Frank Rennie :: Blog

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We need not complain about web censorship in China, there is plenty of this around here. Apple has been rightly criticised for pushing it’s own measures of what goes and what not on the iPhone.

We don’t want to be dictated by a commercial company that iFart, an application to produce electronic sounds of hot air, is socially more acceptable than iBoobs (no explanation needed). In the context of OER for mobile devices, anatomic study materials may be excluded for silly Puritan reasons, whereas brainless shooter games are seemingly o.k for educating our citizens.

Reliability of content applications (even kosher ones) on the iPhone is relatively low, and may depend on the daily corporate mood. This does not make it a good distribution network for serious content development of mobile educational products.

The other annoyance is ad-supported applications (ad-ware) which obviously do not contradict Apple’s terms, but leads to frequent application updates perceivably only serving the purpose of spreading more ads around - I call this “apps-spamming”. A clear distinction in freeware, ad-ware, and trialware would be useful.

SchoolCentral  = COMPLETELY FREE

My name is Michael Chua from Zebra Mobile, and I would like to introduce you to a new, COMPLETELY FREE service called SchoolCentral.

SchoolCentral is a custom-built web based communication platform, built upon the latest Internet and mobile technologies.  This platform is not a call system, but serves as a mobile notification system, organizational tool, and communication hub between administration and the community.  SchoolCentral will enable administration to improve the districts communication with parents and students, and will measurably impact parental involvement, staff communications, school organization, and community out-reach.  Functioning as a supplement, this platform supports existing emergency procedures, providing different options of how important school information is sent and received.


10 Ways SchoolCentral Will Benefit Your School District:


1. Real Time Communication -SchoolCentral has the ability to send up to 9,000 messages per minute, via email, text message, web, mobile web or RSS.  Capable of notifying the whole community, faster than any call-system, some districts under 60 seconds.

2. Platform Independence -School administrators and community are enabled to decide how they want to receive and respond to important information. School notifications are sent via Internet or SMS.  If a district alert is sent from a cell phone, SchoolCentral deciphers what phone number it is sent from, and where it should be delivered.  More frequent messages of less importance can also be sent to notify families when an event such as an awards program is cancelled, or if their child on the soccer team is returning late from an away game.  Each member of the community now has the option to select what methods of communication are best preferred.

3. Communication Hub –SchoolCentral is a protected, moderated communication platform that provides each school, and groups within, its own online community.  Parents and teachers can connect easily and engage in what is most important to us, our students.

4. Tool For the Classroom – Everyone benefits when using SchoolCentral in the classroom.  Teachers are enabled to compliment a student for a job well done, or connect to a parent with underlying concerns.  Our filing system allows teachers to store documents of unlimited size, giving students the option to access school material outside the classroom, or to reprint an assignment accidentally forgotten at school.

5. Tool For Athletics –Coaches can instantly notify students and parents, if practice is cancelled, when riding on the bus, or standing on the field.   They also can address the community with the winning scores, stats or rosters.  Each sports team now has a web presence, and their own calendaring, filing and alert systems.  This enables them to share important notifications, drum up support, organize team practice and game schedules, or post pictures of the winning touchdown.  The potential is endless.  SchoolCentral’s group’s for athletics is a powerful tool, easily engaging parents and students throughout the community.

6. Easy to Use Calendaring –The RSS Feed calendaring system checks for new events or changes, and automatically updates every 60 seconds.  It also can be synced with Ical, Gcal, and Outlook.  Now all school related events are synced with your personal, work, and mobile calendars.  Besides Alerts, the calendar is the second most utilized feature in the SchoolCentral platform.  It allows parents with multiple children, to organize their schedule more efficiently with color-coding.  It also has a reminder and invite feature, easily allowing reminder and event invitations sent to friends via Email, SMS, RSS, and Desktop Widget.

7. Upload Your School News Letters -Our News Section is a big hit with Superintendents.  They now have the option to blog messages addressing the community without third party help.  School newsletters of any size can be uploaded, and the community has the option to be notified by text, Email, or neither every time new material is released.  This could save the district money by reducing cost on postage.

8. Easy Effort for Schools –This is an End-User-Based Platform.  There is no database management, staff allocation, or maintenance required.  Each member manages their own account, self-registering through a setup wizard, choosing how they would like to receive their school updates and information.   Zebra Mobile custom-builds every platform for each district.  Schools can choose what they want to use SchoolCentral for and we will make all the arrangements.  We customize the look and feel to your districts needs.  You can pick your school colors, and can even choose your own U.R.L.

9. 24 Hour Support -It is Zebra Mobiles commitment to accelerate, and provide your district with superior service and support, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

10. COMPLETELY FREE -We are currently offering this service completely FREE to early implementers, as a thank you for helping us get SchoolCentral started.



Please send me a message to arrange a short (10 min.) web demonstration.

 
Please feel free to contact my direct line listed below, or send me an email.

Warmest Regards,


Michael Chua
Zebra Mobile's
SchoolCentral Team
Direct line (513) 729-6973

mike.chua@yourschoolcentral.com

www.yourschoolcentral.com

I tried to change my password, to one that contained characters that aren't letters/numbers - as if often suggested.

I thought it had changed & realised it wasn't working. I then reset it & tried again. 

This time I saw the feedback & it does say "password can't be changed" & it says why. 

However, this was all the in body of a large block of text - and very easy to miss. 

If this still applies for version 1.x - is it possible to ensure that it's highlighted & put in red at the top - or something  - so that it's clear?

I also noticed that my Twitter password is showing up nice & clear when it reports what's been reset ... 

Hi

I have recently updated my external blog to WordPress 2.7 - and have noticed that the updates to here stopped at more or less the same time. (The last post to appear was the peunultimate one posted from the old versoin - but I wrote a post & then updated fairly shortly afterwards, so quite likely didn't give Eduspaces time to get the RSS feed)

In resources, my blog's still listed. If I click on the RSS icon, I get to see the new content as well as the old; however, if I click on the "view content" then I only see the old content (i.e. what's showing in my blog). Has anyone else got a similar issue? 

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A recent survey among experts on the what to expect on the Internet by 2020 shows unsurprising visions:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.


• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.


• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.


• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.


• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.


• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch

Technical progress aside, the rather worrying social message can be summarised as: less openness of content - more transparency of people and further diminished privacy.

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We see (public) education slip more and more into developing a business approach to learning. This is not to say that the humanitarian mission of “education free and for all” has failed or has been given up, but governments force universities to work on shoestring budgets that merely/rarely keep the status-quo, not to mention innovation, change or new approaches.

Who suffers is the student population (customers as they are called nowadays), cause someone has to pay for it. Don’t get me wrong, as tax payers we like value for money and transparency of public spending, but many students end up in debt or cannot pay the fees in the first place.

This cut in public funding requires HEIs to radically change to business tactics, including e-commerce style approaches. However, one thing that hasn’t changed much yet is the strict industrial approach of product-based education that sells content and courses to students. Newer models like OCW suggest process-based business approaches, where students pay for service (e.g. tutoring, exams, certification).

What has not been tried yet is a price-based business model, where affordability of education is the key element for large sales. Can your university offer competitive pricing and still deliver reasonable quality? - the no-frills education pack? Start with pricing your educational offer and adjust the service to the basic needs of students. Not every driver needs remote control keys to be able to drive a car.

We also need to go away from mere B2C thinking (students as the ‘only’ end-consumer). B2B offerings may be just as attractive, based on alliances and collaborations between institutions. This in turn can cover for lower earnings from student fees at the other end (student affordability).

—-

PS: A personal note: I am a fiery believer that education should be free for all, and that it is the only way to provide equal opportunities to all citizens. The above post is a reflection on current trends not on idealism

Hi, I am quite impressed with the format of the front page on this ELGG powered system, and am trying to achieve the same. Would the developer(s) of this site be willing to share their knowledge of how they managed to achieve this? Any help or tips would be extremely appreciated. I'm running the latest ELGG. Many thanks. Dean

This is unrelated to Eduspaces (we're not involved), but we thought some of you might find this event interesting:

The Scottish Book Trust is hosting Creative Sparks, "a conference for learning professionals interested in creative approaches to literature in education," in Edinburgh on February 27, 2009. (It's open to educators outside of Scotland as well.) From their site:

"Join Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen (find out more about the Children's Laureate post), Nínive Calegari from 826 National and some of Scotland’s best writers and literature development experts to explore and discuss the impact of creative approaches to literature and language in education."

You can "find out how engaging with a new approach to computer games can stimulate your pupils’ creativity and get them writing – almost without them noticing." Standard Life is also sponsoring a Best Practice award:

"If you have developed a project in your school or library that you think is innovative and really effective, we would love to hear from you. The 5 best projects will have the opportunity to showcase their work for 6 minutes each at the conference. The winner will be chosen by the delegates and will be announced at the celebratory reception at the end of the day."

For more information, check out the Creative Sparks website.

Hi, I am developing an ELGG system (version 1.1), and cannot get the user registration to work.  The only method I have that works is by an administrator manually adding a new user via the admin panel. However this is not practical if there are going to be many users of the system. What is happening is that, even though the new user's details are recorded in the database when the new user registers, their accounts are not getting activated because no email is being sent to them to activate their account. I notice that the registration system is working soundly on this Eduspaces system....I am hoping that the developer(s) can help me out here.

Many thanks.

Dean

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A new browser called Iron has recently been launched. It is based on the Open Source Chromium browser engine and looks and feels like Google’s Chrome. However, it claims that all compromises on privacy which are built into Chrome, such as the recording of websites visited or search history, have been removed, and that it is also easier on resources using less memory than Chrome.