Category: Primary School

EEE Desktop is super slick

Posted on by primaryt
Had a demo of the EEE desktop in our office today.
The unit was sent to us to use in a primary school. They cost about £340 exc vat or so.
My only beef, no VGA/HDMI output on the model we had 🙁 This may not be accurate for all models.

But first meet our moody Engineer aka Cuddles

webcam

handle

clean -_-

cables + ports

low profile kb

slick design

save desktop space

Summer web surfing for pupils at home

Posted on by primaryt

Over the summer holidays your kids may want to use the internet and they may ask you about some good sites to visit or you may want to give them a few.

I recommend this site because it is a great starting place for gaming, collaborating and searching.
The easiest way to access the site is to give the child the URL or to ask them to google “School Safe Search“
Enjoy the summer everyone 🙂

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.

Second Life or Virtual 3d Worlds in Primary Schools

Posted on by primaryt


Naace are running a conference on using 3d virtual worlds in education. I can’t help but feeling this is mostly focused on the secondary market but I guess it has some relevance to Primary.

Right now, even though I feel it has relevance I feel skeptical that this is a good idea but I could be wrong, it’s happened before 😛

Try to remember most primary school kids don’t even have email addresses provided by their schools yet and we’re going to open them up to a second life (be it walled or not)

I’m not going to rant about security or child safety. I want to focus entirely on the point. Right now, I just don’t get it.

I’m not going to download it or try it out, I don’t want to know if it feels good or clever. This isn’t a particularly new concept. Games have been used in Primary Education for years, mostly cartoony games that are very simple. Why do I need my character to walk to a piece of work to pick it up when its available on my VLE.. (I’m pretending I’m a kid…)

I do however think games is a great way to encourage kids to learn, Primary Games Arena is having huge success worldwide with engaging children in fun learning.

Virtual worlds should be all about engaging with other people, school mates for example.

Maybe the whole Digital Citizenship is what I don’t get. Being that I started with BBS, moved to IRC + LPMUD, now I have every possible way of being “Hailed” 24/7… Come to think of it I think I probably learned a lot of social skills through LPMuds (Multi user environments)..

I think I will go spend some time thinking about what Digital Citizenship is and how it will feel in 3/5 years time when virtual worlds MAY be at their peak. They certainly haven’t peaked yet and all the hype from Second Life is blatant hot air..

I may have just begun a revolution in my head.. Oh dear..

If you read this all the way through then you may wish to consider reading this article of Terry freedmans interview of Miller – its focused more at secondary but you get the picture..