Introducing the Random name selector tool

Posted on by primaryt

Introducing the Random name selector tool. A simple tool built for teachers to randomly pick a pupil, person, item or object from a list.  

Basically if you have a list of people and you need to pick one then whack their name into a list and click Go..  It will randomly pick someone, give you a pretty animation and some audio output.  I know it’s simple and basic and doesn’t have  many options but that’s the idea behind it.

You can single click share and embed it using an iframe (click Save & Share).

Geek warning: The tool is open source (as it’s 99.9% html/javascript) and is under the Afero GPL license. Just View Source and copy/paste, most of the js objects are from CDNs and you can just grab them too. If you do decide to copy it then please try to keep the credit to me in because I need my ego pleasing. I avoided flash as much as possible so all the animations are done with jQuery.

Oh before I forget, thanks to @PrimaryT aka Primary Technology for funding the development 🙂

Why your school infrastructure matters more today than it did yesterday

Posted on by primaryt

With the launch of PrimaryWall we noticed that we have a number of schools getting periodic dropped connections, this is due to schools infrastructures “dropping packets”.  I was dealing with a school a few months ago who had a technical support provider who promised them that dropping ~5% of packets wouldn’t affect their performance..  This may of been true for their current usage but really-real time web apps such as PrimaryWall and PrimaryPad require that your infrastructure is correctly configured, any packet loss is a potential future failure and should be avoided.  So how can you see if your infrastructure is up to par?

We made a simple heartbeat tool so you can test this yourself.  Enjoy!

PrimaryWall finally rears it’s friendly face

Posted on by primaryt

“PrimaryWall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time” – and it was conceived by Lord James Langley to replace the unstable and overly complicated Wallwisher and Linoit in schools.  PrimaryWall is initially starting with just public features and in beta so we can get quality feedback from teachers and pupils.  We have tested it in a few Primary Schools and it has been fast, stable and most importantly enjoyable.  James asked me to develop it in January with the idea that it is easily accessable from PrimaryPad but a lot has happened over the last few months so it took us a while.

To make PrimaryWall we had to work on a lot of new technologies and to learn about these technologies we made a game which is due to be published in a few weeks. The initial plan was to use the standard PHP/AJAX/Apache stack but we figured NodeJS would be way more fun and make for a much sharper collaborative experience.

We were able to publish PrimaryWall open source so you can host your own if you want.  We hope to bring professional options in soon so watch this/that space 🙂

I would love to hear your thoughts about PrimaryWall so feel free to leave me a comment or post a message on the Primary Technology community. Alternatively if you have a blog it would be really useful if you would do a review letting me know your pro’s/con’s and what you would like to see in the future. Our basic link of functionality we are adding is:

  • Password protect walls
  • Manage walls – Delete etc.
  • Change font
  • Change background
  • Profanity detection and filtering
  • Phone support
  • Pass name of author from third party applications
  • Easy wall embed

When twitter goes bad..

Posted on by John McLear

This week twitter has really been a nightmare for me..

Problem a) A friend decided to advertise that I was abroad. This is an obvious security risk but once it’s out there it’s out there and you can’t claw it back, subsequently a conversation took place on twitter about me having a holiday so the message spread.. Pretty damn annoying.

Problem b) People started DM’ing me about problems, my inbox was being monitored by my colleagues who couldn’t get in touch with the people DM’ing me because the people DM’ing me didn’t have my email address and my colleagues don’t use twitter.

Solution: Change my twitter profile to ask people to email me instead of DM me. As for people advertising if someone is on holiday (away from home) think about it first. The people who mentioned I was away from home have had e-safety training so should know better.