ULearn14 Breakout 3: Windows in the Classroom - Arnika Brown, Cyclone Computers

I'm catching up on my reflections from ULearn14.  Better late than never.

One of the Breakouts I went to at ULearn14 was held by the team at Cyclone, who market for Microsoft.  I found out a lot of things that this breakout that I didn't know before. 

For example, we can get a whole lot of Microsoft support and set up in our school for free under the deal with the MOE.  I went to this MOE site where lots of questions can be answered and probably not many teachers or principals know much about what is on offer.  Essentially Microsoft are offering pretty much everything Google offers schools, including a teacher dashboard to collate what is happening in your class easier.  Here are some screen shots from February 2015:

And did you know this about the BYODs your students may bring to school?

Here are the bare bones of the breakout:

Arnika Brown opened with these remarks and questions:

• 21st Century learning design is about ensuring students have the skills to enter the workplace, to engage in further learning.
• Do we have 21st century classrooms? 
• Has teaching and learning evolved? 
• It is more than changing the furniture in the room. 
• It is about how we teach.  The PLD we get and how we use it. 
• How do you share information with students so they can get it efficiently?
• How do we see what our kids are doing?

Arnika then went on to discuss:  What is in Windows 365?

OneNote available to all teachers through the MOE Microsoft contract and is part of Office on your computer.  This is how teachers can access the students' work. 

SharePoint  is a web application framework and platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001, SharePoint integrates intranet, content management, and document management.  SharePoint is mostly used by midsize businesses and large departments.

Windows 365 is the brand name used by Microsoft for a group of software plus services subscriptions that provides productivity software and related services to its subscribers. For consumers, the service allows the use of Microsoft Office apps on Windows and OS X, provides storage space on Microsoft's cloud storage service OneDrive, and grants 60 Skype minutes per month. For business and enterprise users, Office 365 offers plans including e-mail and social networking services through hosted versions of Exchange Server, Lync, SharePoint and Office Web Apps, integration with Yammer, as well as access to the Office software.

OneDrive has 1 terabyte of saving capacity, so Arnika was recommending moving all the data schools and teachers save into OneDrive.  She did warn not to cut of TeacherWrite completely, but to give teachers time to change over, e.g. 6 months.

Skype Classroom is a great teaching tool.  This link will take you to a video where there are kids talking about how they learn using Skype and where you can join up.  Last year I did my first Skype with a class.  I blogged about it in the post My first Skype session with my class.

Arnika told us about how we can do a Microsoft Educators course and earn badges.  The aim is to help teachers be technologically able and to be able to use technology in the class to enhance learning and teaching, as well as expand the skills of the children.

The 21CLD resource was spoken about by Arnika.  Students around the world need advanced skills to succeed in the globalized, knowledge based world of today. 21st Century Learning Design, or 21CLD, professional development helps teachers redesign their existing lessons and learning activities to build students’ 21st century skills. It can be linked to your national or local curriculum standards. The program is based on rubrics developed and tested internationally for the Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research project.

Arnika stressed that importance and the need to have the right devices, the tools, the training, the empowerment for teachers to ensure their students have great meaningful learning experiences.

We also got to check out the first Chrome Book Computer (HP) coming into the country in the following few months.  It was to be set at the same price point as the Chrome Book but would not be limited to Microsoft products, as the Google Chrome Books have been limited to Google only products.  These ones would allow the user to choose the most appropriate program to achieve what they wanted.

I personally really liked the colour, size and weight of the device.  As a teacher I think it is best to give the students a choice as to the program they want to use to best present their learning, and I do not want to be limited to either Microsoft or Google products, I want to access both so I can do my best work.

Essentially this breakout was an advertisement for Microsoft and the products, support and training which Cyclone can provide teachers and schools.  I thought when I signed up for it that it would be a bit more practical, but I found the discussion around how some schools are currently using the products to enhance teaching and to be in contact with students and their learning to be very interesting.

My first Skype session with my class.

Ok, sometimes I am a little behind the times.

I confess - I'd never done a Skype session with my class - until last week.

This is how it all came about:

In the term break I purchased this book:

I blogged about it in this post, Anzac Books I am going to use this coming term, and the author of the above book, Peter Millett, commented on my blog.  A short conversation ensued, he said he'd love to talk to my class about the book, I followed Peter on Twitter.

I read The Anzac Puppy to my class and they really enjoyed it.  Of course they wanted to know if it was based on a true story or not.  I said to them that the author wanted to talk with them, so we should ask him questions about the book and being the author.  I split them up into groups of three, and these are the questions they came up with:

The other week I tweeted photos of the questions to Peter.  And eventually we settled on a Skype conversation.

As I said, I was a "Skype in the classroom newbie".  My previous solo Skype conversation was with a mate to help him prepare for an interview, and prior to that it was gate crashing my Mum's conversations with my aunty and some family friends in Aussie.  I'd just never really had a good reason to Skype with a class before.  But Skyping with an author is a very authentic reason.

Mistake #1:  Not prepping the kids on how to do a Skype session.
Actually, this was the one and only big mistake - I pretty much sprung this on them, by telling them we were doing it after the Year 7 & 8s left for Tech - who wants to miss out after all?  Then, by the time I set up the computer at the end of lunch and got on Skype, Peter was there, so no time to tell the kids what I was expecting.

Now it wasn't a complete disaster.  The children were very excited to see Peter and know that they were going to get the answers to their questions.  They all gathered around and at the beginning were attentive.  But as time went on, they drifted off to be silly while the teacher's back was literally turned.  Some went off to draw pictures.  Any child who wasn't participating wasn't hearing the answers, and certainly wasn't engaged as I expected.

Peter's wife is also a teacher, so while I was embarrassed at the rudeness of some children, he rolled with it and was very understanding indeed, which I was grateful for.  After the conversation ended I did the growling thing with the kids, the one that starts with, "I'm extremely disappointed... why do you think that is?"

Peter was great.  He told the kids something very important: he has loved writing ever since he was a little boy.  He told us about how long it can take to write a book.  He started researching The Anzac Puppy in 2001 and it wasn't published until 2014... that's the longest time it has taken him to write a book.  Peter loves writing for children, and he loves writing stories that will make people laugh.  He also told us about some of the things that inspire him and the book he has just completed that is next to be published - but we were sworn to secrecy.

My class and I have the opportunity to have another Skype conversation with a class in Australia.  So I am thinking we will definitely have to nut out some expectations prior to doing the next chat.  The children are also keen to Skype an ex-teaching colleague of mine who is now working as an advisor on writing in schools, including my school.  I said we would ask her next time she came to the school.

Later that day on Twitter I started a random #edchatNZ chat about personalising learning for teachers (that is for another blog however).  I mentioned my first Skype chat during it, saying how I had done some "just in time learning that day".  As a result, now another teacher is pursuing Peter Millett's books for use in his class and may also do a Skype chat with his class and Peter Millett.  So there is a win out of the day.