Day 2: Big day for Spectrum students

Today was the BIG day when Sthembiso, Leigh, Kirsten & Juzevan presented project M-Ubuntu to hungry digital bods.

These 4 & Lesego (deputy head) have had a non-stop journey ever since arriving 7pm, Tuesday evening but they were fantastic. Everybody (no exaggeration, I promise) was so impressed by these 4 confident, out spoken, willing students from SA they were…

• Interviewed
• Asked to present, take part in other presentations
• Asked to try out products

The presentation can also be found on the HASTAC website.

The conference finished at 12pm & we decided the students needed a celebratory lunch. When asked what they wanted they said ‘Pizza’ – your wish is my command! (Guys you’ve been a fab hit – & yes we can now go shopping!!)

Tonight I’m going to see Duke Ellington’s, Sophisticated Ladies, the award-winning musical that explores the legacy of Washington’s local jazz hero.

When we met Aneesh Chorpa………

So we mentioned White house officials and we weren’t disappointed! No we didn’t get to meet and talk to the Obama’s (damm) but we did get to meet Aneesh Chopra, first Federal Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America.

I was seriously impressed with Aneesh Chopra, using his words, he was ‘awesome’. Before his current position he’s actually spent time on the ground working with people, technology & really understanding processes to get the result needed.

Before coming CTO, Aneesh Chopra was Virginia’s secretary of technology for 4 years. He helped develop a modern web site, using social networking tools that ranged from Facebook and Twitter to Ning, which creates smaller social networks.

President Obama said his aims for Aneesh Chopra…

"As Chief Technology Officer, Chopra's job will be to promote technological innovation to help the country meet its goals such as job creation, reducing health care costs, and protecting the homeland. Together with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, their jobs are to make the government more effective, efficient, and transparent.”

Some cool people I met

There was so much enthusiasm, excitement and energy in the room that after the conference and ‘dinner was served’ everyone carried on discussing/networking into the night.

Here’s a couple of people I met and a bit about their projects…

Amanda Garces from Vóces Moviles or Mobile Voices told me how the project connect low-wage immigrant  labourers with practitioners, researchers, and open source software developers to design, deploy and use a low-cost mobile multi-media platform that shares, creates and publishes multimedia stories directly from their mobile phones. These stories represent their own experiences, perspectives, and ideas.

Gary W told how Devinfo GameWorks encourages users to create games that can  be played online or printed and played off-line.

The games provide opportunities for people to think about the ways in which young people learn and engage with this information.

 

I’ll add more people tomorrow but I’m off to do a bit of social networking with the team from DML!

Global Digital Media & Learning competition

Now in it’s 3rd year, the conference was opened by Cathy Davidson & David Theo Goldberg, Co founders of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).

The competition is funded by a MacArthur grant to the University of California, Irvine & Duke University and is administered by HASTAC. The comp is part of MacArthur’s digital media and learning initiative designed to help show how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialise – very neat!

This yr it was launched in collaboration with Presidents Obama’s Educate to Innovate initiative, ‘challenging designers, inventors, entrepreneurs and researchers to create digital environments that promote building & tinkering in new innovative ways’.

10 winners of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning Competition were announced today. The winners will share $1.7 million in funding to use games, mobile phone apps, virtual worlds & social networks to create learning labs of the 21st century. Find out about the winning projects

The day lasted from 9am – 6pm, long day but was a chance to meet, hear & look at some amazing projects & people, that have been part of the Global competition.

South Africa meets DC, staring the Big 5

 

The story to DC...

Part 1 - Make sure I can fly & get to heathrow...yip I can woo hoo Part 2 - meet the guys @ Dulles international airport...in 9hrs time Part 3 - Finish prep for BIG conference tomorrow with students & teachers from SA, Theo, Lucy...oh boy :) more parts coming soon...off to board!!

I’m off to the Washington with Spectrum Primary students!

OMG what an amazing opportunity….On Tuesday 11th May I will be flying to DC to meet up with the 4 students from Spectrum Primary School, Lucy & Theo.

Why??

M-Ubuntu was one of 3 projects selected to present and showcase the Mobile Learning project to White House officials who spearhead technology-assisted learning initiatives in the US.

The event will be held at the University of California Washington Center. Presentations are on Wednesday and Thursday next week (12-13 May) – how cool is that…extremely!!

Blogs, pics & videos to come next week :)

Lessons learnt

Back at work & reflecting on the visit to SPS, Ennerdale, SA. Both times I have come back feeling very honored to have met some wondered people who have made me feel very welcome into their lives & community.

What have we learnt?…

What this project continues to highlight to me is that you don’t need to have the latest all singing, all dancing technology to help students learn…

This basic phone is helping the students become engaged and learn. ‘We’ seem to over-complicate things by having lots of choices on offer but at the end of the day, its all about the content. As one person said ‘it won’t matter if you use a walkman or an iPod, it’s about the content.’

What do you think, right or wrong?

Support concerns

• On the ground the School has teacher & the school governors support.
• The teachers have voiced how they feel the project has gone so far (good & bad) but in terms of ongoing support and making the project sustainable in the future, they were unclear & seemed a little nervous how they would do this.

Time concerns

• Teachers have said that one of the frustrations is time. There is not enough time to charge, prepare especially when the devices are shared among classes.
• To charge, clean (remove files from phones), add content takes quite a while especially if you’ve got 20-40phones per lesson & you are not the only class using them that day/week

How to bring mobile learning into the classroom

• In theory introducing new ways of learning is seriously exciting and opens up so many doors but it can also be quite a nervous journey especially if you can’t see how it will work.
• Some teachers were confident how they would incorporate mobile learning into their lessons
• Some teachers were unsure how they would have time to use m-learning as well as deliver the lesson
• Some were uncertain and couldn’t see how the ideas could fit into the classroom

Deploying content

• Along with the above, adding content was a huge issue for the teachers.
• how & when they would add their content
• how can they be sure their content wouldn’t be overwritten by other teachers or students
• Storage space - the more content, media you add to a phone the less memory you’re going to have.
• with 7 teachers involved in the project how are they going to manage this?

Training

• Who’s going to train them, new teachers, students about the phones, planning lessons etc
• They loved having Lucy & I there for support & training but what happens once we’ve gone

What can we do?…

Support

• While we were there we set up a couple of teachers with Skype & email
• These guys will help set up accounts for the other teachers
• They have our Skype & email addresses & the project intends to make contact fortnightly
• They’ll also be able to use the project laptop at the school to contact us when needed for more support

Learning materials

• We’ve introduced the school to, & we’ve trained him on how to load, take care of the devices; Blake Haddon
• New, updated content for the lessons will be provided by Lucy and loaded onto the SD cards by Blake. This will help the teachers to plan how to use the phones in their lesson without the added pressure of loading the content onto 20-40 devices.
• The content will initially be placed into ‘subject folders’ as time goes on the project will check and amend to what works best.

Eventually the teachers will build up more confidence to write, provide their own content to use in lessons.

Training

• The idea is to provide ‘online training sessions’ for the teachers involved in the project. These will be fortnightly.
• Eventually the teachers trained will be able to pass their knowledge onto new teachers, students – even in the future to other schools.

The outcome of the project is to make sure whatever happens it’s sustainable at the schools. The project will finish this year but we’ll continue to help the great people with met!