By sheer serendipity I happened to see a programme on teacher's tv about blogging this afternoon. And very interesting it was too. The school they visited was a Primary in East Sussex which also had an autistic centre. All the pupils used blogs and clearly found them both stimulating and fun. Boys who were not keen on writing really wanted to work on the computer to create entries that could be read not just by their classmates but the whole world. There was a boy had come over from Iraq whose self confidence had been greatly improved by the whole experience of blogging: members of his family still in Iraq could see his work and telephone him to say how good it was. How different from just having work displayed on the classroom wall!

Another boy, from Bangladesh, had very little English when he can into the school and found writing his blog difficult at first: but now it is easy and his English is excellent. I know this cannot all be put down to blogging but the thought of the global audience which included his family still in Bangladesh was a great motivator. As were the calls from them saying how well he was doing.

This breaking down of the classroom wall is one of the most powerful motivators there is. Alan November talks of some pupils writing for a fan-fiction site where, like the pupils in this Primary, the motivation comes from knowing that others are reading your work, appreciating it, commenting on it, and maybe also being inspired by it. As he said: "If you had the choice of writing for your class homework or an audience of millions what would you do?"

The autism centre was just as interesting: the computer given them a distance that they don't have when talking face to face. Also the non-judgemental interaction is confidence building. I saw something similar when doing some work on video conferencing. A special school was using it with its pupils to talk to pupils in another school. Some pupils had found any sort of conversation with a teacher difficult but when using the VC equipment they came into their own and found their voice. Perhaps blogging can have a similar effect: when blogging is also taken to include podcasts, video-blogging and a global audience then perhaps we have a powerful tool at our disposal.

As well as the full programme two shorter clips from it are also on the teachers tv site: one about blogging in the autistic unit and another about the benefits of blogging in the more general context. It is well worth watching.

See my ll4schools post

See my ll4Schools post.

See my ll4Schools blog.

The following was taken from the Insafe survey was sponsored by UPC, with support from the European Commission. Further survey results will be available on the Insafe website in the coming weeks.

This survey just goes to show how important it is that online security is covered in schools with users of social networks being educated about the issues. Here are a few snippets:

• 57% of young people make their online social network profiles public and disclose a great deal of personal information, according to a recent survey of 21,872 people across Europe organised by European Schoolnet, coordinator of European Insafe network.
• Almost a third of youngsters responding indicated that they didn't know what to do about making information public or private.
• In some contexts, many young people are aware of what to do: for instance, when using MSN, 58% of young people surveyed reported that they would not accept a request for contact from a person they didn't know.
• The under 10 age group seems to have relatively little awareness of the dangers of going to meet someone they have been chatting with online. More than a third indicated hypothetically they would go to meet online contacts without telling parents.
• However, awareness increases greatly for 10 to 13 year olds, and then steadily declines; 22% of 17 year olds would forget to tell their parents about such a meeting and 24% of 18 year olds would go alone.
• A similar pattern of increased risk-taking from age 14 to 17 can be repeatedly seen in a detailed analysis of the survey results, underlining the need to tailor awareness-raising campaigns to target these age groups.

LL4Schools enforces the privacy of personal, profile data - currently we prevent all but the user's biogaphy from being made public. All other profile data is made available only to other logged in users: and all accounts on LL4Schools are created at the request of schools with full traceability and no self-sign up. If there is demand from users we could, on a school-by-school basis, restrict such data further.

Performance was so bad today I decided to swap the router they supplied with the one I bought a few weeks ago just to see if that improved things. Lo and behold - I now have access to redhat.com and live.com! How did that happen? It seems my router was blocking these sites although I have no filtering running on the router! Even the firewall of trivial as I have my own firewall in place behind it. Very strange.

I cannot access some sites - in particular I am still cut off from all redhat.com sites and today I found I cannot get to login.live.com! I need access to this to test how best to filter it on my local copy of Protex before making any regional changes. Bulldog technical support were not very helpful - they didn't seem to think routing was their problem to resolve! I've sent a mail asking for my MAC address so I can go back to Demon without any loss of service...I've never got the promised 16Mb so Demon's 8Mb should be just as effective as I get now.

Much quieter today. The 10am deluge was more restrained today. On Thursday and Friday there was complete mayhem as people flooded in and then made a beeline for the cafe areas before the queues built up! Today it was more sedate. E2BN still had a steady trickle of interest in the filtering system and, in fact, we probably saw more schools from our own region today than on the other days.

BETT is very much a business-to-business show for the delegates and exhibiters as well as a selling-to-customers one. In fact, for E2BN, this is probably the most important aspect of the show. And I think we made useful contacts this year for Protex

Well, that's it for another year. I can now give my feet a rest and let my shoes air! And Monday we start to follow up those we spoke to and plan all the work for the next few months!

Another busy day. My impression is that there are no "big-ideas" around at the show to interest the geeks but, having finally got time to go around the galleries at least, there are lots of companies with interesting products for the teachers.

One really good product which has come on leaps and bounds over the last year or so is gigajam which offers online instrumental lessons. At first sight (hear?) this sounds impossible but when you have seen it workings and kids using it you soon see its potential. It is very useful for drawing kids into playing instruments together - and hopefully they will then go on to to "proper" teacher.

The big learning platform/VLE/MLE companies are here of course: this year's "must have" word on a stand "learning platform"! This is becoming a very crowded and competitive space but few really compelling offerings in my opinion. I am still undecided about this whole area: does it really mean anything? Are the products worth the investment a school/LA/RBC needs to make in time are money to make it work? What about the whole issue of taking your "learning space" with when you move school? Or go to Uni? Who owns the contents of the platform and who has access to it? Still lots of work to do on this I think.

And then we have shibboleth to contend with and all the data cleaning and inter-departmental liaison that will involve. It never fails to amaze me how much detailed work needs to go on behind the screens in order to make a simple; clean; transparent process for the end-user...

The shows seems much busier today - we've had lots of visitors to the Easynet stand to talk about filtering. There are lots of foreign visitors it appears: we've had enquiries from Denmakrk, Sweden, India, Spain, Cyprus & Iceland. A pretty comprehensive geographical spread. So far I've not had any time to look around the show - perhaps tomorrow?

I've managed to look around on of the galleries a bit. Some interesting stuff - Moodle is here again; some very interesting media creation things going on as well. The Apple stand has lots of cool stuff (as always) but no iPhone!

So here we are - I arrived at 8am and spent the best part of two hours trying to set up the server that failed to arrive yesterday. We finally got the required IP details and managed to set up the Appliansys cache and install the Protex software just in time for the 10 am start.

In the meantime we also had another problem with the Cambs cache - so while setting up the server here I also spent time redirecting all the cambs caching up to our core! Still, all seems to be happy now.

Jeff has done the Making the News presentation; I've has some lunch and am now (13:00) manning the E2BNProtex stand...

The show seems quite busy and we've had a few interesting conversations - moodle on a USB stick for example - and a chance to catch up with a colleagues. I finally left about just before 6pm to struggle home on the train.

The conference went very well - there was loss of internet connectivity in the afternoon which was unfortunate but apart from that it was very successful. Had several conversations with Chris Stolberg (DfES) about Learning platforms and other government initiatives in this area which were very useful.

The filtering presentations were not very well attended - but this is a good thing. I am sure that if there was general discontent we'd have been booked out! It seems to have bedded down very well and been well received - we also now have full Becta accreditation on all the student profiles (confirmed on Monday) which will be a good "selling" point. C&W/Appliansys were happy with the responses they had and are also talking to other potential users. Herts were positive about it and will shortly be asking for our input into a trial of the system.

My "Expanding Horizons using Online tools" presentation went quite well - I overran the first day but the second one went much nearer to time.

I finished my two presentations for the E2BN conference this morning. The "Expanding Horizons with Online Tools" one I did in Keynote and exported as a QuickTime movie - it is posted on my website. The other one (about Protex) is a combination of a short overview presentation and live demo of the web-interface and comment handling system.

I have moved my work blogs to b2evolution from the iBlog software I have been using until now. This should give me greater flexibility and make them more manageable. iBlog is very good software and has some advantages in being stored on a desktop and then uploaded but as the blog is growing the number of files being uploaded was growing. A single change may cause most of the pages to be rebuilt as the archive, calendar or links lists were changed on each page. The last update caused over 600 hundred files to be uploaded!

b2evolution is database driven and instead of hosting it remotely I have put it on my home web-server (the database itself is on another server not accessible from the internet) which offers better performance when I am at home but is still available when I am away. I can back up the database and save the backup to my remote host for security.

I did look at using elgg for this - I even went to the extent of writing a page to modify the posted date (something which is not available in elgg at the moment) before finally coming down in the side of using b2evo. The advantages would have been the file storage integration which is very useful and the community aspect: but the files I can upload to my server and just link to (not quite as easy but not that much of an effort) and the "community" is covered by the user managment and publishing controls in e2evo.

Elgg will win over b2evo in a larger installation where the community really comes into its own: this is an extra level over b2evo which is more of a pure blogging tool which can cope with large numbers of users writing & reading blogs.

I have copied any existing entries from my old blog for April 2005 into this one: entries pre-April 2005 can be found HERE. Prior to this I used Blogger.com but posted the files to my server: entries older from February to October 2004 can be found HERE