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Those doing work on Picasso might be interested in Mr. Picassohead, a site that allows you to create your own masterpiece in the style of the great master.  Using drag and drop onscreen, pupils can quickly and easily create those crazy portraits (with both eyes on one side - you know the ones) and raise discussion points about what makes a great piece of art.  The pictures they create might generate starting-points for a number of activities in creative or descriptive writing, including screendumps^* of their own images alongside those of others to discuss the differences. They might try to replicate some of their onscreen designs on paper, or even using art software such as the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, Photoshop, Paint.net, 2Paint a Picture, Doozla …. the list could go on into Web 2.0 apps like Splashup or Aviary though there might be problems with registering (Splashup requires no registration).

Add a comment to this post with your favourite art software and suggest ways you might use it, or even share your favourite sites for creative stimulus.

^*Use the printscreen key or a screengrabber such as Gadwin Printscreen, or on a Mac use Cmd-shift-4.

Every week it seems there is a front-page headline proclaiming another government agency data stick lost, or a laptop stolen exposing personal details of thousands to persons unknown.  Clearly the amount of damage done will be limited to the nature of the data exposed and how accessible it is to those who have obtained it, but exposing personal data to persons unknown could be career-threatening.  Data that is encrypted to a suitable level will never present a security risk yet many teachers carry data sticks that contain personal details of pupils such as names, Unique Personal Numbers, details of academic achievement and behavioural/health issues - all wide open to the next person who picks up the mislaid data stick in the street.

Schools need to assess the risks of sensitive data being removed from their systems.  A Shropshire County Council policy for schools information security can be found here, and  Becta offers some Data Security advice for schools .  One of the basic Technological safeguards suggested is that removable data be encrypted.  Data encryption used to be a potentially arduous and expensive task.  It’s not so difficult or expensive any more and with this in mind it might be suggested that encrypting personal data held on portable devices is essential.  Becta offers a list of data encryption programs that are of varying ease to use.

Having just installed TrueCrypt I can confirm that this is a user-friendly program and I would be happy rolling out to teachers to encrypt data sticks.  It has versions for Mac OS-X, Windowsand Linux.  Data can be encrypted on an entire drive or simply within one folder/directory, and the ecrypted directory can be hidden altogether to prevent data from being demanded under duress (although I can’t see this being a problem with the majority of the kinds of information we have in education).

Now to think about an article concerning  encrypting emails…

Futurelab (formally NESTA Futurelabs) has just published a report entitled ‘The potential of open source approaches for education‘.

For a while we have promoted the use of FLOSS, including such titles as GIMP, Firefox, Open Office to name three.

I still don’t think that many schools are willing to make the break from paying for software, they seem to believe that if it is free then it can’t be any good, or it isn’t Microsoft!

Leave a comment if your school is using any FLOSS and if they have given copies of it to their staff and students for home.

This article highlights the fact that despite Becta producing a report that stated how much money a primary school could save by using open source software, there still appears to be very little open source software in their education software database.

I think a key point that is not raised in this article or many others, is that some senior teachers in our schools might believe that if the software costs nothing then it can’t be any good - ‘you only get what you pay for’. In Shropshire we have pushed the use of ‘FLOSS‘ with our secondary ICT subject leaders. As a LA we put Logotron School Office onto all the laptops purchased through the laptops for teachers initiative, this allowed all our schools to have a site licence for the software. The sofware didn’t go down well with many off our schools as it was not Microsoft Office.

There still appears to be great reluctance for our schools to move away from Microsoft Office as it is ‘the industry standard’, even though Open Office is a superb suite of applications and there are many more equivalent products on the market. Should we be thinking more about web based office applications with the explosion of Web2.0 applications, for example Writely or Numbler to mention only 2.

The on-screen test in ICT at the end of KS3 has made a number of teachers think that by learning only Microsoft Office some of their students may struggle with a slightly different interface, so it might be worth exposing them to a variety throughout KS3.

A link to a list of Open Source software. For those not in the know, Open Source is free software - free to have, free to amend, free to do what you like with. Try some software, post some comments about it on this blog.