Not all WiFi is created equal

Stress test your WiFi before you find yourself in a stressful situation

Currently there is a territory wide roll out of WiFi in schools across Hong Kong. While this is a wonderful initiative and allows for much easier adoption of mobile devices in both primary and secondary schools, it needs to mentioned that the bandwidth that the schools receive is unclear. It is possible that the person responsible for procuring a broadband connection for the school and a WiFi system for the school is not very tech savvy. It is also possible that price point was the main concern when subscribing to a service and purchasing hardware. In that case it falls to the class teacher to test out and see what is actually possible in the classroom.

Quick and dirty glossary of terms

* These terms are simplified for non-tech based people, if you need absolute accuracy, please google these terms.

Bandwidth - the amount of information that can be passed through the network over time. usually measured in megabits (e.g. 1m = 1 million bits per second)

Ping - how responsive a network is. measured in milliseconds, lower ping = more responsive.

Download Speed - the amount of information that can be pushed from outside your network to a device on your network over time, e.g. watching a video on youtube on a computer. Usually measured in megabits

Upload Speed - the amount of information that can be pushed from your network to a system outside of your network, e.g. sending an email with an attachment. Usually measured in megabits.

Simple network: from a flood to a trickle

The best way to think of your WiFi connection at school is to think of it as a garden hose. If you open your hose all the way you only get so much water per minute. Its quite constant and you can get more out of a hose when it is completely open. Now think of splitting the hose between two people. You still have the same amount of water but now it's going to two different places at half the amount (if both people are using it) Now instead of just two people, imagine that hose is shared between 28 students and 1 teacher in the class. That hose that had only two people using it is pretty effective, but once you have a whole class using it, the amount of water that each person receives drops to a trickle. 

So what does this mean for me and my class?

The challenge is not knowing what the limitations of your network is before setting up your activities. Many "free" teaching resources that use cloud-based solutions require a lot of bandwidth to work smoothly. The more videos and images you pull down and push out the more robust your network and wider your bandwidth need to be to be effective tools in class. Would a video for each iPad work if it took 1 minute to play 5 seconds worth of video? If individual videos don't work, then maybe groups might be better or downloading the video and storing it on each device might be better.

These are things that you should be aware of before you spend a lot of time making arrangements and finding those resources for class.

So how can you test your network?

1. Use a web-based site or app to help you run a stress test on one device.

There are a lot of free sites out there that will help you gather information about your network. Some popular tests are:

• http://speedtest.net
• http://fast.com
• http://testmyspeed.com

These are good tests to see what your network is capable of. Most of these services offer apps both on the App Store and on Google Play. Search for these apps using the names above. You should also conduct this test on multiple devices, e.g. a wired computer vs. WiFi connected device.

You should also run this test simultaneously on multiple devices. Your network may try to limit each device so that it cannot take too much of the network's bandwidth. Test this with multiple devices at the same time until you see a drop in performance and see if it affects all the devices or just the devices that you start a bit later.

2. See how many devices you can connect to your school WiFi at a time in one room. 

Most schools are large and require multiple WiFi routers to provide service to the whole school. If the students are confined to one room, it may over tax that router. Test it to see how many devices can connect to one router using the test services listed above.

3. Test the coverage in your school.

There may be some spots or rooms that have weak or no WiFi coverage. Find these spots before you plan a lesson in a room with no or weak WiFi. You can check at a glance by looking at the WiFi signal bars on your device and also run the tests to see how the performance changes as the signal gets weaker.

Hopefully, by knowing the limitations of your network, you can design technology enhanced lessons that your students can access rather than having a lesson wasted on tech support.

Drama and iPads

 

Start from meaning. This is one of the simplest things to do and it can often be disregarded. Many times teachers are asked to create a drama performance with students in English, and in Hong Kong, this means teaching a lot of extra English. Already by thinking of all the extra teaching and practise and training the main message is dropped.  Worse sill with drama, often people think about starting from the script. This is a very difficult and challenging place to start. It's like handing a child sheet music and asking them to hear the music. It's a skill that often develops later in the arc of learning music and for some, like me, not at all. 

And yet many teachers ask their students to memorise lines like they would a handful of notes out of context and then add on things like intonation and stress which adds even more to their cognitive load. It's no wonder drama performances are difficult. 

But coming back to meaning, and we realise that it doesn't need to be that way. What if we created the music first from a feeling, from something we know? Wouldn't that be an easier way to capture meaning than one detail at a time?

That is how I feel about using drama with iPads. They fit together better than many would expect.

First, start with the visual. What do things look like? If we got three people together could they make the shape of a rabbit? Could they make the shape of a guitar? What about a fight in a restaurant? What would that look like? But with the last idea we don't have a static thing, but a tableau that represents things that are to come. With a fight in a restaurant, we have a the climax to a narrative. And best of all the students understand this story, because they created it. 

The wonderful thing about starting from meaning is that the deeper we look into a specific area the more detail the students are able to provide, because they can place themselves inside that event, which is exactly what you've asked them to do.

At this point I would use an iPad to take a picture of that moment and then ask each of the people in the scene what they're doing, how they feel and what they would say. You might also ask what they want to have happen in that scene. They are not themselves, but they are their character. They may not know what every aspect is of the whole scene, but they know what their character would want, say or do. They have understanding of their part. You can ask one character to what they would say and then ask another character how they would react to that. Once you have that going, they can build dialogue on their own.

After the climax is created and one group models what they would say, think and do, you ask the group to discuss how their scene began and how it should end. At each stage a picture should be taken on that group's iPad so that they can have an artefact for the three distinct parts of their narrative.

Now that the groups have their story and they understand it, they can use that understanding to bring depth to each scene. By keeping the understanding of their characters they can then put their ideas down and work collaboratively to arrange their dialogue in a way that make sense to each of them. Teachers can conference with groups and look at their picture and ask questions about what's happening

At this stage, I tend to use Book Creator. I make a cover with pictures of the group and then three more pages each with the photo for each scene that they took earlier. The reason why I would choose Book Creator, is that they can create audio recordings on each page as their character, and place them on their character's picture, act out a sketch of that scene or even write their script on the page. There's so much that can be done when that page is seen as a working document rather than as a finished product. 

Another advantage of Book Creator is that it is an excellent way to create an artefact of something that before would have been difficult to save. They can save a practise rehearsal, which is difficult when practise can often span months. But with Book Creator they can refer to the whole story quite quickly and hear themselves, see themselves and have a much richer engagement with the material so that they can get back up to speed quite quickly. 

With blocking it's a snap. You have the students take a picture of where they should be standing when the lines are being said and should a student need to move or there's is a part where all the students need to change their position, a quick picture will help the students remember where they should be and hopefully why.

Further more, the wonderful part about Book Creator is that you can add pages and resequence the book as you revise it. Pages can be moved, which is why it's important to make a cover page first, because that's the only page in Book Creator that you cannot move, but you can add anything that you think is missing.  With added pages, you can make a comic book of pictures of transitions in the scene, you can have rehearsal practices recorded on pages or you can have your script typed out. The pen feature can be used to annotate their script and add notes and they can add scenes if they think that something is missing between scenes. The possibilities are endless as long as the students are able to capture what the piece means to them.

I hope that by looking at this little write up on using drama techniques and iPads, you have new tools to help your students tell their stories and find new ways to present their understandings.

Class Dojo news

Here's an interesting bit of news, Class Dojo is working on a way to facilitate communication with parents in a way that may mitigate the need for parent conferences. Let's see what they come up with. 

Here's the link from TechCrunch

http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/15/classdojo-raises-21-million-for-app-to-make-parent-teacher-meetings-obsolete/