Bringing the Real World into a textbook

My senior VCE ITA students are studying file security. As part of this topic, they look at cloud computing. Their textbook devotes several pages to the topic.

It is rather opportune that at this very time, many of my younger classes were taking part in a global project for International Dot Day. Chrissy Hellier of Bangkok organised a Dots Around the World project and invited interested teachers and classes to collaborate. Thirty three classes across the world enlisted. As Chrissy will produce a video collating all the dots, we had to be able to share them in an efficient manner. There were several choices given to us for sharing our class dots and they illustrated beautifully the notion of cloud computing:-

1. Dropbox - cloud storage for collaborative sharing
2. Flickr – online photo storage
3. email

For my students to fully understand the nature of the project, we first watched the youtube clip of the Dot

Then I showed the students how dropbox and flickr worked and how we were using them in this collaborative project. The class then discussed the pros and cons of each method of cloud computing.

To my surprise, as the year 12 students set to work, my year 11 students (who are so often disengaged and difficult to motivate), asked whether they could create a dot. Of course, I said “yes”! I wasn’t going to miss a learning opportunity that the students requested. They borrowed iPads from the library and set to work on the Doodle Buddy app. Levi and Nathan then created a simple collage using Pic Collage.  It took 25 mins of concentrated effort to create the dots shown on this post.

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