The Geekorium

Today we’re announcing that Google Message Security will be offered free to current and new eligible K12 Google Apps customers that opt-in to Google Message Security – powered by Postini – by July 2010. Google Message Security lets administrators limit messages based on who they’re from, who they’re going to, or the content they contain. Message rules can be applied to groups of users, making it easy to customise the scheme for different groups (for instance younger students, older students, and teachers). via Official Google Australia Blog.

There really are no excuses any more. Paying a truck load of money to some little company run by hillbillies to provide lousy support and a product that doesn’t work for no tangible benefit over a FREE set of tools that are world-class… We have to do better soon.

It seems to me that we (society/schools/the world) tend to rely on technology in two ways. The first is to rely on it to actually work - we expect our computers, email and Intranet page to be working first thing in the morning until 10 o’clock at night (or later). We expect it to work without glitch or bug or problem. Of course by ‘expect’ I really mean ‘cross our fingers and hope’. The way we work belies our hope - we back up, use save often and pray that nothing breaks when we try something new. Some of the more tech-savvy of us (or the more adventurous) quickly rely on technology more than we should. But when our USB device fails or our email service is down, we admit fault for expecting rather than hoping.

Then there is the other way we rely on technology. It began when we (and again I mean ‘we’ as a collective) first sat our kids in front of the television and went off to do our own thing. It has continued until today, but now includes DVD’s, video games, “the computer” and now the Internet. The reliance we have developed is more than just ‘expecting it to work’. We now expect it to fill a role it was never meant to fill, namely: taking over our children’s education and keeping them occupied. Technology-as-babysitter is giving technology far, far more credit than it deserves for being reliable. When our technology lets us down in so many other areas why do we continue to trust it with the minds of our children?

Not long ago I arrived at school to reports that ‘the Internet’ wasn’t working properly - people couldn’t access their email. “Nothing new there”, I thought as I logged in to check the problem myself. What I noticed wasn’t a problem with email, but a problem with the proxy - the device that sits between every school in the state and the big wide world of the Internet. It was letting everyone through without identification, and wasn’t filtering their results as it should have been doing. Just to test this, I surfed to MySpace - a site that is definitely on the block list - and was not stopped. I alerted the powers-that-be, and warned the relevant people within my schools, and the problem was soon resolved.

Now it just so happens, that the day before I had already begun thinking about this very topic and started formulating this post. Day after day I hear of staff who sit removed from their students while the students circumvent the filtering and accounting mechanisms we have in place. Schools around the state add daily to the list of blocked sites in an effort to keep our systems clean and safe. And it’s a losing battle - there are more of these sites then anyone could ever find. What we are discovering is what we really should have already known: technology is a poor substitute for real people. The only thing that will minimise the abuse of these new technologies as they emerge is real hands-on teaching that engages the students and keeps them interested in learning.

Please don’t get me wrong - I know that teachers know this. I also know how easy it is to say, but how difficult it is to achieve. Teachers are already too busy, support staff stretched too thin. I know I could never be a teacher, because I see how much work it takes. But working with technology daily, I’m constantly reminded that we cannot rely on technology too much. We certainly shouldn’t rely on it to take our place. Believing that a computer can replace a teacher is just begging for trouble.

We need to daily examine how we teach. Like good computer maintenance we should never get complacent or trust that our technology will always act as we imagine it should. Every system we use, every piece of equipment in place will fail. Nothing can prevent it if we imagine that it can keep a young mind entertained, educated and safe without a human hand guiding it.

Out with the Old

This intro is aimed at people who can use the Internet, and are comfortable using the last version of Microsoft’s Internet browser: Internet Explorer 6 (also known as IE6).

You may know, a browser is any program that allows you to view - or browse - web pages. Because Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser, some of you probably know it only as “the Internet”. It looks like this:

and you usually start it with this icon:

In with IE7

Recently, Microsoft released an updated version of their Internet Explorer browser called Internet Explorer 7 (or IE7). It fixed a lot of problems that IE6 had, and looks a lot prettier. More than the superficial changes though, it adopted a lot of excellent little features that make Internet surfing safer and easier. It’s these changes that I’m going to explore in this article, so you can learn what makes IE7 different and get used to using it in your school or at home.

What’s different?

The first thing you notice when you start it up is that the tool bar with all the menu options is gone

(actually you may notice the spiffy new icon first).

All the same commands are still here, just hidden. To access most of the old menu items, you now click ‘Tools’ on the second bar.

Most of the common functions you may have used in IE6 are placed in this spot. For instance, you can go quickly to your homepage , access your saved RSS feeds (more on this in another article), or use the one-click-print option . However, if you miss the menu bar you can bring it back by clicking ‘Tools’ then ‘Menu Bar’ (or simply pressing the ‘Alt’ key on your keyboard brings it back temporarily).

Some schools may have the tool bar turned off completely (disabling tool menus can stop tampering with settings), so check with your school’s computer technician if you don’t have this option.

Simplified

IE7 has a simplified set of icons for doing the most common tasks. The buttons are the same as those in IE6, but they have been made smaller and prettier, and in some cases moved. The forward and back buttons still take you forward and back, but now the common drop-down button next to them gives you a list of your most recently visited pages, and highlights your current position amongst them.

Next to this is the Address bar, that works in exactly the same way as it did previously - you type in a website address, you go to that website. The “Go” button from IE6 has become the “Refresh/Go” button. Now if you are at a page that is already open in the browser, the button will display as “Refresh” allowing you to re-load the page. If however you have just typed in a new page, the button changes to a ‘Go’ arrow , and if you click on it, it will take you to the page you just entered.

Finally, we have the ‘Stop’ button , which has changed from the stop sign button that used to be on the left-hand side of the address bar to a red ‘x’ on the right.

New search bar

Next to the address bar is the ‘Search bar’.

You can type a search term into the bar, and whatever search-engine is listed will perform your search for you. In this picture I have made Google my default search-engine, but it might be Microsoft’s ‘Live’ search for you or Yahoo. You can change the search engine by clicking the drop-down button beside the magnifying glass and clicking the search-engine you wish to use.

If you don’t have many options here you can choose ‘Find more providers’ from this menu and it will take you to a web page where you can set up more search providers.

The search bar is a very handy shortcut if you find yourself regularly searching Google or any other site. See your school’s technician if you want your favourite search engine listed here.

Faster Favorites

On the next line we have two buttons that handle your ‘Favorites’ (sorry about the American spelling).

Favorites (or bookmarks as they’re more commonly known) are links that you want to remember, so you can visit them in future without remembering the address. The first button opens your favorites in a little pop-out window and selecting a link from here closes the pop-out and takes you to the site. This is ideal if you want a quick way to access sites you visit regularly. If you need to browse your favorites more thoroughly though, you can click the ‘Pin’ button and the favorites pop-out will become a bar that stays at the side of your browser window.

If you’ve used them in IE6, adding and managing favourites is exactly the same in IE7 with one major difference - adding a favourite is as easy as clicking the second button (a star with a plus sign) and choosing ‘Add to Favorites’. You can also access the history of sites you’ve visited from the Favorites panel, and your saved RSS feeds (more on that in another article).

All new Tab Bar!

My favourite (I spell it right when I can!) part of the new Internet Explorer is the new ‘Tab Bar’

Next to the ‘Favorite’ buttons is a long shiny lozenge that can change the way you use the Internet . Similar to the task bar at the bottom of your screen, the tab bar opens up a new tab for each website you visit. However, instead of opening up multiple windows that you have to keep track of, every site you visit can be stored in a tab along this bar. It might sound like the ‘tabs’ have simply moved from below the window to above it, but trust me on this - having tabs in your browser is very useful.

You can click the ‘New Tab’ button and not surprisingly a new tab will open - type in a new address and viola, two websites for the price of one. You might open your email (or EdPortal) in one tab, and Google in another so you can keep checking for messages every half hour without having to keep a window open cluttering up your task bar. You can open up lots of tabs along the tab bar, and as you go they’ll start to shrink in size to fit more on.

When there are too many to fit, IE7 will give you a little button at the sides that you can scroll to show more tabs .

One thing that I’ve been asked numerous times since installing IE7 at my school is how to close one website without closing all the tabs. In IE6, clicking the ‘x’ in the top right of the window would close the current site only, but now with tabs open the ‘x’ closes everything! To close only the site you want, you need to click the ‘x’ on the individual tab.

Quick Tabs

The simplest way to find a tab that you’ve opened is to use the ‘Quick Tabs’ feature. If you click the ‘Quick Tabs’ button (or press Ctrl and Q), IE7 opens up all your tabs at once as little pictures so you can see the sites you have open at a glance.

You can click on a picture and the site will open for you, or even click the ‘x’ button in the top right of the picture to close that site. Doesn’t that make it easier to find and manage the sites you’ve opened?

Advanced Tab Use

I find the best use for tabs is when doing searches or research. Let’s say I search Google for ‘Dogs’ and it brings up a page full of results that all look interesting. In IE6 I used to click a result and the page would load, and if I wanted to look at another result I’d have to click the ‘Back’ button to return to Google. In IE7, I can right-click the page I’m interested in and select ‘Open in New Tab’,

leaving my original Google search open to return to later. It’s also possible to set up IE7 so that when you open a result in a tab, it doesn’t immediately focus on the new tab but stays on the page you were on. If you do this, you can open up multiple pages to load in the background while you continue to look at the page you were on.

You’re not limited to searches either. You can open links from any page into new tabs and keep reading. Imagine reading a Wikipedia article and opening everything you’re interested in in another tab - you might actually finish reading the original article!

Tabs can be so useful that I would suggest taking a little time to get used to them. The best trick I know? If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can click the scroll wheel (middle-click) on a link to automatically open it in a new tab.

You can quickly close tabs too, by middle-clicking them regardless of whether they have a visible ‘x’ on them.

So much more…

There are a lot more things you can do with Internet Explorer 7. Some other new features include an anti-phishing tool to help protect against identity theft, a pop-up blocker to counteract annoying ads, and privacy tools to delete your Internet history and private data quickly. If you want to know more about these features you can visit Microsoft’s IE7 page for more information, or ask your school’s computer technician. There are also other browsers you can use like Firefox and Opera, that have even more useful features. I do find that most teachers and students are familiar with IE6, so the improvements made in IE7 make it a lot more functional without being too big a change.

Why is this important?

Things change. Technology changes fast. You might be comfortable with the same old software you’ve been using, but believe it or not it’s actually holding back the development of a faster and more accessible Internet. Not only that, but Microsoft tend to force these changes, and if your school or home computer hasn’t already upgraded, chances are they will soon whether you like it or not.

If you begin to use a tiny portion of the capabilities of a modern browser such as Internet Explorer 7, I guarantee it will make your time on the Internet more productive and more enjoyable. If you have any questions at all about this topic - please leave a comment, write me an email or contact me through my contact form. I’m sure your own school’s computer technician would also be very willing to chat about anything I’ve written.

Got any other tips you’d like to share? Want to clarify something I’ve written? Please leave a comment.

They do what on the Internet?

I recently spoke to a staff member at one of my schools who in all respects is a lovely person, but who shocked me thoroughly when we started talking about ‘the Internet’. The topic somehow came to MySpace in particular, and in general the idea of putting personal stuff out there for all to see. Now this person has a child, and their opinion was that they would never let their child do anything online that might expose them to the dangers of the Internet. This sounds good and proper

• but my shock was at what their idea of Internet danger extends to.

Do you believe that some people use the Internet for banking!?

they exclaimed.
As I was about to explain that actually the ’net is getting very good at keeping everything you put out there safe I was forced to cut the conversation short to reset yet another password.

Now this person isn’t so old you can forgive their scepticism - and even that’s not fair when you consider that my Grandma has been banking online for at least a couple of years now. More confusingly this person is fresh out of university - so they MUST be using the ’net at least occasionally.

Before we ended the conversation I tried to impress upon them that with a very young child about to grow up in an increasingly net-connected world, they have a chance (nay, a duty) to learn everything they can about this newfangled technology to better educate their children in its proper use. I’m not sure if I got through.

They grow up so fast

Since then, I’ve thought a lot more about our jobs as educators and technologists (and parents) to make this technology safer for our kids (and by ‘our’, I mean the ones we work with as well as the ones we own[^1^](#1sup)). I’ve kinda been interested in this area since starting to work with Al Upton who put me on to a couple of educators who think about this stuff. Until I talked to this staff member though, I never really seriously considered how important it all is.

Our kids are using mobile phones earlier, blogging younger, playing video games before they can walk, and MSNing before they can speak, but instead of teaching them, we’re banning them in classrooms and homes and hoping that they’ll get over it instead[^2^](#2sup). We block out everything new that we see (iPods, websites, phones) and never really re-evaluate it. It makes sense to hold back a little, to evaluate how safe these things are - but too often they are pronounced ‘too difficult to make safe’ and banned outright.

The ban-everything problem

The problem with the ban-everything-new approach is this: new toys, new ideas, new things cry out to be used and played with - every child who was dragged to church Christmas morning knows this. Every geek with a new computer/browser/new-mouse-button knows this. Everyone who’s bought a new mower or car knows that regardless of whether you need to or not, your new things call out to be used in some way. And if you cannot use them in the ways they were intended you find other ways to use them instead.

You get bored of your old software on your new computer - so you buy a computer game to make the most of it. You don’t need to drive anywhere fast, so you do burnouts up and down the block. You don’t need the new phone with the camera, and you can’t find anything constructive to do with it, so you take photos of your friends humiliating themselves instead, and then you post them to your ‘till-now-unused MySpace page. Why do we ban myspace? Because kids can do hurtful damaging things with it. Why do they do hurtful damaging things with it? Because they haven’t been given an obviously positive thing to do with it, and their friends are doing it, and they want to be a part of it, and it’s in our nature to default to the easiest and laziest things. Our kids want desperately to use this technology. They have access in their own homes and at their friends homes. They sometimes just don’t see how to go beyond the simplest and most juvenile uses for it.

But kids can be taught. That’s why we have schools isn’t it? Because they’re still learning and open to guidance (mostly)… Why do we find it difficult to encourage them to use tools productively instead of destructively? These tools are there, the kids will use them. We must keep up.

In the Air

I’ll leave my rant with a link to a story of a family that I think is amazing. Matthew is a very intelligent boy with a blog. He’s nine years old, and his goal is to interview 100 ordinary people. From his mum:

Despite having an above average IQ, everyday learning is difficult to The Boy. Out of all his challenges, I view the output and sequencing problems as the biggest obstacle. What would it be like to have so much knowledge, but not be able to organize it and express it clearly? Or to read well above grade level, but be unable to retain anything you just read?
…
The Boy has huge difficulties … with the most frustrating being the reading…not able to retain information from what he has read. Most times it feels like trying to put out a wildfire with thimbles full of water….you keep dumping and dumping, but it has no effect.

I’ve read this kid’s writing and I’m impressed that he continues to post even with such difficulty. But what impresses me most is that his mother has encouraged him to use the ‘net as a way to express himself. Unlike my staff member friend from earlier, this mum joins her kid at the computer and helps him understand what he’s doing from a more mature standpoint. She does her share of vetting, but not so Matt is left out in the dark, but guides and encourages her child to explore his world using the tools available.

Isn’t that our job as adults?

1. We don’t actually own children. ?
2. Kids don’t need to get over it. This very concerned adult thought that their younger relative needed to get over their computer games, and was put in their place by a 13 year old boy.?

Here’s an easy to use little app for both staff and students. It’s called Jump Knowledge (jkn for short) and it allows you to grab a copy of any webpage you’re reading and write whatever you want all over it (called annotating).

That’s not the cool part - once you’ve left your mark you can share the page with anyone else in a variety of ways: via email, your own blog, print it out, or bookmark it to come back to later. You can come back even after the original has changed because Jump Knowledge keeps a copy of it on its own servers, meaning you’ll never lose the extra info you’ve added.

You don’t need an account, but if you do create one, jkn keeps a list of every page you’ve written over so you can keep track from one handy location.

You can check out the simple page I’ve annotated and shared at http://jkn.com/View?j=805037.873488227171 (ugly URL, but nevermind). Jump Knowledge is the simplest tool of this sort that I’ve found so far as it doesn’t require you to sign up or install extra software, and it makes the page available to anyone anywhere on the web (although you can set your pages to private).

Next time you want to share something you’ve read, instead of just emailing or posting a plain link consider using Jump Knowledge to write your own thoughts or highlight the important parts.

Jump Knowledge (via Lifehacker.com)

This was my first thought when Al said he’d created an EduBlogs blog for me. I already blog infrequently on two of my own blogs, and it seems every website that ever tried to be ‘two point oh’ offers a free blog. I have an unused blogger account, a wordpress blog that I had to sign up for to use Akismet (an antispam plugin), and if I’d ever been suckered in to using MySpace, Facebook, or any other social site I’d be drowning in the guilt of too many unused blogs.

But I’m not going to feel guilty about this one. I recently made a vow to myself to do something creative daily, and one of the options I gave myself was to blog. Maybe it wont be here, but I should be blogging more regularly. About the same time, Al and a couple of other bloggers he linked to have been inspiring me to have a bit of a say about education. I hesitated because my perspective is not unique - there are hundreds of other IT people in the South Australian education system. I also hesitated because I fear that there is not much I can say that hasn’t been said already by people who can write betterer.

But Al’s pushed it and forced my hand, now despite your protests I will not stay silent. Forgive me.

Come back here occasionally to hear my thoughts on education from the perspective of a non-teaching tech guy. I work in two schools where technology in education is highly valued, but often not fully appreciated.

I can understand WHY teachers find it difficult to see the benefit of the latest technologies - teachers are bombarded from every direction with the promises of easier teaching, more engaging programs, wonderful new paradigms that will forever alter… you’ve heard it all before.

If you are a student you’ll have heard your teacher tell you about amazing new things that you and your friends have been doing for years already. But students are making this stuff up themselves. They’re using technology in ways that the creators never even imagined. It’s up to teachers and the tech people they work with to find ways to use the technology to engage students, rather than trying to remove it forcibly from their lives.

I don’t presume to know what the technology of tomorrow will look like or how it will be used (although I know what I want it to look like, and how I think it should be used), but I want to be there to see how it evolves.