certnz is our governmental agency charged with setting up a Computer Emergency Response Team (set up in 2016). It is a key part of NZ's cyber security strategy.
This month they are promoting a campaign targeted at making us more aware of the importance of keeping our online transactions safe. We all use multiple websites and apps and have a range of passwords that we hope will keep us secure, but in reality may well be quite insecure for a number of reasons. They may be short passwords or ones we have reused on many sites or ones that are reasonable easy to guess. And of course there continue to be leaks of details online which may see some details shared. certnz is promoting a campaign called "Password Perfect" and basing the campaign on using "passphrases" rather than passwords. The reason for this is reasonably simple - the longer a password is the longer it should take for any attack to crack the password. It is possible to have a password that could take longer then the life of the planet to crack yet remain easy for you to remember ... It is worth paying some attention to keeping your many online accounts safe. Passphrases are worth considering, and it is also worth reading the more detailed version on their website here www.cert.govt.nz/password-perfect/.
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. This is a post I started some time ago ... so I'll try and finish it and reflect on what's been a tough year on all fronts. As a teacher, first and foremost, my big concern this year was how to maintain useful contact with my students in lockdown and how to try and create opportunities for them to tell me how they were going; and for me to know how they were progressing through the learning I wanted them to complete. I teach digital technologies/computer science, and I’m generally comfortable in the tech I use, but not all of my students are. My students are like everyone else's - a mix of abilities and a mix of technical abilities, so I was a bit worried that some of the ways I have tried to engage with students see me using digital tools that I’m comfortable with, but I wonder if there are better ones for my students. So - in no real order of importance - here have been my main "aha" moments. Oh, and before I forget, everything student-related has been done on my 11" iPad Pro. So easy to carry around everywhere and the battery lasts all day. So, thanks again to Graham at Cyclone for helping out with that! 1. Flipping the classroom works really well. I guess I always though that flipping worked - its just that I didn't do it all the time. Now I do. Even when in face to face classes. I ended up deciding to use Loom for recording my video lessons. They offer educators a free account which gives you up to 45 minutes recording (though you never go much more than 5 minutes at a time). Nice thing about Loom is that they have an iPad app which works really well, and I used this to create a large number of videos. We use an LMS (SchoolBox out of Australia) which has a number of features, one of which turned out to be a godsend for me. By using this feature I can get an instant update on the progress my students are making through their projects. As an example - this is a view I get Now, this obviously shows that everyone has completed all of the tasks, but over the course of the actual work you get to see exactly who is doing what and where they are up to. A second part of this flipped concept was to work out how to know if the students were having difficulty or finding it too easy. This is where I stumbled upon a nice idea from Donna Golightly at UTB . Using her idea to create an "exit poll" from a Google form saw me have this little form set up in no time Students took 30 seconds at the end of each class to leave just a quick note of what they were having trouble with or if they needed extra help - as they would rather do that than ask a question in a live streamed class (we use MS Teams for that). A quick bit of conditional formatting in the Google form generated spreadsheet gave a different colour for each response making it really easy to identify those who were needing some form of help. In fact this worked so well that I still use it in class when not in lockdown. 2. You never stop learning I found so many new resources when I went looking that reinforced to me there is still so much I don't know. Some of my younger students (13 year olds) missed the in-class environment, so it was important to run a live stream whenever we had a class scheduled during lockdown even though there was not much to say (as all the work was prerecorded on Loom). This gave students the time to chat about how they felt and just generally have a talk. General wellbeing was pretty important and many of our live chats were about nothing much more than the weather or what was everyone watching on Netflix. I always left the stream running for the entire scheduled class time so that students could just pop in and out as they wished - to either clarify a point about their learning or to just talk. At the end of lockdown I was pretty sure that all students had in fact learned more than they would have if we had been in regular classes, and the project work they produced was of a higher quality than previously seen. So - I've continued this process back in normal school over recent months and it is going just as well. 3. a new tool worth using I stumbled upon a number of new tools in fact. Perusall is a new one for me that I have begun using with my senior IB class. Rather than me talk about it - here is a video that takes you through it. I don't use the grading much, but I do use the discussion platforms and have found it a near perfect tool for sharing news items for my ITGS class. The new video annotation tool lets you add a discussion question to any part of a Youtube video, for example. And while this is a website - it runs just fine under iPadOS and Safari. 4. Database on iPad In NZ we have our new Digital Technologies curriculum in roll out. That will be a bit of a focus for me next year as far as ensuring we have sufficient coverage across our school. I've been collating our information across the school over the year and to be honest have struggled to find a decent way to house and manage the data. Over the past couple of days have been looking at putting it all into a database ... and have tried using AirTable for something serious for the first time. I've messed with it with senior IB classes as an introduction to relational database structure but never gone into anything larger than just a few records. Below is a screenshot of one of the views of the data - I'm really happy with how this is working out and the data can easily be shared to our LMS by publishing embedded views of various layouts. As well as working on the web, there is an iPad app for it as well.
It's been way too long since my last update - thanks to COVID for that! Still better late than never! The great news for me is that I have continued to use my iPad Pro for just about everything I do this year - from report writing in our SMS, marking attendance, teaching programming, web design and more.
This update talks about two products - Notability for iPad which is my main app for most things I do; and DigiExam which is digital exam creation and management tool where students can sit secure digital examinations on their own devices - from iPad to laptop. I've cut a quick video for each of these apps - but to put them in a bit of context first. Notability for iPad: Look for it on the App Store here Notability is my go to app for pretty much everything. I've used it for several years. You may have heard of it. If you haven't had the chance to use it, my simple advice would be to find the $14.99 from somewhere and buy it. You won't regret it. I have it linked to my G-Suite account, my Microsoft account and across my various devices it is kept in sync by iCloud. This shortish video gives you a bit of an idea of how I use it. DigiExam This year we have been suing DigiExam from our European friends to gear us up for NZQA's digital examinations at the end of the year. DigiExam is a web based app for the creation of digital assessments. You can create the examination, allow access to certain items (eg a PDF resource) via a whitelist, allow extra time for those who are entitled to it, plus a raft of other options. Examinations can be administered, marked, feedback given and published. Students can sit the examination on their iPads, Macs or PC's. Their devices are basically locked once they choose to start the examination. At the moment we are in the midst of using it for many of our Year 11 - 13 practice exams, and I've included this short introduction to it.
It’s been a while since I last posted ... and decided to try just recording a video. So, consider this a Covid-19 edition of the blog post.
Products mentioned in this video are: Brydge Pro keyboard for iPad Pro (https://www.brydge.com/products/brydge-pro-keyboard-for-ipad-pro) Logitech Pebble M350 mouse (https://www.logitech.com/en-nz/product/pebble-m350-wireless-mouse) Machine Learning for Kids (https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/welcome) Great introduction to ML using Scratch and some tools provided by IBM UK courtesy of Dale Lane. Repl.it (https://repl.it/) - an in-browser IDE for pretty much everything I need. The “starting lineup” for hardware This week a quick post with my first accessories for the iPad. Needing a keyboard in a hurry, and also wanting to really experiment with the USB-C on the iPad Pro 11, I jumped onto Amazon and purchased a CHESONA keyboard case and a RAYROW USB-C hub. I had purchased a keyboard and case similar to this model earlier in the year for one of the kids (Fintie was that model), and it worked pretty well on their iPad, so I simply picked up one for the Pro 11. Also wanted access to USB drives of various sorts - so that meant a USB-C hub of some sort. So - here’s a quick video of the two of them. [Just as an aside - I ordered these late at night on a Friday, and they were delivered early the following Tuesday morning ... pretty good service from the USA down to NZ!] The “starting lineup” for softwareIn this post I’ll start with my basic “productivity” set of software tools. Those that allow me to communicate/collaborate with those I need to. In a following post I’ll outline the specific software I plan on using for my Digital Technologies classes next year. So - this post focuses on some of the built in tools that Apple provides via iPadOS, plus some of the tools that I have used for the past few years and that have stood the test of time.
2. The FILES app in iPadOS. Now this is great - it finally starts to look like the filing system you are used to from your laptop. In fact, now that iPadOS lets you plug in USB drives and recognises your cloud accounts, shuffling files between accounts and flash drives is far easier than it was. If there is one glitch for me that needs a resolution, its that the connection to Google Drive is a bit flaky, often the screen redraws itself with “content unavailable” and you have to hit ‘retry” to get back connected. ICloud Drive nd OneDrive seem to behave, as does DropBox. However, having 200GB of files in Google Drive is a reason that I want a fix to this. 3. Notability. I love this app. I have used it for years and has become by default note taking tool at meetings, conferences, in class. It has so much going for it that I’ll provide a review of how I use this app at a later stage. The latest version is just better than the previous excellent ones. Connection to various online systems, syncing via iCloud between your Apple devices - so I can get the same files on the Mac (because there is a Mac version of Notability) [Not that I want to - I’m getting rid of my Mac right?] Anyway - I have 2 iPads and an iPhone - and having access to all my notes everywhere on each device is awesome 4. General Productivity. Despite my preference for apps, people still send me lots of Microsoft Office files - and as a school we have a license for MS apps -so I have Word, Excel, OneDrive, OneNote, PowerPoint, Teams etc installed. Other than OneNote, I don’t tend to use them myself other than to open what others send me. 5. OneNote. The one Microsoft product I love using. So flexible and powerful. I use it as a shared OneNote Class Notebook with one of my senior classes as a content repository where we basically build our own text book over the course of a two year programme at Years 12 and 13. 6. Scanner Pro. This is my digital photocopier. It can scan pretty much anything, provides OCR capability and more. 7. iBooks. I use this for reading books. I have a library of IT related books in here - from all sorts of places. I also tend to buy electronic versions of books rather than traditional books - not that they are necessarily easier to read, but that they don’t take space in my bag or on a plane. I’m already carrying my iPad so might as read. 8. Newsify. This is my RSS/feed reader. Have used it for a few years now. Simple but works for me. 9. Dashlane. My password manager. Have been using Dashlane for 3 years now. It costs about $40 per year for the pro version, and I don’t use it as well as I probably should, but it syncs between my iPads, iPhone (and Mac) and saves time. Now that my new iPad Pro has FaceID it is far better than having Touch ID.
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