ICT | Education

I thought I’d post a small article about an amazing experience we’ve just been going through lately.

My daughter is a avid writer, and for the last 6 months she’s been writing a novel. I know what you’re thinking, “she’s 10! What kind of novel?”.
Well, to tell you the truth, it’s a pretty impressive one! 62 pages, 5500 words and a riveting story about family and overcoming odds.

So, what does this have to do with ICT and Education you might ask… well, as she was determined to become a published author, we have decided to go down the path of publishing via the site, www.lulu.com, and today, after quite a long process, we received her first copies via the courier!!!

Just focusing on the ICT aspects of this, www.lulu.com offers an excellent method for authors to publish their own work. The interface is easy to use, and the final product is amazing! I’d certainly recommend it to anyone out there who has been knocked back by a publishing company, or would rather maintain their own editorial and publishing control of their work.

After leaning from @lucyBarrow (twitter ref) an her troubles with using Word Documents, we were very careful to ensure the PDF document used only the recommended fonts, used their templates and was exactly how we wanted it. We then stepped through the online system to produce the book.

I’d recommend you take good note of the exact pixel dimensions on the images, because I ended up editing the front cover image 20 times before I tried using their settings!

 I’d also recommed to for “Perfect Bound” books you leave larger inner margin.

Anyway, check our Chelsea’s new novel at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperbacks/backwards/6002832 and for $9.95 support a budding young author as she strives to become an author!

Novel #2 is in the planning phase, and I can tell you, it’s going to be brilliant!!!

Tx

Burgess

I’ve added a new page to my Blog to cover the 2009 ICT Rollout we will be undertaking from Monday the 8th of December.

You can view the progress of the Rollout on this page [Click Here].

TX

Burgess

Over the last few months we’ve been investigating the DEA – “Digital Excellence Awards” for our Junior School. The program, by award winning Educator Dr john Ingram (link) is an excellent way of ensuring that students receive their “digital entitlement” throughout their time at our Junior School.

After several presentations and a trip to visit Lynbrook PS (link), on Monday of this week, the JS committed to implementing the Program for 2009!

This is exciting news on many fronts. This decision marks the recognition that it is important to have a mapped ICT curriculum across our Junior School to ensure that our students are developing a staged series of ICT skills that they will need to the rest of their lives.

Not only does the DEA deliver a JS ICT curriculum, it provides us with a tool to assess the ICT literacy of our staff against the same skill set our students will have, and provides our Staff ICT Trainer with a method of customising a PD program that can target those most in need, or deliver specific training in skills our staff don’t have.

Now there is a Win-Win situation.

Currently, the program will be introduced to staff at the beginning of the year, and the current idea is that we should enrol them as “students” to use the system as if they were the learner. This would give them a familiarity of the program and the skills that students are attaining, and also give them an opportunity to better plan their second Semester of work.

In the middle of the year, all JS students will be enrolled into the DEA.

It’s an exciting project, one that will bring excellent results for our students, staff and the School!

Tx,

Burgess

I’ve been swamped by projects this year, and the further I get into the last term, them more projects we seem to have on the go.

Our Risk Management documentation project is still crawling along, but it’s been dwarfed by some big projects. As I’ve struggled to manage some of them (just keeping a eye on some of them is hard work), I’ve decided to “beef up” our use of the Sharepoint Projects template to try to help our team to keep our projects on track.

The template is quite simple, (and free from Microsoft as one of the “fantastic 40 templates” for sharepoint) but, like all thinks Sharepoint, can be adjusted, customised and totally overhauled to do whatever you want.
I’ve talked to the ICT staff, and we’ve decided to make Sharepoint the centre of our Department organisation – so the “ICT Team – Projects” has been implemented to become the heart of our project management.

So, what projects are we placing into our tool, and why blog about it? I want to write here about what big projects we are running (that might interest other schools/ICT Educators/ICT Directors) and how we are customising Sharepoint to help us manage these processes better!

Current Projects (with links to corresponding pages) :

1. Project Paper Cut! – Xerox Copier/Printer Roll-out – Introduction of 10 new copier/printers with the philosophy that there should be a Xerox machine in every building, and no one should have to walk too far to get access to print services. This project also looks at ways for the organisation to reduce the amount of paper the School uses each year (Think Green!) (Cick Here).
2. Project 2009 ICT Hardware Roll-out – placement of nearly 200 new HP desktops across our vast campus – all within a 2 week time frame.
3. Project SIS (Synergetic Identity Server) – A project to see the automatic generation and management of staff, student and parent accounts within the School (Cick Here).
4. Project Archives – development of a secure storage space, scanner and printer to facilitate the digitalising of our School’s Archives.
5. Project DEA (Digital Excellence Awards) – A project to see the DEA curriculum placed into the Junior School (Cick Here).
6. Project AV – The expansion of our Whole School AV vision, including the piloting of an Interactive White Board (IWB) into the Preparatory classroom.
7. Project Risk – Risk Managment project as detailed on previous post (Cick Here).

And others…

I intend on setting up different pages to write about some of these project, and to leave this front page for overviews and anything BIG that comes up.

Tx

Burgess

I thought I’d outline the project today, and perhaps seek a little information from readers.

I was at a conference last week (held by our main Supplier) and listened to a presentation on “What to do when the Board demands a Risk Management Assessment” by Greg Plum, IT Manager at Korowa Anglican Girls College. It was a very interesting presentation and Greg offered up some good ideas about how he had approached the problem. He showed some great Spreadsheets that easily documented how far the School had progressed.

It got me thinking about our own “Risk Management” and “Disaster Recovery” and that, while we have progressed a long way down the track, what we don’t have is a good method of documenting it!
In a discussion with my Head of technical Services in the car on the way home we contemplated a way to use MS Sharepoint to document our RM and DR in a way that would have far more meaning to us (and our Board) and that would be easily accessible (web based).

 So… where to start?

I’ve been searching the net over the last week trying to find some good examples of RM assessments as a starting point, but as yet, I haven’t found anything that really jumps out and looks like it works well. We thought we would start by looking at hardware (like Greg has), and once we had this down we could expand and tackle other aspects of RM in ICT.

So… here’s the request… anyone want to share? This section of the Blog hopes to document my travels through constructing a SharePoint based RM Assessment, and hopefully, in some time down the track, you will be able to see my progress adn how we got to a fully working SharePoint based ICT RM assessment.

Tx

Burgess

It’s interesting… when I started this blog yesterday I had absolutely no idea what type of things I would add. What would people want to know about? What do I do that people would actually read about?

So, I got thinking and decided that I might Blog on one of my biggest projects at the moment – using our Microsoft SharePoint site to assist in the management of our ICT Department.

I’m not inteding on this blog being another “Sharepoint Site”, but it might turn out to be just that, as the more I think about how far this project reaches, the more I think would be worth sharing!

So, this post marks the start of my Blog in earnest!

Tx

Burgess

How many times have I been asked “are you blogging that” over the last 8 months? Far too many to count! So, succumbing to “peer pressure” I have finally set up my own Blog!

Hopefully you might find some of the activites I’m up to interesting – feel free to post your comments!

Tx

Burgess