Electric Chalk

I was a little taken aback this week after talking to my sister-in-law who is a primary school teacher in the north of England.

The LEA she works with has provided an LP which is great but she was saying that her head is keeping tabs on teachers by checking their lesson plans for the week on a Sunday night.

In itself, not a problem - visibility of work can lead to sharing, collaboration and all that lovely stuff.

What gets me is the secretive, Big Brother approach where the staff only found out the head was doing this after the head dropped hints in casual conversation.

Has anyone else had this sort of experience? Are you a head or head of department who sees this as a valuable management technique?

Speak your brains!

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“ 

I’m shattered! 

We’re working with one of our partnerships schools on a project with some 11-year olds where they record a desert-island diary entry in Audacity and create an mp3 out of it.

We want to be able to then put the mp3 onto the VLE but have hit a real snag.

Far from making the process of saving and sharing work easier, having the learning platform involved makes it harder.

The issue is that when you log into the VLE (MS Sharepoint in our case) where there is a document folder for saved work in some applications like Open Office and MS Office you can see these folders when you click on “Save Project As…” 

The problem with Audacity is that it can’t see these web-based folders so at the moment we have to go through a lengthy process of saving the work in progress to either a document folder or the local machine and then copying and pasting into the web folder.

This is harder than it sounds when you have a reluctant, stroppy group of Y11’s and understandably the partner teachers are anxious about taking the project on themselves as it seems too complicated.

I have a dual plan of attack on this and I’ll keep you updated on the outcome.

I’m going to BETT this year so will accost the Microsoft stand for their advice but I’ve also emailed the Audacity developer team with the suggestion that they include the ability to sve to web folders in a future release.

It’ll be interesting to see how much value they developers put on finding a solution and whether a pleb like me can influence development of a piece of open-source software.

NOTE: Here’s an update… (10th Dec 2008)

We’ve just finished supporting a student English teacher, Amy Knott, in a learning platform based project around the text her Y9 class are reading, Robert Swindells’ Stone Cold.

The main focus was producing a short Audacity show about homelessness. To complete this students had to conduct some internet research on homelessness and write a short script.

Our input was to construct a platform page to structure the research and scripting elements.

We learnt the hard way years back that just getting younger students to research using Google is not productive so part of the page was set aside for easy links to charities, public info sites etc. Time was limited in class so Amy deemed this the best approach.

The interesting bit was how they collected the information. Rather than give all the students the task of blanket researching the topic Amy gave certain students particular questions on selected charities. We then set up a selection of discussion pages so any information they found could be easily shared with the whole group. In the end it became something similar to a wiki but using discussion forums.

The next challenge was saving work as we wanted to keep everything on the platform, rather than our network drives. In the absence of e-portfolios (we’re still working on developing that strand of the VLE) we created a separate forum where students simply attached a word doc to their reply. A little clumsy on our part but effective nonetheless.

The whole project took more lessons than we planned but the outcomes were successful. When Amy has had a chance to mark the work I’ll put an example of the finished audio on this post.

I’m hoping Amy will post a comment back on this to give her evaluation on the project, particularly how she sees this sort of project developing in her future career.

It was refreshing to work with someone who was willing to take risks even during her training placement and I hope she gets plenty of credit for that.

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.