A Halcyon Tech Blog

When I re-built the school website a couple of years ago, one of the things I wanted on the front page was a House Point tracker to help increase the friendly competition between Houses. Every time a student gets positive points (e.g. Praise Points = 2 points, Star Student = 10 points) or negative points (for behavioural issues usually) they add or subtract from the House point total - for anyone unfamiliar with this, think Harry Potter!

I thought I'd post something different this week - some of my artwork! As a Star Wars fan (see my profile picture - that is actually me in the armour!) I wanted to try adding some Star Wars into my paintings.

This was another fun one brought about by Covid. Every year we have a "Mentoring Day" at the school. On these days, there are no lessons and students only come in (ideally with their parent(s)/guardian(s)) for their pre-booked meeting slot with their tutors to discuss how everything is going and set targets for the rest of the year. With the added complication of them being on remote learning at the time, we couldn't even go through the questions with them easily. So the compromise was to send the questions to the parent/guardians in advance, then on the day they would have a five minute video chat with the tutors to go through their answers and set their goals. To make this easier for the staff, the questions would be sent using Google Forms and then put together into a concise Word document for each student with their answers and targets that could be uploaded to our Student tracker system.

This was a fun one and you can see the finished product for yourself at exam.alns.co.uk . We needed a way for students who are entitled to use a laptop for their exams to be able to use their Chromebooks. The caveats were: They were not allowed access to the public internet. They were not allowed any form of spell or grammar checking. They had to be able to save their work to USB. In the past we had just used Windows laptops set to boot in to notepad with the proxy set to 127.0.0.1:80 as a simple way of doing this. But now, with every student having (or having access to) a Chromebook, we needed to make it work there. We searched ages but could not find any way of meeting all three goals (without spending a fortune on overkill exam packages). So we decided to build our own!

(Not real data) This was my first "big" coding project at the school. The mission, as given to me, was to create a way for teachers to get a succinct, one page overview for each of their classes, with all the breakdowns required for their data analysis. At the time, I had not yet begun to learn Python and most of my programming experience was in Visual Basic, Java, PHP and Javascript. As the data was Excel-based, my immediate thought was to use Visual Basic as I could then have the option of developing it into a full plugin in future (which was actually done by a colleague later on).

Over the first week of the Easter break, I was determined to try and get my Level 1 and Level 2 Google Certified Educator certificates.

That's probably the third most-asked question I get (after "Who are you?" and "How did you get in here?" ). The short answer is that I'm a member of SLT ( the Senior Leadership Team ), primarily responsible for steering the direction and development of technology within the school to aid Teaching and Learning.