Desktop or portables?

That was the question... the answer was: portables!
The digitisation-project of our school is developing. The wireless network should be active by the end of the Easter holidays, but I hope the electrician will start working on the cables... Yes, cables because there needs to be one cable between each access point and the controller. And there being some 35 access point all over the school this is quite a job.
Then there was the question of one desktop and one projector in each classroom...
Finally the verdict was: let's lend each teacher one portable. There are a number of advantages:

• Personal responsibility is better for the survival of the hardware.
• Teacher can prepare everything at home and be sure the software works when use it at school.
• For parallel lessons this is a good solution: the teacher is sure the computer in the next class will work: it's his/her portable!
• Teachers can use it for their school mail.
• The school is responsible for the licences of the software they have installed. From then onward the teacher is responsible for the other software.
• Security: teachers take the computers home during evenings, weekends and holidays. The risk of theft is divided.

There are also some disadvantages:

• IT-responsible can't control the state of the computer at all times.
• The local and server profiles might be a bit confusing for the user. I'm looking for a solution for that. Help is welcome.

Of course there is also the cost, but I will do some work scanning the market to get the best deal!

In all this means that the school will invest in some 75 portables in 2 years time...

Hotpot + Scorm 2.1 --> Blackboard

One of the interesting steps in the well-known exercise software Hot Potatoes is the integration of the exercises in a learning environment (Blackboard - EloV) in our case.
What's this all about? For years teachers and educators have been using Hot Potatoes to develop interactive online exercises, but to me the feedback/evaluation was always a weak point. Students could do the exercises and read the feedback linked to correct or wrong answers. But in the end they just got a percentage, so that the feedback for the teacher was very poor. Teachers need to study the results, need to see whether the student made a typing mistake or a fundamental mistake, so that remediation is possible. That was difficult with Hot Potatoes... I preferred the exercise module of the Blackboard learning environment, since there it is possible to check the real answer of the student and adjust the marks if necessary.
Thanks to the SCORM norm it is possible to develop exercises and content in third party programs and import them into the learning environment.
Now Hot Potatoes has taken that step (in Beta). From any exercise module it is now possible to export the exercise to a zipped scorm file, which you can then import into Blackboard.
In a first, brief test this morning three out of four exercises seemed to work after importation. During the next few days, I will be testing all the possibilities.

Marianne Wartoft's freeware

I have tried out some freeware for English, developed by Marianne Wartoft. I think the software for phonetics, Sephonics, can be a good help for all students and teachers of English, but particularly for those who are learning English in some remote parts of the world where they have a very limited contact with native speakers. I have experienced in Vietnam that some teachers of English, though full of energy and good-will, had difficulties expressing themselves. I suppose that the Vietnamese language lacks a number of sounds that are used in the English language. If they're not regularly in contact with native speakers, the production of these sounds becomes problematic. Maybe this program can help a little...
Intonation is very important in the Vietnamese language: one evening we were invited in Saigon by Mr Tach for dinner, and the subject of Vietnamese language popped up. They were pronouncing three words, identical to me, but quite different to them because of the intonation, an aspect that I failed to perceive... very interesting!!
Marianne Wartoft has also Selingua to exercise vocabulary and verbs, but the exercises and games are presented mostly in another language (Swedish, German, French, Spanish, but - unfortunately - not Dutch (nor Vietnamese...).
For our Geography colleagues Seterra seems to have been a success for years....
Great to see that some people share their works without the need of financial profit! Thanks to Marianne for that!

Vietnam project: Day 3 + 4

On days 3 and 4 the workshop started to run smoothly with WordClassifier, a tool to analyse any English text on a comparison with a word frequency list. Teachers can easily detect the difficulty level of the text while running the text through this program.

Then they can use the words of a certain difficulty level to create exercises. I used Crossword Compiler to show how you can make interactive crosswords, using an online dictionary to fill in the clues. The local teachers were particularly interested in the use of the word and clue database of CC, so we spent some time experimenting with that.

In the afternoon we explored a simulation game, SimCity4. Although the school program is very strict, there are quite a lot of themes that relate to traffic, urbanisation, economy, social organisation,... and the language content of a game like SimCity4 is full of these themes... So the idea was: work in groups of three, One plays the game (tutorial), while the second notes the interesting words and the third constructs a webquest lesson plan. This however was too complicated since the playing of the game seemed more complicated than I thought... So together they explored the program, of continued to work on Crossword Compiler.

Power cut?

At a certain moment the message came in that a power cut would strike the area the next morning... Jan rushed to find a solution... : renting a power generator for the workshop room...
However at the last moment, the company seemed to want to profit from the situation and wanted more money... Rip-off and back against the wall...

Next day the generator was installed in the early morning, before the start of the workshop.

Guess what? There was no power cut... And in the beginning our power was deliberately cut to link the electricity system to the generator.... And then we had to carry on, using the generator and consuming the fuel...

And then... an unexpected gift! Nice calenders for the team members!!

The fourth day was filled with the making of Zarb exercises. Zarb is a plugin program for Word that offers a few dozen makro exercises. The result is not interactive, and must be printed out, but you have quite a number of different sorts of exercises. I gave the a few tips like: use a separate target test sheet on which you copy the exercises.

• Use another page to built an exercise.
• Once finished, copy it to the test sheet, and the answers to the teachers key sheet.
• Always try to combine more elements, like text, listening and/or viewing with the exercises so that they become more interesting.

And then... an old program which in no time had a great success: Zork... I used it in the 1980's and '90's as a sort of rescue program, a life buoy to save you when the Internet has gone down...

All of the attendants were eagerly trying to get into the house, the living room, to try and find the secret passage to the underworld of Zork. The old DOS-program has very funny ways of reacting to the English imperatives that need to be written... Smiles hit the room...

In the evening the core team were invited by Mr Tach to a nice floating restaurant where we had great delicacies like "drunken prawns"!!

On our way back we witnessed one of the effects of global warming: some of the streets in Saigon were flooded...

T-10

T minus 10! In about ten days I leave for Vietnam. Preparation is taking 100% of my free time now... All practical things have been arranged. I have the tickets, passport and visa. Hotels have been booked. Transport arranged. All I need to do is prepare the final content of the workshops. It won't be easy. I had a short conversation with Hans Defour on Monday. He was there and encountered mainly linguistic problems. Since I will be having an audience of ESL teachers, I probably won't have the problem, except if they weren't fed any Beatles songs during their studies. Then they might have a slight problem understanding my Liverpool-ish accent... ;-)

Tonight I downloaded the mindmapping freeware program FreeMind (I loved the name!) and made the scheme (which is hardly readable, but I'll present it in another way further on...).
I'll try to work as much off line as possible since many schools over there don't have the facilities of broadband internet connections for complete computer classes. So I intend to work on Simulation games ic SimCity, which has a rich treasure of vocabulary on different themes like economy, traffic, landscapes, social networks, functions, housing, urban infrastructure,... Combining the gaming experience of SimCity with mindmaps or webquests, wordlists and interactive crosswords might do the trick! Further on some tools will be presented like Zarb and reviewing in Word (just ordered the English version of Zarb www.zarb.de). About 5 years ago the former VVKSO-team for ICT in the English lesson, led by my dear friend Karel Van Rompaey studied a large amount of CDROMs for English Language Learning, and of all these programs, MacMillan's Reward series was the best. I'll be testing three levels with the HCMC colleagues!
To give creativity a boost, I will present the Poëzome site, which I will adjust a little, adding a few translations of the interactive poems.
Finally I'll introduce them to the Underworld of Zork, an pre-windows program from ancient times... 1981. Even the most basic dos-computer can handle that, and in those days this adventure game was a real success. Students even started a Zork-club to play the game at noon, and they drew hundreds of maps of the mazes in the underworld... Even the humour is great: if you get frustrated after hours of fruitless treasure hunting and in your final despair you type sh** or f**k, the program answers with a cool phrase: "Such language in a high-class establishment like this!"... Students love it, and so do teachers (to put it in a confirming addition to a positive remark!)
Anyway, I'll give you the html-version of the mindmap:

Workshop HCMC

• Techniques
  
  • Mindmapping
  • Groupwork / pairwork
  • Webquest
  • Discussing
  • Gaming
  • Simulating


• Content
  
• Presentation
• Cyber-poetry (creativity)
• International communication program (example)
• Hands-on
• Tools
• WordClassifier
• CrosswordCompiler
• Wordweb
• Review-function (Word)
• Zarb (Exercise-generator in Word)
• Adventure game
• Zork (The underworld of ...
• Simulation
  SimCity 4
• Services
• Internet searching
• CDROM / DVD
• ELO (Electronic Learning Environment)
• Online software
• Weblog


• Activities
  
  • Exploring the net for classroom material
  • Cooperating with colleagues
  • Preparing lesson plans, based on the webquest model
  • Exploring an ELO and publishing material on it
  • Try out and evaluate games to use in class
  • Use WordClassifier as a text or wordlist analyser
  • Use Zarb to create exercises in Word
  • Explore and evaluate a closed CD-ROM program for remediation

Current ICT-situation at school (hardware and services)

Hardware situation. Currently we have installed a fifth-generation computer class at our school (R02). We have two computer classes - one of 30+1 and one of 25+1 computers. The big class (OLC - Open Learning Center) was installed with Pentium 4 desktops and CTR-monitors. The newest (R02) contains Dell Dimension Pentium D desktops with NEOVO 17" flatscreens.
Both classes and about twenty computers in many other locations are connected to a Windows 2003 server. Another server is used for the administration network. In all we have 100 computers, 15 printers and 12 data-projectors in 2 networks.
The services we use on Internet are:

• web hosting of the schoolsite (http://www.xaveriuscollege.be/)
  
• MS sharepoint for filesharing and office-extension (http://werkweb.xaveriuscollege.be/)
  
• mail service (http://webmail.xaveriuscollege.be/)
  
• Online evaluationsystem (http://www.schoolonline.be/)
  
• Broekx administration system (http://www.broekx.be/)
  
• EloV Blackboard Learning Platform (http://elov.vvkso.be/) (formerly http://www.elov.be/)
  

Software licenses were acquired via group-licensing of Sumika and MS KISS licensing for Microsoft products via ZEB-computers.
For Dutch remedial and drill exercises we use the Nedercom software from Henk Bakker.
There are more programs that we use, and which I will mention later on.