Category: Primary School

Curtains for Becta

Posted on by primaryt

Well our old friend is gone.  I’m going to be lost without being able to say “this is what Becta recommend”.  I guess it will open up more choice and creativity inside of ICT but I fear it will lead to uncertainty and extra for work for ICT bods trying to figure out best practice.  I’m lucky because I have an army of educators on my twitter network.  I also think Primary Technology may benefit from a slightly more fragmented decision making process inside authorities and nationwide.

Still, sorry to anyone who reads this that is out of work.

Free digital signage alternatives for schools – WordPress and Visible Tweets

Posted on by primaryt

Ever been quoted a rediculous amount of your digital signage software and figured why can’t I just use this old laptop/pc and do it myself? Well now you can, and you don’t need any extra software. These 2 options work through your web browser and are completely free.

Visible tweets

To use visisble tweets you will need a school twitter account and you will probably want to “feed” your twitter account from your school blog or website.  People can then follow your school twitter account and get the latest updates in real time and as you update your website/blog it will automatically update your schools digital signage.  Visible tweets is super easy but is limited to tweets alone so pictures or video are out of the picture….

Live Example

Primary Blogger

Primary Blogger is a blogging platform that supports themes for digital signage.  You can include videos, pictures, vokis, pretty much anything.  Primary Blogger can update itself from an RSS feed so you can have your blog or website anywhere and just tell Primary Blogger to update from that. It is fair to say that without videos it is less visually stimulating than Visible tweets.

Video:

 

Live Example – Guide for how to do it

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One social web could make school social networking a reality

Posted on by primaryt

Ever wished you could have a school social network that has the the privacy settings to protect pupils yet the power to connect pupils and teachers globally?

One Social Web may make this a reality.  The purpose of One Social Web is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. *Like Facebook but not owned by Facebook, owned by, well um, everyone!

Usually your school data exists only on your school server.  If your school server was integrated with One Social Web school pupils or teachers could easily be “transfered” to another school without losing any information, files etc. and/or be able to access their old school work whilst being access to connect their new file storage.

The One Social Web platform is based in London, UK and has developers all around the world.  The platform is completely open so anyone can contribute and privacy settings are managed on a per user basis.

It would be interesting to see the first school deployment of this, I certainly hope I will get the opportunity to tie Primary School Teaching into the platform!  It would also be interesting to debate how One Social Web can work with Shibboleth providing not only single level accessibility but accessibility at an organizational level.

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Free Office 2010 Web Apps in your school

Posted on by primaryt

To compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office 2010 web apps is free. If you want to use Microsoft Office without an internet connection you will need to purchase the offline version of the software for the usual educational price tag of around £30.

Microsoft Office Web Apps is an on-line version of Microsoft office.

So what do you/don’t you get with Office web apps?

  1. No Microsoft publisher
  2. You get limited web based versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote
  3. Access anywhere, any time (requires internet)
  4. You can upload your current existing Office 2003/2007 documents

When it comes to it, you have a few options for working with documents.

  1. Purchase the office suite.
  2. Use the free online tools by Microsoft – Microsoft Live @ Edu
  3. Use the free online tools by Google – Google Apps Education Edition
  4. Use open office (Free).
  5. Use educationally focused alternatives such as Glogster, Scribblar, Empressr, PrimaryPad – Each of these alternatives is specific to one job, and that job is done well. (Mostly free)
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