Welcome to my fully armed Lapsafe Chromebook trolley

It wouldn't strike many to be that important, but over the next few weeks I reckon I'm going to be counting my blessings that I forked out for a top of the range trolley from Lapsafe.

Surely it's the quality of the technology - the laptop, the iPad, the Chromebook - that's important. Surely it's the product support / the software / the training that is the key to succesful deployment.

Nope. I think it's the quality if the charging trolley (or Cart if you're US).

The next few weeks will prove me right or wrong.

"Wow - Purple Mash looks ace!"

Today was the first time that all the staff got their hand on the Chromebooks.

It was a mixed success, mainly because of the ongoing problems we're having with how Chrome Os talks to the proxy server. I've already written about those particular problems. I had put the Chromebooks out before the staff arrived and of course they all started playing with them. That's great - I normally encourage such practice. However I knew this time it would augur a disaster. You see I had 'backdated' all the Chromebooks to version 14, which has no proxy problems. But unfortunately version 14 automatically updates itself to the next version, which does have proxy problems. So of course, those staff that started playing with the Chromebooks first couldn't use them by the end of the session.

However, for some staff (those teachers who had left their Chromebook lids closed), the experience was very positive. They accessed our new learning platform and played around with some of the tools that the students could use, including Purple Mash, which was a real hit. From the simplicity of software such as Simple City - great for Early Years children, to designing your own cut out car, it all looks great. My particular favourite, though I admit it's quite gimmicky, is 'Mashcam' where the children take a photo of themselves using the Chromebook webcam and it gets pasted into an outline of some other figure, like a spaceman or a police man. I'm particularly looking forward to the Year 3 children picturing themselves as Tutankhamun in a few weeks time as they get their Egyptian topic underway.

I really think that Purple Mash is an ideal match for the Chromebooks - sitting alongside our Google Apps domain, I think it will enhance the children's experience and give opportunities for younger children in particular to access 'The Cloud'. I've been aware that it is mainly our Key Stage 2 classes that have been using our Google Apps domain and Purple Mash looks just the right thing to draw in the younger children (especially the teachers of those younger children).

Back to the technical issue with the Chromebooks. After the session was over, the post arrived and there were the flash drives sent from Google Europe in Ireland with the experimental patch for version 16. Hopefully it will soon all work.

Cue the imposition of another fad in education

Many people who will have read the announcement from the Prince's Trust I found on the BBC this morning will have dismissed it with the thought Oh anyone could have told you that. That's just common sense. The headline reads, "Princes trust: school grades hit by lack of routine." In the article, the vital statistic is that 30% of students with poor grades had no set routine as a child, contrasted with 14% of students with 'better grades'.

Certainly it would seem to make sense. Children who go to bed whenever they want don't do so well at school. I've experienced that myself - eight year-olds staying up watching TV into the early hours then demonstrating zombie-like engagement with lessons the next day. In the famed Birmingham Quake of 2008 (what - you didn't hear of that one?) some students were woken at 1:06 in the morning by the terrifying shaking. Myself, I slept through it. However I was particularly concerned the next day when a Year 6 child (aged 10) told me: "Yeah it was so bad I dropped my Playstation controller."

So what is my response to that as a teacher? A conversation with the child perhaps. Maybe I mention it to parents at the next parent's evening. If I'm really concerned that the late nights are affecting school performance I would make a phone call home.

However, I worry that someone in government is looking at that story right now and thinking they really have to do something about it. Something big. Something governmental. I fear the conversation may go something like this:

Concerned minister: Have you seen this article? We need to bring back routines into family life.

Junior minister: How can we do that? We don't control every family.

Concerned minister: Hmm. What do we control?

Junior Minister [Thinks]

Civil servant: There's always schools. And Ofsted.

Junior Minister: Yes. We could make schools teach their children to have better routines at home.

Concerned Minister: Yes. It could be a new criteria in the Ofsted framework.

Civil servant: So... you'd like a glossy pack going out to every school, perhaps? An instructional DVD? A website?

Concerned Minister: Yes, that sounds good. I could really... Oh I mean, this will help the whole country.

Junior Minister: I'll prepare a press release...

Civil servant: Might you also like a pilot study? Some academic research to back up what we want to do?

Concerned Minister [eyes glowing a baleful red]: Yes! Yes!

Civil servant: Right away minister.

(Apologies to the script writers of Yes  Minister)

Of course, the coalition government have said they want less paper work in schools. Less government and local authority control. More self governance. But when something like this comes along will they really be able to resist the urge to send that glossy fad-pack into school? Will they really have the confidence in the country's teachers?

The King of shapes: the stellated icosahedron

There's nothing quite as good as mathematical toys for Christmas. After I had wrested this 'geomac' off the children, I made my very favourite shape - the stellated icosahedron.

I just love adding points to a platonic solid.

With 60 faces, 90 edges and 32 vertices, Euler's formula still holds true: 32+60-90=2 (vertices+faces-edges=2 for all solids without holes in them).

The question for young mathematicians is "do all the 3D shapes you know follow this rule?" and following on from this "can you make a 3D shape that doesn't follow this rule?" [clue: try making a donut out of geomac].

Egyptian masks @bm_ag

There's just enough interactive stuff to keep the children interested for a couple of hours at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Chrome Os and its Serious Product Failure

In the last couple of weeks I've had to erase the stateful partition on several occasions, upgrade to the Beta Channel and even upgrade to the Dev channel (which, by the way, happens to be very unstable). In addition, I've had to block automatic updates, which is the same as saying go to manual override. It's a mercy that I haven't had to reverse the polarities or change the Dilithium Crystals. No, I'm not re-enacting an episode 1960s' Star Trek, rather I've been trying to get my Chromebooks to work.

I know that in my last post about Chromebooks I wrote that I intended to delve into the depths of the Google Apps Management Console, however the next day they stopped working.

You see Chromebooks update themselves automatically, as many things do these days, but unfortunately, version 15 didn't work. Version 14 had worked fine, swimmingly even. You might possibly say dreamily. The students, even after two sessions had started to: Love. Their. Chromebooks. But version 15 let us down. A crucial part of the Chromebook experience had stopped working - the sign in screen. So I upgraded to the Beta channel - version 16 and that did work. Then to the Dev (Development) channel but that didn't work either.

It was something to do with the proxy setup in my school and authority. You see, Birmingham runs a system where a local 'Squid' server, based at the school, links to a central parent server somewhere in the depths of a shady building in the city centre. With this setup the local server caches the internet sites that students visit. This means that the first student that visits a website will bring the content both onto their computer and onto the Squid where much of the content is cached. Any students that follow up will then have a much faster experience because most of the content can be delivered to them down the metres of cable on a 100Mb connection, rather than down miles of fibre on a 10Mb connection. The central parent server has the job of filtering out unwanted websites, which it generally does a very good job of doing.

Something to do with that setup didn't work in Chrome Os 15 - it just didn't hold any of the proxy information or network information, so any new user wanting to use the Chromebook couldn't do so. The Chromebooks were dead in the water. As the guy at Google told me - it looks like a serious product failure. 

However the marvellous thing about Google is that their product support is absolutely brilliant. If you ever want an experience of being spoken to politely and humbly by people who really know what they're talking about - go talk to Google product support. Within a couple of days some flash drives containing version 14 of Chrome Os were winging their way towards me from Dublin. The instructions, which included the use of the paperclip shown in the photograph, demanded that I block the update server: it would be a nightmare if I fixed the Chromebooks by downgrading them to version 14, only for them to re-update themselves to version 15. The technical guys in Birmingham were equally quick at sorting this - responding to the request to block the update server within a day and also providing me with some insightful tips on how proxy servers work (which in fact helped me right the paragraph above).

It amuses me somewhat that, after all that technical stuff about proxy servers, it should be a paperclip that I would need to sort the problem out. I've all but had the Chromebooks inside out over the last couple of weeks and it has finally been a paperclip (and version 14 of Chrome Os on a flash drive) that has fixed them.

Onwards and upwards then - I'll have a full set of working Chromebooks by tomorrow and I'll look forward to version of 18 of Chrome Os with considerable anticipation.

Low attaining pupils in low attainment shock

The BBC article on the school leagues tables surprised me this morning. According to both the BBC and various politicians, low attaining children don't attain well. Let me put that another way: Children who are less average when they are 7 don't become average by the time they are 11.

It reminds me of when Tony Blair, newly in power back in 1997, was alleged to have said that he wants all children to become better than average.

So what is supposed to happen? Bearing in mind that the National Curriculum is divided into 'levels', which are broad descriptors of a child's knowledge in each subject area, children are supposed to make 2 levels of progress between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. Also, children are expected to finish Key Stage 1 at level 2, although some low attainers finish at level 1, some high attainers at level 3. This progress that children should make means that, if all goes to plan the children

• move from level 1 to level 3; or
• move from level 2 to level 4; or
• move from level 3 to level 5.

Apparently a quarter of children who are 'low attainers' actually made it to level 4 - this means moving from level 1 to level 4 - a great achievement. Disappointing then that Steven Twigg, Shadow Education Secretary should see his glass as being half empty with this statement: "The fact that only a quarter of low attainers at age seven go on to meet the expected Level 4 in English of maths when they leave primary school is not good enough."

Fortunately we have a country with such amazing secondary schools that they will pick up these disastrously low expectations from primary schools and make good their low attaining pupils.

I'll write next about how this announcement is akin to thrusting a red hot poker into the nether regions of all secondary schools, given the current SATs regime.