It's Live Day

Today is the day that we go live with google apps, what a shame it started off with a 502 error.
Also subject choice system is live today as well. It is all setup ready to go. Pity i won't be at work on Monday, I have some Professional Development I have to attended to.

xbox 360 lessons

we have been working through the lessons by Rob Miles author of Microsoft® XNA® Game Studio 2.0: Learn Programming Now! and www.verysillygames.com. The students are loving it. Today we played around more with vibrating controllers. This bring me to todays work. We have 20 students in the class, 10 wired controllers, now that I have this class going they are starting to bring their own wireless controllers in and hooking them up. But how, they expect to be able to come in a get them going. They had yet to realise that they need a connection into the USB port on the computer. I am heading down to Dick Smith Electronics tomorrow to get some Wireless Adaptor for windows to be able to connect them up.

But now they are after some more competition, they want to be able to use these in different ways. I have looked through the book and we are looking at the first xbox 360 Gamepad racer. We are even going to dress then up in jockey uniforms.

This is something we want to emulate and put up on our website. Come on it would be something cool and different.

Also I have some students who have picked up on this so quickly, debugging, they can pick apart any program and explain what it is doing, capture the bugs that I put on the screen in an instant. It is fantastic to see students motivated and interested in something that they love.

Once we have worked on importing graphics into our XNA programs we will look at something I found at Brian Scarbeau's blog which was http://blogs.msdn.com/dawate/pages/let-s-make-a-game-with-xna.aspx written by Dan Waters

is this what it is about?

I entered a competition to take a group of students down to the New Zealand Army camp for some rugby training. It was to write 150 words on why rugby is important to them. I asked the sports coordinator if I should enter and he said go ahead. Now I face a trip with 23 students down to Palmerston North to take part in the two days training session. But as normal politics are involved. What students to take, do we take the current team, the ones that deserve to go, and leave the ones that will now turn up because we have this opportunity. the hardest part is that I cannot tell the team yet because we have to sort this out. I see students working hard at training but not on the field... argh. But what do i mean by the title. Education and opportunities, This is a great chance to get the students out of our area and away from the pressures of family and friends and take them down to a whole new environment. It is an opportunity for us to see what these students are made of and what they will take out of this. I can see them reved up and itching to go. How many of them have not been on a plane, someone else in the island. How am I going to sleep tonight, too many things going through my head. I still have the subject system to finish, working through the bluetooth soution and my year 12 and 13 achievement standards projects. What a job.

What is involved in the trip
Day one, Welcome Brief, trg session 1, Lunch, Nutrition Brief, Trg Session 2, Admin, Dinner, Team- Building / Leadership Session
Day two, Recovery / Nutrition Lesson, Confidence Course, Game planning / Rugby Tactics, Lunch, Unit Visit, Depart and travel to home location.

I have also broken out the xbox 360 controllers in my classroom today. Year 13 programming are starting development of XNA. This has been a long time coming due to various issues, problems, and virtual machines not working with the states that they need to be in. But they are now controllers colours with there controllers, and getting the vibration to work. One student was heard saying "My mac made the Microsoft controller vibrate". It is great to see students having this much fun and realising there potential, it is this easy to get able to create something which has this much fun.

Now I need to get some wireless adaptors so we can have a wireless controller race.

Concept

I have been working on this for a number of days and today i have a solution working, well a trial solution.

One of the problems I had was that I needed a bluetooth module which I found at Dick Smith Electronics, I came back to school and installed it with the software. First Mistake, don't install the software that you are give with the module, a number of the applications developed for bluetooth hotspot and bluecasting wont be able to use it.

Once I had sorted this out and destroyed a one of my virtual hard drives I was away.

i started off with Proxmity Marketing Light, and managed to send a picture out to my phone, though I found this rather difficult and too locked down as a trial to use.

Next I tried out BlueMagnet and this is great I have managed to get mp3 files sent out to phone, though some phones it does take a rather long length of time to push out a 2 meg mp3 file. The best thing about this is that i have been running it for an hour now and students have been accepting the file. which is kinda bad. But so, so, so cool. i can use this trial for seven days at the moment.

All in all I managed to capture 48 blooth devices, I love being in an environment full of technology and stduenst are always willing to get involved. out of the 48 cellphones, the mp3 was sent to 9 of them. Your phone does not make a sound which is a bit of a problem, you have to be aware that content is being "pushed" out to you.

But is there any NZ company using blue tooth marketing.

Bluetooth

Things you can do with a Bluetooth proximity hotspot?
You can allow people to share files:
What files can I send through an Hotspot ?
Images as .gif or .jpg files
Text as .txt files
Animated images as animated .gif files
Audio as mp3, mp4, wav and ringtones
Video as 3gp or mp4 files
Macromedia Lite as .wmv files
Java Applications as .jar files
Wallpapers
Business Card files and Calendar Event files (.vcf , vcard)
And any file supported by a mobile phone (even .xls, .doc, .pdf ,etc)
Applications (.sis)

Open source bluetooth stack

http://www.bluez.org/

This was found at http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/become-your-own-mobile-marketing-agency-part-two/

juts nee dto find some documentation on how I can use this to integrate it into what I need

one system I found is http://proxiblaster.com/

software

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/AreaBluetooth-Light.shtml

what I am looking has been done before

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1080730.1080736

more on what we are trying to do

Specific pieces at the museum that you would wish to provide more information about, like text about each piece, include a sound clip from the battlefield or maybe a short video of the production process of a piece. The user takes the information with them after leaving the Museum and can enjoy a 're-visit' by viewing files received or share the experience. Information provided adds another dimension to Museums and their exhibitions.

Secrets revealed - the mysteries behind the museum

In the right place at the right time?
We had a mass email sent out to us staff at school where it had in it that Auckland Museum were going to have the behind the scenes exhibit and that staff were invited to go along as a preview to this. So I jumped at the chance, one because I had never been to the museum in Auckland, and two, because I am starting to think how can I be a part of the integration of ICT in the New Zealand Curriculum.
While going through the exhibit I was approached by one of the staff who I got talking to, I got talking about the exhibit and what I found interesting and spooky, I hate loud clocks ticking and they have one.
i also started talking about what technology they had for the exhibit and other exhibits around the museum and this lead to a very interesting discussion. They have just created one of their first interactive/multimedia websites, so I talked about what I had seen at other places and how they used podcasts to describe artists impressions and how the galleries were using that information to educate their customers. Auckland museum have just started to develop these with this exhibit and are looking at furthering these with other educational aspects of the museum. But I started asking and TXT and BlueBlue and how PXT technology couldbe used. I was then asked if I was interested in becoming a member of a educational advisory group that will be meeting at the museum on the 4th September, hey, rugby will be finished around then, so why not.
Then we started talking about how students come in, are there for a day, doing reserach or something to that fact, have a looked around and leave, then teh next class comes in the next day and does the same. Why not introduce electronic worksheets that the student scan use, most have digital camera and work with them, why not use that information so they can take it away in a more useful form. This lead to how this could be carried out, My favorite app at the moments is google apps, Online documents and sites the students can create about a topic and post it up on the museum site so they can use it at school and the museum can use it to show other students what you can do. Its nearly and Virtual Learning Environment which could be another aspect that they could go down. I found out later that they are thinking of this.

But this brings me to my notes,
Use Bluetooth to send out instructions and exercise sheets to the students, pointsof interest, stories, digitial story of peron or object that they can listen to one their phone.
Use Digital resources to record experiences, upload to a VLE so students can take away their day and experiences, share with others.
SMS - ask questions, find a code and txt a number to gain more information, maybe link with telecom/vodafone.
Virtual Museum, when you go to a museum you can't go to everything or to some museums, you can't take a group of students to Invercargill to see the stuff they have down their on the whalers or anything like that. Develop some interest from schools on what you are going to see, "Virtual Field trip" 3D models, objects to take another look at.
PXT gallery, send your photos through
They have some smart boards at he museum in the learning classrooms, how could these be made more use of? How to integrate them with the museum.
how to create an instruction environment for an exhibit,

The secrets revealed
It is a staged walkthrough
What do you do when an exhibit ends?
How can people see past exhibits?

Linking in with other curriculum areas?

Bluetooth options or SMS?
Field trip to the museum to try those experiences out with Year 9/10?
Most schools send classes at a time and then the next class the next day. How can we create a more interactive/developed programme with the technology.

how can we get information on ipods/cellphone through the use of podcasts?
ways of getting podcasts out
Wellington Art Gallery uses podcasts to get information out on exhibits and information on various artists, how could we use the same technology.

Then there was a more detailed explanation upstairs in one of the Learning Classrooms
It is a temporary exhbition
It has learning potiential
Elements - designed
-engaes
-imagination
- threatre set
-uses diaramas?

They use traditional worksheets, workbooks.
Who (were), What (we do), How (we do it) are some of teh questions that this exhibit tries to answer.
There is support material,
They want to retain part of the website for eduction purposes.
Usability
Looking at students creating their stories
Secrets, within secrets
Postcard element on the website that students can create a postcard with various elements on it and email it home so their parents can look at it.
- labels, language that is used.
-expand create their own exhibition, unpack
-make more use of podcasts
- bring the community into the museum
-workbook
-building the exhibition, uses the technology curriculum to create a ICT version.

There are also competitions.

The Secrets revealed website

Google apps in schools

We have been using Google Apps for education for a term now, and have been finding it rather good, our biggest problem is not training or support, but rather our Internet Connections. We are a school of over 1800+ students. 

We have three ADSL connections into the school, all three are locked at 50 Gig of data a month. We constantly hit this with all three accounts and are trying to figure out ways to reduce bandwidth. 

We are on the lookout each day and week for the top websites of the day. Most of these are google sites but it is interesting how many of them are proxy sites for the students to get around our filters. These are a constant problem with student addicted to bebo. But that is another matter. 

It is great to see so many collaborative works in progress. With the ability to share documents the social studies department has become a hive of activity as students work in groups. This has not been able to be handled to great in the past with Microsoft ability, or non ability to do collaborative documents. Also the use of the google apps sites program, to create websites/wikis on topics and have other groups post information on topics they have worked on or provide questions and answers to topics. We are looking at how we can use these in other departments within the school. 

Staff are looking at a 21st century learning environment that is different. 

The ICT committee at school are looking at how to create a combined solution that uses Google Apps for student support - applications on tap but also KnowledgeNET for courses, tracking and support. KnowledgeNET is our Learning Management System. 

Some of our draw backs have not been at school, but more at getting the infrastructure in place. getting our domain host company to create the MX and CNAME records, total of 3 weeks to get done. Getting Google to recognise the K-12 status of our school, took a week and a number of emails back and forth to explain to them how the New Zealand system works. 

Also the management of students, google do not provide a facility to place extra information rather than first name, last name, login name and password, you cannot create extra field like a ID number or year level. 

So it has meant that we do not remove students that have left until the end of the year, it also means that we have to individually find each student at the end of the year and delete the account. So for a roll of 1820+ we have 1950 accounts created on google apps.

programming

I have been getting my year 12 programming students working through Microsoft's code rules, which is a self paced e-learning resource designed to build them from development through to production of application using visual basic. It has been interesting as it requires them to work through prove its and challenges, normally they were able to get through a section of work quite quickly, however they have been slowing down as the information they are required to use gets harder. However, this is not the reason why i write this blog post. 

It because of a comment one of my students said today while trying to sole this problem

Look out! You almost hit that Jack Rabbit crossing the road! 

Do you suppose that rabbit thinks it can live forever? Say, that gives me an idea. 

Suppose rabbits did live forever. Let’s say that there is an island somewhere with lots of vegetation for rabbits, and no predators. 

Suppose two rabbits are placed on the island and that every pair of rabbits has a litter of 4 rabbits. 

So after 1 generation there would be 2 + 4 = 6 rabbits. After two generations there would be 6 + 12 = 18 rabbits.

Show the generation number, the number of rabbits, and the number of rabbits per square foot, assuming the island is one square mile in size and that there are 5280 feet in a mile.

Allow the user to choose the number of generations to show.

How would the rabbit population grow with each generation?

"I hate algebra, but I had to use it to solve one of the problems today. I hate it but it helped me." It enabled him to put what he was working on in class into a more practical use. This is what I like and one of the reasons why it is stated in our programme statement, you need to have good math skills, yet no one believes it, due to they are used to end user programs. They think that computing is word, excel, publisher and powerpoint. Some of them still don't believe that they are the ones that are creating the program, it is because they have not crossed that divide. It is too hard is there favourite saying, but break it down for them, "Paint" the form, define what it is you want each element to do in English, then work on the code and debug the code if need be and then test the working program, it can be that simple. Just do one step at a time and don't look at the large picture.
I have also made a little competition with the students, they were to develop a random generator program, which we used to show how it could be used, it was an interesting lesson, then getting the students to get there random number generator working so they could all have an individual number caused some headaches, as normal, not all students follow instructions at once, which caused a few problems. Next comes the chocolate fish awards for most creative use of the button. I am still thinking about how I can do this but it should be fun.

Education Google Apps

I have been working on this for over a term now, first starting to get people in the school to see that google apps was a good alternative of providing email to students. Then getting a pilot group together to trial and use the google app environment within the school and outside.

I looked around at a number of  alternatives of providing student email. Exchange, live@edu teh microsoft branded site and google apps. I think it was that google was providing this and that most students are used to using google's environment took my liking.

But this is not why I am writing this. It has been three weeks since emailing our domain host provider for changes to be made to our domain. After three weeks of emailing them back and forth last night I check the DNS system to find that our requests have been made active. We can now provide the students with a simple web address and away they can go. Now I just need to go through and find the old csv file with hopefully a last name so I can go back and find the student ID number that is associated with it and import from there. 

But we need to start getting this out at school, I am thinking of writing a php file to offer this to year 13 students through the intranet homepage through a banner ad, it is a simple way of getting a year group to work with it and find any problems. But we also need our network use agreement to go out to parents. 

Success

The first trial test was a success, with the 15 students that managed to bring their student ID cards to school. Though i now realease I may need a complete class to push the maximum connections that site5 allow.

two issues that the students brought up, index page only had DD/MM/YY listed as their password, however it is in as DD/MM/YYYY
Year 13 studenst cannot login in, however I knew this as they will not be here next year.
Also they have suggested teh teh list of subjects be in alphabtical order.

And need to check speeling through majority of the page for simple spelling mistakes, like chocie = choice

Programming problems in High Schools

We use a managed network system at our school which limits the students ability to run .exe files.

I have been using gamemaker through a virtual environment and discovered problems that would not allow students to run the executable in the virtual environment, due to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 would not allow a graphics card greater than 16meg to be created, gamemaker requires a 64 meg graphics card or greater. We solved this by enabling an area on the network to run .exe files so the students could test.

The other programming software environments we teach run fine in virtual environments, visual basic and visual c# run well in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, but this does not have USB support.

When my year 13 students asked whether we could create games for the xbox 360 through the XNA creators kit using the skills they have gained in Visual C#, I thought sure, this sounds like something we can do and works in well with Achievment Standards and the competition/learning resources for STUDENT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DESIGN COMPETITION located at http://www.nzfact.co.nz/education.html.

After a couple of months figuring out that Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 won't run the xbox 360 for windows game controllers, installing vmware player and getting all the systems working and testing we have encountered our next problem, vmware player does not support directx3d, there is no drivers or solutions around.

We cannot create the exectable file and copy it through to another area as XNA reequires you to debug the program first. How are other schools providing computer programming experiences, do you dual boot, run liveCD's run off USB sticks? have a complete computer science lab that is setup just for those classes?

Your help would be appreciated.

Note: 28/7/2008 While reading Lance Armstrongs book, it's not about the bike I came up with the answer for my troubles, give the students privileged user rights on the machine. they cannot access anywhere else or so anything on the network due to permissions, but user rights on the machine might just work. I just need to work out what machines they privileged  use and grant them access, no messy creating different user rights or anything like that. Why did I not think of that 6 months ago. I think it because I had my mind on something completely different. Shows what reading a book can do for you. Also we can test out the web browsers that we are going to create...

todays meeting

Todays meeting went well, noone has any serious problems with the system and what it is doing. Just need to go through the whole list of subjects with the deputy principlal and weed some of them out.

There has been questions asked whether I can export the returning, not returning, not sure details out of the system and into KAMAR, I looked at this after school and have figured out I can export the details out, will just come up with the csv import. I'll just try and do a test import tomorrow with some year 9 data I have to put in from last term.

I have been told I still have to apply some lip stick to the program just to make it a little bit nicer looking.

Also I was asked to get some software working for the food technology department. We have a multimedia CD from vegetables.co.nz in reference to the education section. 
http://vegetables.co.nz/resources-index.php

I had been asked to get this working on the school network, the Link from the main application on the root folder on the CD loads straight from the CD, however when you go more in depth in the folder then you can get the program going by running master.exe I love shockwave flash multimedia development.

subject choice bugs

working through the bugs in it, testing to see whether I can take subjects that i know are hidden is one of the bugs

SELECT code, name FROM table where year = " .$year." or year = ".$prevyear." and hide = 0 order by year desc

shoudl have worked, however it ended up to need some () in place to help with the and or statement

SELECT code, name FROM table where (year = " .$year." or year = ".$prevyear.") and hide = 0 order by year desc
is correct.

Now 13STU (13 Study) is hidden so they can not select it more than once. :)

I have a meeting with the development team tomorrow at lunchtime. This I hope will go smooth and they will come back with a few modifications. If they don't come back with modification I know that I have done something wrong, as they should be asking about features or they have thought of something that I haven't.

One of the issues that we have is that the curriculum guide has been developed without listing the subject codes that I use throughout my program, these are five digit codes that will go back into the student management system. What we are going to do is print a list off.

Also required is a list of the hidden codes so we can hide the information. However we need a way of getting the deaf and richard centre students in.

A check of all the information that we have in the subjects table. The problems we have faced the most is around 12 science with two 12SCI subjects, and 12 technology apparel which has two cost listings in it.

It needs to be pointed out in the system that this is preliminary and not the final subject choice as they may not have the conditions of entry, there might be a clash, class sizes might be too small or too large. This statement is being written up tonight and will be implemented into the system tomorrow morning during the ICT PD development time.

after the holidays

I have good reaction to my subject choice app with a number of people commenting how well and simple it is to work. It is now just the cosmetic changes that need to be carried out. The positioning of text, school logos and the words preliminary plastered all over it. The reason for these words is that it I was to create an indication of numbers not a final tally. The main questions I have had today is over printing of subject lists and numbers and letters back to the students. These I have said were not in the initial version as we are using KAMAR to do all the rest of the backend stuff. Why reinvent the wheel. Though I will probably throw in a numbers this just to see how things look. Just for me...

Also having to put up with the paint fumes in my classroom all today, I started to have spots in front of my eyes and things started looking awfully bright. I have a headache which is causing me some frustration at the moment.

Also we have developed a plan for the year 12 programming achievement standards and a topic.

Students have difficulty retaining information in some of their subjects, develop a range of tools to help other students in their studies. this will require them to develop some teaching notes or review notes and others (will get back to this later)

Learning, Students need to major in Learning

I am currently reading a blog that has been written in regards to a Google Blog post that went on thier blog this week, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/our-googley-advice-to-students-major-in.html

In the blog that I got the link from http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-tells-students-to-major-in.html
In their blog they talk about students working through problems to find a solution, they need to think outside the square and move away from point and click teaching. Students today need to have persistence and willingness to work very hard, this is someting that many of them are lacking. You can have a engaging classroom that is also a challenging classroom.
Engagement in class, how do you provide engagement in class when the students dont want to be there...

There are some projects that they people in thearticle talk about,  Flast Classroom project, Horizon Project and Digiteen project. The Digiteen project sounds engaging. The didteen blog is located at http://digiteen.wikispaces.com/
this focuses on the digitial citizenship programme, which sounds like what we are looking at with our new curriculum
The main website is located at http://coe.k-state.edu/digitalcitizenship/index.htm I wish to try and find a location of the book to read. Also the digiteen project sounds like something I might try with my seniors next year to develop a learning outcome with the juniors that could integrate what netsafe have developed as part of their Cybercitizenship Pathway, outlined on the netsafe.org.nz website.

Just an idea that may need some more thought and design

Library Competition

I am working on getting my clients for the classes Achievement Standards, I am looking at the students developing a solution for literacy in the school. This is the year 13 web design class. One is for the library to try and promote the borrowing of books through various means. They have to design a whole campaign around it. From posters, cards, through to a web site. That should make the design students happy. They might even be able to combine it into their design work in their class. I will have to take to the design teacher about it. The other involves the use of flash and some sound recording. Click on a sentence and it will read it out. This will involve patience and is quite simple to develop. Though they will have a rough client to work with.

I have been working through new zealand library websites, a number of them have been doing some good competitions encouraging teenagers to read books at there library, fill in the details and work from there, Invercargill City Library has by the looks of it just recovered its password to its blog site and started posting again, the first time in two years. Which brings up when developing a website it has to be easy to use as well as maintained. If you want to create a web presence you have keep it going. It is no use just using it once then forgetting about it. You need to keep your audience and content up to date. Manukau City Libraries has put some work into their site this year with Manix 2. This seems to be going well and they have put some thought into their design and development. i hope that they keep it up. It would be interesting to see what your local city library is doing to encourage teens to read. For me, this was all started when waitakere city libraries started their books in the wild scheme through the local high schools, that is where I think it would be great for our students to do the same, develop something that they can start at our school. it is just a short time frame. Which raises a question, how much time do you give them for a level 3 achievement standard.

As I said before, I have gone through a number of city libraries websites and had a look, I have print screened these pages and put them in a powerpoint presentation which I have put up on google docs, I have still to do more work on this before putting it out as a resource pack to my students.

The year 13 programming class will have to develop a game for Intellectual property as part of a campaign to help promote it. thought it might be nice to use XNA development. The other would work to the ones that are more interested in Hardware, to develop a wireless hotspot for a motel. They have to look at all the equipment required, setup and installation as well as documentation.

I hope that we can get through all this, i have 12 weeks as well as exam time, though i am going to have to come up with an exam for all these classes. Something that is simple enough to mark and something that others can understand.

I still have to organise a meeting with team solutions about intergrating what I am doing into a more defined subject. It is just a problem when you do not know what your client are going to be or how they will work. I have to get this more defined and talk to them about what we are planning to do.

I am only doing this because twitter is down for maintenance for an hour, and I just needed to get something down on paper, ok, keybaord. The other issue I had today was that the hotfixes for the compuiter still had not been allocated, i had been told they had been. emailled the outside support desk and found that they were waiting for the servers to be restarted before they allocated the packages. I hope I do not get told off on Monday about this.

online subject system

Version 2008.3a

the ability to hide a subject from being shown in the student list is now available. When you change the subject details through the teacher part you can change a hide code from 0 shown, to 1 hidden. Later on I could make this a combo box where it shows the words instead of a 1 or 0.

But this makes it a little less confusing when students already have english selected for them, they cannot select another english subject again.

These changes have now been made tothe live server.

Require a list of subjects that cannot select, especially when it comes to esl english. Though how do we put in richard centre and deaf centre students, this question is still to be answered.

Notes
I have been thinking about the maths, english, science question that was posed to me early on and it was decided that it wasn't going to be developed under this version, however, if I was to develop it I think it would be a valuable part of the system. Being able to say that if your were english you could assign students to a subject, since all the information is in one column of data the UPDATE statement would be quite easy to do, though if the students had not selected their subjects you would need to use the INSERT...ON DUPLICATE KEY statement that I used when changing their subjects to allow multiple times.
All the csv files look for is whether it is filled in or not, SELECT details from table where filled = 1;
They would have something in the export to KAMAR file as their would be information in the transaction table. It would be just their compulsory subjects.
How would I want it to look, would you bring in all students at a time, or develop a login for teachers in a subject to change where they think the students should go. You would also have to include the previous years english class in the information, and at the moment this is spread over 6 fields.
Another question: I have to ask is how do they want the 11FIN/11HEA/11GYM details to be entered.

subject system version 0.3

just in the process of uploading the work to the live site now for testing, I think I am going to break it, as the site does not allow persistent connection, so i may have to rewrite some of the code to put a mysql close statement in at the end of each query

So this could make it version 0.3, then if all the changes need to be made 0.3a

We will see with my amazing upload speed of 0.1K a sec.

It has taken me a while to get the site going, I had a problem with getting the sql data imported, it was producing a rails error. Going through the support tickets with the company they explained that it could not be carried out one way, and instead got me going through my site and through a port at the end. This proved to work, and all 372K of data was imported correctly.

I had a problem with the database not working, this was fixed by removing the user and recreating the user again. All seemed to work after that.

It is now LIVE

This is now been taken off the development server and made live to do some checking that it will work(issues identified above), as i have just put it on to make sure it works, I have not updated the version number yet, will probably go to 2008.3a

Have created some extra users and emailed details out to certain staff for feedback and ideas. I know I have to make some cosmetic changes but this was mainly to check that the functionality works.

What is allowed under Technology Achivement Standards

I have just had a phone call from a client wanting a wireless hotspot setup for his motel, it requires that it be traffic shaped, logins, access controls, and the like. Under Technology Achievment Standards is this allowed?

There is some software that has been developed, it would require the students to implement a solution. Build the computer, install all the software, set it up and write a manual on everything he did.

AS90620 Develop a one-off solution to address a client issue

6 A client issue is one that relates to a person or group.  The client cannot be the student.  However, if the client is representing a group, eg sports team manager, the student may be a non-leading member of this group, eg team member.  The issue must generate a range of needs or opportunities for technological practice.

8 A one-off solution is a technological outcome that is developed to meet the need or realise the opportunity as defined in the brief.  Implementation of a one-off solution should be evaluated in terms of its fitness for purpose in addressing the identified 
client issue. 

http://hotcakes.sourceforge.net/

It is a pity there is no phone number to ring or definitive person to ask.

subject choice system

Version 2.0d
I have been thinking over the night that there is no security on modifying subjects or seeing who has or hasn't completed filling in the form. I have implemented a teachers table that hold first name, last name, login and password in md5 format and included session ids so that noone can make changes if they haven't logged in.

This is included in the teacher folder within the program, so it seperates the login form, and all the teacher stuff in another area for admin, or should I call it admin?

I have taken out majority of the development codes that I have used to check the passing of variables and added comments to various other parts in case I have to make cahnges.

I have to load up dreamweaver and do a search for all login-form.php and change this to index.php

online subject system

Version 0.2b
This was getting all the exporting systems working, these were mentioned in the previous post, these involved the export to KAMAR file, as well as who has not filled in their options.

Version 0.2c
In this version we have improved the display of the system, the top section that displays the users details.

Also am looking at including a print option so students can print off their options, this will be availble in a pdf format using the software below.
http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/

Also have to look at changing the versioning of the system to include the year, so we know hen it was last worked on.

All subjects have now been entered, working on getting the teach-edit system up and working, one to rip the information out of the database and insert it into the text fields, and two to submit it back into the database. I am having some difficultly getting the information back in with my UPDATE syntax, will sleep on it tonight and see what I can do on Thursday. I have the fckeditor in basic mode so all you can do is bold, italic, list number and unordered list working on two of the fields, content and assessment. the rest use textarea and input type = text html tags.

I have backed up the sql in case I break it over the next couple of days.
- I need to look at other pdf creators, I am unsure what I need to do to get this working, and what to put in it. I basically need to wait for the stakeholders to come back to work before continuing, but then I will have probably run out of time.

Another question is why i am looking at using pdf to print it out, maybe i should be looking at using print/css which would do the same

one of the things that I also need to do is print off screen shots so I can get someone to draw on them where they want objects to go. I can remember some of the changes that were suggested but not all.

Version 2.0c
Subject modification is now functioning in a webpage rather than just in phpmyadmin, you can select the subject and then submit, this will bring up the details of the subject and allow editing. Changes are saved. One issue with not forgetting to change the where the code = xxxx this was set to 12pro.

Notes
Thinking about changing the version to 0.2d with the changes to the teachers side of things. However I have one more thing to work on which is the ability to print a form off with the students details, options and previous options with a number of words that mention you may make changes up to this date...

Have to check to see if I meet the specifications of this project, I need to find my viusal diary to be able to read my notes. Also to go back through the blog postings to see if I have implemented ideas when working through.

I have been thinking about the hours that I have worked on this
Friday 9am to 5pm
Monday 9am to 5pm
Tuesday 10:30 to 5pm
If I was a student doing this as a project, how many weeks would that be approx 22 hours of class time, not including work I have done at home plus the 8 hours I did at the start to get the basics working for the beta meeting, 30 hours. Basically 8 weeks of work.