For a piece of frivolity I had to share this gem. Play a track in iTunes and go COMMAND + T. This incredible visualisation enthralls you while you listen- the movie doesn’t do it justice in the flesh- it is just stunning.

The track is a Beowulf soundtrack: ‘Hero Comes Home’.

I feel a little like an international jet setter these days as I presented two workshops at a mini-conference in Tauranga hosted by the Waimarino ICT cluster. Unfortunately I missed all of Michael Pohl’s opening keynote as I struggled with the Bethlehem College protocols of not allowing non technicians to connect any devices without a technician doing it- including plugging in the data projector! I had made a wiki showing some of the ways I embed ICT into my classroom practice and was trying to add the links in tabs in Internet Explorer one by one and the their PC lab computer froze when it got to something it didn’t like. After fighting the good fight a couple of times I gave up and went back to plan A and asked for help from the technician’s to hook my Apple onto their network which he did in a few seconds. I had made a back-up plan C of a Keynote of screen grabs but that would have been a lame imitation when trying to show the interconnectivity of the web

After lunch I moved onto a second group of folks wanting to podcast with a PC. An exercise fraught with complications I hear you say but I had asked them to download Audacity and the Lame Encoder beforehand to save time. I showed the assembled group a smattering of our podcasts and then we got down to business.

Following a similar practice run session with Upper Moutere School last week I managed a work around to record a digital story using PhotoStory3 and export it as a .wmv file which I converted using www.zamzar.com to a .mov file which can be uploaded to Podomatic which makes these podcasts with graphics ready for iTunes. But these sorts of digital mazes can be a bit bedazzling for novices.

The final keynote was by Neil Melhuish, our MoE e-Learning Project Director. I had not heard him speak before and found his message interesting and challenging. I asked him if I record and edit his keynote. I was not disappointed. Unfortunately the sound quality of the recording left something to be desired so I won’t post it. Note to self- don’t chaw your way through crustly chocolate bars while recording with an iPod. They are very sensitive.

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Neil spoke about the way that we record knowledge in the 21st century. The challenging thing (for me) that he talked about that I hadn’t thought of before was the culture-centricity of the way we organise knowledge through the Dewey system. I have always accepted it as being the way that it is and thought of it without challenge. Looking closer though at say the Religion 200’s category. From 200 to 288 all of the subcategories are based on Christianity. All of the rest of the world’s religions lumped together only get 11 subcategories. This is the way Encyclopedia Britannica organises information in its 39 volumes. The way we can co-create knowledge in Wikipedia means that the rest of the world gets a look in- that’s a good thing.

Neil spoke also of the advances in giving children in developing countries access to 21st century learning via the OLPC scheme. I went to order one myself a Give1-Get1 OLPC laptop last Christmas but didn’t realise that the deal finished in 2007. I really do like the idea of giving a laptop and getting a laptop. Neil had a few to pass around. So much for my geekiness- I couldn’t even get the thing open!

I had to hop it smartly to the airport after the keynote and once there had a few moments to spare so opened my laptop to see if there was any chance of open wi-fi. I knew Neil’s nearby presence because I noticed olpc-mesh in my nearby devices. Even closed the clever little things were roaming looking for laptop friends to play with as Neil checked his luggage without shutting down the laptops! LOL

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Today was filled with a myriad of lessons learnt. Mostly ‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.‘

Namely- don’t assume anything!

• Just because you have been to a venue to check that you have a wireless connection don’t assume it will be fine when you go to use it.
• Just because you can access the internet don’t assume that you will be able to access the Movie Making wiki you had laboured over to ensure that everyone had access to the resources you intended to use during the Lead Teacher Day.
• Don’t assume that because you had jacked up a Skpe Video Call to talk about digital storytelling with Anne Mirtschin in Aussie that you will be able to actually speak!
• Don’t assume that because you previously accessed Twitter that you will be able to five minutes later to tell Anne that I couldn’t get Skype to go.
• Don’t assume that Lead Teachers have used movie editing software before.
• Don’t assume that when you put a nearly full bottle of milk in the boot of the car to bring home that the lid would on tightly enough to keep all the milk in the bottle- I have spent the last two hours cleaning up a litre of spilt milk that had soaked into the boot carpet and down into the spare tyre well. No use crying over spilt milk but some valuable lessons were learnt today.

Friday’s visit was to Motueka South- hidden down a driveway, Motueka South was a great find. They are a well connected school with many classes actively blogging throughout 2007.

They are looking to jolly up their website and seek partners for their blogging classes.

I intend to re-visit Motueka South on Monday to share with them some of the possibilities of using Web2.0 technologies (blogger, blogmeister, wikispaces, podcasting, Voicethread, Skype etc to enhance children’s learning.

When I had a test run I hit my first brick wall as facilitator. Although my Apple can connect wirelessly and I was able to Skype easily I could not connect to the internet through their Smartnet server- a call to their technician and to mine couldn’t solve the problem. Something to do with the proxies or something! I am going back to the school an hour or two before the staff meeting to see if we can connect. I could bookmark the websites I want to share or I could use this wiki as a base but I would love to be able to share the connectivity live as it were. How can I show how easy it is to subscribe to a podcast in iTunes unless I actually do it. It will be a pain to change computers between viewing pre-downloaded podcasts, Twitter, movies etc and going live on the internet in the middle of a presentation. I could do the presentation on a PC but I want to dump it as the anti-virus ran out last June and it weighs a ton. I don’t trust it.

If I used one of their PCs some of the content could take forever to buffer and I wouldn’t be sure that they would work like when I was trying to show what we do to the ERO guy at the ERO offices- they had dial-up, Podomatic was banned and he wasn’t able to update his Flash player for the Voicethread to play. How sad is that?

What do other people do in this sort of situation???