Electric Chalk

Here’s a wee Christmas present to all you struggling teachers.

Aaron, Electric Chalk’s web-wizard, has created a new resources directory site accessed form the tabs at the top of the page. Or here…

Blogging what we come across is fine but finding stuff later can be a bit of a mare so here we’ll be categorising everything for quick access along with links back to the post evaluating it.

Feel free to nominate links to appear in the directory. We’ll be moderating it to keep it clear of rubbish, mind.

Merry Christmas!

image: Christmas Cliche by Cayusa

Cards on the table: I don’t think so.

Fiona Miller in the Guardian this week says it better than I could.

I’ve worked in a large telecoms organisation with a very well run IT services team. The hoops that I had to jump through to justify the procurement and installation of something fairly standard (Macromedia Flash) were numerous and fiddly (fiddly hoops?).

Picture a teacher. She has just found an IT resource that will transform a difficult lesson but she’s only found it at the last minute. A school-based IT team is more likely to be negotiated into getting it installed at 24 hours notice than a outside provider with a central call centre working to a 2 week service level.

Make IT more complicated and less people will use it as a tool. Teaching’s hard enough as it is.

Well, top marks for a speedy answer from the previous post. Here’s what they said…

“We have some disabled (because buggy and limited) development code that permitted upload of already exported files to a FTP server. This was last available in 1.3.3 Beta:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/audacity/audacity-win-1.3.3.zip

We have longer term aims to improve this and allow direct exporting from the Audacity window to a server but this is not a current priority.

Also the FTP implementation has a number of potential security issues to be worked out. 

I don’t personally use SharePoint so I can’t advise you whether a FTP solution would work or something else is needed. Web searches are not all that helpful, but there is an article here about uploading files to Sharepoint:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/sharepoint-blog/windows-service-to-upload-documents-into-sharepoint-2007-14358

Audacity projects require the .aup file and the _data folder to be present, so those would have to be put in a zip file. If the project includes imported files, they must be copied into the _data folder if they cannot be accessed locally or on the network:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sending_your_work_to_others     

If you can advise more about the Open Office feature to export to web folders, we can certainly log it as an Audacity feature request. 

Thanks 

Gale 

Audacity Team“ 

One of our main strategic goals this year at our CLC is embedding learning platforms in the curriculum. So far, so good. A few departments are really running with them as tools for managing resources and running activities in the classroom and at home.

A question that comes up a lot is accessing the platform. It’s not always easy to book IT rooms for non IT lessons and what happens when the students get home and they have no access to a computer or broadband.

The latter problem may be sorted out by Gordon’s latest education initiative.

As for computers at home and in the classroom what about something like this?

Advent Netbook (pingpong ball for scale)

Things like them have been out for a while and are selling like hot cakes - big advertising push for the ASUS version this Xmas. To keep costs down they usually come with open source operating systems like Linux which makes running Windows apps a problem but they will run XP.

Down sides are that there is not a lot of storage once you have installed all the software and battery life won’t quite make it through the school day if you’re always on wireless. Also, they’ll struggle with memory heavy apps like video editing.

But is that really a problem?

• Storage problems? If you’re using a learning platform for activities, use that as the storage medium.
• Lack of sufficient memory? The majority of the stuff students do in the classroom does not require bags of memory anyway.
• Battery life? OK, not so easy to solve but you aren’t going to use these constantly though the day and wifi connection can be toggled on and off when needed.

Plus the main bonus is that kids LOVE them! We’ve had dozens of classes though this half-term using our set of  35 Advent Netbooks (pictured) and the buzz is amazing. Nearly all of them say they want them for Christmas. The really powerful, monster quad core machines we’ve got round the walls for video editing are soundly ignored!

Picture a school where each student has their own mini laptop as part of their kit. Either bought by the school or paid for in part or full by parents through a subscription they could transform lessons into ICT-rich activities on the spot without having to book time in the IT suites. 

A few models are available. Check out:

• Asus EeePC
• Acer Aspire

Avoid the Sony models, by the way. Over priced and over designed.

5-way headphone splitter

We discovered these a few weeks back looking for headphone splitters for a classroom set of laptops. We needed them for group work on media editing avoiding drowning out the whole room with tinny laptop sounds. Most splitters cater for 2 headsets but we needed more for groups of 3 or 4.

It’s called the Rockstar by Belkin and it’s really an iPod accessory but works fine with computers. We got them for around £6 each from a regular business IT supplier.

Nothing revolutionary but though it might be useful for someone.