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Hot on the heels of last week’s Byron review comes Ofcom’s research into Social Networking.  The report notes just how quickly social networks have become part of life in the UK, especially amongst the young.  It also notes how sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are stretching the definition of friends to include those we have only ever met online but never in person.  As is usual some of the media coverage focuses on e-safety issues, in this case young people potentially sharing too many details online which are publicly available. 

At Softease we regularly interact with young people and it is notable that the sites that are often put up as areas where they regularly publish materials, such as YouTube, often turn out to be places where they are passive receivers of content, albeit on demand.  The social networking sites appear to be where they spend most time actually publishing about themselves and their interests, and sometimes about characters they have made up! 

The coverage seems to be suggesting that it is up to the providers of social networking sites to ensure that all of their users meet the minimum age criteria and that they know how to keep their details private.  Hands up anyone who didn’t exaggerate their age when they were young!  Far from trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted (and what horse ever wanted to spend all of its time indoors?) surely it’s time to harness this enthusiasm and grab some of the time spent online for some focused creative learning, giving students the opportunity to create online working with their teachers, and, to build on the findings of last week’s Bryon Review, their parents! 

Honeycomb will do just this, and I’m pleased to report that it is now live on our servers, so if you’re one of the many schools which have already signed up, you will receive your login details when it is fully released any day now!

We at Softease have eagerly anticipated the publishing of The Byron Report which has been commissioned to look at the risks to children from potentially harmful content in computer games and on the internet.  

Ewan McIntosh, as usual has made some excellent points in his blog and highlights the positive thrust of the report whilst hoping that the potentially negative interpretations are not leapt upon by certain parts of the media. Much of the media comment this morning highlights the gulf between young adults and their parents, with too many parents having little or no idea what their children are doing when they are at their computer or games console.  Doug Dickinson has links to much of the press comment on his blog and will no doubt be waxing lyrical on the topic later in the day.  There are oodles of DVDs, CDs, reports etc. informing parents on many aspects of e-Safety, the problem is, not enough parents are engaged enough to pick them up and watch, read or listen to them.  Perhaps the report’s recommendation to provide better information and education to children and families will go some way to resolving this.

Having just launched Honeycomb, our collaborative suite of online tools for pupils, we believe we will be vindicated in the approach we took over twelve months ago when we sat down with teachers to begin to design the system.  With Honeycomb we believe we have created a solution which harnesses the web 2.0 experience for pupils, giving them the extended audience which we know motivates them.  But we have kept the experience ‘real’, there is no approval or mediation, publishing their pages means just that.  Pupils can try out different ways of presenting their work, they can switch from creating pages to collaborating on a wiki quickly and easily.  Teachers, however, stay in control and publishing and reviewing privileges can be quickly removed, a powerful sanction in our experience and one which pupils will not typically abuse.In the schools that have used Honeycomb one of the biggest benefit we have had reported is that pupils love being able to access their work from home and to show it to parents, carers, grandparents and so on. There have been specific instances when parents have been in to school to comment on how engaged their children are.  Our belief has always been that Honeycomb will strengthen the links between school and home, and if that means that pupils and parent/carers start to spend some time online together then we will be delighted. 

We will watch with interest for the broad reaction to the report.

I came across a great quote this morning from a Classroom 2.0 blog post by Bruce Nightingale. Although he is unable to attribute it specifically it is certainly worthy of a wider audience:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

My initial reaction was to wonder whether the author was referring primarily to children or adults, as clearly it is a principle that is valid for us all at any age and in any situation in life.

So I was delighted to participate with a group of primary and secondary teachers as well as advisors from Cornwall LA at Upton Cross Primary School on Friday. Everyone seemingly left their preconceptions at the door as they engaged with the world of online creativity and collaboration that is Honeycomb.

It was interesting, and perhaps not uncommon, that one of the first points of discussion in the staff room prior to starting was about the dangers of social networking sites like Bebo . Doug Dickinson’s analogy of e-safety being akin to road safety (you don’t stop using roads just because there are accidents) is still the best way I know of answering such concerns and there was a consensus of approval after this was discussed.

I’ll write in greater detail about the projects that the schools will be untertaking once their use of Honeycomb begins in earnest in April, but for now they include:

1. Exciting possibilities of pupils working with peers from their e-twinning partners in India, China and Poland.
2. Stretching the creativity and writing skills of gifted and able infants.
3. Promoting a much closer out-of-hours, collaborative working partnership between parents, schools and pupils.

So, plenty of exciting opportunities that I look forward to chronicalling in due course. For now, as promised, here are answers to three important questions that were raised during the discussion.

During my initial presentation delivered via the whiteboard using Upton Cross’s internet connection, my favourite YouTube videos were of course, completely blocked. So the first question everyone needs to know is howcan you download videos from YouTube and other online video sites so you can use them in the classroom?

Without doubt the easiest way of doing this is via the fantastic free web site Zamzar. Simon Mills takes you through a complete example using the wonderful Kiwi video animation (fantastic for the Y5 Unit on Narrative). Make sure you choose the flv video format for step 2. Once you have downloaded the flv file you can upload it into Honeycomb.

The second question is how can you convert existing avi, mpg,wmv or quicktime movie files to flv format? The best free tool for this I’ve found is Riva flv encoder which you can download here.

The final question was back on the topic of e-safety. Some of the teachers mentioned they and their students have Facebook accounts. The anti-virus and security firm Sophos recently conducted research from a random sample of 200 London Facebook group members and found:

1. 75% allowed their profile to be viewed by any other member, whether or not they were friends.
2. 54% showed their full date of birth.
3. 41% were prepared to divulge personal information to a complete stranger.

No-one is particularly criticizing Facebook, indeed Sophos notes that its security settings are one of the most powerful of all social networks. Its just that they are not on by default. Indeed, it could be argued that Facebook is doing the world a favour by exposing just how readily the (predominantly) younger generation will divulge excessive personal information.

So, if you have a Facebook account, and even if you don’t, why not demonstrate to your students how to be safe? Sophos has a series of pages explaining exactly what it recommends so I suggest that we all start there.

Fortunately, e-safety is a key feature of Honeycomb itself.

However, even in such a ’safe’ environment its still important that children learn about what is and what isn’t appropriate when interacting and collaborating with others, in line with your school’s e-safety policy.

Photo Credit - Sally Griffin, Cornwall CYPS

Conwy Education Services have provided every Primary and Special school within the Council with a site licence of Textease Studio CT, Timeline and Ideas Map , eleven tools in total. This will enable the schools to better meet the guidelines within the new Welsh Curriculum that comes into force in September 2008. Furthermore, the partnership agreement with Softease enables a Welsh version to be released later in the year.  

Part of the agreement will allow all Conwy children to use the software at home empowering them to use thee tools effortlessly for cross curricular activities. 

All schools were invited to see Doug Dickinson inspire them by demonstrating the power of these tools at the Venue Cymru in Llandudno on Friday 7^th March. 

This is an exciting project with further training planned to help the schools familiarize themselves with the whole suit of tools that they now have.�

Did you miss Doug Dickinson’s presentation at the Education show in Birmingham?

If you did there’s no need to panic if you follow the link below you’ll be able to watch the presentation.

www.21cedshow.blogspot.com

Thanks to Doug Dickinson once again for a sterling week’s work at the BETT 2008 Show in London’s Olympia last week.

Doug gave two excellent presentations. The first, to an absolutely packed seminar room on Thursday morning, was entitled ‘Web 2.0 for the 21st Century School‘ and was unusually run from the blog that Doug had created.

Despite the considerable background noise Doug was able to happily entertain and ask thought-provoking questions about the role of the teacher in supporting modern learners in a web2.0 world.The video is embedded here but on the Motionbox video page you can download the entire video in high quality and/or for your ipod.

The star of the show, however, was still the Honeycomb software which was getting rave reviews on the Softease stand. You can see Honeycomb demonstrated from about the 28th minute of the video.

If you use Textease Studio CT you can discover a wealth of fantastic Christmas activities on the Kent NGFL Website.  These include a compliation of jokes and Christmas Facts from the excellent Woodland School site, details (and templates) of how to create an Advent Calendar, a creatable interactive Nativity scene and many more ideas to adopt, adapt and then develop!

This is the last of Doug Dickinson’s recent Textease CT CPD sessions in South Gloucestershire - comments for which can be seen here.

Highlights include going on a multi-modal bear hunt, animating the moon around the Earth (anti-clockwise of course!) , kinetic calligrams and showing how to easily create videos and put them on a Textease page.

But perhaps the real point to take-away is the following little secret…

Did you notice just how easy it was for Doug using Textease CT on the interactive whiteboard??

These are edited highlights from Doug Dickinson’s presentation at the second Textease CT workshop in South Gloucestershire on Monday November 19th.

Despite a few issues with production (an audio glitch within the first couple of minutes, a debutant’s camerawork and the real difficulty of editing HD video on an ordinary-spec PC…) hopefully the many key messages Doug discusses are clear to follow. Look out for more audio and video materials to come.

If you were at this session or found it useful CPD please leave a comment below - two stars and a wish style perhaps?

In my travels around the country talking to teachers and advisors about web 2.0 social media in education, the predominant focus is often context. After all, to discuss blogs, wikis, social networks and podcasts without understanding their context is rather like eating your favourite pasta dish without its all-important sauce. In essence, a pretty dry experience.

Context contains the answer to the question ‘why should we bother?‘ Well, let’s consider the following:

• Why do children spend hours making YouTube videos of cupstacking contests?
• Why do they spend 200 minutes a night online communicating with each other via IM and social networks?
• Why are TV companies falling over themselves to partner with Bebo to help salvage their dwindling viewing figures?

There are many reasons why, of course. The point is that context is crucial.

If we don’t understand the way young people live today, how can we hope to motivate and engage with them?

It is encouraging for me, however, that the ‘why bother’ question is being asked less and less when discussing web2.0 in the classroom. More and more educators realize that ‘doing nothing’ or worse, simply blocking everything, is only going to create a bigger problem in terms of disaffection and yes, e-safety.

That’s right, because an important part of the ’solution’ to e-safety is the actual teaching of media literacy. After all, does anybody teach road-safety by banning children from crossing the road altogether?

For a more detailed overview of the context for social media in the classroom, as well as real-world examples, I highly recommend watching Ewan McIntosh’s keynote speech video at the ULearn07 Conference in New Zealand in October. Ewan also has accompanying notes on his blog.

Thanks to Doug Dickinson for leading the first of three hands-on seminars in South Gloucestershire this month.

Today’s hosts were The Manor CEVC Primary School in Coalpit Heath. Most of the teachers had never seen Textease before but within minutes Doug had them playing with text-to-speech, as well as recording their own audio files and embedding them into their own images in a multimodal style.

The introduction of kinetic calligrams paved the way for everyone to make their own animations including a ‘my local area’ geography journey to school activity and even a sophisticated scientific model of the Moon and Earth orbiting the Sun. The complete set of Textease CT stepthrough guides are available here.

The dates and venues for the final two sessions are:

• Monday 19th November - St Ann’e CE VC Primary School, Oldland Common, BS30 6PH
• Thursday 29th November - St Michael’s CE VC Primary School, Stoke Gifford, Ratcliffe Drive, Stoke Gifford, BS34 8SG.

If you’re a South Gloucestershire school who would like to participate please contact Sue Morgan from the Local Authority who has kindly been making arrangements for these sessions.

Look out for audio and video uploads from these sessions to complete your Textease CPD!

Future predictions for the web are already being made.  The word from Silicon Valley is ‘Web 3.0′.

According to the people building the internet of tomorrow the web in 2020 and beyond will be able to connect every aspect of our digital lives, the web is becoming smarter!

Those of us still trying to get to grips with Web 2.0 technologies need not worry yet,  the Web 3.0 developments are modernising the webs key index, not the user interface.  A recent article by Jonathan Richards in Timesonline highlights the Web 3.0 concept.  The idea of Web 3.0 is that of drawing together all our digital use for example e-mail, websites, PC files.  When typing an e-mail the Web 3.0 technologies will be able to suggest websites and books as well as documents, photos and videos you already have on your PC that relate to the topic of your e-mail.  The introduction of natural language technology, enables search engines to answer full questions, not just recognizing but understanding the question, searching the web sentence by sentence and returning results based on a general knowledge of language, specific concepts and their relationship with one another.

An end to trawling through search results to find the most applicable, this would be a huge help in the classroom making research tasks for pupils truly effective.

As one person commenting on the article puts it, “Bring it on!”

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Following on from the firework themed pictures, Simon Mills has come up with some great ideas for extending seasonal use in other ICT tools.  Suggestions made include using the firework images created in Textease Paint as a starting point for a guided or shared writing session.  He then goes on to point out the benefits of importing the images to Textease Presenter and using Presenter to create work with images supported by sound and text.  Podium is mentioned as a great oppertunity to present and perform work giving it purpose, context and a sense of audience. 

 All these ideas sound really good for extending the use of ICT within a topic, providing the opportuninty for pupils to be creative and add their own ideas or experiences, combining pictures, sound and text.

To look at Simon’s lesson suggestions in full go to:

http://twowhizzy.blogspot.com/2007/10/remember-remember-5th-of-november.html