John McLear – Page 137 – Founder, Inventor, Creator

BBC iplayer maintenance durations

Posted on December 2, 2009 by primaryt

The BBC do period maintenance on the iPlayer service which requires the a temporary shutdown.

The maintenance duration is usually between 5-60 minutes, maintenance is usually scheduled to take place outside of peek viewing hours, beginning at 10pm and continuing into the night.

In the mean time you should check out Ted talks.

Primary Blogger – How to use your own domain

Posted on November 28, 2009July 11, 2011 by primaryt

So you want to move your current website to primary blogger or use a domain you own.

An Example of this is http://www.wilsdenprimary.co.uk

You can do this for free by accessing your DNS control panel and creating a new A record for your domain.

Note: Having 2 entries means if one fails the visitor will automatically try the next. It also means we can load balance (Which is nice because PrimaryBlogger is huge).

Add entries called www that point to 94.136.53.6, 217.199.169.145 & 109.107.35.108 (Or modify your existing A record to point to these).

If you need assistance with this step please get in touch with Primary Technology.

Once you have set your DNS then log into your Primary Blogger Dashboard by visiting your blog and clicking Site Admin.

Click Tools
Click Domain Mapping
Under add a new domain type in your domain name.
Click OK
Wait 24 hours.

You may want to let us know if you are going to do this.. Why? I hear you ask.. Well we have some clever caching in place that speeds up websites based on their hostname and if your hostname is not included it may mean your PrimaryBlogger blog does some weird things..

Primary School Blog – Adding widgets, content and changing themes

Posted on November 27, 2009 by primaryt

A quick video showing how easy it is to make a great blog for your school!

Emerging Technologies in Primary Education #2

Posted on November 24, 2009July 11, 2011 by primaryt

George did an article on Emerging Technologies in Greek and I couldn’t read it so I figured I’d do a post then ask George to see how many of technologies overlapped.

Here is my list of Emerging Technologies:

Web 2 Replacement (ie Google Apps, Primary Email) for non web applications
Single Sign on / Federated Login (Such as the UK Federation)
SMS, Email & Social networking sites (Facebook/Twitter) to communicate both with pupils and teachers
Netbook devices
Touch screen devices (Such as fizzbook)
Cloud storage, Files stored online
More 1:1 projects (One Laptop per Child) and learning at home

UPDATE: 4 out of 7 overlapped with George (see comments for more details!)

Here are some I missed off ’cause I forgot..:

Learning while playing games (Such as Primary Games Arena)
Oled/eink display boards and learning panels once the technology matures
Learning outside of the school gates (Continued learning (with/without a structure))

Troubleshooting Google Apps and Shibboleth

Posted on November 24, 2009 by primaryt

If you receive an “invalid email” error or invalid user then this is probably due to the fact that the username provided by your identity provider doesn’t match the username created in Google Apps. To remedy this check to see if the user account exists in Google Apps, if so then contact your identity provider and ask them to tell you what username they are sending so you can create the relevant account.