In the last few years society has become much more computer safety and virus savvy.  That’s not to say that all viruses, spyware and malware have disappeared off the radar but people are starting to question content a little bit more.  Many more people don’t open attachments from unknown senders although it is still easy to get caught by an email hoax. 

The latest fashion of fan pages on Facebook is starting to erode all that good work on content awareness as they force people to click a link or Like button before they know what they are getting into.  This is becoming more common and the characteristics are virus like.

How it works

1. The fan page publishes itself to your friend’s profile page and therefore shows up in your news feed.

2. You click on the “Hilarious” link to find out what it’s all about

3. You cannot view the content without signing up or clicking the Like button

4. You then get access to the picture BUT the page also publishes itself to your profile page and your friends’ news feeds

5. They click the link and the cycle starts all over again!

What’s the problem?

Some might say that this is no problem, it’s marketing and publicity.  I have no problem with the pages themselves but the method used is desensitising users to ‘mindless’ clicking.  There is no concept of questioning the content, it forces you to click/accept/like the page before you know what you’re getting. 

This technique will lead us back to where we were a few years ago where people will click anything that is presented to them! It would be quite easy to spoof these pages and send them out as Facebook styled emails to get people to give up their Facebook passwords or download viruses/malware to their computer. 

More information

See this BBC News article about ‘clickjacking’ (c/o twitter.com/xannov)

I heard all the buzz about the Wired Magazine iPad app so downloaded it for myself to see if it warranted the hype.   Here’s my short tour and review of the online magazine.

It’s no secret that I’m an Apple guy! I don’t want to be labelled as a fanboi but I love my iPhone, iMac and my MacBook Pro.

The big question for me was did I need an iPad with this much Mac in my life?
The answer was NO!

The next question was did I WANT an iPad with this much Mac in my life?
The answer was maybe.

I think I did extremely well resisting a US import of the iPad. This was partly due to the cost but also due to the fact that it wouldn’t be long until it was launched in the UK (until Apple moved the goalposts … grrrrrrrr!) By the time it launched in the UK I had almost talked myself out of getting it with phrases like “it’s just a toy”, “it doesn’t do evereything a computer does” and “it’s expensive for a leisure device”.

These were the arguments my wife used back at me when I was thinking about buying one.

The little dance

When it comes to tech purchases my wife and I have a procedure that must be adhered to. It’s not written down anywhere; it’s just known!

The steps to tech purchase are …

1. I express interest
2. She says that she is not interested and comes up with a counter argument (even though I know she is interested!
3. I leave it for a bit. This is important as if I try to force the issue the dance is over.
4. She decides that it’s ‘ok’ but still too pricey/we don’t need it/the one we have works fine/we should be saving* (* delete as appropriate)
5. We go into town to ‘have a look’ - (at this stage we both know it’s a done deal) 
6. She becomes much more interested and decides that we should buy it 
7. End of little dance. 

The beauty of the system is that she gets to do the ‘responsible wife’ thing whilst indulging her ‘inner geek’!  She also gets to feel like she made the decision … and I let her think that!  Everyone’s a winner!

The iPad dance

The iPad was an extreme situation. This went beyond the protocol above and included extra steps. We were in the car and driving home before she decided that we should buy it. We turned around and parked up and headed straight for the Apple Store.

The purchase

We headed back to the Apple Store for the second time and there was a queuing system outside for people who wanted to actually purchase an iPad rather than just play on one.

We joined the queue and were shortly introduced to Jonny who would be taking us through the purchase. We were then ushered into a special area for purchasers where you could ask any questions before purchase. We when then escorted upstairs to wait by the accessories section whilst Jonny brought the device up to us. Here you could contemplate which of the cases you wanted to buy.

After a few minutes we were walking out of the store with a shiny iPad.

Set up

This was pretty much the same as an iPhone or iPod Touch. Connect to iTunes, sync, bam! We bought a 3G iPad so we had to set up an account for 3G data. We chose O2 and I think the rates are quite reasonable and you’re not tied into a contract.

Play time

Then it’s time to play. The device is gorgeous and it’s a joy to browse the web on it. Web pages seem richer than they do on a desktop or laptop. I suppose it’s because you don’t have all the other clutter on screen e.g. dock, Start menu, other windows.

YouTube is great and it becomes more social as it’s easier to turn it round and show it to someone or browse with a partner as it’s large enough that you can both see clearly.

I’ve purchased iWork but haven’t done anything with it yet as I’m too busy having fun to work!

The onscreen keyboard takes some getting used to as the backspace key is in a different place to the iPhone and I seem to be hitting the i key instead of the o key. That’s probably just something which will be fine once you’re used to it.

In summary, everything seems richer on the device. Email is beautiful and the web seems to ‘flow’ more seamlessly.

I’ve utilised RSS feeds a lot more with apps like The Early Edition which bring all your favourite blogs and sites into a newspaper style format. I haven’t seen a single Flash Lego brick yet but I don’t suppose I visit that many Flash sites.

My final question is would I return it and get my money back? No way!

For those of you who haven’t see it, Storybird is a great website when you can write and publish electronic books using artwork supplied by a range of artists. If you want more information you can read about it in this post. Storybird is brilliant but the difficulty occurs when trying to collaborate and keep track of a whole class set of users and their work.

Thankfully Storybird have created some brilliant new class management features that are being launched next week. You can now add classes which provide you with a safe environment where students can collaborate, discuss and share work without sharing with the whole work. 

Class Management

Once you have set up a class you can either invite existing users (who have already registered) into the class or you can register students on their behalf. Safety is important to Storybird so usernames can not personally identify students e.g. contain a student’s surname.

Assignments

It was often difficult with Storybird to ‘collect in’ work for marking. I did this by getting students to email me links to their published Storybird books but that didn’t work if they hadn’t made the book public. Now you can set the class an assignment and it will collate them all in one place for easy marking. The student books remain private from the world but students in the class can see each other’s work. It will even email users when the assignment is due so they can ensure it is handed in.

Student Management

Passwords are often an issue for students, especially on external websites where the teacher has no administrative rights and you rely on the ‘forgotten password’ functionality. The new class management functions allow you to reset a student’s password if he forgets it.

All the rest …

There are loads of other features and tweaks that make the experience a little easier for students (and the general user population) including the a feature request by my students to change the name that appears on the front of the book.

Pssst! I’ll let you into a secret!

Now I’m sure you’d love to have a go with the new teacher functionality to try it out for yourself.  It doesn’t launch till next week but if you go to http://storybird.com/classes/create/ you can have a go yourself.  Just don’t tell them that I told you!

“Deep in thought” by RPatts on Flickr

An essential part of being a better teacher, manager, student or leader is the ability to review and refine your practice and to be open to new ideas.  I am currently reading a book “Teach Like a Champion: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college” by Doug Lemov.  Lemov is managing director of a group of ‘Uncommon Schools’ who are independently run charter schools aiming to be high performing regardless of social profile of the students.

Some may consider the advice in the teaching manual to be for new and inexperienced teachers but there is something there for everyone who is keen to refine their craft and improve the performance of their students.

Lemov has sought out and observed high performing teachers, especially those from schools whose level of social deprivation is preventing students from achieving. He has identified common themes and techniques that can be applied in your classroom now and will improve performance.  These have been organised into areas:

1. Setting High Academic Expectations
2. Planning that Ensures Academic Achievement
3. Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons
4. Engaging Students in Your Lessons
5. Creating a Strong Classroom Culture
6. Setting and Maintaining High Behaviour Expectations
7. Building Character and Trust

Within these seven areas are 49 techniques, each with catchy names (Precise Praise, Sweat the Details, Right is Right), simple explanations and successful case studies. I am part way through the book but a technique that grabbed me in Setting High Academic Expectations is Right is Right.  This is my summary of that section.

Right is Right

This section is about having high expectations for ‘correctness’ in the classroom.  A partially correct answer is not good enough in the high achieving classroom.  There are a number of ways that teachers can ensure that students are always fully correct and are achieving the highest standards. 

1. Hold out for all the way

Teachers try to encourage students and stay positive but their rounding up of answers lulls students into a false sense of security.  Consider the situation

Teacher: Katie, how will the introduction of computers into the factory affect the workers?

Katie: Well, they won’t be very happy!

Teacher: Right, they won’t be very happy as the new technology could mean that they would lose their jobs.

The teacher has ‘rounded up’ Katie’s answer here and set a low standard of ‘correctness’.  Katie may feel happier and more confident but this confidence is misplaced as she would not get the marks in an exam situation.  This situation is all too familiar in the classroom; it’s important that Katie is told that she is ‘almost there’ but that she is not completely correct.  The teacher can improve Katie’s performance in the final exam by using simple techniques.

The teacher should praise the student but prompt them and assist them in expanding their answer to be fully correct.  They can do this by using phrases such as

“You’re getting there.  Can you expand that answer?”
“That’s part of the solution.  Can you complete it?”
“Can you develop that answer further?”
“Okay, but there’s a bit more to this answer than that”

2. Answer the question

Students can often answer the question they WANT to answer rather than the question that is being asked.  Quite often they can get away with that as the teacher is delighted that they have learned something and can recall it, but the teacher should stick to their guns and insist that the question asked should be answered.

Example

Teacher: Who can tell me what a high-level language is?

Tim: C++ is a high-level language.

Teacher: Thank you Tim but C++ is an example.  I am looking for a definition of what a high-level language is.

3. Right answer, right time

We’ve all had the keen student who want to demonstrate their understanding by jumping ahead of the question that you asked.  This is fine for that student but it doesn’t help the other students in the class who need the process to be broken down into the manageable chunks that you originally planned.  It also creates the impression that the pace of understanding is much faster than it really is.  

Effective teachers should tactfully but forcefully ask the student to explain the NEXT step, not the whole process. They should then carry on as they originally planned the delivery of the material.  This is not to say that if you should not move ahead if the whole class has genuinely understood the concept faster than you expected.

4. Use of technical vocabulary

This final point is about getting teachers to not only use technical vocabulary in the classroom but to expect it back from students and not ‘round up’ the vocabulary.  Great teachers should insist on precise technical vocabulary.  

In Lemov’s book he illustrates this with video clips, one of which shows a maths teacher asking a student about how ordered pairs of co-ordinates work.  The student answers that “the x-axis comes first and then the y-axis”.  Many teachers would accept this answer as it is or ‘round up’ and say “That’s right, the x co-ordinate comes first and then the y co-ordinate”.  In this scenario the student probably wouldn’t even realise that their technical vocabulary was wrong.   The teacher in the video clip questions the student to coax the correct vocabulary out of them and then insists on them answering the question in full using the correct technical vocabulary. 
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Summary

Regardless of whether you are new to teaching or have been teaching for a number of years, “Teach like a champion” allows you to identify the little things that make a big difference in the classroom.  I have already used some of the points in my classroom and will be using some of these suggestions for staff when observing lessons for professional development and mentoring. 

Teach Like A Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students On The Path To College (Doug Lemov) is available from Amazon.co.uk 

RRP: £18.99
Sale Price (at time of publishing): £12.34

Amazon also have a live preview where you can read a sample of the book before you purchase.

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No matter how much you deny it, Facebook is more interesting than learning as far as many students are concerned.  However, we could spice things up a little by mixing the social world of Facebook with the educational content by using some of the new plugins available from the social networking giant. 

Mark Zuckerberg launched a number of new ways to integrate your site with Facebook at the F8 conference including the ability to place the Like {thumbs up!} button on your site. This would then show up in the Activity Feed on the user’s Facebook page. 

Imagine a situation where a student enjoys a piece of learning content on your VLE and clicks the Like button.  This appears in their Facebook friend’s news feed and they click on it and learn something new.  This could be a new world where social networking and education intermingle!

How do you start using this TODAY?

It’s easy to use.  

1. Just copy the code below and paste it into the page where you want the Like button to appear.

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://example.com” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0” style=”border:none; width:450px; height:80px”></iframe>

2. Change the http://example.com to be the web page address.

3. Hit save and you’re done!

If you are putting this on your blog you can usually modify the template to dynamically generate Step 2.  I use tumblr so the code for me is …

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href={Permalink}” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0” style=”border:none; width:450px; height:80px”></iframe>

The fly in the ointment

The problem with this is that you would not be able to click the Like button anywhere where Facebook is blocked … but it does allow students to engage from home.  This will also require that we start to reexamine the place of social networks in schools.

There are a range of configuration options to fine tune how the button appears on your site.  For more information visit http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

Do you like this?  Make sure you click the Like button below!

I think Twitter is great.  I go on about it all the time to everyone I meet and justify my usage as ‘excellent professional development’.  Today one of the ICT teachers from my team joined Twitter! Shane Gallaher @shanegallaher signed up.

Apparently I joined Twitter on 14th May 2007.  It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago but that’s what http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com/ tells me.  In that time it becomes easy to forget that the network is still growing and there are new users every day.  We talk about hashtags and @ replies, DMs and TweetDecks with a carefree attitude and the newbies are sitting scratching their heads.  

So I went back to basics and wrote this post to help the newbies make the most of Twitter … quickly!

Step 1: Complete your profile

Nothing is more frustrating that checking out a Twitter follower to find that their profile is empty.  Lots of Twitter users will switch off at this point and will not follow ‘empty profile’ users.  

• Upload a profile picture.  It doesn’t need to be a photo (although I like to see who I’m tweeting with) but it should be something different from the default Twitter bird.
• Put in your location.  Just the general area is fine but people like to know if you are in their town, country or continent!
• Fill in your bio.  You’ve only got 160 characters so you need to make it snappy and interesting.  People like to know what you’re all about and the lack of profile can turn a potential follower off. 

Step 2: Post!

People are not going to follow someone who has not posted anything.  They don’t know whether you’re interesting or not.  You can start by posting

• a little hello
• what you’re about 
• what you’re looking for
• a couple of interesting links

Step 3: Find people to follow

The beauty of Twitter is that it is a network but you need to follow people before other people will start following you back.  If you don’t follow people, nobody will know you’re out there and nobody will see your brilliance.  

You can find people to follow by

• finding the person who introduced you to Twitter
• look to see who they follow and find people from there
• looking on a Twitter directory service like http://wefollow.com/    These sites hold directories of users in different categories so you can browse to find the most popular or useful people in your area of interest.

Step 4: Find followers

A lot of people will follow back if you follow them but not everyone will, so don’t be offended!  Your follower count may start small but the best way to get more followers is to just use it and that number will grow quickly!  Other ways to get more followers are

• by getting the person who introduced you to Twitter to put a ‘shout out’ to their Twitter network and ask people to say hello and follow
• by posting interesting stuff on Twitter.  People will then retweet your tweet (see the Lingo below) and expose other people to your brilliance!

Step 5: Get a client

People start out by using the Twitter website but many move on to use a Twitter client as they find it’s easier.   This is a program that usually runs in the background and alerts you when tweets come in.  This means you don’t have to keep checking the website and means you can respond to and interact with tweets much more quickly.

There are loads of Twitter clients out there and everyone has their own opinion on which is best but here are a few …

Tweetdeck Adobe AIR client - PC/Mac/Linux - FREE
Seesmic Desktop - Dedicated PC client or Mac/Linux client via Adobe AIR - FREE
Twirl - PC or Mac - FREE
Tweetie - Mac Only  

screenshot of TweetDeck

Step 6: Go mobile

Tweet during your downtime.  Get a Twitter client for your iPhone, Android phone, Blackberry or other web enabled device to tweet ‘on-the-go’

Step 7: Learn the lingo

One of the hardest parts of being a new Twitter user is knowing what people are going on about all of the time!  So here are some of the key terms:

Retweet or RT

If somebody likes what you wrote (or you like what someone else wrote) you can retweet it.  This is the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email.  There are two types of RT (old style and new style) and a RT may look a little like this …

This tweet was originally posted by @tombarrett and if you think this is interesting you might choose to follow him.

Hashtag

Sometimes people use a ‘hashtag’ to indicate they are discussing a certain topic.  This is useful as it allows you to search for all tweets about that topic.  This post uses a hashtag #newleaders which is about leadership tips. 

If you click on #newleaders you would be able to view all the tweets about this topic.

DM or Direct Message

Everything you post in your Twitter feed is public (unless it is a protected Twitter account) so you need to be aware of that.  If you want to send a private message to someone you can do so by using a direct message or DM.  

You can only send a DM to someone who is following you.  If you do send a DM to someone make sure you are following them otherwise they can’t DM you back!

@reply or mention

When you reply to someone, the way to do this is to start the message with @username (obviously inserting their username).  This won’t mean that the message is private to them but it does highlight it to the person if they look in their ‘mentions’ or ‘@replies’ 

Web links, link shortening, bit.ly

Tweets are limited to 140 characters so usually people use a web shortening service such as http://bit.ly to shorten any web addresses.  Many of the desktop or mobile clients will do this automatically.

image courtesy of whartz on Flickr

We all love something for nothing and the range of free web tools is amazing. Schools have ever decreasing budgets and we need to get as much value for money as possible but with free tools closing or moving to subscription models can you afford to integrate them into the curriculum?

TechCrunch are reporting that Ning, the “build your own social network” company will no longer be hosting free Nings. This has been a cause for consternation amongst many educators who had invested time into creating their own social networks for students and classes.

One Twitter user writes …

Is Joel justified in his “bushel of bad karma” or are Ning just protecting their business?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch and we are increasingly finding this on the web. Web owners still have to pay the bills on their accounts, and whilst these bills are small initially when you are writing and launching an amazing web product, the bills grow pretty quickly as your free product takes off!

Your options are :

• go ‘freemium’: where you offer a free product with limited features in an effort to encourage people to try the product and move to the fully features free model
• go ad supported: integrate adverts into your website using banner adverts and in-line search result adverts (such as those provided by Google) 
• ask for donations
• wait it out to potentially get bought by a big company for a massive sum and make your fortune - even this is not a great option as the nature of the product changes!

The situation we potentially find ourselves in is that amazing new products come online, grow quickly and close down in a short space of time. The problems this cause is lack of continuity in the curriculum for educators and students. Whilst the ICT savvy staff will take to new tools quickly, it takes time to get best use of a product for many teachers and to embed the tool into the curriculum. We can only do this so many times before staff will no longer want to invest their time in software and online tools.

So the big question is “Why aren’t we willing to pay these developers a fair price for their work?”

About three years ago I wrote an online homework system called plannerLIVE! which aims to support parents and students by creating an online homework diary/planner where students and parents could access homework, download worksheets, get links to useful sites to help with a homework and, most importantly, the date the homework is due in.

It was a massive hit at my school, almost eliminated parental complaints re:homework and everybody said how easy it was to use. I thought I was on to a winner and started marketing it to schools but got little interest, although there were a couple of schools who were willing to pay. I changed this to a free model and although there were many more sign-ups, they weren’t using the tool the way I envisaged as a whole school reporting system.

I think this was partly down to the fact that there is less value in a free product.

Some of the reasons for the reluctance to pay could be:

• these amazing products have not got to the people who hold the purse strings
• the process of buying/paying is logistically too difficult in schools
• there just isn’t the money to pay

I don’t believe that the last point has been true in the past (especially in secondary schools) although budgets are tightening so why are we so unwilling to invest in software?

I’ve been a Microsoft Outlook user for some time but ever since I had been a Mac user I’ve found the Outlook Web Access experience to be poor.  Anyone who was not an Internet Explorer user was forced to use the Light web application. 

Now my school has upgraded to Exchange 2010, we have access to the new Outlook Web App with cross-browser compatibility and a few other improvements.  Here is my mini video review!

I was excited to see a tweet in my @replies today from the Microsoft UK Education team (@Microsoft_Ed_UK) saying that my Kodu tutorials had been featured in their blog.

The post covers my Kodu tutorials (which I must finish!) and gives a little nod to the “visualising revision” poster too.

You can read the full article at the Microsoft UK Schools Blog