Digitalkatie's blog

Sick and twisted

I haven't been blogging much recently, in fact I haven't been surfing or using the computer much either. I'm currently on sick leave with pain in my pelvis and hips. This means I'm sore when I stand up after sitting for a long time. I also have problems walking too much or too fast, and I can't find a comfortable position to sleep in most nights. Fun, huh!

Teaching very quickly became too difficult. I couldn't walk up and down the class quickly enough to help pupils who were stuck, and I was finding even the fifth year class tiring. I couldn't cope as well as normal with cover classes because I was tired and grumpy, and because it was more difficult to use proximity to reduce off-task behaviour.

This is my third week on sick leave, and I finally had my appointment with the physiotherapist yesterday. I now have exercises to do (nothing amazing, just holding my tummy in ten times for ten seconds and doing pelvic floor exercises). I also have a funky big white velcro belt now, which doesn't really help the pain in my pelvis but it's great for stopping my hip pain.

While I was at the New Royal Infirmary I visited the exhibition in the gallery there. I think it's called "Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds" and its work by the pupils at 'Forthill' High School. It was great to see such good work from pupils being shown and it really brightens up that part of the hospital.

I'm managing to keep myself busy though, slowly pottering round the flat. Poor Sean has to do huge amounts of paper recycling (three crates worth almost every weekend) as I'm avoiding lifting anything. I've also not been tempted by daytime TV (if I'm going to have pain after sitting watching telly then I'd rather do it with company while watching Heroes!).

I've also been doing some work to help out with the mobile phone project. I meet John and Annabelle once a week and they tell me their gripes, then I either fix the phones or coordinate with Gaist to solve the issues. It works well - I have the time to do this work and I can do it at my own speed.

I have contemplated whether a scooter might be the answer! I could quickly zip up and down without walking. Annabelle suggested roller skates (and drew a picture of me with a big tummy and wheels on my feet) but I think being almost nine months pregnant is probably not the best time to learn to skate! Alternatively does anyone have a segway they're not using that I could borrow for a few weeks ;-)

Borough film debates

Following the news that David Hasslehoff is considering doing the film version of Knight Rider, the debate in the pub tonight turned to who would you cast if you were making a film version of the A-Team?

Murdoch - Jim Carrey or Ellen De Generes
Face - Will Smith or Brad Pitt
Mr T - The Rock or Vin Diesel
Hannibal - Mel Gibson
Bad guy - Kevin Spacey, Burt Reynolds or John Cussack

Pockets

I ran out of trousers that fit me so my mum took me to Mothercare and got me a couple more pairs. Like most womans clothing none of the trousers have pockets. At least they don't have fake pockets. It really annoys me when clothes designers decide that a pocket would look good but only if it's a fake one so you can't put anything in it and ruin the 'line' of the outfit.

Fake pockets on baby clothes I could understand though. At three months Sproglet probably isn't going to need somewhere to carry his mobile phone and bus pass! Why do so many baby clothes have REAL pockets?! If nothing else it means it will take longer to dry the clothing when there are three layers of material instead of one.

I'll also be pretty flabergasted if Sproglet not only realises that his little hands are cold but that he can put his hands in these pocket things - even if he had the coordination to do that! ...although maybe I'll be proved wrong in a couple of months time :-)

Mobile project parents night

Yay! Our moble project has started - the pupils finally have the phones in their hands!

The parents meeting went well. I did a presentation about why we are doing this and how the phones will be used in class. I also talked about the contents of the Acceptable Use Policy. Keith Archer from Gaist then did the Big Brother "we are watching what you are doing" speech (in a nice way ;-)

I expected more fuss about the £36 we were asking parents (or pupils) to pay before we gave them the phone, but everyone was OK about it. We have done some negotiations about the timing of the payments with some families, mainly because it's now Christmas coming up.

I also expected comments from the pupils about the web monitoring, but they all accepted it, and Keith's talk seemed to reassure a lot of the parents.

The system Gaist have developed lets us see every web page viewed by a pupil. We can block individual pages or sites from being viewed by an individual pupil, a group or everyone.

We can also do things like monitor time of data use, so if a particular pupil is always tired in class, we can look and see that they are surfing till 3am. We can then block that pupil from accessing data during a time period, eg 10pm till 7am. Pretty good!

I'm glad I have a light day today, although finger crossed that I don't get any support calls. I'll also be boxing up the old phones that we borrowed for the staff ready to go back. Very embarrasingly the school doesn't have a courier contract so we've been dependent on te goodwill of Gaist to arrange couriers. Twice as embarrasing when the council still haven't got round to paying the bill for the phone order!

Stork delivery training and delivery of mobiles

The new mobiles got delivered today! Alex from Gaist phoned me while I was waiting for the bus home to find out if everything is OK with them. I asked about the username and password for the data access. He told me the password and said the username is written on the back of the battery. Unfortunately I had to wait until I got home and culd watch the Youtube video on how to open the back of the TyTN II phones before I could use it!

Sean and I are off for our first Parenting education classes tonight. I'm not really looking forward to it. It's in the middle of Corstorphine, and I wasn't very sure how to get there. Out comes the new phone and Google Maps very quickly shows me the street. What is very cool though is being able to turn on the satellite image view and see that it's in a grassy area, not surrounded by houses as I'd presumed, and I can zoom in and see the bus stop markings on the road so we know where to get off the bus!

Mobile magic

Last week I had a bit of a manic week trying to keep the mobile project on track.  On Tuesday night Sean and I were up till after midnight trying to get the 'master' phone image ready to be shipped away the next day.  We had one TyTN II phone and we were setting up all the programs and settings up on that, and Gaist have now used that to copy onto all the new phones that the kids will get on Wednesday. 

The next day I spent all my spare time (and quite a bit of class time too) trying to organise couriers etc.  My break time was spent on the phone to Gaist and half my lunchtime was spent dealing with the courier (a very nice Australian man who pointed out that his school in Australia made all the parents have a computer with internet connection.  It was a private school though).  On Thursday I stayed at home and slept to recover - I can't cope with overdoing things any more.  My fifth years quite happily started the new SQA coursework task without me!

Anyway, we will be getting the phones this week from Gaist.  On Wednesday evening we are having a parents night to tell them all about the project, get contracts signed, and distribute the phones.  I'm hoping it goes really well.  The kids are starting to get excited about it again after the long wait to finally get to this stage.

Last night I got round to installing Visual Studio on my computer (I splashed out recently on legit educational copies of that and Office 2007).  I managed to do the Int 2 Computing coursework task in about half an hour, so I'm now quite happy my pupils will manage it.  It won't be too easy for them, which is good.  It's similar to tasks we've been doing in class, but they're going to have to think hard to join up everything they've learned.

This morning I thought I'd have a play about with Visual Studio's ability to create projects for mobile devices.  It's brilliant!!  I just set up the objects on the form and copied and pasted the code from my coursework task project and it worked!  I tried it on an emulator first, and then on the phone.  As you can see I'll need to figure out how to round to two decimal places, but hey never mind - it's not on the marking scheme!

I had read about programming for Pocket PC and though that it was quite restrictive.  The book said you couldn't have buttons, for example.  I am amazed how easy it really is though!  I now have a CAB file with my program running on it :-)

I really wish the timing of the mobile project was better.  We are just finishing programming and really should move onto the next topic when all we will want to do is play about programming for the new phones!