Creative ICT News

A Little Local Difficulty

Yesterday (30th October) the Manchester Evening News was carrying banner headlines about children accessing porn on school computers. My initial thought was, "Here we go again, yet another internet scare story involving schools." I just loved the article's opening sentence: "HUNDREDS of kids are looking at pornography on school computers every day." Not looking to pull punches then?

The article goes on to show how the private company, "e-safe education", part of Zentek, conducted research into web use at "40 primary and secondaries in the county." Confusingly, in the comments below the article, Colin McKeown, MD of e-safe stated, in response to my own comment that, "The data we have evaluated [was] from across the UK, not just Manchester..." (my bracket). I also added a further comment asking for clarification as to what constituted a "serious alert" which has not appeared below the article.

So, what we have is a story about some "research" (no links provided as to where this research might be published) by a company specialising in e-safety solutions. It's not entirely clear if the research is local, and it's not clear what constituted a serious alert. And, since the company conducting the research are peddling e-safety solutions, it could hardly claim to be independent either.

In fairness, I think the article, although somewhat sensationalised (hey, it's a local newspaper) does have a point, and it's this: schools simply have to start taking responsibility for their own web connections, instead of relying upon the local authority filters. I've blogged about this before:

• Proxy bypasses in schools
• Who is responsible for the filter 

 I also added a comment about my own experiences about monitoring the internet at my primary school at the foot of an article by Ewan Macintosh . The software in use at this school was, I believe, supplied by these people: Forensic Software.co.uk who, presumably are a competitor of E-safe Education. I feel bound to point out that I have no relationship with this company other than to say that their software is excellent.

So, let's see the research; let's understand what constitutes a serious threat before we make such sweeping generalised statements as this article does. It's interesting to note that when I last checked the article only had 8 comments attached, which compares exceedingly poorly to any article that is posted about the Manchester congestion charge. Could it be that the public can smell a rat, or are they simply not interested?

Blogging from my mobile phone

I've just installed the Typepad app for Windows mobile from http://get.typepad.com . On running the application I log into my blog and write this post. Rather neatly I can also access the phone's camera from within the app. This allows me to take a photo on the go and automatically embed it in the post. Ok, so a shot of my pc monitor isn't exactly inspiring, but hey, it's a test! I need to find a similar app for Wordpress now.

Teaching with Honeycomb

The years 5 and 6 and Chorlton Park have been using Honeycomb "in anger" for a full half term now, and it has been interesting watching them using the site. I'm also finding I'm adapting my teaching to try and  capitalise on the strengths of the product.

If you haven't come across Honeycomb yet, it's a tool for children to create their own web pages, blogs and wikis. Published by Softease, it tries emulate the ease of use that characterises Textease into the online world. Schools can choose whether to allow other schools to see their Honeycomb site, or completely restrict access to their own school, or even class, making it a very safe environment in which children can start to learn about the issues of online publishing.

First Steps

The first teaching sessions that we did were focused on the basic functionality of the product: how to write; upload pictures; add weblinks and so on. I the Listography website as my inspiration to create pages entitled "My life in lists". The objective was to produce a "biography" in lists including pictures and weblinks. I have found that the best way of working with Honeycomb is to model what I want the children to do through my own site and so I duly created my own "My life in lists" page. Most children found the task enjoyable and they found producing a basic page like this extraordinarily easy to do. This is Honeycomb's real strength: the software doesn't get in the way of creativity.Here are a couple of examples of list pages produced (click on the image to view full size).

       

The less ICT literate tended not to use weblinks, but virtually all children uploaded pictures, and some worked out how to import sound, too. I would echo Simon Mills' comments on his school's use of Honeycomb, in that teaching children to save and import images, rather than simply allowing copy/paste is a boon. It creates a space for a whole discussion on copyright and what's appropriate on a school site. I'd like Softease to go further and allow site Admins to see all images uploaded in a gallery tool and to blank out unlicensed or inappropriate images with an auto message in its place.

Research Skills

The next piece of work introduced was to address the issue of internet research skill which the teachers felt had been neglected recently. I set the children a task of answering five questions about explorers and then told them I wanted them to answer them three times using three different sources. I gave them two of the sources (allaboutexplorers and wikipedia) and required them to use a search engine (ask.co.uk) for the third. Thye had to create a Honeycomb page with the questions on and 3 different boxes with the answers. Each box also had to display the source used. Again I created my own explorers page for the children to look at (obviously I left the answers blank!). The children found this task very difficult and many produced very disorganised pages. Here, I feel it would have been very useful to be able to create a template page to share, especially amongst the less able children to support them a bit more. I'm pleased to say that the next release of Honeycomb includes this feature.

Again, the ease of use meant that few children got hung up with the functionality of the software, although the ease with which you are able to "point and click" to create a new textbox meant that some children created far too many, and I'll have to spend some time teaching them to type within a textbox rather than creating a new one for each question and answer. I've already told them to create white textboxes while they are drafting pages beacuse they can always make them transparent or change them to their desired colour when they've finished, and this seems to have helped some.

    

Teacher's note: if you haven't used allaboutexplorers, you really should. It's a spoof website full of completely useless information. Virtually all the children blithely typed that Christopher Columbus was born in Sydney, Australia in 1951 without batting an eyelid. It was only later that they began to realise that they had been sold a pup. :-)

Next step

The next step is for the children to produce their own researched webpage on a figure from World War 2. They will be required to source Creative Commons images, triple check facts and state the websites they used. Quite a challenge, and I'm going to spend half-term thinking about delivery. I'm also wondering how I might get the children using blogs within Honeycomb to reflect on what they've done with it.

Honeycomb is going to migrate to the next release very shortly. I'll post on the new features when it's out. In the meantime, perhaps Softease might like to consider how teachers using Honeycomb could work within their own community of practice to share ideas and suggestions...

A real "Bad news" story

My 9 month old got me up nice and early this morning (about 5) and, as is my wont, I fired up my RSS reader to browse the edublogosphere. This story on the BBC education site has put me in a foul mood for the day. Despite having accepted that SATs at 14 perform little useful function, the government is going to further blight primaries by insisting on floor targets for SAts at 11. Question for the minister: "Should the teachers who teach in a Stockport school with 63% SEN give up now?". The school in question has recently received a very good Ofsted report and serves an isolated but impoverished community extremely effectively. How the (expletive deleted) is this school going to meet an arbitrary floor target? And whose interest is served by closing such institutions?

Rant over, feel (slightly) better.

What's Changed?

I picked up from Twitter that fellow edublogger and teacher, Joe Dale, from Nodehill School on the Isle of Wight has decided to become a part time teacher and spend a couple of days a week working for himself. This is how I started nearly four years ago and it got me thinking about how my outlook has changed over that period. At the time, I was ICT co-ordinator at Crumpsall Lane Primary School and I thought we were pretty cool when it came to ICT. We had a fantastic website which included teacher interviews written and recorded by children (nowadays we'd call this podcasting, but we hadn't heard of feeds in 2003); had a fantastic 100th birthday website with recollections from ex parents, photos, scans of school logbooks from the war etc; and we were avid users of Think.com. I'd like to point you at this wonderful site, but it was all lost when the school subsequently switched to a template driven site :-(

I had very set ideas about what life would be like as a freelance consultant: schools would hire me as a peripatetic ICT co-ordinator and I would come in and sort out development plans, staff audits, staff training etc. How wrong I was.

The first step to changing my outlook was discovering blogs. My first post dates back to November 11th 2005, almost exactly 3 years ago, and some 6 months after I struck out on my own. What was significant about this post was the fact that it was a report of a conversation (a phone conversation, as it happens), but one which had a profound effect on me. It introduced me to RSS. Suddenly, I became aware that content was no longer king. I had spent ages developing a Web 1.0 website which I rather naively thought would be an excellent advert for me and my services and my intention was to make it a destination site by putting up loads of resources and links for ICT teachers. The site is still available (and still used - only this week I received an email from someone who had downloaded my sample Acceptable Use Policy), but my discovery of blogging and RSS rendered the site obsolete overnight.

Suddenly, through my blog, I had the means to collect and disseminate resources, reflect on stuff that I was doing/attending/thinking about, and to get feedback from my reader (sic). While I've never been a prolific blogger, and am much more rooted in the practical sharing of resources and ideas rather than the more academic and thoughtful tone of some other edubloggers whose blogs I read (and readership I envy), I'm still quite proud of my blog. 

As my journey through blogging continued I developed a resource site on del.icio.us (which I think is rather good), a Slideshare site, a social network for Wordpress MU in education, various wikis, online document stores,  and I linked to more and more blogs written by the aforementioned Joe Dale, Tom Barrett and Simon Mills to name but three of the most useful.

What all this taught me was that although I thought I knew what made ICT tick in a primary school, in fact I was a long way from the cutting edge. I had a lot to learn. 

For an excellent review of the last 20 yers or so watch Professor Stephen Heppell's keynote for the K12 Online Conference. Follow this link for the video, voicethread and more. It's a 40 minutes well spent. Above all it showed me that although I was on the right tracks with what I and the ICT Team at Crumpsall were trying to achieve, we hadn't appreciated how significant some of that stuff was and how we could have made it even better if only I'd grasped the importance of blogging, sharing and what Professor Heppell calls "usness" sooner.

Best of luck to Joe in his new venture, and if you want to support him then why not attend his popular Isle of Wight ICT conference next weekend? I'm told the island is very nice this time of year, and the list of speakers is impressive.

Fighting against the Tide

It frequently drives me to distraction that children are asked to produce so many PowerPoints, 90% of which are never actually "presented". Slideshare is a great way of getting children's PowerPoints on to a blog, but embedding 30 separate PowerPoints in a single blogpost is somewhat daunting, and will clutter your blog terribly as well as slowing the page load down drastically. This is where Slideshare's presentation pack comes in handy. Upload a batch of PowerPoints and make sure you tag them all with the same unique tag. Next click on Widgets > Presentation Pack. Now tick "My tags" and select the unique tag for that batch of PowerPoints. Slideshare will generate the required code which you simply paste into the HTML tab on your write post screen. Here's an example of my PowerPoints below:

| Get your Presentation Pack

Blogging in the Park

Just created this widget using Sproutbuilder. Very easy and intuitive to use. It's got loads of tools and goodies to add to sprouts such as slideshow builders, countdown timers etc. A great way of promoting special projects at school on your blogs. I'll try and find a moment to build a few showcase examples soon. In the meantime, go on over and have a look at the wiki for the blogging unconference, or if your're feeling generous, click the share button and put this widget in you sidebar.

Stuff that's caught my eye

Web 2.0 is Good for Learning. Official

Becta has just published research that shows that Web 2.0 tools such as blogs encourage student engagement. Read the summary here.

Blogging in the Park

I originally announced Saturday 29^th November as the date for the Creative ICT Blogging Unconference. I've decided to change the date to a spring term date, mainly to allow the event to take place on a weekday. Date to be confirmed shortly. Entitled Blogging in the Park, the event will take place at Green Park Primary School, Maghull. An unconference is an informal conference in which the participants set the agenda. I’m hoping that as many Creative Blogs schools as possible can be represented so that people can make contact, discuss collaborative projects, exchange ideas etc. I’m hoping to have a couple of exciting keynotes too. Much more information coming soon, in the meantime, please mark the date in your diary and pre-register your interest by dropping me a line or visiting the conference wiki. I should be able to offer lifts from Manchester on the day and the event will end in an optional social at a suitable local hostelry. 

Hopefully the event will be a relaxed and enjoyable way to meet fellow edubloggers and learn at the same time. I hope to see you in Maghull.

Don’t let it die

If you haven’t yet registered for the Creative Blogs social network on Ning, then please do so and have a look at some of the interesting blogging related discussion that has gone on there. If you get a moment, add your own six penn’orth too. http://creativeict.ning.com

Stuff from my network

 Not all blog related, but it’s all good!

Mapskip                        This site really appeals to me. Find and tag a location on Google Maps, then write a story about it and upload photos, video etc. Got to be brilliant for adding local ghost stories, anecdotes about holidays etc. Here’s my story, have a read, add a comment...

Flickr Toys                    Loads of great activities using images (upload your own or use Flickr and Photobucket). Create your own spoof magazine cover, or get each member of your class to create a trading card of themselves using a set of attributes that you decide as a group. Loads more activities (great for when you have to cover a lesson and you’ve nothing prepared) and some great ideas here.

Spelling City                  I can’t believe I didn’t know about this site: simply upload your spelling list and play lots of different activities to help the learning process. Brilliant.

Brave New World           Superb 5 minute video: one for the technophobes on your staff Definitely worth a watch at your next staff meeting.

Wordpress PDFs               Set of useful Wordpress guides for those that like the printed word.

As usual I have to give a big "shout out" to my Personal Learning Network for introducing me to these resources.