I Should Be Marking

I was, quite happily getting on with the usual Saturday morning work (reports to write, courseowrk to mark, but I’m spending all my time checking on forums, Facebook and Twitter) when I see a tweet from @mbarrow about a group of people doing something on some website – and there was a URL.

So I clicked away, and sure enough @teachernz has started a document on Etherpad for a number of teachers to explore (also present were @mrs_banjer & @scratchie). I described it as a streamlined wiki on speed. You only get one page and you can’t embed anything, but you get up to 8 people editing a live document simultaneously. No refusing to save because someone else is editing – you see what is happening live; each user having their own colourscheme so you can see who is adding/deleting/improving what.

I see huge potential for collaborative group work and the whole thing just seems to work very well.

It’s not perfect for a classroom situation – small group size, the ability to deface others’ work with ease, the lack of accountability as you can have the same colours as someone else, no logging in so someone could use a false name, etc. – but to solve those issues you would have to compromise somewhere else and you end up with a Wiki. Which is great for when you need one. And this is great when you need something else!

Edit: Clearly one of the issues is the lack of clarity over exactly who said what, to whom and when. As a result of which I now believe that @mbarrow started the document and not @teachernz. Either way, a great little web app and one I shall be returning to often, I feel.

This blog post, along with a whole range of discussions I’ve had of late led me to realise that simply tagging sites in Delicious was not going to be enough to let me find my favourite sites.

I was also dying for an excuse to play with Prezi – quite possibly the coolest presentatin tool I have ever seen.

So, I set up my screencast recorder and spent an hour⁽¹⁾ creating my first proper Prezi presentation. The plan was to include a compressed-time video of how I did it as well but Screenflow crashed. Harumph.

Please feed back with all of the wonderful sites I’ve missed – although I can promise to add only the ones I intend to use rather than attempting to keep a comprehensive list of everything out there!

⁽¹⁾ That’s about 10 minutes of adding content, 10 minutes of arranging and 40 minutes of faffing.

Edit: Very quick instructions for Prezi. Use the the ‘tab’ key or the right and left arrows to go forward and backward through the ’scripted’ order, but feel free to zoom (scroll wheel), examine (click on objects/hyperlinks) and explore by yourself too.

I was taught a valuable lesson this morning, one that I have extolled to pupils for several years.

Flashback to 2006 and a keen young⁽¹⁾ teacher obtains a 4-page website designed to mimic the log-in process for a popular high-street bank and ends with the message “Thank you for your details, we have now stolen all of your money”. The idea was, of course, to demonstrate to pupils the power and the nature of phishing. The data entered was not stored and I plonked it on one of the school servers in a sub-folder of a sub-folder where no-one would accidentally stumble across it.

Fast forward to late yesterday and the head receives a phone call from someone at said bank’s head office, concerned that the school is apparently hosting an illegal website designed to steal bank customers’ details for the purposes of committing fraud (as well as being in breach of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act and the Data Protection Act).

Oops!

Following some anxious moments for the Head, and the Head of Department (both of whom were concerned that the school webserver had apparently been accessed by nefarious characters) the story filtered down to my level and I had the unenviable task of ‘fessing up, lest the situation deteriorate even further.

As yet I’ve had no written warnings or men in bright yellow jackets and stab vests (or, indeed, dark suits and shades) come by for ‘a little chat’ but I’m nervously checking my shoulder regularly and I already have my escape plan organised.

If you don’t hear from me again, I’ll be hiding somewhere on the Spanish mainland.

⁽¹⁾ Well, artistic license perhaps, but I was younger then than I am now so that line stays.

Some of you may or may not have been following the Egglescliffe Student Blogs site (http://egglescliffeblogs.org.uk), which was powered with B2Evolution.

Following a fairly stagnant period, and then an EdTechRoundup session I’ve set up a Wordpress-mu site which is now live at the same URL – or at http://voyager.egglescliffe.org.uk/mwc/wpmu/wordpress-mu if you want the longer version.

I’ve taken the executive decision NOT to import the last couple of years’ worth of posts and to start again with a clean slate. If you still want to access the old posts then you can do so at http://voyager.egglescliffe.org.uk/mwc/b2e/blogs

There isn’t a huge amount there at the moment, but you can rest assured I’ll be plugging any relevant posts here as often as possible.

Another recent find for me is the online music provider Spotify.

Recently in the headlines because a small number of record companies have pulled out, I think, they offer the opportunity to listen to music online. A quick search provided me with Scarlatti, Handel, Faith No More, Jools Holland, Pop Will Eat Itself, Belle & Sebastian, Carter USM – but no Metallica or Beatles.

You need to register and download client (Win/Mac only AFAIK) and a world if music is available for free (with a short advert every 5 tracks or so – no worse than listening to commercial radio in the UK). You can pay £10 a month to remove the ads, or less for a 24 hour pass (for a party, maybe) but they don’t bother me so much and I’m tight

Not necessarily that educational, although it could lead to discussions on piracy, copyright law, changing distribution methods, etc… Or you could just use it for its own sake.

Chatterbox1607 on the TES forum said “I have been asked to look into technology which does not support learning well.” This got me to thinking – we have lots of discussion about useful technolgies, but if there was one thing you could improve/get rid ofthen what would it be?

And while we’re at it, which is the single most useful? It could be a device, a piece of software, a website – OOo, MS Office, Moodle, the concept of open-source… Which would you say is the single most important?

This is categorised this under rants but it’s really more of a moan. Feel free to skip it if you;re in a good mood

Where to start? On Wednesday the Head of Science asked me to put some stuff on the school website. I said fine and shoved the paper into my inside pocket – my rolling To-Do list. I had a free this morning where I planned to get the job done but my inside pocket was bare! Had a frantic search through classroom, staffroom, jacket, coat, bag – nothing. Not a fantastic start to the day.

Then our VLE (hosted internally) decided to stop working for students (but not staff). Bit of frantic running around, problem diagnosed as an internal firewall error – something to do with certificates.

Next I had my horrible Y10 class. We’ve been doing Unit 6 of iMedia, which involves small groups going out and filming. Their behaviour is so poor that I don’t feel I can trust them – twice I’ve had a group disappear for half an hour and I’m not about to jeopardise my career for them. I’m on my own so can’t have a second body supervising. HoD and I have a few ideas but until then we’re treading water.

Bumped into the Head next, and got a chewing out because a member of the dept. hadn’t completed some paperwork relating to KS3. As the KS3 ICT guy I bore the brunt of it. This got to me quite a lot, partly because I’m not used to being told off and partly because I’d been doing most of the Asst. HoD job for a while before my promotion. Since then I’ve carried on as normal, with the exception of being an NQT mentor. This was the first time it really hit home that I have more ‘buck stops here’ responsibilities – it’s less casual than it was. I’m not used to the idea of being a manager – but I guess I have to be.

At lunchtime my HoD reminded me I had a lesson observation after lunch and I had 15 minutes to write a lesson plan, prepare a presentation to guide through the lesson and get to registration. After the lesson I got quick feedback that said ‘fine, a grade 2 (very good), and to improve you need to watch during chalk/talk time – too many of the kids were turning back to fiddle with the computers’. Now that isn’t a bad observation, but you can guess which one of those three bits of feedback has stuck most. Not a bad thing, really, but it all adds up.

What else – after hours this week playing WPMU, setting up themes, hacking at the PHP, writing an AUP, etc. my HoD turns to me and says he thinks it would be better to just use the blogging features in Mahara.

A few other annoying things went on too and it all feels like it’s built into a fairly crappy day, all things considered. I did warn you this was going to be a whine.

Never mind, I stuck some beers in the fridge when I got home and they should be just about reay to drink by now.

Have been playing with WPMU all week, and I’ve cracked a lot of the issues I was having. I figured this time we would do it properly and have students signing an Acceptable Use Policy.

With a bit of help from School AUP 2.0, Bud the Teacher, and Rickypedia (as written by nstone) I’ve cobbled something together which I think should do a suitable job.

Feel free to feedback and also to borrow the content – here’s a PDF version and a Word version you can edit freely.

I had a great discussion on Sunday night with the people at EdTechRoundup all about Wordpress-MU (pronounced ‘Wordpress Mew’, like the sciencey term, or just ‘Emm Yew’).

WPMU (for short) is a package you can install on a webserver that will let you create a massive (or very small) number of blogs. Now I tried WPMU a few years ago on our school servers and I opted for B2Evolution instead as it looked more appropriate for what I wanted.

Having enjoyed the discussion I decided to have another crack at it and see how things went. I’m wanting to kick-start the school blogs which have been stagnant for a while now and this might be a good impetus, and a good time to make a switch.

So I spent a good bit fof time yesterday getting a basic install set up, playing with settings, adding plugins and trying to get it to do what I want. I wasn’t entirely successful with the last bit and now I’m in a quandry as to whether I shoudl stick with B2Evo or push on with WPMU.

What I want (in an ideal world):

• A small number of pupils (10-15) are signed on as official school bloggers using 5 blogs – Music, Drama, Sport, Library, Eggheads (maybe one or two more)
• All of those blogs feed into one ‘whole school’ blog with the audience being parents and the local community
• Each of my Y7 pupils gets their own blog to customise themselves (40 pupils)
• Those blogs feed into 2 class blogs (of 20 pupils each)

And the system would hopefully scale up from there in time.

My problems are thus:

• In WPMU I can’t get individual blogs to aggregate together. I’ve tried various combinations, the latest being BDPRSS which aggregates fine but won’t display as a page (a PICNIC issue with Exec-PHP I think)
• In B2Evo I can’t easily give pupils individual and customisable blogs

So which is more important? The individual ownership of the blogs, or the aggregation? I’m sure someone out there has ideal solutions for both – feedback please!

I was about to post about edtechroundup, but I’m going to leave it for a day or two now and write this instead.

When I first got into blogs I signed up to a load of RSS feeds, then some podcasts, then Facebook, now Twitter and so it goes on. You see the same names, faces and avatars and it can be quite intimidating. People seem to have ideas that you don’t quite understand, talk about things you;re not familiar with and there can be a real pressure to catch up. And trying to make sure you follow or sign up to the right sites (not missing anyone important out) can be exhausting.

Except that there isnt really any pressure – it’s all imaginary.

It reminds me of being back at school and feeling I had to keep up with my mates’ CD collections and following the latest bands (and the ‘right’ bands at that). Actually I’m much better off liking what I like and being done with it.

And that’s what all these social networking innovations should be. There shouldn’t be a pressure to use them all, or any specific one, or even ANY of them at all. And you shouldn’t be intimidated by people who’ve been doing it for longer than you. In my experience they are, without fail, the nicest and most welcoming people imaginable.

Yes, it can sometimes be like going to the pub with a new friend and all his old mates with back-stories and past histories, but it all sorts itself out quite quickly and if people do talk over your head then they are very willing to explain if you point that fact out.

I’ve been talking about Twitter since I signed up (less than a week ago and I’m already dependant on it) both on here and on the TES and I know that some people feel obliged to take it up and they’re not being professional if they don’t force themselves to try and follow this stuff. Now I would encourage the willing to give it a go, and for me the benefits are enormous, but no-one should feel they have to, and if that is your main motivation then I doubt you’ll stick around long or get the full use out of it.

So if you see this blog, and you think it’s another one of those teachers in that social networking clique then PLEASE try not to. I’m also a human being – lazy, forgetful, perpetually behind with marking – just like you! And I’m going to try to avoid being cliquey in my posts. Promise.