If you thought whizzing around on Google Maps on your Apple iPad was impressive, you should see the enormous LG mutlitouch screens at CES in Las Vegas.

The LG Pen Touch Multi Board is three plasma screens wedged together to create one enormous multitouch surface. As the name suggests, the screen doesn’t recognise swipes of the finger; this beast is controlled using pressure-sensitive styluses. However, it can still pull off all the regular mutlitouch tricks, such as zooming in by performing a pinching motion with a stylus in each hand, as you can see demonstrated in the photo below.

This type of technology is intended for the classroom rather than the living room. At one point, three people were simultaneously drawing on the screen using a Paint-style application, giving an indication of the kind of applications that it could be used for in schools.

However, we suspect headteachers might have to sacrifice a teacher or two to afford this magnificent machine.

September 18th was the final delivery deadline for a variety of course dissertations at the Open University. How do I know this, you ask? Old Cassidy must be well past the time when he thinks anyone’s got anything to teach him, surely?

I know it because in the preceding ten days I somehow got the mark of Cain when it came to friends and acquaintances with dying laptops. They all had to be fixed in time for the traditional all-night panic-fuelled scribble-fest on the 17th, and no, I could not take the machine away. The note of panic in the various emails, tweets, texts and wheedling phone calls was nothing short of a full-blown emotional assault. Castle Wolfenstein is, by comparison, a warm-up.

I suspect that most PC Pro readers and contributors are wily enough to steer clear of this kind of situation. There comes a point when there is no longer any shame in simply playing dumb when asked to repair a computer, or terrifying the hormonal supplicant by threatening to “fix” their laptop with a copy of Knoppix.

But these approaches don’t always work — or help you to sleep at night — when friends are trying to get themselves out of the recessional doldrums with an OU qualification.

Which then leaves one to discover the truly horrifying state of home user laptops. There is a whole “Prison Cigarettes” economy out there, awaiting those who can’t buy a fresh machine, won’t put up with a netbook to get their costs low enough, or don’t understand free trial software – and yet want to rely on the machine to achieve life-changing academic goals.

This year, I’ve come across the end result of “my friend who says he has a cracked copy of Microsoft Office”, “my friend who knows how to move applications from your old laptop to your new laptop”, and half a dozen other strategies which take advantage of the cash-strapped sector of our economy, in return for non-monetary bartered favours of whatever flavour suits the participants (let’s not linger over that for too long, shall we…)

OU Advice

I expect that somewhere in a Social Sciences department, someone is studying the way the balance of ignorance, lack of money, and pressure of market forces drives the penniless OU student to such extremes; but the fact is, the issues I see in that population are pretty far from the issues addressed in the OU’s own documentation and advice for students.

They seem very concerned that students check for a “Genuine Windows” or “Vista” sticker, for example. I have yet to ever encounter an actual counterfeit copy of either product, despite Microsoft frequently, automatically and incorrectly insisting that my installs qualify for this status.

The OU’s old central resource to help you pick a machine has now been divested, so each course gives separate advice: even so, I think these guys are much too heavy on the processor speed and much too light on the memory – even in the last 18 months the market has moved so far that a 1.8GHz with 4Gb of RAM is a lot more usable than a 3.0GHz with 1Gb, to take one piece of their advice.

Easy fix

The saddest part of watching people reach boiling point over the challenge of cobbling together a working computer for their studies is that the whole thing can be so much easier than they make it.

Microsoft’s student discount scheme is so far beyond generous it’s just absurd: under £60 secures the new student a usable copy of the current Office 2010. No matter how you run your bartering, I reckon that’s about 10 cars washed, a week shelf-stacking, less than that as a cycle courier: all of which are far, far less stressful than those last seven days before deadline spent thinking more about dissertation failure rather than the dissertation’s topic.

Surely, as we inch out of recession, some smart systems vendor will re-invent the “student bundle” just in time for the next course enrolment season, with a handy “learn to work” finance package to ease the pains of self-improvement?

But recently the NPD group, a market research company based in the States, published a study that showed only 58% of consumers who “bought a netbook instead of a notebook” (my italics) were happy with their purchase. That compares to 70% of buyers being happy if they intended to buy netbooks from the start.

The study then went on to say that 60% of buyers “never even took their netbooks out of their house”, which kind of suggests they shouldn’t have bought netbooks in the first place.

Which is all very interesting, and to a certain extent predictable, but I’m yet to see any studies showing how businesses and educational establishments have taken to netbooks. We hear plenty of anecdotal evidence, much from netbook manufacturers, that says they’ve proved incredibly popular.

But is that just gloss being applied by people with a vested interest?

To me, netbooks have three key advantages:

1. They’re cheap
2. They’re light
3. They have (mostly) excellent battery life

But fully featured laptops still have some big advantages of their own:

1. They’re significantly faster
2. They have more features (most notably, the optical drive)
3. You can actually use them for hours at a time thanks to the larger keyboard and screen

What I’d really like to hear is some real-world experiences. If you’ve bought netbooks for your business, school or college, what’s the reaction been? Are you happy? Likewise, if you’ve bought a netbook for your own use, it would be great to hear what you think too.

Why the sudden flashback to 1999? Because that, according to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s website, was the last time the ICT National Curriculum for 5 to 11-year-olds was updated. Scan right down to the bottom of the page, and there you’ll find: “This content relates to the 1999 programmes of study and attainment targets.”

At first I thought this was a mistake, an outdated page that was left lingering by mistake on the QCA website.  So I rang the QCA press office to point out this heinous error. “That is a long time ago,” said the press officer, before putting me on hold to check what had gone wrong. “Apparently, that is the current curriculum,” he proclaimed upon his return. “They’re in the process of updating it now.”

Indeed they are. It’s part of Sir Jim Rose’s review of primary education. The review that concluded that primary schools were failing to keep pace with children’s IT skills and that “ICT is not yet providing value for money in many schools.”

Is it any wonder when the guidelines are a decade out of date? Hence you’ll find pupils are required to “gather information from a variety of sources – for example, people, books, databases, CD-ROMs, videos and TV”, but there’s not even a mention of the internet in the entire key stage 1 ICT curriculum.

I’m sure most schools and teachers are smart enough to apply the curriculum to today’s technology – in fact I’ve seen first-hand evidence of it at my daughter’s new school.  But surely the ICT curriculum should never be left to fester for so long again.

PC Pro

Yesterday, however, I had the pleasure of visiting Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith – a refreshing example of what can happen when a school gets IT teaching absolutely right.

IT clearly isn’t just another subject that’s taught in the computer rooms at Sacred Heart. It’s intelligently woven into the entire school curriculum and is an everyday part of school life.

I saw how a class of 11-year-olds were practising their French by recording themselves on  pocket Flip Mino camcorders, and then editing the footage on Dell’s new Latitude 2100 netbooks. It didn’t matter if the netbooks didn’t have video-editing software installed, because the pupils could log into their virtual Windows desktops and access the required software over the network.

In fact, virtualisation is second nature to these children. Work completed in school is saved to each pupil’s virtual hard drive, which they can remotely access from home to complete their homework.

When the homework’s done, pupils are encouraged to write about their school day on their personal blogs. The Year 9 girls have been blogging since they first arrived at the school, almost three years ago – which means they’ve already got more experience of blogging than several of the PC Pro staff.

They’ve also got plenty of video production experience. Aside from the French lessons, the pupils run Sacred Heart TV, the school’s in-house video channel. When the school recently refurbished its cloakrooms, the pupils shot, presented and edited a video showing off the new facilities  (headteacher Dr Christine Carpenter was given a walk-on role – she got to flush the new toilets).

PC building lessons

It’s not only camcorders and laptops the children are working with. IT technician Mr Wilson helped the pupils build four new PCs from scratch last year. Deputy Head Ian Donegan told us how the school had also been experimenting with mobile phones and PSP consoles in the classrooms. So instead of surreptitiously texting their mates at the back of the class, the pupils are shown how to quickly look up when the pyramids were built on their mobile phone.

The teachers admitted that not all the mobile devices had been a success – the awkward interface and lack of keyboard on the PSP had proved to be more of a hindrance than a help, but what impressed me was the staff had been prepared to give it a go. Headteacher Dr Carpenter admitted she didn’t have the first clue how most of this technology worked herself, but she was willing to give her tech-savvy staff – and pupils – the opportunity to experiment and see what worked.

In fact, the pupils aren’t only on the receiving end of the technology – they help decide what software and hardware the school should use. “We’re entering their world. These young people know what they want to use,” Donegan told us. “We miss a trick if we do not listen to what they’ve got to say.”

All-round education

The end result? A classroom full of pupils that are so engaged in what they’re learning that – after a few minutes – they barely even seemed to notice the pack of journalists walking around their classroom, and carried on editing their French lessons as normal. Of course this was a pre-arranged visit and I’m sure the school handpicked the pupils that took part in our demonstration, but these girls weren’t feigning an interest. It was patently obvious they are as au fait with video editing software and touchscreen netbooks, as they are with Hannah Montana and Hollyoaks.

By the time these girls leave school at 16, many of them will be experienced bloggers and videographers, who know their way around a virtual desktop and can turn a pile of components into a PC. Not only that, but they’ll leave with armfuls of GCSEs: 97% of the school’s pupils leave with five GCSEs grades A*-C. And all this from a state school, albeit in a rather well-heeled part of London.

But what impressed me most about Sacred Heart was that almost none of this was the result of a Government diktat or local authority initiative – the headteacher hadn’t even heard of the Government IT agency BECTA and bridled at the suggestion of being dictated to by her local authority. Instead, it was achieved by a forward-thinking headteacher and an enthused, switched-on staff who could see the benefits of IT for their pupils and, indeed, themselves.

 Someone send Education Secretary Ed Balls to this school to see how it’s done. Actually, scrap that. Someone send Dr Carpenter and her staff to the Department of Education and let them get on with it. 

The Commission has made five recommendations. At number five on the list is “Uses of technology”, and making sure the hardware and software used in schools in “interoperable”. Hardware and software that works together? The man’s a visionary.

But that pales in comparison to recommendation number two: back pain in children. “Children are generally taller now and the range of heights in any cohort is greater than in the past (BackCare, FIRA and BESA research). As a result, an increasing number of children are suffering from back pain due to unsuitable furniture.”

Are bigger seats for beanpoles really the second biggest priority for our schools? What about the deplorable state of the IT GCSE exams for starters?