2010 - Young Ambassadors

During 2010 a group of Year 6 students from Pt England School have acted as ambassadors not only for the school but on behalf of the Manaiakalani project.  They auditioned for the role in February and developed their own presentations which they have since shared with visitors from around the country and overseas. Some of the groups have been large, some have included folk like Cabinet Ministers, and some have been interested classroom teachers.  Regardless of who the audience was (and what these kids were missing out on -  from Maths to Art to Swimming!) these ten year olds gave more than 100% to the task of sharing how they learn with others.

Housing Minister Phil Heatley chatting with the children after they have presented to him.

Many people have asked if they could have a video of the student presentations, so as the year ends I am publishing links to them.  I am not embedding them in this post. You will need to follow the links to each of their blogs - and leave them some feedback :)

Angela: What is eLearning?

Selena: Television and other screens

Toreka: Blogging

Ala: Graphic Art

Seini-Mino: Podcasting with KPE

Mubasshira: Google Apps

Erene: Video Conferencing

Aidan -Multimedia Technician 

Wireless Solution

Sometimes you see something that makes you smile and you just have to pull up, hold up the traffic on the round-about and take a photo.

This was one of those times - driving past Tamaki College and I saw the big aerial going up on the roof for the wireless connection to Pt England School.  For someone like me, who needs to see something to believe it, this was a big moment.  Yes, this wireless connection between our schools is really happening. Thanks to the team from Fusion Networks.  This is a big project they are giving their time and energy to.

So I went round the round-about again and got myself into position to take my pics - and because this is Glen Innes, the traffic just waited :)  The next visible sign of progress is seeing the network pop up on my mobile devices as I drive around the district - and No, I am not about to reveal the password! But TLN is the Tamaki Learning Network...

Netbook Handover

Tuesday November 16th came and the first two classes of Netbook students in our Manaiakalani Cluster received their Netbooks. What an awesome occasion to be part of. One of the many spin-offs is that by giving the students connectivity on a 1:1 basis they have blogged about how they felt.

So here come some links if you want to read it through the kids' eyes....

Helen T and Sam and Tuipulotu and Ocean and Shaniah and Tia

One quote from Year 7 student:
I am really excited about the future and how this may change our school lives forever

These two classes, Room 19 with Ms Tito and Room 20 Mrs Nua have not only the pleasure of being first, but also the responsibility of piloting the project. This includes keeping smiling through all the teething issues, exploring the possibilities and recording their findings. They will also be required to mentor others when they get their turn next year. The two links in this paragraph will give you a perspective from the two teachers' point of view.

Netbooks in our Hands! from KPE TV on Vimeo.

These students signed a useage agreement form before taking temporary possession of their Netbooks for four weeks. This batch of Netbooks are owned by the cluster (thanks to a philanthrophic donation) and will become our insurance pool of Netbooks for 2011. They will have to start leasing their own along with everyone else in 2011.

We have a three stage pilot for the 1:1 roll out across our seven schools.

Stage One: 2010 two classes in one school to work through the teething problems

Stage Two: 2011 13 classes across six schools (including two Year 10 classes)

Stage Three: 2012 All students from Year 5-13 in our seven schools

Student Netbook Agreement:
I agree that:
I will respect the equipment by always looking after it and keeping it safe
I will respect others by always using this netbook to interact with other people in a positive and caring way
I will make the most of this opportunity to learn lots of new things and to share them with others
I will always be in the right place, at the right time, when I am online. If I am in doubt I will ask my teacher.
I will protect my password and keep it completely secret.

Student Technicians

One of the design goals for this project is that student technicians will be the first port of call for school-based trouble shooting:

"The device should allow a technican to re-image it quickly using a USB stick only."

So when the first 100 Netbooks arrived, the moment came when all the adult professionals had to step back and hand over control to a bunch of eager 10-12 year olds - who had all applied in writing for this position. eg

"Dear Mrs Burt
I am writing this letter to apply for the job as a Netbook technician. I like to help both students and teachers and I have very good people skills. I can explain very well with detail so people can understand. I would love to know how to fix technical difficulties as well as getting people started. I know I will be a reliable and a great technician.
I would love to have this job and I thrive on responsibity. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely etc"

This was a big ask on many levels; EdTech as the company who procured the Netbooks and are supporting us technically, the development team who has put endless sleepless nights into developing the operating system and hacking the BIOS, Russell who has advocated from the outset that students CAN do this, and me who had volunteered to 'train' them when all my expertise is in the Mac OS, not Ubuntu!

Fortunately Joel created a training video, and with Nevyn created a list of written instructions. What could be simpler? Take a look...

Netbook Image from KPE TV on Vimeo.

OK, so that was all we had to do. We watched the video over and over until we all felt confident and then I was chosen to demo the first one - lots of pressure!

Student Technicians from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Things didn't go quite to plan initially, and Nevyn has written that all up here and here.

But they ironed out the glitches and soon the techie team were on a roll, swapping BIOS sticks for OS sticks and discovered they could do the complete job from unpacking to repacking in 14 minutes if all went well - particularly if John was ontask to put the BIOS password in for them.

Students Imaging Netbooks from KPE TV on Vimeo.

In one day 8 kids imaged 100 laptops with ease. No sweat. Roll on the next round of the pilot with the next 500.

We had lots of interested visitors during the day to lend moral support, and most of them were handed a Netbook and asked if they would like to help out with the process. Because so many have put so much into it we decided to UStream the day so anyone who wanted to could watch - from classrooms and offices. At one stage we had 40 viewers online! Not bad for a geek fest.

So when all was completed and the Netbooks were back in their boxes looking like new, all was ready for the BIG day - tomorrow we hand them out to their new owners!

Student technicians:
Joshua, Lepa, April, Sela, Helen, Nathaniel, Paulitia, Latham

Developing the Netbook image

It is one thing to cheerfully say we will save a lot of money by not having a proprietary image on our Netbooks. It is another to come up with a free solution - that is robust and has everything specific to the needs of the Manaiakalani project in it. We are all teachers in this project, not IT geeks!

So Russell sent out a call through the online open source community asking who would be interested in helping us out and people came, offering amazing skills to the project. Over several months on most Tuesday nights a bunch of people have turned up at Pt England School at 5.30pm - fresh from their day jobs and worked into the evening on creating an image for our Netbooks.

The design goals are fleshed out in detail here, but in short we were looking for something fool-proof, open source, that would meet all our classroom and pedagogy requirements and provide a safe environment for our students to learn in.

We also set as a goal that our students would be the technicians for these devices - meaning we would put most of the technical support money into the wireless solution and not the devices.
We wanted to develop a group of trusted students as technicians aged 10 years and older who would be able to handle most of the basic issues. Warantee issues of course would go back to the manufacturer and device repairs would go through EdTech.

Nevyn and Tom did a lot of the work on the Ubuntu based image and Joel worked on the Bios - something I never knew existed till this year :) In fact I learnt a whole heap of stuff that I never knew existed through sitting in the back row at these evening sessions.

As the 'Go Live' day drew nearer the pressure came on key people in the group to have the image ready to go for the first group of students on Monday November 15th. Obviously this meant some working through the night on the weekend before.

We have found it very interesting and entertaining to read about this from a non-educator perspective on Nevyn's blog.

Development Team from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Next post: Handing over to the student technicians