| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

Kick out the spam

A tool that could help in the battle against spam and phishing attacks has received industry approval. The DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) system is a method of validating the identity of the sender of an e-mail.

Spammers hide their identity by using a false, or spoofed, address in the millions of messages they send out. DKIM uses encrypted digital signatures to prove a message's origin and a draft standard has been accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Firms have pledged to work with ISPs, businesses and financial institutions to roll out the technology as soon as possible

Let's hope that not only do these firms take action against spam, but also that the worst offending countries - the US, China and Russia - also take a stand against this annoyance.

Green green grass

I see that for some reason Trafalgar square has been grassed over for two days, and do you know what, it looks brilliant like this;

 

Maybe this will spark Ken Livingstone into action and ripping up the bland, dull concrete of the square and laying a permanent park there. Just imagine how appealing it would be for tourists in the heart of London to be able to sit, rest, picnic or relax. It has to be better than the concrete, surely.

Support Staff ARE worth it

The government has begun moves towards drawing up a framework for pay and conditions for the 300,000 teaching assistants and other support staff. The development follows pressure from unions representing non-teaching staff and head teachers.

Head teachers have welcomed the move. John Dunford from the Association of School and College Leaders said: "A national pay structure that recognises the key role of support staff in schools is long overdue.

More on this here

A chip on their shoulder

Nicholas Negroponte.  A name you don't know. But a great man. He's the one who came up with the idea of the cheap laptop that could be used in developing countries to give them access to the digital age. How did he do it? Well, he worked with AMD, News Corp., Google, and Red Hat, (which created a Linux-based operating system for the laptop) and the choice of AMD seems to be where big problems have come from.

AMD is, of course, a chip manufacture. One of two major players in the computer chip world, the other being Intel. I imagine Intel weren't to pleased to find their rival being connected with such a great scheme so...

can you guess which company is now selling a cheap laptop (actually at below production cost) to developing countries. Yes - that's right. Intel is. Rather than work with Mr. Negroponte for the benefit of children across the world they've opted to compete and make a loss on each machine they sell.

Pointless, and as Mr. Negroponte says "they should be ashamed of themselves". Too right.

It's official - teachers are rubbish!

How do I know this? Well, it's all do with an initiative from the government. The Excellent Teacher scheme aims to boost standards in England by getting experienced teachers to coach others. The Department for Education and Skills expected 5,000 teachers to apply - but only 34 have, and just 26 qualified.

So, if only 26 teachers are good enough to become excellent teachers, then the rest of must be pretty rubbish at our jobs.

From the mouths of babies...

So it was a Friday afternoon, which meant art, which meant portraits as that was the topic.
Previously the children had learnt how to draw their own face (with the help of a mirror, and a lot of patience from me).
Phrases such as "are your eyes really on your forehead" / "have you got a nose on your chin" / "don't you have any hair covering your forehead" / etc had been frequently uttered in absolute despair as they produced what I thought at first were classic Picasso style images.
The latest lesson involved introducing paint (a chorus of "whoooo" went around the class), followed by a discussion why there was no pink paint in the pallete tray. Finally the answer "we don't have pink skin "was suggested - but only after a lot of prompting.

The task of this lesson was to mix white with traces of yellow / orange / brown to create a skin tone very close to their own. They could test this by putting their hand next to their creation and compare. Simple. Maybe not...

A few minutes into the lesson and one of the boys is asking for mirror. "A mirror?" asks the teacher. "Yes. ", he replies, "I want to see the colour of my skin."

Obviously this child does not consider his hand to contain any colour at all. Bizarre!

Is iTunes the new currency?

I was looking around on the web at articles to do with blogs and web2.0 in general when I came across this phrase on a website;

A  blog can connect you with the people that matter to you. 
Prices start at just five iTunes downloads a month.

Has iTunes become a new international currency then? Is it that popular that you can now use it in the Bureau de Change? And most importantly how many iTunes are there to the pound?!!

Advise me, please!

So, five weeks into my new school and the Head Teachers shows me a letter that he'd received saying that the school had been chosen to join a panel to evaluate and select a Learning Platform to be used throughout the county.
Well, tonight I looked carefully on the Becta website at the list of accredited suppliers. There was the company that is currently providing the county with a staff LP system. It works. It does what it says on the tin. There isn't much more to add to that one.
Then there was the company that currently provides schools with cached curriculum content. I can see potential there if they know what they are doing.
There were others too that talked the talk - but none of them showed any images of what their LP looks like (are they not yet built?)

And then, as a shiver ran down my spine, I noted the name of one more company accredited to provide a LP. It is a company famous for its locked down PCs - and for an inability to show any flexibility when it came to installing additional software. I really do dread to think of the restrictions, blocks and "security features" it would put into its LP if chosen. Oh - and for those still struggling to name it - it has two letters in its title. Any guesses?

The law. An ass. What's the difference?

I cannot believe that in the current climate of protecting children from harm, the every child matters initiative, and all the other ways to keep children from harm, that a story like this one can occur.
I mean, come on. When you read that a school cannot evict a convicted paedophile from a caretakers house within it's own grounds because...

a judge refused an eviction bid in December saying [Timothy] Martin had a tenancy agreement and had not been convicted...The judge said under the law he had an assured short term tenancy agreement and was allowed to remain.

Hello!! What about the law that the children should be able to attend school without being at risk from - and I say it again - a  convicted paedophile?
What is more important here - the safety and protection of a school full of children, or a piddling little tenacy agreement of a society deviant??

Build a movie

A free programming tool called Scratch that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been launched.
The digital toolkit, developed in the US at MIT's Media Lab, allows people to blend images, sound and video as it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks.