Primary School Wireless

Posted on by primaryt

My Presentation on Primary School Wireless that I did for Bradford Curriculum ICT is due soon. I dropped the hard disk off at Challenge CLC and I’m just waiting on getting the video footage back. It should only take me a few days to process the footage then I will release it on here/youtube.

If you have any questions before it goes live on the site then please email me or Dally@Primaryt.co.uk and we will be happy to help.
Here are our contact details for wireless networks
Just been told the video is now on the hard disk so I will be picking it up tomorrow afternoon!
UPDATE: This is now available on You tube

Junior Librarian is putting me in a bad mood

Posted on by primaryt

1) This software is so badly written

2) It fails w/ UAC on in Vista
3) WTF does a teacher have Vista on a laptop for after COUNTLESS becta guidance.
My exact error is a frmCatalogue.cmdSave_Click which is a procedure in Junior Library so I google it. Nothing, no documentation online.
So I google “”Junior Librarian” vista” to see if Junior Librarian works on Vista or not. Nothing, no mention.
Sucks, they need to document more and spend less time/money on sales.
Can’t believe im doing this at 00:20am for a teacher who needs it the next day.. . I would twitter bout it but everyone is too busy twittering about a talented Gary Glitter.
The internet is starting to fail, we need to get a grip of it..
Yea awesome, in remove software its listed as Junior3, way to understand how to insert spaces into the name of an application you tools. Just for the record, next time use “”‘s..
I’d spend some time blogging all the flaws in this software but I don’t think I have enough hours in the day..
Okay – Disable UAC/Uninstall/Reinstall JL software and reboot of machine fixed it. Rant over. Someone PLEASE make a decent open source/free online version of this.
PS This application cost the school over £1000, tax payers money well spent? You decide.

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..

elgg public pages are not availabe

Posted on by primaryt

I’m struggling with public pages actually being publicly available on elgg, I’m using the elgg allpublic plugin and I still get asked to log in to view pages.

Files and Photos etc. work fine, just seems to be a pages issue. I will update this thread if I find a fix.
I have recently discovered the fix for this, all of my pages were access_id 2 so that was fine. The problem was…
With the rate plugin which required a user to be logged in to rate a page.. Disabled the plugin. This is now fixed.. Huraa

Elgg – All entities must be public – Remove friends and everyone else as options during inupt

Posted on by primaryt

Wow possibly the worst topic ever for one of my posts 😛

This is relevant if
a) You use Elgg
b) You want all users to only be able to post as public
c) You have the allpublic elgg plugin
If not you won’t be interested..
Basically, the array that holds the values takes 0,1,2 then you drop out 0,1 (this is default behavior in the allpublic plugin).
For some weird reason this leaves behind “Friends” as an option, this is not desirable behavior and the fix is to remove -2 ( I know wth were they thinking) from the array. Use this line of code in the allplugin access.php:
unset($vars[‘options’][-2]);
Put that with the rest of the unset’s in the plugin.
Full file path will be mod/allpublic/views/default/input
As another note, if -2 isn’t right for you just echo out the $key value from the array like..
{$option . $key} then you will get the name of the option and the key/id.