Site   Reads   Search engine reads   Total human reads   Member reads 1.   Waterloo Primary School   4,008   99   3,909   347 2.   Websites for Schools   2,111   916   1,195   102 3.   Bodnant Infants   1,556   367   1,189   131 4.   Salisbury Primary   1,460   274   1,186   0 5.   Pudsey Grangefield College   1,158   483   675   1 6.   Donemana Primary   834   373   461   92 7.   educatr   821   158   663   0 8.   Ysgol Craig y Don   743   301   442   126 9.   Moorside Primary School   678   145   533   22 10.   Southfield Primary   563   60   503   0

Biggest day yet! 4,000 page views in one day! This had a knock on effect for our other schools as traffic went to them too. Bodnant made the 1,500 achievement list because of this. Waterloo has been hit by an arson attack and is closed. They've posted news about this on the site and obviously locals and parents want to know what happened, when it'll be back open again. Though this isn't a record for the sites that I run. I once had 6,000 hits in one hour.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 4:28:56 PM to the Community dept.
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Massive traffic

I always ask new customers, these days, what sort of design you you want? I need the school colours, a logo and a load of pictures: of the building, key iconic parts of the school, gates, gardens and so on, and some of the school life, preferably of children around a typical school desk.

But, on top of all that I need some descriptive words. Bright, staid, fun, straight.

Adswood, a new customer in Stockport, South of Manchester gave me all this and one other word, 'funky.'

I've not done funky before. Here's some funky typefaces. And some more.



Trouble with funky typefaces, is... Well it seems they're just fancy typefaces, which is 'everything else' in the typography world.

I'm sure I'll get the mix right. I'm listening to funky music as I write, and will do as I design. To help those creative juices flow. Here's a selection from an iTunes 'funk' search of my 8,000 songs (which will play for 29 days, 14 hours, 37 minutes and 29 seconds, if set to play continuously).

• Tone Loc: Funky Cold Medina
• The Clash: Overpowered by Funk
• Digital Underground: Rhymin On The Funk
• Blackeyed Peas: Smells Like Funk
• Philip Glass: Cloudscape (Huh?)

And here's some funky patterns.


# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 2:35:42 PM to the Walsall Schools business dept.
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Funky Design

BECTA exec admits mistakes on education IT: "At the BETT trade show earlier this month, Becta director of educational content Dave Hassell conceded that the education IT quango has been guilty of poor deployments. "What we've done in the past is keep throwing IT at people. It's become a burden for some," he said.

The comments came soon after Becta's chairman Andrew Pinder said teachers are unable to keep up with the pace of Westminster-driven IT rollout in schools."

I talk to Heads and teachers who are extremely non-geek. Yet most of the VLE projects BECTA have allowed to be rolled out are for extreme geeks. Silly. When, if they'd have promoted Moodle, many of the courses could have been rolled out nationally, with very little for the non-geeks to need to do. And there's the open education initiative. If a geeky teacher in California could collaborate with a non-geeky teacher in Manchester...

One world, instead BECTA have created islands and confusion.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 12:45:28 PM to the Edu blogging dept.
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Becta smells the coffee

David Cameron and sharp elbowed parents: "This month The Times reported a surge in late baptisms into the Catholic Church, further evidence that some parents may be finding religion at a convenient moment in their children's education. Fears that middle-class parents are adopting religion to get their children into popular schools have led some Labour MPs to call for an end to the expansion of faith schools."

I don't know of one atheist school. Do you? Odd since the UK is becoming more secular and anti-religion.

Richard Dawkins "The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

And on Yahoo! Answers, there's answers.

So, I wonder, if there's going to be more and yet more grown-ups packing out the churches, temples and mosques, because they went to more and yet more faith schools? # Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 12:22:48 PM to the Psychology dept.
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David Cameron's fudge on faith school 'fakes'

Wikipedia, Ubuntu founders back 'open education': ""We have seen over the last 20 years how open-source software, which is produced collaboratively, has been used to solve individual problems but then shared to solve everyone's problems," said Shuttleworth. "Today, I hope we will launch a process that will build something similarly compelling but for the educational field. It will be extraordinary one day to have teachers in New Zealand collaborating with students in China to create documents that will be used by learners in South America.""

Think about all those lesson plans and projects you're doing in your council's VLE at the moment. Why aren't you doing it in a format that can be imported and exported into the open source Moodle? Moodle is used by millions of learners. The BBC is one of the best Internet educational publishers. I hope they'd open their files for translation, but I'm sure they bought those items in, and would have to pay lots more to have them redone in a 1,000 languages.

Here's the declaration.

It's a great idea, and I'm sure it will take off, eventually. But it's started now. All power to open education.

At this time, there's not too many signatories: 600+ individuals. And only, only 30 from the UK! I've signed up. I wish they had a logo and better branding. It would be useful to be able to add a button to my site, to get the word out better, faster.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 12:08:07 PM to the Education news dept.
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Open education, for all

BBC News: Student bursaries of £1,000 'go unclaimed': "...Many of the traditional, "pre-1992" universities are not doing enough to reach out to students from poor and disadvantaged communities. It's not been something that's been part of their culture. Poor families are very debt averse. Universities need to build relationships much earlier - reaching out to schools in disadvantaged areas."

The fear...

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 11:31:37 AM to the Psychology dept.
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Money left on the table

BBC News: "The CD-Rom digital version of the traditional story of the three little pigs, called Three Little Cowboy Builders, is aimed at primary school children.

But judges at this year's Bett Award said that they had "concerns about the Asian community and the use of pigs raises cultural issues"."

The fear...

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 11:20:53 AM to the Psychology dept.
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BECTA: Three Little Pigs 'too offensive'

In the US, a New York town: Fears Anew in an Area Rife With xxx Offenders: "Mr. Alliegro, whose daughter attends William Floyd Middle School, said: "I tell my daughter, ‘Don't get in anyone's car, even if it's a police officer.' It's sad because you want to keep them young -- you're torn -- you want to let a kid stay a kid, but not telling her could cost her her life.""

The fear...

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/1/08; 11:11:57 AM to the Psychology dept.
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12,000 people, 17 on the register