Two Years with IPads and Counting

Wow, what a whirlwind it's been lately.

Just to recap a few things, here is what my last year has been like:

1. Fall 2014- Learn about realignment (junior highs are becoming middle schools, 6-8, and my 9th grade job is in jeopardy)
• No details about how the alignment will work only that non tenured teachers can't do anything until late may after 3 rounds of interviews for tenured staff. We will have to wait for outside postings to the district.
• Students recieve IPads, deployment is horrible, no filtering on the school wifi so engagement in content is minimal due to gaming and social media.
• Staff not allowed to confiscate Ipads because students "need" them in every class.

To touch on these few points, I was stressed. I was teaching a new curriculum to 8th grade students while trying to implement all these new technology mandates by our district. I really wanted students to see purpose in the Ipads rather than just an expensive toy the school gave them.

This was super hard. I was the bad guy for taking the Ipads away even though the kids "needed" them. Other teachers would call and demand that I return it to the student and I simply refused. There was so little being inforced that I wanted students to know that I was serious when I said they can't be messing around on them in my class. After about two weeks of pissed off staff and students, kids finally understood that I was serious and the big issues stopped. I'm glad that I was able to take control eventually, but I think that the school should have done more to empower and support teachers.

Now that I had kids' behaviors on the Ipad under control, I needed to find away to integrate it into my curriculum. At first, there was really very little that could be done. Not every student had the app Noteability, and the school's software distribution model was awful. I was annoyed, kids were annoyed, it was not good.

    2. Winter 2014-Still uncertain about job security, planning wedding for the  
        spring, getting more comfortable with schoology and finding a routine for
        students and Ipads.

• Things were starting to click now for me and the students. All kids had the noteability app and we were learning how to use it together. It was pretty awesome, and I see the potential it has as a notebook replacement. 
• We started having weekly quizzes in schoology and I learned how to properly scaffold questions, got better at using different question types and organizing my materials.
• Biggest issue with Ipads now is the camera and social media. There was a lot of drama and was left unresolved (not touching that one again, just glad it's over)

    3. Spring 2015- Interview for a new job, get married and finally am
        comfortable with the LMS and Ipads.

• Personal life got super busy but I made it work.
• I finally feel like I know how to integrate the Ipad and schoology into my classroom in a way that makes sense. I like it, my kids like it, everyone is happy now. 

• Even with this new sense of accomplishment, I am still angry at the building administration and the district. I can't fathom how poorly planned and implemented this whole thing has been. This has been a VERY expensive undertaking and it should have been done with more care and caution. My classroom is an exception, not a norm and the Ipads are wasted in 80% of the students' other classes.

• Interviewed for a new position still in the same district and got it! I'll be dropping down from 9th grade to 6th grade (yikes!! scary age difference but I'm excited about it)

    Summer 2015: Hangout, spend time with family and start stressing about
                              school in early July.

    Fall 2015: Ipad deployment has gone much better this year. Students have
                      access to apps better as well!

• Really noticing the difference in maturity and attention span. Very difficult time planning and staying within my (expected) expectations. 
• Biggest issue with Ipads is just forgetting them at home and charging them. Video gaming is starting to become a big distraction as well.
• Having tons of fun in lab settings with students and challenging them to apply skills. Critical thinking and application is going to be a focus for me and the kids this year!

    Winter 2015: Ipads and schoology are great! My classroom is 100% paperless,
                          which is a good starting point for students and myself in terms
                          of technology integration.

• I've realized that the Ipad is a replacement tool for me this year and not so much an augmentation. I want to teach the skill of appropriate technology usage so that they will be more successful as they move through our school. 
• Students use the Ipad as their notebook/textbook for my class. My goal is that they get use to it as a a tool so that when they get into 7th and 8th grade where a lot of material is independent, they won't get too distracted.
• Biggest issues are still charging the Ipad and bringing it to school. When they break, the turn around time for a new one is about 4 weeks but that maybe happens to 1/30 students.
• School blocked social media but still has game domains allowed. I don't know why but apparently filtering needs to be done at the district level and not by building. (They really don't make this easy. . . )

Spring 2015: I'm trying to have kids be more independent on the Ipad and
                      schoology.

• I'm going to try some self paced learning using completion folders. No idea how well this will work.

Well, that's a wrap for now! I just wanted to get everything out in a timeline format for my own writing purposes. Now when I talk about some different topics later, you'll know my thinking and context behind it. We are going to be switching our grading system this summer (I'm kind of glad about that) but it won't be super convenient. 

I've been getting about 1-3 side jobs a month with Ne.IT which has been fun as well! If you haven't seen the page, check it out!

Latest and Greatest

What's New?

I got really bored this past summer and started a mini company called NE.IT. It's just me offering my skill set as a technology enthusiast to anyone who wants to pay for it. I created a website you can check out if interested! I remember I have this blog from time to time but forget to add to it. Check out the site, let me know what you think and I'll be back this summer to add to this blog.

 

Cheers! 

Ipads in the school and how education is becoming a business

Well I've been teaching for two years now and I've experienced a lot of change in s short amount of time.

First, my school went digital. What does this mean? Well every student for an iPad and teachers received no training on how to use ipads efficiently in the classroom. Students were suppose to be restricted to a "school app store" but very quickly found methods to get around that and download anything they wanted to. As a school, we had a very lose digital contact that administration did not enforce and that our tech department did not implement well. It was very rough and hopefully the experience will be better next year.

My personal thoughts on the transition are that ipads are replacing the notebook and saving the school money on printing. They are a replacement, not an engagement. The cost of entry for them and the cost of the networking upgrades are probably way more than the printing costs so I would be interested to see the longterm return on them.
     The school needs to have a logical plan for when students break the rules on the ipad. It needs to be followed by everyone. One of the big issues currently is if a teacher takes the device, the student maybe unable to do work on their next class.

Our school also got a learning management system (LMS) called schoology. It is actually s pretty good platform but the school is not training us effectively on it and is demanding that we learn how to use it on our own time so they don't have to pay us. That is crooked and unfair in my opinion. Other than that, I like the tool very much.

So very briefly, that is what has been going on. I'm very scared at how education as a whole is being treated like a business and less like a place of learning. There seem to be more and more administration and people of power who make demands with no realistic understanding of what it's like to be in a classroom trying to teach 36 kids with different learning abilities.

I will try to add more to this blog this summer and will hopefully start my masters in a little over a year.

Coming soon, an overview of my first year teaching and the move my school is making towards iPads and a paperless environment.

Back From the Brink

Wow its been a long time since I have posted here! So much has happened since my last post, let's get a little up to speed on events:

1. Taught at a Junior High for part of the fall
   
2. Taught in Ireland for the remainder of the fall semester
   
3. Obtained my Teaching License
   
4. Got an IT job for the summer
   
5. Landed a full time teaching job for this fall.

Aside from strides made in the education sector:

1.  Created an Ubuntu Server
   
2. Installed Open Suse on my personal computer
   
3. Installed Ubuntu on my Android Tablet
   
4. Sold my Android Tablet
   
5. Purchased a Raspberry Pi

Where Should I Go From Here?

I like blogging when I have the time for it, and I don't think anyone really reads this so I will update periodically with my ramblings from time to time. I will re-post/link to stories that I think are interesting and run some features myself. I think I am going to step away from the Tablet realm for a while seeing as how I no longer have a device, but I want to explore Chromebooks. The school that I will be teaching at is piloting a program using these devices and I know relatively little about them.

As always, I will strive to emphases on advances with Linux and Education and include some tricks and tips along the way.  

Moving forward

I will be teaching at a middle school this Fall for eight weeks before travelling to Ireland to teach for another eight weeks. I am getting very excited for these opportunities and the chance to see how technology is implemented in each of these classrooms. In my last placement at a High School in Duluth, I was a little spoiled by the S.M.A.R.T boards they had and was a tad disappointed at the resources available at my new location when I briefly previewed it. The classroom was low tech, but full of energy and opportunity so I don't think it will be hard to succeed.  Still little information on Ireland other than I have purchased my tickets and am going no matter what at this point.

As far as specific technology advances in the educational realm, I checked out Edubuntu recently and may be installing it as the dedicated OS on my Uncle's laptop for his two children (7 and 5 years old). I would love the chance to introduce them to open source opportunities at such a young age. I can remember my curiosity with computers when I was younger and with the availability and accessibility of these Ubuntu forks I think they will have many pathways to explore if they so choose.

Khan academy has some interesting news. Recently, they launched a computer science channel and are giving people the oppertunity to explore programming. Check it out here! The programs they use are free (although in the video the teacher is using a python program for windows, for debian users or other linux distributions there are other alternatives) and the ability to pause, rewind and fast forward the lesson makes it possible for any person to learn at their own pace. I have started the first lesson and will record my progress in this blog in the future hopefully :)

Seems like tablets are always in the news these days. Here is my prediction, Ipads will be initially dominant in the school systems but eventually android or some other unknown OS will out compete apple for the educational market. I think that the cost of the machines, ease of student integration and app purchases will drive this market and who ever can meet these needs will be the winner. I am pushing for android or open source alternatives like the Vavaldi Tablet, but with the recent price drops for high quality android devices, it is very possible that these will win the race. I believe this because students could become more familiar and comfortable with these devices due to their availability. A parent who wants to get a child a tablet will most likely spring for the cheaper device. Why get your teenager a $500 Ipad when a $200 Nexus or Kindle Fire can meet their needs? They are at a higher risk of breaking/damaging the device or getting it stolen so why would the parent heavily invest in it?

Ok, enough ranting and raving, I have got to get some coffee in me and then head off to my first teach workshop before the school year at my middle school.

How to Run a Java app in Linux

Greetings everyone! I know it has been awhile since I have written anything and I am sorry for that. The good news is that I am working on two great stories and they are proving to be more difficult than expected. As I finish them, they will surface so rest assured that they are coming!!

Now, onto the main event-Running a java app in Linux!!

There are many great java apps out there and if you are lucky enough, they will run without a hitch. This is usually the case if you download them from the software center or the author of the app includes a well written README that includes installation directions and some trouble shooting for newbies. If this ins't the case, you are left with a .jar file in your downloads folder. Question is, WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS FORMAT AND WHAT DO I DO WITH IT?

To be brief, a .jar, .tar or .tar.gz are package folders that have been compressed. For those fimilar with windows, this is similar to the infamous .zip and or .7zip and other variations. The key is to understanding how to open and compile them in the terminal (very similar to the command line for windows users). The terminal is a scary place for non experienced users because everyone is use to the GUI that the OS presents us with. The GUI refers to "General User Interface" which are the nice things you see on the screen. Now for lack of a better, educated explanation, everything the typical user sees on the screen is a gui and the processes behind them are run in terminal space. It is possible to do all of your computing needs from a terminal and in fact, a select few in the linux community choose to spend the majority of their time in this minimal environment. 

 This is the Desktop GUI

 Package Manager GUI

Software Sources GUI (PPA locations etc)

"So the terminal is the command space is the command center of the computer, fine, but I still don't know how to use it" is what you might be thinking at this point. Luckily, you can get terminal work done easily and quickly using forum posts where others have had similar issues. I was able to find relatively similar posts to my problem and find a solution!

Case and Point

I wanted to find good mind mapping programs similar to inspiration. Inspiration is a great piece of software that is very helpful, but it costs money. I am a poor college student and prospective teacher and lack the funds to be fortunate enough to support the developers so I looked for an alternative. A great website to look for such alternatives is called alternativeto and it pointed me to a program called VUE. This stands for Visual Understanding Environment and can do similar tasks to inspiration and prezi. "Great!", I thought, "Two birds with one stone. A mind mapping application with the ability to be a non linear presenter." I clicked on the download now button and saw that it was available for mac, windows and linux. "Perfect, its cross platform!", was my first thought. I grabbed the linux package and was ready to go until I saw the scary .jar extension.

Now I have been using linux for a number of years but an still in many shapes and forms, a newbie. I have dealt with .jar files in the past, but I am waaaaaaaaaaaaay rusty on the topic. So what do I do? Google searched "how to install a jar file in linux" which brought me to a vast amount of page hits. I found some great sites that explained to me what a jar was, but I needed to install it! I used two main resources to solve my issue. To actually find a command to launch a jar I looked at linuxforums.org which had information I needed. Now I could launch the program, but I didn't want to open up a terminal window every time I wanted to use it. VUE has a support forum and I found an easy way to set it up with a pretty application icon and launcher here.

When someone in a forum posts terminal commands, they are generally in a window that you can copy the text from. For instance, the command that I needed was:

java -jar something.jar

This command let me open the terminal and run the application. I had the jar file on my desktop, so to run it I did this:

cd Desktop

This changed my directory from the home directory to the desktop. Capital letters are important, so when someone posts code, do it correctly!!! Also, take notice of folder names and file extensions. Now I ran the code:

java -jar VUE.jar

Notice that something.jar was replaced by the file extension of the program. Hooray! I was able to run it, but I didn't want to do these steps every time I wanted to use the program. So by going to the VUE forums, I found how to create a .desktop extension. 

Now I won't lie, I don't know anything about this. Don't know what it means but I have an idea of what it does, so I was able to try several times and finally make it work. The key lesson, DO NOT GET FRUSTRATED! Part of using linux is collaboration and effort on the users part. I collaborated to find the code to run what I wanted, now it was up to me to set it up. The poster had the command:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/vue.desktop  

so I copied and pasted it into the terminal. (****Note: when pasting into terminal, ctrl+v does not work!! You must use ctrl+shift+v to successfully paste in text)

Upon entering this code, a simple text editor opened up with a lot of mumble jumble that I didn't understand:

[Desktop Entry]  

Encoding=UTF-8  

Name=VUE  

Categories=Office  

Exec=java -jar /home/rohn/bin/VUE.jar  

Icon=/home/rohn/Pictures/Images/Downloaded Icons/vue.gif  

StartupNotify=false  

Terminal=false  

Type=Application  

Comment=Visual Understanding Environment Application  

StartupWMClass=tufts-vue-VUE  

I did however see the familiar command I learned earlier that actually launched the application. So what did I do? I evaluated where the poster had their files located and set mine up in a similar fashion. The execute command was looking at this person's home directory then in the bin folder and then at the jar file. So all I had to do was place the file into a folder and tell the command where to look for it. EASIER SAID THEN DONE! For frustration sake let me tell you how to do it. 

Open up your file explorer which should look something like this:

Now you need to navigate backward towards the root directory which looks like this "/" and you do that by clicking the back arrow next to home. The following screen should look like this:

Now find your way into the "usr" folder. Once in there, RIGHT click on the "bin" folder and choose to open as administrator, depending on your settings you already may be the admin, but if not, then you must do this or else you will not be able to copy anything into it. Once you have the "bin" folder open as the admin, create a new folder called VUE.

UPDATE : In New Versions of Linux Mint, you need to select run as root

I have circled the new folder I created in yellow so you can see what it looks like. Now open up the folder and place in the jar file.

So close to being done!!!! Final steps to make it look pretty.

You can close all the windows now if you want so that you aren't feeling overwhelmed (don't close my blog though) and open up a terminal. Type in that little code from above to create a .desktop file for VUE.

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/vue.desktop  

You will see the previous user's information, but now it is time to enter your own. Here is what mine looked like:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=VUE
Categories=Office
Exec=java -jar /usr/lib/VUE/VUE.jar
Icon=/home/kyle/Pictures/vue.gif
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Comment=Visual Understanding Environment Application

Notice that I have it pointing to the usr/lib/VUE/VUE.jar area. This is because of our previous step with creating a folder and placing the jar file in said folder. If you do this successfully (replacing "kyle" with your user name) then you should be able to find VUE in your office applications. Now, there may not be an icon for the application. If this is the case, you can download one and in the "icon" tell it where to look. Notice that mine is in home/kyle/Pictures/vue.gif yours could be set up anyway you want by putting it in a location and telling the computer where to look.

Well that's it! Now, this was done for the application VUE but in theory it could be applied to any jar file that does not install nicely. Hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial and hopefully it helps you and others in the future!