We had an inset day at the end of term and one of our sessions revolved around improving communication with parents.  We have a huge catchment and students can come from a huge area so parents of students in the same class could potentially live ten to fifteen miles apart.  This means that parents find it hard to speak to each other, and to support each other.  We have a parent of one of our students on staff and she raised the issue that she doesn’t know what her child does on a day to day basis at school, so some kind of feedback and class based communication would be appreciated.  We brainstormed ideas and that was as far as we got.

My sister had a similar issue with pupils of her primary school (although on a smaller geographic scale) and has decided to pilot using Facebook groups to allow parents to talk to each other.  When people first hear the word ‘Facebook’ in connection with education alarm bells start to sound, and people who should know better start to think that inappropriate communications will happen.  So why did she decide to let common sense prevail and go with Facebook?  First of all a significant proportion of parents are already Facebook users, they have login details and passwords already and are familiar with the system.  Having something new to learn and remember is always a barrier to adoption.  Facebook groups are separate to being friends with someone – you can’t see personal details, photos or posts from others in the same group unless you are friends with them as well.  This means that parents can talk to each other (and even selected staff from school as well) without being able to see private photos or status information.  Facebook also gives to the ability to create private groups (hidden if required) that an administrator controls who can join.  This gives control to the school (who will have a member of staff overseeing admission to the new groups) and parents who overstep the agreed boundaries/rules of the group can either have their posts deleted or can be removed (or even banned) from the group.   Parents can choose to receive email updates from the group too if required.

The groups aren’t up and running yet but it will be interesting to see how the groups are used (one group per class) and if the levels of parental engagement are improved.  The system also leaves plenty of room for development such as piping in RSS and Twitter feeds, so who knows what the future will bring?

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or see any problems that we might have overlooked

Using Delicious(.com) to search for useful teaching resources.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo!  You can save, share and discover bookmarks with other people.  Because the opportunities to interact using this service are quite limited, it is often allowed in schools where other social sites are filtered out. Delicious is extremely useful for teachers and can be used in two main ways.

Saving and organising your bookmarks.

When planning lessons from home, if I find a resource that will be useful to me in future I save it to delicious (sometimes with a note of explanation).  This means I can access my list of bookmarks from home and school.  I now also have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies.  When you save your bookmarks you can choose if you want them to be private or public.  Public bookmarks are very useful because you can share them with colleagues and even students.  All I have to do is give students the web address to my delicious page  (delicious.com/fiendishlyclever) and they can look through my bookmarks to find the site they want.  More tech savvy teachers can embed this list on the school VLE as a way of sharing links very simply with students.

Searching for new resources and information

People only bookmark sites that are worth revisiting.  Searching the collected bookmarks of users from across the world should return better and more useful sites than just searching Google.  Simply visit the delicious.com main page and use the search box at the top.  Search results (example below) also show how many people have bookmarked each site and key words (tags) added to the bookmark when it was saved.  The search will also return any sites that match the search query in your personal collection.  (There is a save button next to each bookmark so you can save it to your personal list if you find the site useful)

Whilst many teachers do use Delicious to save and share links, many forget that it has tremendous value as a search tool.

I wondered if it would be possible to access this resource from anywhere on the internet (as the networked drive is always powered on).  The answer was yes, and this is how you do it over an encrypted ssh tunnel (it was quite simple once I had the right software).  It does rely on you having a device running openssh (you can add this to older versions of the Linkstation, or on a separate machine).  I haven’t exposed my network storage box directly to the internet because anyone could stream my music for free.

• Make sure you know the ip address of the Buffalo linkstation on the local network (e.g. 192.168.1.3) and that streaming works fine from iTunes on your local network.
• You need a copy of Putty (I won’t explain how to configure ssh and putty to work together).  There are some pointers on my blog post here.  Set up putty to forward port 3689 to your NAS box as shown below:

• Download Songbird and install.

• Download the daap plugin for Songbird (you will have to edit the install.rdf file to stop it saying that it can’t be run with the current version.  Simply rename the installation package to a zip file, open the file and edit max version to 1.5, then save and rename the plugin package back to an xpi file)

• Start up Putty and then Songbird.  From the File menu on Songbird add a new daap source at 127.0.0.1

• After downloading a list of songs available, your library should be ready for streaming over the internet

Please feel free to comment/contact me if you have any questions. Tutorials for setting up SSH to connect to your own network are available all over the internet – please don’t contact me about SSH if you haven’t read a tutorial first!

The training was delivered using a piece of conferencing software called Saba.  The session itself was very slick (despite the presenter not being fully familiar with the software) but not as interactive as a face-to-face session.  With yes/no buttons to signal our understanding (and laughter/applause buttons to convey some emotion) the presentation flowed quickly, with participants clicking on the raise hand button if they had a question (and they were duly ‘handed’ the microphone).

I found the session enjoyable, useful and was glad that I hadn’t needed to travel, but I began to wonder if a system like this could have any value in the classroom (or even replace the classroom).

Whilst online conferencing (video and audio) is suited to dissemination of information and CPD events, it isn’t ready for teaching or replacing the classroom yet.  Technology will have to evolve significantly before the job of the teacher is under threat.  Online conferencing made me realise the importance of face to face contact with your learners, their interaction with each other and how different teaching strategies contribute to learning in the classroom.

Have you used online conferencing with learners? What software did you use and how did it go?  I’d be interested to read your comments.

When I set up my server, I was new to DNS and hosting, and decided to move my domain to dyndns.com who provide a dynamic DNS service. They offer free accounts with popular names like dyn-o-saur.com or you can go for your own top level .com domain.

What they don’t say is that you can use their free account and register your domain name with a cheap provider like godaddy. This saves you around $30 per domain – worth it if you have a lot of domains.

All you do is set up your free account with your dynamic provider (and install the update client which tells their servers if your ip address changes). You register your domain with your preferred provider and set up a cname record which points to your free domain name. This means that any traffic going to your registered address is redirected to your free dynamic dns account.

All you then need to do is set up your web server to recognise the new sites you have added and bingo – you can run dozens of sites from one machine. This is the guide I followed.

There are downsides to hosting your own server. First of all you have to pay for your own internet and electricity which is not an insignificant cost. My cable modem offers 400k/s incoming and 40 k/s outgoing (with peak time traffic shaping) for the equivalent of $50 a month. Electricity in the UK is also rapidly rising in price thanks to the lack of freedom in the European energy market – my Dell server costs the equivalent of $10 – $12 a month. Another downside is technical knowledge. Your server is continually exposed to the internet and you need to make sure you only open ports you need, and that you keep the server patched and up to date.

With energy prices rising so rapidly, I regularly review my decision to host from home. Using an older more energy friendly PC will help keep the costs down but there is no short cut to gaining technical knowledge (although you could run a preconfigured server on a virtual machine!).

Do you host from home? Are you looking for free hosting for a blog? Leave me a comment below.

Edit: 15/09/08 Since I posted this originally my workload has increased and I just didn’t have time to maintain my installations (updating the ubuntu server was easy, updating joomla/wordpress a bit more time consuming).  I decided to move my blog back to blogger and rely on Google Analytics for my visitor information.  (That and I also needed to turn the ‘office room’ back into a guest bedroom and the server was too noisy for someone to get any sleep!).