Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • The iPrint leads to paperless schools

    News that Empire High School in Tuscon, Arizona will become a truly paperless school next year has already done the rounds. It’s the first of a trickle of such news items that will become a flood by next year and cease to be news by the year after.

    What astonishes me is that this is still news. Now, thanks to a link from Tim O’Reily, I think I’ve worked out why.

    To imagine a school without paper is a huge conceptual leap in a society that is knee-deep in the stuff. And central to our notion that our very way of life depends on paper is the newspaper. Not for nothing is that particular medium commonly abbreviated to just ‘the papers’. Conversely, if every railway carriage, living room and staff room were not routinely littered with newspapers, it would be far easier to imagine a classroom that also didn’t rely on paper.

    How and why might that come about? I propose that there’s both a push and a pull at work.

    The pull
    Think about the iPod, or indeed the Walkman. For two decades now, a significant proportion of the population has routinely carried a pocket-sized device with which to listen to music anytime, anywhere. Now imagine an iPrint. It’s the same size and weight as an iPod but through some ingenious design it’s got an adequate screen. Perhaps you use it like an iPod, uploading the morning news before you leave for work, or perhaps it’s got a radio connection to the internet. Perhaps it’s also your phone, and gets sent news as it happens. It doesn’t really matter; the point is that you can easily imagine such a gadget existing in the near future.

    Now, imagine getting on a train and noticing a young man who, instead of listening to his iPod is browsing his iPrint. Does that seem so earth-shaking? No. The novelty will have worn off inside a fortnight and you’ll have bought your own within six months, simply because it’s lighter than a novel and its news is immediate and current. And so, of course, you stop buying papers.

    The push
    There’s another reason you will stop buying papers. The price is about to go through the roof. Why? Because newspaper prices are heavily subsidised by advertising revenue, and advertisers are abandoning newsprint advertising in droves. They have found a better deal in contextual advertising; those online adverts that are more likely to pique your interest because they are keyed to what you are searching for or reading about. No advertiser who has once mastered the contextual advertising of their product or service will continue to subsidise your daily paper.

    Of course if the price of newspapers goes up, fewer people will buy them and the price will have to go up further to cover editorial expenses. You can see where that spiral inevitably leads.

    So whilst it is hard to predict the timescale, it is clear that a combination of push and pull will make us a newspaperless society in the not-too-distant future. With that symbolic cornerstone gone, school heads and governors will find it far easier to intellectually commit to the possibilities of the paperless school.

    Comments

    I use HYPERLINK with my palm.
    Every time I synchronise the palm it downloads my channels and I can then
    read them when I get time. Admittedly the screen size isn’t ideal, but it’s
    a great service!
    Steve Margetts
    Click to enlarge

  • Ecstra screencast

    Nick, who architected Paperless School, is experimenting with screencasting

    I bought a copy of Macromedia Captivate the other day. It’s a great tool for
    creating demos, or tutorials on how to use a program/web interface, but also
    claims to integrate with SCORM-compliant LMS somehow… I haven’t got that
    far yet. Here’s my first amateurish production: [demo of his CMS Ecstra] –
    a Flash movie of a Flash movie in fact.

    I’ve seem screencasts before from experts like Jon Udell – but this is Nick’s first attempt. It’s a credit to Nick, and has certainly piqued my interest in the Captivate. As soon as Macromedia revise their sniffy attitude towards my preferred browser (Camino) I’ll take a look.

    Ecstra itself is

    a platform-independent web application for managing, visualising and publishing data, ideas, content, processes and plans.

    and well worth your attention if you manage large amounts of information, or just if you love cool interfaces.

    Update: to see M’media at their sniffiest it turns out you have to be in Camino when you click the link above. Which I recommend, because Camino is even better than Firefox.

  • Flash is a tool not a toy

    Received from a Paperless School user who I won’t name to spare the blushes of his technical department…

    We are about to run into problem with technicians again! They turned off flash player because some pupils were playing games in other classes, promptly losing the online encyclopedia*, how nice to be consulted!

    …and the reply I’d really like to send, but won’t.

    Dear _

    When I visited your school a while back I noticed one of your pupils doodling in his jotter. Clearly, this activity is not educational and indicates a dangerous loss if discipline in the school. I appreciate that pens, pencils etc can have educational value if their use is properly supervised, but the benefits must be weighed against the risks. Before matters get out of hand I strongly recommend you confiscate all writing implements forthwith.

    * Our encyclopedias don’t use much Flash, but there’s a very handy link in a Flash banner on the main work pages.

  • Bullying via new technology

    Chalkface publishes some 23 resources on bullying, or with bullying-related content. Over the years, we’ve covered every aspect of bullying as it affects young people….or so I thought.

    Stop Text Bullying is a new site aimed at raising awareness of bullying via new technologies. It is structured around a list of seven ways of using technology to be unpleasant to people – texting, phone calls, photos (specifically from camera phones), email, chat/IM, various websites, identity theft.

    On the downside, I’m not wildly impressed by the content. It looks like what it is, a great idea unimaginatively implemented by its commercial sponsor (Tesco Mobile). But it’s a wakeup call for Chalkface; we should already have both online and offline resources covering this area in a way that’s really teachable, and we don’t….yet.

    Via c|net

    Update 4/7/05: I listed this entry on our monthly customer email and it attracted a far higher level of interest than I’d expected. This reinforces my conviction that a new resource is needed; trouble is, we don’t have an author. If you think you’re the person to do it, and you’re an experienced classroom teacher, get in touch.

    Comments

    The listed site is the best available no matter its shortcomings and it is available to students. That make sit worthwhile. A teaching resource would always be useful but kids need somewhere to go too.
    Barbara Daniels

  • P(r)oxy Servers

    When any online service goes wrong, there are four possible loci for the problem

    1. The program
    2. The server
    3. Proxy server en route
    4. The browser

    Of these, 1 and 2 are under our control (‘us’ being the people who run the service). Problems can generally be found and fixed quickly. 4 is generally something that we can replicate on our own desktops; there aren’t that many popular combinations of browsers and computers.

    But the one we fear more than piranhas is 3. Proxy servers come in endless flavours and their configurations are jealously guarded by their owners. Most secondary schools have one. Grids for Learning (GFLs), LEAs, Regional Broadband Consortia (RBCs) also have them.

    What they are supposed to do is manage the flow of data so that the network, particularly the ‘last mile’ into the school, does not get overloaded. What can easily happen instead is that data gets bounced around between them like so many billiard balls randomly hitting each other instead of rolling directly into the pocket.

    This is not to say that proxies are a bad thing. A single, simple proxy in the school can make a huge difference when an entire class of 30 all need to access the same 20M movie file down a typical Secondary school’s 10 megabit connection. In my perfect world, that would be it. One proxy per school, preferably externally managed by specialists in that single narrow field, and nothing else.