Hannover

Probably not the prettiest city in Germany (it was devastated in the war) – the last time I was in Hannover I stumbled upon Schützenfest Hannover – a huge parade of hunters, brass bands, brewers’ drays and choirs. It was a great spectacle and great fun following it to the funfair and the giant Ferris Wheel. Well who would have thought that running a workshop on middle leadership development for teachers at international schools could be as memorable a day? Thanks to Phil, Jocelyn, Richard, Kim, Sarah, David, Brian, Chris, Renee, Andrea, Ian, Maureen, Janet, Matthew, Suzanne, Jason, Emma, Sabina, Angie, Jordan, Petra, Rupert and Fiona for their responsiveness and enthusiasm.

YouTube cont…

A big thanks to  Jim Black, Marketing Manager at Bloxx for taking the time and trouble to write a detailed response to the posts about YouTube filtering. Jim’s full response can be seen in the comments on the first post. In summary, Jim quotes YouTube’s exact Ts&Cs and concludes that the terms of service “specifically prohibits the downloading, copying and storing of content” and all that Office 2010 and other similar applications do is simply embed a link to stream the video content directly from YouTube.

OK so far…

“Crucially, this means that to use embedded links or a service such as SafeShare to view YouTube access, a school or a local authority needs to provide unfiltered access to the entire YouTube site. It’s all or nothing – you cannot allow access to individual clips.”

Yes, I guess that’s true. But at that point I was thinking about the options to allow YouTube for teachers but not for learners. Jim anticipated this:

“This may be fine if you only want teachers to use YouTube to show clips to students, but means that independent learning using YouTube content is only possible if students have full access to the YouTube site.”

Hmm. I hadn’t really been thinking about it from the independent learner’s point of view…

Jim goes on to say that, most educational providers are “unwilling to take the risk of allowing open access to YouTube.” If access is allowed, there are issues with “inappropriate content being viewed and network bandwidth being totally wiped out by users (students and teachers) constantly streaming YouTube content, not all of it related to education.”

The differentiator and unique selling point for Media Filter therefore seems to be that it works “in conjunction with any existing web filter to allow specific YouTube clips to be categorised by age and subject to be viewed without allowing open access to the site.”

All very interesting and I think I’m slowly getting a bit better informed…

More on YouTube filtering… SafeShare.tv

Re the previous post about YouTube in the classroom, my thanks to Ray Fleming at Microsoft for pointing out that there is another option to use the XL version of YouTube, which doesn’t display comments and has an interface ideal for an interactive whiteboard…and it’s free. Thanks Ray.

But a bit of digging and I found this service, which on first use looks fantastic.

With Safeshare.tv you can view YouTube videos without displaying the related videos and the possible inappropriate comments. If you want learners just to watch the selected video and nothing else then Safeshare seems to do the job. And it does it for free.

So you simply:

• Copy the URL of the YouTube video
• Go to www.safeshare.tv
• Paste the YouTube URL
• Generate a safe link
• Copy and paste this link into the address bar of your browser or embed into a PowerPoint etc…
• Enjoy! – No comments, no related videos

Here’s an example link created in this way…

YouTube Filtering

The Times reports that, “Schools and councils are planning to spend thousands of pounds so that classes can access videos on YouTube… dozens of town halls and hundreds of schools plan to spend up to £10,000 a year…”

Why? Well, the service from Bloxx Media Filter removes the comments on videos and related films.It’s the potential for these comments to be offensive that prevents the use of YouTube in the classroom. Bloxx Media Filter has an interesting whitepaper that puts the case for its service. It looks like a perfectly good service with some other added-value features too.

So teachers have a choice: 1. Don’t use YouTube at all 2. Risk using YouTube and its potential to display offensive comments. 3. Wait until your school pays ££s for Bloxx Media Filter 4. Download videos.

Trouble is, that last action is illegal. Downloading videos from YouTube, according to Bloxx, “breaches Google’s terms of service, which prohibits the ‘caching’ of content.”

I’m not sure how Office 2010 will comply with this as videos in PowerPoint 2010 will now be embedded (is that ‘caching’?) in the presentation by default. There’s even an inbuilt function to insert a video directly from YouTube by clicking ‘Insert>Video>Video from Web Site’ and pasting in the embed code from the video.

All too confusing… After all it’s illegal to make a CD of MP3 files that you legally own. Wouldn’t it be better if Google, in the spirit of much of its services, adapted its terms to allow teachers to download videos for use in education…?

Office 2010 Beta – Worth a Look? Well, yes…

Microsoft has just announced that Office 2010 Beta is now available for download to “find out what makes it good for the classroom.”

Haven’t had a chance to do this yet but will give it a go as there are a few things identified that could be useful. Some of these are:

Useful ‘Save to’ options including save directly to the school’s Learning Platform (provided it is based on SharePoint) and save directly to SkyDrive (with 25GB of free storage). Once saved to Skydrive, the document can be opened directly from there in the web version of Office 2010 – whether you have it installed on your machine or not. Quite like this approach…

Embedding video in PowerPoint has always been a pig – particularly if it’s a SWF file – so if this can be improved then so much the better. Apparently it has been in Office 2010 with easier editing options, videos embedded in your presentation by default, and direct insertion of videos from YouTube and TeacherTube (and other sites).

Might be worth taking a look…

Why wouldn’t we?

Why wouldn’t we cancel Haiti’s $1 billion international debt. How can the west’s poorest country – and now almost totally demolished  – not be given the slimmest chance for recovery?

Sign up at the Drop Haitian Debt campaign

First Post by email

Here we go… my first post to WordPress by email. Not too profound a thought but well worth a try…

Nuggets of Gold

Really enjoyed a visit to Devizes last week to speak at the Wiltshire ICT Team Day. What better than to spend time in the company of Tim Rylands and Sarah Neild and to catch up with ex-ICT coordinat0r colleague Bob Harding?

I stumbled into ICT many years ago as an English teacher amazed by the ability of these strange new devices (the BBC micro and then the Acorn Archimedes) to enable communication, to access audiences and to change, for the good, the nature of teaching and learning in my classroom. At the time I knew nothing about the technology and there was much to learn. Bob was brilliant in helping me to get to grips with all of this – supplying information, technical advice and lots of encouragement. Many years later, it’s good to see Bob still continuing this with ICT Nuggets – a blog well worth a visit. I’ve just learned, for example, that I can now post to this blog via email. Been doing this with Posterous for quick blogging and podcasting work (it’s excellent) but so glad to see this in WordPress. Thanks for the tip Bob.

From The Cotswolds, UK to Boston, USA

I haven’t devoted as  much time to the blog as I should but I’ve noticed that many bloggers begin with an apology for not posting recently so perhaps I’m not so out of step… Anyway, the start of a new term, new opportunities and new challenges after a summer of relaxation, work and mixed weather. During the break, I tried to combine all three in one mini-project where I took advantage of the gaps in the summer rain to do a bit of walking and record progress using some easy-to-use GPS and then post to a free website service – the result: The Cotswold Way…

I would have tried the same thing to record my journey when I was lucky enough to visit Boston, USA to provide some training and insight on UK education. Northwest Airlines (bless it) decided to lose my luggage (containing the GPS tracker) for 48 hours though, so that didn’t work out. Boston’s a great city to visit though and well worth spending a day following the Freedom Trail and taking a boat trip to George’s Island.

That’ll do for now…

World’s worst song – official!

Grateful for wired.com for this important information: the world’s most unwanted music has been researched and recorded.

According to Wired, conceptual artists Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier gathered data about people’s least favourite music and lyrical subjects ( holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children’s chorus, cowboys, political jingoism,  Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjos, harp glissandos – you get the idea) and then did the world a great service by combining the elements in one piece of music. It’s amazingly listenable, recognisable and hilarious.

Well worth the listen!

The World’s Worst Song