Monday 20 August 2007

what a normal teacher must go through

I have been kicked out of my room for a day, the reason for this is that all the motherboards in my room need to be replaced, well the motherboards in three rooms at school need replaced. These were all the computers that were purchased this year.
So this could happen I was removed from my classroom and put into 3 other spaces for today. S5, B4, and E10.

S5 is a computer lab used by Technology and Science, its a pretty good room in its layout and design. Same with B4, these two rooms are not too bad. The only complaint is that they have Macromedia Flash Player 6. Why might this be important you may ask? Digital Learning Objects, one task I was going to get my programming students to do today was work through a DLO and see if they can apply the outcome to their own practice, pretty hard to do when you need at least Flash Player 7. Ok sight grumble there. I never realised that I would miss my classroom so much, I think I take it for granted now. It has been my room for the past five years, although I do "visit" the other computer labs in the school, but for the briefest times.

E10 is a social studies room, with no computers in it. Ok how am I going to teach without computers, well get some pieces of paper, some pens and away you go. I had my students designing GUI interfaces for a mp3 player, weather application, youtube interface and last but not least there virtual pet. Man, what other teachers must go through when there is no computers in front of their students. To gain there attention and make lessons interesting.

I look at some of the teachers that come into our rooms and watch the teacher sit at the front of the room working away while the students play games or watch videos, rather than do the work that they are supposed to do. It is a different way of teaching, they have a media centre in front of them, available to do most things and instant access to the world, IM, social networking. These are now becoming to much of a problem in school. The students are always on, what this means they are always online, wanting access to talk to other people, the cellphones, internet and other communication, they "need" to use it. Bebo to them is an addiction, they need to be on it, see who has given them the "luv", commented about there page, upload the latest images and fill in the blog entry for the day. We can only do so much in the way of locking down websites, it is up to the teacher to direct what the students do in class.

The latest however is another proxy bypass site, http://www.mmproxy.com, man all you have to do is do a search on Google with the term "mmproxy" and thousands of them pop up. It used to be poxy pass which was the popoular one, but this one seems to beat them all.

oneteachersview can do it!
One of the other things that happened to me today and it does start to annoy me, is that a staff member found a video that they wanted to include in a powerpoint presentation, now when they go to present this they will not have any internet access, how can she present her presentation?
She went and visited the technician who could not help her, she then went and visited the IT Manger who couldn't help her, who is also the video technician, they suggested oneteachersview, yes me. Now if anyone can do anything in the school it is oneteachersview. hang on, I get no public recognition of what I can do, have no administrator access, but when it comes down to "we cannot do it, see oneteachersview and he will be able to do it". I get frustrated. Of course I help the person, but it is becoming more frequent this type of we can't do it, see oneteachersview. Youtube is a wonderful resource, http://vixy.net allows you to convert youtube videos to other formats, select .mov and then using adobe premiere elements convert to windows media file. 20 minutes work, would have been quicker if I had my power cord with me - never do it on battery again!!
Bring on the ICT position in schools, come on Ministry of Education and PPTA help a fella out.

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