Matus

This the the screen in my room (please excuse the mess and blurred out bits) You can see in the side shot the thick sheet of MDF we had to screw to the rubbish 80s cardboard wall to reinforce it. Most of our teachers machines are windows 7 so can do all the multi touch gestures but my PC was playing up so I'm using an xp machine.

The importer has a different name, I can dig it up at school. If you like I could post up a few pictures of them from different angles tomorrow?

Don't forget the ipad has a (not great) version of smart notebook, which they do seem to be working on. I use an Apple TV and home and it is great, but then my iMac is reasonably new. We have bought a load of 60" LED TV whiteboards form a company called Seewoo and I must they they are quite good. I was getting really frustrated by the short lives of traditional boards and the extremely short lives of projectors. They have the touch input of a traditional IWB, (but a different tech so less temperamental) but the brightness, low running costs and general lack of projector of a TV. The cabling is pretty simple too, especially as you can buy them with a built in of (I didn't though). In one room I'm going to trolly mount it as there is no worries about lining it up with a projector. On the other hand they cost us £3500 to buy and nave them fitted so they are not cheap.

Thanks for the idea, I've got some spare monitors knocking around.

I've just had a load of Sewoo LCD screen whiteboard installed at school and on the whole they are awesome. Not relying on a projector really is great. However I'd not realised how much we used the projectors ability to freeze the picture. We would prepare something on screen, freeze the projector while we sorted something on the PC screen, then unfreeze it. These new boards, which are essentially Toshiba led TVs, don't seem to have any unbuilt option to "freeze" or "pause" them. Does anyone know if windows 7, or any application for it, has the ability to freeze one screen when using duplicate screens, and leave the other one running. I'm really trying to avoid extended screen as 95% of the time I want the kids to see what I'm doing, but for that last 5%...

Interesting, primary or secondary?

Ah, sorry, that was not my intention, plus I am only talking about my little world and the techies I was, and come into contact with, as well as our teachers. I was just trying to caution against throwing the baby out with the bath water and saying that buying new and hard to integrate tech is bad because it is under utilised. Many people I have come across have disregarded iPads because they will be hard to deploy/maintain and a strain to convince staff to use and while that’s true, since our end intention is to teach the children as best we can, then that’s something we need to deal with until apple gets them selves into order. Basically don't use tech just because it’s fashionable, but don't disregard it because its fashionable or a pain if its a benefit to the children. It was more an example than a major problem, and gain one possibly specific to my experience and locality, a reliance on one old faithful tech at the expense of diversity A lot of teachers and tech support are comfortable with one browser, one edition of one word processor, one spread sheet, one OS, one type of hardware. They know them, they are easy to manage and they know how to teach them. As a result, many of our primary age children are totally phased when they come across something that they have not seen at school or at home. My class had all been taught an old version of IE by their previous classes and possibly used iOS Safari at home. I showed them chrome last week and some of them got really confused, and those applications aren't even that different. We all assume that just being around some tech at home children will be good at them without any specific teaching. Its reminiscent of the study one council did a little while back. The gave all the pupils in one school a handheld computer (pre the popularity of tablets) and they used them in loads of subjects for their whole 6 years in school. They assumed that just by being young and by being exposed to them that they would learn how to use them perfectly. What they found was that by the end of year 6 the children could all do the specific tasks they had been taught, almost all had never found the spell check function. In our school our kids are in a similar situation, they need to be exposed to a greater range of devices and OS. We can't just assume they will transfer their skills and many primary age children just don’t do that unless sits pointed out to them. It always pains me to see our year 6s leave able to type a letter, draw a graph, find something on IE and play games on their parents iPhones, but incapable of video editing, web publishing, using mobile devices for anything other than games etc all of which would be of as much use to them in later life as drawing a picture in colour magic. I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of the article and your post. It makes me very sad when I look at the visualisers only half the teachers use and the voting devices used by even less, but I don’t regret buying them. Seeing their benefits when they are used assures me of that. I'm still fighting at least 3 of our teachers to even get the laptops out and teach some ICT other than sending a TA out with the BeeBots. I don't regret buying the laptops, I lament my own ability to extoll tier benefits properly. I really want some iPads, I know they can be used well from the teachers who bring their own in and other schools I have seen using the well, but I know getting them in children hands would be an uphill battle with some teachers. Basically, to sum up my ramblings: Yes we have lots of unused or hard to integrate tech lying around. In general, don’t regret buying it or fight buying more, just battle the teachers to use it.

I'm going to say something that will probably get me lots of stick. ;-) When I say we, I mean me and the techy people around me, this is quite possibly not representative. I also only worked as a network manager for a few years before I trained to teach, so I'm not as qualified to talk about the tech side of this as many others, I'm thinking more of the intended end result (which I know with bad teacher training and attitudes is not what we normally get). but anyhow... Because we do. We can keep teaching the way we always have. We don't need to change at all. Our maths teaching has gone on fine for years with just text books and cubes, we don't need comparatively expensive numicon or bead strings. Half the times they stay in the draws they are first put in becaus its a pain for a etacher to change tohe wy they have alway taught. It would make for better maths teaching though. Rooms of windows xp (or 8) desktop pcs are easy to manage, staff can use and then we can spend more money on stuff that makes our life easier, like switches and server kit. We'd never have to train teachers to use new innovations, we'd never have to fight people to use things they don't want to and we'd never see kit languishing in a cupboard. We would also be failing our children. We use IE as our main browser at school, its easy for us tech staff, its useful for so many other pieces of networking software. Our county school IT dept doesn't even have packages for chrome or firefox. Yet when the kids go home they enter a world where most browsing is now done in chrome. We use desktop RM1s because they make our life easy, no wifi, no batteries, easy to manage over cc4. We use laptops in trollies, but we don't like them because we have to carry them about and sometimes laptops are taken home by teachers and they are out of our reach. We oppose ipads becase they are hard for us to deploy and maintain and the old guard of teachers may never get round to using them. We would never consider teaching them to use iPhones or iPod touches, way too fiddly and dangerous. Yet around 10% of browsing is now done from a mobile device, and about 60% of that is an apple device. Id guess that those stats probably grow if you look specifically children and young families with children. We need to teach our children to use as many different devices as possible, as when they grow up they may brows the net and do their job on tablets, smart phones, consoles, set top boxes, laptops, desktops and devices we have not even thought of yet. We need to teach adaptability even if a plethora of devices in our schools is an administrative and training nightmare. I don't think mobile computing with tablets and smart phones is a fad and i think its share will increase. I don't think apple is going to disappear any time soon, even if they just become one of many. This is the real world we are sending our kids into, its the one we need to teach them how to exist in. Following trends in the real world has become a dirty word, (oh its apple, its bad by default), but its that real world we are training our kids for.

Cheers, that bodes well!

I'd just like some sort of co-op add on to skyrim that allowed my character and my friends to go on an adventure in a separate dungeon somewhere. Ive played morrowind onwards for hours, but MMOs put me off as I don't have the time to invest in them that they need.

This is not education related, but its windows 8 related so I'm hoping someone can help me out. Let me know if this is posted in the wrong place. Does the windows 8 upgrade disk allow a clean intall onto a machine that doesn't actually have windows on it? I'm not trying to cheat licensing, so let me explain. A year or so ago my sister in law started trying to save space on her Vista laptop by deleting files she did not think she needed. After deleting a few system files concerned with networking and the internet she managed to pretty much kill her machine and came to me for help. I had no idea what she had deleted and she seemed to have killed her restore partition somehow, so I asked her for the disks that came with the laptop so I could rebuild it. Unfortunately she decided she did not need any of the disks or paperwork that came with her laptop and had thrown them all away. I had a go at installing vista with a disk I borrowed from another school, but without the driver disk I had real trouble and even with a few hours of google-fu I was never able to make her network card and wireless work. In the short term I stuck an ubuntu build on for her to use but they did not get on. The laptop has sat in a cupboard for about a year now. Now windows 8 has come along and looks quite cheap I thought i may have another go at resurrecting this laptop. However, the £40 box set is listed as an upgrade. Strictly speaking her machine is liscenced for windows vista and so she is eligible for an upgrade to 8 but she does not actually have vista installed on it. Is it physically possible. If not does anyone have any suggestions?

I've recently bought three eInstruction DualBoard, sold by RM as RM Classboards. I put two into our foundation unit and now, just over a month later, one of the teachers has come to e saying they have broken the pens already, they have either worn the white tip down, or pushed it up into the pen. They assure me reception age children can't control how hard they push with a pen and that they are pushing really hard. If I buy them replacement pens they assure me that they will probably break those as well. This seems rather negative to me, but having never taught such young children I don't know how much truth there is in it. I know they are angling for a Smart board as a replacement, but the DualBoards were I we could afford. As a result I would beg eInstruction users input on three questions. 1) Has anyone deployed such boards, or similarly activboards or any other kit that uses a pen with a white plastic nib in the foundation stage? If so, do they get broken on a monthly basis? 2) Can anyone think of a way of extending the life? I notice on RM's site ( RM ClassBoard - 60" Interactive Whiteboard ), under the features tab, they have a picture of a chunkier pen, but since RM kit seems to be different types of rebadged equipment so often, I have no idea if thats for a dual board, what it would really be called and where one would find it. 3) If I am just going to have to keep buying new pens, most of what I find look different, with a grey charger and compatibility with Mobi listed,a s well as dual boards. Do you think they would work? Does anyone know if you can just replace the nibs (assuming they have not damaged the actual pen?)