Creative ICT News

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

 

Creative ICT Goes Mobile

This morning I spotted the Mofuse widget on Joe Dale's excellent MFL blog. I followed the link and within a few minutes I've created a mobile phone version of my blog. Mofuse gives creates a .mobi compliant URL for you; all you have to do is enter the feed from your blog and it formats the whole thing. You can add a logo, define colours and create multiple pages if you are running multiple blogs. Very Cool.

Here's the url of my mobile site: http://creativeict.mofuse.mobi

Apparently, on some blogs you can provide some code in the blog header which will automatically detect if the reader is reading via a mobile phone and will direct them to the mobile blog instead. Sounds a tad geeky to implement, so haven't tried it yet, but will do soon.

What should we do about secret recording?

This morning Ewan McIntosh posted an article about children secretly recording teachers on their mobile phones and wondering whether it was possible to put a positive spin on this. The short answer is "only in an ideal world". This type of material is bound to be taken out of context, hyped for media purposes and used for political ends. However, I don't think this should be used for justification of the banning of mobile phones in the classroom. Anybody with a remote interest in technology will know how quickly phones and computers are converging. Is my XDA Orbit a phone or a computer? Skype can now be run on Playstation portables. It won't be long before such devices are indistinguishable - where do we draw the line? So, if we are committed to making the best use of such innovative technology in our classrooms (and I certainly am), then we need to make sure that acceptable use policies cover the activity of filming or recording anybody (adult or child) without their permission, and any such breach should be regarded as a serious disciplinary matter. Clearly, in the case of Angela Mason the General Teaching Council found her guilty of professional misconduct and suspended her for surreptitiously filming bad behaviour in secondary classrooms. Incidentally the comments added to this Times online article are worth reading in that it provides an illuminating public reaction to what this teacher did. For my part, her belief that somehow she had nothing to do with the bad behaviour as presented should be contested. One of the comments I most hated as a teacher was the staffroom cynic saying, "you can't do anything with these kids". Nevertheless, the GTC clearly found her conduct wanting, and so, I think, would any school governing body that had to deal with the exclusion of a child who had uploaded a secretly filmed video to Youtube.

Are children who film bad teaching acting as legitimate journalists exposing the inept (what would the reaction be to secret filming of incompetence in an NHS ward be?) or is all such material gathered for scurrilous reasons? Unfortunately, regardless of the motives of the original recorder, the material is likely to be misused.

Which leads me on to Ratemyteachers, a website whose point I've yet to fathom. Here is just one anonymous post about an identifiable teacher (whose identity I've chosen not to put on the image, obviously). Again, in an ideal world it would be great to think that children could use such a resource to provide illuminating feedback to teachers. Sadly it's usually not the case with this site.

If we keep digging, it all boils down to the kind of relationship that many children have with technology at the moment. Again, Ewan McIntosh recently reported on Becta's research into Web 2.0 which shows that the number of children actively and constructively engaged with Web 2.0 and content creation is still a tiny minority (and much more likely to be a primary school child than a secondary school one). Only through modelling behaviours, teaching skills and providing engaging opportunities to create will children learn that the web is a powerful tool for learning rather than just a means of instant communication, and having a (cruel) laugh at someone else's expense.