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A while ago I proposed A PirateBox for TeachMeet?. Several kind folk donated a fiver and I ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router from an amazon reseller.

First problem was that I did not notice that it was shipping from the USA, it arrive the day before TeachMeet SLF11. I didn’t arrive home until late in the evening, but rolled up by sleeves to sort it out. Problem 2 was a USA power supply. This I rectified at Lunchtime the next day and settled down in a corner of the SECC to sort out the box. Apart from the fact I had plugged the mac into the WAN port rather than the LAN port(or the other way round) I didn’t have a wired connection to the network. A major fail, I realised the port problem the next day after TeachMeet and though ti would now be plain sailing.

Yesterday evening I followed the instructions on PirateBox DIY OpenWrt – David Darts Wiki which went, I though pretty well. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router, I had a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH2 wireless router! The router was bricked.

I decided to unbrick the router using instructions I found: WZR-HP-G300NH Router: Firmware flash and brick recovery through TFTP After a few tries I noticed extra OS X help in a comment, but still failed. I decided to leave it until today.

This afternoon I had another go, musing again on the comment:

the Mac uses carrier detect to automatically bring network interfaces up and down, and your ethernet interface needs to be up and running at the moment you power the router on, or you’ll miss the little window when the tftp transfer can happen…

I decided to try using linux running on my macbook under virtualbox. The mac had at least given me an “Unsuport MODEL” error after using tftp to flash the firmware, but the virtualbox linux idea got me nowhere.

I’ve now google “Unsuport MODEL” error which has lead to a couple of interesting looking pages:
DD-WRT Forum :: View topic – wzr-hp-g300nh2 bricked and
DD-WRT Forum :: View topic – problems recoberying buffalo wzrhpg300nhv2 which I am leaving until tomorrow.

Based on hope rather than experience I would like t oget the box up and running at teachmeet strathclyde edition.

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Two years ago David Noble and myself started a open to all podcasting project: SLFtalk, “a project to gather the voices of educators attending the Scottish Learning Festival 2009“.

The idea was to hear from a range of folk attending SLF 2009, gathering their experiences and opinions. It was, in my opinion a success.

Shortly after SLF09 we took the idea forward with EDUtalk – Audio publishing by educators, using mobile devices 1 and over the last two years and we have had 332 audio files posted on EDUtalk.cc.

This year it looks like LTS Education Scotlandare joining in the fun. They have a AudioBoo channel, Glow Radio and it looks like they are going to be tagging their boos so that they will be picked up by EDUtalk. AudioBoo is only one of the ways you can add your voice to EDUtalk.

There is an ongoing open invitation to anyone interested in Education to add their voice to EDUtalk.

Obviously it would be great to get some reports and thoughts about the Scottish Learning Festival or #EduScotICT from a wide a range of voices as possible.

Instructions for adding your audio to EDUtalk are on the site: How to EDUtalk and both David (@parslad) and I (@johnjohnston) are happy to help or try and answer any questions.

If you are going to SLF11 please pick up your phone and EDUtalk.

1. I’ve blogged about this a fair bit↩

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90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don’t use it at all.

“90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands,” Russell said.

via theatlantic.com

Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic spotted on swissmiss | Digital Literacy

Training teachers I find there are still some who do not know about this (or ⌘ + C for copy, ⌘ + v paste etc). I am not sure how this has slipped past NOF, cpd etc but is it going to be hard for the Minister’s vision to come true without these sorts of simple skills becoming more widespread?

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We still live in a world where more teachers do not use ICT as an integral part of their classroom practice than do. Barriers to use include the rigid timetable of secondary schools, the lack of computers or other devices in most classrooms and the failure in many cases to link ICT to relevant CPD The goal for hardware should never be “One Computer per Child” but should be “Access when Required”. Good open access wifi throughout the school buildings coupled with allowing pupils to use their own devices, smartphones, tablets, netbooks or whatever would at least partially overcome that barrier.

via fkelly.co.uk

Incisive & concise. The only bit I wonder about is the byo, not sure how the staff who lack skills would cope with multiple devices, OSs etc. Sometime taking a class through a glow activity using 2 different browsers can cause confusion.

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We know a lot of you were perfectly happy with Posterous and wouldn’t want us to change a thing. Rest assured, with Posterous Spaces you can keep doing everything you’ve been doing with yesterday’s service. Plus we’ve added many cool new features to enjoy

via blog.posterous.com

I like this way of updating. The up and coming Glow update will not be as smooth but I hope the new glow service will be both flexible, able to add new features and evolutionary rather than revolutionary in the future.

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Turn off, be quiet and think. It’s OK, I promise

via 52tiger.net

This is a great post. I guess we are a long way from stopping pupils being bored in school. I do wonder if the new curriculum is building in any quite time. I recently talked to a teacher trialing nintendo DSi in class and was surprised to hear the idea that a spell of maths on the DSi gave the children a quiet spell in the midst of their active maths. I know my mind works differently when I am cut off and value those times. Back in my childhood I am sure my mind ran riot during quiet times in my learning as we cranked through a repetitive task be it a big page of fractions or binka.

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I want to tell them that the iPad is not the future of education, it’s the present of education. If we consign the iPad to the realms of the future, then we are implicitly saying that it’s not for right here, right now, today. We’re saying that we can postpone the task of seriously engaging with the educational and social impact of ubiquity of Internet-connected computing.

via speirs.org

I am wondering about the graph of computer to pupil ratios, pulled in by freedom of information requests (see Fraser’s post)

But there are lots of different reasons for reading this post by @fraserspeirs.

I am with him all the way on the need for more hardware for pupils in our schools, still wondering where it will come from and how long it would take us to turn round our eduTanker if someone comes up with a radical model.

I am also wondering with Adrewburrett: even if it were 1:1 would the majority of pupils still use the tech meaningfully if teachers lacked skills?.