As I wrote during January on the sch.ools.it site, I am exited about the Home Access programme and the whole nature of making inroads into closing the digital divide by providing low income families with equipment to support education at home.

Becta announced details of the latest 4 Home Access suppliers yesterday, taking to 10 the number of companies able to supply equipment under the scheme.

Having met with parents at St. Nicholas Priory Junior on Tuesday I know that there is genuine desire to access this equipment to support their child’s learning, and even the most cynical person cannot fail to be moved when hearing some of the success stories from earlier schemes. Back in September, Sprowston High School working of the Local Authority, provided a few EAL and Traveller students with laptops under the Home Access to Targeted Groups scheme (HATG) and they are making excellent use of them.

St. Nicholas has just completed the installation of a school wide wireless system to support the Home Access laptops (possibly up to 130 given Free School Meal indicators), as well as an additional 100 Dell Mini 10v that the Governors have approved the purchase of. Conversations with parents have been based around highlighting the benefit to the child if they use their Home Access money to purchase a laptop, as it can move between home and school.

The Uruguayan model

In October 2009, the BBC reported that the government of Uruguay was intent on providing every child with a One Laptop per Child (OLPC) device.

“The laptops have an open source Linux operating system with a user interface called Sugar. It has attracted some criticism from detractors for not being mainstream.”

This is perhaps the approach that Becta and UKgov should have taken. Far from scaling back the project as has happened (age range more limited than pilot, FSM eligibility outstrips available money and consequently devices), this would have been an ideal opportunity to work with a provider such as Canonical (Ubuntu) in order to put an Open Source operating system onto every machine. Costs would have reduced and more youngsters would have had access to a machine.

As schools, and UKgov, move to provide more and more services that are browser driven, then choice of operating system will become much less of an issue as the need to install software locally fades into distant memory. In fact, Google Docs can already provide offline access to edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets such provision is maintained at home even in a rural county such as Norfolk.

If you are reading this and interested in how Open Source software fits into education then I recommend looking at the Open Source Schools website.

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Just got myself a 3 MiFi unit to replace the older USB 3G dongle I have been using. I am not going to make this a fully fledged review as there are plenty of those available online, but I did just want to say a few words to sum up my initial experience with the unit.

The basics

The MiFi is a rebadged Huawei E5830 3G and wireless access point in one. The unit is charged through the USB mini socket, either with the supplied charger or when connected to a PC (although I understand from reading in a forum that it won’t charge whilst working) – it is also possible to change settings when tethered. Wireless SSID and WEP etc keys can also be changed when connected to a Windows PC (drawback for Linux/Mac(?) users), as can settings related to IP ranges and the like.

On the right of the unit are switches to control on/off, wireless and network connection. Pop a SIM card in and press those buttons in the right order and you are online. On the left is a MicroSD slot, although I have not actually read the manual yet (!?!) I suspect that when connected via USB it can be used as a storage device.

Cost is £69 on a PAYG deal, but ‘as a loyal customer’ I was able to get it for £2/month on top of my existing £5/month plan with a 12 month contract, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

In use

As someone who regularly flits between various operating systems and devices, often when out and about, the appeal of this device is a given. Although I have not used it extensively as yet, I can say that it worked well (or as well as 3UK does) on the train between Norwich and London the other evening, enabling a phone and laptop to share the same connection. Not having remember the 3G settings when installing a new Linux distro will be helpful, and the fact that this device operates in infrastructure mode (as opposed to ad-hoc on JoikuSpot for the Nokia phone) gives a better degree of compatibility with the iPod apparently.

I see a real benefit of technology like this as being when small groups are working together in a remote location and need to share an internet connection. Examples in education could be field trips where learners are out using wifi enabled devices during the day and need to upload files to their learning platform at the end of the day. Lots of devices recording offline geo-tagged video footage with qik.com will inspire some and strike fear into the hearts of others!

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Those of you who know me will know that I am no developer, so it was with a certain sense of achievement that I created my first ‘hello world’ piece in Visual C# yesterday*. That said, it was more functional than ‘hello world’ and is a very simple plug-in for Windows Live Writer enabling our non-technical staff to embed the Read More link into Joomla! without having to type

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each time. For those that have looked at this blog before you will also know that I have written about Joomla! and Live Writer previously.

The plug-in can be downloaded from live.com and should be copied into C:Program FilesWindows LiveWriterPlugins (or wherever Writer is installed) and is accessed from the Insert menu (see screenshot).

 

The plug-in has been tested to work with the metaWeblog XML-RPC API but does not work properly with others. I will set out why I think this is the case in the technical notes section…

* created with help. Many thanks to Scøtt Lovegrove for providing a great tutorial on how to go about this.

Background

The school where I work uses Joomla! for the school website, and we have been looking for a solution to enable our non-specialist staff members to update the site without getting overly burdened by the more technical aspects of what sits behind the page. As in many workplaces, Word is the default text processor but the Joomla editor doesn’t cope particularly well with stripping the Word code out of documents, whereas Live Writer does a good job of this. Live Writer also enables much easier placing of images and also the automation of their resizing – again important if the full range of image manipulation tools are not available. We have therefore decided to start using Live Writer as the Joomla! editor, coupled with the metaWeblog API from Justo Gonzalez de Rivera, thereby giving the users a reasonably consistent feel when compared with the software they are already used to.

The plug-in I developed yesterday fills a missing piece in terms of what can be done online vs. offline.

Technical notes

What I hadn’t fully appreciated until I began looking into this, is that Joomla! doesn’t actually store the

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code in the database. Instead it is there to tell the online editor to split the article between two different fields contained within the record in the jos_content table; with introtext storing everything above the readmore, fulltext for everything below.

The metaWeblog plug-in handles this correctly, but unfortunately the MovableType plugin doesn’t interpret it properly and therefore the whole article gets saved in introtext. The only remedy for this is to open, and resave, the article using the Joomla backend.

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This blog, and the underlying backend, is powered by the Joomla! content management system. One of the many strengths of Joomla! is that it is a highly extensible platform so this quick post aims to highlight the extensions I use. With the exception of the Azrul products, all of these extensions are provided free by the developers for which I thank them.

Front End

Blog – MyBlog and JomComment from Azrul

Back End

Sitemap (builds a dynamic sitemap for use with Google etc) - Xmap from Guillermo Vargas

Google Adsense – Google Adsense Module from W Z Creative Technology

PHP Module (allows PHP code to be embedded into a module position) – Joomla PHP Module from Fiji Web Design

Backup system - JoomlaPack from JoomlaPack

XML-RPC for blog posting – metaWeblog API from Justo Gonzalez de Rivera

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This summer the both Kate and I have been using the Dell Mini 10v in order to see how well it will fit into the classroom with a view to a large scale rollout at St. Nicholas Priory, as well as possibly making use at Sprowston Community High.

The St. Nicholas project is something that has been ongoing for a while, but the technology has just not been a good fit to date. There was an initial rush from schools to buy the Asus Eee PC when it came out, but we simply felt that the 7” screen, small keyboard and poor battery life just didn’t cut it. Things were looking up by January this year and the Microsoft Wall of Cool @ BETT gave a very good insight into the way things were moving with new technology.

Fast forward to July and we took receipt of a couple of Dell Mini 10v netbooks with extended batteries (£195 with 8Gb solid state drive, £230 with 160Gb hard disk). Kate has been using the standard Ubuntu installation, whereas I have used this machine to install Jolicloud, an alpha OS based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Jolicloud experience

Jolicloud describes itself as “a new operating system for netbooks. The OS provides a beautiful interface, an application directory and a set of social features that make it easy and fun to use.”

It sits as a conduit to many of the online services that we regularly use and gathers them together within the OS, with a dashboard available to install/uninstall the ‘applications’. Some of these are true apps, others merely shortcuts to cloud based services. However, move from one Jolicloud machine to another and your personal settings follow.

The fact that many of these cloud apps will fall foul of school based filtering is something of a distraction, as the technology that enables them to be easily added could be used to create school application sets containing Netmedia, Fronter, TrueTube, Learning Landscape for Schools etc.

Although shielded from the user, Jolicloud makes use of the standard Ubuntu repositories making it easy to add additional applications if desired. For example I always add in the ubuntustudio-video, ubuntustudio-graphics and ubuntu-restricted-extras packages when building a new machine.

Cloud in the classroom

Having installed and configured Jolicloud it was time to see how the Mini 10v works in real life. The default applications, combined with those that I had additionally installed gave me a pretty functional computers. OpenOffice.org as my Office replacement, and Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, Firefox etc for everything else – a well rounded package for the classroom. Jolicloud has an inbuilt update feature which is integrated into the dashboard taking care of both Jolicloud specific and general Linux updates.

The main considerations when evaluating the Mini 10v were battery life, screen display and keyboard size.

• Real world battery life is better than I had expected with in excess of 6 hours battery available between charges with ‘normal’ use – a real plus if this is going to be used throughout the school day.
• Screen is very clear and the 1024 x 600 panel gives plenty of space for making use of learning platforms. I was able to comfortably use Fronter without any problems.
• The keys are a good size, very responsive, and there appears to be no downside with trying to type an essay using this keyboard.

Not all good

You would be forgiven for thinking that this was going to end up being a rave review, but the touchpad is awful. Truly awful. I have found it virtually impossible to try and select and copy/paste – just far too sensitive. Solution is an external mouse, which in reality is probably more useful than the touchpad.

On balance I think that the technology has now matured to an extent that it will work well in the classroom and I am really looking forward to pushing these out during the next academic year.

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Yesterday was the first Open Source Schools Unconference at the NCSL in Nottingham. A very interesting day with lots of great discussions and networking, two very thought provoking keynote presentations (Graham Attwell and George Auckland) and breakout sessions covering a wide subject spectrum.

For those who are interested my slides are available to download from SlideShare (see below) and I have also made a backup of the conference tweets available to download.

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I have been thinking a lot recently about open source software (FOSS), and in particular the merits of adoption in schools. This seems to be a subject which leads to polarised debates – usually presented as being either for or against open source with nothing in-between.

Arguments against open source are in many cases presented by colleagues as “there is no company to turn to for fixes”, but at the same time those people are happy to run outdated versions of commericial software that now lack support. The development process for most popular open source is such that bug fixes and security updates are provided quickly.

Of course it is rarely as clear cut as for or against and we invariably work in a mixed economy with LAMP servers sitting in the background doing all of the work for web and other infrastructure functions with Microsoft products on the desktop.

My own background is one of commercial IT with a host of Microsoft and Apple certifications and therefore would be seen as a traditional proprietary supporter, but at the same time a big fan of Ubuntu and the way that it and other Linux distributions have made the whole notion of a turn key open source distribution a reality.

Topic for discussion

In order to try and reach a consensus within the education sector, I have proposed a session at the Open Source Schools Unconference 09 at the NCSL on July 20th. Full details about the session can be found here, but in essence I intend to address the following key questions;

How to effectively promote FOSS in the classroom.

Application vs. file format – which is more important? Personally I can’t get overly hung up on the application provided that the file format is open source and that there is competition between applications that make use of that format.

FOSS – more accessible at home? Benefit to students of being able to experiment at home with application types that the costs associated with proprietary software would prohibit.

Harmony in a ‘mixed economy’. How do we address some of the interoperability concerns raised when we start to work against the norm.

Skills vs. commericial opportunities. Do our students will need to know specific proprietary applications in order to be employable?

What are you waiting for 

If you haven’t already done so and can get to Nottingham on July 20th, then do sign up for the Unconference as promises to be an interesting day.

 

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