A Milling Machine and The Web Club

19:43 15/10/98

Trip to Gt Yarmouth with PE and GC for more video conferencing fun. Meeting didn't take long so they offered us the chance to have an experiment with the machinery. I comandeered the Apricot and quickly made a drawing with the CAD/CAM programme. This was saved to a disc and then transferred to a computer linked to the industrial strength milling machine which proceeded to spend 20 minutes cutting out my image to the depth of 1mm on a piece of orange perspex. Some joshing over the complexity and abstraction of my image as I am an art teacher amongst DT teachers here. The sort of meeting I prefer - one where I get to make something and take it home afterwards. More Blue Peter.

Start Web Club at lunchtime with a small group of Y7 pupils. Talk them through it and use the new button which allows everyone in the room to see the one screen I'm working on. Finish them off tomorrow.

Doesn't look like a viable large scale or long term option though it does have its advantages. At the moment we don't have a web maker programme at school as yet so this is the only way to make a page as yet.We'll have to try and find one that pupils can use.

I also make up a key page for the pages we made yesterday for the governers meeting this afternoon. Also pin up all of the splendid plug images made by the Y8 pupils this and last week. They look pretty good on the art room wall. I show the boss the linked pages that the kids have done and we talk about the problems of ISPs and wether we can afford it or not. I also get a permission letter typed up for the kids to get signed if they want to make pages so that we are coverd.

Spend some time with Scott during computer club working on his web page. We make a transparent gif which soups up the title a lot. At lunchtime I run a web club which goes quite well - we get a few pieces finished. I think they need to be finessed as regards spelling and punctuation. I also start to feel uncomfortable about the kids writing about themselves and go through and edit the pages this evening. Apparently there are some guidelines floating about. No addresses is obvious - I don't put my address in this stuff. There seems to be some debate as regards photographs of the kids. I'm not concerned at the moment with a beta test site with only 54 visits to date and no chance of an accidental visit but it will become an issue as we go more public. Not to mention the issues regarding controlling what comes in when we wire up.

Apparently my wall display of Y8 plug drawings made on the computers in Paint and my linked together daisy chain of web pages made by Y7 were a hit with the Governers last night.

22:47 19/10/98

Uploaded some links to the web page. Watched 'Cops'.

22:24 22/10/98

Web Club today and write up some notes for the kids to make pages with - 'HTML for Absolute Beginners'. Otherwise hand the brochures and emails over to Tim. He agrees that it is just confusing and that we should get the hardware and then get an ISP rather than try these rather fancy all-in deals. Tim has spoken to our local supplier who has installed all of our kit and he reckons that a deal can be arranged. I still haven't heard from the 'largest supplier of ISDN hardware' yet.

Make a load of digital pix of the Halesworth gallery show of Geralds 25 years of Laxfield art classes and also try to build a page for this months Bungay Hair show. Completely foul up the latter with a Dreamweaver oversight which leaves pix and page marooned in different directories. Darn.

20:21 23/10/98

Web Club goes OK. G does a particularly nice piece. Otherwise Tim and I agree that just getting the ISDN line in will do and leave the router until later. I suggest enrolling us with Net Year so that we can get one web account for starters with AOL or similar. Tim agrees. I try to persuade Tim to spend some of half term fiddling with html and give him the html primer. We both go off to fiddle with our modems.

21:32 24/10/98

As it was such a stormy wet day today I stayed in and did all those computer fiddles I had to do including upgrading my modem to v90 at long last and deinstalling some timed out stuff. I also sorted through the Hair pages and checked all of the links and retitled the files and so on with Dreamweaver. I put them into a sub-directory too and uploaded them to the page.

I visited the Internet Society's page too mainly because I'd read an obituary of Postel in the paper.

Tried to register the school with UK Net Year despite our reservations that there might be a catch.