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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There may well be a social networking site growth equivalent of Moore’s law, but if there is I am not aware of it. That said, new sites are popping up with increasing frequency and trying to keep them all in sync is becoming hard work.

I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google for things like Wave – probably not untypical of many other people.

The difficulty for me has been keeping this various services up-to-date with the current state of my address book as I gain new contacts.

In order to do this, and keep both my work and home Exchange calendars in sync, I make use of Plaxo, Yahoo and Soocial. The diagram documents the relationship between them, with a Plaxo agent running for each Exchange account I have, and Plaxo ‘cloud’ talking to Yahoo and keeping that in sync.

Yahoo is then simply used as a conduit to feed the other services, as for some reason each of them has really good interoperability with it but not Google. Google is a bit more of a pain and has to go via Soocial to receive updates.

Periodically looking for people in the various services is now much easier with no exporting to CSV. The downside: Plaxo costs money but in my opinion it is worth the annual fee.

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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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Ok, well maybe it wasn’t GParted but the evidence is reasonably conclusive.

I have been playing around with various Linux distros recently, namely Jolicloud and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, wiping and reinstalling as necessary. All of this is on a Dell Mini 10v with a 160Gb drive, with 60Gb given over to Windows 7 and the rest to Linux.

A couple of weeks ago - having made a change using GParted - I rebooted, only to find that Grub was refusing to play ball any more. No big deal I thought, I will just boot from a recovery CD and sort things out. And there it was, my 160Gb drive was now a 60Gb drive with the drive geometry reporting to the Dell BIOS the new size - exactly the same as the NTFS partition.

After a bit of research I stumbled upon HDAT2 and download the bootable image. Having booted from this I was able to turn off the HPA and the full drive size was visible again.

The moral of this story? Not sure if there is one, but maybe I should stop messing around with partitions and use VirtualBox or some of the other options available.

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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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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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Since the beginning of this month when an official Windows 7 upgrade chart become available, there has been much criticism online of how restrictive the in-place options are, and how complex the chart is - Ed Bott and Nilay Patel are two such examples. In fact Ed from ZDNet has put together a much simpler version of the chart with slightly less custom install boxes showing, but I can’t get overly exited about the original – it clearly helps someone with version X of Windows get to their desired version of Windows 7 without too much digging through the wealth of information.

Nilay says that “if you're still on XP or you're trying to do anything out of the ordinary you'd better get ready for some pain”. I disagree. Let’s think about the scenarios here for a moment.

According to current statistics, 73% of computers are running Windows XP, with 18% running Windows Vista. On the face of it that is bad news for anyone looking for a painless upgrade, but I suspect that the reality is slightly different.

- a significant proportion of those XP computers will be corporate and no corporate IT department is going to realistically look at upgrading on a machine by machine basis – they will utilise whatever deployment tools they have for mass imaging so the fact that the machine was running XP is immaterial.

- a large number of consumers with Windows XP are quite happy – I know, I talk to them - they just bought a computer to get online / word process / whatever and are not bothered about the latest and greatest. Sometimes we technophiles lose sight of actual reality with our ever present desire to upgrade. Their upgrade will come when the computer dies and they buy a new one.

- lastly we are left with those that bought a machine with Vista, downgraded and are now wondering about how to get to Windows 7 without the pain.

Painless upgrade

Being a TechNet Plus subscriber I have of course downloaded and installed Windows 7 and upgrading from XP on a test computer took around 10 minutes of my time. No need to wipe the drives and start from fresh, just grab a Windows Vista Anytime Upgrade DVD and upgrade to a version of Vista (I recommend installing the most limited version you can get away with) without the need for a licence key.

This won’t be a quick process, but at the same time you won’t have to be present for most of the time.

Once XP has upgraded to Vista, repeat the process with the Windows 7 DVD and et voilà – XP upgraded to Windows 7 complete with all compatible applications and your personal settings. Not really a painful process.

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The BBC has an interesting article (The problem with PowerPoint) providing commentary on the 25th anniversary of the launch of PowerPoint. Most of us will recognise the types of presentations mentioned and know people who try and cram War and Peace onto each slide (or is that just schools?).

I am currently reading slide:ology by Nancy Duarte and Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson, two books which together form an excellent toolkit for improving our presentations. Duarte’s book is really inspiring me to throw away some of the previous ideas I had on presentation design – expect to see very different slides from me in the future – enhanced use of vibrant colours and photography. Amazon reviewer Karen Thurman sums it up well - “Beyond Bullet Points will give you the structure, Slide:ology will stimulate your creative ideas.”

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