I have been looking around for a simple quality assurance test plan that my students could use for developing multi-page websites. I haven’t found one that really seemed to cover the bases. So I made one up.

This is not a testing process, rather a guide for what should be asked. To put this in context – My students have to create a multipage website including graphics, images and potentially video and animation using Cascading style sheets to render the formatting and layout.

Here is what I came up with.

The last week and a bit I have been in Edmonton Canada working with the teachers and facilitators of the Edmonton Catholic School district. The purpose of the week was that, with Lee Crockett, we were developing an understanding of the 21st Century Fluencies and beginning the development of problem based units of learning for implementation across the schools, across the curriculum and throughout the years.

It was a pleasure to work with such enthusiastic and committed teachers and managers. Everyone got stuck in and had a considerable amount of fun and came away with an improved understanding of how they could make learning contextual, relevance and integrating higher order thinking , specifically creativity. Core to our workshops was solution fluency and information fluency which underpin the whole concept. The teachers developed problem based scenarios based on their curriculum that had relevance and context to the students. For some people this is rather hard, but the groups that we worked with did a superb job at this. They then had to use a structured problem solving process, solution fluency, to define the problem, discover the background dream, design and deliver  a solution and debrief. Design includes group formation, roles and time wise planning.

Torkel Klingberg in his book the overflowing brain states that students in their early teens who have education focused on problem solving, inductive and deductive reasoning, inventiveness, decision taking and observation skills will have a 10% increase in IQ. The quoted study was supported by Israeli, Yugoslavian and German studies supporting the teaching of problem solving processes, creativity and inductive and deductive reasoning. All of the studies showed increases in the students IQ irrespective of age, sex or initial test scores. In other words its beneficial for every one. [Klingberg, Torkel, The overflowing brain: information overload and the limits of working memory, 2009 Oxford University press Inc ISBN 978-0-19-537288-5]

While we were in Edmonton we were invited to see St Joesphs Catholic High School. A school of 1100 student with 600 on Self directed learning programmes. It was fascinating! The students were motivated and engaged learners. The courses while self directed and personalized were very well organised and presented, students had access to support and regular structured session with their teahcer advisors and course advisors. It was not a here is the stuff and go away and learn. Rather a managed approach which saw student taking responsibility for their own learning. The students who struggled were quickly identified and very well supported. As they say there is constant review of student progress. Here are two quotes from their manual that I like…

“At St Josephs, student are personally responsible for their learning and are engaged within their learning”

“Students at St Joesph are active participants in their learning on a daily basis whether it is though group discussions, participation in social justice activities, participation in field trips, etc. St Josephs students are amongst the most active in the city!”

St Josephs is a BYOD school which teaches the Alberta curriculum and the IB Diploma and Certificate courses. A fascinating and exciting trip, even if it was a warm (for edmonton) -5c.

The BBC website hosts a series of brilliant gems that are very useful to teachers. While many of us will be familiar with the news page which is accessable via the web or using apps on our phones, there is a whole lot more that’s worth exploring and using. Here are some of my favourites…

1. BBC Future - http://www.bbc.com/future this is a stimulating site that has some interesting and often challenging articles. The site matches well with ITGS and also TOK for the IB’s out there.
2. BBC Science and Nature - http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ and Nature home page – http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/ some great resources here including videos
3. BBC School - http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ this is cool, stretching across the curriculum there are over 7000 resources here.
4. BBC Learning – http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/ this is learning for all ages from the very young to the not so young.
5. BBC bitesize http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ and GCSE bitesize http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/ this is learning resources grouped by year level and subject area. Awesome.

When I am preparing a presentation I often like to take a snap shot of whats happening in the world at the moment to frame the amazing rate of change we are seeing. So here are some of my favourites:

1. CIA Factbook – https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html Say what you like about the CIA this is an interesting site filled with huge amount of information and statistics.

2. Worldometers - http://www.worldometers.info/ This site is actually a little bit scary. With updating totals that tick over a a very fast rate this page will tell you about

• world population
• governments and economics
• society & media
• environment
• food
• water
• energy
• and so much more.

Enjoy the visit, but the numbers are stunning

3. Gap Minder – http://www.gapminder.org/ The website of stats genius Hans Rosling. This is a must visit site and like worldometers, is a little frightening. But watch the videos and dive into the statistics presented in interesting and understandable ways. Just brilliant.

4. World Internet Stats – http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm This site will give you a continent by continent breakdown of connections and more. Again a useful site particularly for those who need a global perspective.

5. Royal Pingdom – http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/ – this is a great snap shot of 2011, and it examine more than just connection to the internet. have a look at these comments about email

• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
• 27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
• 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
• 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
• 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
• 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
• $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
• 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
• 0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

6. Youtube statistics – http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics/ Youtube like facebook is an icon of our age. Its not surprizing that its changing how we view our media and how media producers are publishing media. Have a look at the traffic they have

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth

7. Facebook newsroom http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22 The social network with 900+ million subscribers

• 955 million monthly active users at the end of June 2012.
• Approximately 81% of our monthly active users are outside the U.S. and Canada.
• 552 million daily active users on average in June 2012.
• 543 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in June 2012.

8. Netcraft webserver survey - http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/08/02/august-2012-web-server-survey.html This site does a monthly survey and presents data on the number of webservers in the world each month. The growth over time is impressive, but last month saw the number of websites decrease by 30 million.

Source: http://badgemonkey.com/images/smile.jpg

Badges? What are badges? I always thought badges were small circular discs that you pinned (carefully) to your shirt or jacket. But we now have digital badges as well.

Educause has just released their latest update which discusses Digital badges - Seven things you should know about badges. This is the link to the PDF file for download.

here is the link to the library of resources from Educause in this series.

My students and I are investigating Digital media as part of the ITGS course, specifically we are examining the issues, impacts and changes that exist in IT and the home. What effect and impact does IT have on the arts, leisure, entertainment and the home.

My students are in their mid teens and for many of them they have seen very few different music medias  – so I went looking for an infographic that showed the different media over time I found a very good one thats worth sharing.

See the original article by David Wallace – http://www.davidwallace.com/2010/10/evolution-music-playing-formats/

I have just read a very interesting article from the BBC called “Ready for the robot revolution?”
The article itself is very interesting and a great starting point for discussion in class but two aspects were worth discussion.
The first involves Azimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics – this is a standard and one I make use of in class
Isaac Asimov, outlined ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ in a novel featuring human-like robots. The rules were designed to protect people from harm.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

It is idealistic and interesting and has been the cause of many heated discussions in class.

However, the article also present this ethical code as well
“The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, together with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has drafted a set of ethical principles for robot design – which can be summarised as follows:

1. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans.
2. Humans, not robots, are responsible agents. Robots are tools designed to achieve human goals.
3. Robots should be designed in ways that assure their safety and security.
4. Robots are artefacts; they should not be designed to exploit vulnerable users by evoking an emotional response or dependency. It should always be possible to tell a robot from a human.
5. It should always be possible to find out who is legally responsible for a robot.”
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15146053

Here is the website – http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/ourportfolio/themes/engineering/activities/Pages/principlesofrobotics.aspx

The second aspect of interest for me is the potential conflicts we see. Robots have long been used in manufactoring. While initially this caused much concern, who now hears about this? Are we going to see the same concerns expressed for domestic and commercial robots and will this to fade?

Around the outside of my classroom are whiteboards that the students use for their work. There are four of them and I seldom write on them but the students make quit extencive use of these.

The students today were looking at the London Riots and examining the social and ethical issues (for IB ITGS Teachers  – paper 2). They were starting to analyse the underlying ICT’s (information and communication technologies) particularly twitter, social media and short messaging services.

I set them a 10 minute task to report back to the class on the technical elements of the three diffrerent tools (Twitter, Social media & texting) as it related to the london riots. The students quickly scratched out their area of investigation and presented it back to the class with explanations.

Since the information was vital for all of the students, they grabbed their cellphones and took pictures of the whiteboards and then emailed these to the other students. In the space of 1 minute every student had a copy of all three technical breakdowns as they related to their current topic of discussion.

Technology is a wonderful thing. The students are now incorperating these notes into their own work.

In this on the wire update I am looking at a couple of brilliant  resources for video.

1. Mediastorm – African Air – http://mediastorm.com/publication/african-air This is a seven minute mini documentary that looks at africa in its diversity from the air. the air part of this mostly from a powered paraglider. Its stunning and the mixture of still, moving images and interview show africa in its diversity and beauty. Its a great piece for stimulus material for humanities and the social sciences etc.

The other material produced by media storm is well worth looking at. There is a disclaimer weith this that some of the content is challenging and needs to be checked by the teacher prior to showing to students. The themes are very valid but orientated to an adult audience. - http://mediastorm.com/pub/projects

source: http://mediastorm.com/sites/default/themes/mediastorm/logo.png

2. Commoncraft Show – Computer Viruses and threats in plain english – http://www.commoncraft.com/virus-video Another paper styled video from Lee leFever and the crew at Commoncraft.  As their blurb suggests this video examines the threats to computer etc.

“This video explains computer viruses by comparing them to human viruses and focuses on the role of prevention in being protected.  Major points include:

• A basic look at computer viruses as computer programs that can spread like a disease and can be prevented by anti-virus software.
• An introduction to worms, how they cause damage in networks and can be prevented by software updates.
• An introduciton to trojans, how they trick people into downloading a virus and how awareness is important for prevention.”

Source: http://www.commoncraft.com/virus-video

3. Resources about Youtube – Youtube has announced that it has a creative commons licience for material hosted on the site. This is great news for many of our students who will download and reuse content frequently. So here are some resources to help understand this and also youtube itself

• Creative Commons and Youtube – https://creativecommons.org/tag/youtube
• Youtube key events timeline -http://www.youtube.com/t/press_timeline
• Youtube press kit videos – http://www.youtube.com/t/press_b_roll
• Youtube statistics - http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics

Consider these facts froim the Youtube statistics page

Traffic

• More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded during 2010, and 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
• The equivalent of 150,000+ full-length films in cinemas each week
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localised in 25 countries across 43 languages
• YouTube’s demographic is broad: 18-54 years old
• YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010

Have a look at CITIZENTUBE which is youtube’s news channel – http://www.citizentube.com/

Just a couple of quick updates in this On the Wire Post.

1. Commoncraft videos - http://www.commoncraft.com - There are two new videos that are going to be useful in the classroom. The first is called “Social Media in the Workplace“  The video has the following blurb which nicely summarises its use:

This video takes a look at how social media sites like blogs, Twitter and Facebook are changing how companies think about external communication. It includes points on:

• How social media sites are making organizations rethink external communication
• How one company confronts a crisis – and learns how social media can help
• The role of empowering employees to participate
• The role of policies and guidelines in social media participation

source: http://www.commoncraft.com/social-media-workplace-video

The second video explains the technology behind “BitTorrent“. Just like the previous video it has a outline of the teaching points:

This video teaches the basics of how BitTorrent’s technology works to make downloads faster when more people are involved. It includes points on:

• How files are shared on the web and what makes BitTorrent different
• The BitTorrent application and how it’s used
• How trackers, peers and hosts work together to deliver “pieces” of files
• How anyone can use BitTorrent to share or download files

Source: http://www.commoncraft.com/bittorrent-video

2. Educause – 7 things you should know about modern learning commons – This is a paper looking at modern learning commons as a concept. It is a little different from the usual educause publications, but Teaching and learning technologies are not just about the tools but also about the space. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7071.pdf

This reminds me of Ian Jukes, Ted Kelly and Ted McCain’s Book – “Teaching the Digital Generation – No more cookie cutter schools‘ Agile and flexible learning spaces which can quickly be adapted into a wide variety of r=arrangements are going to be increasingly important as we adapt our teaching and learning spaces to suit the “digital generation”

To check out all the resources – http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/ELI%207%20Things%20You%20Should%20Know/33438

Infographics are a very powerful tool for learning. While we do have learning preferences –  Visual, Auditory, Read/Write or Kinesthetic – our dominant sense is visual. Further we process images faster, some estimate 60,000x faster than text.  Infographics when they are well designed effectively carry a message to us and our students that is easy to interpret and more engaging than a body of text or a table of figures.

Here is an infographic on Data that I stumbled across recently. This will be useful in my IT classes but it also frames the amazing growth in data and devices to use and access this. The graphic is (of course) out of date – anything published is immediately out of date. For example the statistics on you tube are inaccurate. Here is the latest update on youtube uploads – http://technewscast.com/technology/tech-buzz/youtube-two-days’-worth-of-video-uploaded-every-minute/

I plan to use both of these graphics with my ITGS class. The inaccuracies in the data infographic will be useful and illustrate the changes that have occurred, but the message behind it is still valid and very useful. Having the students consider the data and then challenge it is a critical element of not only digital citizenship, but also higher order thinking – Analysis and evaluation

source: http://9.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/YT-48-hours-3-billion-infographic-r4.png

source: http://mozy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/physical-storage-vs-digital-storage.png

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