| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

The Digital Bush Telegraph

I really liked the way I made use of technology today to quickly get an answer to a question I had to ask. I was trying to find out whether 2Simple were providing online tools for Nottinghamshires learning platform that Fronter are providing.

I sent a tweet, via twitter, to Katie at 2Simple who responsed quickly telling me they had passed details onto two people at Notts but heard no more. The two names mentioned were running a course today that a colleague was attending, so I sent a text to my colleague asking her to ask the trainers for the answers. I then got a text back, and tweeted the answer back down to London.

In little over 10 minutes I had gone from not knowing the answer to getting as much information as possible via twitter and text. Simple, effective, Quick!

Self imposed pressure

I've spent this evening putting data into a spreadsheet to show the progress that the children in my class are making. The problem with doing this though is the pressure that I can feel I am putting on myself - and the reason for it would to any non-educationalist seem bizzare. Take a look at this extract from my targets overview excel sheet;

In the left column you can see the targets that the pupils are expected to reach by July 2009, and looking across you can see the expected sublevels each term - rising towards the final July level. That seems normal, but I am pressurising myself to make the pupils reach the targets now. Why? Because this is what we do in education. If we are set a target for the end of the year, then until that child reaches the target we feel we are failing them. Never mind the fact they are "on track" to hit the target in July, we view it as 'they haven't reached their target yet'. Get them to the target early however, and we feel we haven't set them true targets and "reset" them to a higher level piling even more pressure on ourselves.

There is no other profession that does this. They set a target, and aim to reach it at the end of the cycle. For teachers, (with all the external checks made on us), if that target has not been reached when we are checked during the year we feel we've failed. It's a mindset that we have to get away from, and justify childrens' current achievments by saying "they are on track to reach their target when expected". 

The problems when staying in-house

Over 113 million people discovered today that they were unable to access their email if it was held by Google. The reason was simple, Google Mail suffered a major blackout. The actual downtime varied but was roughly 4 hours on average, from 9.30am (GMT) to lunchtime.

Not only were private, personal accounts unavailable, as more than a million business around the world use Google's professional suite of applications, including e-mail, they were hit hard too.

In fact, Google itself relies on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem.

So, there is a lesson in there somewhere. No matter how much you want to kill off your competition, it might be an idea to create a fail-safe account with them so that when your system crashes and burns you can still get the message out and about to let others know what is happening.

Expect to see microsoft@googlemail.com, apple@hotmail.com and google@apple.com soon!

Back ups ARE important

I took delivery of a brand new 1TB external hard drive on Saturday morning. I thought it time to get the contents of the laptop, as well as my other external hard drive backed up for safety. Call it a backup of a backup, "just in case".

Well most of Saturday passed by with the files being backed up to the new drive (nearly 800,000 files it turns out in the end). On Sunday I returned to the laptop to discover that somehow the following had happened;

1. The contents of the "My Planning" folder were missing from the laptop
2. The latest 2 albums downloaded from iTunes were missing from the laptop
3. Half my album art in iTunes was missing from the laptop

Whether this was just coincidence, or whether it was a direct result of making the backup I don't know, BUT I do know that without having that backup I wouldn't have been able to find, and restore, the missing files and images. Backups are important, Backups are good, Backups are essential. 

Have you Backed Up recently??

Ideas to Inspire

Mark Warner - he of the www.teachingideas.co.uk website - has just launched the "Ideas to Inspire" website - As he says on the website himself;

...a collection of Google Docs presentations, which offer a large number of ideas for engaging lesson activities in a range of curriculum areas. The presentations are a collaboration between lots of fantastic teachers around the world.

Contact Mark on twitter: @markw29

Forgotten Scriptings

Several years ago I was seconded to Nottingham Trent University to work as a "Digital Teacher in Residence". During my secondment I looked "below the bonnet" of Flash and learnt how it worked. I even dabbled with the alien world of ActionScript that Flash used.

When my secondment ended I drifted away from Flash and Actionscript, as I had other things to concentrate on (earning enough to pay a mortgage being the main interest!). Now I'm wishing I hadn't as I am "looking below the bonnet" of 2DIY, and that allows limited Actionscript to be included to enhance the activities created.

With the help of @2SimpleKatie I have some Actionscript that I can use, and I've been fiddling all day making things happen, but I have forgotten so much. I need to relearn everything I once knew. It's time to pull out the old Actionscript tutorials, search the web and get reading. I can see late nights looming.

The World in my Hands

Yesterday I had reason to travel to London, and the iPhone, with its iPod and its apps, came into it's own during my trip. On the drive down to Luton Parkway station I had it on the charger acting as a sat-nav unit through the google maps app. Setting a start and destination point, then using the GPS feature, it tracked my journey along the purple route (ok, so it didn't talk to me, but who needs that).

At Luton Parkway the MyRailLite app gave me all the info on the trains arriving and departing, making sure I was ready for the service to St Pancras.

Once in the capital a quick tube ride left me needing to cover the last 10 minutes on foot, and once again Google Maps and GPS showed me where I was and the route to my destination.

Vicinity told me the nearest drinking establishments to my location :-)

On the train back to Luton Parkway the game Labyrinth kept the wife entertained, and I used Stanza to read part of an ebook.

Of course throughout the day I was also able to check my email, and leave tweets on twitter through the tweetie app. And on the car journey back we listened to music through the iPod side of the phone. Oh, and I did make one phone call too!  All achieved through one small hand-held device. Not bad at all.

Conference Completed

That's it, my talk to Derby City ICT coordinators is over. It had some hair raising moments - no access to the presentation blog I was using or the school website made me panic to begin with. Fortunately it was all sorted before I took to the projector so no one knew (although reading this anyone there will now know!)

If you want to see the presentation, you can! It's here;

Peachy News

In this post, I mentioned Photopeach, and my only reservation with the service - the lack of moderation over comments. Today I received an email reply from the company;

Dear Simon, 
Thank you very much for using PhotoPeach. I watched your spiral show of old school photos [here]. It is very interesting! As for your question regarding to comment, we will publish very soon the new function which allows users to delete comments. Your concern that you have to avoid any inappropriate comments as a school is very reasonable. Please wait for us for a few hours. Thank you again for your feedback.

It's worth contacting companies sometimes if you get postive feedback like this, especially when you look on the Photopeach website later and see this;

Note the small dustbin to the right of each comment line - instant deletion of any comment.

Animoto and iPhone

My big annoyance with the iPhone is that lack of Flash support. This means that all the great animoto videos we create for school cannot be seen on an iPhone. Until now that is. I think I've found a way around it.

I accidently clicked on an animoto "your video is ready" email whilst using the iPhone, and as a result the animoto iphone app opened. This asked me whether I wanted to download and play the full length movie - naturally I agreed and I was watching a three and half minute creation on my iPhone.

Up until now I have only been able to watch the short self made "on iphone" movies of 16 images. This opens up a whole new prospect of all the school animations being viewable by iPhone users. I have added a small graphic below where the flash movie displays - that should appear on iphones - and I am testing this further to see whether it really does work.

A peach of an idea

Thanks to @mbarrow who tweeted me about the excellent photopeach photo album website. It takes your photos (either uploaded directly from your computer, or from an online servce like Flickr), lets you add a soundtrack of their choice, and then produces two types of album. A slideshow, or (as you can see in the image below showing photos of the history of the school for our centenary) a spiral album that slowly dances its way up through your photos.

The only issue I have with this, and I've contacted the company to ask them, is whether comments can be moderated before appearing at the end of the slideshow (although they do not appear in the spiral display). When I have a reply, I'll post it here and tweet it too.

Do teachers have rights?

In the current credit crunch everyone is watching the pennies, and that is what makes Leicestershire County Councils recent letter to teachers even more infuriating. With the weather causing schools to close - often because teachers cannot physically get to the school from their homes - the county council has seen it justifiable to send out a letter stating that "failure to attend work without making reasonable efforts should result in employees being expected to take unpaid leave or make the time up". 

So now staff are forced into the situation of putting their own health and safety second, because they are concerned about having a paycut.

What happens then when the teacher crashes their car on the way to work? Will the County Council pay the cost of repair? I bet not. And what if a teacher ends up with a broken limb and off work for weeks because of a fall trying to get to work. The County Council would then be paying for supply cover whilst the teacher recovers. 

Just why do us teachers get treated like this? 

BBC report here