i see tea

I kindle miPad

I have a kindle reader and an iPad with kindle app installed. I like both but don’t use my kindle much. A few of my colleagues have adopted the kindle with gusto, finding the price and the aesthetic and the new method of this reading platform appealing.

I bought a book t’other day and have read it only on the iPad over the bank holiday weekend. It has been a pleasure. I turned the brightness settings down and the background to ivory rather than white to make it easier on the eye. With these settings it has been ideal for me to read in bed, indoors or in the sunny garden (with brightness turned up to max). All good in the ever-increasing circles of finding the tech that suits you.

At the moment, that is a MacBook Pro, an iPhone and an iPad. Still I have the desire to get some non-Apple devices in my life. Most likely contender is the Google Chromium laptop being trawled around the Google community of late (I’m still waiting for my freebie from Google if they ever decide a UK user might enrich their testing process). If I am to buy it, it will depend on availability and usefulness when the time comes. For clarity, my iDevices are both jail-broken affording that extra bit of functionality provided outside of Apple’s app store.

I’ll hang on to my kindle for now because undoubtedly a member of my bookworm family will at some point want to give it a go. But it’s redundant at the moment. I’ve thought about offering it on loan to teachers in my school so they can get a feel for it themselves. Probably a good idea. Buy them a book they want to read and hand it over for a couple of weeks. Maybe the school should buy one or two for this purpose.

The reason I’m chirping about this is because I felt I had too many devices. All getting a bit over the top even for a pseudo-geek like me.

Facebook: should schools report underage accounts?

As the Head of ICT and a Year 8 tutor (12-13 yr olds), I regularly get called upon to investigate inappropriate Facebook activity by pupils who are not legally allowed to have a Facebook account because they are underage.

Listening to Luke DeLaney at Learning Without Frontiers in January 2011 (pictured here), he was quite clear that his organisation want to know about underage use of their social networking platform. Once they identify an underage user they have software that trawls that persons account and identifies other potentially underage users. They will delete the accounts, parental permission or not. I have no evidence this works as he claimed.

So, I am aware that many young people (under 13 years old) have accounts. Should we as a school report them? Yes, of course, and, we do. It is not our choice. However, there is a wider issue at play here. As we become aware of, and if we report and successfully get these accounts deleted, the users will probably make another account and we will effectively be driving their social networking underground. This is not a good thing. How can we guide and nurture our youngsters in the perils of social networking if they are doing it behind closed doors? It is surely best to talk about the elephant in the room.

On the other hand, if we start to delete (not deactivate) accounts as they are brought to our attention, surely we are serving the individuals concerned in the long run? If inappropriate behaviour (usually name-calling or bullying of some sort) is dealt with strictly then we will set a precedent. Pupils will become more cautious about their postings online because, should somebody else secretly divulge the content to a teacher, they will have their account deleted without being told about it. I imagine, over time, this would manifest into a more appropriate use of the sites even for those underage users. Another big reason to hold a firm line on this is because Facebook has two levels of age-appropriate accounts. Under-eighteens have a different account to adults. When lying about their age, pupils will often make themselves several years older than they are which puts them into the adult account long before they are eighteen.

Surely, as teachers, it is our responsibility to do this by the book? What do you do?

FUD: myths about Google Apps for Education

There are some who worry about GAfE. They often do not use the suite of apps. Should you be interested in understanding the myths that are written and said about Google Apps, read this blog post: http://henrythiele.blogspot.com/2010/11/roadblocks-in-deploying-google-apps-fud.html

Google Apps, for me, provide an essential part of working online because they draw together lots of services. We need to be careful about our data and relying on one monolithic organisation but Google provides a superb service and an amazingly useful and usable set of collaborative tools. They are not perfect but they are brilliant.

What do we want from school technology? Dear Santa.

Having read @jamesmichie‘s post Beware Walled Garden’s Part 1, I was unable not to comment.

I am currently writing the review of my school’s ICT strategic plan and aiming to incorporate some ambitious yet simple milestones that might underpin my belief that schools must embrace managed systems and not (please, no, never) locked down systems. OFSTED agree via research they did in 2007. A locked down system is one whereby the ICT team prevent every possible bad action they can from happening by locking the user out of specific functionality. This is backed up with arguments of risk. But I am yet to see proper risk assessment done. Please let me know if you know where there is any.

Dear Santa, in my model of school technology I would like a system that provides every user with a place they can locate their learning stuff. Help them to find and connect to each other within school and in all places they might be learning on the web. It must be in control of the teacher on one hand, and in the control of the pupil on the other. It must facilitate innovative methods of working and learning. Nothing should be excluded by default.

Yours, Dai

PS You are free to leave your comments!

BBC News School Report 2011

A long day making this and I learnt a lot. Detailed post to follow later. Please say which bits you like best in the comments? Thanks.