Foreign Perspectives

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.

These days most people wouldn’t even think about travellers cheques. After all, surely the pre-paid cash or debit cards are far more practical and they’re accepted everywhere too, aren’t they?

Whilst it’s true that they’re accepted in most places, cards aren’t accepted everywhere. Even in those places where they are usually accepted there are occasional technical problems that crop up, sometimes quite frequently in relatively isolated places where not having an alternative method of payment would cause significant complications for you. Don’t think that these are places that only intrepid explorers will reach because the technical problems can crop up quite often in country areas of the most civilised of countries. Usually, of course, they happen in the most difficult of places and awkward of times.

For most places, you don’t need to consider travellers cheques as a primary means of payment basically because they’re too expensive as they usually involve both costs in purchasing them and again when using them (check if you can use them like cash rather than needing to cash them in a bank branch). However, it’s worth buying around US$250 or so for those awkward times when you really do need them. For maximum flexibility, it’s best to buy Visa or Mastercard branded cheques issued by a non-American bank (Thomas Cook is the brand that seems best known worldwide). Don’t cash them when you get home as they’re valid indefinitely and repurchasing them for each holiday just increases the cost for you.

Keep a note of the cheque numbers, cancellation phone numbers, when you bought them and where you bought them as you’ll need this information if they’re stolen.

So, yes, despite all the promotion of prepaid cards these days, it is worth keeping a few travellers cheques.

We’ve been helping out at the book fair in the school this week which provides a different perspective to some of the money making activities that schools need to get involved in these days.

The first thing that’s noticeable is that the school don’t get cash commission from the sales that they make but instead get that commission in the form of books. Thus what looks like a fairly high rate of commission is actually a good deal less in practice and probably little more than 10% for the company.

The books on offer are from one educational publisher which makes the selection more limited than it really needs to be. Well, seemingly more limited than it needs to be as one of the problems is that the books all need to be suitable for children so they could easily run into difficulties were a general publisher to be used. In fact, a growing problem seems to be that people generally are moving online for their purchases which is particularly understandable this year as the discount vouchers previously issued to the children aren’t there any more whilst the books are all at full price and these days nobody pays full price for books. So, why don’t the schools just put a link on their websites and join the internet sales rush? Basically because the link would have to be to only childrens’ books and there isn’t anything fitting the bill at the moment.

Being tied in to a single supplier is rarely a good idea and this is no exception. For all of the items that I’ve checked, the Scholastic price is around 20% to 30% higher than the Amazon price which probably goes some way to explaining the very low sales at the book fair.

I signed up for this a couple of weeks ago on the basis that it looked like a doable way of updating my skills a little bit in a fairly short time.

It’s part of the Certificate of Web Applications Development which is a series of six related 10 point courses. Normally 10 point courses offer you the chance to do the course over either eight weeks or about five months corresponding roughly to the workload of a 30 point or 10 point course but this one is over a fixed 12 week period which means that it should equate to a 20 point workload. In OU terms, a 20 point workload is around 5 hours a week so if my normal scaling factor applies it should take me a couple of hours a week to get through it.

Although it’s billed as an online course a parcel arrived this afternoon containing the book Principles of Web Design, a DVD full of all kinds of Internet software (Apache, several browsers) and a cute video, and the usual OU applications DVD. Going by my quick flick through the book it’s at a fairly low level although there’s an ebook for the course which may be at a higher level but I’ll not have access to that ’til Thursday. Supposedly you can do the course with Windows, Linux or Mac computers but installing it in Ubuntu didn’t work as seamlessly as that implies. In fact, it didn’t really work at all so I may have to break out the Windows machine at some point or maybe give it a spin in VirtualBox.

I came across a website from a former TT280 student which relates his experiences but also rather interestingly the falling number of students on the various courses in the certificate. Whilst TT280 kicked off with 800 students, towards the end the number dropped to well below 100 which I guess is why this is the last run of the course with no plans to replace it. I’m not sure if I’ll complete the certificate myself at this point as some of the modules will run through rather busy periods in my timetable so I’ve linked it to my open degree that I’m using as a place holder for my miscellaneous courses.

Just as the choice seemed to have settled on Amazon’s Kindle as the ebook reader of choice with its 6″ screen and £109 price tag so the sands have shifted underneath us with the imminent arrival of a whole range of Android powered tablet computers.

From the reader angle, you have a long battery life (often measured in weeks), black and white screen which doesn’t give you eye strain and easy access to books from the Amazon model. The only downsides are that they are black and white screens and can’t run video but then paper books don’t run video either and most are in black and white too.

For the tablet computers, the screen sizes are 7″ to 10″ which is comparable to the 6″ and 9″ of the Kindles. Battery life at 7 to 10 hours is good by PC standards but poor by ebook reader standards and it’s going to be more difficult to read them outside. On the plus side you get colour and can run video. Pricing for the 7″ models seems to be about double that of the Kindle, for the 10″ it’s comparable to the Kindle DX (a number of manufacturers are coming out with these so the prices aren’t settled yet).

If you’re only reading novels, the clear choice remains the Kindle. However, if your taste runs to coloured texts with illustrations my inclination would be to go for one of the 7″ models or, if you’re not bothered about portability, the 10″.