Ian Lynch's blog

Coming to the end of term now. We plan to go over the community site and give it a face lift over the summer and upgrade the software to a more recent version. This should solve one or two glitches we have experienced over the year and we can try a different theme for the main site. Main problem with changing the current one is that the themes for the next version are not the same as for this one so if we upgraded just having changed how things looked, they would change again very quickly afterwards.

Don't forget the competition

Compare Firefox 3 with internet Explorer. Make a page using create content and link to your e-portfolio or blog. £20 voucher prize for the winner. Might give you something to do if you get bored during the holiday :-)

A lot of activity on the Blogs and a lot of people learning how to do new things. That's what it's all about! Don't get put off if things don't work out straight away. You have to have some failures in order to learn. If you work something out that was a tricky problem you will develop your brain power much more than if someone just shows you what to do. Bit like if you keep running until you are really tired you get fitter quicker :-)

Don't forget that there is another competition to do with a £20 prize for the winner.

This link takes you to a page that provides more information on uploading pictures and inserting them into pages.

It's a good idea to plan your work so you know whether it will fit the available resources. Your Blog does not need every detail of your product. It needs to show enough evidence of what you have produced and how you did it. So if you have a big file that won't fit on the web site don't worry, take some extracts from it to illustrate your work in keeping with the blog marking scheme. Let's say you built someone a computer, you couldn't attach a computer to a blog page but you could take some digital photos. The same approach can be used with large digital resources that are too big to upload.

We have had an issue reported about logins resulting in seeing other students accounts/work. We are investigating. In order to fix problems like this we need to be able to replicate them so we can see exactly what is happening. If you hit this problem, please record in detail what you were doing at the time and post to the forum where I have started a new discussion topic. We have also had some people saying graphics are not uploading or displaying. There is a limit to the file size that can be uploaded. Mostly this should not affect things like jpgs but it could affect video since these files tend to be very large. The advice is to only upload samples of video or make links to a site like You Tube that is designed for playing video if your video is long. Just refer to it in your Blog, maybe illustrate with a short clip. There is quite a lot about file size issues in the Silver INGOT. Links there in the version of this text in the forum.

Many of you will be using the Internet Explorer web browser because it came with your computer or is the only browser available on the school network.

Why not try Firefox 3?  It's open source and new! You can download and install it for free.

Think about using it as the subject for your Silver INGOT case study if you haven't yet done Silver.

Some older students have already contributed to the Firefox community project. This is what you are beginning to learn how to do if you are doing the Gold INGOT project.

Some people have been producing resources that they are willing to share with others and the logical place to put these is in the resources section. I will simply attach these resources to the relevant pages linked from Bronze Silver and Gold INGOT. Oliver Dowling has put together some learner support guides for Gold INGOT and I have attached these after the Archived Gold Moodle course. If anyone else has anything just e-mail me and I'l do the same. If you want to edit or modify any of these resources please feel free and contribute back anything you think might be useful to others.

If anyone wants higher level rights to the Moodle site to do anything they can't do at the moment, just drop me a line and I'll see what can be done. I want to encourage as much sharing of resources as possible. The main headache is simply organising things to be easy to find. We are looking at the entire site to see if we can improve things.

Hi Everyone,

I hope things are going well. Generally, if we don't hear from you we have to assume they are!

I know there is a bit of trauma caused by having to enter dates of birth for our returns to the DCFS but Mark and Daniel are working on a way of automating the process as much as possible if you have a lot of candidates. Contact Mark for more details.

Don't forget you need to sign the Principal Assessors agreement on the certification site. It is linked to the first log in page and there is a model statement you can just cut and paste into the space provided if you agree. (if you have any problems just get in touch so we can talk them through) A key part of the agreement is for at least one annual meeting per year for you to ensure even standards across your centre. I'm thinking that it might help the quality assurance audit process to have two new database fields on the certification site. In one you would put the date of the centre meeting preferably at least a couple of months in advance and in the other key outcomes from the meeting when it has been completed. This should not take too much time, we don't need full minutes, just the main points for action. eg "Work comparisons showed even standards across all units but there were some areas of uncertainty in relation to Unit 1 of Gold INGOT. Contact TLM for clarification." Any thoughts welcome. We don't want to increase bureaucracy but we all want consistent and transparent quality procedures to ensure expectations are the same for all candidates.

Not too many entries for the Alligator competition. Why not have a go, you might win a £20 voucher or a USB pen drive. What do you think I am saying and what do you think the alligator might be thinking? E-mail me what you think and I'll give a £20 voucher prize for the best one and a 2Gb USB pendrive for second and third.

My e-mail address can be found by clicking through my blog entries if you don't know it already.

It is important that all Principal Assessors read and understand this notice. If you are a student reading this, please check your assessor knows about it.

When we set up the INGOT web site we tried to reduce the amount of data entered to the minimum needed. It now turns out that the DCSF require dates of birth (This was not stipulated at the time we went through what were fairly rigorous procedures with QCA) In one sense this is easily fixed, we have added a date of birth field which needs to be filled in when you add new pupils to the system. This can be done by simply typing in the date of birth or by producing a CSV file from your MIS (SIMS etc) that includes the DOB. The help files tell you how to do this on the site. The snag is that for students already entered, they need the DOB field filled in if they have received or are intended to receive a QCA accredited certificate and you want to claim the points. The next deadline for transferring data is the 21st April, then there is another at the end of July and one at the end of September. We will only be able to submit those with DOB fields filled in and so from now on as a condition of making an award the account manager will check the date of birth fields are filled in before authorising certificate printing. It will help a great deal if you can fill in dates of birth for students already certificated as soon as possible.

I have been away on holiday so my blog has been quiet for a bit. One place I went to was New Orleans in the USA. Here is a picture of me wrestling with an Alligator in a New Orleans swamp.

I thought maybe we could have another competition. By the way, the winner of the last competition was Jeremy Viegas at John Fisher School. Some others got the right answer but Jeremy was the first to E-mail it to me. Remember, my e-mail address is shown on at least two of my blog entries. I don't generally type it on the internet or robots pick it up and I'll get flooded with spam. I have published it as an image because robots can't read images, only text. Anyway for this competition you need to suggest some words to go in the speech bubble and the thought bubble. What do you think I am saying and what do you think the alligator might be thinking? E-mail me what you think and I'll give a £20 voucher prize for the best one and a 2Gb USB pendrive for second and third.

My e-mail address can be found by clicking through my blog entries if you don't know it already.

I can see that a lot of people are working hard at their INGOT certificates, so well done. Watch out for more messages and competitions by reading my Blog. Remember to use Blogs for formal writing and presenting course work in good standard English. If you want to have a general chat about anything including your project, use the forums.