Creative ICT News

Land of the free?

I am reading with incredulity the Guardian report about an Indiana teacher suspended without pay for reading a particular book with her pupils for which she had written consent from all 150 parents who took her course. I find it incredible that she felt that she had to go to the trouble of getting written consent for a book written by teenagers for teenagers that apparently contains some swear words, only for this to be overridden by a particularly vocal member of the school board. Land of the free?  Richard Lea, who writes for the Guardian points out that over there they have a track record for this kind of crazy decision.

Tha fact that the moral minority can overrule the expressed wishes of 150 parents doesn't surprise me that much (I wish it did), but the fact that the school board have the power to suspend someone for eighteen months without pay I find really shocking.

Thanks to Vicki Davis, an American teacher for highlighting this story via Twitter (she is coolcatteacher on Twitter.

Embedable Sports Leagues: Tour de France

Fantasy leagues always have loads of potential for maths lessons (working out budgets, predicting outcomes etc), so was really pleased to find a Tour de France one - my favourite sporting event. Better still, once you've signed your class/crew up, you can embed the league in your blog. Cool.

Madchester Velo League :
Pos.	Team		Mn.	Pts.
Last Updated: 04/07/2008 07:52:22
http://fantasy.tour-de-france.eurosport.com/
999999	Grove Gremlins		0	0

How to blog without adding to your workload

Through my blog platform, Creativeblogs.net, I now have some 20 schools with multi-user blogsites, mostly here in the northwest. When a school signs up to the service, one of the most common questions I get asked by teachers (some of whom were not party to the decision to go with a blog platform) is, "How will it affect my already heavy workload?" This is a perfectly legitimate question to ask, and one which I will attempt to answer in this post.

The first thing I would say is that none of the following points are likely to persuade anyone unless you are willing to give it a go. The actual mechanicals of getting a piece of writing published on a blog are ridiculously simple, and, like all software, you do need to spend a short period of time familiarising yourself with the basic features of your chosen blog platform (in the case of Creativeblogs, it's Worpress MU). Once you are happy with the basic wordprocessor controls of your class blog you are ready to start blogging with your class - and remember I'm trying to show you how you can do this without adding to your workload.

Shared Writing

Wherever possible, use your blog to work on shared writing sessions with your class. You are planning to do a shared write anyway, so do it on your blog. And, by doing it on the blog you can get extra benefits:

• A new published piece of work with no extra effort;
• Go back to it in the future and edit or add to it;
• It's online for a later session when your class might be working on laptops or in an ICT suite;
• Structure a homework task around the post by asking children to comment at home. Perhaps by writing the next paragraph of the story; giving their point-of-view; writing their own verse or poem etc;
• By "tagging" each shared write according to its genre (science-fiction, autobiography, argument, chronological report etc) you can quickly build up an index of searchable resources to use in future.

What have we learned this week?

Once a week get a small group of children (possibly with a TA) to reflect on the week's work and what they have learned. They can also mention any special projects, who has had class rewards etc. Again, this gives other children the opportunity to respond, and it's amazing how often children will visit a class blog and add a comment on how much they have enjoyed a particular activity.

Put homework on your blog

The preparation and marking of homework can be really tedious and time consuming, so try and make it fun and interactive by using your class blog. Posting videos from Teachertube is incredibly quick and easy (instructions here) and adding links to educational websites such as the lovely Tutpup is also really simple. Tutpup has the added benefit of being a fun and competitive way to learn tables and spelling while giving you, the teacher simple feedback to see who is actually having a go. Don't forgot to also structure homework tasks around your shared writes as mentioned above.

The basic principle is to find tasks that you have to do anyway and see if you can think of a constructive way you can do this via a class blog. The easiest way of doing this is to structure tasks around the shared write/pupils feedback via a comment approach which can work for loads of different contexts, not just literacy.

Remember, blogging is a habit: once you do it regularly enough it becomes second nature. With a little bit of effort in getting to know how to publish stuff on your blog you will be very surprised how quick and easy it becomes I'm reminded a little when interactive whiteboards were introduced - a lot of teachers felt threatened and were way outside of their comfort zones with all this new hardware in their classroom. Nowadays I'm really surprised when I go into a classroom and I don't find a whiteboard in it. I'd like to think that it could be the same with class blogs, after all, what better way is there to demonstrate the excellence that goes on in your classroom.

Special Offer on Creativeblogs.net

Until the end of the summer term schools can order a multi-userblogsite from Creativeblogs.net and get their training half-price (£250 instead of £500). Simply contact john@creativeict.co.uk for more details.

Schools with blogs powered by Creativeblogs.net

Click on the tags to find a link to their blogsite.

First Taste of Honeycomb

Honeycomb is a new set of online tools from the creators of Textease. Essentially it's a personal publishing and collaboration platform for children set in the context of a secure walled garden with various levels of publishing permissions set by the school.

I'm in the process of setting up a Honeycomb project with year 5 and 6 children at Chorlton Park Primary School where I teach part-time. So, I thought it might be worthwhile setting out a few initial experiences with the product as I know it's generating a fair amount of interest in the market.

What can a pupil do?

Each child get's their own account and secure login to the Honeycomb site, and once there they can choose one of two user interfaces to work with (Fizz or Buzz). Users can create web pages, blogs or wikis and they can determine who they are going to collaborate with. Adding content to a page is simplicity itself - click anywhere and type (Textease style), and there are simple text and box controls to determine font style/size/colour etc. External hyperlinks are extremely easy to add and it's also very easy to upload images, videos and audio into the user's own multimedia gallery. The simplicity of using Honeycomb is its real strength and I could quite easily envisage Year 2 children publishing their own web pages using the system.

Here's an image of a page I knocked up in a few minutes to act as an example for children setting up a "hobbies" page.

Widgets

At the moment there are only three widgets available to users: a calendar, a slide show and a neat charting widget. Clearly more will be added as the system develops, so for what it's worth, I'd like to see a table drawing widget, a presentation widget (to upload PowerPoints and Open Office presentations) and a "friends" widget to provide direct links to other Honeycomb users. Obviously, there could be N number of widgets added to the system, and I'm sure Softease have a list as long as my arm of possibilities; perhaps people might care to add their ideas as comments below.

What can't a pupil do?

Honeycomb doesn't support any html, so you can't link to images hosted in Flickr or Photobucket, and it doesn't support embeddable script, so no embedding of Quikmaps, Youtube videos, etc. It doesn't have an internal hyperlink structure as yet, and this is a serious flaw as you can't create a homepage that links to other pages on your site, or reference pages from your own page. Finally, Honeycomb doesn't support RSS feeds at present - again, quite a serious shortcoming from a web 2.0 point of view. I should point out that Honeycomb is at the very start of its development curve and I expect the team to address these issues in future releases.

Managing your school's site

Even though the system doesn't have a bulk pupil upload at present (on its way, I'm told), creating new users is very simple, in fact I've done mine live in the classroom a group at a time as this gives children the opportunity to set their own display name. Once up and running, at present the only way a teacher can see what children are doing is by visiting each of their pages in turn. This is where the lack of support for RSS really falls down as I'd like to see a sitewide RSS feed for my Honeycomb site so that whenever a pupil updated their page, I could see it in my feed reader. I'm manging 180 children's accounts in my project and while visiting each page in turn might not be so bad for an individual class teacher, it could become a real workload issue for project managers and specialist teachers.

Where Honeycomb scores highly is in the ability to set permissions for groups and individuals. Users can publish at the individual, class, school, Honeycomb or internet level, depending upon the permissions applied. This is great for schools nervous about taking their first steps into the world of online collaboration and personal publishing as it gives real control to the school as to who can see material published - really important in an online system where children can log in from school or home. Permissions can be changed for individuals or groups as you go so it's quite easy to set publishing to a class level and subsequently relax permissions a level at a time once you are satisfied that the class or individual are following your expectations.

Who is Honeycomb aimed at?

As a supplier of multi-user Wordpress blogs to schools via Creative Blogs, I was initially concerned that Honeycomb might do me out of a living. However, I don't think that any school that's invested time and effort into class blogs will see Honeycomb as a replacement for that type of approach. Honeycomb's emphasis is much more on the level of personal publishing and I can see it being very successfully used by schools already using Wordpress or Blogger for class blogs to give children their own publishing platform in a way which is much easier to manage and control than a traditional blogsite might be. I also think that it might encourage schools nervous of taking first steps into allowing pupils personal space on the web into taking the plunge. If the reaction from my Year 5 and 6 pupils is anything to go by, motivating them to use the system to create content isn't going to be a problem.

Joined up thinking

I also think that Honeycomb is only a few of steps short of an e-portfolio. If I'd purchased Softease's excellent Podium podcasting software, I'd really like to press a button that sent my audio file to my Honeycomb account, and once I'd done my creative stuff with Textease I'd like to do the same via a document embed widget. In this way, a child could save their showcase projects in Honeycomb and open them up for peer review and discussion.

Just one thought, though: if I've worked my way through primary school creating losts of lovely project pages in Honeycomb, what happens when I leave? How do I retain access to all that stuff that I've created?

Conclusion

I'm really fired up to see what the children at Chorlton Park can do with Honeycomb, and although I might quibble with Softease's description of it as "a set of tools which make use of Web 2.0 technology" (if it ain't got feeds, it ain't web 2.0, in my view), I am really impressed by the ease of use that has been built in to Honeycomb from the start. It's definitely worth a serious look, and I would reiterate my earlier point that it's at the start of its development cycle. I'm sure many of the issues I have highlighted above will be addressed in future releases making it an ideal introduction to web publishing and online collaboration for primary age children.

Proxy Bypass, Coming to a Primary School Near You

If you enter the words "proxy bypass" into Google you get 293,000 results, many of which will contain detailed and fairly simple instructions on how to bypass your school's and local authority filters. For the most part this is done to gain access to social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace. In the main, good monitoring of your school's web activity can spot this sort of thing going on and can take steps to block it. Secondaries have become very adept and spotting suspicious surf patterns among students (and staff) and until now  it has largely been assumed to be a secondary school proble.

Last week a primary school in Manchester where I work  discovered a Year 6 pupil had set up a proxy bypass and was downloading all kinds of unsuitable material (they also warned a temporary member of staff about doing exactly the same thing - setting up a bypass, that is). In past blog posts I have ranted more than a little about the irrelevance of filter systems and the need for better education and better monitoring, so, which of the following apply in your primary school?

• Children have individual logins so individual surf patterns can be tracked;
• Someone on the staff is trained and can routinely check web activity;
• Someone on the staff knows how to block/unblock websites;
• You have internet monitoring software installed on your network.

I'm guessing that for most primary schools that none of the above apply.

We are rapidly getting to a situation where the existing complacency around web filtering in primary schools is no longer tenable (massive generalisation, I know, but in the last 18 months I have been in over 100 primary schools and can count on one hand the number with proactive web monitoring systems). Children and staff are actively seeking ways to get around the filters and nobody in the school even knows. The only reason that the above mentioned primary spotted the problem is that it is someone's job every week to check the web access reports.

What's the solution? Certainly not more filtering, as web access becomes cheaper and cheaper and the skills to get around filters becomes more widely disseminated (how many of the children in your school have elder siblings at secondary? How many have web access on their mobiles?), filters are becoming redundant. No, the answer is much better monitoring; back that up by an active Acceptable Use Policy; and finally much better education for staff and children alike on the issues surrounding internet safety, safe surfing habits and educational use.

SATS and Teacher Assessment

I have had a very personal reason to dislike SATS for the last two years as my two eldest have gone through them successively (good luck Eleanor!). It's not so much the tests that I object to per se, rather the total educational destruction of year 6 as it gradually descends into nothing more than a year of exam practice and revision. I've been in too many schools to believe ministers' bleating that it has minimal impact on the curriculum. Just added this link from BBC News (May 17th).The situation is so high-stakes for some schools that snap inspections, major LEA intervention programmes and head teachers' jobs are on the line if a school fails to perform according to expectation. No wonder schools feel pressure over these tests. I did a staff meeting in a Welsh school on Tuesday (no English school will talk to me this week) and the contrast in pressure could not have been more marked.

If the Welsh Department for Schools (don't know the real name) and Estyn (Welsh equivalent of Ofsted) feel they can trust teacher assessments, why can't the English? Which leads me on to the real purpose of this blog post which is to highlight an online teacher assessment recording system called Incerts. Incerts is a not-for-profit company that has developed a superb online teacher assessment system that accurately tracks pupil and group progress against National Curriculum objectives and Early Learning Goals; provides deep analytical data output in the form of Excel spreadsheets; and produces curriculum reports in a  Microsoft Word format. (Full disclosure: I provide training and consultancy for Incerts in the northwest of England). Many schools  using Incerts are now  feeling that the accuracy of the pupil tracking is such that they can successfully abandon the optional SATS in earlier keystage 2 years and at least reduce the level of testing in school that way, even if they can't abandon the SATS.

One of the effects of using Incerts in school is to raise the profile and trust that teachers and managers have in teacher assessments as opposed to test assessments. This can only be a good thing if we believe that the imposition of a high-stakes testing regime so early in a child's life has no beneficial effect on their education.

If you would like to set up a trial of Incerts in your school, or have a chat about its potential, either conact me, john@creativeict.co.uk (if you are northwest based) or Ian Billups, MD of Incerts Labs via his email: ian.billups@incerts.org

Who is responsible for the filter?

The vexed subject of web-filtering in schools has raised its ugly head in the educational blogosphere again. Two recent examples: Doug Dickinson and Ewan McIntosh. It's a subject which I have to be careful about lest I descend into my usual "They don't know what they're doing" rant. As someone who has been an ICT co-ordinator for ten years and as a trainer for various software companies I have seen the inflexibility of filter systems in action all too often:

• This week I was trying to teach web searching using the Olympics as an example. Nothing controversial about that until you realised that the school's filters blocked the string "pics";
• I've trained in a nameless NW LEA which purchased a hugely expensive online content system for its schools, then proceeded to block half the content, including all resources ending with the file extension .mp3. Podcasting is a challenge;
• I've been in far too many schools where teachers don't use the web much anymore: they can't be bothered to search for resources at home only to find them blocked in school;
• And here's the clincher: I ask them, "Why don't you get the resource unblocked?" And the response is all too predictable and will take one of two forms, "I don't know how," or, "It will take weeks, and I can't be bothered."

This is a depressing situation; but what could be done to improve it? First, at the risk of stating the obvious, those responsible for the filters should consider the wider government agenda of getting children to access the internet from home in order to use tools such as their school's learning platform. Do they imagine that these children will be using heavily filtered and monitored web services while they are doing this? Secondly, as we move to a 3G internet world in which children are accessing the web via mobile devices, do people consider that these will have a largely unfiltered view of the web? In such a world, web filters are rapidly becoming redundant.

The answer is surely not more filtering, but education. I consider the Acceptable Use Policy to be one of the cornerstone policies in a school, right up there with behaviour, anti-bullying and special needs policies. It should be reviewed annually by all staff; it should be actively promoted at school and to parents; and above all, it should be ACTIVE! By that, I mean that schools should be actively monitoring their web connections; they should be holding transgressors (staff and children) to account; and they should be educating everyone about internet safety and developing a responsible attitude towards the web.

In too many schools I have visited the attitude towards computer safety is utterly complacent (I don't use that phrase lightly), and it manifests itself in various ways:

• Children don't have individual logins to school computers (how is this going to help accountability? How is it going to help children understand the importance of keeping PIN numbers and logins private?);
• No monitoring of the internet;
• Everyone signs an AUP on entry, and it is never seen again;
• If web safety is taught, it's often a one off project.

I believe that making local authorities responsible for web filtering has engendered this attitude. Schools simply take the easy option and rely on the local authority to provide a "safe" web connection, ergo it's one less thing to worry about.

Monitoring your school's internet use need not be difficult or time consuming. Most modern cache boxes include monitoring tools and the ability for the user to block sites and users very quickly and simply. Many, if not most, schools have such technology, but often haven't been shown how to use it. This well established technology can be very effectively backed up by the use of keystroke monitoring software which records violations when banned strings of letters are entered by a user. In other words, if someone types an inappropriate term into a search engine, it will record it, regardless of whether the user actually hit the enter key! This software will give you a comprehensive idea of what is happening on your school's network at the expense of about 5 minutes a day. I used just such a system at Crumpsall Lane Primary School as ICT co-ordinator, and I can honestly say I wouldn't be without it. It meant our school's AUP was active, and our users knew it as active. The result was a fairly liberal internet filter which allowed teachers to teach and children to learn while at the same time developed a responsible attitude towards the web. For more info about this, read my comment on Ewan's blog post. Note that I can't find the software that was used at Crumpsall, but I believe this will achieve something similar.

So, what's the solution? Actually, it's quite simple, make schools responsible for their own web filter and not local authorities. That way schools can discuss what's acceptable and what's not with their own communities. Meaningful discussion will hopefully result, and an AUP that is a purposeful and active document.

Teachers, the social web and professional responsibility (part 2)

I blogged about this subject last November suggesting that Headteachers might do worse than talk to their staff about Facebook/MySpace profiles. The post obviously got lost in the blogosphere as no-one seemed to read it. I note today that the Washington Post ran an article on Monday in which it talks about teachers being removed from post due to inappropriate material on their Facebook/MySpace profiles. I'm not at all involved in teacher training, but I wonder how many colleges are talking to students about their online presence and what appears on their social networks? And most importantly, what happens if a student contacts them online? Can anyone enlighten me?

As a result of Danny Nicholson's follow up post on this subject, I just had to share the video he posted on his blog. Watch it at home as it's bound to be filtered at school - well worth it. Bet you think about your Facebook profile afterwards!

Do you really need whiteboard tools?

Yesterday I had the privilege of watching Doug Dickinson working with some teachers at Manor Road Primary School in Lancashire. It was a Textease CT training session, a product for which I am a trainer, and I hoped I was going to pick up some good tips on its use. I wasn't disappointed, it's always a pleasure to watch someone who is passionate about their subject and passionate about their product.

Afterwards Doug and I were chatting about Textease on a whiteboard and wondered why any schools using a product as powerful and flexible as Textease CT would be bothered to used the whiteboard tools supplied with their board. His argument was, "Why would you use software to teach and demonstrate, when that software is not available to the children on their pc?" And, to a large extent, I agree. If you have a Smartboard, your software licence allows you to install it on any pcs in your classroom, and I am certainly not alone in advocating that you install their excellent Smart Notebook software on every pc and laptop in your school. With a Promethean board this is much more problematic: a board only comes with five software licences so installing it on all your workstations will be a breach of your licence conditions. This amounts to a powerful reason not to buy their product, in my opinion.

The conversation got me thinking, "what would I miss in Smart Notebook" if I just used Textease on my whiteboard? Certainly Textease has some brilliantly simple tools  such as the spreadsheet tool and branching database tool which are a joy to use on a whiteboard and there is nothing comparable in Smart Notebook. I would miss the screenshade and spotlight tools in Smart Notebook, but the biggest loss for me would be the brilliant camera tools and screen recorder that Smart Notebook comes bundled with. In practice this is not a problem, as both of these utilities run independently of Smart Notebook, so it's quite straightforward to run these utilities while using the superb  Textease CT package as my  software of choice on my whiteboard - let's face it, if you've paid for a site licence for this product you want to extract maximum value!

Textease CT: Top Tips

Incidentally, if you haven't upgraded to Smart Notebook 10, then do so (get your Smartboard serial number noted before you go to the download site). There are some nice new features such as the new spotlight and magnifier tools.

Time to Update Your Browser

The vast majority of schools still use Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) despite this being a browser with well known security vulnerabilities and is essentially 7 year old technology. Worldwide, IE6 still commands a 29% share of the browser market, but the figure in education is likely to be much higher (anecdotally, more than 90%). This is largely down to schools not spending time and money on what is perceived to be a non-essential upgrade. Typically, schools will only move to Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7) when they purchase new kit or undertake major network upgrades. Any computers in schools purchased before September 2006 are still likely to have IE6 on them.

It's high time that this changed and schools updated their browsers across their networks:

• Ian Billups, technical director of Incerts reckons that his development team spend a significant amount of time dealing with IE6 compatability issues everytime they update their system. "We could spend that time much more profitably in developing new features", commented Ian ruefully.

• Another web company has chosen to ignore IE6 completely. Quikmaps is a really excellent educational site (see here for ideas on its use) that won't work in IE6. And this is only going to become more common.

• Users that persist in ignoring recent browsers will also be suffering significant performance loss. Ian Billups again points out that in tests their software runs at least 50% faster in Firefox than in IE6, and in some functions can be a massive 400% slower! Interesingly, he also reports that IE7 is also significantly slower than both Firefox and Safari.

• Paypal have just announced that they will start to actively block service requests from users using old and highly insecure browsers. One can only surmise that others will follow suit.

So, it's time to do your favourite website providers a favour and give IE6 the old heave-ho and upgrade to a more modern browser. By sticking with IE6 your school systems are more vulnerable to attack and you are missing out on potentially large performance gains.

• Firefox download
• IE 7 download
• Safari download
• Opera download