FlashICT.net

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.

The BBC RSS is in .xml format:
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/technology/rss.xml

However, Invisionboard RSS is in a slightly different format:
http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum/index.php?act=rssout&id=1 - this, despite, I believe, being an .xml feed seems to confuse many of the RSS tools that can be used.

Ideally I’ll have a Flash solution, something I can make available both to use on my own homepages, but others can also use. Exploring solutions that are on offer, there are plenty of RSS to Flash tools, but none of them seem to work with the InvisionBoard format.

Up until now I’ve used the marvellous Feedburner.com tools to display RSS feeds (see the right-hand side) but I really need to customise the display further. Feedburner has so many options, but none that really fit the bill. I’ve also experimented with some suggestions from InvisionBoard users, but, to be really honest, the feedback and support I’ve had on the issue has been really disappointing.

I simply want to display the latest posts on the homepage - exactly as I do on ReviseICT.co.uk with the BBC technology news. Currently, I’m completely stuck!

One of the areas I feel Flash has great potential in education is to enable students to help develop their own skills and understanding, using interactive tools to help them revise.

Last year I identified an issue with my Year 11 class that they knew their facts, but were finding it tricky to put together exam style answers. My intended solution was simply to give them lots and lots of practice questions. Trouble is, once I do this, I then create lots and lots of marking. Fair enough, but a teacher simply cannot keep up with a Year 11 student producing 10 essays and expecting them to be marked in 10 minutes.

An obvious suggestion is to get students to use a mark scheme or model answer to self-assess. This is how many revision books and online revision materials work. If the student is able to self-assess in this way they can actually begin to develop far more effective answers anyway. What I decided to do was to create a way of allowing students to do this online. I developed a Flash-based activity where I had an array which stored a question together with a model answer. The question is then displayed, the student adds their answer and then they can compare & contrast their answer with the model one.

This is a really simple Flash activity that was easily programmed, but hopefully an effective additional tool to help students revise. The first attempt was the revision activity I put onto my ReviseICT.co.uk website.

I added a couple of Flash drop-down boxes to the front end, allowing students to select one question, three questions or the entire set of questions. The other drop-down allowed students to set themselves a time limit, or to remove the time limit. With these options a student could set themselves 3 quick questions and note down some quick ideas within, for example, a 30 second time limit. Alternatively they could make their own progress through the entire set of questions without a time limit and practice putting together a full answer.

Having been pleased with the results, I developed the concept a little further by providing students with a rich-text interface allowing them to add colours and formatting to their answers, supporting those who wanted to categorise and extend their ideas further. The Practice Paper activity on my SchoolHistory.co.uk site was the result.

Recently I’ve put together a ContentGenerator.net version of this activity. It is still in beta development, but has been released for testing. It is available for any customer of ContentGenerator. Thus if you have purchased one of the programs, this activity is available to you for free. Customers can download the beta directly from the ContentGenerator.net forums.

Already there has been postive feedback together with suggestions for improvement. I want to have this ready as rapidly as possible so fellow teachers can put together their own online revision activities. I plan to produce such an activity for each of the topics my Year 11s study.

Recently I’ve been developing free releases for ContentGenerator.net. Two reasons really - firstly I do genuinely want to share the technology. I’m really pleased with the concept - I can extend the use of Flash-based e-learning activities that I’ve created but not force others through the hassles of directly editing Flash files. My free releases allow anyone to download and develop their own e-learning materials.

Secondly I’m obviously giving some software away free to encourage people to purchase the pay-for programs.

The are now three entirely free programs avaiable from ContentGenerator.net. The time I’ve spent developing and tweaking them has made them - in my opinion at least - comparable to quiz generating software that you have to pay an extensive amount for.

• Fling the Teacher generator - create your own Fling the Teacher game. Minimum of 15 questions, no maximum. Player has to get 15 questions correct to build a trebuchet to fling the teacher away. Includes the ability to customise the cartoon teacher and to use ‘helplines’ - take a vote, take two away and ask an expert. See an example on my SchoolHistory.co.uk website or on my wife’s new in-development Moodle music site.

• Multi-choice quiz generator - create your own Flash-based multi-choice quizzes. Three different types - ‘big quiz’ ideal for projectors / interactive whiteboards, ‘mini-quiz’ which can integrate perfectly into the side of existing content and a ‘quiz + text’ which is a mini-quiz with accompanying rich-text to include information and / or hyperlinks. Quizzes require a minimum of only two questions and are completely customisable - include a time limit and set all the background colours. They also include silly and loud sound effects.

• Match-up quiz generator - this allows you to create your own simple Match-up quiz, ideal for a quick interactive whiteboard task. Six customisable matches, optional sound effects and customisable colours. I thought this one would be the least well received, but it actually appears really popular. Geography teachers certainly seem keen on it (and that’s no bad thing - I hasten to add ).

Anyway, please feel free to join the ContentGenerator.net forum and download the free software. The profits made from the site fund all our other websites so thus this isn’t some money grabbing corporation.

What I hope to do in the future is to continue to release new games, quizzes and e-Learning applications. Each set of releases will always include some free software as well as pay-for options. I hope that all these programs enable other teachers to experience the benefits of Flash within education. There is such potential with Flash - hopefully fellow teachers will start with my programs, be interested in the potential and then start experimenting with the real thing themselves. I know I became interested in the potential of online quizzes and activities when I discovered Hot Potatoes, so I hope some of my developments may encourage educators in a similar way.

I have an announcement coming soon, together with Doug Belshaw, which will help this happen

Firstly - ICT is the term educators in the UK, but now in many other places to, use to describe the use of computers within education. ICT stands for Information Communication Technology. On another of my websites I’ve created a Flash activity that asks people to consider what ‘effective ICT’ really is.

I actually created this because every year I’m asked to deliver a session about ICT to new trainee teachers. I try my best to make this hands on, exploring interactive learning materials to spark an interest. However, I really felt that people who attended the session weren’t being stretched and consequently they weren’t being asked to think for themselves. I want teachers and students to consider the whole point of using a computer - as often the best use of ICT is to actually decide not to use the computer at all!

So I created a Flash activity that puts forward an example scenario and then the use has to use a drag bar to select how effective they think this activity would be - they have to drag a score from 0 to 10. As a Flash eLearning application, I’m really pleased with it - it was very simple to put togther, it simply works and forces the user to focus on the content.

To build it all I did was create an array full of the examples, together with some additional feedback and my own score. Flash then randomizes this array and serves them up for the user to work with. As each score is selected (or dragged I suppose) the number is recorded. The screen then displays my own interpretation, my own score together with the feedback. This process continues until the entire bank of examples is used up.

At the end there is then the opportunity to reflect. This part I’ve found rather strange. When people try the activity they keep thinking in terms of being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. If their scores aren’t close to mine, they don’t like it. However, this simply doesn’t matter. The idea of the exercise is to get people talking, get people thinking about the concept of effective ICT. The main aim is to prevent people thinking that typing your coursework up in an ICT suite is in any way ‘effective’.

Anyway, this is how I feel Flash is brilliant for us as educators - it allows anyone to create short, interactive tasks that can really enliven a task.

I was delighted to take a group of students (and some fellow teaching colleagues) to the BETT show on Friday. I’ve been to the BETT show for the past five years, normally going on the Saturday due to the hassle of organising days away from school. This year the show was equally as technical, packed with new shiny and tiny gadgets but I felt something was missing.

Perhaps it is because I’ve been for a few years now, but I didn’t really discover anything there that I felt could change the way we teach using ICT. In the past I’ve been amazed at new technology and innovations. This year it felt much more like ‘more of the same’. All the major companies were there, each showboating their latest innovations. I personally feel I learn much more online that I do at these events. I didn’t even obtain that many pens and pencils - although the students (and my colleagues including my Senior Manager) more than made up for that.

My Neale-Wade students were great in their presentations and they’ll be uploading their own opinions to the College website on Monday. Hopefully some of our photos will have come out too. It was equally great to meet a number of people who I’ve met online, but never met in person. They are some amazing individuals out there teaching some brilliant examples of ICT. This has to be the most pleasing thing to see. Hopefully our presentations about Adobe (formerly Macromedia) software will help push more along towards that path.

The first presentation was about Contribute 3.1. This was ok - although when it came to the students putting the audience on the spot with a quick Penalty Shootout everyone scarpered! We should have realised, teachers on a day away from school don’t like being put under any pressure. The second presentation on our uses of Macromedia Studio 8 in after school clubs was much more successful. Mainly because the students were able to take over and explain what they’d been doing. Anyway, more soon when the students have updated the College site.

Appropriately, I’m typing this on our Mac Mini, or is it our Mini Mac? Anyway, don’t miss Steve Job’s keynote speech at MacWorld. Despite never quite being completely taken in by all things Mac, this yearly speech is nevertheless one not to miss.

The content of this year’s speech isn’t quite as outstandingly brilliant and amazing as previous years, but it is still great to see the way Apple make such effective use of style - the Apple brand is incredible. What they never seem to mention is the actual Apple market share of computing, which I’m sure I recently read is around 3%.

Anyway, last year we purchased a Mac Mini. We make extensive use of it. Actually, not in the way I thought we would. Developing online activities and websites, I purchased it to enable testing and development of our materials on a different operating system. It now holds all our music and serves as a digital music library for our SoundBridge player. We also use it for photos and scanning - so it is basically a digital resource store.

What the Mac Mini isn’t as good at - and this is obvious when you look at the specs - is Flash authoring. I thought it might be a great tool to use, but I found it simply couldn’t keep up the Flash authoring program. Thus I’m firmly in favour of using our main PC for Flash development.

Nevertheless I’m very keen to make use of Macs. I’ve been exploring the potential uses of Mac Minis at school but the prices and relative power don’t really cut it. It will be interesting to see what the potential uses and benefits are. From my own limited experience I don’t thing that Mac Minis will be powerful enough for school use.

Then again, there is the rest of the Apple Mac product line - I’m sure the more powerful machines would be amazing development tools.

Do find time to watch the keynote address. If not just for the amazing technology, then for the features that Microsoft will be implementing in their next releases One thing that Steve Jobs and Apple do is announce a new feature or a new product. They don’t say “coming soon” - they say “available today”. I like that.

To cut a longer story short - go to FlashGen.com

As for the longer story: I’ve been working on my Multi-choice quiz generator today and while finishing off a few aspects of the interface I came across another annoying problem. I’m using the standard Flash component buttons (as in Flash 7 and later). In the interface, I want to provide the user with some information about the type of quiz they can make.

Simple, I thought! I just have the standard button, but when the user hovers over, just get it to trigger a tool-tip type effect. However, to my annoyance it appeared that the rollover function wasn’t possible for a standard Flash 7 component button. It was rejected as an invalid mouse movement or something.

I spent a while fiddling around with an invisible button that would trigger the tooltip, but it was a really irritating and annoying solution. It simply didn’t seem the right way of doing it. Then, by doing a bit more research on the internet, I came across a brilliant solution. It appears that the fuction was left out of the components, but it is still hidden within Flash somewhere. Thanks so much to Mike Jones and his FlashGen blog. His post about AS2 component kludging solved the issue.

His additional code has given me the perfect quick-fix solution - meaning that the button component looks and works as expected, but it can also trigger a rollover and rollout event. Ideal

I’m going to upgrade FlashICT.net to Wordpress 2 this afternoon - hopefully this will work well, but if normal service isn’t available for a while you’ll understand why!

I was searching this morning to try and find a solution for an image resizing problem. Basically I’m looking for a way to import and replace and existing image in Flash. Using the same solution I use for my ContentGenerator.net applications I can easily import and replace images, but the problem comes if the new image is a different size from the original one. My idea is to somehow track / read the image properties and then get Flash to resize the new image accordingly.

Anyway I couldn’t find much to help, but I did come across a Flash site that I’d never seen before - Oddhammer.com. The page I initially arrived at was about resizing the Flash stage with a feature that appeared in Flash 6. As I explored the site further I found some really great ideas and suggestions - and lots that is closely linked to things I experiment with in Flash. The site is great!

The Actionscript performance tests are quite interesting - shows why scripts slow up when working with complex arrays. They also demonstrate that the newer versions of the Flash player seem to take longer to work with arrays - I had thought that things had become quicker. Then again, the improvements in other, more significant areas, are much more useful. Pleasingly the array.sort command that I use to randomize an array has a massive performance boost with the new Flash 8.5 player. This bodes very well for the next version of Flash.

One thing I’ve been delighted to find is a Flash extension that automatically backs up your Flash file within a specified time limit - the Auto Snapshot extension. This is a great tool. Up until now I keep saving my Flash files with file01.fla, file02.fla, file03.fla - and it becomes a bit of a hassle to keep remembering to do this. It is also always the way that just when I need to go back and recode something it is the one time that I haven’t bothered to save it. So, I’m going to download this extension and give it a try. I’ll certainly be donating if it works

So, have a look at Oddhammer.com.

Following a bit of research I’ve discovered why I’ve been experiencing so many issues with Urlencoding (as explained in my previous post).

From this page - http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/urlEncoding/ - it would appear that the + sign becomes %2B as I thought. However, it also explains that is urlencoded as %20 or +. This means that any urlencoded text that contains the + sign will change this to a space.

This is thus a rather complex issue that means urlencoding / un-encoding of a + sign can potentially lead to issues.

I think the source of my issues with this may actually be that continual urlencoding and un-urlencoding means that the stored text is processed twice. The first time, the code will be correctly un-urlencoded, turning all the text into the required format. However, if this text is again un-urlencoded, most of the text will simply be ignored, but the + sign will be processed again - and will appear as a space.

Thus, I suspect the solution to this issue is to look carefully through all the programming to ensure that any stored text is only un-urlencoded once - I suspect the issue is that I’ve asked text to be un-urlencoded more than once, thus causing this rather complicated issue.