Category: Primary School ICT

Changing Youtube to get it unblocked in the Primary Classroom

Posted on by John McLear

Over the next month I will be working with the Youtube team trying to implement changes that will make Youtube a safer tool to use in the Primary Classroom.  We managed to achieve a relatively safe Google Search experience through Safe search and we hope to copy that successful process over to Video.

Google TV and Primary School TV are both due early 2011 and I expect that within 5 years the majority of TV content will be consumed on demand over the Interwebs.  This means now is the time to address this issue.

I’m pretty confident that if you are reading this blog then you are aware of the issues surrounding Youtube and why children can’t use it.  So instead of talking about the issues I am going to simply propose three changes Youtube can make that will make teachers more confident to adopt the worlds largest video resource.

Allow a Very Safe Search mode

VSS is a Google Search parameter that stands for Very Safe Search.  Youtube’s Safe Search is called “Safety Mode”.  Safe Search passes this parameter to Google when doing searches and then that users session is always in strict search mode and their is no option to turn this off. Simply put it’s a way to enforce a safer search experience. What Youtube shouldn’t do is expect for a user to login prior to making the experience safer.  This defeats the point.  The current API claims to have a safeSearch mode but I’m not convinced it works (proof here— WARNING: Contains explicit material).  Youtube could easily add a fourth category.

Make Safety Mode more visible

Did you even know Youtube had a safety mode?  To find safety mode you have to scroll to the bottom of the page, you are then reminded it is not 100% accurate.  All in the experience is hard work and doesn’t fill one with confidence.   This will be a tough sales pitch as it means altering the UI for everyone.  Ideally the Safety Mode option would be under “Search options” and only visible when VSS isn’t set.

Implement a Custom Search Engine

A custom search engine would allow content from certain websites/publishers to be emphasized in the same way that Google Custom Search performs. This will allow third parties to improve the search experience and remove any undesirable content without having to contact Youtube.   Youtube would benefit from this as third parties would pro-actively flag up any inappropriate content, allowing Youtube to optionally crowd source this should improve the Youtube experience.  This will act very much in the same way as Custom Safe Search and will give Youtube the option to allow Educators to remove Ads from content.  Educators would benefit from this as content from educational publishers would show up higher in the search results.

What do you think? Are there still issues with Youtube that I haven’t addressed?  Are you scared of pupils uploading inappropriate videos?  I would love to hear your thoughts, please leave a comment!  I am going to be putting my proposal forward later this week so all feedback is greatly appreciated! 🙂

BdRuAmIpN 4 days of craziness

Posted on by primaryt

I have been none stop since Thursday and I figure, what with it now being technically Tuesday I should give myself an opportunity to brain dump.  So in the last 4 days..

I earned a BrainPOP badge, yay thanks for that 🙂

I’m Impressed by Egil, Joes and Michael’s ability to sit in complete science with the odd groan for prolonged periods of time.

It sucked that Aaron Iba the original developer of Etherpad couldn’t make it talk to us, he was ill, I hope he gets better and gets a chance to have a chat with us soon!

I’m not a proper programmer, you might think I am because I can fix problems by programming.  But programmers are awesome.  Scala has changed and Etherpad can’t compile on the latest version so I went into #scala on freenode, explained my problem and some guy fixed it and committed to Github.

One of the work vehicles got broken into.  We will not be claiming on the car insurance and probably wont report it to the police.  Tools were left in the van.  It’s just one of those things that comes with the territory of living in Bradford.

Firebug is awesome.

I now have a load of kudos on Reddit, how the hell did that happen whilst I was away from my computer?

As a general rule of thumb, caretakers should avoid touching ICT in schools, in hindsight I’m sure they create more problems than they solve.

Primary Blogger has had some updates (I can only assume by Adam) and it looks much nicer.

We had a bunch of hackers from Olin university join us for the hackathon and while I appreciate their efforts I was slightly disappointed with their output.

Everyone from the Etherpad foundation shares the same views about how the foundation and software should be maintained and supported.

The Amazon Kindle doesn’t really fit into my busy life schedule.  Most tech rarely does.  I didn’t get time for books before the kindle so who was I kidding thinking I would when I bought it?  It is a great device though, I wish I had more time to play with it.

Here is a picture of Etherpad running on it.

Scrobbling Learning

Posted on by John McLear

Scrobbling is a process last.fm uses to figure out the type of music you like.  It is about 90% accurate and over time builds a more and more accurate profile about what you “might like”.  A while back we have entered into an Internet age of recommendations.  Amazon adopted it a long time ago, it is about 20% accurate for me.

Recommendation engines do work but they must rely on users not only “doing” tasks but feeding back if they felt it was a positive/negative experience and if the recommendation engine should of recommended the item or not.  For example even though last.fm is 90% accurate for me sometimes I block a song but get the rest of the songs from that artist.

A project called ROLE intends to profile a learner based and recommend content based on their learning profile.

Currently the project is in an abstraction and development phase.  I appreciate the concept.  I think it is possible, doable and feasible and should have a number of practical purposes.

ROLE has many more challenges to face, such as what type of content is being delivered and is the learner more focused on a type of content IE biology or a type of learning style or will it approach it with a 3d angle of trying to profile the style of learner and the content desired?

The largest challenge ROLE faces it the natural opposition from educators feeling like their workload is being converted into a factory style process. I hope ROLE get a decent video up on YouTube explaining the challenges they face and how they intend to address them. It appears for an open project they are having lots of problems communicating to the wider public exactly what they are trying to achieve and why developers should get involved.  I hear some recent employees have been brought in to address this and I think that is a huge + and I’m looking forward to seeing what they achieve!