Here's a few of my thoughta about whar Mr L said: "As promised here is a brief report of our very productive meeting."

"We brainstormed a number of ideas relating to the use of ICT to support teaching and learning. Here they are in no particlular order."

"Our school website www.dunbar.org.uk/dgs is already having a very significant impact upon the the school and yet we all recognise there is still a great deal of work to do."

I've been working on the dgs website for a few months now after coming in knowing absolutely nothing about how any of it is done, I've got the hang of maintaining it now and am about to start trying to take it to the next level (probably with a lot of help from Grahame Smith from the traders association) but what I really need to do is make sure everything I have picked up is passed on to younger pupils so that the site doesn't start to die every new year. One way to do this could be to set up pages for each year group that are looked after by people in that year, I wouldn't mind helping out at some sort of club on a Friday afternoon for this. It would also help to make the site more relevant to younger members of the school.

"We are exploring the idea of having a web-based personal learning plan for every student, which would allow students to develop a secure web-based folder in which they could keep information about their learning preferences, learning strategies, personal targets, interests, schools reports (which could be uploaded by the school) - perhaps with read access for parents. This took us onto the idea of a virtual schoolbag in which students could keep all their school work from throughout their school careers. This would be particularly helpful for those students who have a tendency to lose information or to be disorganised. It would also reinforce the notion of education being a progression and students could actually see the extent of theirlearning as the years go by."

Every pupil already has on online folder on schoolmaster which they can login to from our home page. It has e-mail and an online folder with private and public sections. However it isn't an easy system to use and it isn't very reliable. I would prefer to have all of these things on our own site but wouldn't know where to begin. I've been playing about with some free cgi scripts I found for password protecting pages but I don't really understand them and so haven't had much success. I thought that maybe if I worked out how to do this I might then be able to move on to something more useful. Any ideas?

"We were most excited by the idea of students having their own web pages. Duncan intoduced me to the idea of wblogging and I was immediately attracted by its apparent simplicity and potential."

I hadn't heard of weblogging until Mr L mentioned it on Friday and when I saw this I realised it's pretty similar to the forum that we are going to be adding to the school site next Friday (fingers crossed!) The one we're going to use is the same as the forum on the Dunbar site, where you can set up as many administrators as you like who can delete entries (and edit them i think)as well as being able to ban entries from certain ip addresses, it also has a swear filter. If we eventually have a page for every student then there would need to be this many controls because you know what some of them are like.

[I know, I deleted a huge chunk of what he said here, but I don't really have anything interesting to say about it!]

"We would like to establish a pilot project for volunteeer groups of students to undertake a weblogging initiative. The conversant software seems to have real potential for schools. My only concern is the security angle for young people and we would probably need to have some means of ensuring only those individuals who have password clearance can read the web logs."

Yeah, I agree, there needs to be lots of controls on what is said because it really doesn't look good when you get the usual neds contributing their thoughts. (ha! as if they have thoughts!)

"Finally, we agreed that the two key criteria must be that the system does not place any burden upon teachers and the system is VERY user friendly for students."

Yeah, I agree again, teachers have enough to do (except Mr L who just seems to wander aroung the school saying 'hi' to everybody)

"I would welcome the thoughts of current undergraduates and school students. "

Well here you are - my thoughts for what they are worth, (probably not much I know, but at least I try)

cheers,

SM