Category: ICT

School ICT ownership model

Posted on by primaryt

I am in the process of writing an article on how schools can adopt and approach an ownership model which means parents/pupils contribute towards the cost of the ICT used inside of the school.

The principle idea is that the parent/child then owns the device and can be used in the future outside of the school.
Various schools have offered to contribute already to this paper but if you know of any school that has adopted this model and wants to talk about the advantages, disadvantages and the learning curve experienced throughout their deployment then please get on touch VIA twitter, email, a comment on this thread or facebook.
I am hoping to have this article completed by the end of the summer holidays 2009 and as always I will post for free on my blog.

Hosted Operating systems in schools

Posted on by primaryt


I have spent the last few days looking at fully hosted OS’ for schools. My consideration has been:

  • What problem are we trying to fix by using a fully hosted OS in a school?
  • Who will benifit most from using a hosted OS in a school?
  • What are the cost implications of using a hosted OS in a school?
An example of a fully hosted OS is http://eyeos.org – Basically an operating system you access through a web browser. It is available anywhere which means your applications and files follow you around.
Why use a hosted OS in education?
  • Reduce cost of software licensing & hardware requirements
  • Increase stability
  • Increase availability
  • Safe environment (not safer but safe(truly safe))
  • Simplify application deployment and delivery of content to the pupil/teacher
Why not to use a hosted OS in education?
  • Unfamiliar OS
  • Unfamiliar applications
  • Lack of printing availability
  • Inability to install x32 applications
  • Complex video streaming
The fundamental flaw…
Why have an OS thats completely hosted when 95% of people have a perfectly working OS on their desktop at home atm which was purchased OEM with a pc from a retail outlet?
The arguement against that flaw…
Applications do not require installation so a pupil/teacher can go to their safe environment as a restricted user and focus on learning without being at risk at all.
My opinion…
I believe in (MS/Open) Office over Textease. I may be wrong on this but my fundamental belief is that you have to introduce children to an ICT environment that will be familiar with when they leave school.
Further reading:
Is that interactive white boards are part of daily school life in most western countries, so erm, do these work with a hosted OS? In a nutshell, yes. Just like a Microsoft Windows OS you are required to install a driver on the actual hardware device.
A video of a school using eyeOS (not over the internet but hosted locally on site)

Review of Microsoft Family Safety Installation

Posted on by primaryt
Today im reviewing Microsoft Family Safety with a consideration on e-Safety for parents

“With Family Safety, you decide how your kids experience the Internet. You can limit searches, block or allow websites, decide who your kids can communicate with when they’re using Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail, or Spaces and monitor what websites they’re visiting…”

In this review I will be installing the package and looking at what this really means in real life.

The product is easily downloadable from http://download.live.com/familysafety

Once you have downloaded and run the package you get this installer screen:

I was shocked to see Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer, some outlook and some Live Add ins bundled. Also SQL Server CE 3.1 is required and some of my applications will be updated.
For me this is bloatware already. I want an application that does what it sais in the blurb so I am going to remove all of the additional programs except from Family Safety (However you may want some of this functionality).
With everything else removed the install is a quite large 109 MB. I hope this disk space usage is justified.
I needed to close MSN messenger to proceed and the install process took 8 minutes to complete on a machine with with an Intel Core2 6600 & 2 GB ram.
Once install is complete you are presented with this screen:
I have already set my search provider to google safe search and my home page to Primary School Safe Search so I don’t want to do that. I also don’t want to help improve Windows Live, not right now.
Now for a restart… Microsoft never seemed to learn that this is the most frustrating thing about most of their products for IT professionals however parents might not mind this restart as much.
After the restart I was prompted to “Sign Up” to Windows live but I already have windows live so I clicked Close. Nothing has been placed on my desktop or start menu and Windows Live Messenger has not opened as it usualy does. Very bad first impression.
I had to browse to Start – Windows Live – Family Safety, here I tried to sign in as a parent using my hotmail/live username/password. I was given an Error That I have not yet ereviews the Windows Live Terms of Use. No link was provided. I logged into my hotmail to look for the Live Terms of Use.. I clicked More then Family Safety and then clicked “I accept”.
Then I clicked Sign in again, now im in. Already im convinced this is too complicated for parents.
I am going to leave it here for today, it has been 30 minutes so far and the install is done but the configuration isn’t.
In my opinion most parents would simply not go through this entire process as it is too complicated.
Part 2 of this post will review configuration. Expect it in a few days.

The "Open" arguement and how it changes learning

Posted on by primaryt

Why do I publish everything I do?

I don’t, I publish about 90% of what I do. I don’t publish all of the School Email source. I do publish nearly all of my music work and most of my educational source code especially the php work I do. I also create free to use resource sites that enable learners and educators to quickly and easily access the content they want to access.

Why be open?

I’m a computer geek, we have an entire community dedicated to sharing code, ideas, thoughts and knowledge. It’s great. In fact its probably the best part of working in IT. For example, Primary School Teaching has 900 man DAYS of code yet 890 of those days were provided for free, by a community of contributors.

How does this translate to educators?

Education created IT, yet IT seems to of outdone education when it comes to sharing resources/ideas/plans and knowledge. How bizarre is that?

I have spent the last few days trying to encourage educators to spend 30 seconds a day uploading their lesson plans to Primary School Teaching and the #1 argument I face is why should I share my hard work with someone who will just steal it? For me this just doesn’t compute. I don’t see how it does in teaching, I don’t understand why teachers won’t share as much as I’m used to.

It should be free to learn.

Shouldn’t it?

When to have closed systems

Only when security is an issue (ie child details) should a system be “closed”. Certain niche systems that require lots of revenue to fund them and have large start up capital may also be closed. If the content is of a high quality then this can be justified.

But if everything is open then how do we make money?

This all sounds a bit communist… Not at all, schools will steal need teachers, learners will still need resources. I get paid for what I release publicly too. There are lots of revenue models other than the simple pay for knowledge.

Today’s great debate

Today was great, I was using twitter(A free service) while talking to some resource creators who felt it was inappropriate that Primary Games Arena(A free service) had an iframe linking to other websites which had games for kids(All freely available games). The argument was that it looked on the website like Primary Games Arena is taking credit for the resources it links to. On each game there is some text that displays who the publisher is of the game.

In my nature I feel that if something is available on a website then referring to that resource should never be a problem as you are making it easier for the learner to learn and/or teacher to teach.

After our short < 1000 word debate we decided that Primary Games Arena will now email each resource creator asking for permission to put games on Primary Games Arena. This is a simple procedure that will take a matter of minutes to accomplish and should keep everyone happy.

Thanks for everyone who got involved in today’s debate.

I do hope we can encourage teachers to share more and for websites to show more respect to the resource creators/authors and publishers who create the content.

This post will probably spark some conversation and I hope that it does because I feel this is an important issue that needs addressing.