David's Exc-el blog

This blog has moved!

Its new home is at http://exc-el.org.uk/blogs/david.

You can subscribe to the posts here, and to the comments, if you want, here .

Tonight I was trying to find out about Microsoft's Virtual Classroom Tours , as I'm talking with Emma Griffiths tomorrow about these in relation to her role on the Innovative Teacher Program . They're packages based on PowerPoint. I had a look in one about Designing a Room and found it contained an interesting short note on the thinking behind the idea. It pointed to the work of Michael Fullan, one of Microsoft's International Advisory Board Members .

It sounded like he was on the same wavelength as Exc-el, so I had a look to see if I could find out more about his work. I found his web site, www.michaelfullan.com , is a good resource. It includes downloadable articles, for example. He has authored a number of books, one of them with Andy Hargreaves who spoke on "Success and Sustainability" at SETT . It's a small world!

Here's an extract from one of the articles, which he'd co-authored for the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, which made me think of Exc-el: (http://www.michaelfullan.com/Articles_05/Tri-Level%20Dev%27t.pdf)

"...Beyond this, system leaders have a special responsibility to foster and support crosssystemnetworks where people across a region, state or country learn from each other.When done well this has significant payoffs for sustainability. First, people are able to learn directly from other practitioners. Second, people begin to identify with larger parts of the system beyond their narrow interest group."

WordPress Multi-User is now working here http://exc-el.org.uk/blogs. Testing yesterday didn't identify any problems, so we'll be starting to migrate existing blogs over the next week or so.

East Lothian learners - including teachers, students, support staff and parents - wanting a new Exc-el Edublog there can sign up here.

If you've got an existing Exc-el blog why not sign up and have a play? The blog names will look like this: http://exc-el.org.uk/blogs/yourblogname. Ideally the name should relate to what your blog's about, and be memorable, if it's to help build up your audience. Don't abruptly stop your existing blog, though. It's important that your audience are told what's happening, and get the information they'll need to change any feed subscriptions they may have. At the very least, your last post in the old blog should:

• provide a link to the new blog
• make it easy for people to subscribe to the new RSS feed
  

We'll be helping you with this process as part of the migration.

This is going to be shorter than it was -I've just lost version 1 after getting a worm protection pop-up message!

Today we've put a new Home Page in place, with menu options for the main Exc-el site and (less prominently) for WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) testing . By using a piece of code from the WordPress forum, we've been able to get both eZpublish and WPMU running.

That's the good news, but testing this morning showed that a bit more work is required.. I guess it was a bit optimistic to hope that the WordPress forum code would fix it (WPMU makes use of URL rewriting for the blog names)... but if it worked, it would have saved a lot of time. Spent this afternoon getting up to speed on the "voodoo" command syntax , and it's now starting to make some sense. Now I know how Alan will be feeling learning Polish . We can get a log of everything it's doing, so it's all do-able, just tedious. Still worth it, though, to get elegant - and easy to use and remember - blog URIs like blogname.exc-el.org.uk and not blogname.exc-el.org.uk/wordpress, for example.

Met with Ewan on Skype to discuss development of the site. This is just such a useful tool - perhaps we should consider a pilot of Skype on some school PCs? I see that Vicki Davis has an intro to the use of Skype in the classroom , aimed at new users, on her Cool Cat Teacher blog. What do you think?

The difference the WAN upgrade is going to make can't be overestimated. There's clearly a large latent demand from people who are avoiding use of it just now. It would be interesting to capture some stats on what it's doing now, if only to be able to quantify the benefit of the investment.

Today I met a parent of an S6 student. Her son has been frustrated by slow internet access in his school. On the positive side, though, he'd been very enthusiastic about Mr Bray's Geocasts as a revision tool at home. Mum reported arriving home and being very puzzled to hear Mr Bray's voice in her living room. She was pleased to hear the news of the upgrade.

I also met a teacher this evening who's now doing all email at home, as it's now taking too long in school to be usable. She's also looking forward to being able to use web sites with her classes without having to carefully select web-based applications that can be downloaded and started up well before the class arrives...

I'd a useful conversation with Ewan about Exc-el site development. It looks like migrating existing Exc-el weblog posts to WordPress will be straightforward, but migrating comments won't be. Our plan is to migrate all the posts across for each weblog, and then manually move the most recent comments. The archive of eZpublish Exc-el weblogs will be left on-line, so full comments will be accessible there.

If you're an Exc-el blogger, maybe you could have a think about what name you want for your new blog? They'll be of the form http://blogname.exc-el.org.uk. Ideally, we'd like the names to be more helpful, and meaningful, than they are just now. The owner's name may mean something to us, but a name that conveys what the blog is about would help potential readers.

Hopefully new WordPress blogs will be live this week. Just need to sort out a conflict between the requirements of eZpublish and WordPress. Each application installs a .htaccess file for server overrides. It would be nice if you could just put the separate commands into one file, but it's not proving that simple... eZpublish doesn't like the WordPress bit!

Exc-el has now grown up and gone off to live on its own. It lives on its own server now, instead of sharing a home with lots of other little web sites. This is a common stage in the growth of a web site. The benefits of doing this include:

• Improved performance: The performance of our shared server was sometimes slow, and this was off-putting for contributors.
  
• More storage capacity: Additional space was needed for additional applications such as WordPress blogs.
  
• More flexibility: We are much less constrained in what we can do as we now have more control of the server software.
  

The changeover took place over the weekend, and I've been working to resolve teething problems yesterday and today. I was having difficulty logging in, which I seem to have fixed by increasing a server time-out setting. I've been able to see from log files that some other people - sorry, can't tell who - have been hitting the same problem.

Please test out everything, and let me know either by email or by leaving a comment here if you notice anything that's not working as you'd expect.

This comprehensive piece (7 screens full, whatever that is in words) via Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian looks a good resource for internet safety work. We're planning to run some sessions for parents on internet safety: this looks like it will be a help us make sure we cover all the concerns.

"Decoding MySpace - It's the coolest hangout space for teens-but parents might be surprised at what their kids do there. Here's how to help keep them safe online" - Michelle Andrews at www.usnews.com. Link

It mentions www.wiredsafety.com. I've not explored that yet, but at a first glance it looks very comprehensive. It's run by a 9000-strong volunteer group, which is even more than we've got behind Exc-el.

What do you think of it?

Alan Coady has sold me on the importance of music in schools. Yesterday's Scotsman carried more evidence: Schools 'need music as tool of education' , based on the editorial in the current Brain Journal. There's a more detailed 1-page story here that describes the method and conclusions. Unfortunately the original paper is a $28 download.

What they found:

• "After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ."
• "It is clear that music is good for children's cognitive development and that music should be part of the pre-school and primary school curriculum."

It's been picked up by the media in a big way:
http://news.google.co.uk/news?tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&q=mcmaster+university+music+brain&btnG=Search+News

Music clearly has an important role in the future 3-18 curriculum . It would be a particularly good keystone for an " Extreme Learning " project if it could surreptitiously improve learning ability in the other subjects...

I wonder if any has ever looked at the statistics to see if there's a significant relationship between learning an instrument and attainment in subjects that use these intelligence skills? Of course, we may not have the stats; if not, maybe this is data we should be capturing and analysing?

SETT, the Scottish Learning Festival, proved a rich source of ideas for Exc-el. I'm helping support Glow, and was there to start on mentor training. That left plenty time to attend other events. I went for those I thought might help with Exc-el:

• All about Glow G1A

• Ministerial Address Peter Peacock

• Everything is Miscellaneous David Weinberger

• Success and Sustainability; By, With and Across Our Schools - Andy Hargreaves KA
• New Approaches to Engaging Learners Frank Pignatelli
• To Blog or not to Blog? Fiona Andrew
• Web 2.0 (or what was Web 1.0?) Ewan McIntosh
• Turning Good Teachers into Great Leaders Terry Dozier
• Unlocking Creativity: Teaching Creative Thinking and Learning Brian Boyd
• The Powerful Effects of Teaching Thinking Explicitly as a Skill Edward de Bono

I'll do some more posts with thoughts on each.

Today we tried to set up the PCs - a mix of Windows desktops and iMacs - to enable the students to log straight in to their learnerblogs.org accounts using links stored in the Internet Explorer "Favorites". Tests had previously shown that this worked, but today we realised that this wasn't consistent - there must be some variation between them. Anyway, it didn't take long to ensure they were all logged in before each of the 2 classes arrived. That made all the difference - they were able to concentrate on their writing!

The WordPress (multi-user) interface doesn't seem to present any difficulties, even at this age. By setting them up with Author rights, they're presented with a lot less menu options - just the ones they'll need. They were again enthusiastic about describing likes and dislikes. Motivation was sufficiently good there was no need to introduce any more features yet. Things like changing the appearance may become rewards for good work...

We've also now started adding a Blogroll, or list of favourite links, to each which will enable them easily to find one another's blogs. The idea here is to enable peer commenting. Here's an example of what they're looking like now.