kieranhogg.com blog

I’m delivering an INSET session soon on technology in the classroom and I’m focusing on websites that are useful for lessons. Some of these are fairly well-known now but it’s being delivered mostly to non-ICT specialists so I’m afforded that luxury.

Prezi

Probably the most well known, Prezi is a flash-based alternative to the dreaded Powerpoint. It makes use of an ZUI which creates pleasing visual transitions which is good for keeping interest and doing cooler things than Powerpoint affords.

Wallwisher

Wallwisher is a virtual noticeboard where you can add post-its. It’s great for plenaries and anywhere you need to get feedback from students without breaking out whiteboards or bits of paper. It’s also really convenient as you can check it at a later date. As below, they are available to embed so you can embed them on your website or VLE.

ClassDojo

This is my newest discovery, ClassDojo. It’s currently in Beta but that pretend kind, not the kind where it’s full of bugs. It’s a Behaviour for Learning tool where each student gets their own avatar (a point of contention as some boys will inevitably get pink ones and changing requires paying) and they get points based on positive or negative aspects of their behaviour. Example positive actions are participation and helping others, example negative actions are disruption and late. One of the nice features is that these are configurable. It also has an mobile version to use on your phone as you’re presumably walking around the classroom but it doesn’t want to load for me on Android and it’s probably quicker to walk to me desk than get my phone out.

I’ve so far used this to good effect with a Y8 class and less so with a Y10 class predictably. It’s hard to say whether the eagerness to see their monster gain points would only be temporary but nevertheless it’s a really cool little website to try out.

DROPitTOme

This is my favourite site currently, but probably likely to be sensitively omitted from the INSET due to it competing with the Academy’s VLE. It’s a really simple website, it’s a front-end to your Dropbox account that lets people upload files into your Dropbox. There’s nothing I’ve used so far that can match the work flow of having students upload files with no hassle and have them arrive on my home computer when I start it up.

A notable mention goes to Google Docs and Mediawiki for collaborative document editing and creating wikis respectively but despite both being awesome, the premise of both is really simple and no explanation necessary if you’ve used them at all.

I think that’s all for now as I’m only supposed to fill 30 minutes but I may add more if any come to mind.

UPDATE: App Inventor is back online at it’s new MIT home.

For the first week back from half-term, the entire school is off timetable and students got to choose 2 and 3 day sessions that each teacher had proposed themselves. I’ll probably add another post on this idea as it has been great so far. One of my sessions I proposed was creating mobile phone apps with App Inventor for Android.

Firstly and foremost, what an excellent piece of software. When I first came across it – a good time after owning a phone and becoming a teacher – I literally couldn’t believe that it existed and I hadn’t heard of it. I’m sure the much-repressed developer in me would probably turn its nose up at a GUI interface for producing software but the educator in me thinks it’s amazing. For literally anyone to be able to drag a few components onto the screen and to convert to an .apk which can be loaded onto a phone is a million miles away from the usual developer-far to produce a binary. For comparison, it’s almost identical to Scratch except it’s for general phone apps not just games and it has a built-in phone emulator (it’s no great surprise that MIT have appropriated the newly open-sourced App Inventor).

Starting from the beginning, the setup was less than hassle-free I must admit. School computer systems are notoriously locked down and even after the required software was installed I ran into problems. It seems a good point to explain the components of the software: there’s a website for the GUI, a java app for the blocks editor (code) and an installed .exe for the phone emulator. The problem came with the firewall blocking the blocks editor talking to the emulator. It was eventually resolved but we did suffer from random crashes, no fault of the software I would imagine, but just something to bear in mind and plan for next time.

Once it was up and running though, the students were quick to engage with the GUI part of draggning components onto the screen, and the emulator loading the app onto a phone was a real ‘wow’ moment for them.

The rest of the session was very similar to how a Scratch lesson goes in terms of pros and cons.

• The students were good at using tutorials to adapt into their ideas
• The students have over-ambitious ideas so it’s important to say what can and can’t be done.
• They ask a lot of questions so you need to be fairly proficient in the software
• The students struggle with the code part (no suprise) but most get the general idea suprisingly quick and just need correction to keep on the right track
• Getting their software onto a real phone is really rewarding (again permission problems prevented this going completely smoothly)
• There’s no way of creating more than one screen (one of most common questions), it can be done with showing and hiding ScreenArrangements but it’s not ideal

Despite the technical hiccups and teething problems, I thought it was an excellent session and I’d definitely do it again with a bit more structure around it, knowing everything would work slightly better next time! Underneath are a few examples of the apps they made, bear in mind, they were done in around 2 hours!

 

This is my review of the Ramesys Assimilate VLE. I’ve used this for the past few months, fairly heavily being an ICT teacher so I thought I’d post my thoughts on it. I should prefix this by saying on the whole, it’s not terrible, but there are some glaring bugs/usability flaws that would help improve the product immeasurably. I must also say that as a user, I am unsure how many of these items could be solved or improved by the configuration of the installation.

It’s also useful to remember at this point that more than half of the target audience is children.

Frames

My primary annoyance with Assimilate. Frames arguably do have a use in websites, but this is not one of them, for any of these reasons, see the image for a prime example of when frames are not needed. In a more practical way: “Ooh, this looks interesting” *opens in new tab*, “strange, the menu bar has disappeared. Never mind, I’ll just continue using this page. Hang on! All the links are opening in my previous page!”.

It’s fairly easy to work-around this behaviour but the use of frames and target= breaks how an internet site should work, not cool.

Dynamic Content

This is a generic problem, and it seems to be that the general UI could be enhanced by the increased use of AJAX, the creation of a test for example requires about 6 steps before you’re even ready to enter a question, with a page load for each action. Which leads me on to…

Uploading files

File submission is one of the key aspects of the VLE and something which seems very clunky. Although there’s options to upload SCORM content and a zip file, there’s no way of just uploading a couple of files without zipping them or doing the process over again after each one. The upload page is one of the key places some AJAX would go a long way.

Displaying Communities

The method of displaying communities (which I find confusing by using a <select>, simple hyperlinked navigation would make more sense) is even more confusing when it displays ‘A to Z’ despite not showing all the communities, you have to notice that it’s only actually showing ‘A to G’, a mistake which I’ve seem students and teachers alike making.

Search

For some reason, the search feature only seems to search items that you have entered matching keywords for. This functionality isn’t explain either on the search page of the keywords page. In fact, the compulsory nature of the keywords has made staff enter anything for this field in order to speed up creating items which leaves search essentially useless. I would expect to be able to find by searching a community’s name at least.

Tables for Layout

Whilst divs are used throughout the site, tables are used frequently to create the content boxes seen throughout the site. Not only could these but done effectively using divs and CSS, the argument for not using tables for layout has been done to death.

Confusing Permissions Page

On the whole, the pages aren’t that badly designed but the exception however being the permissions page.

When I click to add a user to a community, the last step is to select a role, this is not clear if you need to select a role to find the person, or to add the person. It implies the role is associated with the finding, which is isn’t.

Following on the from the last point, once I have found the user, I then have to select them, then choose the role, then click add users. Considering how fond of putting processes across several pages Assimilate is, it seems odd to cram everything into the same space and lay it out in the opposite order to the way you are required to click on the elements.

Curiosity usually gets the better of me, so despire there being no indication of what a new condition was, I tried it anyway.

No such luck.

No Notifications

It goes without saying that Teacher’s are very busy. However the only way to check if your students have taken a test or uploaded a file is to constantly check the community which seems a great way to waste time and miss student work.

Default Content Page

There’s no way to set a default document or web page as the first page loaded when the community is clicked on. Obviously intentional but the front page is lacking is customisability. An interesting workaround is to add some javascript into the community description box which redirects to the document of your choice. Whilst being very useful, it’s a tad worrying that the input isn’t sanitised of javascript. I presume the counter argument would be that the managers, i.e. the teachers are trusted, but still unsafe that it is allowed.

Use of full names

This is a tiny cosmetic thing, but there’s no way to change your display name. Some Teachers don’t mind students knowing their first name, some do, the choice is nice however.

Timeout

Most lessons are at least 50 minutes, yet you get timed out after 25. Even though there is a facility to extend it, that assumes you’re actually at the computer and not teaching.

Reading this back, it sounds a lot more harsh than my actual experience of it. Generally, the product isn’t deeply flawed in the way some VLEs are, but the interface definitely prevents me from using it effectively.

For reference for myself and anyone else who happens upon the error E: Internal Error, Could not perform immediate configuration (2) on initramfs-tools when trying to upgrade a Linux machine, it can be resolved using:

cd /var/cache/apt/archives
sudo dpkg -i --force-all initramfs-tools*
sudo apt-get -f install

In a break from the usual Teaching posts, I descend into a bit of geek.

Having spoken to a few people recently about how I handle my data, I thought it’d be useful to post the process. Here’s how I keep two laptops, two Operating Systems and a USB stick synced with Dropbox, shared partions and Synctoy.

It looks complicated, but it’s out of necessity; I have to share data between 3 locations and two Operating Systems.

Macbook

The Macbook is my main laptop which runs just Kubuntu. This is nice and simple, anything changed on here gets synced via Dropbox.

Samsung NC10

The NC10 is my school laptop bought as it was super-light, and also I didn’t have a Windows install before that. I use it to deliver lessons, but I don’t have access to wireless or the school network. It runs dual-boot, with a shared FAT partition between Windows and Linux. The hard drive is paritioned into two, the latter being mounted as ‘My Documents’ in Windows. This is then mounted to /media/ under Linux and my Linux folders are symlinked to the appropriate ones on the partition. This lets me have data on just Windows, and just Linux, and to share certain folders which are always the same. Both OS are running Dropbox too so the shared folders are synced to the Macbook.

USB Drive

As mentioned, I don’t have access to the school network so I need to use a USB drive to get data to and from it. I use Windows Synctoy to keep the folders from the Windows’ Dropbox synced with the folders on the USB. If I add anything to the USB it gets back to Windows and therefore Dropbox (and vice-versa).

So there we have it (I think), a setup which stops me having to think about my data and let software keep it organised for me.

So I’ve had the G1 for a good few months now and it’s pretty awesome except for the well-publicised battery issues. Now, I’ve recently started commuting which involves a fair period on the train and tube. Since I started, it seemed to be even worse battery life but I thought I was just imaging it; the battery didn’t seem to last until I got home however, this definitely seemed shorter.

It turns out that for whatever reason, the G1 really sucks when it doesn’t have a signal; it seems to rape the battery when it loses a signal while it frantically polls to find a reception. I installed Locale (a must-have app anyway) and an airplane mode plug-in for it and turned on airplane mode for the times I was travelling. The results are amazing, it literally lasts about twice as long.

Now, it goes without saying that this shouldn’t be necessary, the iPhone doesn’t need dirty hacks to last the day, but the battery issues were well publicised before I bought it. I hope this helps someone with their battery woes.

If you (like me, and apparently scores of others) are having problem with o2 Broadband and it dropping connections, it’s down to its crappy DNS. I recommend changing the router’s DNS to something like OpenDNS or Google DNS (which the Howto uses) for the time being.

How to change o2 router’s DNS