FlashICT.net

Flash is an amazing program – I know this! However, why specficially is it so useful in schools? Some might say it is too complicated or tricky for students to understand. I really don’t think that it is. The reason for this post is that I want to challenge that – I’d like to establish what Flash is good for in terms of education.

As an ICT (Information, Communication, Technology – the term for computer use in education in the UK) teacher it would be easy for schools just to deliver a standard curriculum using Microsoft products. Get students to use PowerPoint to create a presenation about themselves, use Excel to calulate their pocket money, use Word to write a formal letter – so on and so on. There is a role for such activities as students need to gain those skills. Yet most secondary school students can do all of these things by the age of 12. The main requirement for ICT teachers, as I see it, is to stretch student achievement and essentially, to engage students with something more challenging and interesting.

Hence – Macromedia / Adobe Flash

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I can’t really type what I’m feeling at the moment. Thus, instead please think of the rudest possible expletive you know, imagine you are shouting it out loud and that equates to about 10% of how annoyed I am.

I installed Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 yesterday to check out all the problems with Flash. Problems that mean Flash, video and nearly all other interactive content have to be ‘activated’ before they work. The whole thing because Microsoft lost a court case and thus had to change the way Internet Explorer works.

It is really annoying and irritating, but ways around the issue seems to be being found and I hope it won’t cause too much trouble anyway.

So, having found out the problems, I thought I’d give IE7 a good go anyway. I click on the IE7 icon on my desktop. Error message. I try once more – error message again. Looked to me like Internet Explorer 7 was a real non-starter for me. Not a problem I thought. The ‘new’ beta contains an ‘uninstall’ option that allows me to remove Internet Explorer 7 and swap back down to version 6. (Obviously in reality this means just continue using Firefox ).

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Long time no post – so many distractions – my beautiful wife & daughter plus at school we’ve had OFSTED, Naacemark / ICT Mark inspections then there have been holidays in Scotland and much much more…. Plus I’m continually developing the ContentGenerator.net applications – more posts about them in the coming few days.

Anyway, I’m still looking for an ideal solution for displaying RSS on a static webpage. On my ReviseICT.co.uk website I display the latest BBC technology news in a sidebar. I really like this solution as it continually updates the site, keeping it fresh and current.

My aim is to show content from each of the forums that I run on the relevant website. I’d like to show the latest posts on the History Teachers’ Discussion forum plus the Student History Help forum on the SchoolHistory.co.uk homepage, I’d like to do the same with the ContentGenerator.net forum and the EffectiveICT.co.uk forum.

However, I cannot use the same method that I use for the BBC feed. This seems to be because the Invision Board RSS is a completely different format to the standard RSS.

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