Evangelising

So far no one had actually taken a thing like this into the classroom or early years setting. I was very keen to see what the response might be by actual practitioners when I had the opportunity to describe the 'Freetheteacher' project to them.
This opportunity presented itself when I was given an half hour slot at a Local Authority 'Early Years Update' event. My audience was 160 practitioners representing childminders, nurseries and foundation stage settings across the region.
The problem was, without a device, all they had was my word for it and a few pictures on a Powerpoint slide. I chased and hasseled Akhter to get me a device delivered ASAP. Luckily they had a sample that they lent me a few days prior to the event - I would still have to wait for my brand spanking new one to arrive though.
A strange thing happened when I booted up the sample M84A, within minutes it blue-screened and died (just like the H70 had before it). This continued (as it had with the H70 before). This too was met with bafflement by the guys at Tatung until one of the guys punted an out of the box speculation when he said, "You don't happen to have a powerful RF (Radio Frequency) transmitter nearby do you?" I replied that I wasn't sure but would check this out. I walked through to the IT technicians' room and asked the question. It was met with, "Have been out in the carpark and looked what's on the roof above your desk?" Out I went and sure enough, there is the largest mobile phone transmitter installation positioned directly above my head when I'm working. Could this be the source of the blue-screen-of-death? More investigation would be called for.

Armed with my rugged, bump-covered, harnessed up, sample M84A and with my Powerpoint eportfolio. I stood up in front of 160 early years experts. I envangelised, I described my journey and I appealed for their support on the next leg of the voyage. It went down well. There was a queue of eager, interested parties at the end of my spiel. Four schools were prepared to order one (or even two) pretty much on the spot!

This brings me to the point you've probably all been waitng for. How much? I was being sold the M84A with the bump cover, harness, spare battery and charger for a princely sum of £770. A price not to be sniffed at by the average UK primary school. A price that probably needs to come down a bit before schools might realistically take this on. Surely the ideal situation would be for there to be one of these in the hands of every adult. Not at £770 though!

Four more days to wait until it arrives and I can really get my teeth into it...

The eportfolio - Powerpoint or Onenote?

Tatung (or more specifically Akhter Computers - their UK distributers) were keen to take back the blue-screening H70 and replace it (for a slight increase in price) with the 8.4" M84A. All I had to do was wait (the following week I was told).

To keep my mind off the wait, I set about thinking around what the eportfolio might look like. My initial thoughts had been along the lines of a Powerpoint file. My thinking being that it would be the perfect host for the eportfolio. I set up a template such that boxes are ready to receive either text (via handwriting recognition) or media (photos, sound recordings or video). This presented a challenge. I wanted 'content boxes' and text boxes to be on the blank Powerpoint slides so that the practitioner could point at the children with the device, take a picture or make a recording and drop it straight into the content box. This was possible in my version of Powerpoint (2003) as I could choose Format->Slide Layout from the menu and choose a layout with a text box and content boxes for the media. I then fiddled about with the look of the page by organising and resizing the boxes until it looked like this:

There would be an unlimited number of pages like this for the ongoing record of the learning journey.

Using the same principal, my first (title page) would look like this:

The child's picture would go in the big, central content box.

I also thought it would be good to have a three point record (given that the initial idea was for this to work in the Foundation Stage) - 'On entry' (to Nursery), 'On entry to Reception' and 'on exit'. So page two would look like this:

Maybe the child just writes their name onto the screen of the umpc for the 'Picture of child's attempt to write name.' box.

A photo goes into the big box and a sound recording of the child saying "My name is..." is hyperlinked to the speech bubble.

Bob's your uncle.

This could be the ever-growing document I had in mind for the eportfolio. It would not only be a record of learning that could be used for assessment for learning purposes, but could also be the report to parents, shareable with parents in electronic form (a CDROM, via a secure area on the VLE?). This raised another issue in my mind, that of esafety. Would there be any issues for parents given that video clips and photos would include their own and other children, shareable with a wide community of parents (albeit those parents with a PC at home - in the absence of Microsoft Office, a free Powerpoint Viewer is downloadable). Would this be covered by the permission slips that are signed and returned by parents as their children enter school - regarding photos of children and internet policy?

However, a school that is very keen to try the device and the eportfolio idea had started looking into Microsoft Onenote as a possible alternative to Powerpoint as the host software for the eportfolio. This definitely needed looking at as it has similar functionality to Powerpoint, can be handwritten staight onto, will support all kinds of media files, is easily manageable and has some astonishing export functionality (including html - could the eportfolio be a webpage?).