Bromley ICT Forum Blog

On the 9th of May, the school community at Biggin Hill Junior celebrated the launch of the school’s new Virtual Learning Environment with the issue of family logins and passwords.

This celebration was the culmination of twelve months hard work put in by Year 6 Coordinator, Stephanie Edwards and the schools ICT Technician Linda Brown, who both worked tirelessly to design the structure, set up the content and lead the training of all the staff at Biggin Hill Junior. 

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(Thanks to Darrick Wood Junior Primary School)

As you are aware, Digitalbrain have made updates to the VLE software which has led to changes in the ways adaptamation elements are handled and edited.

A bug has been discovered in the adaptamation editing process, which prevents the user from editing their current adaptamation page. This bug has been reported to Digitalbrain who promise that a fix will be in place by tomorrow night (23/5/2007.)

Update 30/5/2007

It looks like we were being optimistic. The bug still hasn’t been fixed yet although Digitalbrain have indicated that if schools are desperate to make changes to their adaptamation pages they should email the page link to me and I will pass it on to their programmers (sigh).

Bromley Schools may be wondering why the Digitalbrain Helpdesk is being …well.. not so helpful. The reason for that is Digitalbrain and the LGFL have created a new ‘premium support’ service for schools which requires each Bromley school paying an extra fee  of £600 per year.  As the LBB of Bromley  haven’t entered into this deal on your behalf,  this service is therefore unavailable (at the moment). However if you do have an issue which requires technical support please contact me (0208 461 6224) or email me and I will see that it gets attended to.

If you want your school to be part of Digitalbrain’s premium support package and you are prepared to pay the necessary money, please indicate by dropping  a note on the Comment link of this blog entry.

Update 2

I received the following email from Patrick Rutherford  on Tuesday 6th

My colleague Martin Machado asked me to confirm to you our progress on the issue of our customers not being able to edit some of their Adaptamations; for example in their homepages. I am happy to report that we released a fix for this on Friday 1^st of June. Details of the fix can be found here: http://www.lgfl.net/updates/known%20issues/adaptamation/.If you have any further enquiries please do let me know.

Patrick Rutherford

No doubt you are aware of the current issues regarding wireless networks and health risks which has been raised in the media last week. Panorama (BBC1 ) will be running a program on this tonight. 

Becta has provided some guidance on this issue.

 Visit their web site  for more information.

The HPA have issued a statement saying that the comments attributed to Sir William Stewart in the Independent on Sunday (22/4/2007) are not his.
See  http://www.hpa.org.uk/radiation/default.htm .

The articles in question were:

Wi-fi: Children at risk from electronic smog

Danger on the Airwaves: is the wi-fi revolution a health time bomb?

The massively popular Rock Idol- now renamed Rock IT! is underway again, giving school based bands nationwide the chance to strut their stuff, with the winners receiving music kit for their schools worth £1500 from Roland.

The final will be staged early in December 2007, in Birmingham, from where performances will be relayed around the nation via video conference, as well as on BBC Big screens in numerous city centres.

Hosted by the West Midlands Grid for Learning, the project involves all 10 regional Grids for Learning in England, plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which  provide broadband connection and a wealth of resources for use over broadband to schools and colleges.

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As you are no doubt aware, Digitalbrain have implemented site release version 1.4 which has the following new features

• New Icon View
• New Account search functions
• New Text Editor for Learning Module pages
• New folder Listing design.

For further information, visit http://updates.digitalbrain.com

Digitalbrain are also developing new features that will allow schools to build social networking tools within their sites such as blogs, eportfolios and podcasts.  More ifomrsation about these elements will be released soon.

MathsRap (for KS 2)

This new content for KS2 Numeracy includes 22 online rap videos covering basic rules for KS2 Numeracy in Match and Calculations, Shape and Space and solving Problems. Find them in the KS2 Maths menu or directly at http://www.mathsraps.lgfl.net/ (Please note that you will need your lgfl name and password to access the site)

MFL News- Vamos from Espresso

A second new piece of content is Module 1 of Espresso’s resource for KS2 Spanish, covering Greetings, In school, the Alphabet , Numbers, Days of the Week, Festivals and the Weather. Lots of video of native speakers, support activities . Find it at KS2 MFL Menu or at http://www.vamos.lgfl.net/

Weather Stations online

With six weather stations across London, schools can track weather systems across the regions contrasting inner and outer city conditions. Yorkshire and Humberside Grid for Learning have just insatlled their first weather stations ta Scunthorpe, so now all schools can contrast North, South, CIty and Coast.

Find this at www.weather.lgfl.net

Big Day Out

The South West Grid for Learning is working with iBoard to develop a resource for KS1 Modelling and Control. Its called Big Day Out and users can ‘visit’ any of the 15 LAs in the SWGfL, complete an activity realted to that LA and ’send’ a postcard back to themselves to resord their activity. See it at http://bdo.swgfl.org.uk

For the last five months,  selected schools from the Bromley Learning Alliance have been engaged in a project to see if the use of eportfolios made an effective contribution to student learning.

Thanks to a partnership with Spider Networks , a standalone eportfolio module was provided for each of the participating schools (enough for one class of thirty students  per school). The enclosed report indicated that the project had a major positive effect especially in the Key Stage 2 area of the curriculum. It also highlighted some issues that schools need to take on board if they want to exploit the potential of eportfolios.

Special thanks to Hayes Primary School, Royston Primary School, Princes Plain, St Mary’s Catholic School and Langley Park School for Girls for their participation in the trial.

Design the Official logo for a mission into space!

Spacedate: October 2007 A rocket is launched to the edge of space frmo Australia’s remotest outback.

The Mission: to conduct scientific experiments that will find out if bees can pollinate in space and so help humans grow food to survive the long journey to Mars

The Task: Bees in Space needs a mission ‘patch’ to be used on this planet and beyond. ‘Space Qualified’, the mission controllers and the LGFL offer Key Stage 1-4 students the opportunity to design the official ‘Bees in Space’ Logo.

The winning design will become the official patch for the mission. It will be placed on the rocket that carries the bees into space and be used on all communications on this planet. All the entered designs will be recorded onto a disc, placed ina  special module and released into space to wander the galaxy for the rest of time.

How to take part: The competition rules, support images, teacher and classroom resources can be found at www.beesinspace.lgfl.net

Mission Deadline: To be in with a chance of being launched into space, all entries must be received by mission control by the 21st September 2007

CDEC have proposed a partnership project with Bromley to enhance the quality of teaching and learning through the application of Video Conferencing in schools.

What does it involve?

The project involves schools undertaking a collaborative curriculum project requiring them to link with other schools and  experts around the world  using Video conferencing units that would be supplied on loan by CDEC along with technical and curriculum support for a limited six week period. Participating schools would, in return, be expected to maintain a journal recording their experiences and the impact upon the students

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Blogs, Podcasts, Video Conferencing, Web Quests, Digital film making and animation are being used effectively in schools to engage students in the curriculum. These tools  are deceptively easy to use and will extend student learning and assist in embedding staff skills. The  ICT team at Bromley Learning and Achievement wants to offer interested schools the opportunity to participate in a series of six week ICT Adventure Projects using these tools.

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