Carol's thoughts on life, ICT and whatever comes

Life after Redundancy

2011-12-27T16:10:00.001Z

Well it is one full term after I have been made redundant and my life has done a complete 360⁰ turn around. I am not doing what I have been doing for the last 20-odd years but teaching English to Air traffic controllers and many more people needing to learn English either for their jobs, for fun or simply interest, at Language Lab in Second Life, and enjoying every minute! It is interesting to change jobs, I could not imagine enjoying anything as much or more than my ICT consultant role, and it is not quite the same, but there are advantages! On mornings like some we have had already, with thick black ice for miles around and snow in various parts of the area that make grateful to be working at home and not driving miles every day. I do not spend a fortune of fuel, food away from home or “working” clothes – jeans are my working clothes.

On the downside though it is not and 8 – 6 type of job! The worst session timewise I had to do was between 2 and 4 am. I don’t usually get those, 1 – 2am was another cover I did, but on the odd occasion, as I do not have to get up early, it does not really matter! Then again I could always say no!

When I see newspaper and TV reports about people who were made redundant the same time as me and I realise how far removed from work many of those people are, when I hear about people sending off hundreds of job applications and not even getting answers, and similar stories, I am very grateful to have the opportunity to use existing skills, and learn new ones to provide myself a part time job!

In January I think I have 12.5 hours a week scheduled, so far I have also done lots of cover work for things like Thanksgiving, when many teachers are at home with their families for the festival or covering other people’s power failures (we are totally dependent on both power and the internet, there is no plan B!) and as the teaching is so new to me it is still taking me more than an hour to plan and make resources for every hour delivered (I am sure I will get better) so it is currently about a half time job. J

I spend far more time now as my teacher avatar than my normal avatar, that is strange, even old friends have got used to her now and see more of me as her than as me J I have not quite grown into my role yet though, experiential learning – doing, being part of, experiencing, living it, all quite different to experiential learning in the classroom and I need to get better at providing and living it!!

I am just so grateful to the many English teachers out there who share their resources and ideas, without them I think I would be really struggling to get through each week. I have a batch of EFL teaching/ learning books and between those and the websites they inspire me to keep learning and have provided so many ideas that I can use in the classes their work is absolutely invaluable to me! Thank you one and all!

Which Devices?

2011-11-07T12:33:00.000Z

I have been asked which devices a school should buy and am trying to formulate a list of questions that the school staff can work through to decide which would be best for them. There is no way I can simply guess what they need so I want to make something useful that anyone can use in any educational establishment.

Questions to consider

1. Does the infrastructure have the capacity to add a new class set of devices? (In the UK many networks were installed in the early 1990s and have been added to and bits replaced on an ad hoc basis ever since. It may be time to upgrade the whole wireless system before much more can be added to it.)

Who is going to add the devices to the network and provide passwords?
How to you plan stop outsiders using the network if a common password escapes into the community?
How often is the techie on site to sort out wireless access issues?
What about filtering?

2. Are pupils allowed to bring their own devices or technology (BYOD / BYOT) or not? If pupils bring all sorts they will not be compatible but each one will be able to add something, some maybe good for photographs, audio work, music, video or text, is the teacher happy to combine all offerings? Is school going to restrict the type of device so that only iPod Touches or iPads can be brought to and used in school?

Phones are an extra considerations – are pupils allowed to bring in their own phones? What are the rules for using phones in school?
How is their use going to be monitored?
Is there a policy in place? Does that cover insurance, e-safety, expected behaviour and sanctions?

3. Is the staff confident about pupils using different devices and how to manage their classes using them?

Does the staff know how to combine all these different offerings?

Is staff training needed?
Has training been budgeted for in the cost?
Have you talked to prospective trainers to find someone happy to try to train teachers in using all of the different devices they may get in their class?

4. What about equality and families who can’t afford their own devices?

Is school going to provide devices for those pupils who can’t afford them?
Is school going to allow school devices to go home with individual pupils?
Does school insurance cover home use / transportation? The school filtering will not work at home, and some homes may not have broadband. How does school intend to address that issue? Will filtered dongles be provided? Who is going to set them up and pay for the usage?

5. If you are planning to use sets of iPod Touch or iPad devices

Do you intend to use apps?
How will you purchase the apps?
How will you synchronise the devices?
Will school purchase the apps for home devices?
Will schools ask parents to buy the apps and provide money for those who won’t?
How will you charge the devices? If you have a Parasync suitcase or similar for the class ones, how will you charge the home devices?
What about pupils who forget to charge their device or bring their charger?
Do you need more electrical points / sockets? Are trailing wires going to be a health and safety issue?
Do you have a budget for apps? A set of 30 devices even at a few pounds each is a considerable expense over a year or two.

6. Are the devices going to be used by one class, so one per table, pair or child, or several classes?

Where are pupils going to store their work if being used by several students? Is there are master computer with storage that they all link to?

7. How do teachers want to use the devices?

For photographs, video or animation work?
For digital art work to be printed and put on display or displayed on an electronic photo album, Smart Screen, plasma screen, signage screen?
For music lessons?
As shared research / collaborative projects in groups or pairs?
Just for Office applications - Internet, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and e-mail?
For research using CDs or DVDs?
For watching video clips or listening to podcasts?
For using IWB materials such as SMART or Promethean Active?
For audio / SMS / photographs / Skype / internet research / note taking?
For on the spot, use as needed dictionary checks, fact checkers and searchers?
To access lessons after the event for revision, shared resources etc?

This is just a few questions, I guess there are lots more!

My recommendation would be for teachers to try to use what is already available really well, go through the cupboards and dig out the older sets of unused bit and pieces and see how they work. Incorporate them into lessons and encourage pupils to bring in their devices too, see how useful they are, see where there are gaps and look to buy to plug the gaps – but – I am a "play with techie stuff" sort of person, I don’t mind investigating, pulling bits together and making things happen. I like doing that! For teachers who can’t be bothered with that, have not been using the school digital cameras, video recorders, sensing equipment, IWBs, visualisers for years, bringing together a host of “odd” technology with little common software may be a nightmare. I would be really worried about buying a class set of anything – unless the teachers really wanted them and planned to use them.

On my actual working document I have added loads of links to hardware, synching devices etc., but have left them off here as they may considered advertising. If you have any essential questions to add to my little list though please do add them as comments, I do not mind bringing them altogether later and sharing the final doc with anyone who may find it useful :-)

On-line Courses - the sublime to ridiculous?

2011-10-17T20:27:00.004+01:00

I have just finished my second on-line course. The first I really enjoyed, I found it a very valuable, pleasing experience and I would happily repeat the same course any time, so when a very sudden change of career
opportunity arose I had no hesitation in signing up for a second on-line course to acquire a bit of paper necessary for the job. I found a course, signed up, paid up and got stuck in.

I have just completed it, I have spent 18 days, almost non-stop, working on an advanced TEFL certificate course. I have now received my certificate, I passed by a wide margin thank goodness, after being a teacher for most of my life, the bit that was new was teaching English as a foreign language rather than to native speakers.

What struck me as very strange though, was how difficult it was to try to guess what the required answers were. A huge proportion of the course dealt with the sequence of teaching all four language disciplines for various different types of English learners.

A typical sequencing task

Sometimes course recommendations were clear and sometimes not. For all the teaching sequences, whether there were any hints of the expected order or not, I could imagine situations where I would have done things in a different order to meet the needs of learners. I often changed the order several times having no idea if what I was doing was right or wrong and if I got one wrong then it is likely that the whole sequence and subsequent set of marks would be wrong.

In the following screen shots, apart from the unnatural language for example in the first sentence, two options are almost equally valid. Maybe there is a hint that three and four are the wrong way round with the repeat of the word individually and individual but in the light of the unnatural language I encountered in many questions I was not positive that would hold true.

There were things like this true or false set of questions:

Though I did not go back and check I am pretty sure that the last sample, "Walkie-talkies can be used in dialogue practice to mimic the sound of aviation equipment,” is “True” though trying to imagine a mobile phone producing the noise of a jet engine and many more aviation equipment sounds stretches the imagination somewhat.

Then there were things that I simply did not understand, I spent quite a lot of time in one exercise trying to work out how the word ‘assage” fitted in, it did, but it seemed so far removed from what I was studying it had me puzzled – suddenly I realized the p was missing and it was passage and the context and content of the question became clear.

I did not work out what the following actually meant and guessed it was right or wrong, true or false on a whim…

“Listening sections can have students write specific information they hear.”

Almost every time the word “example” appeared on screen it had a capital E – interesting…

Many, many screens told me that I would be marked on the answers I offered on this page – but there were no questions…

I was about half way through the course and had felt several times there was lots of missing information. Suddenly I found out that in some, though not all explanation pages, some words were hyperlinks to glossary type of entries, but there was no way of guessing, they were black typeface, the same size, not underlined... there was nothing to hint at a link! It was only when I ran my mouse over a couple of statements trying to decide something about the answer to a question that I found them.

I came across many questions such as:

“Whereas uninterested students usually respond well to general chat at the beginning of class, students who are actively trying to avoid course material should probably not be asked such questions at the beginning of the lesson.”

In light of that is the following true or false?

“It is best to avoid general chat at the beginning of class with students who are uninterested in studying English, because they will become even less motivated as the class goes on. “

That bit was fun – I chose true but was I right or wrong? I am still not sure! They make the case for both starting with general chat and not starting with general chat, I changed my decision from true to false several times, knowing that once I could get a student talking I am pretty confident that I could inspire something constructive in the learning field but decided eventually that the course writers decided it was best not to start in this way J

During this totally on-line course I encountered missing words, wrong punctuation, missing letters, instructions to do something that was not there, subjective answer sequences to guess and ambiguous statements. Before anyone points it out – I am completely capable of committing any and all of those crimes in everyday texting, chat etc, often when I am mindlessly chattering, mutli-tasking and the like but I do know the difference and if I am writing for public use I would expect to proof read it and hopefully get someone else to too after I have finished proof reading! If I was the only proof reader I would leave it a week between proof reads so that I did not read what I had just meant to write instead of what I had actually written – there is a difference!

This was an English course leading to a professional qualification, not necessarily for native speakers; I paid for it! I can’t help but feel that it should have been better!

And guess what, there was no opportunity for feedback , maybe that says it all J

Reform Symposium

2011-06-24T07:15:00.000+01:00

Test the highlighter tool

2011-06-21T21:26:00.002+01:00

After reading about a blog highlighter tool on Nicky Hockley's blog: http://www.emoderationskills.com/?p=594 today I decided to try it. I went to the website http://highlighter.com/ and signed up, got my code, embedded it in the page where it is supposed to go... and it does not work!!

I went back and read the instructions for Blogger - they are the same as for everything else...

So - does it work on a new post and not the old post? No!

Back to the drawing board ;-)

Hmm - come back to it and used two different templates....
driver touble - again!

ePub - Children's St Lucia

2011-06-15T12:28:00.001+01:00

I attended an Apple Regional Training Centre conference last week and was introduced to the ePub (short for electronic publication) format. It is an open source book format accepted by many reader apps. Apple iBooks will use it, so apparently will the Sony reader and apps such as Stanza and Kobo, hopefully loads more that are listed in Wikipedia though I have not started trying it on anything other than the iPad and iPhone yet. The file extension is .epub.

I have seen lots of a huge range of genre adult literature for all of my book reading apps, some free, some paid for and definitely in large numbers but have not seen loads of children books available. Admittedly children’s books need much more in the way of images and video, maybe sound files to make them interesting but unless they work out to be massive in files size so that they are hard to download I can’t understand why!

I decided to try to see what the benefit of using the ePub format instead of a website is. In the dim, distant past, I wrote several websites for schools. These days however, I wonder if a format suitable for use on personal devices may be more useful - still undecided on that one as this is my first experiment. Also, looking towards the future I am not sure whether I should try to start developing apps or books! I have not worked out which is the best format for what.

This is a short account of my issues, if anyone is making an ePub book there may be bits here to help!

Very early Yesterday morning I started an ePub book on a topic which I created a website for years ago. I still have suitable images and video, so in theory it was going to be a quick test... I soon discovered there is no such thing as a quick test!

Having done the hour training session on my Macbook I needed to replicate the set up on my iMac - first problem how did I import the template into Pages! Having achieved that I started writing.

On the course we were told clearly to have one image and one lump of text on the page then move on to another page... I did that! No-one could say why, the tutor just said that that more “went funny, err did funny things.” I imported images and wrote a few words about each one. Next I added video files and a link to a Google map. I set the floating bits to inline - was told that is essential! Saved - exported to an ePub - No, no, no you can’t do that! No clue why, but it was not acceptable.

I guessed that it may be the video format, so imported the videos into iMovie, exported to Quicktime and, success, my ePub book exported.

I synchronised my ipad to see it - hmmmm - okay but it neededs loads more work. Most titles were on the wrong page, there were huge gaps and an empty page. It had doubled the content on one page and that looked good.

So - back on the computer I doubled the content on the pages, two headings, two images, two bits of text. It looked better, a bit more like a book.

I added it to the iPad - and - it still looked dreadful and the titles were still on the wrong pages. Pictures or videos were placed inside text and all sorts of strange things. Half pages were mixed up on the wrong pages, something I would have thought was impossible.

So - back to the drawing board. Version number three was back to very short pages, as recommended, just a photo and some text, but, it still failed.

I realised that at the end of a passage of text the cursor needs to be on the next line down or it thinks the picture, video, link or whatever goes at the end of the line. Hitting the in-line status for a picture then places it in the middle of the last line of text, if there is not a new line after the image it carries on the text from below. I also thought that as the pages were short to have them centered was really going to look better. So I added a few space at the top and between items, it all looked lovely on Pages - but disastrous in ePub...

I decided that as several of the headings were on the wrong pages it had to be something to do with page breaks, took them all out, put them all back... experimented with space, took them all out, put some back - tried all sorts. By this time I had probably published it 20 times and nothing improved it.

I knew it was driver trouble - though I was getting cross with the software by then. I was telling myself to think logically - I had homed in on spacing and line breaks but nothing made a difference, text from the next page entered the bottom of the page before the line break in several cases.

I was on the verge of giving up but thought of one more thing - I started to check the styles of each line - and - though my headings on two pages were the same size and colour as the other headings, they were called something different...

The styles are the key! As soon as each line was the right style it published and looked reasonable on the iPad - not nearly so good on the iPhone and the videos that play on the iPad don't play on the phone.

So I have my first short ePub made, it is called Children’s St Lucia, it is 12.3 MB.
Each time there is a line under a photograph saying who took it and it is on the left, it should be centered, each image should be centered. I have tried everything I can think of - centering the line before and after as well - nothing changes them.

At this point I am giving up for a while. The software is flaky! It is not just driver trouble.

However, taking into account it is never going to look like I want it to look it is still an easy way of making books for the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone. It should also work on other devices...

If anyone has time to test it on any device and tell me which ones it works on, which it doesn’t etc., I would be really grateful. We could all learn whether it is worth developing books for children with it or whether or wait ;-) To download the book Click Here, add it to your book library and synchronise with any device having a suitable reader :-)

The Apple RTC Summer Conference

2011-06-11T15:43:00.000+01:00

I have just returned from the Apple RTC Summer Conference, my head is absolutely buzzing with ideas.

I was particularly impressed with the workshops and need to practice and get to grips with so much!

ePub - Today I made my first ever ePub book, not to share as it is rubbish but to learn the techniques. I have so many ideas of ePub books to make I don’t know where to start! Embedding video, audio and images in a book is just such a wonderful way to make teaching resources available to pupils and for pupils to share information. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4168 Many thanks to Oscar Stringer for the ePub session and his patience :-)

I have made my first iphone app with Dashcode - it is far too simple to be worth having, but it is a starting point. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/Dashcode_UserGuide/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/MakingaWebApp/MakingaWebApp.html . I have started working on an app in Quipper.com but I think this offers more functionality - the downside is that I need a developer’s license to move forward...

I saw a demonstration of, and want to investigate Hype - it is a flash type of program, far more intuitive than the others as it is basically drag and drop, simple logic but no programming :-) It is built in html 5 so should play a website on virtually device - we shall see. Not sure that it is an app maker though, it may just be for making web sites in html 5!
http://tumultco.com/hype/ .

Also Padilicious looks to be a very useful app making site! Can’t wait to try them all. http://www.padilicious.com/index.html

David Baugh lead the Make an App sessions and he is going to add the workshop information to his wiki http://www.makeanapp.info/
I have ideas, too many probably - and not enough time. Roll on the summer :-)

The easiest workshop for me to keep up with an understand was GarageBand on the iPad.
GarageBand turns the iPad into a recording studio, so anyone without any musical knowledge can make music but with just a little knowledge masterpieces can be made! There are a selection of pianos, organs, guitars, drums, and basses which sound amazing, Joe Moretti lead us through making a piece of music in an hour - not bad going by anyone’s standards!! It was great fun. Thanks again to Joe for the session. I am tempted to subject all to my first effort - but like my app I am sure no-one would appreciate it :-)

An ePub book for children first I think!

Having logged into Blogger for the first time in ages I am delighted to see a mobile template available - so - to view my blog on my phone now and see what it looks like :-)

How useful an iPad?

2011-05-11T19:47:00.003+01:00

I have been asked - on Twitter - "How useful is an iPad to an ESL teacher?"    A strange question! How useful any device is depends on what you want to use it for…

I should probably first clarify that I am not an ESL teacher, not even much of a teacher these days, but...
My iPad is most used frequently by myself to
    •    check and respond to e-mail and Twitter whilst I am away from home
    •    make notes in meetings, seminars and more
    •    listen to podcasts or videocasts
    •    read from RSS feeds, websites, news and books
    •    play on the Garageband app - current favourite
    •    play silly game apps whilst travelling or wasting time
    •    currently - whilst trying to get thinner and fitter it sits in front of me on my exercise bike so that I can read and exercise - takes my mind off the exercise bit ;-)

My iPad is in demand almost the second my grandson arrives in the house with a "Can I play on your iPad please nan?"
Woody uses it for loads of games, books, painting and music apps - he even investigates those I have downloaded for myself, once he hands it back apart from having a depleted battery (he does like the sound up full) it has many apps still open. He flits from app to app trying them all out and having a fun time. He will happily play with it or on it whilst the adults are doing the boring coffee and talking bit, until someone offers to play with him!

We have not had a set of iPads in a school situation but there are many similarities with the iPad Touch which we have been using for a couple of years. The web access, apps, instant accessibility and long battery life makes them a huge success in the classroom.

If I was wanting to use mine for teaching there are a few things that I would consider…

unless I "jailbreak" it I cannot share it with a class though a projector and screen
if I make great use of an interactive whiteboard and have made lots of interactive resource with the IWB software I can't load that onto my iPad
I can't share the games or websites created in Flash with my class
The camera flash card, USB type of added extra is underpowered - I was not particularly successful at things I wanted to do with it.

Compare with a laptop or netbook - that you can do all of those things with, and lots more…

The iPad is a lovely device with loads of wonderful apps for group work such as making stories, recording narrations, making animations, videos and other things with various different sorts of apps. It is a delight to use. I consider it a personal device rather than teaching device, if wanted something to use for teaching I prefer a laptop…. but that is just me and my preference others would say otherwise!

Weekend Work for week 3 MobiMOOC

2011-04-16T21:59:00.001+01:00

As I am away until Monday evening I may not even see a computer for
two days so I have rushed through the weekend work and decided I had
better post before I go:-)

What is your perspective on the OLPC programme?

It was a great idea but flawed!

What do you like about it?

I love the concept of being able to educate pupils with technology to
help them overcome some of the difficulties they have to get the most
basic education. I admire the ideology that pupils given a computer
will educate themselves and the amount of money that various people
have put into this dream. The fact that it was initially aimed at
those pupils who have virtually nothing and this was going to give
some sort of equality is great.

What do you think went right and wrong?

The foundations for this initiative simply were not in place. Pupils
and schools needed electricity, a support system, wireless
infrastructure, the internet, and staff training. Most of those needed
to be in place before there could be serious hopes of success. Sadly
that lack caused huge problems, staff had little idea of how to
approach using them, often schools did not have the means to charge
them, did not have the repairs when they broke and the computers do
seem to have suffered even though the design was that they were to be
rugged.

The project, in some places, suffered at the hands of man, crime meant
that the computers did not get into the hands of children, and even
where crime was not an issue still many computers did not get in the
hands of pupils.

The assumption that children would learn proved not to be the case.
Children did not learn how to use them, look after them or repair them
as had been expected in far too many cases. Being aware of Sugata
Mitra’s work I can’t help but wonder whether there was too much made
available and to individuals not groups. He proved that groups of
children will support each other and work things out but his computers
had internet access, power and were hardy desktops not laptops being
carted about.

Possibly children who were given the computers were given too much too
quickly so that they could not get to grips with them. This is where
the SMS on the simple mobile phone projects teaching pupils to read
and write seem to have the advantage, they can do much less but what
they do is more structured. Mobile coverage is improving all of the
time and they are much cheaper.

I am not sure that much actually went right though I am sure that in
some places people are striving to make as much use of them as
possible such as Uruguay seems to be doing.

When compared with the statements:

“The cost of implementing an XO program, including the purchase of
laptops and other infrastructure, as well as development expenses, has
been estimated at about $75 per student per year. Even a less
expensive national program would be difficult to afford in a country
such as Rwanda, which currently spends a total of about $109 per pupil
per year on primary education.
If donors are expected to foot the bill, they need to consider how the
costs and benefits of laptop computers compare to the proven cost-
benefit ratios of other aid programs for improving social or
educational conditions; in short, opportunity costs. For example,
apportioning a total of $8 per person per year over the next five
years to basic health expenses could save 11 million lives in Africa,
according to projections of a prominent coalition. A total
expenditure of $0.50 per pupil per year in Kenya on deworming was
found to increase school participation by 14 percent.”

One cannot help but wonder whether the money used in the initiative so
far may have been better spent!

Week 2 MobiMOOC

2011-04-15T21:52:00.000+01:00

Hi MobiMoocers - I am not at all sure where I should have posted my mLearning project so will put it here :-) already posted it on the wiki for week 2 but obviously no-one found it there :-)

Hope that is okay!!

My Learning Project

Define your objectives:

Why do you want a mobile learning project?

I am still exploring the possibilities of mLearning and take every opportunity of trying new things out for the primary classroom

What unique result do you want to achieve?

To motivate pupils to explore local history and get involved with researching, finding and sharing information in groups to make presentations for school assemblies.

How you will know when you have met your goals?

On presentation day and by talking to the pupils and their teacher

How will you evaluate your effectiveness?

By talking to the pupils and their teacher and looking at the pupils’ work, how they worked, the motivation levels etc. all anecdotal

Define your audience:

For whom is your mobile initiative intended?

Primary school pupils at a local primary school

What user support do you need to provide?

Nothing extra to normal classroom support, I doubt that the pupils will be phased in any way

Define your budget

What do you need to get the project done?

How are you going to fund it?

How long will you be able to sustain it?

Apart from my time the project is already funded – the school have 30 iPod Touches for the class.
The class have the iPod Touches for 12 weeks, this will be a small project within that time

Identify your Instructional strategies

Is it an interactive team / community network?

Is it a broadcast distribution framework?

Is it for formal learning programs or informal learning assets?

It will be informal learning, assessment will be by outcomes i.e their presentations

Who is going to produce the content (e.g. is it going to depend on community or commercially produced content)?

I will do the research and produce the content

Where is the content going to reside? N/A

Who is responsible for placing content in repository? N/A

What content distribution methods will be used (e.g., web delivery, copyright, registration for use, charges, etc.)?

I will distribute the qr codes

What content management mechanisms need to be in place?

None

How will you assess learning?

I will teach the pupils only how to read the qr codes and let them explore the local are 5. Identify your stakeholders
Primary school children, their parents and their teachers

Identify the technology

Who will provide the service?

School wifi

What kind of reception technologies will be used?

iPod Touches with QR code readers

What content creation tools will be used?

Any of the presentation / story making apps or Quick Office on the iPod Touches – pupils make their own choice

What network will be used for distribution?

School wifi / DropBox

What security mechanisms will you have in place?

The county filtering system

What kind of user interface will you use?

The iPod Touch and an Interactive Whiteboard

What user support will you provide?

Normal classroom support – I do not anticipate that anything extra will be needed

Determine Intellectual Property

My own – shared freely with the pupils and anyone interested under s CC license. I am still experimenting with mLearning and examining what excites pupils and motivates them to really get involved with a project.

Folk Songs on the iPad :-)

2011-04-10T21:44:00.002+01:00

I have been playing with Garageband on the iPad for the last two days. I need to learn the program properly so that I can make podcasts and more with it but even though I have had a Mac for a couple of months I have not yet devoted any time to it finding it much easier to return to the well known Audacity for sound work that I have had to do - mostly because of time constraints!

I thought using the app version of it on the iPad may give me some insight, it seemed a good plan as we have had a few days of beautiful weather and it was great to be able to start the learning journey outside. However I was not bargaining on finding and getting hooked, within seconds, on the acoustic guitar synthesiser which sounds very realistic. I was so delighted with it I starting to work out the chord sequences of dozens of old folk songs.

It has a full range of keys both major and minor and a preset selection of finger picking rhythms which seem to be set in a straight 4 time, any speed but not any time signature, not that I have found so far anyway!! Consequently I abandoned the presets but am enjoying playing myself.

Having a few iPads in schools would give children comparatively cheap opportunities of playing a large combination of instruments together. With preset chords it should sound lovely and allow pupils to add real instruments with with an in-tune chordal accompaniment. We have had the drums being played on a class set of iPod Touches but Garageband opens the field much wider. I am not sure yet whether the built in recording facility would be useful in this situation but I guess not as it would only record what was being played on one iPad.

Here is a You Tube example of a piece of music composed on the iPad - somthing like this but with real instruments, flute or clarinet for eample playing a main melody would be great in school giving great opportunities for improvisation too.

Teachers who use songs in class to aid teaching such as those who teach languages to very young children would really find this app useful - not having to carry a guitar to and from school, having it on-hand at any time and so easy to play - simply a dream :-) Not only that it is very easy to record a song so that the teacher could just start it playing then be with children doing actions or whatever without having to play at the same time. I would have loved this at school!!

There are a few blog posts to share ideas for this very new capability
http://meganaiemma.edublogs.org/
http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/garageband-for-ipad-first-hands-on-review-397287/3#content

From the comments on the following blog clearly not everyone shares my opinion… http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/garageband-for-ipad-7-things-musicians-need-to-know-391104

Experienced musicians can get quite an amazing sound from this app, my favourite so far is this version of Let it be but the walk through here and other demos may be much more useful!

Images and Sounds for use in Educational Presentations or Podcasts

2011-04-06T21:13:00.001+01:00

This week it seems that I have been asked almost every day about free images for use in schools so I decided to start to compile a list! There is a Creative Commons Search Engine: http://search.creativecommons.org/ which can be used to search many different creative commons sources from one page. Google images and Flickr have settings that can restrict images offered to those with a Creative Commons licence, it is worth exploring the settings. The following should be an embedded Google Doc - I have never done this before so it will be interesting to see how/if it works!

If you have any sites to add please go to Google Docs to add them and share the page with anyone who may find it useful - visit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QHJoG7pbZxQPNEzIhCNIuLwxQIydlyIcINdLLD5xOkg/edit?hl=en

Re the embedded Google doc - I had to add some code to give a bit of height and width, it started off very tiny with no measurements in the original code. It is pretty usless - but an interesting trial :-)

Educational Origami

2011-04-05T23:18:00.002+01:00

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/ - I visited Educational Origami and was amazed and perturbed that I have spent so many hours on the internet, supposedly learning about teaching and learning with ICT, looking for and understanding theories, searching for ideas, facts, good ideas and ways of assessing and more and have never before seen this wiki offering Blooms Digital Taxonomy!

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

From the site:
“This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy describes many traditional classroom practices, behaviours and actions, but does not account for the new processes and actions associated with Web 2.0 technologies, infowhelm (the exponential growth in information), increasing ubiquitous personal technologies or cloud computing.
Bloom's Digital Taxonomy isn't about the tools or technologies rather it is about using these to facilitate learning. Outcomes on rubrics are measured by competence of use and most importantly the quality of the process or product. For example. Bookmarking a resource is of no value if the resource is inappropriate, invalid, out of date or inaccurate.”

This information on the site helps to place all aspects of ICT onto the developmental continuum. The quick sheets give examples of ICT exercises and how they fit into the the progression of the taxonomy. I would love to map these into the learning objectives of the National Curriculum so that we have a clearer method for assessing the ICT work of our pupils - if and when we get the new curriculum I may do exactly that but there is no point at the moment.

There is a downloadable PDF giving lots of information, ICT ideas and examples for each level that would be so useful in assessing a pupil’s ICT work.
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/bloom's+Digital+taxonomy+v3.01.pdf

Not totally convinced I am really for primary school children to be hacking and reverse engineering - but hey ho...

and more...

The same wiki does loads of work on Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Gardners+Multiple+Intelligences+and+ICT

Cyber Safety
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Cyber+Safety

Interactive Whiteboards and Pedagogy
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/IWB%E2%80%99s+and+the+development+of+pedagogical+skills

The whole site is a little gold mine of interesting things to investigate it will take a while to get through!

Thanks to Cyber Placebo for mentioning it in the SL VRT11 :-)

MobiMOOC

2011-04-04T20:50:00.003+01:00

One year on I am attempting to take part in another MOOC and having failed miserably last year I am not too hopeful :-)

I do really want to do this one though, it is about mLearning and started April 2nd and is running until May 14th. Two days in I am overrun with e-mail, all interesting but just too much! I have done loads of week 1 reading and answered the week one questions. So – up to date on the 3rd day ;-) Long may it last.

Anyone still wishing to join visit the wiki http://mobimooc.wikispaces.com/a+MobiMOOC+hello!
And join the Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/mobimooc/topics

One of the videos for week one was the 2007 Teacher’s TV on the use of mobile phones in school – I watched it when it came out but had not revisited and it is quite astounding that even though the statistics will have increased dramatically since the film was made the attitudes of the adults probably hasn’t in many cases, it could have been made yesterday! http://www.teachers.tv/videos/mobile-phones-mobile-minds.

The survey carried out very recently in the States and reported on today would appear to uphold that view http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_do_kids_say_is_the_biggest_obstacle_to_techno.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
Quote
"The results are pretty fascinating, as they show great adoption of technology among even very young students, but lingering resistance on the part of school administrators to sanction some of those tools into the classroom."

The report on the survey finishes with the most telling quotation:

"74% of high school teachers, 72% of high school principals, and 62% of parents of high school age children said yes, they thought their school was doing a good job using technology to enhance learning and/or student achievement.
Only 47% of high school students agreed."

I am looking forward to taking part as much as I can in the MobiMOOC and hopefully learning more about what is probably the most fascinating aspect of educational technology for the near future.

mLearning History - The SMS Project

2011-04-02T20:56:00.002+01:00

I did a very interesting course run by The Consultants-E that I have already written about see http://carol-carolrb.blogspot.com/2011/03/mlearning-completley-on-line-course.html. That course http://www.theconsultants-e.com/ spawned a very small project to see if SMS and mobile phones could be used to inspire reluctant readers and so improve their reading.

This project is still in progress!

SMS for reading project - a journal

Week 1
I visited the school doing the SMS project and was shown by a very excited and willing group how to use the phones, talked through all they they have been doing etc. There is lots of enthusiasm within the group that are taking part but they were really upset that a new message had not arrived to coincide with my visit.

It is very early days but the children are clearly very involved in receiving texts and sending replies. The text they got earlier this morning was "How many months have 28 days in them?" they all have responded "February" - so it will be interesting to see what they make of the answer "12."

It is interesting to note that the children have been told that they are only allowed to use the texting facility. Yesterday their teacher was with us at our ICT Conference all day. Today when she got in she found that they had all been using the camera while she was away - it does not take them many seconds to work out how it all works! While the cat's away… We have promised them that if they behave we will use the camera facility for the treasure hunt so I must try to spend time at the school soon to write that!!

Whilst the teacher involved was talking to other teachers at the conference yesterday she was amazed that there were secondary school teachers who had never thought to ask the pupils to use their phones in the classroom, apparently a few went away quite excited by the idea... let us live in hopes that we get a few more converts, they are quite hard to come by!

Week 2
I visited the school again at lunchtime today and was able to take some video of the children getting, reading and replying to the messages. They are very enthusiastic - whether that will pay in terms of reading or spelling improvements I am not at all sure They seem to have an understanding now of what a riddle is. Next week the messages will be based on the Greek Myth of Pandora's Box. The answers should be longer than the one or two word answers to the riddles. It will be interesting to see if their interest diminishes with the need to type in more words. Friday I am going to create the Treasure Hunt for the following week.

Week 3
I visited the school on Friday and planned the treasure hunt, they are going to use the Learning Platform for this project. I made up a sentence of brightly coloured huge words and cut them up putting them into tiny envelopes. Their teacher is going to take pictures, real close-ups of tiny images from the classroom. Pupils have to find the image, photograph it and send their photo of it to their teacher, close by they will find a tiny envelope with a word on it! The words need to be collected, they can be assembled into a sentence on the last day and their sentence sent back to their teacher. So 13 words, 13 picture clues to lead them to their envelopes!

The words given to the pupils for the treasure hunt make up my sentence:
Little Red Riding Hood and how she beat the big, very bad wolf. The children will have to end up with a similar sentence. The treasure hunt is running next week.

This week has fallen apart somewhat! On Friday I did not talk to the children, they were playing Red Nose Day Games, when we planned the visit I should have had about 20 minutes with the children and then done the treasure hunt but they were otherwise occupied, we had forgotten Red Nose Day.

Week 4
Today (21st March) I sat them down, started the camera and asked them to tell me the story of Pandora’s Box so far. They denied having it, they said the messages they had were the riddles....

I read the first message to them
• We are going to work through the story of Pandora’s Box over the next day or two. It is a Greek myth. See if you can find out what Pandora’s Box is.
- yes they had all had it and answered - they all told me it was a metal box. When pushed a little further apparently there was a Pandora’s Box episode in Dr Who! So I asked what that story was but no-one could tell me. I asked what this story was about and no-one realised they had had the first part of a story in the next four messages. They told me they had received something about the Romans - close but not close enough and not enough of it. I mentioned a sacrifice - they knew about a bull - and a god - really no idea at all. So - I read them the story, explaining it as I went, they were fascinated as one would expect but unable to take enough meaning from the text episodes to get the gist of the story. I have left the teacher to send them the last 6 messages, the next two they have already heard but the last four are new, what was in Pandora’s box when she opened it and that hope was left etc - I have asked them to tell me the story next time I visit!

One rather strange thing is that the children do not seem to be bothered by the fact that they don’t understand. I asked them what they would do if they did not understand a text, they replied they would ask.... but they didn’t! When I pointed that out they seemed pretty nonplussed, as though they had not realised that they did not understand... hmmm difficult to see how to encourage them to think about it to decide whether or not they understand. Answering questions should provoke thought.... maybe the riddles are working against thinking for understanding!

I chatted to the teacher about this story, it is simply too hard so we are finishing it quickly and getting on the the treasure hunt. The teacher had an idea for sequencing another story, a traditional tale. I have used Red Riding Hood fort he treasure hunt so we agreed on the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I have split it into texts and mixed it up as requested but not sure what the teacher envisaged - numbering the texts and sequencing them by number? Waiting to see what she has in mind. Meanwhile I need loads more riddles and one liners :-( That seems to be the level of understanding, reading capacity etc..

Week 5 - sadly the teacher was away ill when I got there. Knowing that there would be no messages to look at, talk about etc, I did not even go in the classroom, the pupils involved would have rushed to me and grabbed their phones - and been disappointed!

Now we are headed towards week 6. The pupils should have done their treasure hunt and we should be on to a sequencing activity, In theory this little test finishes on Friday - must talk to the teacher before I talk to my boss on Monday to see whether we want to carry it on, whether the teacher is able to put up with the disruption, whether the pupils are making any advances in their reading - though I am already sure that their attitude to reading has improved - and more!!

mLearning History - setting the scene 2

2011-04-02T20:38:00.002+01:00

IPod Touches

Following the Handheld Learning Conference in 2009, and the pensioning off of the EDAs the team bought a set of iPod Touches. Almost immediately my colleague who was setting them up discovered that the ports we needed to access the iTunes store were blocked – after all someone may want to buy music whilst in one of the educational establishments :-( The kit consisted of:
•    Class set of 30 ipod Touch (8GB)
•    Two Parasync docking stations (take up to 20 ipods each) in a ‘suitcase’
•    One Mac Book for synchronisation
•    One wireless router (Netgear) (is robust enough to allow 30 ipods onto Google Maps)
•    A selection of apps

Eventually they were ready for use by children and they were loaned to a Year 5 class of a large primary school based in Witney, Oxfordshire. The Class teacher was fairly new to the school and was very keen to try new things. This teacher was willing to let the ipods be used as classroom learning tools as well as for directed tasks. The iPod Touches had general class tools loaded such as - dictionary, internet look-up, Quick Office linked to Dropbox, mental maths games as part of maths lessons, a copy of Dragon story as a literacy text and the use of Google Maps for Local Study project.
Class Teacher

“When the iPods arrived, the children were so excited. We played and explored the apps downloaded. The children have now got used to them and use them to help their learning. They use the thesaurus and dictionary in literacy. In geography we looked at map work which was great to plan a journey using google maps. In literacy we created a Martian and then wrote a Description. The children use their iPods as they would pick up a pencil and it is not very often they are not available.”
“The parents are very keen and have embraced the experienced. A parent said she liked the fact that the children were able to work at their own abilities in the lessons. The children's favourite apps are spelling bee, hangman and touch pets. We have used the books for guided Reading. The only disadvantage is that if things go wrong (which does happen with ICT!) and sometimes when looking at images or paintings the screen is too small... Now if they made one with a bigger screen - now you’re talking!
LOL

For more information on the apps and a video clip see our project page http://occprojects.buzzinged.org.uk/OCCProjects/iPod_Touch.html

mLearning History - setting the scene 1

2011-04-02T20:30:00.003+01:00

Hand-held Learning and Game-based Learning

Our first Venture 2008

For a couple of years at Oxfordshire County Council the ICT Curriculum Team’s has had an interest in mLearning or Handheld learning. After a wonderful conference presentation made for us by David Wiley from the Wolverhampton mLearning project we bought a class set of EDAs and a county loans scheme started.

The team bought a class set, a colleague set them up, installed software, he spent loads of time and work, it was not particularly easy. We, as a team, had a training day booked. The software we were intending to use was Wild Key http://www.wildknowledge.co.uk/ a really inspired program with various data bases that could be used to identify minibeasts, plants, seaside wildlife and vegetation, butterflies and more.

Our training day arrived. The router or something similar that was supposed to give us all wireless access out in the field arrived and we started out. I never did get connection, I kept breaking my EDA, it had to be re-streamed so many times it was unreal – eventually mine was used as a reserve machine for others that went wrong :-(

Four machines only connected to the wireless, but even then once those users identified a minibeast the GPS to feed back the information to the master database failed… we did not have a lot of luck.

However – the team all blamed me for breaking them ;-) and the trial went on! For some things the EDAs were very good - where they have a fixed wireless link they were fine, and where I was happy to use my iPac some people kept hold of, and used their EDA. A few schools has some success (one at least left them in the cupboard I found out recently!).

Eventually the EDAs got pensioned off to where they could be set up permanently at one of our outdoor education centres for which they are ideally suited.

For more information see http://occprojects.buzzinged.org.uk/OCCProjects/EDAs.html

Teen Work

2011-03-31T21:07:00.000+01:00

Last night I spent some time in Skoolaborate for the first time since it has moved onto the main grid. My login has only just been sorted! Skoolaborate teachers were invited to see the work that has been done by a group of teens. The students were there, ready and more than willing to show off their work and even though they were teens they were very childlike in the demands to looks at their poster next! They were anxious to talk about their work and their experiences. I was very moved by what I saw. On the surface it is a simple, but very well presented poster display, but the notecards given by the posters were very distressing and clearly were inspired by first hand experiences. After writing about their experiences the students had done research and suggested ways to cope and move forward.

Short quotations from the posters

SMACK!!!!
My mom once experienced domestic violence when she was married to my sister’s dad. She told me that one day she and my sister’s dad got in an argument. When he smacked her so hard that she started dripping blood from her nose. She was wearing glasses so they scraped her nose really hard.

If you’re Latino you won’t be able to get to college because you are going to drop out. That’s how people talk about us. They also call us wetbacks and lazy. They don’t think we deserve an education.

My grandfather died from drinking alcohol. I was 10 years old when my mom told me the story. I felt sad but at the same time mad. I know that alcohol is bad for everyone. I always wondered why he had to drink to his death.

So many people don’t even care about what they do to the earth. For example the factory that burns many things, the smoke is changing the weather. Ok, what about me? You? What are we doing to kill our planet?

It was a Saturday night. I knew something bad was going to happen. My dad was out with his friends drinking. I was with my sisters in the room when. All of a sudden, I heard, “BOOM!” the door closed real hard.

Smack!!!! My older sister got hit by her future husband. My sister started to cry. Her husband told her to stop crying. I got my little baby niece out of the room but I was too afraid to go in the room.

I have seen bald eagles and their tree’s have been cut down. And bald eagles build there nests in houses. Or in city lights around neighborhoods. Because there trees have been cut down and they have no homes.

The statistics for domestic violence and alcohol related problems where they live are horrifying. These are teens.... it is so sad that they have to live through these things :-(

The 4th Virtual Round Table March 2011

2011-03-27T21:51:00.000+01:00

The 4th Virtual Round Table 2011 has taken place this weekend with
• 5 plenaries/ panel discussions
• an Adobe ConnectPro and a Second Life strand
• 18 presentations
• 16 workshops
• a Pecha Kucha Night
• an Open Mic session

The Virtual Round Table is planned by Heike Philps, Shelly Terrell and Berni Wall and takes place in Adobe Connect and Second Life. It is a free, totally on-line conference for language teachers primarily, and a very inspiring event.
It has been a fantastic few days with some amazing presentations such as Barbara Sakamoto's Little Tech for Big Results, Janet Bianchini's Storytelling in a Digital Era, Tyson Seburn's Soundcloud for listening and writing practice and mLearning: an introduction - by Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly. There were masses of wonderful presentations for language teachers, but my interest is in the technology more than anything else.

I have to say that the Pecha kucha was quite amazing - I am still laughing at Marisa's event, it was without doubt the funniest presentation that I have seen. I don't know how she carried it off, she must have practiced for ages to do it without laughing but it was good. Recordings will be available soon!

The open mic night was somthing of a revelation too, Bernie has a lovely voice :-) Sue singing the VRT song was wonderful - I had only heard Heike's rendition before the event… it was good Heike - but don't give up the day job!

The party was fun - I think everyone was a bit exhausted by then but I have some lovely pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157626365999086/

For loads more information, wonderful photos and videos very soon keep an eye on http://www.virtual-round-table.com/

The Naace Conference 2011

2011-03-27T21:34:00.002+01:00

Well - back from the Naace conference for three days now and I have still not got to grips with my thoughts of the whole event. It was great seeing Sugata Mitra present, he has long been a hero of mine. Sometimes when one is looking forward to a preso it can be disappointing but in this case it was just wonderful. I was slightly worried, having seen You Tube videos of his talks that there would be nothing new but it was superb.

His new pedagogy - " I have no idea I am going now, see you in eight weeks," still has me giggling. His SOLE - Self organised learning environment - is a story to inspire. Some of the new things he added to this talk were about primary children answering GCSE questions in 20 minutes, the children in Hong Kong answering how an ipad knows where they are thus mastering trigonometry without even knowing what it is called and The Hyderabad Experiment where very strong accents were a problem to teaching English and students were not getting jobs. Sugata set up computers with speech to text software which did not understand the children's accents so returned rubbish, he told them that the software was fine they needed to make it understand, then he used his wonderful pedagogy when the children asked him what they had to do. When he returned he met a child and he asked how they had got on, apparently the child replied in perfect English "Fantastic." He queried the children to find that they had downloaded the Oxford Talking Dictionary and learned how to pronounce the words that they knew properly :-)

I loved Ollie Bray's session about gaming! There is so much information about the Consolarium and so many recordings of his sessions I will not attempt to write it up here - but it was inspiring!

Ewan Macintosh kicked off the conference reminding us why ICT needs to be taught in schools, tinkering with the curriculum is what ministers do but what they need to do is invest money into CPD!

There were so many inspiring talks and breakout sessions I can't begin to write it all out. The one session that I really enjoyed though was towards the close, it was Geoff Stead talking about
Mobile learning: Can smaller = more personal AND more effective?
From the programme:
"There is an amazing convergence point happening right now. After several years of creative, disruptive and technological tension there is an emerging consensus of how new and mobile technologies can add real and meaningful value to today’s learners.

This convergence is steering us towards opening schools up, allowing students to use a range personal devices and encouraging schools to adopt “collaborative project based” approaches to new technologies.

These solutions are by no means straightforward. “techno-hype” and “supplier enthusiasm” can quite often drown out the most important of lessons. Sometimes local problems can only be solved with local solutions whatever the global enthusiasts tell you.

Geoff will be challenging UK schools to look at lessons learned further afield. Post-school. In work. In health. In Africa. Across the globe. He will also be presenting a range of tools and ideas to support practitioners looking to adopt some of these emerging lessons."

Geoff started his talk with a video clip from You Tube showing how mobile devices can really help in times of crisis: http://www.mole-project.net/project-vision

He shared a site offering a collection of Research papers - having read a few there is some really interesting stuff here! http://www.mole-project.net/research. He did mention that there are some tools in the making - whether these are cross platform, useful for education or what I can't say, still waiting for an answer to an e-mail :(

Sadly this is now well out of date, it seems to have lurked in draft for two weeks - hmmm - some catching up to do!
It has been so long in the waiting all of the conference videos are on-line now - maybe only for Naace members though :-( www.naace.co.uk/conference2011 that seems a bit sad to me - it will hardly encourage membership!!

Also - nearly forgot with the passage of time :-) I receieved my Certified Naace Professional certificate after the gala dinner - quite an honour!

A lovely Day

2011-03-19T22:13:00.001Z

Well I guessed right but it did not go quite as planned, Andrew's work van broke down on the way back to work to drop it off so I had to get H out of bed early to go and tow him in :-) H got out of bed after only 3 hours sleep and dressed - jeans and t shirt - ready to tow a van in! This is significant - when they got back we had a houseful and he did not change, now does not like the photos :-(

Clem arrived in their car with the meat which we got started, Pete and Helen rushed over as soon as they heard to get the veggies all prepped, by the time Andy got here it was as if he had started on time :-) This is good - Andy is a little stressed just now as trying to stop smoking!

Sadly three of the family could not get to us due to work but 14 of us sat down to dinner about 2pm; our best man and his wife, lifelong friends, and the family. Everyone who walked into the house seemed to have an armful of food! They had it planned down to the last fine detail. Andrew phoned Helen last night realising he had boobed saying that no-one had told him mum didn't know..... doghouse for Andy ;-)

The sun shone, it was uncommonly hot for March and we spent some time outside with all of the family dogs!

I was presented with a huge pink box, I had already had to move it to lay the table and knew it was a light as a feather :-) Inside was a helium filled balloon with two tickets for a hot air balloon flight attached to the ribbon, on the 9th April we are going hot air ballooning - our present :-)

The day has been quite wonderful, a lovely surprise and celebration.

The Cat's out of the Bag

2011-03-19T09:09:00.000Z

Had a phone-call from one of my sons last night - "Mum there is an accident on the A34 - I am stuck behind it, need to get to Woodstock and Chippy to deliver can you see if you can find a route for me?"

So - I start to open maps and road news pages to see what is going on an where and Andrew keeps chatting….

"Clem and I will be over quite early tomorrow…"

Fine I say, but Phill and Vicky usually come mid - morning (his twin and twin's wife whose son's birthday it was in the week - me thinking they wanted to see Woody for his birthday!)

Andrew - Oh is it Woody's birthday?

Me - beginning to get puzzled - Yes it was Wednesday! Also your dad will not get to bed until 5.30am so he will not be up until about 10-30…

Andrew - but Helen (his sister) said we have to sit down at 2.30 and I need to get the meat on…

Ahhhh - suddenly these oddments come together and he has let the cat out of the bag. It is our 30th wedding anniversary on Monday and the family are clearly planning a huge family gathering today - Andrew is cooking - I can understand their choice, he is an excellent cook, it will be like Christmas again :-)

So I have done the house, am dressed in better than usual Saturday jeans and t shirt - just waiting to see what unfolds :-)

Royal purple

2011-03-09T15:38:00.002Z

Wonderful - I posted it by mobile phone to Posterous and it ended up here :-) Hmmmmmm one wonders how. Investigation time!

Our Last ICT Conference

2011-03-08T21:08:00.003Z

Today was our annual conference - the last one! A really fantastic day even though my feet hurt so badly now :-)

We split the building into four areas:

The Virtual Zone - showing off Learning Platform work and the use of Second Life for e-safety sessions. Children shared what they have been doing, teachers shared resources, we had a spoof video clip on the difference between the learning platform and Facebook by 11 year olds ... hmmmm ;-) I was in the virtual room and I kept losing the children to the games and mobile zones - wonder why??? Once I got a group in ready for their preso I had to bribe them with my iPad and iPhone to keep them there!

The Mobile Zone - schools showing off and talking about the use of laptop trolleys, netbook trolleys, iPod sets, mobile phone work, iPad, tablets and more (actually there was a lot of control work with Probots and Lego in that room too) it was buzzing and lively, I just wondered why the teachers were playing with the ipod touches for up to 30 minutes at a time :-) We have a tiny SMS to develop reading skills project that has just started and the teacher was in the mobile zone to talk about it. Amazingly she said at the end that loads of secondary teachers were astounded and thought it might be a good idea to let pupils use their phones in class.... wow from tiny acorns...

The Creative Zone - where Apple have been demonstrating all of the wonderful capabilities of the Apple software and launching our creative trials of MacBooks for green screen video, podcasting etc., there was an Apple Distinguished educator there all days demonstrating what could be achieved - hands on - wish I could have been there all day! Also there were pupils demonstrating stop motion animation all day with a swap over of pupils at half time :-)

Finally
The Games Based Learning Zone where teachers could see pupils using DSis, Wiis, PSPs, Kinect etc and explore how they can be used to inspire classroom projects. It is frightening just how quickly the children learn new skills such as those needed for various games on the Kinect and just how poor the adults were on the same learning curve.

Both an inspiring and sad day! Inspiring as there was so much creativity that was being shared by children and teachers in all of the different zones but also a wide range of great resources on show in the exhibition hall.

All of the Oxfordshire schools that attended had their evaluation forms put into a hat and a grand raffle will be drawn tomorrow to complete the event. The prizes - some 50 or more lots - is all of the kit that we have been using for years as a LA ICT team. Netbooks trolleys, laptop trolleys, ipods, cameras, sets of cameras, control kit, data sensing kit, flip cams, IWBs, projectors, wiis, DSis all sorts!

I not sure how I feel about it all - very sad obviously, glad the kit is going into schools not into a skip like so much unwanted county kit but the big county consultation document shows that my job is going, the building we use closes on the 31st July, and still two of us have not been informed about anything yet so could be expected to turn up to teach on the 1st August with no training room or facilities :-)

It was very touching to realise how many teachers are concerned for us, everyone asked what is happening and if we have heard anything yet. One of the big companies said that if I go independent to let them know and they will try to send some training my way - aren't people lovely?

mLearning - a completely on-line course

2011-03-06T21:58:00.003Z

Having delivered a fair few but strangely not actually done one before, I have recently finished taking part in my first ever completely on-line training course. I really enjoyed it! It was so different from any other courses that I have done.

Most courses that I have done over the years have been one or two day training events - EPICT, CEOP, ICT Assessor training etc., where I went somewhere, took part in something and was "trained."

Thinking back to one of the last real life training courses I did for my degree, it involved me driving home from school as early as I could get away. Cooking dinner and leaving family to fend for themselves. Driving for an hour to get to the university in Oxford. Getting into the library for as long as possible before the course session began at 8pm. Into the room for 1.5 hours of note taking etc during the lecture, an hour's drive home, wash up, sort out lunches, clothes etc. for next day and fall into bed by about midnight! Every week the children were abandoned either to mother-in-law or husband if he was on the day shift. I know it is fair to say they all disliked it! Tis true that was about 1993 and before the Internet had made life so much easier!

With no children these days and consequently much more freedom from time constraints when I said to my husband that I wanted to do a 6 week training course he more happily agreed saying to go ahead and sign up. He asked which night it was - I replied whenever I want to do it. He asked how long it would take and I replied about 5 hours a week. I still think he thought I would be away from home.

The course was 30 hours spread over 6 weeks with each week's work being made available on Tuesday evening. I logged in on the first night and read the week's instructions, decided I needed to do as much as possible during the week to leave the weekend to family visits, housework and planning my real work for the following week as usual, so got stuck in and did the work. It soon became very clear that the on-line course enabled much more delegate interaction than I ever was aware of in the face to face course, we had forums to discuss work, to chat in, and one to sort out technical issues. We were in touch with each other!

In the face to face course I basically rushed in at the last minute, sat and listened taking notes and rushed out at the end, a typical lecture scenario, I did have tutorial time when it came to discussing my dissertation, then a further tutorial to finalise things but had little interaction with anyone really, the most being a few minutes class discussion at the end of each session.

In the on-line course I was completely free to decide when to work, all of the resources for the course had been made available or were on the web with links provided. The reading list was easily accessible, I was not fighting everyone else on the course to get one of a handful of copies held by the library - and then return them for the rest of the delegates on the course!

There were only two hours in the whole course that were scheduled, live on-line discussions, but they were recorded for people who could not attend.

It also was very obvious that everyone on the course really wanted to do it, delegates were enthusiastic about trying out new stuff and sharing their experiences. I learned people's names, something of their work situations and interests. People were from several different countries, working in different circumstances with different age groups, bringing between them a huge wealth of experience to the work and all willing to share their knowledge. The course was exhilarating in a way I never expected it to be. I had a wonderful time!

I would absolutely recommend on-line courses to anyone wandering whether to try one or procrastinating in any form about their value. For people not used to planning their own time a little discipline may be needed but the benefits of this on-line course were great and the learning opportunities are enhanced massively.

This particular course was mLearning being run by The Consultants-E, for more information about their courses see http://www.theconsultants-e.com/, many thanks to Nicky and Gavin who ran and moderated the course and to all of the delegates who shared their experiences so freely!

A Holiday in The Gambia

2011-03-01T20:36:00.004Z

Click To Play

I have just returned from a week's holiday in The Gambia. The week was supposed to be just relaxation but once we got there we signed up for a few outings - can't resist looking round just a little bit :-) We flew into Banjul international airport where there was a veritable battle over our cases with dozens of porters trying to get them onto their trolley… it was clearly going to be one of "those" holidays… tourism is one of the biggest trades and people need to make a living from it! It is a very poor country with over 1/4 of its people living below the international poverty line. It was quite funny though - we paid a porter to take the cases to the door, another to take them to the coach, a third held his handout to put them onto the coach!

The Gambia is a long, thin, low lying, small country moving inland from West Africa along the River Gambia. It has two quite clearly defined areas, north which is westernised and south which is largely traditional. It has tropical weather and the charts show that the temperature in February is about 32 degrees. It wasn't when we were there!! I don't think it got down to 32, it was over 40 most of the time!

Click To Play

We stayed out of town in the middle of nowhere at a place called Brufut, there was nothing much except the hotel so it was very quiet and peaceful. Nearby areas such as the Senegambia strip and Bakau town are pretty modern places with bars, restaurants and places of entertainment as well as shops, supermarkets, chemists etc.
There is a good tarmac road from the airport to where the hotels are, the locals call it the M1, there is another road going from east to west - apparently the M25 :-) Road signs etc are few and far between. tarmac is a rarity with sand being the common surface. In the rainy season roads are virtually impassable because of mud so the cars that people have over there are mostly 4 X 4s.

The river is about 700 miles long and up to 11 miles wide. We travelled the tributaries for a day seeking out beautiful birds in the mangroves. This day out was booked at the hotel, a coach was laid on to pick us up and take us to the boatyard. First impressions of the boat - well let's not go there :-) We had two choices, sundeck or bar so we chose the sundeck. We were ordered to take our flip flops off - "shoes off, shoes off…" so we obliged and walked up the steps to see spread before us about 6 mattresses with frayed, ancient covers, wet from the low lying cloud over night - and all looking rather dilapidated. As soon as the sun broke through though everything dried and we were set for the day. Coffee with brandy was served soon after we arrived, the most beautiful, light, crisp garlic bread mid moorings, champagne and orange juice just after that and lunch not long after that!! We were spoiled rotten. The birds were a little shy, but pelicans, stalks, whimbrel, oytsercatchers and loads of others, I have no clue what they were called, were all there to be seen and photographed. After lunch we had a swimming stop. This was a revelation! One poor lady wanted to get in the water to cool down but was worried about the depth - apparently about 7 mts., I got in expecting to swim but it was so salty that was impossible, all I could do was float. When the lady lacking in water confidence saw me bobbing about on top she realised she had no worries. Neither swimming nor sinking was going to happen.

We spent a day travelling in the south looking at villages, there are still villages that have to draw water from a pump house well. Children are not usually allowed near the wells, obviously any breakage would result in the loss of water to the whole village, but the villagers are clearly used to the old Bedford Army wagons arriving and know that means visitors - so the children were out in force asking for sweets and money, showing us how the well works and displacing folks actually gathering water who seemed to disappear into the background leaving us to the tender mercies of the village young.

Extended families live in family compounds. This is normal and commonplace. In muslim areas these compounds may include several wives and sets of children. It seems that children, however young, look after the next age down, we saw that as a recurring pattern wherever we went. Tiny children gathered up even tinnier children and carried them around :-)

We drove for miles along sand tracks, past several villages and family compounds. We saw miles of walled off plots of land. Apparently people buy a plot of land and put a wall around it. As and when it is needed for a house, or they have money to build, they may build a wall or two. Over a period of years a house may appear on the plot. Meanwhile the termites build their homes on these plots with no thought whatsoever for the owners! A "comfort stop" was on the schedule, we stopped, in the bush, ladies to the right and gents to the left please :-) That was a bit of a shock to first time visitors!
As we passed one village we saw a large group of vultures. Apparently this was the place where carcasses were put, they were eating a dog at the time. The guide called them Sanitary inspectors!

We arrived, eventually at a village school. The Government provides school buildings and teachers but parents have to provide school uniforms, food etc., for some families that is impossible so some children still do not go to school. The headteacher at the school we visited was quite a lady! She opened with two classes, invited the tourists, invites them to leave as much money and goods as they can and uses it for education. She now has ten classrooms, a library almost complete and 550 children on role. There is an accommodation block for the teachers, whose monthly wage is about 500 dalasai (£12.50) each and the children are fed once a day at school.
The children sang and danced for us - it was delightful! They showed us their vegetable plots, where they sell the surplus food, their classes etc. They were all talking in English and many of them, at least the older ones, could hold a reasonable conversation with us in English. Looking back into the room where we had been invited to leave all of our wordily wealth and virtually everything else too, my husband saw the headteacher and travel guide squabbling over the binoculars he had put in the box :-) She won!

The music and dancing was spectacular, we watched groups several times over the week, their costumes were lovely, very colourful, very sparkly! They sang, danced, did fire eating, all sorts with the most amazing energy. There seemed to be lots of symbolism in the dancing, sadly I had no idea what most of it represented.

Click To Play

Several nights, after dinner, in the dark we walked along the beach. It is the Atlantic Ocean and huge rolling waves break onto the shore sending brine in white fluffy lines onto the sand. The first time we went, as we walked, we realised the "brine" was running hell for leather back to the water as we moved. There were hundreds of white crabs from the tiniest things as small as my little finger nail up to about 6 inches across. I tried to film them but did not have the right equipment there :-(

To see photographs from the Gambia Click here

I am not convinced that I want to return - we love Africa with its colour, music, traditions, crowded, roadside stalls selling anything, animals wandering freely etc, but it is getting quite westernised and losing it's appeal in the process. Also it is still very poor, that one can do so little for them whilst there is quite upsetting.

Sounds to Inspire Writing

2011-01-28T22:45:00.002Z

I am three weeks into a course being run by The Consultants-E called mLearning. In the UK I guess most of us would call it Handheld learning but in the current "down with ICT" message that I, at least , am getting from the Government I think it will be the only way for schools to go over the next ten years.

The course itself has been really interesting so far, we have been exploring what it is, our own contexts and experimenting with various techniques.

During the first week there was an exercise on sound and one of the delegates introduced the idea of a story in a sequence of sounds. It seems a very obvious way of using mobile phones, mp3 or 4 player in the primary classroom. I have taken the idea and created a few MP3s that could be downloaded and used on mobile devices to inspire writing.

How I would use them:

•    Listen once
•    Listen a second time and note down key words or phrases linked to the sounds
•    If necessary listen a third time filling out their notes
•    Pupils either work alone, in small groups to create a story
•    If pupils are working in a foreign language I may ask them to prepare to tell their story
•    If pupils were working in their own language I may get them to work in groups to make a “choose your own path through the story” in a wiki.

This exercise could be as easy or advanced as required, pupils could use only the main sounds and develop a story using them, or use every sound in sequence to make up a story, or in any other way a teacher can imagine!

Each sound files has a sound that does not really belong, e.g. the jungle has a cat’s meow and the shopping event has robotic sounds, some pupils may enjoy weaving them into a story if they hear them, others may choose to ignore the odd sounds, it really does not matter.

If you try them out please let me know if it worked, how it turned out, and if possible, share your pupil’s writing.

Jungle at Dusk
Cut Down a Tree
Whoops
Shopping Event

A mad few weeks

2011-01-22T22:23:00.001Z

Well for various reasons it has been a few weeks since I wrote anything here - the main reason being my desktop computer died about a fortnight before Christmas and I have been juggling an old machine and laptop to get by! The desktop I have been using was the one I had before the one that just died, it is a bit old now and I had cleared all of my software off for my son who only used it to talk to his fiance whilst she was studying in France and he was here. Since she came over the computer has been sat idle upstairs as they use her laptop in their flat, so out it came and I have just about finished installing and updating everything again as I am going to put it back upstairs in the box room office tomorrow! However so much has been happening I feel as if I should have written a book in the time never mind a single, strange, rather mixed up, multi-themed post.

I went out to buy a new computer the other day. I had decided I wanted a nice neat all-in-one type. I found a good one, a Sony with everything I needed, but decided to have a last look around before buying, a bad move, I ended up with a big Mac, and not the burger sort :-)

It will take me a while to get used to it I think! I have loaded Parallels, Windows 7 and a new version of MS Office that I purchased and downloaded the day my old computer died. I have put a few favourite essentials on that just so the virtual computer so that I can do all that I need to do on a daily basis but where possible I am using the Mac software to start to get used to it. I am really impressed with how the Mac does things, I just wish I was a month on and knew a bit better where everything is and what to expect, I feel a little insecure at the moment!

It has been about ten days since I was at Learning Without Frontiers conference at the Barbican in London. Lots has already been written about it, it was an amazing few days with lots to see, think about and learn. The thing that just blew me away was Tim Ryland's green screen filming with children. He used the iPad app Epic Citadel as the background and started a story about two pickpockets. It was totally believable set in an "Oliver" style of old London. The children acted out the story, filmed against green, then the action was set over the old London scene. See lots more on Tim's blog posts http://www.timrylands.com/blog/2011/01/10/learning-without-frontiers-london-2011/ and http://www.timrylands.com/blog/2011/01/11/learning-without-frontiers-london-2011-2-a-few-more-links/.

I bought the software virtual world software for little ones called "All about Me" I love it! I have to pass it onto to my grandson but only when I have finished playing with it :-)
The DSi Excel was impressive, it does not have apps so is used in a different way to the iPod Touch.

See more about the LWF conference from colleague Nick at http://buzzinged.org.uk/ he has been much more productive than me ;-)

There are a lot of video clips at http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=learning+without+frontiers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=learning+without+frontiers&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=4z6&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivns&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=t1M7TcicJMyXhQfilcXACg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=6&ved=0CFYQqwQwBQ&fp=18c83b03fcd69cdc and all of Leon's clips are being made available at http://www.l4l.co.uk/

From there we went on to BETT and sadly between meeting people, presentations and doing things for work I did not see as much as usual but the one piece of software that stood out above everything to me was the I Can Animate app by Kudlian. The software itself has been around for a while but the app - for the new ipod touch 2s with cameras - amazing!! It has green screen capability and I was thrilled with the small sized green board that the demos were being filmed on at their stand. I bought the app on the train on the way home :-) and my husband covered a small board with green felt that we just happened to have in the loft - green screen miniature studio set up and ready! When my grandson came last Sunday we created a story, he recorded the narration and we made the props. Sadly my spring loaded iPhone tripod has not yet arrived so we can't record the stop motion animation tomorrow :-( However it will be done very soon and then I will be experimenting with more ideas.

I have to just mention that after the Wednesday preso in BETT, about Second Life, a Second Life colleague whom I have only met once was at the end of a queue of people who wanted to talk after the event. I was so shocked I could not believe it was her and had to check her name badge - what a lovely surprise!! It made the whole weekend for me!

Our team and centre is due to become an Apple Regional Training Centre over the next few weeks, it has taken a while to set up and now the time is just about here I am quite excited ;-) Whilst at BETT we talked to the Apple people that we are working with and they are going to put some of the new iPod Touch 2s into our kit so hopefully at least in this one aspect - miniature green screen video creation we will be able to do something wonderful!

Our e-safety course has started again in Second Life, join us Tuesday evening for week 2!

The EVO VILLAGE 2011 is running and with so much going on at work at the moment I really am not doing nearly enough to help the team, but we did have a lot of fun outfitting everyone with new clothes last weekend! For video of that see http://lancelot.emea.acrobat.com/p27122770/.

There is more to come for the last fortnight - but tomorrow :-)

QR Code Investigations

2011-01-08T22:09:00.001Z

I have been experimenting for a few weeks with using QR codes to make class puzzles or quizzes. They are ideal for out of school use where you can read one on the side of a building to find out information or open a web link explaining more about the building but I feel that children would enjoy getting used to using them. As we have a set of iPod touches that go out to schools I am hoping to write a curricular puzzle for the next school that has them but how to do it, how to plan and run a quiz or create a classroom puzzle has been a bit of a trial in itself!

I have just pulled a set of QR code investigations together into a document and wonder if there is anyone out there who would like to try them! I tried to make a quiz before Christmas, based on the story of The Night Before Christmas, but I felt it was boring so not good, I will try to refine it for next Christmas, I may know what I am doing by then!

There are issues to consider when trying to make a classroom QR code quiz, investigation or whatever, one of the hardest to deal with is that sites which use plugins, Flash and Shockwave etc. can’t be used in the work as the plugins are not available on the Apple products. ANother is reading the codes. When I had printed off my first set of QR codes to try out the quiz several did not read and I thought they had failed – but no – the way I was holding them or propping them up to try them out was what failed, the paper was floppy so bent slightly meaning the camera could not read them accurately enough.

This document The Ancient Greeks QR Code Investigation is a set of open ended investigations for older primary children who are studying the Ancient Egyptians. The differentiation in this case would have to be by outcome, I have not set differentaiated tasks, I may in the future if this sort of activity would work. It could be an extension activity for more able once they have finished the core work, I guess there are many ways in which it could be used according to the facilities available in a classroom. The pupils need internet access through a phone or iPod Touch with a QR reader such as the free one at http://itunes.apple.com/app/id368494609?mt=8 to access it.

The investigations are written as QR codes, so are the websites that pupils may use for the study! Pupils may just find the investigation title with the QR reader then go and look up information on the computer to formulate their answer, which would give some better sites for this age pupil, sadly the lack of flash on the Apple products means that many interactive children’s sites are not available on the mobile devices.

Teachers should print out the sheets and cut out the images which need to be laminated to make them rigid enough to be read by a phone or iPod Touch with a QR reader such as. The laminated code images need to be put around the classroom so that pupils can look around with the QR reader, find an investigation that they like and then find the website to help them with their answer.

The instructions code says when pupils have done 6 of the 10 investigations to go to the teacher for their prize. The answers may be as short as a sentence or could be a much bigger investigation depending on the age and ability of the pupils involved. The prize may be house points, a star or something more substantial but if that is not how you want to use the puzzle don’t put the instruction code image out. You could use a website such as http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ web site to create your own instruction!

If you use it please let me know how you use it and how it goes! If you have ideas to improve it and you have time to feed back please do that too!! If you use it I hope your children enjoy it. If it fails - I am sorry it is only and experiment but I am lacking children to try it out on these days :-(

QR Code Links
http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
http://hamsterclass.posterous.com/using-our-class-ipod-touch-to-get-help-with-t
http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/qr-codes/qr-codes-the-nuts-and-bolts/
http://mrbroadfield.blogspot.com/2011/01/using-qr-codes.html
http://www.qrstuff.com/

Things to try to make use of QR codes
Treasure hunts, maths trails, nature trails, history trails – text posters around the school.
Messages for the local community posted outside school for schools to read.
As a stimulus from writing - take the maps of the school, plant a virtual world on top, set a quest around the school.

Seasonal Greeting

2010-12-14T11:40:00.004Z

Who am I really and am I an on-line friend?

2010-12-05T11:48:00.000Z

I may tell you that I am mid 50s, married, a teacher, mother of a houseful of grown up children, most of whom have children – so – a grandmother too, but am I who I claim to be?

You may tell me you are mid 30s, living with your partner, a teacher, interested in technology and I believe you!

Why?

Can on-line/ virtual friendships be taken seriously?

Can you possibly know who I am from what I choose to reveal about myself?

Can I possibly know you from our on-line conversations?

How can we know who is a friend?

I talk to you in an on-line situation, plan events, work alongside you, trust you as a friend – an on-line friend. I am happy to see you. I chat to you freely, sharing incidents, maybe some friendly local gossip, maybe family details. I have no fear.
I am comfortable and happy with that relationship.
Is it real?

You work in the same school as me. I see you every day.
I gather from conversations your wife’s name, your children’s names, the school they go to, the minutiae of daily life with young children. The birthdays, the presents, the illnesses, days off, struggling to cope with child care...
I see your eyes during conversation. I see how you cope and deal with small children, colleagues and parents...
I feel that I know you, I share the daily hassles to cope with work, a family etc.. I consider you a friend.
One night you up-sticks move out of the family home and into the home of a lover.
Did I really know you?

I worked alongside you in real life, called upon you when I had problems with technology and you solved them. I was happy to see you arrive. I chatted to you happily, maybe gossiped about friends, mostly just friendly stuff but more likely current events, maybe family events. I had no fear. I considered you a friend.
Years later I heard you were in gaol – your crime was really not nice. I may have been the person on the receiving end...

What is it to know a person? How can I know a person in physical life or in virtual life?
What an dilemma. I do and always have chosen to believe people are inherently good, friendly and for the most part trustworthy. I know for many money is an issue and they may not have paid for every last video they watch, song they listen to, or picture they use and that is not the sort of trustworthiness or honesty that I am talking about. It is the trust when someone is not under pressure, people in a natural, relaxed frame of mind such as most that we meet in an on-line or local social situation when I feel they should have no reason to fabricate their life.
Am I wrong?
I don’t think so.

Recently I have read with horror the plight of a friend – dare I say that? An on-line friend – can that really be though?
He has suffered dreadfully at the hands of someone whom he thought of as one of his on-line friends - one party deliberately wanting to hurt another – that is strange, abhorrent even to me who dreads accidentally hurting anyone let alone someone I consider a friend... How can anyone do that? It really upset me I was saddened, shocked, experienced pain, but can I really empathise with someone who is a virtual friend?

How can we know who we are talking to when we are on-line?

Part of every one of my e-safety courses is trying to answer the question “How can we know who we are talking to when we are on-line?” During the session delegates try to make a poster of three questions that we can give to pupils so that they can say yes – this is someone I can trust, it is a safe on-line friend, but we have never yet managed it. We make a question – think it is good, then comes the “Ah but...” moment. So the question fails. This happens over and over again with every group of people working on the exercise.

The question seems to be unanswerable.

Thinking about cyber bullying

I have happily set off on several journeys to meet my on-line friends and absolutely love them – more from having physically met them, than knowing them purely in the on-line world where they are still rather abstract.
Have they been genuine people?
Has what they have told me been true?
Probably! I have no reason to doubt it.
I don’t want to know private details of friends’ lives if they are on-line friends any more than if they are working in the same building as me all day every day, or I grew up with them and have known them all my life. We are all entitled to as much privacy in our lives as we require. We all choose what to share with others and what to keep hidden. So if I feel that all my friends – on-line or off, are friends, they are not deliberately lying to me, they are not pretending to be someone they are not, and that they are all simply delightful people is there an issue?

Clearly there is as the plight of one particular friend shows.

Is it anything to do with the on-line world? That is where the problem occurred.
What is it in the on-line world that makes such a difference?
Tone of voice – in the on-line world it is often not there as a hint of how seriously messages of being made – is that an issue?
Eye contact – in the on-line world it is missing – is that an issue?
Body language - in the real world distances, personal space, touch or lack of, these things may more easily help people to understand the social requirements of a situation - is the lack of that a contributor?
When physically with someone I can see easily if words are upsetting someone – so I stop talking, back track, apologise, try to resolve the issue? Is not being able to see someone an issue?

Did someone set out deliberately to destroy someone else?
So maybe I should try going on-line and deliberately set out to mislead another person, pretend I am 25, make up elaborate stories to hide my real family, age etc... nooo – could not keep that up and no interest in trying to deny who I am or my lovely family...
If I even say something innocently that gets misinterpreted – oh dear, full of apologies and explanations ... followed by a quiet embarrassed withdrawal...

So if someone did deliberately set out to deceive or destroy someone else is that a sign of illness? Is a cyberbully an ill person? If so how can we recognise the illness, deal with it? Support that ill person?

I have to go on trusting people are who they say they are, enjoying their company and all the rest. However – I know how hard it was to completely avoid one on-line “friend” who decided I needed to be someone else and do things that I am not prepared to do to meet his demands, who told me I was a useless teacher because I did not jump through his hoops when evaluating my own work, he had access to me on MSN, Twitter, e-mail, in Second Life, through various Nings etc., it took ages to stop the contact and was an experience I really did not enjoy. Earlier this year I was at an on-line event and he was present – I was able to ignore him and enjoy the event without contact and without worry, but it did take a while! I am very lucky of course – I am strong and have a family who support me! I read another story yesterday about a teacher who had been bullied in school and it had destroyed her confidence so much so that she is locked away at home unable to work at the moment.

Can I honestly carry on teaching about e-safety and cyber bullying when all I have are questions? I have to! We all have to pull together to stop cyberbullying – any sort of bullying – it destroys lives and what possible satisfaction can come from that? We must try to recognise spark points, reasons, illness involved and create more and better support for all involved.

EduBlog Awards Nominations 2010

2010-12-03T22:00:00.002Z

Well - here we are at the last second, I am with a friend, sat in Second Life, trying to think of all the wonderful blogs I read regularly and can't think of them.... ooohhh should have started earlier!

EduBlog Awards Nominations 2010

I am sure there should be more - but this is it for me - if I have left you out - I am sorry please don't take it personally!

Best individual blog E-moderation Station http://www.emoderationskills.com/ An enjoyable introduction to many technological terms, explained really clearly – good for use with teachers new to ICT!

Best New Blog http://emmaherrod.com/category/blog/ A great new blog full of interesting teaching ideas.

Best individual tweeter @eyebeams – keeps me up to date with educational and technological events in the UK!

Best group blog http://digitalplay.info/blog/ - Kyle and Graham give lots of ideas for using games to learn! I frequently share their ideas with Oxfordshire schools.

Best resource sharing blog - http://www.freetech4teachers.com/ Loads of wonderful tools for teachers are reviewed and shared on this blog, again I often share the ideas with Oxfordshire teachers.

Most influential blog post - http://slife.dudeney.com/?p=665 - Bullied, Blackmailed, Defamed, Threatened…The shock of the year! A salutary warning to all of us how vulnerable we are in cyberspace. We really do not know who we are talking to all of the time. That this can happen to such a lovely person is beyond belief.

Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion #UKedchat a weekly discussion on various aspects of education. http://ukedchat.wikispaces.com/

Best teacher blog Dawn Halleybone http://hallyd.edublogs.org/tag/wii/ Dawn shared her games based learning ideas – a gift to all educators:-)

Best educational tech support blog http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/ loads of lovely web 2.0 ideas offered here ;-)

Best educational use of video / visual http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ This is a great resource for all teachers whenever they are trying to work out how Web 2. tools work!

Best educational use of a virtual world #SLanguages 2010 http://www.slanguages.net/archive2010.php

Best use of a PLN Shelly Terrell - #EdTech http://edchat.pbworks.com/w/page/219908/FrontPage

Tom

2010-10-30T16:05:00.001+01:00

Well we have Tom living with us now. He is another rescue dog, an adolescent male, very puppyish still but rather large! He has a huge head and feet but is still quite skinny having suffered a lot from stress in the kennel.

He loves running and runs like the wind, he has chased the turkey and hens, not to hurt them, just because it is fun. He loves chasing a ball. He loves people, dogs and children and will make a lovely pet as we get him a little better mannered, at the moment he is rather too boisterous and would love to be a lapdog taking advantage of cuddling up to and trying to get onto people’s laps when they are seated. He thinks all day is playtime and that everyone is going to play with him! He loves men and as soon as my husband or sons come in the house it is instant play!

I have got through so many clothes this week (working at home as it is half term) as he rushes in from the garden and throws himself at me – when standing on his back legs his paws reach my shoulders so he leaves muddy paw prints all down me :-)

At the moment he is totally bemused when I talk to people on Skype or in Second Life, he thinks that I can only be talking to him as no-one else is around, then tries to get on my lap!

We have one smallish problem – he is afraid of small spaces! I can’t get him to use the dog flaps in the back door and conservatory to get in and out of the garden! As he wants to run all day I have had the doors open all week and it is getting cold here. I have tried all sorts so far – even as far as putting a pork pie on one side to encourage him through – after half an hour of trying to coax, persuade etc., I went and started work leaving him outside hoping he may pluck up courage but Dexy dog went and ate the pork pie - #fail!
So every time he goes in and out and I am with him I open the flaps and get him to go through but for how long I have to do this is anyone’s guess ;-) It could be a long cold winter in this house!

Happy Rezzday Gizmo and Karelia

2010-10-30T15:14:00.001+01:00

Well what a party! It was a complete and happy coincidence that these two wonderful friends joined Second Life on the same day which three years on led to a party and a half! We started by looking at some of the amazing art of Solkide Auer and moved around some of Karelia and Gizmo’s favourite places in Second Life including Lynto Land at the Cross Worlds gallery, Arcachon, Aeonia , Costa Rica, Santiago, Tall Trees and quite possibly more :-)

We met on Learn 4 Life with champagne and merry making along the wonderful reproduction by Solkide of an Escher art work. When the group had gathered we moved on to Aeonia and progressed gradually down the list of places to visit, staying rather than longer at some than intended so by the time the group got back to Edunation for the disco I was not there to take photos.

One of the funniest episodes that I have ever seen in Second Life took place on the Costa Rica sand where after everyone wearing the Baywatch gesture and running in sync across the sand one of the wonderful men in the party, Div, a rather cuddly individual, changed into a Pamela type of bathing suit. That started the laughing…
Next he wrapped himself around Claudio with a huge hug before leaping into his arms. It was just so funny, we had only just finished wiping the tears away and Div had dressed as himself again when Claudio turned into a stereotypical Russian doll type of figure and returned all of the compliments…

For more of the fun photos see the set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157625147493713/

As it was close to Halloween there was a lot of festivity already happening around Second Life and the group were made welcome in the fun everywhere. What a great way to spend an evening!

Flickr set http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157625147493713/

Burning Life 2010

2010-10-23T22:52:00.002+01:00

Burn 2

http://www.burn2.org/

Second Life’s Burning Life has always been a favourite few days of mine in-world and I thought it was over, finished, not happening again. Earlier this week ( have been trying to write this paragraph for four days or more) out of the blue a friend TP’s me over to the new Burn 2 islands and I was instantly captivated again!

From the Burning Man website -
“In 1999, Philip Linden went to Burning Man, and came back with new ideas for the virtual world he was planning. Among them was the idea that humans abhor a blank canvas and will compulsively create form to fill void. They will provide their own content and entertainment and create a whole city (or world) when they are given permission and tools to do so.”

Phillip built Second Life and gave the resident the tools to create. Since then they have created a wonderful, artistic world. It is akin to what happens every year at Burning Man in the Nevada Desert when the real-world city of 50,000, is built by its citizens, who transport everything into the desert to build the community. Similar to Burning Man in Burning Life or the newly named Burn 2 there is a vast virtual desert covering six sims and made available to the residents of Second Life where they can go and build works of art, theme camps, art cars, music, performance, and there are usually several copies of the "Man." They have their work on display and being shared by the crowds for a few days but then cleared away with the “land” being restored to its original condition.
From the website:

"This year's theme is "Metropolis - Civilization in the Desert." Exploration and expression of the urban reality in the style of Burning Man, where materials are trucked into the desert to build a temporary city that then disappears, leaving no trace."

The promo video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpitbiJq_lI and is well worth watching - it gives an overview of the whole thing.

I had not realized that a new event, BURN 2, was being run by a private community and is designed to be completely self supporting. I have been ignoring notecards, I realize that now ;-( There are simply not enough hours in the day to do all that I want to do and reading notecards that I did not realize the significance of went on the backburner :-)

My first visit, teleported by an avatar friend, Graham Mills, landed me in a circus area and The Stilts Bitches build with free costumes, stilts, unicycles etc. It was wonderful and the result of very clever scripting, costume making and building work. Very enjoyable and quite mad :-) I can’t wait to go back. I really admire people who can create these wonderful artistic builds and write the scripts to make things happen, it is very clever!

There are so many very clever builds it is hard to choose photos to put on the blog. There are many more on Flickr and I will be adding to them through the next few days. http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157625225097522/.

See the two of us there enjoying the circus facilities:

Nemo 11

2010-10-22T22:59:00.000+01:00

It is very sad to hear that another build is leaving Second Life. Apparently Nemo 11, the stunning steampunk village and more is on its way out leaving on October 30th.

Nemo’s profile description is: "Nemo is one of the most beautiful and detailed SIM in SL featuring the Steampunk submarine city (Nemo's workshop, the tesla room), Northelia the steampunk Village, Alnitak the flying City ( the house of mirrors, the Air Museum) and much more!"

According to Wikipedia Steampunk is:
“Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, alternate history, and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s.[1] Specifically, steampunk involves an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century and often Victorian era Britain—that incorporates prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy. Works of steampunk often feature anachronistic technology or futuristic innovations as Victorians may have envisioned them; in other words, based on a Victorian perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, art, etc.”

For a video clip explaining the layout and more of the whole site visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTtecn2kPpg&p=D1F52E6280264930&playnext=1&index=65, again it is well worth watching! Another video clip can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXcQVgnOP1Q I guess it is just so successful people like it and can use it for machinima and story telling. I don't know why he is leaving but is seems very sad to me, there are hours and hours of building involved in the sim.

It is easy to see from the photographs that this build is exactly that and very good quality, absolutely fascinating in all that it has to offer. It is so detailed, every bit of metal has a texture including rust spots, there is grass growing up through the road, the steam is dirty grey – it is so clever!

There is a small selection of pictures on Flickr, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157625219777268/

SLanguages 2010

2010-10-17T16:46:00.004+01:00

SLanguages 2010 is over, I have had a few hours sleep and cleaned the house so in a good place to be :-) I have uploaded my conference photos to Flickr and decided that I can at least start to write before family arrive, though I may not finish it this morning.

It was a very enjoyable conference and even though I am not a part of the language teaching world many sessions about teaching in-world are pertinent to my role so there is lots of useful stuff to listen to, particularly the endless debates about if /whether / why teaching in a virtual world is good, bad or just plain ugly. There is lots of interesting discussion between people who have tried it in various ways and have differing opinions whereas often instigating such a conversation outside of such a conference will meet utter disbelief and often non-interest.

Particularly impressive were the couple of sessions that I saw that focused on real teaching in SL. One, about making machinima so that students practiced the target language repetitively whilst writing and refining, the practicing and filming a script looked hugely successful but Anna Begonia and Gizmo Latte also highlighted problems of non-attendance, people joining and dropping out frequently and un-developed relationships. It was clearly not all plain sailing.

I loved Baal, the Brecht play performed by German Students, it was quite brilliant and clearly showed how the focus brought the dispersed group of language students together working toward a common purpose and created an impetus which kept them going. I just wonder, now, if the anticlimax could work against the learning experience. It will be interesting to follow up. I wish I had understood it a bit more, but everyone knows that I struggle with English never mind German but I got the gist I think :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4VQtLM_8zI

My favourite tour was the Macbeth visit. I have been there lots of times alone and had a good look around most of it but the explanation from someone who knows the layout made it very much better. Thanks go to Barbara Sakamoto or avi Lynn Carlucci for the tour. I have been in the blood room, or red room or whatever they call it loads of times, but never wearing the hud before. This time when I arrived with the tour I was fighting ghosts – great scripting! I must visit the wiki and read more about it and visit again trying to work out the maze for myself this time  I have been stuck there so many times before and teleported out thus missing the last room where one loses their head! An interesting thing now though, is that every time I visit the Mega Temple I am missing my head! Something there triggers the script that must be in my cache!

As usual I did a short sound workshop. I really enjoyed it and the people managed to achieve far more than I expected in the hour. I think I must have dramatically improved my teaching technique in Second Life since I did my first one a couple of years ago. I can imagine a whole host of avis saying 'Well thank goodness for that.' :-)

Fun Moments

The holodecks that were built by Randall Salder avi Randall Renoir, the forest scene and Mega Temple were lovely, but on one rather momentous occasion in the opening plenary just as we had about 80 people on the sim with all of the stresses and strain that puts on the server, someone from the floor asked if we could all hear and an audience avatar replied in text “loud and clear,” clear being the operational word to end the holodeck simulation so we were all thrown out of our seats as the temple disappeared. Usually rezzing it again is a few seconds task, but with the crowd it was a few very hopeful minutes :-)

Everyone involved will know that Gavin Dudeney started the SLanguages conference but it is a huge task and the workload rather too much for one or two people so this year a committee was formed to take it forward and run it in the future. Gavin was the founder, so in the style of that wonderful British institution The Proms – where a bust of the founder Henry Wood is honoured each year with a laurel wreath – well you can see where this is going…

Heike Philps avi Gwen Gwasi decided that a bust should be presented to Gavin so the search for a good, sculpty bust-maker started. We toured classical sims with IMs “Come and see this one”… poor sim owners must have wondered what on earth was going on as stray avatars flew in examined their architecture for busts then moved out never to be seen again, but the search paid off and a maker was found. Gwen e-mailed me saying send any photos of Dudeney, Gavin’s avatar, and another search began. I went through years of SL photos to find his little avatar, they all seemed to be stuck on or in a beanbag, hidden by leaves, other people, instant messages, text chat and more. Between us Heike and myself gathered what we had but the artist needed more. Gwen decided a video board needed moving so I said “Okay I will come and do that” but was met with a “Don’t you dare! I will ask Gavin if he will come in world and do it so that we can get photographs.” So dozens of photos were taken from every angle, the bust was created and a presentation was made. The instant guffaw from Gavin as he saw it said far more than words ever could have done and he was very nearly speechless, though of course that is never going to happen! Good fun!

Slanguages is the only virtual conference where I do actually stay the course and do the 24 hours, often I can’t be bothered and choose just a few sessions so missing out on the whole conference-like immersion which is a pity because that is the magic of a conference wherever it is.

Many thanks from me to the organizing committee – I think I may be on it, but never did anything (sorry folks) they did an amazing job, Heike, Gary (Motteram), Graham (Stanley), Randall and many more totaling 43 people apparently, thanks to their planning it ran very smoothly and worked brilliantly. I was quite pleased to be involved in the last four days though – think I have won a new title – PA to Gwen Gwasi – an SL job - yay!!

For photographs of the event visit these links and I will add more as I spot them:
My Flickr SLanguages set http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157625047300627/
Graham Stanley’s Flickr SLanguages set
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grahamstanley/sets/72157625055674405/with/5088434295/
The post event party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM_b0R3VU5A

I am sure that later today there will be an address where we can all see any sessions that we missed on video, as soon as I know that I will add it here.

SLang10 - The Summary http://www.virtual-round-table.com/profiles/blogs/slanguages-2010-summary

Ben

2010-10-06T17:19:00.000+01:00

The loveliest most faithful friend of the last eleven years, Ben, died in my arms this afternoon so I am feeling a bit sad! Ben is the creamy coloured dog, rescued at 11 months old and a beautiful family pet ever since. As with all dogs when he first arrived and we didn't know him we were not sure how he would be with children. I phoned a neice who was coming to stay and told her we had a new dog, she arrived and we could see it was instant love. Ben adored children - right until the day he died, which was rather sudden certainly unexpected up until the end of last week even yesterday we were not prepared for this outcome.

Playing with Dexter, another rescue dog and rather elderly gent!

Playing with Dexter again - most of our lives seems to be playing with dogs :-)

In the snow - playing again!

Favourite pastime - Ben would get into anyone's car! There are three of them in here setting off for a walk in the woods!

Such lovely memories from a lovely dog - the house seems empty at the moment, Dexter is still looking for him :-(

Fotobabble

2010-10-01T18:21:00.003+01:00

I love this little tool but it is only for over 13s! That is very sad. I can imagine all sorts of use of it for pupils from Foundation Stage upwards. To try it out visit http://www.fotobabble.com/ - leave a message to try to persuade them to open up an Educational version for schools :-)

Post Script - Yay I have just heard form Fotobabble :-)

Quote: You can absolutely allow students to log in from multiple computers with your log-in information while they're supervised at school. You can also be sure to go into your profile and change your default setting to "private" Fotobabbles. This way nothing your students create is searchable or appears on the main FB site. Does any of this help? If students want to use Fotobabble at home, all they need is a parent to create a log in and agree to supervise their child's use of the site. They'll never encounter anything extremely profane on Fotobabble, but nevertheless, parents can keep an eye on what their children are viewing online.

So - teachers can now log in, allow students to create Fotobabbles and the embed code makes it easy to embed the finished work in the Learning Platform, on a blog etc. I am going to write embedding instuctions for KLP users later today - drop me a message if you want a copy... guess you will know where to find me :-)

Should Schools use a County VLE / Learning Platform or Go it Alone?

2010-09-26T09:29:00.003+01:00

I had a discussion this week with a couple of people on Twitter who thought that using a free Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) provided by Google, their own Moodle, or similar, was good for their schools, they were saying “One size does not fit all.” That is a fair comment but I fail to see that the county provided platform which includes a Learning Platform (LP) and VLE, e-portfolios and personal space does not provide a huge freedom to pick and choose which elements the school needs!

I have a couple of schools who started using it just for staff, so we built a staffroom, a document library to host all of their planning etc, a discussion forum where they can all discuss whatever subject they like and a place that they call a day book – notification of what is going on by the day. Those schools are just beginning to build class spaces now, the teachers having realized the usefulness.

I have other schools that have said the staff systems area all up and running, we want it for pupils. So we have built pupils class spaces. Class spaces include discussions, blogs, wikis, places to put topic web links, fun web links, embed games, embed video, put news, put RSS feeds to Newsround for the older children, put photo albums that children can see in a huge Windows slideshow, a Cool Iris wall or just inspect picture by picture by click on the thumbnails. With many teachers we have embedded whole web pages, imagine very small children trying to navigate to a chosen story in CBeebies – not necessary, just embed it in their area. All of the frequently used Web 2.0 pages can be embedded into the LP. Wallwisher, Wordle, Voice Thread etc – just sit either as an embedded item or as an embedded page very easily, navigation for youngsters is easier at least!!

Yet other schools just want a VLE – they want to offer courses, tests, surveys, they want work marked and graded, marks and feedback given to pupils automatically – they can do that!

Primary schools like the Quick Assignments better, they can take content from the provided content packs or their own resources, allocate it to a class, the VLE provides a mark book to track who has open the file, done some of the work, handed it back in etc.

Governors, in my experience have embraced the LP as a place to store, share and provide for the committees, each having their own document libraries, a shared calendar and as many discussions as they can manage.

PTAs and similar parent groups enjoy having a space to share posters and information about coming events, a place to share photo albums, a shared calendar for meetings…

There is so much that can be done it is hard to see why a school would not adopt it!

I was told that it is not intuitive – it largely depends on how it has been set up and the support given. I worked in a school yesterday where the new ICTC had come from out of county so never seen our chosen platform before but having worked through it she is delighted! She is planning now to scrap the school’s external website, develop the top level area and make that public!

I was told, in the Twitter discussion that there are no disadvantages to going alone, and then asked what they were!

Support and training, we can only support one LP for the county, it is impossible to do all of the same stuff for several systems for nearly 300 primary schools with 3 people. Whatever we develop we develop for all and share with all. We can make all resources available to all schools and give everyone access. The other county teams – e.g. the Strategy teams, the Inclusion teams, MFL, ASSET and more, all share their resources through the LP.

If you want to do a cross- school project such as a transition project at the moment it is easy – all partnerships have a partnership area that they all have access to and can be built as they want it to be, it could have subject areas for coordinators, a heads’ area, deputies’ areas, pupil areas and so on.

There may be no-one left to run your own personally developed system when you leave! The answer to this was that the person I was talking to had no plans to leave – I will remind him one day when he goes off to be a deputy or head somewhere else in county!! But this is the most serious issue I think, just this summer in one of my schools that was using the LP very effectively the head was offered a post in a bigger primary school, the ICTC was offered a deputyship in another school. Both were better posts, progression along the continuum so they went. Suddenly from being very strong, with lots of support there is only one teacher there who really understand the management etc., who can pull them through whilst the new staff get their heads around the LP, and she is pregnant, due to go on maternity leave before Christmas. Does that sound like a problem? It would be if they were using a different system – as it is we can offer training, I have spent a day there this week – we have screen casts, easy guides, update training sessions, constant e-mail support, they can even phone me and I can log in to sort out a problem or tell them how to sort out whatever the issue is. Before the first month of the school year is up they are enabled to move forward without many hiccoughs. If that was another platform we could not move in and provide that support.

Parents can access their pupils data held on the county MIS so as far as we can, certainly as far as I understand, we meet all of the current Freedom of Information Act needs and Data Protection issues and needs.

The last thing that I can think of – and more thoughts may come later, it has been on my mind a lot since the conversations – Security! The LP that we use is secure. It is backed up regularly. We can make bits of it public and bits of it private, everything is permissions driven down to the last bit of paper in a document library or discussion on the discussion forum. Apparently though other well known providers where one can build their own learning platform, pupils can keep their accounts forever and more do not meet even the most general of security agreements and could in fact be hosted on open servers in third world countries…. User Beware seems to be the message on a lot of these – even Google Docs that I use all the time http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/09/24/warning-google-docs-is-not-safe/ may not be secure, which is fine for me as an adult I can choose the info that I am happy to be seen in public if it does ever escape but we have the right to protect children from possible data escape. Children are building their e-porfolios, they can add images and private data even though we spend our whole lives as adults telling them not to – we have a responsibility to keep them safe!

It was a very interesting discussion. Had it not been at midnight we may have carried on and got more people involved. It may be a good question for #ukewdchat on Twitter one week!

Skype in the Classroom

2010-08-27T21:57:00.000+01:00

Skype™ is a free software program that, when installed on your computer, works with your Internet connection to turn your computer into an Internet phone. It allows you to make Skype-to-Skype (IP to IP) calls to anyone in the world at any time for FREE. Download it from http://www.skype.com .

Skype, over the last few years, seems to have become a verb, it is one that I use at home, but have not used much in schools. I regularly have Skype chats with friends or colleagues, "Skype me" is quite a regular and well used saying.

Lately our old VC client in Oxfordshire is not holding up so well and I have been wondering if Skype could be used in schools to replace it. In Oxfordshire I think most of our video conferencing, especially in primary school, has been linking with experts at the Maritime Museum, National History Museum etc. and I have seen some fantastic teaching by specialists pretending to be famous people, dressed in costume and explaining, demonstrating, sharing artifacts and more with pupils. I have been aware of it being used for language teaching, but not so much for learning about children around the world. This is a field that fascinates me – schools without walls, flat Earth, global school and I am sure that I have seen projects with all of those names. I am starting to get together examples of how teachers are using Skype and the projects that they are doing – there are some very interesting ones!

Video recording of pupils

http://vimeo.com/9917988 Around the World with 80 Schools by Martin J Gottlieb Day School
http://vimeo.com/12206352 Students from Martin J. Gottlieb Day School and Jenkintown, Pennsylvania recite and read poems to each other.

Small Projects

http://iditarodblogs.com/teachers/2010/04/21/21st-century-skills-skype-project-in-pa-wins-award/ tells of a class project to learn all about the Alaskan Iditarod – and so lacking is my education I had to look up what that was before I understood what the children had achieved ;-)

http://pdsblogs.org/mattscully/2009/05/06/skype-and-tell/ Skype and Tell – “Two kindergarten teachers in Charlotte, NC are now connecting with another kindergarten teacher from in Raleigh, NC to allow their students to share their show and tell. The students eagerly come to the computer and share the clues about their secret item tucked into their little brown paper bags. Their peers watching and listening on the smartboards in both classrooms ask questions like “what letter does it start with?” or “does it rhyme with wagon?”. Once they narrow it down, one student will approach the computer and triumphantly announce the answer. Both classrooms erupt with applause.” Just a small clip from Matt Scully's blog post.

Huge Projects

http://langwitches.wikispaces.com/Around+The+World+With+Skype The English version of this video gives loads of ideas for getting started with Skype and there are lots of links on the page too. This video also reminds people to check the time zones of schools that you want to talk with, it is no good arranging a session that is 2pm here and midnight in your target school! This video clip goes into great detail about the whole Skype/ school meeting event with lots of helpful details.

World Class Schools http://worldclassschools.00politics.com/ is a website where one can sign up one’s own school and arrange to meet other schools around the world…
“In addition to providing innovative, cutting-edge projects, World Class Schools is bringing technology to change the future of how we learn. The future is in communication and the students who learn this lesson will be successful in life. By keeping schools in touch with each other all over the world, World Class Schools helps to provide enriched curriculum enhancement augmentation programs for any high school.”

http://www.markwoodexplorer.com/2010/05/global-schools-project-%E2%80%93-newsletter-update/
“Adventurer and polar explorer Mark Wood is aiming to attempt the toughest journey on the planet by skiing solo, unsupported and unaided to the Geographic North and the Geographic South Poles.” On route Mark has managed to get sponsorship to set up electricity as well as computer networks for all to benefit from.
He says “On expeditions I connect with schools, universities and businesses around the world.
Relaying day to day films, blogs, podcasts and live links I hope to give people real insight into how and why our world is changing.”

Other Useful Links

50 awesome ways to use Skype in the classroom http://www.teachingdegree.org/2009/06/30/50-awesome-ways-to-use-skype-in-the-classroom/ many of the ideas have examples to read about, in fact had I found this first I need not have bothered, it is very useful :-)

A Skype lesson plan for secondary school https://wiki.itap.purdue.edu/display/INSITE/Skype+Lesson+Plan+for+Secondary+School

People looking to Skype in school http://skypeinschools.pbworks.com/Want-Ads

The Skype educator’s phonebook http://skypeintheclassroom.wordpress.com/

Many of these and more seem to have been pulled together in http://livebinders.com/play/present?id=25372

Sri Lanka

2010-08-19T11:16:00.003+01:00

Sri Lanka is a small island with the most amazing variety of different landscapes imaginable. The flat, dry grasslands of the National parks provide a home to elephants, leopards, lizards and some 400 species of birds. They give way to the wetlands with its lush green vegetation and rainforest jungle from which rise mountains consisting of wonderful waterfalls and tea plantations. Wide rivers edged by all sorts of palms, hardwood and acacia trees open out into mangrove swamps and provide home to the fish eagle, cormorants and loads of other birds. Prawn farms are set up along the rivers with huts for the night guards who are there to protect the catch. Fishing lines, nets and fishermen in canoes can be seen all along the rivers with their catch for sale outside their homes just a few minutes later.

Tropical fruits, pineapples, papaya, mangoes, ramutan, jack and durian fruits grow on the lower lands with tea, carrots, turnips and potatoes on the higher land. King coconuts are a main crop, very important to the Sinhalese people, once harvested they are husked by poor people who get paid about 2 pence per coconut for this very hard work! The fibres in the husks are then used to make coir mats, ropes etc., the king coconut itself is what we get desiccated coconut from, the leaves are usually plaited for roofs and mats whilst the stems of the leaves are used to make brooms.

We visited the botanical gardens to see some amazing trees, there is a weeping fig which apparently can give shade to 1500 school children though we were not there when they counted! Banyan trees with loads of trunks that leave spaces that enable other trees to grow up the middle of them are really interesting. The whole country seems to be decorated with beautiful orchids, lilies various colourful creepers and the national flowers, mahanel, are plucked from rivers and waterways to make necklaces for the women (I was so sad when the young man taking us on a river trip did one for me – would have preferred it to stay in the water :-( but it is considered an honour to present visitors with one!)

The country is recovering slowly from the war, some 16% of the people there are very poor, scraping a living from selling the coconuts or bananas that grow where they live, often with a wooden stall or on a mat in front of their wattle and daub homes. Once people have squatted in their home for twenty years and one day they can apply for ownership.

Towns and villages
We drove through busy village streets with shops jammed together in every space, some wooden constructions, some tin huts, some cobbled together from all sorts including bits of plastic sheeting and held down with bungies. The shops were the most unlikely mixture, a bridal shop next to a cement shop which was sharing cement dust with the ice cream shop next door. Used tyres, alloy wheels (second hand imported from Japan) used domestic machines, car spares (second hand) single bunches of king coconuts, clothes plastic toys such as swimming aids, bats and balls, Christmas type of reindeer and awful naked pink dolls were some of the offerings that these lovely people were hoping to sell. In the towns the shops tend to be gathered together by type. We went into a clothing arcade, fruit, fish and meat markets, down roads selling all hardware, all bags, luggage etc., or all jewellery.

Despite the fact that many people are quite poor most of the women dress beautifully and look really lovely all of the time. We talked to ladies selling saris in a silk factory who thought that the average Sinhalese lady would have about 30 saris. Every village has its religious shrine or shrines, Buddah sits in beautifully painted splendor in every village, often there are Hindu shrines and Christian shrines nearby. These are bedecked in flowers and candles most of the time, even when the houses in the road are a series of tumble down shacks that have never seen a coat of paint. The shrines and / or temples which are often far better than the homes that some of the villagers live in. People spend much of their free time at the temple, lighting candles, making offerings, in prayers, chatting to friends, they can be quite social gatherings. There are many historical temples and shrines that are quite wonderful to visit. We went to the cave temples at Dambulla and the ruins of the temples at Polonnaruwa.

Animals
Dogs roam everywhere, they are totally street-wise animals who will move from the road after being hooted at and watch the traffic every bit as carefully as the pedestrians. At one time there was a programme whereby stray dogs were taken to the pound, the owners were contacted, strays not claimed after 30 days were offered to good homes after that they were put down. Buddhist clergy though did not approve so now the dogs are left to roam and scavenge every bit of food etc. they can. Monkeys are everywhere on the island, to me are wonderful, mischievous, playful and very entertaining. I really enjoyed watching their antics but at the rainforest hotel some people were frightened of them and sending for staff members to move them on before they would come out of their chalets. We were told of times when monkeys modeled bikinis so we made sure our swimming kit was tied firmly to the rails, the most we saw was them playing in groups, youngsters chasing each other and gamboling down banks – occasionally tipping out the bins to scavenge left over food. At another hotel breakfast buffet we watched a family gather rolls butter etc, then go back to fetch their main course, whilst they were gone the monkeys came down and cleared their plates. The family looked totally puzzled on their return, looking suspiciously at the waiters, who, of course, did not have a clue what had occurred! Crows did similar antics at another hotel but specialized in pinching the little bags of sugar put in a bowl on each table. Chipmunks provided endless amusement, watching their antics racing up and down trees, drinking out of glasses and taking food from one’s hand, they provided many a video or photograph opportunity. As we drove round Habarana, the dry area more or less central, we saw a “Tusker” an elephant about 12 years old wandering freely, in fact he crossed the road in front of the bus. That was a quite wonderful moment; we were told it was a one in a million chance. The guide and bus driver were as enthralled as the holiday makers. We walked along a waterway following a water monitor lizard, apparently if they get cross with people on land one swish of their tails will cut the flesh off one’s leg, he obviously did not like us following him and sunk to hide below the water. We moved up to the other side of a bridge was looked back. After a few minutes he rose and carried on his journey, as he came under the bridge we were able to photograph him. We had to stop the coach for a land monitor lizard that was blocking the path. Seeing these amazing animals in their natural habitat is great – an experience in itself! During the holiday we went on several very long river trips and ended up watching dozens of the water monitors. On safari seeing elephants, crocodiles, huge lizards, mongooses, jackals, pelicans, storks, kingfishers and monkeys was lovely. The animals were obviously unmoved by the approach of the jeeps which visit them daily as they go down the drink in the late afternoon. It was fascinating to watch the female elephants hiding the baby in their midst. We only caught a glimpse of it being shuffled between the females. Probably the only disappointment was the elephant orphanage at Pinnawela. At first I was entranced at seeing the elephants in the water, it soon became clear it was little but commercial exploitation of the poor animals that had suffered at the hands of man. Bullet wounds in the legs of some, a foot missing from one who stepped on a land mine – that these animals need looking after seems feasible until you go on safari and realize there are more of the same living freely in the wild. The “poo paper” factory – the completion of the visit to the orphanage where they sell paper products, Christmas cards, calendars etc made from elephant dung put the finishing touch to the day.

Children
I was fascinated by the school children – all wearing white, state provided uniforms, the ties worn by each child denoted the school that they were at and the girls had long hair worn uniformly in two long plaits and tied with matching ribbons at the bottom. To keep these uniforms clean would be hard enough in the UK but many of these children live in houses with no running water and their clothes are washed in the river – I was told the answer was “rubbing with blue” and one would have to be at least as old as me to understand that :-) School starts at 7am and finishes at 1pm but many pupils take extra classes in the afternoon and evening and we saw lots of them, still in uniform in almost every place we visited in the evening. The children visit all of the temples, shrines and cultural centers; I don’t think we visited any of them without seeing the white clad crocodiles.

The Hotels
We arrived in Colombo very late in the evening after an 18 hour journey, had dinner, a swim and sat by the pool having a drink. A man carried a laptop over to another table and sat down clearly working. Being me – could not resist – went and asked him if wifi was available and how much it cost etc. He told me it was not available where he was but if I went and stood in a specific spot it was fine – and it was free to me! It turned out that I was talking to the manager and his office was close to where he told me to stand. I contacted home and told them we had arrived etc. So far so good! We moved on to Kandy, visited the temple and took part in a festival – that was an interesting experience, not bad, but different and in a way quite exciting. We attended a cultural concert of Kandyan dancing – the costumes were amazing representing cobras and peacocks amongst others with brightly coloured face masks and all accompanied by intricate rhythmic drumming. We were in the equivalent of the Royal Albert Hall in the capital – the swallows nesting in the eves were making nearly as much noise as the drummers and dive bombing the audience all through the concert. As we exited the swallows were replaced by huge fruit bats by the hundred. From Kandy we visited Polonnaruwa where we investigated lots of ancient temple ruins. Once again at the hotel I asked about wifi and was told yes they had it but it wasn’t working. In the next hotel my query was met with a huge guffaw and the following one, on the top of a mountain in a tea plantation they had heard of it, they thought they knew what it was… In the final hotel where we spent the last six days I asked and was told, yes we have a business suite – 2 internet linked for about 400 rooms ;-).

I tried to explain that I wanted wifi access, yes I could buy it for an hour. Could I buy it for 10 hours to be used over several days like I had found in Colombo? Hmm – not sure can you come back tomorrow? So when I got back they said the right person was not working – come back tomorrow – on the third day the answer was no but they would give me a cable link in my room… no I want to link my phone… so that I can talk to my family…. Never mind I will buy hour long tickets as I need them!

Travel
Travelling by road in Sri Lanka is not for the nervous. Tuk tuks, brightly patterned lorries, cars, bicycles and motorcycles drive alongside ox carts and share the roads with dogs, goat and cows. Overtaking, undertaking is all normal and if there is a space big enough for one’s vehicle then it is fine to put said vehicle in it. Overtaking on blind bends is good so long as you have give the little toot on the horn as a warning. Wide yellow zebra crossings are places where the pedestrian takes their lives in their hands if they really need to cross… traffic giving way is by no means guaranteed. We took several tuk tuk rides and most of the young drivers were delightful. We had one though – when we gave him our destination address took us straight to a gem factory. We said no – we were not going in – he knew where we wanted to go. Next he took us to a family shop – no! He did himself out of his tip!

We had a mad impulse to see the country by train. Having flown into the airport near Colombo and spent just one night there we thought we had not seen enough of it. We decided a slow train journey would give us opportunities to see a different aspect of the country, take photos etc., we could spend the day in town and make our way back to the hotel for dinner. What a stupid thing to do! We boarded the slow train and had to stand, it was already quite full. Each station more and more people got on the train and squashed themselves in, there were soon three people deep hanging out of the doorways. That journey gave a whole new meaning to the word intimate! It was hot and hellish and those poor people do it every day to go shopping or get to work! At Mount Lavinia we had to swap to the main-line train. It was ancient, rusty, dirty, open, packed beyond belief and fast. The journey back was even worse. Sinhalese people lined the platform both sides, as soon as the train came in they jumped down from the opposite side of the track so that they could leap on the train from both sides. I always had this romantic notion of crossing India by train – it has well and truly gone!

Historical Sites
From Habarana we visited the 12th century Sinhalese capital of Polonnaruwa, it is a whole ancient temple complex, something like 316 recognised sites but with only about 60 that have been uncovered so far. We visited Sigiriya rock with its fresco paintings. The cave temple at Dambulla and the temples at Polonnaruwa were all a huge surprise, I had not expected ancient temples for some reason. There is lots of Chinese influence in the temple buildings; many take the pagoda shape with 18 meters between floors. Most artifacts are at the Museum in Colombo so we saw lots of them there.

We took about 1500 photographs and several short video clips. I am sure I will remember loads more as I look through them and start to name them etc. It was a longish journey – a 10.5 hour flight then an hour long stopover in the Male. Seeing the Maldives from the air is a quite extraordinary sight, it is like the biggest set of stepping stones imaginable, some submerged, some above the water, some surrounded with salt, some with surf. After the hour stop it was another hour out to Colombo. It seems a long way to visit an island about the same size as Ireland but it is so diverse I felt that we had covered lots of Asia in that one short visit. It was a really interesting holiday, good fun in part, sad to see the remaining Tsunami damage and the poor people struggling simply to survive but I am really glad that we went. Apparently the beaches are lovely – but where we stayed it was still winter and the end of the monsoon season, hot rain was a novelty though. We could not swim in the sea it was far too dangerous. The pull was so strong to try to swim would have been foolhardy. Even those determined to try soon gave up. If we ever go back it will be to the undeveloped north coast.

There is a selection of about 100 photographs on Flickr which shows a variety of animals, vegetation, temples and lifestyles that one can experience on Sri Lanka. http://www.flickr.com/photos/24572238@N02/sets/72157624631186083/

Google Tools

2010-07-30T12:05:00.003+01:00

I have been involved in discussions about the use of Google Tools in the classroom twice in as many days. On the first, with a group of educators, we decided that a set of screen casts showing teachers how to use them would be good, the second, last night on #ukedchat was where @didactylos said there are already loads of resources out there we just need to find them – so – here goes…

This list is by no means exhaustive – but hopefully these will be some of the most useful for learning the tools and giving ideas how to use them for teachers.

http://sites.google.com/site/gtaresources/events/2010-07-29 The Google Teacher Academy resources - there are some amazing resources here – it is going to take me ages to look through them all, there are so many useful videos and ideas. Also the people that went on the Google Teacher Academy yesterday may start blogging and add their ideas. If so I will try to list them as well.

http://sites.google.com/site/gtaresources/events/2010-07-29/apps Google Apps for Education

Get Google apps for your school http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html

Google Apps training centre http://edutraining.googleapps.com/

Google Docs http://echucaelearning.wikispaces.com/Google+Docs

Screen Casts and Ideas

http://www.vimeo.com/album/18311 - a set of five videos, calendar, mail, talk, docs and opening page

http://sites.google.com/a/nausetschools.org/googlegoodies/ screencasts includes forms and making a Google website

A whole Google search result

24 Interesting ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/googledocs.htm

Sketchup

Sketchup - http://sketchup.google.com/industries/edu/primary.html

Video Tutorials http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html

Self paced tutorials http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=36e1fa0d054a15eecc725c514c21d975&prevstart=0

Primary school projects https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc837t9h_12g2pxr6

Geo Education Google Earth & Google Maps

http://www.google.com/educators/geo.html Google maps, Earth, Sky and incorporating Sketchup

Google Earth for educators http://sitescontent.google.com/google-earth-for-educators/

Google Maps Mania http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/08/educational-uses-of-google-maps.html

25 interesting ways to use Google Earth in the Classroom http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/googleearth.htm

Using Google Maps in Education including tutorials http://www.warrensburgr6.org/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=382

Blogger

Blogger http://www.google.com/educators/p_blogger.html

How to use Blogger http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4107328/How-to-use-blogger

Using Blog to integrate Technology in the classroom http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/47

Picasa

Picasa in Education http://picasained.wikispaces.com/
How can Picasa be used in Education https://wiki.itap.purdue.edu/display/Social/Examples+of+Picasa+in+Education

If anyone knows or more resources that schools really need to enable them to use the Google Tools in the classroom please do add them as comments, or e-mail them to me carolrb@rmplc.co.uk and I will add them to the post.

Simulations to aid the Modelling Programme of Study

2010-07-26T20:51:00.007+01:00

Another post linked to the fact that we are retaining the 2000 ICT curriculum for the foreseeable future and there are so many resources available, many of which are not used by our teachers and children. Why would we use computer simulations? See what Marc Prensky said about them in 2007…

“Computer-simulation technology is a way of looking at objects or systems that encourage a learner not only to wonder, "What would happen if . . . ?" but also to try out those alternatives virtually and see the consequences. It is a way for learners to acquire experience about how things and systems in the world behave, without actually touching them. I call it interactive pretending.” http://www.edutopia.org/simulation-nation

Simulation games suitable for use in schools

Primary Age Range
Run your own lemonade stall - play it on-line
The Great Balloon Race – burn gas to go up or vent it to go down but do not crash!
Lego World Builder
A roller coaster - manage it on-line
Design a room – Victorian, Tudor or modern
Growing plants - grow your own crop and make a profit
A Graphical Modelling exercise for year 5 pupils
A coffee simulation game - a year 3/4 exercise from the Northumberland grid for learning
An Eco House See how much money and carbon dioxide can be saved by running the energy system in a house efficiently.
Building Blocks – recreate models demonstrated or make your own

Foundation Stage
Early years ICT skills from the Northumberland grid for learning
Create a Village Add houses, roadways, water and trees.

Secondary Age Range
Parking a Peugeot – young teens will learn why they need driving lessons :-)
Build a sustainable house
Dinosaur Sim - Set in the time of the dinosaurs, the task is to raise the baby allosaurus in the hard Jurassic wilderness.
Google Earth Flight Simulator
GoogleMaps Flight Sim
Run an Eco House See how much money and carbon dioxide can be saved by running the energy system in a house efficiently.

#ukedchat & Creativity

2010-07-16T23:51:00.000+01:00

The #ukedchat session last night was all about how one can inspire creativity in the classroom. It was a very interesting, exciting event as usual with lots of ideas shared.

Not many seconds into the session people were trying to define creativity.

I quite like this definition

“I define creativity as the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing. Innovation is the production or implementation of an idea. If you have ideas, but don't act on them, you are imaginative but not creative.” Linda Naiman http://www.creativityatwork.com/articlesContent/whatis.htm

And this one:

The experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative and idiosyncratic way which is characterized by a high degree of innovation and originality, divergent thinking, and risk taking.
www.usm.maine.edu/~trudy/frame/fgloss.htm

Roger von Oech - Creative thinking involves imagining familiar things in a new light, digging below the surface to find previously undetected patterns, and finding connections among unrelated phenomena.

From the QCDA http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-1-and-2/learning-across-the-curriculum/creativity/whatiscreativity/index.aspx we get:
First, they [the characteristics of creativity] always involve thinking or behaving imaginatively. Second, overall this imaginative activity is purposeful: that is, it is directed to achieving an objective. Third, these processes must generate something original. Fourth, the outcome must be of value in relation to the objective.
Creative people are purposeful as well as imaginative. Their imaginative activity is directed at achieving an objective (although this objective may change over time).
Skilled teachers can help pupils tackle questions, solve problems and have ideas that are new to them. This makes pupils' ideas original, the result of genuinely creative behaviour.
Teachers need to help pupils judge the value of what they and others have done through critical evaluation. This means asking questions such as, ‘Does it do the job?’, ‘Is it aesthetically pleasing?’, ‘Is it a valid solution?’, ‘Is it useful?’

I sat having coffee with, and talking to my son and his wife last Saturday whilst their little son got paper and crayons and crayoned a flag (World Cup inspired) on his rectangle of paper. He then went and found a kebab stick and sellotape, he sellotaped the flag to the stick and stuck the flag in the nearest plant! He enjoyed that activity, completed it and we all knew that he was delighted with the outcome. I think that, along with all of the lego creations often found in corners once he has gone, recordings he has made on the recording toys, pictures, play dough creations all demonstrate true creativity. It is natural in small children.

Children will tell the most amazing stories, creating it as they go, they will dance, sing, make up songs and jokes, invent games and more. Why then, as they get older and in school, are we trying to inspire creativity? It does not make any sense, it is there already, it simply needs harnessing, guiding and nurturing. Is there something about school that kills creativity in the young child?

So what does creativity in school look like?

“Sit down, fold your arms and eyes this way…” I remember that as a child, in fact with some teachers it lasted right the way through secondary school… no creativity inducement there, far from it. Chalk and talk! I did have better teachers though - those that instilled a love of music, art, poetry and literature by inspring me to investigate, listen and look for what I like with gentle guidance.

“Choose a topic that you are really interested in, study it and find a way to share what you find out with the rest of the class, I be here if you need me”… great but how many times did that / does that happen?

The National Curriculum - the first prescribed curriculum this country had faced started the real slow down of creativity in primary school, the QCA Schemes of work even more so. Teachers began to lose their creativity and do what they were told hour by hour. In 2003 when Excellence and Enjoyment came along schools were told to take control of the curriculum, make it creative and exciting, but too many teachers had already lost or never acquired the creative style of teaching. Things should have got better over the last seven years, to be fair they have in many places but there are still teachers who “do the QCA”, I have even be aware of one I the last few weeks told to do exactly that to improve the school! (Thanks goodness not one of my schools or the boxing gloves would be out by now.)

So what it a creative curriculum?
Is it
•    One built around acquiring necessary skills through any exciting medium and subject but based on a theme free enough to let pupils take their own route?
•    Giving children challenges and problems to solve, time to reflect, improve, collaborate and investigate whatever they are curious about?
•    Giving them freedom to express themselves in the way they want to including with video, sound files, music and drama?
or a mixture of all three? Or is it something different altogether?

What does a creative curriculum demand from a teacher?

•    Above all confidence in their own ability to teach – even when things seem a little chaotic the children will be learning
•    The confidence to let go and let it happen and know that they are getting it right for their children
•    Enthusiasm – it is no good a teacher wondering in to the classroom disinterested, exhausted or in a bad mood – the children in class, just like children at home reflect the adult’s mood – consequently going in full of enthusiasm and fun will bring its own rewards
•    Commitment – to the children and their learning
•    The ability to value all of the learning processes

About 10 years ago I worked with a class of children on a project about bullying. A couple of the groups wanted to make presentations. They made story boards, PowerPoint presentations that were very good, they gave presentations to the class, and later that month to the visiting teachers at the ICT conference. I made a display of the presentations and started to put the story boards up on the wall. A colleague said “You can’t put those up, they’re crap!” It seemed very sad to me that she did not value the preliminary work showing how they had got the where they had got and just wanted the polished, finished version on display.

I think that more than anything a creative curriculum needs time. It has to be okay to take several days dedicated to a project e.g. to do some D&T in a Tudor’s project where pupils may choose create a Tudor house, plan it, measure the pieces of dowel needed, cut the wood and card carefully, construct it, decorate it, keep a video or photographic diary, write a reflective log about what went well and what could have been improved. There is so much in that simple project, so many life skills, maths, literacy, D&T, historical research, art for the finishing, maybe ICT if CAD used to plan, digital camera were used for the photographs or video log, a word processor was used to write up plan or report etc. There will be opportunities for creativity – planning, constructing, problem solving, recording, presenting, collaboration, in-depth study into Tudor housing. It could be expanded to go wherever the children wanted it to go – Tudor gardens, furniture, clothing, food, music, banquets, religion, Shakespeare, The Globe, theatre, play writing etc. So long as everybody is comfortable with this it is easy in primary school, maybe not so easy in secondary school and that is very sad.

Current access to such a vast range of technology, hardware, handheld technologies, software, web 2.0 resources offer a much bigger and better range of tools to facilitate creativity than pupils have ever had before but complex tools are not essential, an easi-speak mic or digital camera can make a difference!

Best quotes from the #ukedchat: (NB no more that 130 characters allowed, #ukedchat takes up the other ten, I may have added a few letters in for easy reading)

Primarypete_: to allow creativity to flourish, you need to allow children to risk and fail with grace
Dughall I think we can only have creativity with a high degree of pupil choice, involvement and personalization of the curriculum?
Eyebeams: so elicitation using mind mapping, cross curricular, risk taking, just building a list here
ChrisFullerisms: not just taking risks but an environment in which errors are accepted and embraced, by erring we often learn more
Eyebeams: I think creativity might allow for being receptive to and exploiting serendipity
Nellmog: I think applying creativity in the classroom is throwing away the lesson plan when something more relevant happens
Didactylos: We are naturally programmed to use play / creativity as our mode of learning. Schools therefore are often unnatural habitats
Natty08: Life doesn’t happen in straight lines so why try and teach it as so – creativity encourages bumps and corners

I started writing YES!! At the end of the statements I feel strongly about – but it got too repetitive :-)

All in all a very interesting session! Follow #ukedchat on Thursday evenings 8 – 9pm BST, to find out more visit: http://ukedchat.wikispaces.com/

The National Curriculum - ICT at KS2

2010-07-04T17:38:00.004+01:00

Well it seems that we are stuck with the 2000 version of the National Curriculum so I am revisiting to have a fresh look at how it fits the needs of KS 2 children today. The National Curriculum text is black, digital literacy text green and my text blue!
The ICT Curriculum for KS2 opens with a general statement:

During key stage 2 pupils use a wider range of ICT tools and information sources to support their work in other subjects. They develop their research skills and decide what information is appropriate for their work. They begin to question the plausibility and quality of information. They learn how to amend their work and present it in a way that suits its audience.

Okay – that general statement gives plenty of scope for the newer technologies, much of the research can be done with iPod Touches or mobile phones, games machines can easily support work in other subjects – no problem there.
Thinking of Digital Literacy which is something that we all agree all children need to be taught, and take Becta’s http://schools.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/digital_literacy_publication.pdf definition of what that it:

The term ‘digital literacy’ relates to:

•    the functional skills of knowing about and using digital technology effectively
•    the ability to analyse and evaluate digital information
•    knowing how to act sensibly, safely and appropriately online
•    understanding how, when, why and with whom to use technology.

Then we can see that that first NC statement gives the scope for the first bullet about Digital Literacy: “knowing about and using digital technology effectively.”

Knowledge, skills and understanding

Finding things out

1.Pupils should be taught:

to talk about what information they need and how they can find and use it [for example, searching the internet or a CD-ROM, using printed material, asking people]
how to prepare information for development using ICT, including selecting suitable sources, finding information, classifying it and checking it for accuracy [for example, finding information from books or newspapers, creating a class database, classifying by characteristics and purposes, checking the spelling of names is consistent]
to interpret information, to check it is relevant and reasonable and to think about what might happen if there were any errors or omissions.

The Finding Things Out section reads a bit out of date, mainly due to the reference to CD Roms but gives plenty of scope for making branching data bases, normal data bases and the interrogation of both. This gives opportunities for the higher order thinking skills, questioning, hypothesising, testing the hypothesis, classifying, analysing and interpreting the information. NB the second bullet point in the definition of Digital Literacy is present in this section – see “the ability to analyse and evaluate digital information.” Think about using Word Clouds made with tools such as Wordle to analyse a text, to find key messages from a speech after watching a video recording of a speech. ICT add so much more scope here now than when the statements were written, there was no YouTube bank of videos and Web 2.0 tools that we now take for granted. Think about using Wallwisher or Voicethread to meet the "asking people" bit, the NC is not restricting here but it needs think about a bit more broadly than was intended originally and use other tools as well as database software to enhance it.

Developing ideas and making things happen

2. Pupils should be taught:

1.    how to develop and refine ideas by bringing together, organising and reorganising text, tables, images and sound as appropriate [for example, desktop publishing, multimedia presentations]
2.    how to create, test, improve and refine sequences of instructions to make things happen and to monitor events and respond to them [for example, monitoring changes in temperature, detecting light levels and turning on a light]
3.    to use simulations and explore models in order to answer 'What if ... ?' questions, to investigate and evaluate the effect of changing values and to identify patterns and relationships [for example, simulation software, spreadsheet models].

Developing ideas and making things happen – how many presentations do I see children creating each week?
Statement 1 is covered fairly well in all schools by the use of PowerPoint, brochures, newspapers etc.
Statement 2 relating specifically to control technology is covered well by younger children with bee-bots and various software control simulations, some schools using Lego NXT and robots do it well, but the majority of our school's coverage of this is poor. Many schools seem to have abandoned using Logo - sad, some use Scratch which is fine, Go and Flowol contribute towards coverage but there is still loads of scope here for our schools.Control technology is such a big part of our lives pupils do really need to have some idea of how it works. Data logging is so easy and can be great fun, still many schools shy away from getting data loggers and doing it!
Statement 3 Spreadsheets – some schools do this section well but it is not sound across the board. Computer simulations are improving by the year and there are games galore to introduce to pupils to meet the needs of this statement.

Exchanging and sharing information

3. Pupils should be taught:

1.    how to share and exchange information in a variety of forms, including e-mail [for example, displays, posters, animations, musical compositions]
2.    to be sensitive to the needs of the audience and think carefully about the content and quality when communicating information [for example, work for presentation to other pupils, writing for parents, publishing on the internet].

The examples here are old, but they are only examples, if we replace them with EduGlogster posters, stop motion animations, photostories, podcasts, wikis, blogs, forums and videos with sound track and narration added where appropriate then it would seem more up to date and maybe more exciting. Thinking of the digital literacy aspect 3rd bullet - knowing how to act sensibly, safely and appropriately, - then knowing how to share and exchange information may take on a slightly expanded meaning, it probably needs the word “safely” added to update it for current times. The last Digital Literacy bullet also understanding how, when, why and with whom to use technology is relevant here as well as in the last section!

Reviewing, modifying and evaluating work as it progresses
4. Pupils should be taught to:

1.    review what they and others have done to help them develop their ideas
2.    describe and talk about the effectiveness of their work with ICT, comparing it with other methods and considering the effect it has on others [for example, the impact made by a desktop-published newsletter or poster]
3.    talk about how they could improve future work.

Think forums, voicethread, post it type notes added by each other and teachers as well as e-portfolios and showcases (if you have the same learing platform as us).

Breadth of study

5. During the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills and understanding through:

1.    working with a range of information to consider its characteristics and purposes [for example, collecting factual data from the internet and a class survey to compare the findings]
2.    working with others to explore a variety of information sources and ICT tools [for example, searching the internet for information about a different part of the world, designing textile patterns using graphics software, using ICT tools to capture and change sounds]
3.    investigating and comparing the uses of ICT inside and outside school.

There is so much scope here if we think more broadly about the words and add web 2.0 tools and newer software such as wikis, blogs, forums, polls, quizzes and game making resources into the range of software that it was actually designed for that is should pose no restrictions whatsoever on what people want to do in the classroom today. Still the ICT curriculum is not covered well in all schools, some bits of it are done brilliantly, and some are barely looked at!

It does not matter which topic are being covered in a class, ICT can be used to enhance the learning, almost anything imaginable will fit the National Curriculum expectations and the Digital Literacy agenda, as with any subject it just needs a planned structure to cover all aspects and all learning objectives for all children.

DIGITAL ART SITES

2010-06-29T18:27:00.002+01:00

Day after day whilst working with schools I find that teachers very often do not have photo editing software on their computers. Photographs from class digital cameras are usually huge and the uploader for the learning platform can't deal with them.There is a vast range of very useful art software on the web, much of it can be used freely on-line but also software to do most tasks can be downloaded and installed so that one has access anytime and anywhere, with no need of an internet connection.

I decided to list a few sample sites, this is by no means a full list of those available, just a few of my favourites. These could be useful to most teachers.

PAINTING

Sumo Paint – http://www.sumopaint.com/app/ A full on-line graphics package offering a wide range of tools and effects.
Sketchpad - http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/ A full graphics package offering a wide range of tools and effects
Art Pad - http://www.art.com/asp/artpad/default.asp Pick up a paintbrush and choose a colour! This painting site records a picture while it is being created and plays it back as time lapse movie.
Slimber - http://slimber.com/ An online drawing application allowing users to draw online, replay and save their drawings. Users can rate, comment and share drawings.
Live Brush - http://livebrush.com/ Livebrush is a drawing application. It employs an easy-to-use brush tool that reacts to your gesture. By combining simple motion controls with brush styles, Livebrush offers a fun and unique way to create graphics.
Odosketch - http://sketch.odopod.com/ Choose soft water-colour type of pens to sketch and create pictures.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH LIVE EDITING

Picnik - http://www.picnik.com/ Picnik offers easy to use yet powerful photo editing tools .
Pizap - http://www.pizap.com/ Says it is the world’s easiest editing program – well maybe .
Lunapic - http://www.lunapic.com/editor/ Lunapic gives photo editing and animation tools.
Photofunia - http://www.photofunia.com/ A fun application, choose classic image to add your face to e,g, the Statue of Liberty or the Mona Lisa.
Be Funky - http://www.befunky.com/ Make photos works of art by applying a range of drawing / painting styles to your photograph.

TEACHING ART SITES

The Artist’s Toolkit - http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/index.html Explore the tools that artists use – like line, colour and balance – to build works of art.
Leonardo’s Workshop - http://www.alifetimeofcolor.com/play/leonardo/index.html
Carmine’s Line and Shape - http://www.alifetimeofcolor.com/play/lineshape/flash3page.html Learn about lines - So many to see. Then discover shapes - A better artist you'll be!

ART FOR LITTLE CHILDREN

Pbskids - http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/games/mix_and_paint/mix_and_paint.html
Mix and Paint, a fun colour mixing simulationCrayola colouring pages - http://www.crayola.com/free-coloring-pages/
Crayola drawing and painting - children can choose a tool and mix the paint on screen http://www.crayola.com/coloring_application/index.cfm
Billy Bear – Learn to draw http://www.billybear4kids.com/Learn2Draw/Learn2Draw.html a project for kids
Learn to Draw - http://ababasoft.com/how_to_draw/paint_brush_mi.html Make cards and e-mail

FUN SITES

Artisancam - http://www.artisancam.org.uk/ lots of exciting projects to try out
Bonomo - http://bomomo.com/ Great fun, use the tools to create unique images
Doink - http://www.doink.com/ - a fun animation site, create vectors and animate them

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL

Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/ - GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
Tux Paint - http://www.tuxpaint.org/ A painting program suitable for children
PhotoPerfect Express - http://www.arcadiasoftware.com/photoperfect-express.html A Windows only photo editing program.

Talking to children about using iPod Touches in their classroom

2010-06-24T08:58:00.001+01:00

For weeks now two of us have been monitoring a class that are using a set of iPod touches in their classroom. They started off playing lots of games, saying it was hard to type and obviously not having much idea of how the apps worked. After about two weeks – where we sorted out some problems where some of them lost various setting so they would not access the web etc., the pupils used them lots and thought it was easy to type. They were still enjoying the games. After eight weeks the children do not know how they are going to manage without them next term.

As the project is coming towards an end I was given more or less free rein to talk to the children about anything to do with them yesterday. I interviewed each table in turn, just for a few seconds and asked them to tell me how using the iPod touches had helped with their learning.

All said how much they helped in day to day class work, all said that the dictionary and thesaurus was used all of the time and their writing had got better! They mentioned how internet research was so much easier – one reckoned it took 15 minutes to go to the laptop trolley. Get a laptop, bring it back to class, log on to the network then the internet to get some information. With the iPod on the table, or in the case, the longest it may be is to cross the room, pick up their Touch and bring it to their table with instant internet access.
One boy said how he like the maths games it did not seem like learning maths! One said that Word Web had a whole collection of level 5 adjectives and adverbs that helped his writing. They all enjoyed sharing “The Dragon Book” as a class text.

One girl said how the games had challenged them to think more about what they already knew, and that they had become better researchers. Watching an activity later seemed to prove that. The year 5 and 6 classes had split into 9 groups to do a carousel of activities for “Circus” week. I stayed in the class where the iPod touches were and they were studying Seurat in preparation for doing a painting about the circus in his style. The children who were in their own class, with their own iPods were so much quicker at finding the information they needed. Hands went up almost instantly and the quality of information was much better. The teacher waited until many children had found their few important facts then allowed pupils from other classes to say first what they had found, most came up with where and when he was born and when he died, those sorts of simple facts that would start any page of information on his life. The children from the host class came up with information of his style of painting and how he was shunned as an artist in his own lifetime etc.
It was interesting to watch one of the visiting class pupils, instead of writing George Seurat in the search engine, she laughed and changed it to George Clooney, making her friends giggle, I guess that is part of the playing to get to know them issue which the other class had long since got over.

Watching children navigating Google maps and showing me key features of their locality was interesting – can’t imagine children actually taking me to a map to share that information but it was what they chose to show me as I passed.

Others showed me a program called Gears – a logic game that one of a pair was very good at and one could not instantly see. The conversation between the two as the logical one explained to the non-logical pupil how to do something and why was really good! I was left in no doubt about the reasoning skills of the one who saw it – an assessment opportunity!

There was so much going on and so much interest in the iPods, children could not really imagine how they were going to work next term, they have become a part of the repertoire of tools available in the classroom the pupils take them for granted. It was wonderful to see!

A real disappointment was not being able to use Wallwisher! We had made a wall, put it up on the IWB and asked all chidlren to think of a comment to add. Sadly they were unable to post :-(. I asked the Twitter community to test it today but no-one can post to wallwisher with an iPhone or iPod Touch, what a pity, it would have been wonderful!

I have taken miles of video footage, but not sure yet where the final reports, videos etc will go, that is not for me to decide, this post is just anecdotal snippets.

For me the biggest lesson was to take baby wipes to clean the iPods if I have to touch them – once they have been in use in class for a day they are unbelievable sticky and revolting :-)

The Christian Aid website and games to help with Citizenship

2010-06-23T19:27:00.000+01:00

I have not studied the Christian Aid site for a while but have been missing a treat for the primary citizenship curriculum! There is a newish section with games suitable for pupils to play as part of the PHSE/ citizenship curriculum. http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/games/.

There are assemblies to introduce children to problems that other children around the globe have to cope with - see
•    Assembly of the month: World Cup fever - A primary assembly about the World Cup and recycling
•    Dying for the loo - A primary assembly on Kenya for Christian Aid Week
•    Watch out! Scary creatures about! - A Christian Aid primary assembly on malaria

The primary teaching resources include:
•    Ready-to-use assemblies bringing global issues of poverty and injustice to life.
•    Curriculum-linked activities to help pupils learn about life around the world.
•    Popular simulation games to challenge and inspire action on global issues
•    Interactive whiteboard resources to help schools explore global issues with primary pupils.

The site has children's stories from around the world that show how children are helping to end poverty in their communities and Global Gang games such as Help villagers in Nicaragua survive floods or get on board the Citizen Ship.

The games are available http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/games/play.aspx
1. Disaster Watch - Help villagers in Nicaragua survive floods, earthquakes and food shortages! Kyle Mawer has looked at how to use the game Disaster Watch in the classroom http://digitalplay.info/blog/2010/05/an-educational-game-disaster-watch/

2. Citizen Ship - Get on board the Citizen Ship and save the Global Gang from stormy seas, hunger, thirst and lots more... http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/games/citizenship/game.htm This is a set of challenges, probably suitable for years 4 or 5.

3. Go Goat Go! - Get a goat to help you grow more food! They eat weeds, their milk is magic and plants love their poo... http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/games/gogoatgo/launch5.htm Pupils need to copy rhythms and use arrow keys to move around the screen. This is suitable for younger pupils – about year 3, maybe 4.

4. Sneaky Snakes - Help sort out things that just aren't fair. http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/games/sneakysnakes/snakes.htm Sneaky Snakes is snakes and ladders with a difference – answer questions to get your counter past the snakes and for the snake to catch your opponent!

5. Carpet game - Help rescue kids from carpet sheds in India. http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/games/carpetgame/index.htm Sadly this one will not play for me but if it plays in schools it has a very good theme.

Young people tell their story

Stories from young people about how they people fight poverty in their communities around the world.

Escape from soldiers - Florinda and her family fled from Angola to Zambia.
Real life disaster! Gile 'Some of our neighbours got swept away' says Gile from Bangladesh.
Better days- Find out how Sara's family stood up for their rights, thanks to Christian Aid.
What? Tortillas, again?- Imagine if every meal was the same. And it wasn't even chocolate!
Trapped! - Find out why it takes Sunduz over an hour to get to her school 2km away.
Goals for peace - How is sport helping to stop the fighting in Sudan? Daniel tells us more...
Bernard's story - Africa is home to more than 12 million orphans whose parents have died from AIDS.

This site would be good to use in most KS2 classrooms.

Why I'm Still Married ;-)

2010-06-19T09:46:00.002+01:00

Household conversation on actually meeting up for the first time in days (odd shift system at husband’s place of work)

Husband: What went wrong with your computer, I saw it all unplugged and on the floor.

Me: Nothing, I just did not want to switch it on again until I had stripped it down and blown the dust out of it. I haven’t done it for ages and kept forgetting until it was too late!

Husband: Did you do it?

Me – puzzled: Yes.

Him: What with?

Me – even more puzzled: The compressor.

Him: How did you get it started? It hasn’t worked for weeks, the switch is broken. I have a new one, just not fitted it yet.

Me: Flicked the switch and away she went…

See, even his broken compressor is not going to argue with me ;-))

TMFISHBOWL

2010-06-18T20:58:00.002+01:00

Last night was our third teachmeet fishbowl event. It was quite different, each one has been, but still very exciting.

The first fifteen minutes was a whole room event, three experience fishbowlers were in the bowl, I think there is a video recording of it somewhere - just need to find it!

Next we broke out into smaller fishbowls, I was in the bowl to start session 2. We were given an old QCA based history unit based on The Tudors and were expected to update it with exciting activities. We promptly decided that out two big skills were research and presentation. I spent so much time scribbling everyone’s ideas down that I can’t remember them :-) They will be shared very soon though. The main idea was to create a book, so do lots of research, podcasts, interviews with the queens, Twitter as one of the queens trying to feel some of the pain, worry etc that they may have experienced. Discussion came up about findin data, verifying data etc - all very necessary skills for year 6, contributing towards a whole digital literacy.

After a short break where we sat sipping cold drinks with supper in the Italian garden we went back into a second small bowl session.

Around our table, and I was facilitator this time, the bowl structure broke down and it simple became a round table - that did not detract from the session, just took away the formality.

Our theme was rockets and so many ideas cropped up it was wonderful, I sat scribbling ideas for about 20 minutes – again they will be shared soon, but the group I was with thought it may be good to have a rocket making its journey from class to class all up the school. In Foundation Stage it may be a model rocket, but we decided they would need a passport to their new class, so taking digital photos to make ID cards was one lovely idea that was shared. Also recording their thoughts, fears, information about their families and pets on a easy speak mic which recording could be put with the photos and sent to the next class as introductions were among the ideas I recorded. As we moved to KS1 we got lots of 2Simple 2 Publish ideas, comic strip type of booklets to pass between classes. Bee-bot journeys, moon landings, a voice thread with the moon landing video clip in the middle and pupils adding their thoughts around it were all ideas for KS1.
As we moved up into Key Stage 2 Wallace and Gromit inspired use of stop motion animation to tell children's stories and to inspire writing encouraging creativity. The Earth in Space would be the main theme at that stage so therefore lots of science probably a lot of data handling comparing size distance away from the sun, moons and satellites ect.

One teacher spoke about the transition project that her year 6 to 7 child was doing. They were making moon buggies and testing them, so they were designing, making, testing possibly programming them on the computer but I am not sure about that. They were going to take the buggies up into year seven and revisit the project at the end of the year after they had them all in a science work and D&T programme to try to improve them.

Another teacher spoke about transition where they had a similar sort of project that the children did it all in secondary school so for six weeks they would go to the secondary school one morning a week and create their moon buggies while there, and then bring them back to primary school to talk about what they had done so that the children in year four and five that were still facing the transition would start to get a feel for how it was going to go and start to understand the process that they were going to go through as they went into the transition class. Certainly the rocket theme did make that sort of project possible. Once again to change schools a passport idea would be good, also a video telling the history from one place moving onto the next place would be interesting. Lots of ideas came and I cannot remember most of them I am looking forward to them being written up and shared.

We did have an idea last night that the team may build a whole creative curriculum project around the theme.

There is nothing magical and new about the fishbowl idea it simply groups of teachers coming together and all pooling their ideas, as one says something that sparks an idea from another teacher and that sparks idea from the next and so the discussion at the table gets quite interesting and very lively.

We also discussed the very necessary aspects of assessment, peer assessment, self-assessment, mind maps before and after were all suggested ways of the teacher keeping check on what was going on.

Finally the discussion on most tables seemed to be around the barriers to success when thinking about these exciting projects. To some people that was having not yet adopted a creative curriculum, they were still stuck with the old QCA units, for others it was teachers who were not ready to embrace the technology.

It was a wonderful night and lots of food for thought with lots of inspiring ideas many of which we need to share with as many teachers as possible.

PS 1 - Leon's photos :-) http://www.flickr.com/photos/learn4life/tags/tmfishbowl/
PS 2 - have found the video stream - lots of video to come later though I think.

10 Blogs to Watch

2010-06-18T20:43:00.000+01:00

I was extremely flattered to have been named in http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/ Ozge Karaoglu’s blog, 10 X 10 blogs to watch. I am very late in responding – sorry Ozge, just been a bit busy :-)

Actually compiling as list takes very little time, I have hundreds listed in my RSS reader, but I have had a real struggle to decide where my focus should be, it has changed several times over the last couple of weeks and until I sat and really thought about it I knew that I would have just put down my favourites, which would be okay I guess, but one may have struggled to see a theme running through them.

So here goes, my 10 blogs to watch, chosen for various reasons but mostly because they feed directly into my work. There are many others that I read linked with personal interests, people I like and others for reasons that elude me totally… but this is my choice – today – in no particular order!

Firstly – and not one of my ten – cheating a little – is Ozge’s own blog, as a big part of my job is working with teachers of small children her’s is an inspiration itself, with loads of lovely ICT ideas and resources http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/

1.    http://primarypete.net/ - lots about using ICT to enhance learning, games based learning etc.
2.    Tom Barrett – so many productive links are Tom’s where should I start? http://edte.ch/ Tom inspires people to work together to create really useful sets of ideas – a skill I really wish that I had!
3.    http://www.timrylands.com/blog/ Tim has inspired me - and a lot of other Oxfordshire teachers - for years :-) Thank Tim!
4.    http://ltsblogs.org.uk/consolarium/ - I am just so envious of where they are… wish we were half way there ...
5.    Dawn – to listen to Dawn talking about ICT in the classroom is a delight http://hallyd.edublogs.org/
6.    I am really interested in how Redbridge are developing games based learning, another inspirational group of people http://redbridgegamesnetwork.blogspot.com/
7.    http://forcuriousteachers.blogspot.com/ Qrious – I keep an eye on this one to spot any new ideas or tools that I can investigate
8.    http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/john-mclear-primary-school-ict/ I do not give this one nearly enough time thinking I will go back and read it properly when I have time… hmmm – must do that, I have lots to learn from this blog!
9.    http://chickensaltash.edublogs.org/ Inspiring projects, food for thought… all here
10. http://olliebray.typepad.com/ Ollie shares lots and lots of exciting ideas :-)

A very satisfactory list where I can learn from some of the best of the ICT practitioners in the UK! Thanks folks:-) Now everyone who knows me is suitable surprised that I did not do the techie list... or the Secodn Life list...

South Shields Community BSF Build

2010-05-21T12:23:00.000+01:00

South Shields Community schools have created a model their new school build in Second Life so that the teachers and pupils can experience the school before it is even built. There is a school close by that is did something similar and the teachers who were involved with the build felt they had already been there :-)

“It is quite strange that you know your way round before you get there” Graham Firecaster said in
one night just before I visited! “You don’t have to think in 3d,” which is a problem I have, “you can just experience it!” Graham did not know of Second Life, he saw the cad/cam model videos and realised he wanted their pupils to experience the build before the whole things was built. He started to investigate the possibilities offered by using a virtual world and so they started out in Second Life. Graham is now taking a whole school lead in it.

The head and deputy head are pushing a project in TeenGrid where the school build will be taken eventually ready for the pupils to build the furniture, make interactive projects etc. That island is already ordered! What a lovely refreshing attitude from UK education - Yay!

This morning I have visited the build and walked around. I love the huge expanses of glass surrounded workspace, one can only hope their wireless network will be enough to empower the student to make full use of the learning opportunities afforded by the space!

Gone are the corridors of old school days, instead there are square areas with rooms built off them where there is room for pupils to move comfortably around. There seem to be some large teaching areas, with smaller group areas around them but whole swathes of self study space where, I am sure, individuals and groups of students can work in whichever ways they want to when they have the opportunities to do so. Where solid walls they are coloured with rich but soft, gentle colours that should be soothing and inspiring, they lead to each of the four branches out from the main structure.

Toilets, lifts, staircases, cupboards, offices, the dining hall, fire escapes, gym and more are all there – one can wander around and work out where everything is and how to get around without ever having seen the plans of the actual build. Disabled visitors and pupils will be able to plot their routes around, the facilities really do look to be inclusive. Students can start to understand the layout and main navigation routes before they go there.

This is inspired use of Second Life for a purely practical demonstration of what a new school will be like.

The only thing that would improve the school for me is some signage helping me to understand the use are various places. I can’t, for example, work out where the music area is. I thought I had found it – a large rehearsal room, but could not find practice rooms – so think I must be wrong :-(

Museum of Natural History Vienna

2010-05-18T23:33:00.001+01:00

I visited the Vienna Natural History Museum in Second Life and was met outside by a huge dinosaur skeleton and an unbelievably large King Kong. The noises are quite horrifying, it sounds like one of them is eating something and I did not like to think of what it may be!

The building is impressive and rather beautifully constructed having the most lovely ceiling in the downstairs museum area.

There is a rather inspiring Greek room which is interesting.

There is a sort of fresco / cave paining gallery which shows the woolly mammoth, deers, camels and more...

Most impressive by far is the collection of Bryn Oh sculptures on the top floor. There are very typical of Bryn’s work, all of the creatures have moving part and sounds added but they are inspired by insets etc – hence the natural history museum to show them off. A visit to this area really needs sound enabled, these creatures all have sound similar to radio interference and the overall effect from them together is really strange.
To read more and see many close up photographs of these insects see http://cyberloom.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/homage-to-steampunk-and-bryn-oh/

The museum will host meetings, discussions, exhibitions, events and education events, it is a shared place for Europeans and Friends.

The slurl is: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Forum%20Europe/72/78/31

The overall effect is strange, it is atmospheric, different, unusual and quite weird but I like it.

Visiting one or two new builds in SL - The Cave

2010-05-18T22:46:00.000+01:00

The SLED list inspired me with information about a build called “The Cave”. I spent hours with my daughter studying The Cave alongside other allegories when she was studying philosophy at A level a few years ago. It is a very simple but effective build and so true to the story. I really enjoyed seeing it and recommend it to anyone interested in philosophy.

The notecard at the entrance to the cave says:

Just Imagine...
You and your friends and family and fellow citizens have spent your entire life chained together with your heads facing front and your eyes watching an inner cave wall. Unknown to you there are real people and animals behind you near the opening of the cave, near a fire, and they alone are free to cast shadows over your heads onto that inner cave wall. Your entire life is spent inside the cave thinking the shadows before you were, in fact, all there was to see and know. However, one day you escape from your chains and leave the cave.
On your way out you cannot believe that there was a fire used to cast shadows. But you do get out and then you really can’t believe what you see. At first your eyes are blinded by the sun but then you come to see the real world is so much more robust, more detailed and more beautiful than you ever imagined inside the cave. Now that you know how things really are you feel you must tell your family and friends and fellow citizens. Returning to the cave you try to convince the poor souls who remain that they’ve lived a lie in the shadows their whole lives, but of course they don’t believe you...

To participate:
            Inside the cave, you will find benches made of rock.
            There are balls on each of these benches that mark places for you to sit.
            Right-click with your mouse on one of these balls, and choose "Sit".
            You will then be facing the shadows on the wall...
            When you are ready to leave, click "Stand Up" to release yourself from the chains.

Then, reflect on these questions...
            Could you ever go back and live in the cave? Why or why not?
            Why won't the others believe you if you try to convince them of the truth?
            In what ways might Plato's allegory be relevant to life in today's society?
            In what ways might Plato's allegory apply to your own life's experience?

Jack G. Musselman
St. Edward's University

The Slurl for the build is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%203/85/206/23

To find out more visit: http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/plato-cave-second-life

Plato's Allegory of the Cave can be found in Book VII of Plato's Republic (514a-520a)

The links offered there to explain the significance of The Cave in differnt contexts is:

1. Cave in Plato's own text (Republic VII 514a-520a)
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html

2. Cave and the Matrix
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_partridge.html

3. Cave and education
http://www.rivertext.com/weil4.html

4. Cave and financial markets
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12957753

5. Cave and lawyers at work
http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/platos-cave-why-most-lawyers-love-paper-and-hate-e-discovery-and-what-this-means-to-the-future-of-legal-education/

6. Cave and public policy
http://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Platos-Cave-Blindness-Threatens/dp/0312364407

7. Cave and science fiction
http://sfgospel.typepad.com/sf_gospel/2008/07/a-brief-history-of-platos-cave-in-science-fiction.html

8. Cave and the war in Iraq
http://www.counterpunch.org/corseri05192004.html

9. Cave as claymation
http://platosallegory.com/

10. Cave and philosophy
http://philosophybites.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=221242

Second Life Teachmeet 2010

2010-05-08T11:37:00.005+01:00

May 7th 2010 - the first ever Second Life 'Vital' Teachmeet event took place in the theatre on the Learn 4 Life island.

At midnight we were still partying:-) It was a fun night, very experimental and, in my opinion pretty successful.

Leading up to the event all of the preparations had been easy but inevitably about 7.45 as a larger group than expected started to gather on the island a few problems occurred. Suddenly and without warning one of the party was totally ruthed, another could not see anything except water and steam, a couple did not have sound then as we started we had a black avatar and anyone who has seen that knows it is not fun for the person it happens to. So a few minutes were spent solving these problems but we were still online for an 8pm start.

The few minutes lost to sorting those problems meant that even though I tried to set up the twitterfall and the fruit machine to give presentation order neither worked in-world and I had no time left to sort those problems. But... who needs a fruit machine and twitterfall? We carried on without!

There were five presentations, all made in the theatre, we did not go to the sandbox, where at least one of the presos, a sound workshop, should have been. The reason that we did not move out was because it took us a few minutes to round up the delegates and get them in the main presentation area we did not want to risk losing them again.

During the session we managed to play videos full screen for all to see, play multiple presentations and talk – pretty much what we would have been doing in any room in real life but also we were able to do a workshop on sound – making animals speak – not easy in the physical world teachmeet – one up for SL :-)

What did we learn?

•    There is lots more work for me or with colleagues Nic Byron and Eyebeams Electricteeth to do to try to get the fruit machine and twitterfall working – these were not things we thought of until the last minute so as they did not instantly work we gave up so as not to impede the whole event.
•    Eyebeams (aka Leon Cych) used his iphone to time the event – we need an in-world timer, again we never thought of that! However on the point of timing any teachmeet visitor know the role of the camel; he worked well and was used to very good effect, not only during the meeting but also at the party :-)
•    One good decision made on the night was not to move to the sandbox for a session, I think we would have lost too many people and also many people wandered in and out as we were where we had advertised the event for the duration of it.
•    I had planned to do a virtual visit – for the same reasons as the last point they are not really viable and we did not do that session, I will re-plan that as a session for the next event.

So is it viable?

You will all soon be able to judge for yourself. Two people videoed the whole event and Eyebeams will release footage very soon, I will add the url here when it is available. I really enjoyed it, the people there enjoyed it, I asked one or two if it had been worth attending and they thought it had. We can do the same in-world as in the physical world and more but as all things in Second Life or any virtual world there is a leap of faith and some orientation work needed before one can benefit. For some that may be a step too far but I would recommend trying it!

Sadly I was too involved to even think about sitting back and taking photographs or twittering :-)

Post script - just received an e-mail from Osnacantab who took loads of photos, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/42691103@N00/ .

Added on Sunday - Leon's video of Cyber 360's presentation at the event http://blip.tv/file/3597497 .

Also - remembered when looking at the video - tell people who want help with their presentation upload etc to ask early :-) No last minute rush.

Kirsten’s New Second Life Viewer

2010-04-30T20:45:00.000+01:00

This evening I decided to try Kirsten’s new viewer and after the first five minutes I am very impressed. When I went into the new SL Viewer 2 it took ages to import my inventory etc., but this was instant.
The side bar does not have to be present, not even the tiny tabs and that really is a bonus. It can be minimised to the bottom bar out of the way giving a much clearer view of the desktop.

I love having the map and minimap as well as inventory buttons at the bottom of the screen under my right hand and mouse – being right handed it is instant access and switch off if I don’t want to see either, they are just where I like most of my frequently used icons, top of left is so far out of my normal reach I tend not to use icons over there :-)

The view controls are good, very versatile! I am sure that I am imagining it but the depth of vision seems to be much better and as the menu tabs are not on the left the whole image seems vast and clear.

The viewer is very quick. I was teleporting from place to place and the textures were rezzing very quickly. Admittedly they were places that I often visit, but these places were not cached – it was the first visit with this viewer!

For lots more information visit http://www.kirstensviewer.com/Blog
To download it visit http://www.kirstensviewer.com/Downloads/

Expanding training opportunities in Second Life

2010-04-16T17:10:00.002+01:00

Well it is the last day of my 6 days leave, I have just about caught up and, though not quite ready for next week decided to see how our idea of providing Learning Platform training nuggets in Second Life may work out.

First I thought I needed to stream my desktop into Second Life so that delegates could watch what I was doing and then practice on their own computer – so stream I did, I used my laptop to stream from and my desktop to be in SL to explain the process etc. It was okayish but not as clear as I had hoped.

Thinking more about it I realised that I could do the whole demo live in Second Life – all I need to do is share my login details for the session. If everyone logs in as me they can see exactly what I am doing as if I was doing it on a whiteboard in front of them in our training room – also – just like using the IWB they could take over and try bits of it out! In fact each person attending could make a blog post and add to a wiki better than simply on an IWB in the training room as all have equal access all of the time :-)

As soon as the session is over I change the password for the login we are all using an the site is secure again.

That is the theory – I need a few willing volunteers to come into SL with viewer 2 so that I can try it out!!

A life well lived & odd memories

2010-04-12T23:29:00.009+01:00

Richard Gordon Rutter

Richard or Dick as he was affectionately known by many, was born in Walsall on 10th Feb 1925 and was the youngest of 7 children and last surviving family member.
He was a loving father to three children Carol, Lindy and Mike, with nine grand children and three great grand children.

His childhood days were spent at Palfrey school in Walsall, and when not at school he was regularly expected to work in the family allotment with brother Jim, for his few farthings pocket money.

His first proper job was for a transport company called Hickenbottom’s, this position was short lived because at the tender age of 19, he was called up for the army joining his three elder brothers. When posted abroad, not wanting to worry his parents he wrote several letters and asked a mate to post them periodically saying that he was training in the south of England and it was only when his parents read about him in the local paper did they realise he was at war.

During his army days some of which are well documented he was made up to Sergeant Major and courageously led his men into battle many times unfortunately loosing a lot of friends and colleagues along the way. During the war he was awarded the military medal which he was very proud of and was even talking about it the day before he died. He was asked where he won the medal and although he was very confused about most day to day things he clearly understood the question and replied “Normandy.”

In January 1948 after the war he was called to work in the Gambia with displaced Africans, trying to set up new villages, clearing forests etc. During his time there he was presented with an ebony elephant to bring back to England. He arrived back in the UK in November 1948 to the family home on the Broadway in Walsall. The elephant was put away in a draw and forgotten about. Soon after arriving home he started to have a run of bad luck. A lady stopped him on the street one day and explained that his run of bad luck was due to the elephant. He returned home, found the elephant and burnt it, sure enough life seemed to get better. Apparently Elephants do not like to be locked away.

He started a new job working for the BRS as a long distant lorry driver. Whilst driving he was away from home one night and parked up in a lorry park. Whilst walking about the lorry park he smelled something burning, he wandered around for a few minutes looking and realised it was one of the parked lorries. The solenoid had stuck on this lorry. Richard fetched a crow bar from his lorry and levered the battery leads off to prevent it setting on fire. The security people looking after the lorry park at first thought he was vandalising the lorry and got very angry. He explained and left his name and address and walked away. Weeks later he was honoured and mentioned in the paper saying how his actions had prevented what may have been a very nasty lorry fire in the middle of a park full of lorries and fuel.

On the 1st September 1951 Richard married Patricia and lived in Lord Street, Walsall where Carol and Lindy were born and Pat ran a small hairdressing business. Richard’s elderly dad George, lived with the family until his death early in 1960.

After this, the family travelled far and wide. Richard had a motorbike and sidecar. Carol and Lindy rode in the sidecar, Richard and Pat on the bike, and Timmy their springer spaniel in the sidecar boot. Timmy had the sleeve cut out from an old army t shirt pulled over his head to hold his ears down.

Soon an old Hillman car arrived which took the family on swimming and picnic trips to Swancote most Sundays, as well as trips to Sherbrook forest where they used to go walking for miles and deer spotting quite frequently. They would have many wonderful weekends visiting the family at Holt Fleet and Gloucester were they would have big family gatherings with his older brother Bill and his wife Ida.

Richard would often join shooting parties, all his life he enjoyed shooting, his father’s shooting diaries were always a point of interest, the shooting parties fed the family whist they were all at home as children.

In 1960 the family moved to Wolverhampton Road, Cannock. Where once again Pat his wife set up the family hairdressing business. It was there that Mike was born. Richard went to work for Columbus Dixon as a very successful salesman, selling huge floor cleaning machines. During these years Richard was presented with three major awards for top sales man, winning family holidays abroad.

While Mike was still a small baby in 1964, the family moved to Cannock Wood where Richard and Pat set up home for their family. Over the coming years many family parties were held at the house and everyone was always welcome. The front door to the house was never locked and friends would always just let themselves in whenever passing.

On December 9th 1971 a car accident was responsible for the tragic death of Richard’s wife Pat. Carol was 17, Lindy 16, Mike 7. Shortly after Pat died Richard was taken into hospital for a major stomach operation that was not successful, so was followed by further major surgery a week later. He was very ill. It was a difficult time.

Within a very short time the girls had left home, Carol to college, Lindy got married and Mike was home with Richard and the family dog; Buster.

In the early 70s Richard became a salesman for a double glazing and storm porch company run by his good friend David Ray. This was where he met his second wife to be Sheila. During the company weekly Sunday morning sales meetings at the T.I club in Aldridge, Mike his young son had great delight in racing his dad’s company car around the local car park.

In 1983, Richard married his second wife Shelia. During their 13years of marriage they enjoyed many, holidays abroad and attended many reunions and memorials to Epron and Normandy.

Richard now getting older, was asked by his brother George, if he would like to join the family antiques business in Walsall restoring antiques and regularly attended antique auctions. He thoroughly enjoyed himself during these years.
Sheila, Richard’s second wife sadly passed away in November 1996.

In the year 2000, Richard finally retired, and has spent these last ten years, catching up with old army pals and regularly attending Sunday morning meetings, together with voluntary work at Whittington Barracks Museum. He even carried out an interview with BBC radio stoke were he talked in detail about his experiences during the war.

Richard became ill at the beginning of February this year and following a short spell in hospital, spent his last three weeks in a local nursing home, where up until the day he died he was still playing up the nursing staff affectionately calling them his "Harem."

Richard was a very loving, proud, hardworking and generous person. He was always immaculately dressed. He loved life, his family and friends. In his later years he sought particular enjoyment from his garden, wildlife, music and the occasional shot of whisky and lemonade. We will miss him.

RIP dad :-)

Post script
The funeral was a celebration of dad's life, we were all delighted by the company and the whole event, and though sad it could not have been better. There was an obituary posted in the timesonline 21st Apri 2010:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7103020.ece

Tweet-up at Harrogate iatefl 2010

2010-04-11T23:08:00.002+01:00

With family committments taking over huge amounts of time in my life over the last eight weeks I was not at all sure that I was going to get to the tweet-up at iatefl in Harrogate. However, as things worked out I managed to leave home on Friday lunchtime and arrived in Harrogate in time for the start of the Pecha Kucha – watch it at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/sessions/2010-04-09/iatefl-3rd-annual-pecha-kucha-evening it is well worth seeing :-)

Not being a language teacher maybe I do not appreciate the finer nuances of humour when very famous language educators are mentioned but still found something interesting, inspiring or just entertaining in all of the talks. Marisa, Burcu and Karenne all did Pecha Kucha presentations which were brilliant but Gavin Dudeney’s "A Personal Reading List" it is just the funniest session imaginable! I have to treat him to the "Is your dog gay?" book from his wish list on the strength of it! This particular book rang a bell with me because my sons, when young teens, always called one dog that we had "Gayboy," I was never brave enough to ask why :-)They clearly recognised something I missed!

I was delighted to meet, for the first time face to face, many of the people that I have talked to frequently over the last year in Second Life, or been in contact with through Twitter. I met up with Marisa, Karenne and Shelly and stayed with them overnight sleeping on the sofa in their flat – thanks ladies! I had a wonderful time. We sat quite happily talking the night away, though deciding at about 4am we really should get a little sleep ;-)

At the tweet-up I met Olga, Maureen, Jeremy, Jeremy’s musician friend (sorry his name has gone), Ken, Amanda, Petra, Burcu, Anna, Sue Lyons, Shaun, Kalyan and Tamas possibly even more people, I am sorry if I have left you out!! As more names and faces come to me I will add to the list.

It was great to meet up again with those I had met before including Gavin and Nicky, Graham, Kyle and Joe, Jessie and Iffaf – again probably loads more of you. Thanks again to everyone for making me so welcome, I am so glad I managed to get there.

From home, via the iatefl Livestream, I had already watched the Thursday and Friday Plenaries and lots of the interviews from the presenters at the conference, I know they are directed at language teachers but so much of the session content and inspiration is transferable, it does not really matter what you are teaching! I still have more to catch up with, it is going to take about a month to get through it all – see all of it here: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/. Many thanks to all involved in making it such as huge success and so much of it accessible to those of us who were not present. Massive thanks and credit to the team who made the on-line conference happen so fluently and smoothly. The quality was superb. The Sunday plenary, Jan Blake telling her wonderful stories, was an amazing conclusion to the whole event. I really hope that is available on video to rewatch!

I have three short video clips from the tweet-up that I would like to edit into a sharable clip – I will see if I can contain it to the people that I recognise and see if they agree to it being shared! Watch this space :-)

Redesigning an Island in SL

2010-04-11T21:32:00.000+01:00

Over the last few weeks I have worked with a colleague to completely re-develop the Learn4 Life island in Second Life. It has been great fun!

The island’s theme is “Back to Nature” with lovely waterways, plants, wildlife and each teaching plot has its own stretch of beach. There is a kingfisher that dives in the water for fish, there are butterflies by the hundred, swans, ducks with ducklings and a heron feasting on fish from the pond.

The conference area has an amphitheatre built into the hillside and an area for large meetings or group work. The social area is slightly away from the nature theme but still outside under the stars! There are about six meeting spaces for smaller groups and fourteen teaching plots available for people who want to develop CPD sessions for teachers in the UK.

The island has a pirate ship where one can teleport to the crow’s nest or spin the wheel to move the rudder! It has an underground secret passage leading to treasure. We are designing a treasure hunt at the moment so soon you will be able to visit and do that! Near the pirate ship are hillside walkways with rope bridges and canoes to ride around the whole island.

The island has been built with viewer two in mind. It is based on users making best use of the new media opportunities.

Many people know that I generally reside on EduNation, one of the islands belonging to The Consultants-E and designed by avatar Dudeney Ge. It has always been my favourite place in Second Life and Mr Ge's influence will be apparent in the design of Learn 4 Life to anyone who knows his work :-)

To visit and look around download the free Second Life (make sure you get Viewer 2) and sign up. You will need to make an avatar. Once you have got that far follow the slurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Learn4Life/96/175/21

The Naace Conference

2010-04-11T18:30:00.001+01:00

It is a couple of weeks after the conference and I have not had the chance, until today, to start getting my blog up even close to being up to date. Now, sadly, I can’t even try pull together several half written posts to make them make sense :-)

The conference was held in the Hilton Hotel in Blackpool on the 16th - 18th March 2010.

This year’s conference was brilliant, a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring event. The conference centre itself was superb, the rooms lovely, swimming pool fine, food good etc. It was great that, once again, we were all in the same hotel, that brings so much more to the event, particularly to the social networking aspect! So many times in the past I have been chatting to a group of people and had to leave them to get the coach back to where we were staying, or left at the same time as colleagues so that we were not walking alone late at night.

In the main room there was a twitterfall wall used as a back channel; that added a whole new dimension to the event. Huge numbers of delegates had netbooks, notebooks or twitter capable mobile phones so the back channel was a rich source of information and discussion. Many of the presentations are available now at http://www.naace.co.uk/conference2010videos for Naace members, sadly not for others.

A new event added this year was a Teachmeet, sponsored by Vital and very enjoyable. We were treated to loads of 2 minute nano talks or 7 minute presentations on aspects of our work that is new, exciting, motivating or similar to inspire us all move forward in our ideas and ways of working.

During the exhibition many people agreed to provide us (Oxfordshire) with free access to their on-line resources so that we can hold an on-line resources fair through our learning platform in June and July. My next job is to organise that event!! Much of the entertainment was based around the launch of 2Simple’s Purple Mash and they hosted the first night party. Sat on my desk right beside me I still have my potato masher tied up in purple ribbon – not quite sure what to do with it now though :-)

Three of us decided that as we were in Blackpool there were two things we should do – take a tram ride and a trip up the tower for photos. The weather was glorious so we skipped lunch one day and charged down the promenade. The tram lines are all ripped up, being repaired or improved ready for the summer traffic and the tower only opens over the weekend out of season! We failed!

It was great however to meet up with many countrywide colleagues, some that we meet regularly in Second Life and some that we only see at big ICT events. I think we managed to persuade a few more to join us in Second Life and on Twitter!

As a really nice conclusion to the conference – I have since heard that I have become a Naace Fellow – not sure quite what that will mean yet but it is an honour :-) thanks Naace!

Using Free Music in Schools

2010-03-20T22:14:00.002Z

Free music and sound effects are very useful in the classroom helping to make podcasts, presentations, IWB teaching resources, and other teaching and learning materials more interesting. Licensing is the proverbial minefield with so many different clauses being a possibility even in “royalty-free” sound files.
Royalty-free – from Wikipedia “Royalty-free music libraries originally addressed this [paying the royalty fee] by offering music that could be purchased for (in most cases) a one-time fee and then be used by the purchaser as many times as needed.” However larger companies bought up smaller libraries and changed the rules, sometimes only allowing a certain number or type of use. Mostly those restrictions will be too high for the classroom situation to be worried about.

There is also “Podsafe” music that I have seen a lot of recently. As podcasts are often quite openly public it is of great concern that the sounds used in one are safe and not going to bring law suits against the school! Wikipedia “ the only actual requirement for a work to be podsafe is that any licensing requirements it has, if applicable, allow for the work's free use (typical broadcast use in its original form, if in no other form, depending on the specific license) in a podcast or web broadcast. This gives specific favor to podcasts only, allowing the artist to impose more traditional constraints on everyone else. Podsafe licensing can, for example, continue to require non-podcast consumers to pay for the work, require royalties on derivative works, and profit significantly from the work's use in traditional radio, television, or film.”

“Open Music” sharing sites most often use one of http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/ the Creative Commons licence structures, so it is worth actually checking out what a piece of music from an “open music” site is offering in the way of a licence. For example http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/ says: “Downloads from Open Music artists. Released for free under the Creative Commons license.” It also says quite clearly “We don’t believe in the conventional record label. OpenMusic’s objective is to release great music and sound projects from around the world, in a freel, share-friendly and re-distributable manner. We encourage you to redistribute individual tracks or whole releases via sharing links, Peer-to-Peer networks, MP3 Blogs and any other form you see fit, as long as you respect the rights of the respective Artists and follow the rules of the Creative Commons Sharing License.
Remember - this is not your music - you just have some files on your hard drive.”
So – absolutely not for rehashing and use in a presentation or podcast!

Having had a little look at the licence issues and started to work out what we need, where can we find useful sources of sounds and music to enhance lessons and pupil work? There are several sites that I use frequently for sound effects, my favourites being
1. Partners in Rhyme http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/
Here we have large collections of free royalty free sound effects and public domain free sound effects available for use in your multimedia projects plus an extensive library of general free sound effects collected from the web.

The free sound effects should be fine to use in school, any royalty free music that you may decide to purchase here is good too!

2. A1 Free Sound Effects http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/noflash.htm

They have a library of free sounds, also for a one off fee of $9.99 they have a download file available of all 890 sounds - “free sounds 890 Sound Effects Personal Use Sounds: Allows the buyer to use the 890 sound effects in this download for any non-profit manner. Sound Effects for Churches, Sound Effects for Schools, Sound Effects for Students, Sound Effects for Teachers…” All the way through the site they encourage you to purchase the whole collection but it is not absolutely essential for all of those they make freely available.

Searching for Sounds

I love the search engine Soungle!

“Soungle is a free site, developed by Southern Codes, for finding all kind of sound FX and musical instruments samples on our mega online library. As different from most of similar sites, Soungle is NOT a Web search engine. It only searches in our growing monster database. Our goals are to keep it simple to use (search, preview and download) and to keep it free.

One can search by keyword, try several variations because sometimes the results are not what may be expected for example search for bugle call and you get several bugle sounds, then telephones – to fit the “call” bit of the phrase! Play, see how long the sample is, liten to it and download it is it is required.
“Remember, all of our sound effects and samples are royalty free for downloading.”

There is no mention of any sort of licence for use but as their whole ethos is “keep it free” one would hope they have already checked what goes into their database!

The New SL Browser

2010-02-25T00:22:00.002Z

Well I am trilled to bits by the changes in the new SL browser!
I am not going into great detail – there is plenty of that around, I will just list a few of the things I have done over the last two nights :-)

•    Shared an etherpad with loads of people – including using the log in facility to keep it private to a group of learners
•    Streamed myself into SL through Twitcam – entertaining – the virtual me watching the real me :-) but very easy if you want to do it
•    Pete shared his desktop with me through Adobe Connect – and we played a video from his computer into SL
•    Nergiz started a DimDim session that we could join in with, and see her broadcasting live into SL
•    We shared several Flickr photo slideshows
•    We played a slideshare presentation
•    I added loads of different web pages to a cube prim – these were scrollable and the links worked
•    We updated – between a group of us – Moodle, our VLP, our Nings, our blogs and Twitter – logging in and updating
•    I – sorry, rather childish I know – played Tetris and an assortment of other Flash and drag and drop games.
•    I played videos from a variety of places – some of which are not available on You Tube but will be very useful in my teaching in SL.

I have several more experiments to do tomorrow but so far I am really thrilled with what I have seen of it and the potential that it opens up to learners and teachers in Second Life.

Thanks to Graham, Anna, Nick, Pete, Nergiz, Marisa and Leon – in fact anyone who came along this evening and had a play with whomever of the group were experimenting.

Holodecks in EduNation

2010-02-15T14:10:00.003Z

St Valentine’s day evening in Second Life Osna and Mary put on a Holodeck Faire where people shared their holodeck scenes. There were several amazing builds on show! The project was part of the Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds course.

It was so well attended we ran out of space on ENll and spread onto the second sandbox in EduNation. There were many people all interested in the scope of using holodecks for teaching languages in Second Life.

The real virtue of a holodeck is that if you have a comparatively small plot of land somewhere you can rez a whole scene to teach in and replace it instantly with another. So, for example, you may have the airport scene, where a visitor arrives in a new country and practices the language involved there, followed by situations like the taxi and address systems, registering in the hotel, dinner, breakfast, arranging meeting times offer more scope.

I lost track of the number of scenes I visited tonight but among them were

·         An aquarium

·         A French class with masses of self study resources

·         A church in Venezuela

·         A shop in Venezuela

·         A castle

·         A forest scene

·         Meditation Tower

·         Dogme Gardens

·         A tree house

·         A night club with a wonderful rainy road leading to it

·         A haunted house

·         The Mad Hatter’s Tea party

·         A pyramid

·         A temple

·         The Black Cat Nightclub

·         An Asylum

·         A maze

·         An auditorium

·         A lecture hall
Lots of people attended, the sims were quite full at times. There was lots of networking with people sharing ideas and planning to work together to produce educational resources. It seemed to me to be a hugely successful night and I must congratulate Mary and Osna who ran it, it was a good idea that worked very well. To see a whole set of photographs visit Flickr.

First Greek Lesson :-)

2010-02-14T17:22:00.003Z

Probably my last too. I am sure I have already been disowned, when, two hours after the lesson I could not answer the questions!

In Second Life this week Marisa Constantinides did a beginners' Greek lesson. We started in EduNation where we stood on a world map to show where we came from. We learned the names of our countries and had a game to see who could get to the country named in Greek the quickest - Karelia won with Pawlus a close second - spot the competitive students :-) We moved on to ask where does one come from and reply.

After that we learned to say what our names were and to ask others what their names were. Marisa had prepared a vocabulary board that played the recorded lines as you touched it. She gave us all a copy so that we can practise at our leisure!

We moved from EduNation to Santorini, a Greek sim. There we chatted and finished the lesson with a Greek dance. It was great fun but it is very hard to see how the letters in the Greek alphabet relate to anything that we already know :-)

Now I just have to keep practising!

Word it Out

2010-02-06T15:29:00.003Z

A new program akin to Wordle - experimenting here :-)

I took the words from the new National Curriculum, essential skills for life section Literacy Maths and ICT - starting to get familiar with it :-)

Made with WordItOut

The blog post here makes it sound more versatile than Wordle but I must admit to loving the different word directions and rich colours of Wordle. They are very similar though - another lovely educational resource :-)

K9 Web Protection

2010-01-30T17:17:00.003Z

K9 Web Protection is a free Internet filtering and control solution for the home. K9 puts parents in control of the Internet so that they can protect their children. So says the webpage: http://www1.k9webprotection.com/ .

I signed up – downloaded it, it failed.

I restarted for a second time as the site suggested and it seemed to kick in alright. Twitter and You Tube pages that were open in the browser were blocked, filtered. I tried AOL video – that was filtered.

I went to Google images and typed in Sex - okay - the pictures are fine, naked people but nothing to offend, upset etc., it could have been lots worse and this has still got Google’s moderate filtering on, as it told me!

A poker game website was blocked, making home-made explosives was blocked, E-bay and Amazon are not blocked. So usual, normal household use of the internet seems to be fine, except maybe for video sites, my guess is that I could put exceptions and allow them if I was confident they would not be abused!

So far it does seem to be a fairly effective filter.

I went onto the website, typed in my password to alter/ view my settings. This in itself good because offspring will not know the password to get on and do this!

There are several views of what my computer has been up to – I can see the sites I tried to visit that it filtered, and the ones it has let me access. I can set the restrictions and website exceptions if required.

This is a very comprehensive system, it also tells you if someone is trying to get past the proxy :-) a favourite teen sport!! A very effective, free filter to help internet control with older children and teens in the home!

Now - to get it off again... Tweetdeck, Twitter and Facebook seem to be really struggling!

Post script
I needed my password to remove it and it promptly e-mailed me to tell me the filter had been removed and what to do if this was not intentional!

E-safety and children browsing the web

2010-01-30T15:33:00.005Z

1. Zoodles

Whilst attending an e-safety course last summer I picked up the paperwork for Zoodles meaning to have a very good look at it. I did not spend much time on it after realising it is a paid for service and for the home not schools. I am always pretty sceptical about whether parents feel that they can afford to pay for these services, or whether they feel that being with their child whilst on the internet and restricting the amount of time on the family computer is a better alternative.

This week my attention was drawn to it again through Twitter and I resolved to really have a look, rather than just read through the paperwork which is all I did last summer in the end.
I registered a child, downloaded Adobe Air and downloaded the Zoodles toolbar – this was not all as easy as it sounds though – see confirmation e-mail:

Thank you for your interest in Zoodles. Our system shows you are just a couple steps away from having an incredibly safe and educational environment for your child to play and learn in. To get fully up and running all you have to do is install the Zoodles browser. To install the Zoodles browser please follow the following these 2 steps:
1. Install Adobe Air by going to: http://get.adobe.com/air/
2. Now install Zoodles by clicking on this link: http://www.zoodles.com/kid/download
After installing the browser your child will be able to play with hundreds of fun and educational games in an incredibly safe environment.

The first time I clicked on the link it took me to “Woody’s Games.”

I started to play and realised I had failed, there was no difference at all, I was just visiting kids’ sites on the web. I went back to the e-mail – I had clearly missed something – this time I clicked on the link I got “The page you were looking for does not exist.”

I had to poke about to find the Zoodles toolbar, it was on http://www.zoodles.com/parent/kid page.

Once installed it showed great promise, the browser covers the whole screen taking away any elements of clickability, if that is a word :-) There was nothing left for me to click on apart from "my" games. I played lots of those, tried some other links that popped up on these web pages, such as “Parent Vacation,” “Parents and Teachers,” and got taken back to four games on the Zoodles browser.

Suddenly I realised that my Tweetdeck notification had popped up several times, the next time it appeared I clicked on it – and – oops! My whole bottom taskbar bar showed all of the programs open on the computer and Tweetdeck opened up on screen.

Fine – lesson learned - as a parent using Zoodles I need to close any programs that have a pop-up facility, close Skype, MSN, Tweetdeck, the “freebie of the day” notice – maybe more, things that I often ignore, close, respond to – depending on the situation at that moment. If I leave any of these open Zoodles is not secure.

Another thought – alt and tab – yes it does what it is supposed to do – I can cycle through the programs open quite easily, access any program and could escape out into the web in just a few seconds.

Okay I am an adult, I know how to get around a computer! I also experienced a huge sense of frustration that I could not click on the games and videos that looked good on all of the sites I was able to visit and know that any childre will try to escape after just a few minutes. About 25 seconds after I started clicking randomly on the games menus on the pages I was allowed to visit the Zoodles toolbar stopped responding, I minimised it and went out onto the big bad web all alone.

No filter system is 100% safe and the best answer is always going to be to sit with children whilst they are on the web. I know for some this is totally impractical but to have the computer in a family room where it is clearly visible from lots of places enables parents to keep an eye on what is happening whilst carrying on cooking the dinner etc!

Had I paid Zoddles to keep my children safe from internet harm I may well have been lulled into a false sense of security and handed over the browsing welfare of my child to a tiny, not 100% secure program. Had I chosen instead to play with my children on the computer for a few minutes each day – until they got bored and moved on to other toys, outside activities, playing with friends etc., and talked to them about things that we saw and places that are good to visit and maybe not so good and why, they may have started to learn the value of the web and a little about keeping safe in that environment.

Thank goodness my children have grown up and playing with my grand-children on or off the web is a joy to share. I use the Google's Moderate filtering setting for my browser but would use the Strict filtering if I had children here using the internet frequently. See Google's filtering notice:

Many users prefer not to have adult sites included in search results (especially if kids use the same computer). Google's SafeSearch screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and removes them from your search results. No filter is 100 percent accurate, but SafeSearch should eliminate most inappropriate material.
You can choose from among three SafeSearch settings:
•    Moderate filtering excludes most explicit images from Google Images results but doesn't filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you'll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
•    Strict filtering applies SafeSearch filtering to all your search results (i.e. both image search and ordinary web search).
•    No filtering, as you've probably figured out, turns off SafeSearch filtering completely.

For little ones I would happily use the free version of Zoodles knowing it is a fairly safe environment filled with games, I have left it on my computer and will try it out with my grandson but I would not depend on it to keep any children safe! The complete breakdown of pricing and what the premium service offers is http://www.zoodles.com/home/pricing.