Category: ICT

Review of Pearson Developer tools

Posted on by primaryt
The Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster, ...
Image via Wikipedia

Today I was introduced to the idea that Pearson are going to be releasing some of their content via an API.

Just to get this point out of the way, this content isn’t free or open as is put beautifully by John in his article.

API’s for the less technical among us are things that allow web sites to access content from other websites, an example of an API usage is the UK snow day maps, that uses the Google Maps API to provide the ability to overlay the snow onto the map.

None the less Pearson have bought up several companies that have made fantastic content so they have the ability to really provide some great material via their API. With that in mind I figured I’d give their API a blast!

After first login you are taken to your “My API trends page” — Ideally it would take you to a “what APIs are available and how to use them”. You have to click “APIs” to get to this page and that’s really where the dissapointment begins. Only 3 APIs are currently listed.

The APIs available are:
London travel guide…
FT Press (< 20% of the FT Press articles are available)
The Longman Dictionary…

A minor bug is the bullet points under the API options tell me I haven’t logged in yet when I have.

So do I need any of the above APIs or can I not get more mature ones elsewhere?

Google Maps and Open Street maps have way more reviews and travel info than the London travel guide and the reviews are far less likely to be biased.
There are thousands of finance and business blogs I can refer to that already have APIs and/or I can do a simple Google search API request with the “site:” flag set.
Dictionary.com provides a fantastic free API, has done for years so Pearson will gain nothing trying to compete with that.

So why should you use Pearsons developer API? You shouldn’t, not yet, but you should get familiar with their methods because in time they will be adding resources you will actually want to use that no one else can provide. I applaud Pearson for this step in the right direction and I beg them to release some educational resources that aren’t available elsewhere in a better format.

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WordPress.com Vs PrimaryBlogger Vs Self Hosted Vs Edublogs

Posted on by primaryt

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.

Our contribution to collaborative writing

Posted on by primaryt

Since December 2009 we have been contributing towards an open-source project called Etherpad.  Open source projects can be described as free software that is free to modify, use and redistribute.  Etherpad has been the technology we have used for PrimaryPad.  Today Etherpad Lite finally reached Version 1 which means it’s ready for download and widely adopted usage.  We’re really proud of this achievement and we hope to support the project into the future.

Read more about Etherpad including the option to host your own