A Halcyon Tech Blog

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.