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.

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.

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

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 -

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.

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….

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

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.

I have no idea how this happened, nor do I know how to restore the original post, so here is yesterday’s post again…… 

Bob, talented man that he is, has now come through with the installer for the Physics Illustrator toy software.

I tried several times to put it on my public bit of box.net and finally got there.

Click Here for the installer exe file

There were a few wee problems with the installation - mainly to do with Microsoft Journal Viewer not being installed on my system, but it seems to work just fine now.

Bob has added a few instructions concerning the fiddly bits into the installer, but if you have any problems let me know through the comments below and I’ll pass them on to Bob.

He sorted out all the fiddly bits with the Physics Illustrator and I’ve had a wee hour playing around with it.

It is brilliant! (Screenshots to follow - might try and grab some video with captivate)

Bob, who is a star by the way, is also working on making a .msi installer file for it which will be available from this blog soon.