RichardRadio

Wondering why my new XP install has already filled an 8GB partition, it turns out that Adobe Acrobat 9 takes up 210 MB of disk space. Astonished that a pdf reader could be so large, I googled “Adobe Reader bloat”.  For an entertaining and informative read check out http://blog.micropledge.com/2008/07/adobe-reader-9/

Foxit is a good alternative. I also downloaded Foxits pdf creator (unfortuneatly not free – the evaluation copy leaves a saved by Foxit message). When experimented printing pdfs from a couple of browsers I noticed that Safari created a 1.2 MB file whilst Opera made a 78 KB file - a factor of 15. Add that on to Safari’s slow startup time Its bye bye Safari too. What was it that made me think that apple would write good PC software? I have no idea.

Only remains to see if I can unbloat Service Pack 3

Reading Toxic Childhood produced some kind of epiphany for me. It has clarified so many of the questions I have had in my head not only about teaching but also how I view the UK and modern industrialised soceities.

It tells us why teaching is hard and getting harder. And that is surprisingly freeing. Our failures in the class room are not because we teachers are lazy or inadequate there are actually powerful forces at work in soceity that make it a difficult – but not an impossible job.

We’ve always worried and moaned about previous generations and its difficult to distinguish the messiness of forming young minds with systematic change in soceity.

Once we allow ourselves to realise we CANNOT actually hold back the tide on our own, we can look to solutions that allow us to group together to solve the problem. And a book like this is a good start. What a secondary school teacher (me) should actually do is not really the subject of the book.  Nor what school leaders should do, but I do feel that they should read it.

One small help would be to give parenting skills classes for 16 year olds. I think this could be easily achieved. But this is a small part of the solutions that Sue Palmer offers. Ideally initiatives should come from the parents. But if they do come to schools and say help us? Schools need to be ready.

I just successfully used a Gparted Live CD to resize my C: drive that I made too small over three years ago when I installed Windows XP.  I used to make the partition small (5.5 GB) for speed, XP installed in just over 3 GB at that time, but what with Service Pack 2 and Office updates I later came up against drive capacity problems.  I’ve been avoiding solving this problem for a while. Partition resizing could of course go drastically wrong.

So Phew.

Other than the stability of the drive, what was it that forced me to action? Well its a convoluted chain of events that ends in Audible audio books. My iPod died so I can’t listen to the books in the car. The only way I have is to burn the books onto CD as the iTunes plugin allows you to do.  I haven’t yet found another way of listening to these DRM protected books on my other non compliant mp3 players. The lack of drive space caused the CD burn to fail as there wasn’t enough space to create the CD audio cache.

An interesting result is that if you leave the CD in the drive iTunes will rip it again giving you, hey presto, DRM free mp3 files. So now I have 2 ways of listening in the car!

I’ve been playing with a lot of Linux distros over the summer. Once I’ve got an Mp3 player and media player that can play wmv and DVDs working and once flash video is configured, here is a list that follows of the stuff that needs to be installed.  I love the distros like Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) that has all of the above working out of the box.

Fspot or Picassa
GPaint
Google Earth
Inkscape or scribus
Kino (best of a poor bunch on linux)
Mame
OpenArena – Quake
Skype

Just had 3 hours of ICT with Year 9. They were pulled off timetable to do ICT catch up because they were seriously underperforming in the subject. The normal Year 9 problems apply: Kids spend more time messing about or socialising than working.

The three hour lesson with a different class grouping and for some a different teacher was successful.

Kids were engaged and keen to get the work done. More than one student thanked me at the end of the class – very unusual.

There was less poor behaviour than normal, I think because the class grouping had changed. Year 9 get really comfortable in their tutor groups and have got it down to a fine art how to push the boundaries collectively and be disruptive.

There are interesting implications for timetabling and project based learning – hmmm.

I visited Ladakh last year. Ladakh was opened up to tourism in the mid 1970s. As a child I remember visiting the village hall to see a slide show of a local mountaineer/traveller type who had visited, so the name of the country always stayed in my memory.

Because of the clear and recent change in policy Ladakh has been an interesting ‘test case’ of the effects of globalisation. Helena Norbert Hodge was a linguist studying Ladakhi folk songs in 1976 and she noted the effects of Westernisation on a culture that was largely harmonious both socially and ecologically. Her book Ancient Futures was an epiphany for me, it bought together in a logical framework so many things that I’ve observed on my travels and living in other countries (mainly Venezuela).

It seems that Bhutan is a generation behind Ladakh. Does this year’s move to democracy mean the begining of the end of the last Shangri La? Check out this video from (rather interesting) Current TV by Christof Putzel:

Lost in Democracy

Bhutan is different though. It is an autonomous state that is already famous for promoting Gross National Happiness before Gross Nation Product.

Also check out this podcast on Happiness (in Bhutan) By Michael Hawley of MIT. I remember listening it one night driving across the country to Norwich its from from IT Conversations.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail289.html

The TDA (Teacher Development Agency) are responsible for attracting people just like I was 3 years ago into the profession. They put me in touch with a local school and I spent an afternoon observing. Great! but of course afterwards they had to pester me with over zealous forms AND phone calls to get feedback on my experience (service audit no doubt). I remember saying to one guy on the phone, hey give me a break I’m on the PGCE already.

3 years later after recieving another mail I have had to telephone the TDA (Teacher Development Agency) to try and get my name removed from their list. I must have tried via the unsubscribe link to remove my name 4 or 5 times in the past year.  They keep on sending me mails along the lines of “Visit the Train to Teach Event…” so I Click on the unsubscribe link and receive

Your request to unsubscribe from the ‘tda’ mailing list has been received and will be processed shortly. You will be notified of the success or failure by email.

I never got notification by email. Today I got “It’s been quite a while since you expressed an interest in teaching science…” Er, I applied for and teach ICT. So something must be broken at the TDA.How can a Govt agency get this so wrong?

Has anyone else had this problem?

Really nice example of a real problem: an author not satisfied with the cover of her book; being used as an educational exercise. A shout out on Twitter led to these stunning results!

There are so many things that are right about this as a piece of education. Well spotted Ewan

http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2008/04/art-students-pu.html