Phil Bradley's weblog

Look and Learn magazine

When I was a child one of the highlights of the week was the delivery of my comics. One of these was 'Look and Learn' which was an educational comic, full of interesting articles and titbits. One thing that was particularly memorable was the range of imagery contained within its pages. Bright, bold and strong drawings, which I would happily look at for ages. I was therefore delighted to see a website called Look and Learn History Picture Library. It contains thousands of images (350,000+) on a wide variety of different subjects. It's a great resource to wander through. It is a commercial enterprise however, and images for use privately or for education purposes are charged at £2.99, but you can also send images as e-cards as well. If you're of a certain age, it's a great site to take a look through.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

I think that by now most of us are aware of the Wayback Machine at archive.org, but just in case you're not, it's a service that has been around for well over a decade, and it archives websites and pages. It allows you to browse through URLs that were produced from 1996 up to December 9th 2012. Not every single site or page has been indexed (crawls can miss them, and owners can request that their sites not be included), but rather a lot are. Recently the index has been updated and has gone from having 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, a total of about 5 petabytes of data. This database is queried over 1,000 times a second by over 500,000 people a day helping make archive.org the 250th most popular website.

It's extremely easy to use - just type in the address of the site that you want to check out the archive for, and you'll see a series of dates going back to - in theory - 1996, or whenever the site started. You can then choose your archived time, click on the link and view the site as it existed then. You won't find the entire site, and sometimes you'll find images missing, but it'll give you a fair indication of the content of the site.

There are as many different ways to use the Archive as there are users, but some basic ideas are as follows:

Check to see the history of a site - has it always been owned by the same person/company, or has it changed hands over the years?

Find out information about a company that's not currently on their site - who was the CEO five years ago for example.

Compare attitudes towards different subjects then and now. Has the position of a person or company materially changed over a period of time?

Initial responses to events - what was the first statement that a person or organisation put out publically about some event?

How webpage design has changed over the years/months.

View world events, such as 9/11, or national elections.

Check out early pioneers of the internet - who was doing what when.

Compare previous versions of search engines and their functionality with what they can do today.

Cite specific examples of webpages, even when they have changed.

Content stored in the Archive has been used in legal cases.

Find archives for a site that has changed URLs.

Locate a manual for an obsolete piece of kit.

View a site that has been suspended for whatever reason, or which you cannot reach.

Compare old/new prices.

Find old predictions and see how accurate or not they have turned out to be.

That's a quick 15 examples, but there are plenty more valuable ways of using it. The Wayback Machine should be a really useful weapon in any information professionals arsenal.

 

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Freeze The Web

Wayback Machine: Now with 240,000,000,000 URLs

Nice! Milestones: Wayback Machine Now Home to 240,000,000,000 URLs and Improved Currency

Internet Archive URLs storage grows to 5 petabytes

Free Online Thesaurus

According to graphwords.com "It’s an free English online thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and show connections among associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it." Simply type in your word and see a nice graphical display of related words and definitions. Thanks to Carol Bream for bringing it to my attention. :)

Teaching school children internet search

I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a very enjoyable day at Norwich School yesterday teaching year groups of 11, 12, 13 and 14 about internet search. As I normally teach adults, this was a bit of a departure for me, and although I had done it once before I was still a little uncertain. However, I very quickly understood why working with children can actually be really enjoyable. (Those readers who are parents, teachers, school librarians or other educators please do feel free to smile, nod or make any other passing remark that you'd like to!)

They were all really on top of the concepts, and I had some excellent questions - some more in depth than I often get when I teach adult groups. They were asking about excluding a range of synonyms from searches, legality of websites, responsibility of people making material available, the role and concept of privacy and so on. Each lesson was about an hour and I probably taught about 250-300 children by the end of the day, and then I did a twilight session with members of staff where we looked at a variety of real time media resources that they might want to use in their lesson plans.

It was a really fun day, so my thanks to Mrs Cheryl Wood for arranging it!

Learning with Learnist

You may recall that I mentioned Learnist the other day, which is a tool that allows you to create learning boards, by adding content from websites, YouTube video, your own content and so on. At the time I wasn't able to do much since my invite hadn't come through, but now it has, and I've had a go with it. You can take a look at my short test board: Urban Exploring or URBEX | Learnist

I found it really easy to use - give your board a title, click it into a category, and then start adding stuff. This is made easier by the little 'Learn It!' book marklet that you can pop into your browser. You can then simply add stuff as you find it. In this case it's very much like Squidoo although each segment is much larger, rather than a single line of text, it's a board in its own right. Visitors can add comments and share via social media as you would expect.

All told - simple and easy. It would appeal to students and educators alike. Take a look, and see what you think.

Share what you know | Learnist

Just discovered a new educational web based corrolation tool called 'Learnist'. It's still in beta at the moment, with limited abilities to create your own stuff, but you can join and poke around the site - although you have to log on via Facebook, which is irritating to say the least.

The idea behind Learnist is to create learning boards by dragging in content from different places, such as websites or YouTube videos, write a brief description on what people are seeing and allow them to comment, ask questions and so on. It looks reasonably straightfoward and easy to do, and would be a great educational tool to get a class to create their own boards of content .

I wasn't able to create my own boards, but as I say, that's being rolled out. I found the concept very similar to Meograph which I've recently blogged about. It's certainly a step on from tools such as Squidoo, Museumbox and LiveBinders, and will appeal to trainers, educators, teacher librarians and children. The main issue that I see with it is this integration with Facebook, which is irritating and unnecessary; particularly if you want to use it with children in a school - it'll be near impossible.

Neotake

Your ebook search engine.They've indexed 4,700,000 books so far, and you can search for them by category, language, format and price.

Sweet Search for students

Sweet Search is a Search Engine for Students. From the website:

"It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites.  

SweetSearch helps students find outstanding information, faster. It enables them to determine the most relevant results from a list of credible resources, and makes it much easier for them to find primary sources. We exclude not only the spam sites that many students could spot, but also the marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor. As importantly, the very best Web sites that appear on the first page of SweetSearch results are often buried on other search engines."

There are several variants of the site - for emerging learners, for school librarians, teachers and students, biographies and social studies.

SafetyWeb

Keep tabs on your Child's Safety and Online Reputation. I have a real problem with this resource. Basically you can use it to search for your child's email address and this thing will check to see where they are on the net, how open/closed their accounts are and other basic information about them. You can then pay $100 a year to keep tabs on them. On the face of it - maybe it's a good idea.

In practice, I think it sucks. Firstly, the resource doesn't work properly. I tried a couple of my email addresses and it came back and told me my age - it was out by a decade - it told me my address, which was vague and incorrect. It told me which sites I'm active on, and it was wrong. So we're not setting off on a good foot to start with. So, you need to know your child's email. What if they use different ones? What if they assume that mum and dad are going to be spying on them - which using this software they are, and provide another address.

Is spying on your child the best approach? I've looked at quite a few American resources, blogs and videos in this 'keep your child safe' and they all appear to take the same view - spy. Wait until they're out, and then check the computer and look at the history. How about this for a radical solution - learn how these things work, get your own Facebook accounts, friend your child, talk to them about online safety and TRUST them? Be there for when they need you, let them fight their own battles if they wish, but sit and listen - from a position of understanding the resources. This approach increases distrust and a gulf between parents and children. Wicked.

Ofsted Rpt on safe use of new technologies

There's a really useful Ofsted report that is worth reading if you're involved in the school education sector as a teacher/parent/interested individual. It's called The safe use of new technologies and it's packed full of really useful stuff. Personally I think it should be required reading by every head teacher and member of staff in every school in the country.

Let me take you through a few of the key points which leaped off the screen at me. My first point however is a negative one - how much longer do we have to refer to the use of computers and the internet as 'new technology'? Next year will be my 20th on the net, and I've been online for over 30. It's just 'technology' surely? The more that we siphon it off into special little bunkers, the worse we're going to be. So let's drop the 'new' bit and the 'digital' bit as well, and just go back to having cameras and so on. Right, negative rant over. Let's continue, in the order that points are made in the report. Ofsted data in italics.

99% of children in the 7-17 age group access the internet. Even I'm slightly surprised by this figure, but pleased by it. Clearly this isn't all (probably not even half of it) taking place in school, but a fair proportion will be.

An excellent point is made about safety and responsibility. A key quote here: A child whose use of the internet is closely monitored at school will not necessarily develop the level of understanding required to use new technologies responsibly in other contexts. This makes perfect sense to me - Ofsted (and I, in fact) use the example that a child will be safe if you hold its hand while crossing the road, but it needs to be taught how to cross the road independently, and until it does, it's not really going to be safe at all.

Of the 35 schools Ofsted visited 13 had locked down systems; while this kept children safe they didn't learn how to authenticate sites, and time was taken up unblocking perfectly safe sites, thus wasting times. However, in managed systems, while there are still inaccessible sites there are few of them and the school "recognised the potential dangers of new technologies, but tried to equip their pupils to deal with them. Where the provision for e-safety was outstanding, the schools had managed rather than locked down systems. In the best practice seen, pupils were helped, from a very early age, to assess the risk of accessing sites and therefore gradually to acquire skills which would help them adopt safe practices even when they were not supervised."  Schools should really take time to teach children what to do when things go wrong, as of course they will. They should teach children how to evaluate the good from the bad, and if they never have an opportunity to *safely* explore both, how are they expected to learn?

Chat sites caused problems for students, as did lost or misused passwords. When this happens, rather than attempt to lock everything down, teachers in schools that embraced technology used such events as useful teaching/learning opportunities.

Osted discussed teacher education as well. Ironically, "training for staff was the weakest aspect of e-safety." Well performing schools saw it as the responsibility of all staff to be involved with the development of IT policies and use of resources, and the best performing schools established a clear vision for sensible use of technologies. This is surely obvious? The internet is not a thing apart from pupils lives, it's *part* of their lives, and to try and treat it as anything else is just painfully out of touch.

Moreover, in the best performing schools, education was incorporated not only into their school lives, but their lives at home - parents were informed and educated as well, and strong links kept up by schools. Surely the best way of doing this is to encourage the use of social media tools, and to encourage parents to become active partners.

In summary, the report continually stressed one thing; education. Education of the pupils based on age, education of the teachers and education of the parents. Locking systems down is, if it's anything at all, a dangerous, ill thought out and lazy attempt to keep children safe, rather than capable and responsible.

The report isn't too long, and I'd encourage anyone to read it!

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