Is it Easter yet?

Oh my word, I'm tired. Candle burning at both ends and all the way through the middle. A combination of a long, involving term since Christmas and a desire to write more and more things down has left me with the sort of tiredness I usually have at holiday time.

Unfortunately I've managed to skip a week. I'm in holiday tired mode with a whole week left of school. Arse.

Smarter people than I would spend the week being careful and getting to bed early. But not me. Oh no, I have a list of things to do this week, both school and writing, that means early nights are something I can only imagine once the holidays start.

Oh well. Could be worse. I could have a real job that didn't give me school holidays off. How do you people do that?

Should have deleted that email...

Oh, what a great day. All went well until an email from someone in council ICT that just happened to mention, in passing, the new BECTA guidelines for schools and data. I should have just deleted it, seeing as it doesn't come into effect until later in the year, but oh no, I read it, I clicked the links, I tried to decipher my way through page after page of BECTA guidelines and all the way through I just felt my mood getting worse and worse and worse. The work involved is overwhelming, bogglingly so.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be done all in one go. The bad news is that now I know it has to be done it's going to be at the back of my damn mind. Should have just deleted the email. Damn.

It's the end of the holiday as we know it ....... and I feel fine.

Seven weeks later and the summer holiday is just about over. And it's really been rather excellent. The idea was to spend an awful lot of time relaxing, an awful lot of time having a great time with Molly and an awful lot of time writing. I'm not sure about the relaxing - I've not really had the spare time to do that - but the other two have certainly happened (see here)

It used to be a horrible time, this final weekend of the summer holidays. I'd spend it in a horrible mood, futilely thinking up reasons not to go back, trying to work out a way to find something else to do. But not now. Obviously I'm not saying I'd rather be at work - especially not after having a great seven weeks. But there's no great horror in going back. And that's such a wonderful feeling.

I would write more, but hey, it's Sunday night and I've a last night of holiday to enjoy.

My job in diagram form

Well, most of the technical stuff anyway. (via Jez)

Summer Holiday 2009. Day 1 / Day 2. Relax.

In a surprise move, I've been neglecting the blog for the last few days or so.

Last week it was all about being utterly, absolutely exhausted and desperately trying to get a few things finished at night before the end of the school term and desperately trying to finish up a couple of halfway written reviews that were causing me grief. But the last couple of days I've actually done very little online at all, checked a couple emails, surfed a little. Most of the last couple of days has been spent relaxing, reading and generally enjoying the start of the holidays.

And what holidays they are. ecause of the way it's worked out this year we've actually got a complete 7 weeks off. I've never known this before. 6 weeks is long but this is amazing. With the extra weekend at the end of the holidays that makes for a stunning 5 days. 51!

So I figure a few days off isn't going to hurt too much.

Last week of term update

Final week of term: Day One.
Busy? Oh yes. I'm having to get everything done in addition to getting all the usual stuff I have to do - pupils in the ict suite, teaching, responding to all the daft stuff that goes wrong with the computers (or rather, all the daft things that staff manage to do to the computers). But despite this I'm just about on course to actually finish on time. I could, of course, actually get some things done in the holidays but I really want those 7 weeks off to be completely school free weeks.

So onwards. Four days to go. My only problem now is that I find myself absolutely wiped out. I'm coming home, crashing and only recovering enough to do either a bit of schoolwork or a bit of blogging. Reviews are almost out of the question - brain just not functioning enough for that. Maybe in a couple of days. Maybe next week. I'll just get this week out the way first.

You know it's the final week of term when .....

I looked at Twitter at school and the direct message from Remember the Milk (my lovely substitute for memory) told me I had 76 things to do today. 5 of those were not to do with school.

This should give you some idea of the workload at the end of term. It hasn't helped that I spent most of the day proof reading and to be honest rewriting someone's reports to make them readable by humans rather than teachers.

4 days left. Lots to do. And then I get news today that there's a new SIMs update to do tomorrow as well. The last two SIMs updates managed to break SIMs completely. This should be fun.

Too cool for school........ hopefully

Last night I spent far too long playing around with a music presentation for a lesson today. The idea was to get the children thinking about instruments and sounds and what exactly makes something musical.

Last year I got the electronic keyboard out and showed them that it can replicate traditional instruments. This year I decided to do the same thing but use existing pieces of music, going from simple, single instruments all the way through to full electronic pieces, both old and new to try and emphasise how music has developed alongside computers. But I didn't have any time to sort out thhe individual tracks, download them, edit them etc etc. God bless Spotify. Had everything arranged, playlist organised and ready to go. Even bought a day pass to guarantee no annoying adverts.

They certainly seemed to enjoy it. They got loud enough at times to disturb the classes around them - just like I'd hoped it would.

And yes, there was Kraftwerk involved. What did you expect? Musical education after all.

Today - a quick run through of triumph and misery....

What a horrible / brilliant / horrible day it has been..... Dropped Molly off at school; she's really nervous / excited about the prize day this afternoon where she's got to do a trumpet performance and is up for the position of Head Girl.

Then along to my school. Generally an indication of how utterly crap or good my day is going to be is a combination of how far I get past reception before someone says "Richard.... such and such is looking for you" and how many frantic pleas for help are on the whiteboard in the ICT suite. Today we had both. Network trouble. Which first looked simpler to solve, then I realised it was happening across most, but not all of the school.

Devastated, I phoned Louise to tell her I wouldn't be making prize day. The first such thing I've missed since I missed Molly's first sports day ages ago in Birmingham. Pledged then that I wouldn't do it again. Utterly sickened that I might miss her getting head girl.

If you have a look through various posts about my job, you should be able to get the idea that I'm pretty damn good at what I do, generally making ICT easier for pupils and staff and essentially making our kids digitally literate. But one thing I do fall down on is the hard techy network knowledge. What I do know is okay, but I don't know enough.

However, when I investigated the server cupboard and one bank of switches is flashing on and off like it's having it's own 4th July fireworks celebration, even I can figure out that this is not good.
Take cables out. No change.
Swap cables round. No change.
Turn it off. All switch lights go out.
Turn it back on. 4th Of July all over again.
Being not completely stupid I realise this is more than I can deal with. And I'm probably going to need a new switch thingy. Very handy ICT techy folks we used before are close by on a job and actually pop in within the hour - do everything I did and a bit more and eventually disconnect the switch box and can't get it to power on again. Swapping all the leads over to the other, smaller switch box solves the problems and off they go pledging to bring new switch box tomorrow or Wednesday.

This is great news; a hardware problem that's not my fault and network downtime that I couldn't do anything about.
Took until half 11 to get this sorted and organise the remaining switch box so that admin, myself and the ict suite have connections working.
Then a manic rush to get loads of Year 6 stuff printed and lots of reports reprinted. Seems a lot of staff didnt take my advice about proofreading the work to heart. Oh well. It may be a surprise next year when we limit their printing each term - some of them will run out after a couple of weeks.

It's quarter past one and I'm meant to be at the prize giving by half one. Manic rush to make sure everyone knows I've done everything I can until we get the new hardware and then out the door. Race to prize day (within the speed limit of course. No more speeding fines for me) and settle down in the chair just as the head comes on for her introductory speech.

The very act of finally stopping means the hideously bad headache finally takes hold and I sit for the next two hours with my head throbbing painfully.

And yes - Molly did get the Head Girl award - see here. What a wonderful girl we have!

Another moany post about work, work and more work.

God, I'm tired. At present all I seem to be spending my time doing is working and writing, writing and working. It gets to the stage about 1am when I can actually feel my eyes hurting and have to fight against the tiredness to just stay awake and stay functioning.

School is now into the grand end of year changeover and sort. It may seem a long time to spend on this sort of thing, but it's now last week in June effectively. We finish on 17th July. This means that I've only got 17 days left at school to get it all done. And, aside from the complete clean off I'm planning, there's a lot of stuff to get done. This year I'm going round every single computer, cleaning it out, trimming the OS, making them all run cleaner and faster and then physically cleaning the mountain of dust out of them as well. Then there's changing all the network stuff over and final year end bacups to clean off the server, plus the website to change over to reflect the new school year; moving all of the galleries for 08/09 to archives and setting up new galleries for 09/10. Lots and lots and lots of work. But all relatively easy and simple. Just got to rush to get it all done.

And on the comic reviews front it's just as busy. The review shelf is looking fairly full but I've got at least 10 books that really need reviewing NOW. After all, when people are kind enough to send them for review I feel some moral obligation to actually review them in some timely manner.

It hasn't helped that the last three reviews have been absolute bastards to write. And every single one of these difficult as all hell reviews was actually of something I figured would be quite easy. The last one took 5 bloody days to get right. Nothing would flow on it for the longest time and then suddenly tonight, all came good.

Probably isn't helping that I'm making time to get a little Wimbledon viewing in as well!

OFSTED. Oh joy.

We had Ofsted in today. Always a joy. Obviously it's been a little stressful at work this week. Didn't help on Thursday that the school website went down for a couple of hours and one of the classroom projectors broke. Cue lots of running around trying to get replacements rigged up with teaching staff having minor meltdowns as their lesson plans evaporated. Likewise, the main network printer/photocopier just had to pick this morning as the perfect time to start misfeeding like a bastard. More meltdowns, more stress. (the misfeeds were, of course, caused by someone printing off a ton of double sided colour stuff in a hideous rush - got to show off for the ofsted folks!)

Personally I've always thought Ofsted should just come into a school without any notice. That way everyone would have to just do their thing as normal and the inspection team would get a true image of the school. The majority of staff will have everything pretty much in place anyway and it would certainly save on a lot of the hand-wringing, stressed out, get in hours early and put the extra work in we've seen this week.

And of course, it was all fine. We knew it would be. Didn't stop the meltdowns though.

The best Ofsted story I can tell is about the secondary I used to work at in Birmingham. The really bad school in Smiths Wood. Possibly the worst sink estate in the whole of Birmingham. Ridiculously bad exam results, at least half of year 11 had no interest in being at the school and by Christmas they always shuffled the classes around to have the phantom class - the kids that just never bothered turning up were stuck in one group on the timetable that freed up a member of staff for other things. Anyway, we went into special measures and there was talk of the school closing. Ofsted kept coming in and there was a huge push to tart the place up. Finally everything was done, all the relevant paperwork and assessments completed, a few more kids excluded for the Ofsted visits than were normal. And we sailed out of special measures. Absolutely NOTHING had changed in the school. The lessons were still an exercise in crowd control, kids still verbally and physically threatened the staff, fights were everywhere, kids just walked out of lessons whenever they wanted. But because the illusion of improvement had been created, we were suddenly an improving school. Quite ridiculous.

One week back and already running out of time....

Back to school one week and one day. Got just 29 days to go now. And I've totted up everything I really need to get done before the end of term.

And I haven't got enough time. There's a load of network changeover stuff that I'm spending all of July working on. I may have enough time to get it all done, I may not. This leaves the remainder of June to try and get a couple of things done. This may not seem too bad, except one of them is getting the start on the Learning Platform. Oh poo.

Training Course hell.....

Today's training course was a refresher course on Learning Platform administration. When the email came through a couple of months ago this seemed like a good idea. After all, wasn't the initial plan for the summer term at work to spend the first half term doing email changeover and school blogging and the second half term to actually start the work on the Learning Platform? So a refresher on the LP admin would be a good thing. That was the theory anyway.

Of course, in practice I found myself drowning in work stuff, with the plan to not do much (if any) work stuff at home working well but putting me behind in what needed doing. So a day out re-learning stuff on the Learning Platform suddenly seemed a complete waste, especially when I knew the training day rule applied - anything learned on training days that isn't immediately applied is almost instantly forgotten and will need to be re-learned when actually tackling the problem. So, with permission from the boss I decided to just go for the morning and duck out at lunch to get back and do the more important stuff.

And I was glad to get out. The content was just ridiculously basic, all stuff I knew anyway and none of the difficult stuff was dealt with. To make matters worse we found ourself trapped in a room with that annoying teacher stereotype - the far too loud, know-it-all type who spent 10 minutes talking about what they'd done in their school with the learning platform so far during the usual round of "let's introduce ourselves to the room" rubbish. And how, pray tell, had she managed to do so much with the learning platform - simple - she just did it all at home. No life. No life. No life. I had to leave at lunch just to avoid saying something very unprofessional to her.

But it's no help to me. I've spent the first three months of the year working far too many hours getting the school website done with lots and lots of hours working on it at home. But at least with that I knew there was an end in sight. It had to be done by the end of March. With the learning platform the end is at least 3 years away, if it ever really ends. There's no way I can commit to it in the way I did the website and I've decided it's something I'm only going to work on at school. So I'm going to be pushed to find 10 hours a week to work on it. Not enough. But it will have to be enough.

Tone Matrix.... say goodbye to hours and hours.....

This is amazing. A complete time waster but wonderful:
Tone Matrix. Fully flash generated sinewave sythesiser.

I've just spent an hour entranced by it. Tomorrow I think it's going to be up on one of the whiteboards at school so it's making music by touch - the kids will absolutely love it.

weird twitter things and when job meets online stuff....

Training day yesterday including an hour with me banging on about the new website, the forthcoming Learning Platform, developments in the network and a lot about the future direction of school ICT and how we have to keep up with the emerging technology that our children treat as standard.

Hence a chat about social networking in all it's forms. I had planned to include a little 5 minutes on Twitter. Except it appears our school internet provider has blocked it over the holidays. Damn.

However, the few mentions I made of it prompted the inevitable comments of: "what's the point of it?" to which I did the usual reply and talked about how useful it is when you start to use it but looking it from the outside it does look quite silly.

Well, someone was listening to the training at least. And later that night I got a follow email telling me that the boss has joined and is following. Well that was unexpected. Paranoia follows. Checked blog for work mentions - completely clear of direct references. But still the question of what to say at work about the twitter thing. In the end we had a joke about it and boss has reassured they have no interest in snooping, they were just enjoying doing new ict stuff.

But it's a strange feeling when you realise people you know actually know what you do online. It happened before when I started the blog and Nostalgia & Comics folks and friends were suddenly emailing and talking to me about the stuff I was writing. Ended up taking me a few weeks to stop deliberately censoring myself on the blog and write naturally again without thinking about what people would be thinking about what I was writing. It's happening again slightly. Twitter use has reduced, swearing a lot on twitter stopped and mentions of gin reduced severely.

It's a strange online world it seems.

Late night thinking - of websites and reviewing

Weird night last night.
After a month where I've just been incapable of putting anything even remotely interesting together on the screen about the comics I've been reading, I sat down last night and wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more.

In the end I came out of the trance with three near fully formed reviews. Pretty much done. A little polish and checking and they're complete. Three. I've written the grand total of 5 so far this month and then, in just one night, I near enough double it.

Of course, I know the reasons I haven't been writing. All last month I've been doing what seems like hard labour on the school website. It's coming to an end now. Or as much of an end as these things ever do, I'm sure that, if I wanted to, I could spend every hour of every day in perpetuity adding more and more stuff to the website. After all, with 7 years to cover and a host of subjects and topics, there's plenty to do. But the first stage is done now. All of the essential stuff is on there, all the school information; the school day, what the uniform is, how we deal with children who've fallen over and banged their head or cut their knee. It's all there. And then I've extended it. we've got wonderful galleries of the children's work and loads of photos of them doing all the fun stuff that they'll remember far more than learning how to write and add stuff up. We've also turned the website into a learning resource in itself, with page after page of links, information and activities on a host of subjects and topics. This is the bit that could be extended as far as I want to take it. Just looking at the syllabus makes me shudder to think how much stuff I haven't covered. Each year has at least ten subjects and each of these subjects probably has another 10 units in the year. A lot of things to cover. And in time, I'd love to have a go at getting them all on there.

But time isn't on my side. once the website is finished and goes live, I've got next half term set aside to do all the jobs I've not done this last term while I've been devoting myself to the website. There's a new email system to set up and train the staff on. That should be fun. We've used the old system for years. It's the simplest system in the world and there's still staff who can't deal with it. So the new one is going to terrify them. Then there's the blogging. We've got a school blog but I haven't had any time to do anything with it so we want to get the Year 6 class blogging to their heart's content. I really want to see them doing loads and eventually think we'll let them off the leash with it and have them not only contributing but editing and publishing themselves as well. Hell, even the head has said that she wants her own blog. (Now, all I need to do is find a good educational use for Twitter and I'll be happy).

So that's next half term done.

After that? Well, that's the not so good news. After that, I really have to get started on the Learning Platform. If the website was a big project, the Learning platform is a project that stretches out in front of me to the horizon and far beyond. I've been saying to all who will listen that it's going to take me years to get it done as i just can't dedicate the extra time to it in the way I have with the website. That was working towards a definite, short term end point. When I started the website build in January, I knew it had to be finished and launched in march, so the extra hours didn't matter that much. The joy of getting it done, of crossing something else off the list made up for it.

Not so with the Learning Platform. For a start I'm just not that enamoured with it. The mechanics behind it, the ways you go about creating it seem really overly complicated and counter-intuitive. In these days when you can set up a blog in an hour and be publishing to your heart's content from then on, the Learning platform has a development cycle of years, not days. Sure, it has to integrate a lot of data, but even the basic page building software is clunky, difficult and time consuming. Plus it's a system that's definitely been developed to be a secondary school solution. It's then rather been retro-fitted (badly) to work at a primary school level. There's too much text on it, too many instructions, too many far from obvious hoops to jump through to get to where you want to go. How are my super Year 1 class going to manage this? They're great, but they're not up to that yet.

So once the Learning Platform build starts after half term in May, that's it for me. All my time gets sucked into it. Just not ALL my time like the website swallowed up. The Learning Platform is strictly a work thing. The plan I have is that I'll do very little Learning Platform at home. Given that even the most optimistic trainer talks about at least two years to get it properly working tells me that to get really heavily involved and bring it home every night is a guaranteed route to insanity.

The funniest thing about the Learning Platform? In theory, my role, once I've done the basics of setting it up, should be limited to maintenance and upkeep. All of the content, all of the actual stuff on the Learning Platform is meant to come from the teachers. Remember? These are the teachers who haven't gotten to grips with the simplest email system in the known world after 4 years. Again, it's a secondary school solution applied naively to a primary school environment. In any secondary school each department is more than likely going to have one young thing who fancies themselves at the forefront of interactive digital learning and is willing to take on their department's section of the Learning Platform. In a primary school, in my school, I'll be lucky if I get two members of staff willing to do anything with it. Like I said at the last training session, the developers are living in a dream world when they confidently tell us administrators of the Learning Platform that most of the content, most of the work, most of the load, will be taken on by the staff. No. It will be me that ends up doing it. I know it will. I'm resigned to it. But I'll be damned if I'm bringing it home.

Now, in a rather roundabout way that brings me back to the opening salvo. Reviewing and writing. In the past couple of months of getting the website done I've seen myself get less and less creative, more and more tired, more and more time got given over each night to just finishing that page or just tweaking the way that page works. Until this past fortnight I've done nothing. Not one word of reviewing and very little blogging of note. And although that might seem like no big deal, I really miss it. the old adage of writing being a horrible task, something no writer enjoys is true. But likewise, when they tell you of the payoff of basking in the glow of knowing that something is done, written, finished. And knowing it's good. That's wonderful.

And, at 2:35am on a Monday morning, that's where I am. Three reviews done and this lengthy tract of blogging. Happy. Tired. off to bed in a moment. But happy.

Oh, I do so love the end of term....

End of term. Manic staff all around trying to get everything sorted. Me trying to get everything done by the end of today so that tomorrow is an easy, stress free day.

Fat chance. The staff have to start thinking about the reports this year. I emailed them a month ago telling them I'd done minor design revisions and thay each had a template and help files in a folder ready for them to take off the network. One month ago. Knowing they'd take them home over Easter.

So, knowing what teachers can be like it should really come as no surprise to find out that, at 2:45pm today (a whole 3 1/2 hours before I finish for Easter), one of the teachers wonders if I can completely redesign the reports structure for them.

I shouldn't be surprised. I really shouldn't.

Bloody hell - a good day......

Good day at school. Everything went well. No annoyances from shitty software. Lovely day with all the Foundation pupils in the ICT suite. That great joy they have of experiencing something new. Tuesday's are always a tiring day, looking after the little ones and keeping them amused all day is knackering but so much fun. At one point I ended up wearing a piece of A4 paper selotaped to my back with some lines drawn on - it was a superhero cape one of the kids had made for me. That's why Tuesday's are great.

Then got home and started the job of installing the new Home Hub that BT had shipped to me as an upgrade. They phoned up a few weeks ago and offered me a broadband price reduction and a new Hub. Now I know a lot of people have a real problem with BT and their broadband service. But I can honestly say I've never had a problem with them (yet).

But as with any sort of upgrade there's always that problem of replacing stuff what works with new stuff. So I'm a touch wary of potentially screwing up my entire Internet setup. But I shouldn't have worried. Unplugged the old one, plugged in the new one, blue lights came on, stuck the cd in and set it up in 10 minutes. Bloody great. Stuff that works exactly way it's meant to. Amazing.



(The full-on Bruton Mansions multimedia experience; Coffee, Blog, iPlayer)

And now I'm sat upstairs typing this out, answering e-mails and getting stuff done before the Battlestar Galactica fest later on tonight.

I've got the eepc sat in front of me and the iPlayer on. Have watched last weeks QI. Now onto Dave Gorman's Genius - like I thought, so far it's really good, but not as good as the radio version. After that I reckon I've just about got time to catch up with the Stewart Lee show I missed last night.

Perfect Day. Near enough.

(& yes, I realise that talking about how great the Internet setup is means that it's very likely to go hideously wrong any time now.)

A wasted day ... why government organisations shouldn't produce software. Ever.

The day went well today at school. Up until the point I was asked to do something with a dvd that the dfes had produced on dyslexia. Then it all went downhill fast. The dvd itself is the worst resource I've ever seen. Complicated beyond belief and completely impossible to navigate in any meaningful way. It looks very pretty. But functionality got lost somewhere in the design process. Talking to various people who went on the original course on this, they have nothing good to say about it at all. Even the people delivering the training spent more time apologising about the crapness of the dvd.

The only way we can even use the dvd is to just treat it as a very simple resoource and guide the staff through it without letting them go off on their own and get impossibly lost. Even then it's going to take me sitting down and spending hours making a spreadsheet for them to fill in as they go. My rage at the moron who designed this cd just grew and grew as I realised there was no way we were going to be able to get this rubbish ready for a training session on Wednesday. Thankfully the head was willing to change the training session to next term.

The bad news is that the morons who brought us the Dyslexia dvd are coming out with a dvd on Autism. And that's going to be on a training course as well. The temptation to start trying to find the person writing these awful dvds is great. I could probably track him down and, in these financially troubled times, be able to hire a hitman for about £8.50. After the afternoon I had, it's very tempting.

Richard is away right now....

I'm off doing something or other involving school websites, gin and a terrible feeling of ennui right now. Hence very little blogging.
Just pretend you've read a few hundred words of biting, incisive commentary and I promise to be back in a little while.