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?

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!

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!!

We were delighted to be asked to support the event through the innovative SMS text application which is currently known as ‘Walls iStream’… I know, I know… we’ll need a better name than that! Still, it will do as a working name for now, and certainly gets people thinking!

The system allows you to send a normal SMS message that appears almost instantly on a screen. We have versions which run off a local phone connected to a laptop through bluetooth, and we have a version which operates through an SMS gateway. Both are identical to look at.

What we find when we deploy this software is that people immediately find a use for it that is different to the original purpose, which was to support speakers at conferences and collect delegates’ views. Today was no exception and plenty of people talked to us about how they might use it with learners, with staff for ICT development and lots more, too.

If you’d like a copy of the software, or access to use it for an event, please contact Cleveratom on 0845 868 9020 and we will work with you to make sure it is fit for your needs.

Walls iStream currently looks like this:

Cleveratom were there to provide an interactive session and encourage the delegates to ask questions. To do this I worked with half of the group (there were just too many delegates to fit in one room) and used the ever improving SMS tools that we are developing. The current incarnation is dubbed as ‘Walls iStream’, meaning text that is streamed onto a wall… Hais has been refining the interface and making it more linear than the previous versions, although we see a space for both in the future. The current version looks like this:

What we have seen is that architects are desperately keen to get the design of new schools right, and that they are under immense pressures from a number of different angles to confrm in one way or another with guidelines that limit the way spaces can be developed.

The BCSE event served to really highlight some of the issues to a wider audience and encouraged wider dialogue between people involved in BSF work.

Ty Goddard is the director for BCSE and is known as a strong campaigner for good design in schools. The responses from the event will be used to inform a document to go back to the Select Committee and let them know what is happening ‘on the street’. This is no easy task and there are many diverse views to consider.

The blog site for the seminar is http://www.buildingbetterschools.org.uk and you might like to sign up there and continue (or engage in) some of the dialogue as it unfolds. Participants at the seminar are particularly encouraged to make their views known (and felt) but anyone with an interest should have a sign in and join in the debate.

All looked set and everything progressed smoothly, until we were told that there was an extra bag in the hold not accounted for. To be fair, this isn’t strictly a problem with Ryan Air in any way and the other agencies involved have to accept the responsibility. However, I fail to see how this sort of thing happens.

You see, there is a list of all the people on the plane, and next to their names is a sticker which is put there by the check in desk staff. The sticker shows the number of bags passed through, and the list of names is, well, a list of names. In simple mathematical terms, you count both sets of numbers and you’ll know how many of each you have got.

The lists get sent to the baggage handlers, who collect the bags and take them to the hold of the (almost always) correct aircraft, then stow them there. They count them as they go because there is a big label applied to the bag saying which plane it neds to go on. They then check their count against the list and make sure no-one has slipped an extra bag or two on. Yesterday the numbers didn’t add up.

So we were delayed as they went through the entire lot until they found the bag they didn’t know about, checked the name on it and talked sternly to the person on board to let them know… except we missed our slot for take off… twice! The net result was an extended stay in my seat - thank goodness I opted for one by an emergency exit where there is more leg room.

So I was thinking, what happens if there are less bags accounted for? Is that alright? Do they go through the lists so rigorously and make sure everyone has got their bag on board? I dont think they do - hence the amount of lost luggage in the world that doesn’t arrive at the destination when you do.

So perhaps it comes down to simple adding up and fear of an extra bag, when no such fear exists for a missing bag. If it isn’t there, it couldn’t explode, right?

Still, the ryan air flight was excellent, the staff very professional and the prices for the food on board astronomical - some things are always able to be relied upon! I wonder if the baggage system is the same eveywhere, or just in Liverpool? I’ll find out on Monday morning when I fly back and land at Stansted

However, one problem with having such lovely design is how to keep it looking lovely. For example, my 3rd Generation iPod has a shiny chrome back cover, which suffers enormously from smudges, scratches and generally getting bashed about. I keep it in the case it came in, but somehow even sliding it in and out of that has introduced wear and tear. Of course, it is a good few years old now, has had new batteries (see my article about replacing an iPod battery) and gets used almost every day. It is bound to suffer wear and tear, and I should expect no less.

The problem has moved on now though, as I also have my iPhone to protect. There are literally hundreds of cases designed to look after your iPhone, and some are remarkably expensive affairs by comparison to others. The ones I’ve seen or used include wallet type ‘fold over’ where you slot the phone in the top and there is a front flap which opens and closes like a book to reveal the phone controls, clear plastic cases that snap on, and various types of rubber or silicone rubber sleeves which you wrap around the phone.

The issue with the wallet type has been that the phone can easily slide out of the opening at the top since there is no strap to keep it in. Thus, casually hoding the case the wrong way up can result in a nasty fall to whatever surface is below. In Matt’s case that has been everything from carpet to concrete. Not good. They also require more manipulation to answer the phone and are much more bulky in your pocket. If, like me, you keep your phone in your jeans pocket then that’s not a good thing!

The clip on plastic covers also increase bulk somewhat, although not drastically. They do also protect the device, but they look, well, odd. It somehow destroys all of that lovely design work and you end up with something akin to a cheap underwater housing for a disposable camera. They are low cost, and they look it, too, IMO. The one exception for me *might* be the InCase ’slider’ for iPhone and iPod touch.

So that leaves the silicone rubber covers, and at the moment that is what I’m using. There are lots on the market, some in funky colours, some with reinforced ribbing, some with built in screen protectors and so on. I’ve looked at most and discounted most. There’s even one made from a material designed to protect helicopter rotor blades whirring at high speed in a sandy environment. Nice. The one I am using is in fact very cheap and soft feeling that covers most of the phone, but not the front glass. This hardly affects the overall bulk, allows easy access to the controls and essentially is just plain black. It looks smart to me. I also cover the glass with a stick on screen protector (around £3.00) which is probably overkill, but I feel better about keeping my phone in my pocket with these sorts of things on. The touch screen operation is not affected in any way by such a protective cover.

The only downsides I can find are that the rubber material doesn’t slide easily over cotton and thus getting the phone out of a pocket invariably brings the pocket inside out with it! I also have two rather large holes on the iPhone itself - the headphone socket and the dock connector - and these are susceptible to that dreaded of all afflictions - pocket fluff. No matter how clean your garments, fluff collects in the pockets! The worry is that the fluff will lodge in the sockets on the phone and prevent them working as they should.

So far, one month later, that hasn’t been an issue, thank goodness.

Phone covers are pretty personal things, and different people will want different ones. I’ve found the rubber cases to be better for lots of reasons than the leather wallet types, but I guess you’ll have to make up your own mind. For what it’s worth, I spent less than ten pounds on a rubber case and a screen protector film. I’m happy with the protection, knowing I’ll never use the phone as a helicopter rotor blade, unless in some MacGyver moment I am thrown into a survival situation and that’s what I need to do to escape. Alernatively, I’ll just ring for help…

A lot has already been written about most of this stuff, and I’ll probably not say anything new. The Edge network is slow compared to 3G, and a 3G iPhone is about to emerge from Apple, if you believe all the rumours. Hence my 1 month old gadget will be out of date in no time at all, such is the way with technology. However, before the iPhone I didn’t even have an Edge connection, I refused to pay the extortionate costs for accessing the internet through my old phone, and managing email on the go was a joke. The iPhone has at least given me a connection I can afford and some excellent tools to manage the things I need to manage. So why complain about any of that?

There are some areas where I think there could be improvements, and again, lots of this has already been said. However, it’s worth repeating from a user’s perspective that whilst the iPhone is a massive improvement over my old Sony Ericsson, and a massive improvement over the call plan I was on, there are some simple wins which I think Apple could make with this soon to be outdated gadget.

Let’s make a list:

1. the ability to select and mark as read a whole lot of emails in one go, instead of managing them one at a time.
2. the ability to send a contact to another person
3. have a link through to contacts on the home screen instead of within the ‘phone’ app
4. Be able to set a default page in safari
5. better spam filtering (well, to be fair, ANY spam filtering)
6. ability to remove a single call record from the calls list
7. ability to forward an SMS to other people, or at least convert the content of an SMS to an email and forward that

Then there are the simple things I used to enjoy, such as the ability to write an SMS from my mac book pro and send it using the phone. I have been using the excellent ‘BluePhoneElite‘ for this purpose up until now, but the iPhone doesn’t play well with that, yet.

Basically, the more integrated the phone is with my laptop, the better it becomes for me. There is a suggestion that the phone’s data connection could be accessed by a laptop and then we’d have permanent internet access from any machine. However, I think that is only going to undermine the phone’s abilities, and perhaps we should avoid doing that.

Matt came up with a suggestion too -and that is for the calendar to link to the ‘favourites’ list in the phone functions so that if there is a contact listed in an event that the phone number for the contact gets put into the favourites list for three days, the middle of which would be the day of the event. This is actually a cool suggestion, I think. The number of times you need to speak to a person before and after an event would merit such a piece of functionality, I think.

And then there is the idea of the developer community now able to make apps for the phone. I think this is simply awesome and we will almost certainly be swimming in such things before too long. However, with that power comes the responsibility (to paraphrase someone else) to ensure the apps are good quality and needed, not just trite and uninteresting to all but a few people.

One of the very simple things I have found when using the phone is the ability to add web pages to the ‘Home Screen’ of the phone - a little like adding a bookmark but making it very obvious. The thing here is that the phone will take a snapshot of the web page and convert it into an icon for the phone, unless the website itself has already declared an iPhone icon in the root folder… a little like a favicon works. Such icons need to be made 57px square and labelled correctly for them to work, but when done properly they are superb ways to get to your favourite sites very quickly. Given that teh iPhone can have three sets of screens as the home screen (just flick across the screen to move between them), this makes a lot of sense.

In conclusion, this is a superb tool for lots of reasons, but it certainly has room for improvement. I wouldn’t complain about al the missing features though, as I didn’t have them before (mostly) and I can only list them because I see potential, not because I feel cheated. there are plenty of folk who think of the iPhone as a gimmick, and some who feel it is not yet worthy of buying as they can do more with other phones (Nokia N95, perhaps), but I would say that they couldn’t do them in as sexy a way as they could with the iPhone. The thing is way too nice to use, and far exceeds any other touch screen interface I have used on any other phone. I am sure the comptetition will play catch up, and that can only be good for the consumer, but until then I’m delighted with the phone, with the features and with the thought that it can get even better still.

The BBC Micro computer is 25 years old this year and has been the stalwart of many a school computing lab, or classroom computer. The device was always streets ahead of its time, but as with all things technology changed, development ceased, newer machines became available and life generally goes on. Many a BBC was consigned to a skip, never to be used again.

And what a shame that was, for all the wrong reasons! As a teacher in the late 80’s and early 90’s I definitely didn’t know very much about the BBC computers. I didn’t appreciate the ability they had, and apart from the excellent ‘Logo’ language and a range of associated input and output modules, including sensors and motors, I actually despised many of the programs available.

How wrong I was to think like that! Today, Ridgeway Primary School (and Geoff) helped me complete a level of understanding I have been missing for a generation. Today, in amongst all of the bits and bobs, was a copy of ‘Geordie Racer’!

I used to take a class of eager 8 year old children to the TV room at school and have them watch episodes of ‘Look and Learn’ the fabulous BBC series that brought us such greats as ‘Through the Dragon’s Eye’ and of course Geordie Racer. Children would merrily sing the opening music then sit glued to the screen as the story unfolded week by week. Once the episode was over it was back to the classroom to play the computer game. By today’s standards of Quake Engines 3D graphics and Wii consoles the games are very very dull. But back then, this was enthralling stuff as the children battled with Baz (the villain in the story) and picked up a huge number of literacy skills as they did so. As the teacher, I remember thinking that I really ought to find a way to turn down the music as it was soooo annoying, but today I went back in time and relived some classic memories.

Thanks to Geoff, we think these BBCs will be able to help us develop the innovative ‘BBC Micro News‘ website where BBC Micros read RSS feeds from the BBC web site in their very ‘Steven Hawkins’ voices, helped by a couple of more modern machines as they do so. This project started as a bit of a mental challenge and has grown into something more - quite what is not yet clear, only that we need to get this able to handle more requests soon.

There is much to do, of course, and we need to reset all of the hardware so that it will run the ‘BASIC’ program we need it to. In checking the machines today, most are in working condition with few, if any, ailments. Some keyboards are not quite fully working, one or two keys are missing, all of them are dirty and need cleaning, but even so, after years in storage, years of use in a busy school, and a bumpy ride from Croydon to Chelmsford, they ALL powered up!

So imagine my delight when we got to look at the diskettes that Geoff kindly donated - including a box of unopened 5.25″ floppies - and found Geordie Racer, and found that it still ran (no pun intended). Fabulous stuff!

As we get more done, and the service becomes more reliable, I’ll post pictures and write about the developments. We will of course be crediting Ridgeway Primary School on the web site for their very kind donation. If anyone else has got any working BBC Micros (any model, but particularly ‘B’ or ‘B Plus’) then please do get in touch - especially if you have got old software to help us relive special memories!

We will be showing off the personalised learning software with Edison Schools, as we were at BETT in January, but also the new and vastly improved community software for schools which we are using in Norwich college. We have several working names for it, and the one that we want to ask about when isitors appear at our stand is ‘Thought Park’ - an online space for communities, group activities, conversations and so on. It really is a seductive piece of software that is not trying to be another VLE. It would augment a VLE nicely, and it would be ideal for groups wanting to run colaborative projects. Aimed at secondary schools and primary settings, this is going to be interesting to see a response to.

If you are coming over to ExCite, do look out for us. We will be using a smaller display stand than we had at BETT, although it looks similar…

The 24th is the day of industrial action by teachers in England, and it is likely that the show will either be packed, because staff are not having to go to school, or empty, because teachers are staying at home! Either way, we’ll be there, and we’ll be keen to hear your opinions about what we are doing.

You will also be able to talk to someone from Edison Schools about PLiP - an ingenious process for introducing a personalised approach to learning, using software that we have created. The question we need an answer to is how would this need to be adapted to fit with how Primary schools like to work - after all, personalisation is not just for secondariy schools, is it?