I Should Be Marking

Two posts in an hour? Unprecedented. I would prefer to stagger them but that way I’d just not get round to writing everything down.

Well, my 3year old PowerBook (Mac laptop) was finally due for replacement and I have to say it’s done me proud. It’s happily kept up with a suite full of brand new Intel iMacs despite being built on the old PowerPC architecture. It stills beats my 6 month old desktop PC at home once I get more than two applications running simultaneously (and I quite often get well into double figures) but the Superdrive had gone, I’d replaced the hard drive once (down to 60GB which was perpetually full to burtsing), it’s taken a knock to one corner at some point in the past and it’s standard practice at work to replace every 3 years anyway.

And so to my new toy - a brand spanking 15″ MacBook Pro. Not the top of the line 17″ version - I couldn’t justify the expense and wouldn’t want a laptop that big anyway TBH. Externally it looks very similar but with a bigger trackpad, built in iSight camera and few scratches you can tell the difference if you stand them side by side. Leopard, the latest Mac operating system is everything Vista wishes it could have been. Some graphical and efficiency improvements but otherwise the same solid, reliable and effective OS I had been using previously.

Using Bootcamp I can boot into Windows for those essential high powered applications (Read: I could now play games if only I had the time!), Parallels allows me to run Windows within Leopard (so AQA Exampro, Teacher’s Report Assistant and Paint.net all work as well as IE for compatability testing) and I’ve even installed Ubuntu linux in Parallels as well (although, again, I’ve not had time to play with it yet).

Another issue is that I’ve changed my mind on browsers. I’ve been an Opera fanboy for a while now and never warmed to Safari, my new browser of choice. It’s slick, efficient, quick and the main reason I loved Opera - the ’speed dial’ - also works in Safari (well, the CMD-# keyboard shortcut for bookmarks does which amounts to the same thing AFAIC).

My biggest issue is still with online WYSIWYG editors. Moodle, Joomla, B2Evolution and Wordpress all of which I use regularly) come with WYSIWYG editors that just don’t work with either Safari or Opera. I’m forced to resort to Firefox in order to get line breaks working, or else hand code the HTML (which negates the whole point of a WYSIWYG editor in the first place).

It’s a small price to pay and only a minor inconvenience but overall I’m still a very happy bunny!

My Y11 marking went ages ago and my Sixth Form coursework was all done by the end of the weekend - so no more marking! Just a few revision classes to finish off for Y11 and my exam classes are all done.

Mrs. HH says she starts to like me again once I get past May as I return to being a normal human being. I wouldn’t go that far but I can already feel the relief setting in. Not a bad haul of coursework marks either, considering.

So for all those who have just, or have nearly finished their marking. Have a nice relaxing day/week/weekend from me (when you get there).

Nothing to do with education but it’s still worth a mention.

Now I don’t play many computer games these days - I just don’t have the time that most gsames require. For Portal, though, I made an exception.

Essentially a puzzle game the style is similar to a 3D shooter (it uses the Half Life engine and is made by the same people) but the only tool at your disposal is a ‘gun’ which can create two portals allowing you to reach otherwise inaccessable areas.  The most spectacular portions of the game occur when you have to dive from a great height through a portal in the floor, only to emerge from another portal sideways at great speed (conservation of momentum and all that). It’s hard to describe but fantastic (if headache inducing) fun.

The official 3D game also has a Flash based 2D version - so plenty of puzzles to enjoy. Warning - they’re both very addictive!

After 4 years of university and 2 years of teaching I finally caught a fleeting glimpse of that Work-Life Balance thing I’ve often heard people mention. I worked fairly hard for the first week, but then decided to leave it until the end of summer.

Halcyon days indeed, spur of the moment day trips with the family, whole 3s of days without using a computer  - a truly momentus few weeks.

And now back to the grind stone. In by half 7, out by half 5, fixed the CSS on the site, restarted the Podcasting, restarted the animation, new courses, new Schemes of Work, new names to remember (colleagues and pupils).

It’s good to be back, but the break (the first real relaxation in years) was well overdue. Long live summers!

There are quite a few things on the go at the moment.

Last year, as an NQT, I had no Year 11s at all. This year I had 3 classes totalling 8 hours a week. As a result I’ve had a very busy year, particularly as one of the Y11 groups was picked up from a departing colleague, but now I have a significant proportion of ‘gained time’. As well as this, next year we’re not formally running the AS Computing course which has meant that the department is slightly overstaffed. All this led to the department members being asked to organise some extra projects.

Then, one of the non-specialists was promoted to head of D&T and we managed to get enough bright kids to sign up to an AS Computing course to be run in free periods, so all of that free time seems to have been eaten up. And yet the projects remain.

So what am I doing? Well, I’m learning Flash with the aims of

• allowing me to teach Unit 10 of the A2 Applied ICT
• allowing me to create Flash based resources

I’m also in charge of updating around 1/3 of the KS3 SoW and replacing the  control activities previously run in Flowol with Scratch.

And finally I’m also in charge of implementing a new website for the school, but more about that in an upcoming post.

So the end result? Despite having all this ‘gained time’, and despite having to cram a lot of work over the last 10 months I’m actually more busy than ever.

And do you know what? I’m loving it. Getting to grips with new software, setting up new websites, getting the Podcast up and running finally. I wish it was like this all the year. In fact if it wasn;t for the kids, and their parents, this job would be perfect ;-p

Hiatus: noun: A gap or interruption in space, time, or continuity; a break

Well, as the more observant amongst you may have noticed it’s been a wee while since I’ve posted anything.

Between an incredibly hectic Easter break and the culmination of a series of particularly unpleasant family events I’ve found myself a little distracted.

Before I knew it a month had gone and then it seemed hard to get back into it.
It was only a conversation with another colleague today that made me realise
how much I ’ve missed the opportunity top vent, rationalise, discuss and all the
other stuff that blogging is good for.

So, 2 hours of cleaning up spam comments later (apologies if I’ve deleted any genuine ones) and I’m back. You can expect normal service to resume momentarily and plenty more inane witterings over the coming weeks and months.

You poor souls!

Edit: Apologies for the dodgy line breaks but my editor is playing up
and not wrapping properly.

One more day to go until the Easter break.

It’s been a helluva term, particularly the last few weeks. I was struck down with the obligatory ‘end-of-term-virus’ about halfway through this half-term and it’s knocked the bejeezus out of me frankly.  I’ve just been constantly knackered. Having 4 exam classes, all with piles of coursework to get through hasn’t helped (technically I have 5 but I can’t whinge too much about my solitary Computing student, bless).

My first week off I’m away to sunny Skegness (luckily I have a carefully crafted pseudonym that none of the readers of this blog should know about, so I’m comfortable that my posessions will remain safe until my return). No laptop, no coursework, exactly what I need.

Of course the second week I’m back in school for 2 days running booster sessions and coursework catchup, not to mention that gargantuan pile of coursework to be trawled through in time for the exam boards’ deadlines.

Still, I wouldn’t change jobs for the world.  There must be something seriously wong with me

I was going to have a moan about parents’ evenings today but actually last night wasn’t that bad. We only do meetings with tutors here which keeps the attendance up and means we don’t need the whole staff in 8 times a year.

I don’t hate parents’ evening but it does sometimes feel al little pointless. I inevitably feel like I’m wasting the time of certain parents as there’s very little to say that isn’t in the pupils’ report. And then you get the parents who say “Well that was a pretty good report” which was most definitely not the idea they were supposed to get.

Well, one more night to go and I’m done for another year (I’m just grateful I don’t have to talk to the parents of all 200 odd pupils that I teach ofr ICT).

One of my jobs this weekend was to get to grips with Quark Express. Having run through half of the basic tutorial before getting bored I made 2 different versions of a poster for IT careers. The plan is to make a series to decorate my classroom with.

Having had no real experience of ‘proper’ DTP (ie. not Amstead) I’d really appreciate any feedback.

Warning: The PDF download is 35MB (unzips to >130MB! I need to figure out how to compress the files a little aand my poor PowerBook was starting to struggle towards the end). The link expires in 1 week.

Alternatively click on the thumbnail to see a screenshot.

Has it really only been 2 weeks since my last post? It feels much longer…

Partly it’s been due to a heavy workload, but I’ve been a bit out of sorts lately. I had some bad news over Christmas and a close relative has been diagnosed with secondary Cancer and things aren’t looking too good.

I haven’t talked to many people about it and I’ve resisted posting about it thus far, however now I have a good excuse to.

Back in my Windows days I used to run a distributed programming project (think SETI@Home - a small number crunching program runs when your computer isn’t being used and sends the results back to the project organisers) aimed at proteome folding with a long term view to helping cure Cancer. I wasn’t aware of a similar solution for the Mac until I came across Boinc.

Boinc is an open-source, cross-platform solution for a variety of distributed programming projects. Anyone can donate spare computing time while their machines are sat idle. All you need to do is download the program and then attach yourself to a project (or more than 1 if you want to).

I’ve just put a post on the school blogs site asking people to install the software and donate their screensaver time to the Rosetta@home project which aims to help cure serious diseases such as HIV, malaria, Cancer and Alzheimer’s.

If you have a spare machine that you don’t turn off as often as you should, then why not make use of all those spare CPU cycles?