I discovered the Teach Thought web site today. It’s written for the first world (at least that’s the impression I get), however some of the ideas and articles seem very stimulating, especially we we’re using lots of videos as part of ka-lite and RACHEL in various pilot projects.
Here’s the article that I found particularly interesting today: http://www.teachthought.com/technology/viewing-comprehension-strategies-watching-videos-like-you-read-a-book/
I finally have a week at home after working away in Sweden for the last 5 weeks. I have a backlog of many small projects and experiments related to eLearning. I’d like to provide a snapshot here, partly to encourage me & also in case you’d like to help somehow.
I suspect there’s lots more I’ve forgotten to include. However this might enough suggestions of where people might be able to help.
Here are some links to potential materials that may be relevant and useful for people. Thank you to various people for providing the links, and of course to the people who created the material and make it available online.
The language of the materials is often English, sometimes other languages may also be available. You would be welcome to contribute materials in other languages, and/or to enhance existing materials by translating and/or providing subtitles.
http://www.scienceonstage.ie/
At HP Discover’s annual conference I was interviewed about this project. They have posted the video online via http://hpsw.co/Af9s2J6 I hope you will enjoy it and rate it.
Thank you, Julian Harty.
On 6th September 2014 I gave the closing keynote at the Selenium Conference 2014 in Bangalore, India. I was asked to show how our skills with computing and with creating good quality software could be applied more generally, as I’ve been doing in my project work described here.
Here is the recording of my talk
And the slides
Many things can cause a project to stall. During my visit to Kenya in April 2014 I discovered various problems that had caused projects to stall, each was fixable, and the fix will enable the schools to continue getting the benefit of their respective projects. These things, are similar to speedbumps on the roads, ubiquitous in Kenya and many other countries. If we stop when we reach a speedbump, because they take a little more energy to cross, we’d be blocked indefinitely. Instead we’ve learned to keep going, albeit slowly, to cross the speedbump and continue our journey.
The schools need to commit to crossing speedbumps in their respective projects by taking ownership and committing to get problems resolved. I, and others, are very willing to help people who make the effort.
Here are examples of some of the problems that had caused projects to stall:
The use of the kindle has greatly promoted the basic ICT skills of the teachers and students of the schools that have benefited from this pilot project. From the start, it appeared a rather complex task for the teachers who saw it for the first time. Through continuous practice, the active teachers have learnt a lot and even some pupils have acquired the basic skills. This is an encouraging trend for our learners in Oyugis.
Loading credit onto the kindle accounts caused a lot of mess and the funds in some cases were never spent wisely. One would easily be lured into purchasing books of their choice but in the long run realize they are not relevant to the curriculum. I feel this made some of the funds go to waste not really benefiting the children and teachers.
By introducing Worldreader, a great change has happened; the schools get the books directly onto their kindles. By just clicking on the archived items, a list of books appears and download with ease. I am glad; most of the books selected by teachers in Oyugis area have been posted onto the kindle.
A case in point is Nyabondo School. They were the last to receive a kindle and when I visited to help them download the books, I was surprised they had already done it, wonderful!
I see a remarkable improvement on the use of the kindles and I believe the schools will achieve a lot more knowledge and skills on the use of the kindle for e learning.
Leonard Odongo – School link programme manager.
Editorial Notes by Julian Harty:
The schools had a budget to purchase books from the Amazon store. Sometimes irrelevant or inappropriate books were bought, which depleted the budget to buy more relevant books. Thanks to World Reader’s help we provided a list of books in Swahili. The various schools collaborated to select a common list of books that would suit them. I then paid for these books and they were distributed electronically in January 2014.
In October 2013 we were able to send more Kindles, Solar Panels, and USB Batteries provided by an innovative Danish company called Volt to the schools in Oyugis Kenya. In this post we have included photos of the headteacher demonstrating how to charge the battery using the solar panel and then the kindle using the battery. By using USB batteries we’ve been able to resolve a technical problem where the power provided by the panels wasn’t sufficient to charge kindles or other devices directly.
We really appreciate the support of Volt who have provided 6 batteries in October. These batteries have survived a wealth of concerts and are now helping the schools to recharge their kindles in Kenya, thousands of miles away.
I (Julian) first met one of the founders Trygve, at a large street concert in Copenhagen in May 2013. They provide an innovative service to concert goers in Europe who want to recharge their smartphones while at the concert or event. He provided one of their batteries so I could test it, and it’s one of the few I’ve found that works reliably. They’re surprisingly capable for such a small compact device. Their web site is getvolt.dk
On to the photos
We will monitor the effectiveness and reliability of the Volt batteries and Solar Panels (from another supplier). In parallel we’re testing larger capacity USB batteries so we can compare the results.
This week one of the schools reported they’d been unable to buy books using their Kindle. I checked the account and even configured a spare Kindle to use the same account to see what was the problem. Here’s what I discovered
I managed to buy a book using the Kindle for about £1 which I then returned immediately using the ‘bought by mistake’ link. So, all appeared to be in order. I didn’t see the error message.
However I decided to try again when the school sent me a screenshot with the warning message that said: “You do not have a valid default credit card specified for your Amazon.co.uk user account. You can set up your default credit card now or you can visit Amazon.co.uk and click on ‘Manage Your Kindle’ from ‘Your Account’ page. Please note that subscriptions and pre-orders cannot be purchased using gift cards. Would you like to set up your credit card now?”
This time I got the same error message when I tried to buy a book for £3.99 – less than the balance that I’d checked that morning. Now I had something to work with…
I then logged into the web site from my computer, to check that the account had been configured correctly. (See http://kusaidiamwalimu.org/kindles-accounts-need-device-country-and-delivery-address-specifying/ for details.) After some investigation I discovered the school had managed to buy another book during the day for £6.42 which left a balance of £0.42 on the account, insufficient to pay for another book of £3.99
On the Amazon web site, when I try to buy a book that exceeds the remaining balance there’s a very clear explanation (see below), including a calculation of the shortfall; however the Kindle doesn’t communicate the cause clearly, at all. Instead the error message is misleading.
Thanks to Amazon for a useful lesson learned about the value of clear error messages, and the confusion inaccurate messages cause.
PS: Sorry for the poor formatting where the HTML of the following message overlays part of this web page.
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I hope I’ve managed to configure the amazon account used by these Kindles so they will now allow the teachers to buy books. I have tested the process by ‘buying’ a free book: Pride and Prejudice for both of their Kindles.
Here are a couple of extra steps I had to remember to do when creating another Amazon account for a new school.
I was then able to ‘buy’ the book for the first time (before the Amazon web site told me even the free books were not available).
Here is the link to configure the country on the UK site (this may change given the strange parameters on the URL)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/digital/fiona/manage?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0#cor
And here is one of several good articles online about the issue and the way to fix it http://www.singaboleh.com/buy-kindle-books-in-singapore-and-malaysia/ and the following answer was a useful reminder for me http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101229222344AAb2Rzo
Amazon publishes various device-specific guides to configure a Kindle and the account e.g. for the Kindle Keyboard http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help_search_1-9?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200505460
(last updated 25 October 2013)
