Author: John McLear

Curatr – A buzz word based VLE/LP?- not an LMS? Confused?

Posted on by John McLear

I love the work Ben is doing, the focus on game based learning and experience points ties in lovely with some of my latest projects. I hope to get time to check out curatr this week. First impressions is that it isn’t very primary focused from an interface point of view. Also it is closed source, BAD BAD Ben! When I asked him about this he said that he had to keep his investors happy which makes me slightly sceptical about his understanding of open source and also Curatr’s commitment to providing integration with other platforms and learning objects.

Two videos that explain Curatr for you to enjoy..

Google Teacher Academy application

Posted on by John McLear


What is Google Teacher Academy?

The Google Teacher Academy is a FREE professional development experience designed to help primary and secondary educators from around the globe get the most from innovative technologies… Upon completion, Academy participants become Google Certified Teachers who share what they learn with other primary and secondary educators in their local region.

Why am I applying?

I’m not doing this for the badge, in fact the thought of Google needing to put a stamp of approval on my work as an Educator is cringe worthy.  The same feeling applies to all big brands, be it Apple, Microsoft etc.  A teacher can be a fantastic teacher without any badge or sign of approval, just ask their pupils.

Most of my job is listening to teachers and educators, trying to understand how they want to use ICT to deliver the curriculum. I feel like GTA should be a great opportunity to meet other people that have a similar role as myself and hopefully share some of my experiences and best practices that I have discovered over the years.

What I hope to gain from GTA

I hope that the users of safe search will benefit from increased confidence in knowing that I have been on the course.  Safe Search is built on Google Custom Search engine technology so it would be good for me to get some more contacts, feedback and support with delivering a service that thousands of people use every hour.  The same applies for the work I do around GTalk, App Engine and Etherpad.  I work with about 100 local schools in Bradford promoting web2 so I’m sure I will be able to share some of the experiences I hope to learn at GTA.  I especially want to ask what the Google Apps team thoughts on free office WApps 2010 are, how the two products compare.

UPDATE: 25th of June 2010 – My application was unsuccessful.  d’oh – I hope that doesn’t put any one off applying to GTA in the future!

Google’s “Learning platform” clarified

Posted on by John McLear

Google rely heavily on people talking about their products and brands for free promotion but Cloudcourse was just an example of the consumer and the provider getting it horribly wrong.

Initially Cloudcourse wasn’t even designed for Schools as Irwin from the Cloudcourse team explains:

We actually didn’t design this system with schools in mind — we designed it as a course scheduling tool for enterprises. Nevertheless, CloudCourse can certainly help school teachers, who most likely don’t have the time or resources to worry about hardware hosting and dealing with traffic bursts like the ones that occur during class enrollment periods. We’d love to see schools/universities pick up this platform and code additional features on top of it to make it more relevant to the education ecosystem.

However several blogs released statements saying how Google have entered into the Learning platform market and the disruption it would cause..  I asked Irwin to clarify if Cloudcourse was a learning platform:

CloudCourse certainly is a tool today, and not a ‘learning platform’ as compared to other offerings which are branded ‘learning platforms’.

So that clears that up, thanks to Irwin for the clarification.  My recommend to those who jumped on the bandwagon based on this poor press release from Google is to fact check before posting and even to download the software or try out this hosted solution for you.  I have also asked Google to research their language used in Educational press releases/blog posts prior to clicking the Publish button.  There is a massive array of EdTech people on various social networks they could leverage to proof read/fact check these documents.

One last thing while we’re on the topic of Cloudcourse. Cloudcourse runs on Google App Engine which requires a “non open source” database so while the code may be open source, it’s not as if you can download the software and install it anywhere for free, and that is a shame.  Kudos for Google for releasing the CloudCourse platform open source although it really doesn’t compete with any of the current contenders in the market.

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Simple Javascript to write to mysql

Posted on by John McLear

This is more of a braindump/code dump for me. Original source…

Note: If you are going to use PHP values in this script please make sure they are set first…

Note2: I know javascript isn’t writing directly to mysql, this is my preferred method. function.php does the actual writing to mysql.. (uses update function – if you are reading this I expect you already know how to write a simply mysql update/insert statement and execute it inside of php..

Example.html

<!-- Function to save avatarID -->
<script type="text/javascript">
function showUser(str)
{
if (str=="")
  {
  document.getElementById("avatarsavediv").innerHTML="";
  return;
  }
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
  xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
else
  {// code for IE6, IE5
  xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
  {
  if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
    {
    document.getElementById("avatarsavediv").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
    }
  }
// best to set a new variable name so I don't forget what I'm working on
var avatarid = str;
// below we can grab a mysql value if we need to
var phpnickname = "<?= $username ?>";
var avurl = "function.php?nickname="+phpnickname+"&avatarid="+avatarid;
xmlhttp.open("GET",avurl,true);
xmlhttp.send();
}
</script>

<div id="avatarsavediv"></div>

Final note: The above shows the output

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Sending Hex to MyAvatarEditor object using PHP

Posted on by John McLear

Want to push a hex value from a database to a myavatareditor element? It’s easy, here is an example:

Make sure $avatarid is the Hex code for your avatar. PHP example included here..

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var avatarvalue = "<?= $avatarid ?>";
var avatarURL = "myavatarcharacter.swf?avatar=" + avatarvalue;
swfobject.embedSWF(avatarURL, "avatarSWFContainer", "160", "200", "10.0.0", null, {hosted:true});
function setFacialFeature(){
                var avatarSWF = document.getElementById('avatarSWFContainer');
                avatarSWF.draw();
        }
//]]>
</script>