ICT – Page 63 – John McLear

Safe Search design

Posted on October 12, 2009 by primaryt

I quite like the idea of doing a termly design for Safe Search and each week adding something “new” to it. I think it should hopefully get kids talking and paying a bit of attention when using the site..

Anyway, I added something today, can you spot what it is?

Visit Safe Search

The descision makers of tomorrow

Posted on October 9, 2009 by primaryt

When planning for events the event organizers have a few things they want to accomplish:

1. Everyone has a good time

2. They don’t lose too much money

3. The event makes sufficient “impact” on teaching and learning.

#3 on this list has been swimming around in my head over the last few days.. The problem we face is that event places are limited so it tends to be the same decision makers attending. I don’t think this presents equal opportunities so I have been thinking about how this may evolve..

Physical limitations at the event as far as number of people that can fit into a room at any given time. This was proven at Hand Held Learning 2009 which was a great conference but was over subscribed and overpriced.

Can technology provide a fix? All of google tech talks and TED are now published online, not live but that is fine. A few ICT conferences this year have been streamed live successfully.

Is the TED model the right model? It seems that way, TED charge for attendance to a conference and only fit a limited audience in.

So what technology is required to make this happen? Stuff that already exists!!

Twitter hash tags has become the norm now for many conference attendees and provide a great reference point.

Any video conferencing that can support a wide audience, it would be great if you could “Sponsor” your video feed and maybe even a twitter page sponsored by the event.

That way you could get “Micro Sponsors” for say a minute of ad time next to a video stream for say £50

We cannot ignore how important it is to allow our education and ICT conferences to be open and transparent and we MUST NOT exclude anyone from attending, be it physically or digitally.. (with exceptions obviously).

It’s a London thing

Posted on October 4, 2009 by primaryt

I set off to London on Friday at 4am after getting no sleep at all, I landed at the FOTE09 (future of technology in education 2009) conference and really enjoyed it (see my blog posts). Although I was really tired I then headed to my friends house in Acton and had a great Friday night eating pizza and crashing watching the TV. 40 hours after getting up I finally got to sleep…

Saturday was slow to bring to the boil but we got up and went to watch Surrogates (See review) then headed to Mr Jerks for Jerk Chicken rice and peas. So good, so full, but never the less I battled on to head to Clapham to meet a friend we call “STI“ for a quick drink. After being hit on by a girl of Brazilian decent we decided it was probably best for everyone if we headed back home to get a reasonably early night.

I woke up on Sunday to the piercing tones of an Auzzy or NZ skype conference call in the room next to me. Safe to say I didn’t want to stick around too long so I walked around to the bus station with my mate P whilst discussing how eager we are for the release of Diablo 3….

Leaving my friend “P” behind after a few great days I headed on bus to Wilesden Green to hang out with my aunt for the day. The bus was great and I got from Acton to Wilesden Green in 40 minutes or so. We had a great lunch then headed to see my cousin, her husband and their two children who I have barely even met! Seeing them was great, the kids are great and we had a great time. I wish I remember to get some pictures of me with the kids, especially Charlie who has similar hair to what I had when I was his age. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome so we left at about 9:30 and headed home for more food and tea. I rang my friend Fuxtonius at 10pm and told him I was crashing at his house, an idea he was not opposed to which was good because I didn’t have anywhere to stay on Monday night! Last thing I did was prepare for Hand held learning 2009 (See review) which I had to be at by 10:30..

Monday came and I was eager to get to HHL to meet some of the twitter folks and to see what people had to say, especially about the wilsden project and also to see if I could persuade anyone to get behind my “Not a VLE project”. Met a lot of people and really enjoyed the first presentation of the day. Met some friends and family for lunch then headed back to HHL, unfortunately some of the presentations were repeats from Friday and the exhibition didn’t have any interesting companies showing anything new. I think with the stands costing £3000 this year a lot of smaller innovative companies weren’t interested. Anyway, read my review if you are interested in HHL.. After the do I headed out drinking with some friends till about 11 at which point I walked up to Angel to stop at Fuxtonius‘ flat.

Woke up on Monday morning and tried to persuade a train guy to not be a douche bag and to let me get an earlier train but he wasn’t having it so I jumped onto Macdonalds wireless network and enjoyed a cup of tea while slowly authoring some blog posts and thinking about where to eat breakfast and how to kill 3 hours…

Thanks to my aunt, my cousins and their kids, P, STI and Fuxtonius for everything, I had a great time and I will be back in January probably. 🙂

Also thanks to the Bradford massive (EB) for the entertainment factor 😉 You do realize the pub we were in was completely empty? Was that something to do with us cause everyone left when we went in! Do I smell?

E-Ink brings fresh thought to classrooms

Posted on August 23, 2009July 11, 2011 by primaryt

E Ink is a new technology that is exciting investors the world over. E Ink is basically a way of displaying 4 shades of grey onto an LCD type display that uses a less power. I am going to be discussing practical uses for this in a school or classroom environment.

Obvious uses are:

Replace classroom display boards with relevant material.
Replace paintings or signs with suitable notices.
Use as a reading device, alternative to a laptop.

My concept..:

It wasn’t that many years ago since I left the classroom… Okay, so it was but I still remember most of what I wasn’t supposed to be learning. My eyes constantly wandered around the walls looking at the presentation that year 11 had done on osmosis whilst trying not to learn..

So I figured..

Why not have displays that update with material that is relevant to what the teacher is trying to teach, that way when I start to wander at least I’m learning something that’s useful.

Something to note:

E Ink will mostly be powered by solar and should be sustainable using standard classroom lighting. E Ink will not be a replacement for a computer or laptop. E Ink is a display technology.

And to sprinkle the frosties…

Currently 7″ x 9″ screens are classed as “massive”. Some of the screens are flexible and most do not have any wireless connectivity.

In my ideal world a screen would be 4ft x 3ft, width/height adjustable and include some sort of wireless content delivery system. Oh and it should be solar powered. I want to pay about $200 for this, max.

Oh and as my last request I want to be able to roll it up at the end of the term, just so the cleaners don’t break it!

E Ink in 2005

The flexible potential of E Ink

Toshiba NB200 clean XP Pro install

Posted on August 18, 2009 by primaryt

How to … (Yes this is the quickest method…)

Prereqs:

External USB CD OR DVD drive.
Nlite
Windows XP Pro ISO image or XP Pro CD

Steps:

Get External USB CD Drive & Blank CD/DVD
Get nlite
Get this driver from Toshiba – It’s the Intel matrix storage floppy driver..
Extract driver to a folder..
Install nlite
Run nlite and select to include driver and create ISO Image
Create new ISO Image
Select folder where you extracted the driver (Multiple drivers)
Select all drivers.
Burn ISO image to a blank CD/DVD
Install from CD/DVD.