2013-03-22 Friday

Since schools were closed today, it was a somewhat more relaxing day in the office. We had a meeting about digital citizenship and policy development. We need to avoid punitive policies, and talk more about educating students to be ethical and stay safe, and about their digital footprints. There's a lot more to be said about this, but perhaps that a topic for a later post.

In the afternoon I worked on, among other things, Ed Tech Now.

2013-03-21 Thursday

This morning as part of our staff meeting we did a professional development session involving setting up Raspberry Pi computers and getting Minecraft running on them. There were a few technical glitches along the way, but everyone was able to get it all done.

This afternoon I answered some emails, of course, and spent some more time with Source Filmmaker.

2013-03-20 Wednesday

Yesterday after work we had an interesting meeting about what what next year will look like in Instructional Services. We've been encouraged to apply for Assistant Principal positions, and there will be a few Instructional Services Consultant positions starting in September.

This morning we met about "AISI Legacy" planning, including how to share stories and set up supports for people to continue with innovative environments. We also did some planning for our sessions on the upcoming professional development day.

This afternoon I spent some time with Source Filmmaker working on episode five of Ed Tech Now. If you have some time, I'd certainly recommend that you check out Source Filmmaker. It's a program for creating 3D animations. It's a little difficult to start with, but you can quickly do some amazing things.

2013-03-19 Tuesday

Last night I realized that this process of blogging my daily work seemed to be encouraging me to avoid unbloggable activities. Other than all of the Scratch Day stuff, I've sometimes tended to choose things to do that would translate well to a line or two of a blog entry.

I've also realized that not even my wife is interested in reading about the daily minutia of my job. So I'm going to try to write about some different things. Starting today.

Starting last September, we've been putting together a new media studio here in the Education Technology Building. It's set up to be a place for staff to experiment with podcasting, shooting video, recording tutorials, and other related tasks. It's also where we record most of Ed Tech Now.

It's a work in progress, of course, as studios usually are. Let me share some photos of it here though.

First of all there's the SMART Board, projector, Mac mini, and Windows 7 (Dell) PC, along with some extra parts and furniture and such. We also have some microphones, headsets, and webcams.

The lights are being stored/used here by our district's Media Producer.

The green screen is just PVC pipe, safety pins, and some green fabric that I picked up on sale.

So if you work in EIPS and want to try your hand at recording, send us an email.

2013-03-18 Monday

I've started to put together Moodle courses for some high school CTS courses. I'm focusing on some courses (modules) that are not currently offered at many of our high schools, but that could easily be implemented.

There was a meeting this morning about Off-Campus Education (work experience) and how we can help streamline and digitize as much of the process as possible. We've started to put together a website and some Google Docs (forms and spreadsheets) to help with that.

This afternoon I continued to work on those Moodle courses, the OCE site/docs, and getting some materials ready for the upcoming professional development day.

And I had a dentist appointment.

2013-03-15 Friday

Today I helped a Special Needs teacher at Salisbury to get her students playing video games. We've been working on this project off and on for some time, but it was nice to finally see some things come together.

Jill had gotten an email from Brentwood Elementary yesterday about them not being able to clean the filters in their projectors, and they didn't know who to get in touch with about that. So I stopped by there to adjust the way the projectors were mounted; now they can blow the dust of the front and back filters.

I dropped off at SCS a couple of iPad sound deflectors that I had printed on our MakerBot. Unfortunately the MakerBot's extruder has been stopping occasionally, so I need to take apart the hot end and replace the plunger.

Today was also the last of the Scratch Day logistics, things like moving tables and sending thank you notes.

This afternoon there was a brief meeting about possibilities for digital textbooks and other resources. We brainstormed about what the requirements might be, and what recommendations we can make.

I also spoke with the Manager of Youth Services for the Strathcona County Library about some possibilities for a summer Maker program.

2013-03-14 Thursday

After unpacking from Scratch Day and returning things to their proper places and owners, there was some debriefing about the day.

I spent the lunch hour with the Salisbury Maker/Hacker Club, talking to some students about Energia programming, the Scratch Picoboard, and other hackery. And since it was Pi Day, Mr. Basaraba saved a piece of pie for me.

The afternoon involved sending and answering emails, fixing and troubleshooting a few things for some people, and organizing some things around the building here.

And at 4:25 this afternoon I reached an important, although fleeting, milestone: Inbox Zero.

2013-03-13 Wednesday

Today was Scratch Day.

What an amazing day. We had a lot of staff helping out to make everything go well, including people from Technology Services, Curriculum Services, Communications, and of course Education Technology and AISI. The teachers who brought students were also great at helping things go smoothly. We also had visitors from the EIPS Executive Team, 2Learn, and the County Library.

We tried to have all of the adults walking around with iPads (or other devices) awarding points that went up on the leaderboard. Unfortunately the script for adding points got a little overwhelmed and we occasionally had to add things manually. In all today, we had just under 2000 challenges completed by almost 200 students. The student at the top of the leaderboard was marked as having completed 11 beginner challenges, 15 intermediate challenges, and 18 advanced challenges (out of a possible 22).

We had also given each student three "help tickets" for asking questions of other students. If they asked a question of another student, they gave that student one of their tickets. At the end of the day we gave a prize to the student with the most. According to the count of his tickets, he had answered 37 questions.

One of things I was most impressed by, however, was a student who came to me near the end of the day to show me what he had been working on. He had decided not to do too many challenges, and instead to spend most of his time drawing sprites that he could use for future projects in Scratch or a game that he plays. These sprites were as good as, or better than, characters I've seen in commercial video games. If we'd had any prizes left at that point I would like to have given him one.

If I had to pick a favourite part of the day, though, it would have been the keynote at the beginning. Dr. Karen Brennan was enthusiastic, engaging, and really set the tone for the day. She was great at answering the students' questions about Scratch and her work, and even the question from a high school student "would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or one hundred duck-sized horses?".

I think the stickers and the "Scratch Programmer" water bottles went over well too. I would definitely do both again, since students seemed to like them.

There were, of course, some glitches during the day. The biggest issue was network/Internet access, which was not as reliable as we had hoped, but thankfully we hadn't planned activities that used too much bandwidth. Power was another big issue, since many of the laptop batteries lasted less than two hours. We had set up charging stations around the room, but since we were in a gym there weren't any power outlets in the floor that would have allowed laptops to be plugged in all day.

Here are some of the highlights from a feedback form we had the students fill out at the end of the day:

• It was fun!
• We got to miss a day of school. And Prizes. And Food. and Motivation to be better at scratch.
• Learning to use Scratch was great, and the challenges and competition were a lot of fun. It was also fun crashing the server :p
• I liked that we could make our own stuff up.
• The trivia questions to go get lunch.
• I liked that everyone was so nice and helpful. and the challenges were fun, as well as the human sprite projects :)
• cool giveaways
• I liked that you could view the leaderboard, instead of it being a secret until the end of the day.
• My friend made a jetpack.

There are also a few other things that we would consider if we do this again, both from our own observations and from the feedback form:

• more open-ended challenges
• other programming environments or languages as well
• more stations with sensors/robots and instructors
• age or grade groupings for competitions
• expert judges for merit prizes
• more learning resources and/or people
• charge a nominal registration fee to discourage drop-outs and help defray costs
• intermingle school groups more intentionally
• more table interactions
• more varied activities
• some similar to the people programming (human sprite) activity
• Minecraft LAN

A lot of work went into this day, but I think it was valuable and it was certainly fun for the students and staff involved. I'm hopeful that we'll get the opportunity to do it again next year, perhaps at a bigger venue with more students.

This entry was cross-posted to the ScratchED site.

2013-03-12 Tuesday

Okay, last post about getting ready for Scratch Day. We had a final pre-briefing meeting this morning, followed by some setup at Salisbury.

I've set up a few laptops to have at the side with Enchanting (for controlling Lego Mindstorms robots), a mOway robot, and Kinect2Scratch. Speaking of Kinect, we're also going to have an Xbox set up in the corner as kids come in, with Kinect Party as a demonstration of some ideas for Kinect-enabled Scratch games.

Hopefully tomorrow we'll take a lot of pictures and video, and get some digital feedback from students. I sincerely hope we'll be able to have another Scratch Day next year, maybe even a bigger one with EIPS and surrounding districts at the Edmonton Expo Centre. But maybe that's dreaming too big :)

2013-03-11 Monday

More Scratch Day logistics today, including a dry run at Salisbury of the audiovisual setup, and finalizing all of the prizes. I think Wednesday is going to be a great day.

The basic plan for the day is:
7:00 - 8:30 Set up: tables, screens, signs, audiovisual, etc.
8:30 - 9:15 Students arriving: name tags, water bottles, chairs, videos showing, etc.
9:15 - 9:30 Welcome and introductions by Faye McConnell
9:30 - 10:00 Keynote interview with Dr. Karen Brennan by David Hay, including questions from students
10:00 - 11:30 Challenges: students working, adults assigning points to them on the leaderboard
11:30 - 12:30 Lunch (a buffet in the grab-and-go style)
12:30 - 1:00 Sharing some projects and ideas
1:00 - 2:00 Challenges continued, with a reminder of the resources available
2:00 - 2:30 Prize draws (although we may do some earlier), debrief (including feedback form)
2:30 - 3:00 Project sharing (although some schools will have to leave earlier)

2013-03-08 Friday

The day started with a meeting that had previously been scheduled for AISI planning, but had a somewhat different agenda following yesterday's provincial budget announcement.

Most of the rest of the day was spent with Scratch Day logistics. There were, as always, a number of Education Technology related questions to answer via email.

I also responded to an email exchange from someone at the County Library regarding my upcoming Maker class and possibilities for future classes and programs. I really think Makerspaces (or Hackerspaces) are good for kids, grown-ups, and society in general, but maybe that's something we need to explore in a future post.

2013-03-07 Thursday

Despite being home on a sick day, I still managed to attend a Google Hangout with some staff from BoxClever. I also participated in a brief teleconference about an announcement that will affect our work.

2013-03-06 Wednesday

This morning I installed a new video card in my desktop computer, started putting together prize packages for Scratch Day. and we met with our keynote speaker for Scratch Day, Dr. Karen Brennan. Following that was an Ed Tech meeting about a number of different topics.

I then needed to pick my daughter a couple of friends up from the County Library where they had been on a preschool field trip for the morning.

After lunch I organized some things in our new media studio before a funeral that many of us attended. Then just a few more things to take care of before the end of the day.

2013-03-05 Tuesday

Today was another day spent mostly in the office. I should take some pictures of my office and post them here.

This morning I arranging logistics and resources for Scratch Day, configured a BigBlueButton server (and discovered that the router we're using doesn't support port forwarding), and set up some things for our Skype meeting tomorrow with Dr. Karen Brennan who will be our keynote speaker for Scratch Day.

Around lunch I picked up the last few prizes for Scratch Day, as well as the stickers and posters that we had printed. I spent the lunch hour with the Salisbury Video Game Club, a student club that I started in 2002 and still feel a certain fondness for.

The afternoon was mostly taken up with teacher conversations, Scratch logistics, and an ATLE Conference planning meeting.

2013-03-04 Monday

Over the weekend I ordered prizes for Scratch Day from Adafruit (Raspberry Pi computers), SparkFun (Arduinos and parts, and Picoboards), Element14 (parts for Raspberry Pi and Arduino devices) and Walmart (SD cards for the Raspberry Pi computers). Hopefully those should all arrive in the next week or so.

As a grammar nerd, I had trouble deciding how to pluralize Raspberry Pi. Should it be Pis, Pies, πs? Perhaps it could be Raspberries Pi or Raspberrys Pi. The official site occasionally calls them Raspberry Pis, but I don't like that, so I decided to avoid the plural issue entirely.

This morning I answered some questions about Chrome (and ChromeOS), completed some long-neglected paperwork, met with a Consultant from Student Support Services about possibilities for sharing and posting digital resources.

My afternoon mostly consisted of writing challenges for Scratch Day, setting up other digital resources, and developing the live leaderboard for the day. I blogged about the process of setting up a leaderboard.

I also learned that when you restrict the visibility of Picasaweb photos when using your Google Apps for Education account, they can't be public anymore.

2013-03-01 Friday

Today was a School Based Professional Learning (SBPL) day in EIPS. Staff from a number of different junior high schools got together at Clover Bar for networking and technology sessions. I was involved with some of the technology sessions that we had structured to be more like a café rather than sit-and-get sessions. Staff were able to ask questions, get individual and group help, and collaborate with their colleagues.