The new thumbtribe generation has embraced an innovative way to slay their age old enemy- maths, using their cellphones and the much debated and severely fouled, Mxit!

Mxit has been getting a lot of bad press ever since it became the craze of the teen (and pre-teen) generation with parents and teachers alike, calling for Mxit to be regulated. In the midst of “slut-lists‘ and paedophile phobic verbal attacks on the popular cellular chat-client, Dr Maths is emerging as a ray of hope!

There is no doubt that Mxit is incredibly popular. This free service has grown by word of mouth to over 2000 learners country wide! So Laurie’s Butgereit of the Meraka Institute’s brainwave to use our learner’s favourite tool for teaching and learning, was indeed not only a stroke of genius, but an incredibly brave move in the face of adversity. I, for one, was initially sceptical about whether the learners will allow us to use their favourite tools for something like (…uhmmm) learning maths, but the popularity of this maths helpdesk speaks for itself.

To test the service and to catch up with the latest Mxit-maths “craze” I dialled in on this here lazy Sunday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to found the friendly maths tutors on hand, ever so professional, helpful and oh so knowledgeable. I have it on authority that they are well trained not to just provide answers, but to guide the learners through the meaning making process. The fact that there is also a delay between responses also makes it possible for learners to “give knowledge a try” and most of the time, they get to the answers themselves with just a little nudge from the tutors. The tutors can assist with maths and maths literacy problems and even help out with a bit of science hassles along the way as well. Truely remarkable!

So how does it all work?

First off, you need to install Mxit on your cellphone and/or computer. For more instructions on how to do this….

• Give your cellphone to a member of the thumbtribe (the closest teenager around you) and tell them to set you up (Quickest and easiest method)
• Or you can follow the instructions from the Mxit website
• Add Dr maths as one of your contacts 27799923960 thru 27799923969
• When they come online, you will hear a little sound and there will be a green dot next to their name
• Then go ahead and ask away!
• The Dr Maths team is online after school hours i.e. Mondays to Thursdays 2pm-10pm and Sundays between 11am and 8pm. They are even considering extending the service to Saturdays as well. How amazing!

They also have introduced a maths game which can be played when the team is not online when there are no tutors on. The learners can then compete in different categories, like addition, subtraction, factorials and others, to see who can get then highest score. The champion and the previous champion are notified to defend their title. Positive peer pressure at work!

So bravo to Laurie and her Dr Maths on Mxit team! Let us learn from their enthusiasm for creating authentic learning environments using the oh so dreaded Mxit on cellphones!

A few more articles regarding DR Maths on Mxit:

• Maths is cool when you MXit - South Africa - The Good News
• Using MXit to learn
• Learning and Support using MXit
• MATH ON MXIT: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE (Laurie’s Amesa Paper on her brainchild- a must read!!!)

What do we do about cellphones in a school context? Do we ban it or embrace it as an educational tool?

The tendency in our country (and pretty much world wide) is to ban the use of cellphones in schools. They complain about the disruptive ringing of phones in their classes, learners using their phones to share test answers as well as learners distributing compromising photos and videos of fellow learners (and even teachers) . We know that we are dealing with a new generation of “thumb tribe” learners who can Mxit in their pockets while listening to lessons (Mmmm….)

Then there is the personal safety concern of learners being mugged outside of schools for their cellphones. Media coverage of learners being kidnapped after giving out personal information as well as more recent “slut-lists” making the round on Mxit, implores us to take the general use of cellphones (in or out of schools) more seriously.

There are definitely educational advantages to allowing cellphones in and out of the classroom. The learners have a ready calculator and encyclopedia in their hands. They can get help with their maths from Dr Maths on Mxit, Mlearner or MyMobi. How about getting the learners to video science experiments or summarise Shakespeare using Mxit? Maybe if we keep them busy with educational experiences on their cellphones, we will actaully manage to keep their attention?

Then there is also the advantage for parents to keep in touch with their children using cellphones. I am also glad to see that nmore and more schools are using SMS technologies to advise parents of school functions and their children being absent from school.  So to say that the tool is all bad, is just not giving the whole picture and we need to work towards finding a middle ground between learning and abuse of the tool.

My feeling is (as with the rest of the new technologies doing the rounds) to be pro-active. Isn’t it our job as educators to educate our learners about safe use practices? Can we do this if we ourselves are not informed?  So the first step is for us to use the tools. We need to get connected to Mxit, use it critically before we ban it outright.

So let’s get the debate going, voice our fears and more importantly start using the tools ourselves so that we can be informed, prepared and educated! We have created a wiki page for educators on this very topic, see http://saschools.wetpaint.com/page/Cellphone+use

Some articles to get the discussion going:

Last week I ran into a little hassle with the creation of my PowerPoint tutorial for the Thutong portal. My colours were not quite “going together”. Joy, my colleague advised me to use similar colour palettes. Now for those of us, who are not art teachers, finding the right colour scheme might not seem so easy after all!

So today I stumbled on a little script which can help you with your colour choices! And it even give you the names of the colours

Here is the link: http://chir.ag/phernalia/name-that-color/

Spending a huge amount of time on your computer can be detrimental to your health! I have been waking up at night with an aching wrist and numbness in my hands. Coupled to the fact that my keyboarding skills have taken a turn for the worse, I have decided to look into the situation a bit more seriously. I have also decided to invest in a good voice recognition system to see if I can “save my hands”.

The following little slideshare gives some basic advice on how to teach children proper keyboarding skills.

I am busycreating learning objects for my subject advisor training and one of the tools that we will be playing with is Bubbl.us. I chose it as it is really easy to use and you actually do not even need to register in order to create your mindmap!

The context that we will be mind-mapping is the National Curriculum statements (NCS) so that we can also check if we all have the same understanding of how this official structure “fit together”. Please test drive it for me and tell me if there is anything about the “how to” of bubbl.us that is unclear or cumbersome!!

This morning I had my first try on WIZIQ, a free online virtual classroom platform. And I am pleasantly impressed! I have registered for  Wiziq some ago but have only got round to giving it a spin today.

I set up my session and invited some of my contacts to come and join me. The whole interface is totally user friendly and I got a message via e-mail to remind me of my session (which is just as well as I was still in bed and recovering from my hubbies birthday party the night before). I clicked on the link which took me to a screen telling me that I will be allowed into the session as soon as it starts. This was a bit daunting as I would have liked to peek around before the rest of my invitees arrived!

Right on schedule I was allowed in and found myself all alone in the “room”. I was then joined by a friendly soul from California, Alvin,  who is also still trying out WIZIQ and who fortunately knew a bit more than me! He “pointed” me in the right direction and showed me where to use the pointer!

The room consisted of a attendee list, and showed me as the “teacher”. In this role I can control who ‘has the microphone” and I can even set it up so that more than one person can share the microphone (a bit chaotic due to the a bit of a lag which resulted in people talking over one another). Once I shared the microphone, whoever I shared it with can talk and use the whiteboard and play with whatever I have loaded onto the common area. It is really easy to load powerpoints and documents from your computer (I used a presentaiton from the common resource area). I was very impressed with the whiteboard as it even allows you to draw pretty nifty sketches (more or less the same tools as in Paint) but it also has support for mathematical notation! How much cooler can you get? It even has a graphing tool. Maths Heaven!

It has the normal chat window and you have the ability to mute your microphone. Eugene, one of my critical technology friends, joined us from a GPRS datacard and we could hear him crystal clearly! So the interface seemed to not hog so much bandwidth, a critical consideration here in our bandwidth starved little country! Yolandi from a rural town in Limpopo joined us as well and again, she sounded like she was right there next to me! I had a bit of trouble with the handing over and release of the microphone, but did figure it out eventually! If someone do not have the mike, they can put their hand up and you can give them control. We drew on the whiteboard, typed on it and chatted. A real connected classroom! At times there were a slight echo and of course the inevitable lag factor, but on the whole, it worked really well.

Alvin introduced us to Dragon dictate, a speech to type tool, and he actually talked and chatted at the same time. This could also be really useful for those of us without headphones!

You can choose to have the session recorded and it gets archived for a month. Our session is available here.

One the whole it was a great experience and I will definitely be using it for virtual meetings and teaching. You can even register yourself as a teacher and get paid for training!!!

How can we use ICT to address the gap in performance of learners going into secondary education?

This is a quick idea that we brainstormed in an effort to come up with an ICT intervention. The idea of an e-portfolio was explored as a way for teachers (school communities) to help smooth the way for learners and address the “performance drop” from primary to secondary school. If teachers have easier access to information in the form of an e-portfolio they will possibly be able to assist learners with problems.

Questions:

• Privacy: who will have access to what information?
• Who will control the information that go into this system?
• How will you incentivize pupils and teachers to contribute to the system?
• Has anythging like this been done elsewhere?

I was scanning over Sherman Dorn’s blogpost on Co Creating with Web 2.0 which resonates with my dream project of getting teachers to co-create learning objects to enrich the curriculum here in our country. But of course, we are currently still in a place where we do not even have a culture of sharing learning materials and co-creation is, at this point in time, just a far away dream.

But I do take encouragement from Sherman’s vision: “Co-Creating may become one of the most powerful engines of change and innovations that the education world will experience. Co-Creating with other educators across the nation is like tapping a knowledge pool of similar interest, a reservoir of creativity that may emerge through an enthusiastic wealth of talent producing warehouses of digital curriculum.”

This statement does however,  ring a slight warning, though. Warehouses of digital curriculum, does not turn me on. We have in the past, even here in South Africa, been hard at work in creating just that. Think of the Thutong portal, which I am glad to report is starting to morph into dedicated spaces where teachers can upload (much improved) and discuss resources. Discussion is the first step to co-creation. If teachers could collaborate in setting tests and exams, just think of what value and time saving mechanism that could turn out to be!

Maybe co-creation could be the missing link? It has been my main frustration to get teachers to share, never mind discuss resources. I know the issue of time is a distinct barrier, but if we could go straight into co-creation, it could address the time issue as well. It is worth a try. With the prelims coming up, maybe we can give it a shot? Any volunteers?

I have been playing with a few new tools. “Wordl is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.  Here is a Wordle cloud that I have made from my del.icio.us tags:

Another tag cloud generator is Tagcrowd, where you can also choose the colours scheme for your cloud presentation:

And last but not least, Tagcloud creator is tagcloud-generator, where you can also choose which tags to keep and which to loose: http://www.tagcloud-generator.com/index.html

Of the three, I thought that Worldle generated the most effective, visualy stimulating cloud! Which brings me to the question, why would we want to create tag clouds? The answer for me lies in more than just visual appeal. Pasting a piece of text into any one of these tag cloud generators provides us with a quick visual summary of the important (most used, most of the time) keywords and concepts contained in the text. It gives us a quick overview of what has been highlighted within the text and it can sometimes be quite a suprising way to see if the idea that you wanted to get accross where the one that are being visualised.  A very ahndy tool indeed!

 Here is a little worksheet from Pam:

Validating data in a classlist