Creative ICT News

Is this a school's business?

A teacher in a primary school that I work with has become aware that lots of the children in her school have started to use Facebook in clear breach of the terms of service of that website (Users must be at least 13 years of age). She has no evidence at this stage that they have used the site for any nefarious purpose but contacted Facebook to ask what their policy was about this sort of thing. Facebook responded that in order to investigate an account they need the following information:

 - The exact name listed on the account

- The child's real date of birth (month/day/year)

- Any networks associated with the account

- A link (URL) to the account's profile page or search listing

- A list of any email addresses that may have been used to register the account

- A description of the profile picture

A school is not at liberty to disclose such personal data as dates of birth, and will probably have no idea about email addresses. She obviously has a pastoral concern for the children in question, but should she be taking the matter up with parents, rather than Facebook, or indeed should she be taking it up at all?

Teachmeet Northwest this Friday

On Friday evening the first ever Teachmeet to take place in the Northwest will happen at the 21^st Century Classroom in Salford 5pm -10pm

 

If you have never been to a Teachmeet you are missing one of the most exciting and vibrant events on the teaching calendar. A Teachmeet is an unconference run by the attendees consisting of micro (7 minute) and nano (2 minute)  presentations on some aspect or other of innovative classroom practice, often tech related. Teachmeets are informal, fun and free. To attend, all you need to do is sign up on the TeachmeetNW page. You don’t have to do a presentation if you don’t want to, but the more who do, the better it gets. Afterwards there is an opportunity for a bit of a social gathering, too.

Here's what I thought of Teachmeet Midlands a few months back.

 Sign up here: 

http://teachmeetnw.pbworks.com/

 

Anybody wanting a lift from Stockport or South Manchester, just drop me a line.

 

I hope to see you there.

 

Directions

21CC Salford:

Google map

Address:
21CC Salford 
2 Broadbent Street
Swinton 
M27 0BQ 
21CC Salford is in the grounds of Moorside High School which is situated on the A580 East Lancashire Road. 

By Train: 
Moorside Train Station (turn right down Moorside Road, at junction turn left and then take subway underneath dual carriageway.Turn left through Moorside High School gates and then continue right into 21CC car park). 

By Coach:
From the M60:
Exit at Jct 13, follow signs to Swinton, on Worsley Road turn left on to A580.
From the A580 (Manchester to Liverpool direction):
Pass Premier Lodge Inn, New Ellesmere Pub/Restaurant and Total garage on your left, turn left after garage into Moorside High School gates, and then continue right into 21CC car park. 
From the A580 (Liverpool to Manchester direction):
Turn right at lights at Moorside Road, continue to mini roundabout and turn left on to Worsley Road, follow to traffic lights and turn left back onto A580 to come back on the other side of the dual carriageway - follow rest of directions above.
Please do not park on Broadbent Street. 

How many ways are there to skin a cat?

The "Wisdom of crowds" is a common concept amongst web aficionados. It's the notion that a group working together, despite being spread across the web can produce something much more useful than an individual working alone. Amazon were one of the first companies to realise its potential in a big way by encouraging its customers to review the products it sells. The idea being that customer reviews carry a much greater authority than marketing blurb. There is a common misconception that Wikipedia also harnesses this power. However, recent research at Carnegie Mellon University reported on at ReadWriteWeb shows that there is a real danger that intensive activity by  relatively small number of customers can seriously skew customer ratings. Similarly, 1% of Wikipedia members are responsible for over 50% of the edits. So the whole idea of the "Wisdom of Crowds" may well be overrated and called into question. Nevertheless, when working at a more prosaic level it is still a very useful concept with realworld, practical applications as the development of Ideas to Inspire amply demonstrates.

Using the collaborative power of Google Docs, Tom Barrett (a teacher from Nottingham) and Anthony Evans (the ICT advisor for the London Borough of Redbridge) among others have been creating a whole series of presentations containing useful ideas, tips and inspiration. Each one is thrown open to teachers to add their own ideas and is a genuinely collaborative effort (I've added a few ideas of my own). As an example, here is one on ideas for using search engines in the classroom:

Anthony has also just started work on one about digital images and he would be very pleased to give you edit rights to the presentation (just drop him a line)

The complete collection of these presentations can be found at Ideas to Inspire, a truly inspiring example of the wisdom of crowds in action.

Boolify Updated Already

As a result of my blog posts, Boolify have already done one update on their website: the Boolean operators are now displayed in capitals, making the display of the operators match the way they work in real life thus avoiding one of the more obvious mistakes that one can make when trying a Boolean search. Thanks Boolify! I'd be interested to know what you thought about my idea of automatically parsing complex searches with the "AND" operator and introducing quotes.

As an aside, I was using Boolify to support my local studies blog at Springwood Heath Primary School. We were building complex searches such as:

Woolton AND Liverpool AND Shops

or

Woolton AND Liverpool AND Railway

This all worked really well, but some of the older laptops we were using still had Internet Explorer 6 on them. Boolify detects which web browser the computer is using and if you are still on IE 6 (which was released by Microsoft in 2001!)you get a much older and clunkier version of Boolify (which will presumably have IE 6 browser compliancy). Yet another powerful reason to get rid of that archaic, insecure anachronism that is IE 6!

More on the Mysteries of Search

In my last blog post I was trying to understand (somewhat unsuccessfully) the mysyteries of Boolean search. Luckily, my Twitter network came to the rescue and @neiladam pointed out the flaw in my methodology, namely, the Boolean operators "OR","AND" or "NOT" all need to be in capital letters. I was using Boolify to teach the session and was thrown by the fact that the operators on the jigsaw pieces that Boolify uses to build their searches doesn't display the operators in capitals. Clearly Boolify themselves use Google Alerts and I was pleased that David Crusoe found time to comment on my piece taking on board the suggestion of putting the operators in capital letters.

I think they need to take a further step and parse complex search terms too. A complex search term is any search that consists of more than one word. So in my example I searched for Second World War. Google actually splits this up into a Boolean search thus:

Second AND World AND War

What this means in practice is that Google will find pages with these three words occuring anywhere, not just together, which is obviously what I meant it to do. This is an instance where you would need to use quotes to get it to search for the exact phrase "Second World War". It would be fantastic if Boolify automatically inserted the "AND" operator between complex search terms as well as having a quotation operator to allow the searching of phrases. 

Rules for teaching Boolean Search

1. The operators AND, OR, NOT must be in capital letters;
2. Complex search terms containing more than one word automatically get parsed (split) using the AND operator;
3. Use quotation marks for searching exact phrases.

Now that isn't too complicated. And, because Boolify builds the search terms visually using a jigsaw, it is very easy for children to understand. I'm hoping that they look seriously at the changes that I mention as it would massively improve the site as a teaching tool - I would even go so far as to suggest you use it as a default search engine for research in class.

To add a final spanner in the works, David points out that Google's search technology goes far beyond simple Boolean logic and uses all sorts of ways of ranking pages in terms of relevance, importance and authority, but I'm guessing you need a degree in computer science from Berkeley to understand how they do it.

Explaining the mysteries of search engines

Teaching how to search is always a tricky area for teachers. Most simply don't have the deep understanding of how a search engine works (I readily include myself in that category) to explain things in simple terms to children. Today I was using World War 2 to enter the world of Boolean search terms.

First we listed the number of different ways World War 2 could be written. We found:

• World War 2
• World War Two
• World War II
• WW2
• WWII
• Second World War
• 2nd World War

We then tested a couple of search engines to see if they produced different results for each term (they did). So far so good.

Next we introduced the "or" term using Boolify (a great site for teaching searching)

This is what we did:

Next we started to narrow it down to our topic focus: local history. So, we introduced "and".

It all worked brilliantly, doing exactly what we expected. Then we tried it on some real search engines.

And the results turned out oddly.

Clearly the search engines weren't recognising our Boolean searches. A little digging revealed the following: for Ask, Bing and Google the Boolean operators need to be in capitals. This was a fact that I'm sure I learned once but had forgotten. Anyway, we repeated our searches and got the following results:

At this point I admitted defeat. According to the Ask advanced search tips, it should recognise the OR operator, but clearly doesn't. Both Google and Bing kind of did, but when adding a second OR statement, both lost a million results. Am I missing something here? Or has search engine technology moved on to such a degree that teaching a simple Boolean logic search is so out of date as to be irrelevant? Can someone with a much bigger brain than me explain it in words that my year 6 class will understand?

Stuff I've been doing elsewhere

I have been posting some content in one or two other places that folk who read this blog may find useful, so I'll post some links to it here.

Pupil Tracking Spreadsheets

As part of the work I do with Incerts, I have published a number of Excel based pupil tracking spreadsheets. These sheets are designed to be automatically populated with data from the Incerts teacher assessment system (thus saving you bucketloads of time). However, it struck me that many people who don't use Incerts could still find these spreadsheets useful by filling them in manually or using copy and paste etc.

Sample maths tracking and Y6 on target spreadsheets

Sample Early Years summary spreadsheet

Incerts will be publishing more spreadsheets soon, and when they do I will make notes on them over on my Incerts blog. I also hope to publish a date for an Incerts seminar shortly. Drop me a line if you are interested.

Creative Blogs

Recent posts on my Worpress for schools platform, Creative Blogs, include:

A review of Animoto, the fantastic slideshow creation tool;

Instructions on using the import/export function in Wordpress to set up new blogs,

How to create a Google Custom Search for your school (and why you might want to do this).

School based Honeycomb Training

If you are a Manchester LA school you have had a Honeycomb licence purchased for you by the local authority for the next 3 years. In case you don't know, Honeycomb is a secure online publishing platform for schools. Within it children and teachers can create their own webpages, write blogs and collaborate using wikis. Children can comment on each other's work (facilitating peer review) and teachers can create templates for children to build on, supporting those with additional needs, or simply providing a scaffold. 

I have been using Honeycomb in my classroom at Chorlton Park primary school in Manchester for over a year with years 3 to 6 and as such am ideally placed to deliver training that is rooted in classroom practice. I've written a few blogposts about Honeycomb on the way which you can read here. I am also a registered Lightbox trainer for Cheshire and Greater Manchester.

School based training

As a special offer schools can book a 2 hour extended staff meeting on Honeycomb for just £100 (half-price, also available outside Manchester LA, but travel expenses will be added). The session will be practical and will include the following.

• Building web pages full of rich content such as slideshows, mindmaps, video etc;
• Ways of using blogs;
• Setting up collaborative tasks using the wiki feature;
• Building and distributing templates;
• Lots of practical lesson ideas;
• E-safety advice.

All staff will need access to the internet on either a laptop or in an ICT suite. The programme is flexible and could be delivered as an extended twilight, or half an Inset day, or even split over two staff meetings (this will cost £150 plus travel).

To book, simply contact me by using the email link in the sidebar of this blog (john(at)creativeict.co.uk)

I've jumped on the Iphone band wagon

The new iphone 3Gs arrived a few weeks ago. It was prompted by the dropping and smashing of my Windows Mobile based XDA Orbit. In truth, it was a phone that I never loved. This was the second time I smashed it, and I was always frustrated by the clunky nature of Windows Mobile and the lack of applications to install on it. So, when serendipitously, a letter arrived on my mat inviting me to upgrade the day after the XDA bit the dust it didn't take me long to decide.

The process was helped by my friend Dave who had spent an entire Italian meal showing off his new iphone (note to self, don't join the legion of "incredibly pleased with myself" Iphone users who insist on demonstrating its capabilities whenever and wherever - I have only been partially successful at this). He was inordinately pleased with his London Underground planner app which, not only planned his route for him, but told him which was the optimum carriage to get on to minimise distance through crowds to exits etc. He was unimpressed when I pointed out the logical flaw in this app: namely, if all iphone users on the Tube downloaded it then you would see empty carriages on trains except for the "optimum" carriage" which would be crammed with geeks peering at their iphones and using Google Latitude to see which of their Twitter friends were also wedged in with them. This image had me giggling, and I'm sure that there is a cartoon in there somewhere.

It wasn't enough to stop me putting my order in and I've now spent a few days playing with my new phone. It's a brilliant piece of software design - incredibly easy to use, but it does have its limitations:

It currently doesn't support Flash. This means that loads of the interactive content uploaded to Learning Platforms and available generally on the web won't work on it. To be fair, this is no different to other smartphones, although the HTC Hero does claim to support Flash now, although I'm told it's a bit clunky.

The phone won't run 3rd party apps in the background. That sounds fairly geeky, but it's an important point. As an example, I have downloaded the MapmyRide app which uses the GPS feature of the phone to trace any runs or bike rides I undertake onto a map. Unfortunately, if I receive a phone call during the training session I have to resume the MapmyRide tracking after the call. It would be so much better if it just ran in the background. Again, Android phones allow this.

Maybe I should have looked seriously at the HTC Hero,but I've been seduced by my iphone and in practice have found it to be a wonderfully intuitive and simple device to use. Synchronising contacts, calendar and email with Outlook was the work of moments and browsing the App Store has given me some great applications that will make my life a lot simpler. Doing stuff like taking a photo/video/voice memo/note is so intuitive that Apple don't put a manual in the box.

Here ar a few of the apps that I'm using regularly:

Wordpress

The Wordpress app is an absolute gem. I can set up access to as many Wordpress blogs as I want and write new posts, edit existing stuff, upload photos straight from the phone's camera  and so on. It makes mobile blogging a piece of cake.

Typepad

This is a Typepad blog, but the iphone app from Typepad is nowhere nearly as good as its Wordpress counterpart. Its biggest limitation is the inability to edit existing posts as it treats any edit you make as a brand new post. I use it if I really need to, but any edits or additions I leave until I get home.

Evernote

Evernote is a new application for me that brings together the camera, notes, web bookmarks and voice memos into a single application. It uploads all notes that you create to your Evernote web page (creating an instant backup) and syncs with the Evernote desktop application that you can install on your home pc. I know some schools use Evernote on pupil handheld devices as their preferred jotter and I'm looking forward to exploring its potential.

Other apps I've installed:

BeeTagg:     QR code recognition software (see post on QR codes)

Tweetdeck:    Impressive Twitter app

MapmyRide:    GPS tracking for exercise (there are lots of other GPS tracking apps)

Facebook: Nuff said

National Rail Enquiries:    Although this cost £5 it is absolutely brilliant. If you use our rail network at all it's far easier to use this app to find out about trains/delays etc than using the web on your computer. Particularly keen on the "next train home" feature which, because it uses GPS will tell when your next train home from your nearest station is in a single click.

I'm looking forward to exploring the new phone's potential (did I mention it makes phone calls too), and I would be very happy to receive suggestions for apps that I might have missed (there are so many thousands of apps in the Apple Store that finding what you want is actually a bit of a trial and error experience).