End of the 2009-2010 school/work year and it has been an immense year.  I’m signing off from work for a bit (2 weeks) to regain some sanity and reality but before I do here are the people I want to thank for this year.

Ian Addison (Great to chat with seems to understand both technical and teaching aspects of my work)
James Langley (Great at everything to do with ICT and primary schools)
Chris Mayoh (Fantastic feedback on our services)
Jo Dean (Amazing understanding of making managed service contracts work)
John Sutton (Fantastic understanding of encourage schools to adopt blogs)
Simon Finch (second to none understanding of internet provision in schools)
Kumar (Brilliant Android/Java developer)
Takeektas (Amazing artist)
Redhog (Breathtaking brilliant developer(this guy would blow your minds))
Teeny Tiny (Supportive, supportive, supportive.  Lucky to have known her so long)
Mark Chambers (Every sentence is like a change factory)
Harshad Taylor (Amazing sys admin with great network stability and flexibility and great personality)
Ramsbeb (Great supported of modern technology)
Stefan Richter (Genius behind scribblar very open to work with new services)
Joe Cornelli (Great philosophical mind, I’m expecting great things)
Terry Freedman (Always supported my articles, always been there for guidance)
Chris Ratcliffe (I hate sales blokes but Chris breaks the mould..  Has been so keen to share and help, he puts edu first)
Tim Rylands (Probably most inspiring man of year)
Deputy Mitchell (I can only say thanks to this man, he works so hard, does so much, I think he has a doppel)
OmnomnomTom (If code needs writing properly, this is the man I turn to)
Margaret Vass (Great supporter of blogging, I truly hope glow supports her as well as we did)
Sharon Dominik (the only person I always answer my phone to)

Everyone who works on an open source project.  Kudos, gg and ftw and obviously (this is delivered in person) those at Primary Technology who support and endure the challenges we all face on a daily basis.

And last but not least is my dad, who as you know is my alpha, beta and gamma.

Thanks so much for this year, everyone has made it special and I’m hoping 2010-2011 can provide some fruits for you to pick from!

Basic overview of my workload till next year up till April:  Launch new PST, Launch new SC (inc new standard), polish PGA, launch SIMS service, launch XPArena,

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Office Web Apps 2010 in the primary classroom
2. The new Microsoft
3. Web2 Primary School go go magic arms

Right now I’m suposed to be writing a bid that could bring £100k of new work into the city but because I’m in this pickle I’m not writing it..  This is why Bradford could fail in the future.

You are probably thinking, what pickle?   Well it’s all a pickle created by the council, specifically Bradford Council Parking Services.  This is all very petty but it shows just how the petty things in life when mismanaged can have serious consequences.  Anyway, they are basically trying to bully me into a fine that I shouldn’t have to pay.

Here is the story so far

2007 – Jan – I received a £25 fine for not properly displaying ticket.

2007 – Feb – I showed proof of ticket and fine was cancelled.

2010 – May – I received a £25 fine for not properly displaying ticket. (Even though I personally showed the attendant the ticket)

2010 – May – I told them it was in error and showed proof of ticket.

2010 – May – Bradford Council Parking Services decided to still fine me

2010 – June – I appealed fine and informed council all documents would be released under Apache GPL2 license (for funsies and so they know to protect peoples identities should they choose to)

2010 – June – Appeal was rejected.  <– wtf even with proof that I had paid and displayed!

2010 – June – Fine was increased to £75

2010 – July – I tried to re-appeal but was told there is no way to appeal

2010 – July – Bradford Council Parking Services threatened me with “registering debt at court” and bailiffs.

2010 – July – I threatened Bradford Council Parking Services with equally “registering debt at court”.

To summarize

I received 2 parking fines in error. I proved they were both in error and now I am threatened with debt being registered at court.

Worth noting the company I own is awaiting about £50k of unpaid PO’s from Bradford Council which have been overdue by over a year, should I register them at court too?

The evidence

The proof I paid and displayed (Note this tickets start time is BEFORE the time/date of the fine so that isn’t an issue)

Related posts:

1. Lolsies @ Bradford council parking fine efforts
2. Snapcasa is down – 06 July 2009
3. Review of Imax Bradford (Short)

Considering their approach..

to identifying their pupils, parents(current and prospective) and teachers requirements for a learning platform.  Including showing the school example of how other schools are using web based technology.  The main idea of this is to get the school to think about what they want the web to do for them, not what they can do on the web.

Web based vs downloadable

I showed each school how to access to the Primary School Web2 searchable database which will allow them to search for web2 resources in the future when they are contemplating replacing a current legacy application.

I showed off Microsoft’s Live at Edu showing how even the most pricey of apps are moving on-line and the experience is relatively high quality compared to a few years ago.

I explained why I believe web based is better than downloadable especially for mobile projects.  I also tried to explain the new method for distributing apps through systems such as Google Market and iStore.

Web2 after school

I covered some useful web sites and resources that are focused on extending pupils learning outside of the school gates.  The examples I used were Mr Thorne does Phonics and Primary Games Arena amongst others.

The biggest problem I faced during the sessions were the amount of sites that were filtered so access was not possible.  This is something all LA’s are working on and struggling with.  This problem wont be experienced at home so I suggested that the teacher/head continued investigating resources from the searchable database at home.

Summary

I enjoyed doing the sessions and I spent the last few minutes of the meetings asking the school if they thought the meetings were valuable.  Many schools have expressed an interest in pursuing things further with their own web based systems and all have said they will use some of the web based resources already available on the internet.  Nearly all of the schools were not aware of all the resources available and were amazed at the quality and ease of use of a lot of the sites I showed them.

It is worth remembering that these sessions are often required just as a way to introduce schools to the basics around web based technology and they aren’t meant to be a thorough session with direct outputs or goals.  I hope/think they went well and will probably run them again next year depending on funding from Primary Technology who funded all of the sessions this year.  I do hope that some schools begin exploring Web2 in more depth and begin working with the Education Bradford ICT team to embed Web2 into their whole school plan.

Related posts:

1. Web2 Primary School go go magic arms
2. Do we really need local servers? A Web2 school
3. Google Apps in a Primary School – Getting Started guide

eJamming audio is a 10$ per month service that allows you to real-time jam with your mates via the power of the internet.   Or so it claims..  Heres what I found…

Sign up

I found the sign up process a little too intrusive and cumbersome, even the verification email took about 5 minutes to come through.
There was no message stating I had been verified, after clicking on the email it just  redirected me back to the download page.
The link to speedtest.net should really open in a new window – removing me from the website at a critical moment seems like a bad idea and th link to HTTP://PORTFORWARD.COM/EJAMMING/  isn’t clickable and it 404’s when types in the address bar & the port forwarding docs aren’t clear, but whos are?  Ideally port forwarding wouldnt be required.

Getting started

Initially the ASIO4ALL application broke all audio playback on my system, I had to fiddle with audio setings to get it work again.
The desktop app doesn’t fill the available space on screen which makes my widescreen monitors feel a bit wasted, also the File, preferences window didn’t even open on my main window (it opened else where) and just for fun the app dumped a .txt file and .xml file on my desktop.  I feel like the preferences should be part of the main control bar and not hidden away.

Joining in

Some sessions would let me in for a few seconds then drop me out not give an indication of why but what is worst is that most of the sessions just wouldnt allow me to connect at all.

Summary

Basically this service didn’t work for me.  I wish it did because I love the idea and I hope they are able to fix all the bugs/issues because I think it could be great =)  I emailed a link to this post to the support team in a bid to get things improved.

Related posts:

1. HTC hero camcorder audio 3gp
2. 2009 review
3. Primary School Web2 meetings

Secondly they just locked me out of the DNS for 50+ school domains because they need more of private information (they have this information).  They never warned me, I can’t get in and change DNS.  There is no one answering the phones (as per usual).   Note:  I am not the only person they locked out, they locked out all of their customers until they provide more information to easily.  GG Easily, you have proved once again that epic buckets of fail still exists in the IT industry.

So just avoid Easily, they suck.  Never had a good experience with them, never will.  /QuickRant.

Anyone know a good UK registrar I can move all my .co.uk domains to?

Related posts:

1. Safe Search gets an earth day snail
2. My pointless PLN
3. Primary School Google Apps Education Edition Preparation

Here is the Classdroid apk for public beta. We only have support for primaryblogger and xparena(not a live service) available right now. We are waiting on Moodle V2 to bring moodle support in.

1. Get the Classdroid.apk
2. Read this guide for how to install an .apk
3. Make sure you have a Primaryblogger account & Blog
4. Have fun

Note:  We still have a lot of GUI tweeking to do but most of the functionality now exists. We will be releasing the source code once beta testing is complete.

Thanks to this guy for the great custom artwork/logo/icon!

Go here for info on classdroid

Related posts:

1. Opera mini 5 beta designMode support is very partial
2. Security Warning: Using a mobile phone to take pictures of kids activities/work
3. Primary Blogger update

The below code takes an rss search result from twitter, detects the authors location then posts the information to Ushahidi via the API.

Application I used it in: My School Closures for detecting people who tweet about school closures.  Unfortunately I have to use pipes for the location builder which isn’t elegant as Yahoo Pipes sucks and I wish I never started playing with it.  Feel free to play with the pipe I created to get geo location information from a location name, it is the pipe that has the json_decode.

You will need mysql and a table for the guids (this stops us from spamming twitter for authors we have already located). Make sure you change the configuration settings and create a table in mysql.

The method is simple, the code isn’t pretty and will require polishing but here it is:

<pre>
<?php
//CONFIGURE THE SETTINGS BELOW
//twitter settings
$twitterusername = "mytwitteraccount";
$twitterpassword = "apasswordgoeshere";

//database settings
$host = "databasehostname";
$user = "databaseusername";
$pass = "databasepassword";
$dbname = 'databasename';

// You should create a table called tweetguids in your database
$tablename = "tweetguids";

// Change the below feed to a rss feed similar to below
$rssurl = "http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=a9663ebc09e69b9195fb2407fba9f2bc&_render=rss";

// END OF CONFIG

$conn = mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass) or die                      ('Error connecting to mysql');
mysql_select_db($dbname);

ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('log_errors', 1);
ini_set('error_log', dirname(__FILE__) . '/error_log.txt');
error_reporting(E_ALL);

$rss = simplexml_load_file($rssurl) or die("failure");
$count = 0;
foreach ($rss->channel as $chan)
{
$time = $chan->pubDate;
}
foreach ($rss->channel as $chan){$time = $chan->pubDate;}
foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item)
        {
        // only do first 10 records
        if ($count < 10)
                {
                $foundguid=0;
                $guidnew=$item->guid;
                // Check to see if guid exists in db already
                $sql="SELECT * FROM $tablename where guid = \"$guidnew\"";
                $result=mysql_query($sql, $conn);
                while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($result))
                        {
                        $foundguid=1;
                        echo "Foundguid: $foundguid";
                        }
                if($foundguid==1)
                        {
                        echo "We found an alredy existing guid...";
                        }
else
                        {
                        $count = $count + 1;
                        $task="report";
                        $incident_title=$item->title;
                        $guidnew=$item->guid;
                        $incident_title=str_replace(" ","+",$incident_title);
                        $incident_description=$item->description;
                        $incident_description=str_replace(" ","+",$incident_description);
                        $incident_date=date("m/d/Y",$time);
                        $incident_hour=date("H",$time);
                        $incident_minute=date("i",$time);
                        $incident_ampm=date("a",$time);
                        $incident_category="Possible Closure";
                        $location_name="Unknown";
                        $author = $item->author;
                        $author = str_replace(" ","+",$author);
                        $pos = strpos($author,"+");
                        //$author = substr($author,0,$pos);
                        $author = str_ireplace("http://twitter.com/","",$author);
                        $url = "http://$twitterusername:$twitterpassword@api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.xml?screen_name=$author";
                        //echo $url;
                        $output = simplexml_load_file($url) or die("badauth");
                        foreach ($output->user as $item)
                                {
                                // Get the values out of the XML
                                $location=$item->location;
                                // Clean up the location
                                $location=str_ireplace("-",",",$location);
                                $location=str_ireplace(" ",",",$location);
//                              $location=preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $location);
                                echo "<br/><b>Location content: $location<br/>";
                                // Pass the location to yahoo pipe
                                $location = str_ireplace(" ","",$location);
                                //echo "<br/>Loc: $location";
                                $locationurl = "http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=03539616e4cdd62eb15ed26b81e3041e&_render=json&q=$location";

                                 $ch = curl_init();
                                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $locationurl);
                                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

                                //make the request
                                $json = curl_exec($ch);
                                $arr = (json_decode($json,true));
                                $blah = $arr['value']['items'][0]['name']['loc'];
                                //print_r($blah);
                                $latitude = $blah['lat'];
                                $longitude = $blah['lon'];
                                $location_name = $blah['city'];
                        }

                        $incident_description="Closure reported from twitter";
                        $url = "task=report&incident_title=$incident_title&incident_description=$incident_description&incident_date=$incident_date&incident_hour=$incident_hour&incident_minute=$incident_minu$
                        $posturl = "http://myschoolclosures.com/ushahidi/api";
                        $Curl_Session = curl_init($posturl);
                         curl_setopt ($Curl_Session, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
                         curl_setopt ($Curl_Session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,
                        $url);
                        curl_setopt ($Curl_Session, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
                        curl_exec ($Curl_Session);
                        curl_close ($Curl_Session);
                        //Write to the database
                        $sqlgo="INSERT INTO $tablename VALUES (\"$guidnew\")";
                        $result=mysql_query($sqlgo, $conn);
                }
        }
        //Write anything else to DB just in case anything trails behind
        $sql="INSERT INTO $tablename VALUES (\"$guidnew\")";
        $result=mysql_query($sql, $conn);
        $row=mysql_fetch_array($result);
        //echo "<br/>$sql<br/>";
}
?>

Related posts:

1. Send_NSCA.exe example
2. Twitter & Yahoo pipes returns 420 Unknown
3. Free digital signage alternatives for schools – Wordpress and Visible Tweets

The answer is still no.  These are the reasons why…

1) Becta’s requirement for dual form authentication was a good idea and is a good idea.  It’s not that we don’t trust you to not give out your username and/or password it’s that even the most seasoned of IT professional can make security errors and by having 2 forms of authentication it would take 2 catastrophic security errors to allow someone to access your schools data.

2) We are considering RSA or usb keys to remove one prompt for username/password

3) We want to try to encourage you to use more web based services and to remote into your data less.  This will allow us to apply more granular security policies and hopefully encourage you to adopt a single sign on mechanism.  Hosted web services should also increase the reliability of access to resources.

If you still want to go ahead and remote straight into your school then I would recommend you do a thorough risk assessment and that the decision is approved by the schools leadership team (I would recommend you do this anyway even if you have dual form authentication).

If you are a technical support manager/engineer trying to make your life easier be aware that if you open up school information to the outside world you may be charged under the data protection act.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Now BECTA has gone, do we NEED to have a VLE? Remote Desktop Services instead? (edugeek.net)

Related posts:

1. Shibboleth accounts from an MIS
2. Home Access Problem – Please help!
3. Etherpad with Shibboleth Authentication (Technical document)

Google suck at Social, and probably always will.  This is because even though the line between our work and play is often merged we have to actually pro-actively try to keep the two separate.  Google Me will suck, Google Buzz sucked, Google Wave sucked.  Why?  Because we are human.  Google can’t break/fix that.  My advice:  Launch Google Me, very quietly.

Zynga have maybe 20 games available, yes they are huge on the platforms they run on (facebook/twitter etc) but there are 1500+ educational games available that have nothing to do with Zynga that wont even be affected by Google…  Unless..

The fact is….

Google didn’t invest in Zynga for Zynga’s games.  They invested in Zynga to get the expertise of providing massive web based games to create social networks.  I can see Google going off to places like Armor games, bitbitallion etc. and trying to get them on board.   Let’s face it, Google know how to write a well documented, easy to use API so if they can persuade other vendors to monetize their content and improve their games by using Google then why not?  (See Adsense/Adwords).

I wrote an abstract piece on this and began building an open platform that is similar to Xbox Live.  I called it XPArena and it is very private closed beta.  I’m still working on it.

So how does this affect education?

The way I see it Google have enough capital available in Zynga to create an open platform for social game integration.  This platform would operate in a similar way to XPArena or XBox Live, allowing pupils to share educational games, show off their high scores, compete with friends, collaborative with friends.  Teachers could review pupils work and assess their progress.  Google could potentially also work on a recommendation engine that recommends games based on what a pupil likes to learn by playing.

How can Google make this work? Google should create a platform, not a service.  Allowing third parties to leverage their technology and keeping the Google Brand away from the learner/consumer.  PLEASE Google don’t tie this platform into Google Me or Wave etc..

Some questions/answers

Will you need a Google account to play a vast array of online games in the future? No.

Will you need a Google account to share your gaming experience on Zynga games in the future? Yes.

Are Zynga making any education games? No.  But if you look hard enough you can find SOME educational value in the odd game.

Will Google use Google Checkout for Zynga games? Yes.

Will Google remove Zynga games from Facebook when they launch Me? No.  It would damage Zynga’s revenue stream too much and would see a flurry of angry farmville players switch from Google to Bing for search.

Will Google place their own Ads on Zynga games in that annoying way they do? Yes.  Even if you are paying you will see ads.

Will it suck if Google just invest without any outward reaching goals? Yes.  If they focus purely on social networks it will be a waste of money.

Is the internet crying out for a good social gaming platform that is away from main stream social networks? Yes!

Did Google purchase Zynga to make their shareholders happy? No.  They are already happy, see the index.

Do I want a job at Google Games? Sure if they can afford me

Related posts:

1. Are Google planning to put Google Wave into Google Apps?
2. Troubleshooting Google Apps and Shibboleth
3. Google Apps in a Primary School – Getting Started guide

1. Share work from mobile with others via large classroom display

2. Truly turn the cell phone into a teaching tool by embedding it in the fabric of a classroom

3. A great presentation tool

4. An abundance of easy to access interactive apps/games

5. Unfiltered internet connectivity (This has its pros and cons)

*6. Charge phone via cable (HDBaseT can provide power)

Could this mean an RJ45 connector in every desk to charge pupils handheld devices and give them access to both network and media/presentation resources?

Check out the comparison chart below to see what is possible over HDBaseT

I reckon there will be a large market/demand in HDBaseT 1.0 to micro USB adapters mostly because the RJ-45 connector (seen right) is too chunky to fit into a phone.

If you know a company that makes a RJ45 -> Micro USB adapter for Network / Video connectivity then invest now.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What is HDBaseT? (jakeludington.com)
• Bye Bye HDMI and Welcome HDBaseT (mwd.com)

Related posts:

1. Another step towards mobile for the classroom
2. Security Warning: Using a mobile phone to take pictures of kids activities/work
3. Awesome Picasa feature