drew.burrett

In a lot of ways too.

Its been a long time since I last blogged anything.

Its been a long time waiting for Glow to come into being in my locality. Its early days yet, but so far (ignoring niggles over functionality) I’m really impressed. Let’s see how the big, whole staff roll-out goes on Tuesday….

Its been a long time since I embarked on a project before carefully considering the possibilities – like setting up a National Glow Group for Physics Teachers. Luckily there were a few other like minded souls ready to share the task.

However, this gave rise to an unexpectedly venomous backlash against the group’s existence, those involved in it and Glow as an entity in general.

It seems that the act of creating a group to help teachers share ideas, interests and resources has more than a few of the physics teaching community up in arms. Glow has been described as ‘exclusive’ as access is strictly controlled to registered users; ‘obstructive’ as Glow’s structure allows users less freedom to grow their sites incorporating new features and techniques; and ‘divisive’ as not all teachers and authorities have access, nor do private schools or FE colleges.

Some physics teachers are demanding that the Institute of Physics (IOP) set up an open access forum in a similar vein. One especially vehement individual urged others to join him in starting a campaign of “SAY NO TO GLOW!”

Another solution was sought by Nick Hood – he has created a wiki (teachingphysics.pbwiki.com). This, like all wikis is open to all, and can be edited by any or all of its registered users (including me).

Both the wiki and the Glow group are in their early infancy, but will grow and evolve over time, possibly catering to different audiences (especially while Glow access is denied to some by their Local Authorities). But surely the fact that some people are doing something to allow colleagues to share, can’t be anything other than good, can it? I understand the anger of those excluded form Glow, but that issue is not with Glow, rather the Local Authorities who are denying their staff, pupils and parents access to this potentially revolutionary facility. By setting up National Glow Groups and using these to share throughout the country, surely we’re provideing those who have been excluded with more evidence of Glow’s worth, giving them a stronger position from which to argue for their authoirites to get on board.

It was supposed to be so easy…….

Finish up the S2 ‘Food & Digestion’ unit with a few problem solving tasks, a bit of ‘cross curricular’ with hints of ICT, Home Economics and Modern Studies, all wrapped up in some of the CfE capacities.

And then WebSense ruined it all.

Task 1 -

We wanted to find the price per kilo of some staple foods – potatoes, rice, chicken etc – to decide what you’d be able to afford to eat if you were on a low income, in say India, or a high income, in the USA , then discuss the relative benefits and drawbacks of each diet.

None of the sites that could have given me the cost of spuds could be viewed – every supermarket and price comparison site in the UK was blocked.

Now, I should point out that I wasn’t trying to buy a fridge, book a holiday or get a bargain on eBay. I was trying to find information that I needed to teach a lesson. To children. In a school. Apart from the obvious learning outcomes they’d have also been made aware that such useful tools exist on the web.

In the end we fudged it a bit and made up the prices, eventually getting to the end of the task despite the obstacles placed in our way.

Task 2 -

Use the laptops to tryout some revision websites – BBC Bitesize and skoool.co.uk.

By this point I should have known better, but hope springs eternal….

Half the pupils were fine, logged on, looked at the sites, watched the animations and did the quizzes – SUCCESS!

Not so for the other half, for whom WebSense had another surprise. It seems if pupils (I’m not sure about staff) attempt to view ‘too many’ blocked sites, WebSense blocks their access to ALL sites.

How are pupils supposed to  avoid trying to view blocked sites if they don’t know they’re blocked? Surely ALL pupils will eventually be blocked if this is how WebSense is going to work the system?

This reduced my lesson to an utter shambles, from what I’d thought was a pretty promising plan. It’s anyone’s guess what an inspector would have thought if they’d seen it. And it has finally crushed any will I had to incorporate more of this stuff into my teaching.

I know I may have been naive not to have tried the price finding task first and come up with a contingency, but should I now assume that half of my class will be disallowed from viewing ANY internet content and plan accordingly?

I’m no longer confident to integrate such tasks into my lessons – the barriers are too great and the returns too small. I used to get a real kick out of things like this just working – the pupils seemed to like it too.

Congratulations WebSense, you win.

I’d love to be able to answer that question, but unfortunately my home PC is under spec’ed to do it justice – graphics card not up to the job of rendering the terabytes of images.

Nor is my school machine – lovely MacPCBookWinProXP – able to do it justice, simply because Websense will not allow it access to the internet.

I was quite excited by the announcement of the release of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope, as I hoped it’d make for some interesting ‘find out for yourself’ collaborative Web 2.0 work for the kids as part of our up coming ‘Space’ topic.

Alas, Websense feels it is unsafe to allow such programs (and Google Earth, Stellarium etc) to be used in the education of children. This piece of software is slowly crushing my enthusiasm for incorporating ICT into my teaching.

[I had to laugh when I saw Websense's corporate website - where they are selling themselves as 'Integrated Security for the Web 2.0 world]

Andrew Brown made an interesting observation on his blog regarding filtering – www.whereisab.co.uk

I wish there were some trust in the professionalism of teachers, rather than a blanket ban on everything until its proven to be’safe’. In the meantime, I’m thinking of abandoning any attempt at using ICT and going back to chalk.

At last, we’ve moved in to the new Hermitage Academy, and it is a truly fantastic place to be.

As well a first class building, we have loads of cracking ICT – Smartboards, Promethean boards and E-beams all over the place; a new campus-wide wireless network, with very fast links to file servers and ‘Click & Go’ that loads and updates in no time at all (no, honest!).

In addition, we also got a new warp-speed broadband connection – part of the Pathfinder initiative – running at about 32Mbps!!! Sites come up amazingly quickly -but only if they come up.

We’ve now changed from IGear to Websense, and I now appreciate what everyone was saying all along. It has raised the level of filtering from ‘exceptionally cautious’ to ‘utterly paranoid’.

Amongst the sites blocked today were the Institute of Physics Archive – blocked as an ‘educational institution’, and SCHOLAR (Heriot Watt University’s excellent VLE for S5 & 6 pupils) – which was ‘uncategorised’. Oh, and the web site for ‘Click & Go’ that we use to register using PDA’s in some areas of the school. And this blog.

Whilst I recognise the need for school pupils to be protected from inappropriate content online, surely we should be allowed to see something online?

This blog threw up another slant -

http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2008/01/websenseless.html

I’m sure there must be positives to using Websense, please feel free to let me know about them and add a comment below.

Like youtube, but for teachers, and accessible through the school filtering! (for now)

http://www.teachertube.com/index.php

A bit of ICT, but not for class work. As mentioned in the last post, I did a wee abseil thing for CHSS at the Falkirk Wheel.

My family came along in support (to see Daddy not fall) and my wife kindly shot some video. As a first effort at using Windows Movie Maker I think I did ok.

To share with far flung friends I posted it on youtube -

I know this blog is for logging my use of ICT, not self publicity, but as noted in my last post there’s not been much scope for getting much new stuff done of late.

In an entirely unrelated vein I have signed up to do a small charity thing, jumping off this…

I’m doing a sponsored abseil for Chest, Heart, Stroke Scotland. See the link below.

http://new.acefundraising.org.uk/events/falkirkwheel/index.php

Any donations to the fund will be gratefully accepted.

Been back at school for three weeks now, give or take, with a new (completely full) timetable, Argyll & Bute’s ICT in Secondary program looming, Captivate 3 to play with, SETT coming up, a few training opportunities in the pipeline and a move to the new school on the horizon for Feb 2008.

Yet to find a moment to do anything except teach so far, but will start posting new bits and bobs as soon as I get a minute….

I found this by accident whilst mindlessly surfing -

SUPER HERO QUIZ

I’m not at all sure of its accuracy, but do try it – apparently this is me….

You are – Iron Man

Iron Man 85% Spider-Man 80% Green Lantern 70% Batman 65% Hulk 60% The Flash 60% Catwoman 50% Supergirl 50% Superman 45% Robin 35% Wonder Woman 30%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Having dipped my toe into producing quizzes for my subject using Captivate 2 (thanks to Andrew Brown for his tutorials), I recently received details allowing me access to the authority’s Breeze server.

I’ve now made a couple of quizzes using the Breeze plug-in (for which Andrew has promised tutorials in the near future), and it seems to work in a very similar way to Captivate 2 in terms of its quiz making facility at least.

If I had to express a preference, all be it after only limited use, it would be for Captivate 2 over Breeze.

I’m sure that the majority of my colleagues would prefer the familiarity of the PowerPoint front end, and therefore prefer Breeze, but I found it very frustrating not to be able to format the slides as easily as with Captivate. Any attempt to adjust the formatting of a slide in Breeze seemed to make it fail to function entirely once the quiz was published to  an .swf file.

Captivate 2 allows much more flexiblity, it’s easy to place images into, other than as background, has a much simpler branching facitity and seems to publish quizzes with significantly fewer associated files.

These are only first impressions of using the two packages, and I’m sure that many of these issues can be over come.  However, it seems likely to me that less confident users  might be put off using Breeze if their end results are not as desired, or cannot be rejigged easily to make them so.

A bug-bear with both packages is the way quizzes are scored. Each question can be allocated a number of points – e.g a matching task with four options might be given four points. If the answer is correct, obviously all four points are scored, but only one error results in the entire answer being treated as being wrong, and consequently no points are awarded.

Pupils getting a bit of every question slide wrong, but getting the majority correct would, by this arrangement, be awarded no points for the entire quiz. A little demotivating surely?

Having said all of this, I’m quite prepared that in all likelihood this has transpired due to my lack of knowledge and ability in setting up the quizzes correctly, and that there is a way to overcome this.

As usual, any advice, comments or criticism will be gratefully received.