Sharing the Addiction

The Rise of the New Generation

I ran a couple of workshops at a teacher only day for the Wellington College cluster and I was impressed with the presentations by the students at the school. They were not only incredilby knowledgeable about ICT but they were also fantastic speakers. They commended individual teachers for the way they were using ICT in classes and spoke about what they would like to see in the future. A number of students brought up making greater use of text messaging by teachers to students. They also spoke about teachers making greater use of Web 2.0 tools and multimedia.

One student who really blew me away spoke about his classes decision to use a wiki as part of a study of “The Life of Pi”. None of the available wikis seemed exactly right for what they were looking for so the student decided to write his own. He didn’t have it up in time for the unit of study but he has now almost finished working on his Ed Wiki. He came to my wiki workshop in the name of ‘research’ and spent time asking all of the participant about what features they would like in a wiki. One feature he is currently working on is the ability for teachers to set assignments for specific individual or groups of students and the work students do on this assignment would not become visible to other students until after the completion date. The wiki has a greater number of editing features than most wikis and I think it looks very impressive. He hopes to launch the product in the next few weeks and is offering it for free to Wellington College staff so that they can give him feedback to improve the product. Then he is thinking of offering it to schools for a cost of around $2.50 a student (he has a company set up).

Did I mention that he still has three years of schooling left to go? (if his business doesn’t take him in other directions before then). I was actually really interesting seeing where things are going in a secondary school and the types of skills the kids have at this level. People there also didn’t really know what types of things we were up to at primary level so I had a number of interesting discussions.

I also found out the problems of trying to use web 2.0 tools on Internet Explorer. After getting used to working on Firefox, I forgot to check what internet browser was used by the College and I got caught out when a number of things didn’t work all that well in IE (such as picture resizing in Wikispaces). The workshop still worked OK but I am certainly going to check that Firefox is installed on the computers at ULearn!

Oh, and I seem to have got it wrong about Flash Player updates fixing problems with TeacherTube – it crashed on me again the other day! I hope they sort out this problem as I think it is a great service.