Teacher101

Found a good website today. Allows teachers to do some really simple task that take too long really quickly. I have just signed up and put in some test data (supplied) it works really well only a few mins to set-up. Tomorrow I need to get my data from school. The best thing since google docs!

The site is www.onlineschooltools.co.uk

I forgot to say they don't charge for the service! I the spirit of the open source world.

Includes detention system, room booking system, praise postcard system

I have a dream….

I have a vision of students submitting work online from wherever they wish. I can then mark the work from the comfort of wherever and give students feedback in a easy to manage environment. In this day and age should be no problem, however in education it’s not that easy!

I thought VLE’s would solve the problem but apparently not. I have yet to find a package that will allow real marking online. Our VLE doesn’t make it easy despite spending hours on end trying to make it work. I have also experimented with other resources.

The closest I have come is www.yacapaca.com. Unfortunately it will not let me save changes to the students work, but allows good comment feedback. Can someone come up with a solution please!!!! Surely the cost saving from printing in UK schools would more than pay for the bandwidth.

I thought goggle docs would do the job but I could not get it working when in front of a class. They shared files and nothing came to me.

An interesting economic question is how do the likes of Microsoft stay in business. With the amount of free software do they really offer value for money? Why doesn't every person or company use stuff that's free?

I think the honest answer is that it's the way we have always done it, would people feel the same if they didn't dispatch a regular payment to Microsoft and the like. People feel safe and like the feeling of security, even if the free software can do the same job or even a better job.

I was on a course yesterday and I started thinking. Why as a teaching profession is there not more sharing going on?. We all spend time making things that will hopefully capture some interest and then we file them somewhere on a computer or on paper and don’t share them with our students and other teachers.

I know there are places where teachers can find free resources, but if you think about it in this world of cheaply flowing data our life’s should be easier and we should be able to share everything we create. Granted some websites have made some headway e.g. www.teach-ict.com, www.bized.co.uk etc but come on!

The only logical conclusion I can come to is that we are scared and want only use to see the resources (mistakes and all). Maybe VLE’s will address this issue, but I think we are a long way off yet?