check out these YouTube videos from a trade show this year in China:

While this may not be completely cosha and you would seem to have to order a fair few at that price … this would seem to be Moores law in practice. At this price it would be affordable to have enough for good saturation in a school ….
Hmmmm …. watch this space!

follow the link to get “the cult of Mac” entry speculating on the brick project at Apple - an all screen laptop?

This is like an oversized iPhone …. very cool!

It would seem to come from the One Laptop per Child project ….

CORE have produced this series of videos looking at key issues in education.  I like this one from Sharon Freisen looks at the difference between Inquiry as a disposition and Inquiry as a Teaching Strategy.  This is a fundamental difference!

ALL those in the school need to be Inquirers and Learners.  Sometimes this will be together and sometimes it is more focused on teacher professional learning.

… thanks Jane for the link!

With the c**p 3G connections in NZ this would be even worse:

so how misleading is misleading?

The iPhone in NZ would seem to be more of a status symbol than a useful piece of technology? Especially for the extortionate plans Vodafone have …. and for those of us who spend most of our lives in a wireless network, for most of the functionality - WHY?
An iPod Touch is pretty cool - and does most of the things an iPhone does (but no phone).

No week view in the calendar would drive me NUTS. Why not day view in portrait and defaults to week view in landscape - now that would be so Apple.

I think I’ll wait till they halve in price, triple in capacity and the plans don’t take a small mortgage.

” Is it not possible that certain technologies undermine best practices?

Are we so technocentric that we believe that every technology is equivalent and dependent on either a) “PD” or b) teacher effort?

I’m sure there are teachers who could do creative things with a chainsaw. Why not buy every teacher a chainsaw?

What if the technology is just bad or unnecessary? Is that a possibility?”

ouch! …. a very good point though!!

(source - comment 13 …. and a good discussion to follow in full)

and from Sylvia Martinez:

…, I see very little evidence that they [IWB's] are being used well in MOST classrooms. I just don’t think that the handful of teachers using them in “engaging” ways would justify the millions that have been spent on them. Most of the schools I work with are busy “looking for things to do with whiteboards”. Really, I wish I didn’t hear that phrase time and time again. In reality, People are looking for ways to justify the money they spent.

I think we have to acknowledge that although IWBs MIGHT be used well, they aren’t. The next question is whether “good” PD can fix this.

To answer that, I think you have to question the primary model and design intent of any technology, because that’s how it will mostly be used. Just because a few excellent teachers make something more out of it doesn’t justify it. The primary model and design intent of IWBs reinforces instructionist teaching practice. That they are being primarily used this way should surprise no one.

In my opinion, no amount of PD will fix this. And in fact, it’s likely that millions more dollars will be poured into PD to try to get teachers to use IWBs, and the result will by and large be in an instructionist, front of the classroom mode. I don’t think PD about IWBs, classroom embedded or not, will be able to overcome the basic nature of IWBs - that their primary function is to allow a teacher to control a presentation in the front of the classroom.

So, to me, the news that PD isn’t overcoming this basic nature of the IWB should surprise no one either.

Backs up my thinking as well. I am yet to see any classroom with an IWB where the pedagogical model was anything other than “full frontal”!

I spent a very fun day yesterday with my sons school teams at the RoboCup Junior competition here in Dunedin. Phillips team has spent months developing and refining a dance routine for a small robot. For those who don’t know the concept go HERE for a link to the official RoboCup junior site. There is a logo like interface where the kids can programme the robots move-by-move. Congratulations to the group Iain was working with who won the section Phillip was in.
Pricing the kits they are VERY expensive (around $500nz) but still a lot of fun and heaps of learning applications/potential. I have sent emails to a number of people who are selling the kits online so will be interesting to see what costings comes back.

and the entry that won the world champs for the dance section from YouTube:

and other dance routines HERE.

Try YouTube as well if you want to find the kinds of things people are doing with these kits, just because you can:

Semour Papert in a keynote from Australia I watched recently went to great pains to emphasize that programming is the real use of computers in education (in his view). It is in programming that children are taught to think and solve real problems in a logical and reasoned way. You can’t help but be creative in programming too as you are always solving unique and real problems in novel ways. Robotics is an area we are yet to explore in any meaningful way in schools… as the pricing for the necessary bits-and-pieces gets cheaper this is something worth watching over the next few years.

I can immediately think of a number of children at school who would LOVE this stuff!!

A good one to share with kids about the power of viral advertising and urban myths?

This video:

… is doing the rounds at the moment and at face value is pretty scary. I certainly wouldn’t want a device that could do this in my pocket or close to my head.
But … hold on … a quick look shows to was produced by these guys who make bluetooth headsets. This blog has heaps of comments that link to the original site too. Good to show the importance of reading just that bit further
YouTube has a variety of vids from people who have actually given it a go too:

I like the comment you here at teh end of this one ….”why would the internet lie?” …. indeed!

an interesting post from David Pogue - not just the post but the comments:

Today’s mailbag brings a question that was on every teacher’s lips a few years ago. I haven’t heard much talk about it recently. Is that because teachers have solved this problem on their own? If so, I’d like to hear your suggestions…

Dear David: I’m a high school teacher. Like all high schools, we are dealing with a problem that sucks time, energy, and resources like a black hole: cellphones. We waged a similar battle a few years back with iPods, and although stakes seem much higher now, the fundamental argument is the same. The argument is:

1] cellphones are a distraction
2] cellphones present a potential liability in terms of cheating on tests
3] cellphones are a distraction

My position is that we’re fighting the wrong fight, and fighting a fight no one will win. Telling teenagers that they cannot have a cellphone on their person, or worse, telling them that they can carry it but they cannot use it, is like banning cloudy days. It’s an admirable suggestion, but totally ludicrous. If I’m gauging the pace of progress correctly, by the time my current students exit college, the iPhone will be one of five devices that offer voice, text, e-mail, video chat, and Web access. Banning them is, in my opinion, ill considered at best.

I truly feel we should be incorporating their capabilities into the curriculum when possible, and teaching etiquette and personal responsibility in their use–because if the college class I teach is any example, they don’t got none. It’s so disheartening to look around during a lecture and see the soft glow of the screens while my students text away. I want to say it’s insulting, but it’s not personal — not in the least. It’s just the way it is.

So I’m asking for some insight on how to sell this to an administration that is overwhelmed with a hundred more important things, and to a school board that feels that two $500 computers are twice as good as one $1,000 machine. What’s the answer?

check it out here

There is a real push and buzz around interactive whiteboards at the moment. I just don’t get it …
how is this:

much different to this …

The cost of putting an interactive whiteboard in a classroom in NZ is about
$12-14000 … what could we do with this amount of money? Thats a lot of digital cameras, laptops, projectors etc. I am struggling with what makes it BETTER with an IWB.

I don’t just want different I want better for any changes we make to our pedagogy and classrooms. Where is the $10k difference between a good projector/LCD screen and an IWB? Remembering that technology can just make an average teacher expensive to run how is the IWB better?

What am I missing??

I had a quick play tis afternoon with an unlocked iPhone. Much and all as I am reluctant to buy into the hype (as I see Apple have sold a million of these things in a few weeks!!) it was very nice! Google Earth worked well accessing a local Wifi network and the screen was very clear and sharp.
I would love to see these with 80gb of flash memory …. now that would be a toy REALLY worth having. I have nearly 50gb of podcasts, music, video, photos, etc on my laptop so a 16gb anything is not really much use - however cool and nice it may be.
oh well …. sigh ….. I guess I’ll wait a bit longer. Still a VERY nice device!!
I am told the price point for these puppies will be around $700. This competes very well with smartphones like my Treo. Man this looks like a brick now - lol