A little while back (27th June, in fact) I attended the British Council for School Environments (BCSE) conference and ran an interactive session with the delegates. The session used some neat tools, including the SMS Messaging system developed by Cleveratom (now called MobiStick), but the purpose was to open up the dialogue relating to some of the issues surrounding the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) processes. The session helped gather thoughts and ideas to inform the BCSE response to the Education and Skills Committee report “Sustainable Schools: are we building schools for the future?” Read more
Author: Hal
Children’s weight problems
So the government asked the care trusts to ask the schools to ask their parents if the children could be weighed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7541279.stm
So the children whose parents said ‘Yes’ were weighed, and the data collected and used to inform the nation about the state of obesity in young children. Glory be.
However, a *significant* number of parents said ‘no’ – and I am estimating significant to be around 20% in every county – and so those children were not weighed. Lo and behold, the county closest to home for me declared that there is not an obesity problem with young children for them, and they had the data to prove it. Citing healthy schools initiatives, a growing appreciation of participative sports and all manner of ways that children are being encouraged to exercise and eat a healthy diet, the campaigns have been hailed a success.
I’m sorry if this rains on anyone’s parade, but the 20% of children were very likely the ones who were overtly conscious (and worried, perhaps) about their apparent weight problems. The very children who need to inform the statistics were not included out of their own choice. Suddenly, in a county with some *very* overweight kids (and I have taught a few), none of them have been included in the census.It is hardly surprising that the figures show no obesity, when the obese children were not weighed.
Lies, damned lies and statistics, eh? When will we stop paying out money for this kind of ‘research’ and realise that there are far more realistic ways of gathering the data?
WordPress for iPhone, Stumble Upon
Well, this has got to be good… Here I am using my iPhone once again to send information to my blog. This time it is a short note to describe adding a ‘Stumble Upon’ button to your WordPress themes.
I noticed that last week the hits rose quite dramatically on a particular item t do with iPhones and on further investigation it turned out that a visitor had added my site to StumbleUpon and thus the sudden influx. It was enough to encourage me to make it even easier for that to happen in future.
A quick visit to Stumbleupon.com and I had the code I needed to enter into the theme files I am using, but it needed some editing. Adding the ‘title’ attribute from WordPress code endured that the specific page or post gets tagged.
I’ll monitor traffic over the next couple of weeks to see what happens, but I am not expecting much.
Just to finish by saying I rote this entry using my iPhone, and as you can see, it has arrived safely on the site. I am a fan of the wordpress app for iPhone now… but have been a fan of Stumble Upon for years! 🙂
Testing the iphone app for WordPress
So here I am posting directly to my blog using my iPhone. It is slower to type than using a keyboard, of course, but it is at least available to me from anywhere.
And as you can see… I can add an image, too. In this case it is a picture of my recently bashed car – thanks to Robert from Princes Park Manor, N11 who looks left when pulling out of a junction whilst turning right. Twit. Good job it was at walking speed otherwise the damage would be far worse.
Do I still think that mobile phones are good tools for learning? Well yes, actually, and probably more so than before. I am typing at a reasonable speed and am not struggling too much. I have Internet access, can post short texts to a site and basically do most things I would expect to do in a normal lesson if asked to research information or put some text together. Of isn’t yet perfect but it isn’t at all bad.
Bring on more… And soon!!
Wanstead High School Creativity Day
On Monday, my colleague Matthew and I, accompanied by two work experience lads, went to Wanstead High School to run an animation day on the theme of Dr Who.
We worked with twenty young people from Yr 7 to Yr 9 and took them through the stages of creating a stop frame animation using the ever brilliant ‘iStopMotion’ from Boinx. Adding audio using Garage Band from Apple was also included in the day and we then created videos for YouTube.
The children had not made an animation before this, although several had used Mac computers and were familiar with Garage Band. Given the relative lack of experience with the software they were very easily able to achieve a result… but we already know that the vast majority of children that age, when given the right tools and right challenge, will work their socks off to get their ideas translated into film.
It was a delight to work with such a focussed group, and our thanks go to Carolan Murray for inviting us to the school. The workshop was arranged through various email messages, and Carolan had no real idea of the quality (or otherwise!) that she would get by inviting us in… hopefully we didn’t disappoint!