When I read the front page from the TES last Friday, I initially didn’t know which part of the story to take issue with first and would call into question the credibility of the reporting.

"The program, also known as spyware, has been installed on computers in schools up and down the country to keep tabs on what pupils are looking at online."

Really, spyware? This e-safety software is installed to protect the students and spyware is traditionally used to refer to maliciously installed software. Like many others I applaud schools and LAs who take the issue of e-safety seriously.

“A lot of teachers bring their work laptops home, but they have no idea that they are being monitored,” the source said. “More often than not these laptops are being used by the whole family, and a teenage son or daughter could be viewing all sorts of sites that are being monitored.”

Where to begin. On the one hand we have professionalism, as allowing a family member access to equipment that potentially contains data about students is absolutely reprehensible and should not be condoned in any way.

The other angle is that of the economy. In my family we have a number of teachers and associated educators and not one of them uses a school laptop for the social computing needs of their family. Given the tough economic situation that will be facing Directors of Children’s Services over the next few months, the notion of the public purse providing for the home computing needs of teachers is an anachronism.

Whilst NQTs earn less than the national average, a teacher in their third year is in line with the median (average salary source: ONS), therefore it does not seem inappropriate that they might be able to commit a few hundred pounds to purchasing a netbook in order to fulfil their Facebook needs. This would bring them into line with a large chunk of the  rest of society.

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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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We are just in the process of rolling out the SIMS Learning Gateway to the parents of 1700 students. If you assume the nuclear family as an average (some single, some triple reporting scenarios) then that is in the realm of 3500 parental logins that the school has to manage in order to comply with a DCSF September 2010 requirement. Given staffing levels it could end up being a challenge.

That sounds negative, but it isn’t intended to be as I think that giving parents ‘warts and all’ access to their child’s data will be a wakeup call to many and will, in the longer term, be part of a cultural change in the way that schools ‘inform’ parents – although I suspect that for many years schools will continue to produce reams of paper ‘just in case’.

What concerns me is that having each school handle the parental authentication seems to be slightly at odds with potential efficiency savings. In addition it is one more username and password to write on a piece of paper next to the computer, mainly due to the complexities of trying to remember so many of these in our digital age.

Stick with me whilst I lay out some key pieces of information;

• All students have Unique Pupil Number (UPN), and now a Unique Learner Number (ULN) *
• All adults have a National Insurance (NI) number – also unique
• The UK Government operates a Government Gateway service for individuals to access UK Government’s services

My solution to the problem would look something like this;

A parent would get a Government Gateway login (assuming they don’t already have one) which can be used for other UK Government online services. This would benefit not only the school in terms of reduced administration, but would drive the uptake of e-gov services in the UK.

DCSF (or whomever) would hold centrally a record of which NI (parent/guardian/carer) records are associated with a given UPN. Find a way of cascading that information down to a school MIS in an automated way and you have a solution to automatically cope with changes to legal relationships e.g. as a result of court proceedings. This central record would also hold the establishment number associated with a specific UPN.

When a parent logs into the Gateway they are presented with the information for all of the students they are ‘related’ to, irrespective of which school that child attends or which MIS system the school uses.

Of course, all of this is largely a utopian dream as big government IT projects invariably fail and even getting to where we are today with The Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) has been a challenge, but I don’t want to rehearse those arguments here.

Many be possible one day though.

* why we can’t just give children an NI number at birth and be done with all of the others forms of uniqueness is beyond me.

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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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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;

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Just catching up with the papers from this week, and on page 6 of the Education Guardian supplement on Tuesday 12th was the question “Is ICT more important than science?”.

Very balanced view from a headteacher, parent and pupil: ICT is a key skill and should be tightly integrated across the curriculum. All are concerned about home provision how the lack of it can be negative. Read the full article at guardian.co.uk

Although difficult with current budget levels, I feel that it is a duty of all governing bodies to ensure that their ICT provision is up to date and that money is not simply poured down a hardware black hole. Take stock of what your school has and look at how it can be used creatively across the curriculum. Sure, there are great opportunities with new technologies but don’t discount what is already there.

The main objective is to ensure that children leave school confident with technology as a whole, not specific applications. Consider open source – educators should come along to the Open Source Schools Unconference at the NCSL on July 20th to discuss open source in schools. The Leitch Review of Skills published in 2006 talks about a reduction in “employment opportunities for the unskilled” (pg. 19, para. 59), therefore there is an onus on schools to provide not only an academic grounding but core functional business skills to their learners.

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Last Friday I attended the launch event for the BCS Foundation Certificate in Green IT at their London offices. An interesting event setting out some of the practicalities of how the qualification will work, but more importantly the role that the BCS is taking in leading the drive towards Green IT.

Working in a school, my particular focus is on how we impact at the desktop level – no data centres to worry about; although server virtualisation is a distinct possibility. With over 700 devices, nearly 2000 students and a reach into the community of several thousand people we are ideally placed to be both part of the problem due to size, but ultimately part of the solution when it comes to education.

During the next few months I will begin planning an education programme for the local community much of which will be shared here. For the time being take a look at the Greening your IT workspace resource from the BCS.

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There seems to be a lot of discussion around school at the moment about visualizers, and the impact they have on learning and teaching. Whilst looking at the options available for use at school, I found huge disparities in the amounts that companies were looking to charge and functionality available. A good whitepaper is available from here.

The bigger question is knowing exactly what the teacher wants to visualize, and whether or not that may well be a more effective way of achieving it. This is where the Veho VMS-001 (pictured) comes in. Not a visualizer as most educators would understand it, but a fraction of the cost (£42 from Amazon.co.uk) and definitely suited to practical subjects such as Technology and the Sciences.

A colleague who teaches Biology showed me sweat forming on his finger, with perfect ridge detail for the fingerprint. Just like CSI.

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