There has been a sudden rush of teachers protecting their tweets for a number of reasons, and it’s worthy of considerable thought before making a decision.

Advantages of protecting tweets:

Only people I approve can read what I am saying.

Recently two pupils from school have followed me, and I have blocked them both. One of those pupils is clearly still reading my tweets (presumably from the website – twitter.com/mwclarkson) and keeps dropping hints to that effect. I have had discussions with the pupil about why I have blocked them and about whether it is appropriate for them to be reading my tweets. I have to accept, though, that there is nothing I can do to stop him.

People who do use the website to follow me only ever see my half of the conversation, with absolutely no context whatsoever. If tweets are protected it limits that very one-sided view.

I don’t know who’s watching. If readers have to be followers then there is some accountability. It’s not impossible for someone to use a false name, but creating a persona, gathering followers and making a ‘real’ account is a hell of a leap for someone who just wants to see what I’m up to.

I don’t have to worry quite so much about what I say. I’ll still be posting in a technically open forum – my posts can be retweeted and some of my exisiting followers may be some of those I am trying to isolate myself from by protecting tweets.

Advantages of an open system:

Anyone can read my tweets. As a point of principle, I like that. I’m not ashamed of what I have to say and hope that a wide range of people would find it useful.

When I get followed, I like to look at that person’s tweets before making a decision to follow or not. This means that I might lose out on potentially valuable additions to my network.

As I said at the start, a number of teachers have protected their tweets recently. And I confess that I thought this was largely a knee-jerk reaction to a certain Scottish news story. I dislike knee-jerk reactions, often do the polar opposite indefiance and left mine open as a statement of “Look, it’s fine. I’m confident that what I am doing is right”. Now the knee-jerk reaction has died down I’m haveing a serious think.

I haven’t made a decision as yet, but it is a serious concern. Where will stand if I do end up in front of the governors? I don’t think I’ve done/said anything wrong but will those that don’t understand Twitter agree with me? Will my union back me up?

The same argument applies with my blog and my TES postings. Hopefully my blog is more carefully considered than my tweets (as that’s the point of it). I initially started both under a pseudonym that has been repeatedly worn away to the point that I swapped out the ‘HH’ references for ‘mwclarkson’ in the About page, above.

So if my tweets do become protected, at least you know why – and that I’ve considered it carefully.

Well, today was the day of the much anticipated (by me, at any rate) Achievement Show 2009. An early start, a reasonable train journey (2.5 hours) and a brisk walk (the recommended Tube station bringing me out at exactly the opposite side of the stadium to the only available entrance) and I was in.

Having never been to this type of conference before I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There were 10 or so exhibitors’ stalls, a round room made of cardboard with no roof for the smaller and more frequent talks and 10 other ‘zones’ (rooms) for larger and longer talks.

I watched a couple in the round room and was relieved that it was a relatively small room with around 50 chairs, but the noise level was awful. The first speaker had to get half way through his talk before being provided with a radio mic and the sound stopped dead halfway through the room as the only speakers were at the very front.

I bumped into a couple of twitterers (@mikeherrity and @gideonwilliams, in strictly chronological order of meetings) and delivered my presentation at around 14:20 (so only 20 minutes behind schedule). The presentation went well and was packed out (standing room only by the end), if rushed (although I think that suited the style of the presentation anyway and I certainly can talk!). I saw quite a few people scribbling like mad as I romped through the tools in the presentation and hope that a few people caught my website address and email at the end.

Overall I have to say I was a little disappointed by the rest of the show. There were a couple of talks that made me think (using e-book readers, annotation and authoring packages, Learning Platforms, creating podcasts/videos for revision) but nothing really new and a lot of the talks were clearly sales pitches (am hoping that Thursday night’s TeachMeetNE will be quite different). Also, the ‘Speaker’s Corner’ to which we were apparently to retire could not have been further from where we were talking without being outside the stadium.

A lot of the more major talks were centered on leadership, Maths, English, Science or Diplomas – none of which are immediately relevant to me.

I did talk to some nice people from Channel 4 Learning who were trying to sell a subscription to their service (just £5k for the first year!) and must get around to FINALLY trying the Yenka sequencing application. And I did get a day off timetable.

I think that (without wanting to sound arrogant) I am spending a lot of my time talking to innovative people trying lots of exciting things, and as such, the topics that make it to conferences like that seem a little stale in comparison. I’m not in SLT, I don’t use Sharepoint and I don’t want to spend several thousands on a whole school resource (I do think that a significant proportion of those there were Assistant or Deputy Heads).

Or maybe I’m just a miserable git.

I did enjoy myself though

They looked at where each person was born (I gather there was a quite a diverse mix of cultures), what they had for breakfast and much more besides.

I thought the idea sounded fantastic, and after a bit of a natter with Andy Wallis (one of many forward thinking educators form the isle of Islay – it must be something in the water up there) I think it could be a really powerful idea worth stealing.

We could create a wiki, with 1 page per interviewee, embed/mashup with Google Maps, potentially use the data during topics on data handling at KS3 and potentially even try to convince other schools to do the same and compare data.

My main issues with the project are:

• As a curriculum task it’s extremely large.
  Working with 20 mixed ability students, all with varying degrees of interest would make this project very difficult to manage and sustain.
• Child Protection
  The nature of the project is such that students would be required to approach strangers to interview. Now actually I’m not that cyncical that I think it would be particularly dangerous. Most of our students are relatively streetwise and most of th elocal populous are pretty decent people. The students whose idea I am borrowing were working in (I think) Hounslow which (at the risk of a sweeping generalisation) sounds more potentially risky than a quiet and fairly well-off area of North East England.
• Treading on toes
  If I’m going to run this as an extra-curricular project then I’ll need to attract a group of students, and it would only be fair to describe this as a ‘digital media’ project. This would present an overlap with our Drama/Media department and I need to be careful about treading on toes. I don;t think anyone down there would actually object or be put out but it is something that I need to bear in mind.
• I have enough to do!
  [Skip list of jobs I'mdoing beyond the bare minimum - don't want to imply I'm doing more than everybody else]. Do I need / do I have time to really commit to another extra curricular group, one that would take up a lot of time and effort?

You might think after reading that curmudgeonly list that I’m not going to run the club, but of course the idea of a Digital Media club sounds brilliant. We can look at podcasting, video editing, wikis, blogs, image editing, all sorts of topics that really interest me – and with (hopefully) a very interested and enthusiastic bunch of students.

I’ve a horrible feeling I might just do it, you know…

• spent an entire day signing every pupil in the school up to the World Maths Day website and collating the maths sets so that password can be distributed
• created Wordle quizzes based on the text from famous books for World Book Day, along with an online quiz using a Google Form which I still haven’t marked
• recorded around a dozen Moodle screencasts for my colleagues
• created resources for a Y9 options evening tomorrow
• set up an interactive (Google) calendar for the school website
• made a variety of subtle, but time consuming, alterations to the school website (you update an old logo and find the page it links to is subsequently out of date, and so you have to rewrite a whole page of text…)
• attempted to enter into negotiations with a major film studio over the use of 50 seconds of soundtrack
• co-created a wiki about copyright implications in education
• installed, edited, tweaked, hacked, advertised, recruited for and moderated a school-wide blog

And yesterday I decided that the visiting Cafe Scientifique visitor ought to be recorded and podcasted, rather than simply blogged about.

So here I sit, at 11:10pm, devising disclaimers for our guests to fill in, trying to work out whether I can use PodPress with a WPMU installation, worrying that the media tech returns the mixing desk tomorrow as promised – and I’ve yet to actually do any of the curriculum planning or marking that i need to get done for tomorrow.

Oh, and I had an idea today to gather some obsolete laptops and start a school Linux User Group.

I think I need a Time Turner…

¹ Of course I know why I do it. I love doing it!

Why run around trying to get the latest gossip from individual departments when you can get the puils to do it for you!?!

Over the weekend I put quite a lot of time into making a World Book Day Quiz using Wordle, Prezi and Google Forms. You use Prezi to view 15 word clouds based on the text from some popular books – you have to guess the title and author of each one and enter it into the Google Form so that I can collate (and examine the data with my Y9 as part of their database unit).

The other thing is that I’ve started a more school-friendly blog on the local WPMU installation. The aim there is to model an example blog for the pupils and also to share some of the appropriate ICT links and resources I stumble across. So I’m currently actively involved with 3 forums, 2 blogs, Twitter, Facebook and a weekly Flashmeeting with EdTechRoundup. Thank God I don’t have a full time job or kids, otherwise I’d never manage it all!

The Quiz

My school blog

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.

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.

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!

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.