Ultralab

Having worked on this for nearly a year now it was a delight to be able to launch the website at the recent Design Council conference in Birmingham, ‘From the inside looking out’.

The site is an innovative online metric – a questionnaire for children to help them rate various aspects of their school environment and for teachers and school managers to be able to use the results to inform their decision making processes. It is beyond anything else a tool to help open the dialogue between children and their schools about a range of issues.

It may not be quite perfect, yet. It is, after all a beta version…

At one time you could have checked it here

http://www.designmyschool.net or here http://www.designmyschool.com

but it is currently off line pending review and possible re-build.

There is still stuff to do, and ways to improve it, but we are excited about the early feedback from schools…

Check out Jonathan’s blog on this item too – Jonathan worked on a lot of the coding!

Let me know what you think…

One of the projects that I work on involves setting up a website in partnership with the Design Council, as part of their work on the Schools’ Renaissance campaign. The website is a form of questionnaire for which we use the ‘Gearbox’ software developed by Nick and Alex at Ultralab.

The online metric project, as it is being called, is a fairly complex beast and for the first time at Ultralab I have started to use a piece of project planning software called xTime Project.

This is a simple project planning tool which allows me to add resources we will use (including people, hardware, software and time for holidays, etc) and cost these into a budget. The software allows me to link events in the project together so that we can see the flow of the work we are doing but more importantly than all of that it integrates nicely with iCal and can be exported to a web server as well.

This means that using iCal I can broadcast the entire project plan as a series of diary events to the Ultralab WebDAV server for anyone else to see and subscribe to. xTime also integrates with Address book so I cn easily add people and resources that way, and it keeps track of the budget for me, showing totals against events (events mean work done by people on the project) and I can even export this financial summary to Excel for the finance admin team to get to grips with.

All in all a cool piece of software, well worth the money ($129 for the standard version, but it is easily worth the $249 for the ‘Pro’ software, which we use), easy to use and very visual in what it does.

Here I am, at home on a Friday, wondering what the future might hold.

Nothing unusual about that, of course, except today there was a meeting with the immediate line manager for the workplace, who tried very hard to convince me that he wasn’t here to shut us down.

Trouble is, it sounded just like when Tony Blair gives a message of support to a cabinet colleague, who promptly loses their job a week later.

Gulp. let’s hope it isn’t so…