Did you know when you take a picture on your mobile phone it may add your current location to the Exif data of the image?
So if you are out on a school trip and have GPS or location enabled on your device then you upload an image to an e-portfolio or blog anyone will be able to see the latitude and longitude of where you took the picture.
I discovered this when working on Classdroid and Kudos to Hak5 for the useful link. Safe to say all images uploaded from Classdroid will set the location as: “The moon”.
This is especially a concern if you out doing school trips and updating your blog on the fly.
How to turn off location tagging. On Android, Click Settings then Locations then un-tick My Location.
The claim that 3D can result in higher test scores makes me cringe!!! Arghz
I had an interesting email today from our installs team leader, it read:
3D projectors are now priced at pretty much the same level as normal 2D units, and are of course backwards compatible. If we started offering them to schools, how much of a pain would it be to upgrade existing PC’s to be capable of projecting in 3D?
Naturally computers should begin supporting 3D natively, most Nvidia graphics cards already do and intel have it on their roadmap.
The life span of a projector is 3 to 5 years max, will there be enough 3D content within 3/5 years to warrant purchasing a 3D projector?
Yes and no. So much interactive educational content will be provided as Flash objects and Flash simply can’t do it. The thing is if a 3D projector is going to be the industry standard then that will increase the demand on 3D content creators and more 3D content will be created. I would rather see a lower price point for projectors instead of trying to cram technology in that the consumer hasn’t requested.
Does a 3D projector have the same lifespan of the equally matched 2D projector?
In theory yes, although 3D bulbs will be way more expensive to replace.
Will the quality actually be as good from a DLP unit?
Interactive gaming, 3D story time. Nasa released an immersive 3D game so content is coming, but it is all full of it’s own barriers IE registration, installation, bla bla.
Do these projector require glasses?
Yep.
How many bulbs are there?
2 bulbs would mean twice the cost. 3D projectors on the market at the moment have one bulb and it is likely to stay that way.
What about kids that only have one eye that works(monocular)? Will we be excluding them?
Yes from any/all 3D content. It will simply look awful.
What about kids that aren’t sat directly in front of the IWB?
3D viewing angles aren’t great. That is why when you go to watch a 3D film at the cinema nearly everyone wants the top-centre seats. On one of the videos below the teacher is literally stood 1ft to the side of the board and pretending to still be able to make out 3D content, this simply isn’t realistic as the below image illustrates:
How will the signal look if its passed over VGA not HDMI?
I would recommend using a HDMI cable to transfer the signal, that will probably mean running new cables and installing a new break out box.
I stumbled upon this blog post which included the below video, kudos to the author. Sorry if I covered some items you already covered!
3D projectors have been at BETT for years and not caught on.
Should you buy a 3D DLP projector and hope to get a better experience or value than a 2D LED projector?
No. Don’t do it. Wait another year or two. We need manufacturers to reduce the price of projectors, not try to sell us a technology we don’t really need/want.
It is never popular talking about how schools can save money on ICT or areas where spending is just too high. Sorry if you fall out with me on this one.. These are all suggestions, I don’t endorse any in any way, shape or form (this is mostly for political reasons…).
For the most part you get what you pay for, so any savings may mean a drop in quality and a negative impact on teaching and learning. The conservative education policy is (we assume) run by people with more knowledge than myself so when they say schools need to spend less on ICT all I do is figure out how..
It is up to you to decide how they will impact your teaching and learning.
1. Printing
Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500
Yep, the ugly ink spewing beast is still costing even the smallest of primary school thousands of pounds every year mostly in toners and ink. So how can a school save money?
a) Use a managed printing solution to reduce the cost per sheet and to restrict the amount certain users can print.
b) Use on-line collaboration such as email more effectively
c) Encourage parents to get on-line and use an e-newsletter / social networking
2. MIS support
Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £2000
Why is it that one application costs nearly as much to support as the entire network full of applications used on the curriculum side?
b) Use e-registration and remove the need to replace that nasty OMR
3. Internet connectivity
Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £2000
Internet provision from Becta approved providers usually costs 2 to 4 times that from a local internet provider, this is because they usually bundle educational services into the package and/or tools to collaborative with other schools in your area.
Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500
Microsoft have now released their Office web apps so when you come to purchase new devices you can almost ignore the cost of Microsoft Office licensing.
b) Become familiar with the vast array of free web 2 tools for schools
7. Technical support
Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500
From personal experience I know a major cost of technical support is the time spent visiting a specific machine. There are obvious advantages to having an on-site engineer. Face to face support is still by far the best we have right now but that is because we haven’t really explored the realm of good remote desktop support for our curriculum networks as of yet.
a) Encourage your technical support provider to explore on-demand live remote desktop support and monitoring
My Local Authority are rolling out a trial of e-Safe education to all subscribing schools. I think it’s fair to first get out of the way that I think it is a sad world when we need to monitor individuals activities at such a granular level. But that’s my opinion and it’s not relevant in the context of my review.
So what is it?
e-Safe Education is a managed service that allows schools to monitor for inappropriate use and abuse when using the schools technology. The idea behind the managed service is that it detects potential misuse by detecting keywords and phrases, abuse imagery, nudity and then informs the pupil/teacher that what they are doing is perhaps putting themselves at risk and/or not included in the schools acceptable usage policy. The software runs on all school devices, laptops, net-books etc and (this bit is important) can be turned off at 4pm or whenever.
I would recommend parents check with the person responsible for safe guarding pupils inside their schools to find out exactly what is monitored to ensure they are fully aware of any privacy issues.
e-Safe Education Monitors keystrokes local to the computer, your keystrokes are not sent to a managed service which is nice, all of the detection is done against a local library designed to protect children which is regularly updated.
Keywords are customized at School &/or LA level so you can include local dialects and you can include customizable alerts on keywords. IE if a pupil types fanny, you can display an alert(“Is this appropriate?”). If a pupil types in cock-head you can display a more, erm, serious, alert..
The application works online and offline. Schools can assign an Acceptable usage policy at the beginning of a session using the Internet, so we need to educate kids & teachers to log out. Though the software does allow you to log the computer off automatically so as to help the reduce the the chance of somebody doing something on another users Login. The application doesn’t use an excessive amount of resources, in fact it’s footprint is relatively low for the amount of work it is doing, with this in mind you shouldn’t find the application slowing down your user experience at all.
Images are scanned with a nudity detection tool and blocked from the pupil/teacher if they are deemed as inappropriate e.g. naked or illegal. Obviously this weighs slightly on CPU although e-Safe claim this is only a few % and barely noticeable to the user.
Flash object first view can be scanned but the contents of flash files can not be scanned in the current version however e-safe education claim this will be addressed towards the end of the years. Canvas type objects can be scanned and therefore detected.
e-Safe education claim the managed service will be able to detect keywords on PrimaryPad, which is likely because they also claim it can detect keywords in SecondLife. The keystroke detection is a given and I expect this will work fine with very little headache.
Conclusion
As someone who has written child protection email algorithms before I understand how this service works and we should be clear from the outset this service will not detect 100% of the threats facing a pupil/teacher when they use technology. e-safe education’s managed service does however make for a cosy and somewhat expensive comfort blanket for schools looking to increase their pupil safeguarding.
It’s worth considering the burden of responsibility to check such systems otherwise would typically fall upon school ICT staff who might not have the time to review and respond to potentially serious alerts.
Saying all of that.. The cost of the service is worth it if it protects one child however we cannot avoid the root of the problem or the fact that education is a more effective tool than monitoring when it comes to being safe on-line.
What are your thoughts on this type of monitoring?
Has your school implemented a solution like this? How did you find it?
The world has changed and Microsoft is changing with it.
Contrary to popular belief Microsoft is longer is Microsoft the money grabbing beast it used to be.
It’s easy for companies to try to exploit new revenue streams and to gain investor support but this isn’t about new markets, this is about reducing existing market share or presenting better value in markets that provide a healthy revenue stream for Microsoft.
Microsoft are pro-actively cutting existing revenue streams to aid education, I am involved in this and although it damages our profitability it does increase our ability and potential to provide a better service at a lower price.
Live @ Edu is a perfect example of this. We purchase thousands of pounds/dollars worth of Microsoft Exchange licenses each month and then resell those on to schools through a service called Primary Email. The introduction of Live at Edu means we can still sell Primary Email but instead of using our own hosting and having to pay Microsoft for Licenses, Microsoft cover it all, how nice is that?!
Live at Edu is a free service but because we have worked in Primary schools providing email for so long we are able to offer the 5% extra that makes a big difference to how a school efficiently uses email. Eventually Microsoft will figure this out and push us entirely out of the market and that is fine, but until that point it give us a great opportunity to offer a great service at a ridiculously low price!
Question is.. How does the Microsoft Exchange team feel about this? Knowing Microsoft I think they will feel somewhat vulnerable and the thought of merging the Exchange team with the Office team could make for some uncomfortable conversations..
In reality.. Imagine you were payed £20k to do your job then your boss said we can’t pay you any more AND you have to work for free.. But in 10 years time your £20k will be £50k. I hope this is sustainable for Microsoft, I’m pretty sure it will be and their business model/plan will be widely adopted in other emerging and stale markets.
Finally it is worth saying that past experiences means that we do treat Microsoft with the same treatment we treat other companies growing at the rate of a steroid infused tuma. With a very, very, very large pole, muzzle and a poached salmon and rocket sandwich.
Did you know when you take a picture on your mobile phone it may add your current location to the Exif data of the image?
The world has changed and 
