Monkeez.org

(Work in progress).

Jenni Russell has written this piece on what might be going wrong in education.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/education.labour

"On the day before the Commons rose last week, the government quietly issued its response to the children's select committee, which had spent months taking evidence on whether the focus on testing was distorting children's education. The committee's report had been thorough and merciless. It concluded that while England needed a testing system, the existing one was damaging. It turned students off learning, and was in urgent need of reform."

and…

"This culture of brazen denial comes right from the top. In an interview last month, Balls was asked about the fact that, in most schools, even seven-year-olds spend much of their year being anxiously coached and drilled in Sats techniques. They are put under such pressure because teachers' jobs and schools' futures depend on good results. That's the system of reward and punishment his department has constructed. But Balls simply denied it was true - and claimed he would be horrified if it were."

They campaign on issues such as digital rights management, e-voting, vehicle tracking and basic privacy and public domain information issues.

Please read my Ant shape poem. It took me a while to create. You will need Powerpoint to open it. If you don’t have Powerpoint, you can download the free program OpenOffice.org and that will work fine.
Please let me know what you think of it.
Isaac

I like my iriver so much that I’ve now managed to replace the battery twice (on two separate models):

It was fun and it was expensive.

It was very hard and I fell over loads of times. The boots didn’t fit. It was hard. I was rubbish.

About a week and a half ago, I purchased a Fon router. This wireless router creates two SSID channels to connect to the internet. One which is private and the other which is open to other Fon members. This allows Fon members to access the internet wherever there is a Fonspot. So far, the router is working nicely, with both SSID channels perfectly. However, they run on WPA, and so I had to update the Eee PC which worked nicely as soon as the update was complete.

Overall, I don’t expect to get loads of traffic around here, but it would be nice if I did. Even if other Foneros don’t come by, Joe Public can buy access for 3 euros a day, using paypal to purchase time. Even if no-one stops by, it means I can call in on other fon-spots and check email, and do the odd bit of geocaching logging.

– share your wifi and create a hotspot.

I managed to get a nice little Palm Z22 cheap a couple of days ago, which gives us the opportunity of paperless caching. We’ve been out a couple of days this half-term with it and it’s almost revolutionary!.

Using Pocket Queries (PQ) you can download a lot of geocaches in one file, and then run them through a nice application called GPXSpinner. This looks at each cache and creates some nice html for it. This html is then parsed through to plucker which parses all the html and creates nice links between all the pages and then creates a .pdb file which can be installed on the palm (and viewed with plucker’s own viewer).

We were out today, and because we had a nice database of caches on the palm, could roam around with all the information we needed. Cool

Joe

Our party was good. It was my best party ever. David and Ali
My best bit was the scavenger hunt; we had to found out how old a tree was so we counted the rings. We also got points for finding bugs and flowers and strange things. I had a centipede on my hand. So did my cousin, Eden. My team won the medals because we got so many points!
We had a Spongebob Squarepants cake, my mum forgot the candles. It was a really fun time.

Isaac

Today it was my birthday party! First we played a game, then we got sorted out into two teams. My team was the Red Team, with Callum, Lucas, Aaron, Tom and Alfie. The best bits were when we found the sweets because I liked the sherbet. We found a very strange leaf. Aaron F was the first to found the treasure, both times! It was my best birthday party ever!

See all the pics at our gallery. (password required).

Tonight Joe and Isaac were finally invested as Beavers, after going for 7 months.

Today we went to the Tolpuddle Martyr festival in Tolpuddle. We saw Chumbawumba, some of The Men They Couldn’t Hang and Billy Bragg.

We liked the stalls that were selling crystals, chess sets and wooden toys for us, books for Dad, clothes for Mum and ice cream for us all!

Chumbawumba are all folk now, and sounded very good. Billy Bragg was excellent at the end singing with a group of pupils from St. Mary’s school, Puddletown.

First of all, we got off the coach and then saw cows, calves, pigs, piglets, sheep and lambs. Next we saw two horses and a pony. I liked stroking the calves.

A bit later we went to the old church. There was a tomb in there. Next we went to see where they make horseshoes. It is called the blacksmiths.

Isaac came second in a chess tournament last weekend. He played well during his four games, and enjoyed the day. Isaac even had to play Joe, but I won’t say who won to keep the peace.

Luckily for me, I could sit and work during the tournament, but it was a very long day. Well done Isaac.

kingswood_tower

Originally uploaded by kabads

I’ve just returned from Kingswood, an activity centre on the Isle of Wight. It was pretty exhausting, with activities starting around 9:30 am (with an early rise for breakfast) and then finishing at 9pm.

The children thoroughly enjoyed the activities, including Quad-biking, archery, climbing, zip-wire, abseiling (both from the tower in the photo) and Night-line (following a length of rope whilst blindfolded).

Wave those flags

Originally uploaded by kabads.

Happy birthday Pete – sorry it’s taken us a whole week to sort this pic, but it’s worth it. Hope you got some sleep in the end. Trugs, Ads, Treasure and Zakster.