Archive for the ‘primary’ Category

  • The first school meeting

    Date: 2012.01.01 | Category: primary, Primary School, primary schools | Response: 0

    Warning: Contains some strong language

  • Useful website for anger management #ukedchat

    Date: 2011.11.25 | Category: ICT, primary, Primary School, Primary School ICT | Response: 0

    I’m not expert but it seems like calm.com would be a useful resource for behavioral management. It’s pretty hard to be angry or upset after idly watching it for a few minutes.

  • ICT teaching and learning framework

    Date: 2011.09.25 | Category: ICT, primary, Primary School, Primary School ICT, primary schools | Response: 0

    Matt Lovegrove and others have done a fantastic job of writing up an ICT teaching and learning framework. I added some minor bits and suggestions and here is an updated version:

    Download link

    I want to commend Matt Lovegrove, Steve Greenfield, David Sheppard and Claire Waite for their efforts in creating this very clear and useful document. I also want to commend them for releasing the document under a creative commons license. What a great example of teachers willing to share and work in collaboration with other teachers and educators!

  • Free online autocue

    Date: 2011.09.20 | Category: ICT, primary, Primary School, Primary School ICT | Response: 0

    Ever needed a really quick, free and easy piece of autocue software without any barriers? Well Primary Technology paid me to make one for PrimaryPad so I released a jQuery plugin and pushed out a free online autocue with a really simple editor.

    If you want to collaboratively edit on your document before sending it to the autocue why not try use PrimaryPad? Video for how to use it below:

    Note: Autocues are sometimes called teleprompter so the above is an autocue/teleprompter..

  • WordPress.com Vs PrimaryBlogger Vs Self Hosted Vs Edublogs

    Date: 2011.09.03 | Category: Blog, Blogger, Blogging, blogs, ICT, primary, Primary Blogger, Primary School, Primary School ICT, primary technology | Response: 4

    WordPress is the only CMS you should be considering if you are serious about a long term investment. I know Google fan boys will say how Google Sites is free and okay but when the key thing about Google products is that when you decide to leave you can’t take your content elsewhere, it’s closed source, it’s closed off. Google is Microsoft episode 2, we can debate this further but the fact is that if you use posterous, typepad or Google Sites you will be burned in the future.

    Schools often ask me how they should be hosting their blogs, should they use wordpress.com, primaryblogger.co.uk or self hosted? I’m biased as I work on primaryblogger but I still feel like it’s worth answering the question.

    Bad things about wordpress.com:
    No Embed so no embedding primarywall, primarypad, wordle, voki etc. [Excludes youtube and vimeo]
    No XMLRPC so no ability to use mobile apps such as classdroid.
    You can’t use your own domain IE myschoolblog.com
    You can’t heavily modify themes so changing the layout of your blog can be difficult.
    No plugin uploads so you can’t access the millions of plugins available in the wordpress Codex.

    Good things about wordpress.com:
    No need to worry about growth, wordpress.com can handle millions of requests per second.
    No need to worry about upgrades or updates.
    Preview new versions of WordPress.
    All of your data is backed up and protected for you.
    Comes pre-loaded with a spam filter.

    Bad things about PrimaryBlogger:
    No ability to upload your own plugins, you have to put a request in via the community

    Good things about PrimaryBlogger:
    No need to worry about growth, PrimaryBlogger can handle millions of requests per second.
    Can use your own domain name.
    Comes pre-loaded with Edu-Focused plugins and themes
    Has a community of edu-users
    Each blog post gets manually read by a human
    No need to worry about upgrades or updates.
    All of your data is backed up and protected for you.
    Comes pre-loaded with a spam filter.
    PrimaryBlogger publishes all of it’s plugins and development open-source so the WordPress community can enjoy using them.

    Bad things about self hosted:
    You have to worry about scaling which can be a huge technical hurdle
    You have to worry about upgrades and updates.
    You have to worry about spam.

    Good things about self hosted:
    You have completely control about how to configure your blog.
    Can use your own domain name.
    You can integrate your blog with your own authentication mechanism.

    Bad things about Edublogs free:
    No ability to embed youtube video, animoto, vokis etc.
    Your blog has a big edublogs advert on
    Limited number of blogs per account
    Limited access to themes
    Very limited storage space
    Dashboards can be unreliable
    No stats
    No Forum support
    All of the plugins are kept closed source and sold through WPMUdev

    Good things about Edublogs free:
    Edublogs is a big community
    You can pay more to get more features, storage etc.

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