Mar
24
Let me just say that I have the greatest respect for the Dutch. I have been steeped in Dutch Canadian culture since I was young enough to crunch a King peppermint so I know about the Dutch reputation for being thrifty. Some would uncharitably say that a Dutch Canadian could grasp a penny so firmly as to leave it gasping for air. The truth is only that we folks of Dutch extraction have been brought up to appreciate the value of a dime, let alone a dollar. In contrast with that, I’m a computer teacher. Everything in the world of computers is fabulously expensive. You need newer and newer computers, faster and faster software, and all sorts of cool devices to plug into your computer if you’re going to make it all work well. This all costs money, and, well… my inner Dutchman rebels at the idea.
So what do I do? How do I get my students doing fabulously cool things with less and less money? How do I resolve that ongoing war between my thrifty Dutch character and my computer geek nature?
It can be done… if you’re careful.
Make old things last longer
Most schools that are older than five years have several (and often dozens of) old computers stored in a backroom somewhere. They’re there because they’re too slow for the computer lab and nobody wants that old junk in their classroom. What if you could do something useful with those old machines? It’s possible.
Now here’s a crazy idea. Disconnect the hard drives in those computers, Take out those noisy cooling fans. Download some software from www.publicwebstations.com and burn it to a CD. That CD will replace your computer’s operating system; everything your computer needs to know will be on that CD. Now pop that CD into your computer’s CD drive, connect your computer to your school’s Internet connection and suddenly your old, useless computer is a sparkling new Internet station. Since your computer doesn’t have a hard drive, there’s no place for viruses to be saved. Since it has no fan there’s nothing to make noise. Sure, this new Internet computer may not be fast enough for your computer lab, but you could put a few of these in a classroom and run a mini-lab. These are remarkably stable and quiet. Some computers set up this way have been known to run continuously for two years without any crashes.
But, wait, I can hear your objection: “I need to do more in my class than just surf the Internet.” I know. Read on.
The Internet has unexpected value to replace your software
If you need to create a document, build a spreadsheet, make a PowerPoint style presentation, or even work with a database and all you have is an Internet connection, have I got good news for you. You need to visit docs.google.com, and www.zoho.com. These two sites have decent online word processors, spreadsheets, and capable imitations of PowerPoint. Zoho’s database functions are really remarkable. These sites may not be good for a full-length essay with footnotes, but they’re great for shorter and less formal work. Because they’re online, work done on these sites is accessible at school and at home which means students won’t be able to use the excuse that they forgot to bring their homework. It’s even possible to share a document so two students can work on a project together.
If you need photo editing, try Picnik.com. It does all the basics of cropping, resizing, and rebalancing your color photos for free. If you need to practice typing skills, you could experiment with www.Keybr.com. The list could easily go on. Odds are good that whatever you want is out there somewhere.
Use free software
Free or open source software can often be incredibly good. Some good-hearted souls have designed some remarkable products and then simply given them away. These pieces of software are easily commercial quality, but they’re yours for free provided… Well, actually there’s no strings attached. Just give credit if you change the product, and don’t try to make money off a product someone else is giving away. I’m currently typing this article using Open Office, a free office suite given away by Sun Microsystems. I’m using the word processor, but I could also be using a spreadsheet, database, or even a PowerPoint style application. All of it is free.
If that’s not enough, edit your pictures using the always free Gimp which some claim is every bit as good as the very expensive Photoshop. Record and edit audio presentations with Audactiy. It’s not quite as nice a sound editor as Garageband which comes packaged with Macintosh computers, but it’s free and it’s really very good.
Don’t pay for the fancy add-ons
If you’re creating documents like reports, or audio or video presentations, you need to throw in pictures or sound effects. If you buy these, they’re extremely expensive. However, there are great places to find all kinds of pictures you can use for free such as those at Wikimedia Commons or Morguefile.com. If you need sound effects for something, there can be no finer place to look than soundsnap.com. This site has thousands of sound effects and music clips that are all free to use for whatever purpose you want. None of this will cost you a penny.
Maintain control
If you have your students working online, at some point they’re going to need e-mail. A lot of parents are very nervous about their children having e-mail at school. They’re scared their kids will do something stupid, or come in touch with someone they shouldn’t. If your students are using e-mail, as their teacher, you need to be in control of it. To be in control, you need to be in charge of your students’ e-mail accounts.
If your school can’t afford to give the students official school mail, there is another way. Visit Google Apps. Google, everyone’s favorite search engine, will set you up with their e-mail, G-Mail, plus their online word processor, and spreadsheet. Using Google Apps, you get to assign the students their accounts, login names, and passwords. Since you’ve given out the accounts, if anything goes wrong, you can also shut them down. You can keep your students safe and out of trouble.
As a really neat bonus of Google Apps, the students are all automatically part of each others’ contact list making collaboration very easy. If you need to suspend someone’s e-mail for any reason, as the administrator, you can. What does all this cost? Well, Google charges you nothing, but they do require you to have a domain name to use for this and that can be had for as low as seven dollars per year from a registrar like 1and1.com or www.domainsatcost.ca.
Buy what you need, not what they say you need
With two of my classes we tried recording sound clips to a particular website. Before we could do that, we needed microphones. If you believe a lot of the salesmen we needed $20 or $30 mikes in order to get decent recordings. The thing is, we didn’t want “decent” recordings, only ones that were good enough to be clearly understood over the Internet. We weren’t recording a CD, we were adding comments on a website. Cheaper equipment was a much better choice. Some of that equipment even came from dollar stores. That leads to the next suggestion.
Shop around. Shop online.
Once you know approximately what you want to buy, watch the websites of the big stores. In Canada, places like FutureShop, BestBuy, and The Source all have their store stock listed online, You can tell the current price and even if a particular location has what you want in stock. You want to watch the websites of the major electronics retailers because you need to find out what a fair price is, and also because the price of electronics varies wildly from week to week. I have seen a flash drive cost $70 one week, $25 the next, and $60 the week after. There’s no rhyme or reason to the prices, so take your time and shop around.
Get help
Believe it or not, you’re not alone. There may not be anybody else in your school who wants to do more with your computers, but there are thousands of teachers around the world who want to do just that. Go online and find them. The social network site Ning.com has a discussion area called Classroom 2.0. Currently over 4,000 teachers and other people connected with education are members of this group. If you have a question about how to get students in your class using computers, someone in that group has the answer and is willing to share it.
Using computers in your class can be done well, and can be done fairly inexpensively. You need to be creative. You might need some help with the technical geek end of things, but if you’re not afraid to ask, and eager to learn, there’s always someone willing to help out. Do it well and do it for less. Why not make your inner Dutchman happy, too?
This was originally published in Reformed Perspective.
Dec
20
I went away for a conference. Sort of.
Filed Under Articles, Collaboration, General | Leave a Comment
I spent much of a two week period in October at a conference all about using computers in the classroom. I went to about six different presentations, hearing speakers from all over the world. The cool part is that I never boarded a plane, I never left town, and, in order to do this, I never even left the school where I work.
The K-12 Online Conference was held entirely on the Internet. This was the first time I’ve ever been to a conference like this, and it left me thinking. The format has enormous power, but there are problems, too.
Inexpensive: It didn’t cost me anything to go to this conference. Of course, it did cost money for the organizers. They had to pay for web space to post the presentations, and bandwidth used when everything was downloaded. Yet to fly in one speaker and put him in a hotel for a few nights is hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. You can have an awful lot of people download a presentation for the cost of bringing in one live speaker. If they’d actually had to fly in the more than a dozen presenters who were part of the conference the costs would have been enormous.
Accessible: Thousands of folks from all over the world were able to “go” to this conference. Presenters from right here in Manitoba, over in Alberta, and all over the U.S.A. were able to make it to the conference without ever leaving home. This meeting brought ideas to people who would never normally have been able to hear them
Ready when you are: I’m a dad and a full time teacher. I don’t have the option of going away to a conference for a few days, let alone two weeks. I don’t have that kind of time. I was able to download the presentations when I had time and listen to them on my MP3 player whenever I was ready. That’s convenience.
Personalized: Presenters were able to personalize their presentations in ways that can’t be done face-to-face. Some of the presentations were done in multiple locations as the speakers tried to illustrate different points by videoing themselves outdoors and, later on, in a classroom. The presentations weren’t confined to a lecture hall or a dusty church basement. They could be wherever the speaker could bring his laptop computer. He was limited only by his imagination.
This is only the second time this particular online conference has run, so the opportunity to personalize presentations was not used nearly as well as it might have been. Not all speakers left you sitting on the edge of your seat, but there is a potential there that doesn’t exist with live presentations.
Impersonal: I never met a single person who was at the conference. Make no mistake, I’m a huge fan of Internet collaboration. Over the Internet, I’ve gotten all kind of help with classroom projects from teachers I’ve never me. These people have been an enormous help to me and are collectively a resource that I never would have had access to if I could only have talked to them in person. Yet you do lose something when you can’t talk about the speech with the person who was sitting next to you. It’s fun to have coffee (or tea) with some of the others who heard the same speaker and see if they reacted the same way.
While there were online discussion areas, and places to leave comments for the presenters, somehow that’s just not the same as being there live. It’s the difference between listening to a CD or going to a concert. One is good, the other is better.
The speakers, too, could have benefited from having a live audience. A good teacher, minister, or public speaker watches his audience to see if they’re interested in what he’s saying and changes what he says and how he says it in order to keep his audience engaged. Never seeing their audience, the conference speakers didn’t have this opportunity. Consequently, their material while uniformly interesting, was sometimes a little awkward and clunky in the delivery.
Do-able: The main thing that I fascinated me about these presentations was how easy and inexpensive it would be to duplicate this conference in a different setting. The software you need is cheap or free. The hardware, aside from a computer, consists of a ten dollar mike and a twenty dollar webcam. The hosting, if you were inventive, could be free if you used YouTube or a site like that.
It has potential for Christian churches and educators. In October a local church brought in a speaker from New York to talk about evangelism. He was heard by hundreds of people here in town. He could have stayed home and been heard by those hundreds and thousands more if they had broadcast his message over the Internet.
A group of Reformed Christian principals gathered recently in Washington state. They came from around the world. For the dozens of people who attended and paid conference fees and travel costs, the conference cost them many thousands of dollars in total. Had the convention been held on the Internet, it might have cost only hundreds and could have brought in speakers from around the world. While they would have missed the face-to-face contact, they could’ve benefited from a wider range of speakers and a lower cost.
Churches and independent schools need contact with experts and thinkers outside of their immediate community. Often they don’t get the number of speakers they want, or the quality of presenters they desire because of monetary and distance limitations. This presentation format, while it’s not perfect, could sure help overcome some of those issues.
This was originally published in Reformed Perspective.
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