The minimum cell space allocation for each prisoner to avoid torture or degrading treatment,
as recommended by the Council of Europe “European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” link

The teaching space allocation for a secondary school pupil,
according to BB98 (the non-statutory guidance used for school design), based on a 1,000 pupil school. The space allocation extends to a lavish 6m2 in total if you include all teaching, meeting, social and staff space (like the staffroom!)

And, if you’re in favour of silly statistical comparisons, then what about:

• £5,600 a year – the average annual spend on a second pupil, according to Hansard
• £37,500 a year – the average annual spend on a prisoner, according to Hansard

It makes you think, that maybe if more was spent on students while they were at school then they might not to have as much spent on the prison service!

• Fizz Weather - detailed weather information (£3.49)

• Google Mobile - Google search (£ FREE)
• Shazam - Hold your iphone to music and it will tell you the artist and track name (£ FREE)
• Remote - Control music on your computer or Apple TV (£ FREE)
• WordPress - Post to your wordpress blog (£ FREE)
• NetNewsWire - Access RSS feeds, synchronises with other Newsgator RSS readers (£ FREE)
• Twitterrific - Twitter client (£ FREE)
• Twinkle - Twitter client (£ FREE) no longer using as it doesn’t appear to work for me since my trip to Glasgow
• Palringo - Rich messaging system, I use it to access MSN messenger (£ FREE)
• ShoZu - Allows posting of photos to my Flickr account directly from the phone (£ FREE)
• iFooty - Displays English Premiership football information (£ FREE)
• Facebook - Facebook client for the iphone (£ FREE)
• eBay - eBay client for the iphone (£ FREE)
• iChoose - If you’re in a bind and without a coin to help you choose, just break out your iPhone, and all will be resolved (£ FREE)
• Movies - Watch trailers and get showtimes for UK cinema’s. (£ FREE)
• Exposure - View Flickr from your iphone, excellent integration with GPS to show photos from nearby (£ FREE)
• Bookmarks - Access your delicious bookmarks on the iphone (£ FREE)
• Scribble - Basic drawing app, Jack loves it (£ FREE)
• Dual Level - Spirit level for your iphone, came in handy straightening picture frames (£ FREE)
• GPS Tracker - Tracks your movements in real time, then plots to a googlemap (£ FREE)
• Earthscape - GoogleEarth equivalent (£ FREE)
• AirSharing - Drag and drop files between iphone and pc/mac over wireless network (£3.99 was free when I downloaded)
  

Games:

• Trism - Highly addictive tetris type game (£1.79)
• Monkey Ball - Roll a encased monkey around a maze (£5.99)
• Cro-Mag - Racing game (£1.19)
• Sudoku - (£ FREE)
• Break Classic - (£0.50 was free when I downloaded)
• Tris - has now been pulled from the App Store
• Moonlight lite - Mahjong (£ FREE)
• Dactyl - Test your dexterity (£ FREE)

If you have any recommendations for good iphone apps, please leave them in the comments.

Wikis, originally uploaded by stevebeard73.

One of my highlights of SLF08 was Neil Winton’s presentation on wiki’s. I have followed Neil’s exploits in Perth for several years now, probably since the first teachmeet I attended in 2006.

Neil was going to talk us through his experience of using Wiki’s at Perth Academy and how they can be used to support the Curriculum for Excellence.

You can check out his presentation here.

Points that stood out to me:

1) Difference between a ‘typical teacher network’ and the ‘networked teacher’. I wonder what the split is for our teaching profession?
2) How could I not mention his movie…. What do you get if you cross the death star with a can of alphabetti spaghetti? Wikipedia (it is better in the presentation)
3) There are a variety of wiki platforms out there, Neil recommends Wikispaces - sign up for free as an educator and avoid the adverts.
4) Examples of wiki’s used in his school:
4a) Caves of Mull (thecavesofmull.wikispaces.com/) - text based adventure games, each cave is has its own wiki page, make choices on which route to take while navigate you through the wiki.
4b) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (midsummerdreaming.wikispaces.com/) - used by students studying the book with the same title, I would recommend looking at ‘Aunty Flo - problem page’
5) Why use a wiki - ‘engages pupils, enhances learning, real world experience’.

Blog from within Flickr
Originally uploaded by stevebeard73

I guess I am a little behind on this, but while browsing photos from teachmeet and slf, I found that I could blog the photo.

Setting up the link between your blog and flickr account takes just a couple of clicks, select your layout template and you are away.

There are a couple of limitations to this, I couldn’t see how to format the text, add links etc - maybe I need to use html code? The other major limitation was that I couldn’t add any tags to the post.

All that said, it is a nice tool and I was able to edit the post using my normal editor after I posted from Flickr.

Corridor chat
Originally uploaded by kardon

Just before leaving the Scottish Learning Festival I caught up with Neil Winton & John Johnston. I wanted to get a copy of Neil’s presentation on wiki’s - you can now find it up on his blog.

It was then time to swap ideas/applications etc etc

I benefited from the following advice:

1) Ctrl-tab - firefox extension, allows shifting between tabs (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5244)
2) ReloadEvery - firefox extension, allows you to set a page to reload very ‘n’ seconds (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115)
3) Plainview - interesting browser (www.barbariangroup.com/software/plainview_app_1_0)
4) Instapaper - A fast, easy, free tool to save web pages for reading later, also works on the iphone (www.instapaper.com/)
5) Earthscape - Google Earth like app for the iphone (www.crunchbase.com/company/earthscape)
6) Edublogs.tv - Upload your own videos or simply grab them from YouTube to avoid school filters (edublogs.tv/)
7) Get YouTube Video - bookmarklet for firefox, drag the link on the page to your bookmark toolbar, next time you want to get a copy of a YouTube video, click on the bookmarklet and the download the mp4 file (googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html)

Ollie discussed the strategies he is using in East Lothian to deliver the e-safety message to pupils & parents, Ollie was supported in his presentation and in rolling out the strategy by PC Gunn.  David Muir has blogged about the session here.

Points that stood out to me were:

• Link with the police, partnerships are essential
• Headteachers all received a 1hr presentation about e-safety, this has led to support from SLT in rolling the strategy out
• Funding that went to schools was spent on posting letters home to parents, sending texts and placing an advert in the local paper to advertise a parents e-safety evening
• When delivering sessions to parents it is good to have real life examples from the local area

Check out Ollie Bray’s website - the presentation will appear there soon.

Update: Blog post now available here.

This is when having an iPhone comes in to it’s own. I have just used the free ‘wordpress’ app to post to my work blog and to write this. The application is very neat and allows me to do everything I can do on the website editor, except for ‘copy & paste’.

This makes the wordpress app a must have to any blogger using wordpress who has got an iPhone.

I think I have now completed the circle - my blog posts to twitter, twitter updates facebook and my tweets appear on the blog in the sidebar.  I am now pondering if rather than just my twitter status appearing in the sidebar should I have my twitter feed?

Does anyone know of a plugin that will post my del.icio.us bookmarks directly into Twitter, I know I can get them to go from del.icio.us to my blog and then from my blog to twitter.

The internet connection is slowling done - twitter keeps timing out #

Powered by Twitter Tools.