| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

Google goes gaga

Earlier today it seems that the internet went a bit lopsided. I was out and about at the time, but through my iPhone and the tweetie app I was able to follow a steadily increasing rate of twitter messages concerning google searches and their "this site may harm your computer" message. Google posted a response about this;

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file....

...Thanks for your understanding.   

Of course anyone can make a mistake, but it suddenly brings one thing in sharp focus. This was one small error from Google, and it caused a huge problem worldwide because of their far reaching hold over internet search. 

The words "basket", "eggs" and "all in one" come to mind, and make me wonder what might happen with a much more serious google related problem...

Staff meeting preparation

I have a staff meeting to lead on Monday. It's on visual literacy, and was planned for before Christmas (but time restraints pushed it back). I had already planned to talk about 

• Windows moviemaker - for video / stop animation and cartoon making
• Comic Life - for photo comic creation
• MovieStorm - for creating true animation
• Google Earth and Vocoroo - using real life places with audio

Add to that the following resources that I am also going to now mention;

• Glogster - online poster collage creation (education version)
• Kerpoof - animated cartoon tool (education version)  
• and of course showing the new software we have (2DIY)  

I'm supposed to go through all this in 1 hour, so it's going to be a rollercoaster session! 

Now this is how to complain...

A letter from a miffed customer of Virgin Atlantic, concerned at the food they were presented with...

Dear Mr Branson
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do, which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [image]
I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day.
What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And which one is the starter, which one is the dessert?
You don’t get to a position like yours, Richard, with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power, so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left.
Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue, hasn’t it?
No sane person would serve a dessert with a tomato, would they?
Well, answer me this Richard: What sort of animal would serve a dessert with peas in?
I know it looks like a bhaji but it’s in custard, Richard. Custard. It must be the pudding.
Well, you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top.
Its only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter.
Perhaps the meal on the left might be the dessert after all.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment.
I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents, and if they knew I had started dessert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries.
So let’s peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer. [image]
I’ll try to explain how this felt. Imagine being a 12-year-old boy, Richard.
Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sitting there with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is.
It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out from the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it’s not in there.
It’s your hamster, Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this: [image]
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that bhaji custard.
I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard, Richard. MUSTARD.
More mustard than any man could consume in a month.
On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown, glue-like oil, and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato.
The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.
Once it was regurgitated, it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard, Richard.
By now, I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit.
Luckily, there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier because of its baffling presentation: [image]
It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING.
Either that or some sort of backstreet, underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast.
You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through Customs.
Imagine biting into a piece of brass, Richard.
That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.
I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax. But obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour.
I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.
Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment.

I switched it on:
I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen.
Perhaps it would be better on another channel:
Is that Ray Liotta?
A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this.
After that I switched off.
I’d had enough.
I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.
My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food or sleep.
Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:
Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie.
Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.
Richard, what is that white stuff?
It looked like it was going to be yoghurt.
It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the bhaji custard and the mustard sauce.
It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and Refreshers.
I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times.
When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese, Richard – a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your bhaji mustard.
So that was that, Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing.
My only question is: How can you live like this?
I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like. It must be like something out of a nature documentary.
As I said at the start, I love your brand. I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to its knees and begging for sustenance.

Absolutely brilliant. I loved it :-)

Collaboration through stixy

I was informed of this new online collaboration tool tonight from @digmo, and rather than write about it and try and mention everything it does, here is digmo's stixy article about it.

Who trains the trainers?

I heard the good news yesterday that I am to be given Wednesday mornings out of the classroom for a few weeks in order to train up our T.As to make full use of the technology we have in school. High on the list of "things to be taught" is use of the visualiser, as well as video capture, smartboard tips and going through some of the software in order for it to be used effectively.

I'm really grateful that I get the time out to do this, as I thought I would be using lunch / afterschool sessions to train up the T.As, however one thought does occur to me; I use one type of visualiser in my class, and the others school are of a different type. I need to make sure I know the finer points of those visualisers before I start talking to staff about them. The same is true of the Smartboard and software. I need to know them inside out so as not to be caught out when asked a question. 

There is no-one in school to go and ask. Along with the HT, I am the one who "knows everything ICT" apparently.

So, that leads me to ask the question in the title of this post - who trains the trainers? I suspect the answer to this is that I train myself first, in the time I can find; evenings, weekends, searching on the web, and tweeting on twitter. Then I can pass any knowledge on to others.

Twitter in the mainstream

There has been a steady amount of press over the past few weeks for Twitter - the "micro blogging" service that lets you say whatever you want in no more than 140 characters.

After re-joinging again recently (I'd tried it long ago before the use of twitpic / @ and # tags) I quickly found it a great way to reach out to like minded teachers, and discuss issues, make suggestions, sound out ideas and generally hear other people with the same educational outlook as myself talking (or should be "tweeting"??).

Soon came the Twitter security issue - fake homepages that were harvesting usernames and passwords to then gain access to other accounts and send messages across the system (several celebrity messages left were unusual to say the least).

And then came Jonathon Ross. The guy had obiously had too much free time on his hands, and took to twittering to occupy him during his suspension from broadcasting (google his name along with Russell Brand and you'll see why he was off air). Not content with twittering along quietly (as Stephen Fry has been doing for a long time), he took it upon himself to bring to the publics attention all the "real" celebrities using Twitter, and outing all the fake celeb accounts.

Now, I have nothing against JR, he's great and he's brought a whole new type of person into the twitterverse - but he's also inadvertendly notified the mainstream of the potential audience for tweeting. How long before we start getting tweets inviting us to try the latest greatest cola, or telling us to "just do it"?

It would be the end of Twitter as a social, communication tool for real internet users, and the beginning of a global, instant advertising medium. And that would be built on money, profit and subscriptions...

Netbooks - what's the fuss?

I can't quite get into the hysteria that other teachers and ICT consultants are getting into at the moment with regards to using netbooks. You see I hear other teachers raving about their use in the classes, but to be honest I don't get it.

At my school we received one from the tesco computers for school vouchers scheme, and when it arrived I took it aside to see what we could do. Well, pretty quickly two major flaws became apparent;

• We cannnot log into the school network. Our technician explained that as we run an Active Directory network (running on windows) and the netbook is a linux machine they are incompatible. So, no access for pupils to their files and folders.

• The screen displays at a width of 800 pixels. Our website is optimized (along with most other sites nowadays) for 1024 pixels. Therefore, sideways scrolling becomes neccessary to view websites (and everyone knows how appealing sideways scrolling is)

I cannot see a use for this machine in school, with these problems. The only use it may have is as a portable field trip electronic diary, and when used with a mobile broadband dongle it could access the admin side of our website to post live articles from a field trip location.

Would I go and buy 100+ of these things - as I heard some teachers at this years BETT show? No. I'll stick to laptops in the classroom with a full display, and access to our AD server.

Spot on

I have to post this link to a blog posting from a fellow twitterer (@ollibray) as what he says hits the nail on the head with regards to Local Authorities and their blanket filtering policies for many great resources on the web for education.

I'll say no more other than read his article. It will make you think long and hard

You were only supposed to work out the problem...

Michael Cane uttered the memorables line "Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea" at the end of the classic 60's movie The Italian Job (not that half arsed US remake recently), as his coach of gold bars rocked precariously over the edge of a large cliff.

Annoyingly the film then ended, and that was it. There was no sequel and we were left wondering what his idea was. Fortunately the Royal Society of Chemisty invited the public to suggest what the idea was, and there were some crackers.

The best one I read about was that the gang sing, get frogs in their throats, let the frogs jump up and down to rock the bus and use the rocks to weigh down the bus. A brilliant piece of lateral thinking from a 12 year old!!

Bye Bye Scanner?

I found this useful little application that could see an end to scanning documents. Called Snapter, you simply take a photo of a page from a book (for example) and then the clever software somehow manages to turn your off - centre, gap round the edges, curved page photo into a flat, professional looking pdf. I've no idea how it manages it, it just looks good!

Free for 14 days, beyond this you'll find a watermark appearing on anything you "snap", but you can buy the paid for version for $49 (around £36) to remove the watermark and tagline.

An annual event

I know this sounds like something I would have said many years ago, as a child, but...

"I've just finished my Christmas Annual"

That's right, I was given the QI Christmas Annual and tonight I had time to finish reading through all the trvial facts contained within it. So, that's another QI book I have now gone through - the 2009 annual, the 2008 annual, and the book of general ignorance. I now know so much useless information it's untrue.

Now with added Goodness

I've just installed the Apture application on this website. As their website says;

"Educators across the world use Apture to get their students engaged with learning. Involve students to link rich content for homework assignments. Accommodate shorter attention spans while interactively driving interest to go deeper and learn more.

Use Apture to Link and Embed:

• Reference learning materials: a specific slide in a PowerPoint presentation or specific page in a PDF handout
• Link any article from Wikipedia, including a specific section of an article
• Link educational videos from YouTube or other sources
• Let students collaboratively link blog posts and web pages with more background information and rich content"