Day: October 29, 2007

eduBuzz Open Meeting

Today’s eduBuzz Open Meeting provided as usual a rich source of ideas for next steps and feedback from a range of activities over the past month.

We were pleased to welcome Alison Hunton, a parent whose two daughters Alice and Ellie are already amongst our youngest bloggers.

Topics covered included:

  • Internet skills for staff

As use of the internet becomes more embedded in school activities this is highlighting an ongoing need for training in some fairly basic web skills for staff. A useful resource for WordPress training is the Stuck With ICT site developed by Andrew Brown of LTS.

  • Internet safety for parents

Ollie Bray reported on the internet safety session recently run for Musselburgh parents. This training, based on CEOP standards, is planned for roll-out to clusters.

  • Comment spam

There were a couple of reports of nuisance comment spam, and the possibility of adding a Captcha check was discussed.

  • WordPress upgrade

A few points of feedback from the recent software upgrade arose, including the loss of the coloured text facility.

Support new web users amongst staff?

I found out today that there are staff trying to explore edubuzz who are still so unfamiliar with the web that they worry about clicking the wrong thing and breaking something, or about ending up somewhere and not being able to get back again.

No one has yet fed these points back in person: they came out of a meeting with Hilery Williams and Eleanor Carnell of Support For All today about making edubuzz more accessible.

This is good news in terms of the increase in audience, but it maybe means we need to cater more for the needs of this group. For example, our Support Wiki at https://www.edubuzz.org/support currently targets an audience who are already past that stage. We don’t provide help, for example, in using Ctrl-Z to undo actions in Windows.

Ideas from the meeting included some home page options to explain terminology like blogs. The home page is currently being worked on, and these points will be used to inform that work.

It’s clear that there’s also scope to extend CPD to include foundations of web use. This could include such things as browser commands, use of the mouse and simple searching.