relationships being like an iceberg - the visible and obvious are only a small part of the real picture.  Things that are fundamental are often those ‘below the surface’ but they are still paramount to relationships and ongoing development.

Those of you who know me will also feel pangs of sympathy for the other teachers as I have begun sending on e-mails to them .  lol.

Well I am ‘back in the saddle’ of principalship.
Having a week of things at school including our ‘teachers only day’ on Friday the realities of less time for the blue sky stuff is sinking in. It is almost midnight and I have only about 30 blog entries to catch up on in my Bloglines …. sigh!
It has been a great week though since finishing my year at CORE on the 28th Jan. I wrote an article for the CORE mag reflecting on my year and have included it below.

Some things I have noticed about life at school already:
* the pace
* the shortness of the time you are able to concentrate on one task - but the flipside to that is I am sure I will get a lot more exercise - and loose the notches added to the belt in the last 12 months …. lol
* I need more RAM in my laptop!! It is much slower than my CORE one and that makes a difference when you are used to the speed (hmmmm …. what does this mean for kids who have better IT gear at home than we have at school!!??)
* I work better around people! - than driving a computer and being ‘remote’.
* the multitasking - it’s full-on isn’t it!

COOL job though!! Love it …. roll on 2007!

My article for the CORE newsletter …

I am not sure what I expected the role of National Facilitator to be like. But it has been an incredibly steep learning curve and ???one hell of a ride???. I have found my year at CORE challenging of my thinking professionally, as well as affirming of the directions and ideas I had already begun playing with.

My 2006 year finished in a whirlwind, sorting out things at school in order to be able to come to this new role and trying to figure out in my head what an ICT PD national facilitator actually does. The role is very different from principalship, but at the same time there are big overlaps and many of the skills are readily transferable.

Some of the key ???impressions??? for me have been:
?? The pace at which things happen in and around CORE is amazing. When you have a group of such passionate, focused and highly skilled people things happen at a fast pace and often all at once.
?? I have really enjoyed the ???level of thinking??? I have had to engage in at CORE examining ???the big picture??? of how ICT???s can and do have a tremendous positive impact in classrooms. I have had time to get my head out of the day-to-day life of our school and into an environment where it is OK and indeed expected that you will spend time reading and responding to blogs, research and articles; and where there is a huge amount of technical expertise to support you in doing almost anything you can dream of being possible to support clusters and their programmes. I have begun my own blog and contributed to the blogs and thinking of people all around the globe. Recently I was approached to contribute to an on-line conference presentation on Web2.0 tools ??? when in principalship do we get the opportunity to do these sorts of things?
?? I have found blogging such a powerful tool for my own thinking. When you have to write something down you have to be sure of your thinking and that what I am saying will make sense to those who will be reading it. It has also forced me to think more deeply about what I believe and ensure I can justify the position I am taking
?? Over the year I have had the privilege to engage and work with such thought leaders as Julia Atkin, Joan Dalton and David Anderson, Ian Jukes, Marc Prensky, Tony Ryan, the list goes on. This is powerful stuff, and again a very unique opportunity. For me it has removed the mystique of these people and allowed me to engage with their ideas without being intimidated by their ???name???.
?? Working remotely is not for everyone, and I am not sure if it really is for me. Coming from a principal position where I was teaching as well as in the Office meant my day was full of people. Some days in this role I may send lots of e-mail but not talk to a real person for hours at a time, certainly not face to face. Coupled with this is the fact that there are often no interruptions. This just never happens in a school, there are always things going on that mean you are juggling multiple tasks at one time. The luxury of focusing on one thing for more than 10-15minutes at a time (maximum) took some getting used to.
?? As a self-confessed software application junkie I have enjoyed being able to spend the time getting familiar with different tools and technical issues with the equipment (computer, iPod, video, etc) I have had experience with this year.
?? Having been a principal for nearly 13 years reporting to someone else and being the ???noobe??? was an odd feeling.
?? Getting behind the scenes with big conferences like ULearn and learning at School has given me a huge respect for the teams that put these events together. I will never complain about missing out on a workshop choice again!!
?? The National Facilitation Team, what a team. The passion, enthusiasm and commitment of this group to making our schools and education system better places has never ceased to amaze me. I will really miss our meetings and the group that have so quickly become friends, despite only seeing each other every few months.

I have been really enthused by the power and potential of collaborative Web2.0 applications to transform our classrooms. Tools such as podcasting, blogging and wikis in particular are easy to use and give such a powerful voice to the kids in our schools to share their learning in ways that make it meaningful to THEM and allow them to share it with the WORLD. The key thing is that this requires internet access and a web browser rather than lots of sophisticated equipment and lots of technical skill.

What has become even clearer to me however is the central place LEADERSHIP plays in school change. It sounds redundant to be saying school leaders are powerful change agents but they are. Schools without powerful leadership who model and USE ICT???s as a natural and integral part of their work make much less ???progress??? towards their goals than those who do.

I have developed my personal use of tools like blogging and wikis; networking tools like Del.icio.us; and using aggregators like Bloglines and iTunes. I can see myself using these in my principal role as tools for my own learning, as well as ways of sharing my learning with others and networking to be able to debate ideas in a wider forum.

I like Ian Jukes analogy of teachers comfort zones being like a rubber band and that they will ???ping-back??? to where they were unless we can change their thinking. The most powerful computing tool in the classroom is the necktop, not the laptop. We need to change the ways teachers think about their teaching and their pedagogy ??? then their teaching will never be the same and their classrooms will be transformed. We need to change the way kids think about their learning ??? they need to be active and in control, and expect to be so.
We need to change the way families and communities view their schools and education. Kids are not passive, helpless and unskilled empty vessels that we ???stuff information and understandings??? into until it sticks. They CAN and SHOULD be active, engaged, responsible, self-motivated learners; and deserve teachers who are the same.

The pace of change in education is increasingly rapid. In order for schools to keep up we need to adapt and adopt the best of what is happening for our own purposed. The big issue is workload though. Teachers have only so many hours in the day to give to their professional lives. They will adopt and adapt to changes willingly if they see the benefit for:
Themselves as professionals
Themselves personally
The kids in their classrooms

We need to ensure that changes we are proposing makes learning in our schools better, not different, better! Then teachers will adopt the changes. They won???t if change is adding to their role, they will if it makes it easier or better (preferably both). I see that as the hook and the key thing we need to focus on as we mover forward with ICT PD and the curriculum reforms we are embarking on.

I have enjoyed my contact with clusters, principals and teachers all around the south island. It has been a real privilege to be welcomed into schools and for people to share their classrooms, plans, and dreams for their schools with me. I hope I have been able to support and challenge peoples thinking as well as promote a few changes of my own.

So CORE 2006 has been very challenging, heaps of fun and I have learned more than I think I realise yet.