Saturday 06 February 2010 at 11:29 pm
On Thursday I went over to the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick for TeachMeet 10 East Lothian. The Sea Bird Centre was a great venue and what I cold see of North Berwick made me think it might be nice to visit in the day time.
The event went very smoothly indeed, Fearghal Kelly and David Gilmour kept things running very smoothly indeed.
I arrived a little late so didn't reall pick up Martyn Pegg on Taking Curriculum for Excellence in the right direction.Outdoor Education, orienteering and the energetic classroom. It looked pretty exciting with members of the audience running all over the shop. The EL East Lothian Outdoor Education Service blog looks interesting. I managed to grab a sandwich an a seat thanks to the helpful centre staff and settled down to watch. There were a lot of new faces to me, I guess a big local turnout with perhaps a good few new to teachmeet, the evaluation was very positive.
I didn't take any notes during the presentations but enjoyed them all, I loved the mix of tech & tech in Rowena Blair & Krysia Smyth talking about E-scape but failed to get my hands on the fizz-book. Don Ledingham gave a quick and impassioned defence of Curriculum for Excellence and blogged about this: Curriculum for Excellence: Stand up and speak up : Don Ledingham’s Learning Log on Wednesday. Neil Winton presented via Skype and I was surprised how good the video was.
I am going to be revisiting all of the presentations over the next week or so as I post the audio to EDUtalk.cc my own presentation was about EDUtalk and I recorded the other speakers. I would recommend listening to them all.
There is a lot more info on the TeachMeet 10 EastLothian wiki page and:
After the meet I had a quick pint with Robert Jones fresh from his parent's night, Rowena, Krysia (Who kindly gave me a lift back to Glasgow, thanks Krysia), Fearghal and David. As you would expect an interesting chat and ScotEduBlogs, google docs and delicious links in RSS feeds, the last has led me to remove mine as it seemed to annoy most folk. If you are disappointed you can always Add me to your network.
Now I am looking forward toTeachMeet Perth which also has the CfE badge.
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Sunday 24 January 2010 at 12:14 am
I've just organised (in a loose sense) an iPod touch pilot at Glencairn Primary School. At the North Lanarkshire ICT & Technical Services Centre we have an an ICT Box Scheme - Hi-Tech Kit on Short Term Loan and had originally got 22 iPod touches as part of the scheme. Although schools regularly borrow the other kit on the page no one had asked for the touches, so we decide to do a slightly more formal pilot and asked for classes to volunteer. We wanted a primary class with ≤ 20 pupils so that the children could feel some sort of ownership for the devices. We had a few volunteers and drew Glencairn out of the hat. The pilot will run from now until Summer.
Last week I spent a couple of days trying to choose some apps, and ended up with 50 odd and a pile of podcasts. Here are the apps: 3D Brain, Angle, Art Envi, Basic Math, Brain Toot Lite, Brain Tuner, Brain Tutor, Bump, CM_, ColorTalk Free,Comic Touch Lite, CountriesLE, Dictionary, Documents, EU, EuropeanCapitals, EuroTalk, FlagsWorld, Flickr, FlingFree, FlipBook Lite, Fliq Notes, French LITE, Google Earth, HistoryMaps, Hubble, iBearFlagsEU, Icon Memos, iSpy, iTalk Lite, iThesaurus, Kaloki Free, Martian, MATHO, Maths, miTables Lite, Muscle Head and Neck, NASA, Newbie Lt, Pix Remix Lt, PopMath Lite, Quick Graph, SculptMaster D FREE, SimpleDraw, Skeleton Head and Neck, Sketch Pad, Sketchmania, Slideshow, Stars, TCT Lite, TimesTables Free, touchPhysics Lite, UpThere, Whiteboard & Wikipanion. I just copied the file names from the finder and remove the file extension and version numbers so the names may not be exactly the same as the app names.
The podcasts:
The ipods all sync onto one mac and the idea is that we will not add any more apps and the children will not be able to update the ipods, they will be able to transfer images to classroom computers. I was surprised that this allows you to buy apps and add them to all of the ipods.
On Friday I visited the school and handed over the touches to the pupils. I was surprised at how many of them had touches at home, over half a dozen out of 19. We went through some stuff to introduce the children to the the basics. I used a document camera to project one touch to the class smartboard and that seemed to work fine. After we let the pupils explore the ipods and play with a couple of games we introduced some apps. We typed a sentence into the notes app and figured out how to copy and paste. Next we checked out the Calculator and Dictionaries. Then we created Martians with the Make a Martian app and use Bump to share them between phones.
The classroom has an airport base station (one of the older grey ones) and I was please at how quickly the children could exchange images using bump over wifi. I hope this can become the basis for some collaborative work, groups collecting images or screenshots annotating them with Comic Touch Lite and bumping them. eventually they may be able to use some sort of slideshow app to put the images together.
The possibilities for using the touches seem endless and we explained to the children that they were more likely to see how to use the touches to help their learning as we were.
The hour and a bit I had in the class went by far to quickly and i feel a wee bit of jealousy for Ms Moonie.
We have started a blog Glencairn iPod for the class to report their adventures and assess the devices and I'll have to go back in a couple of weeks to explain how that will work (that is my excuse anyway).
Thursday 21 January 2010 at 11:28 pm
SconicPics is an iPhone/ipod touch application that allows you to create custom slideshow movies. The movies are made from still photos which you can add from the photo library or take with the iPhone's camera. You can then narrate a voice over and create and enhanced m4v video with chapters.
In this example I've just used some pictures from classrooms I've been teaching in recently. It only took a few minutes to create and I am sure taking a little more time would have produced a more professional result and few plosives. I exported the 4v to reduce the size which removed the chapters too.
This looks like it could be a useful app in a classroom equipped with iphones or iPod touches. With touches pupils could use images downloaded from webpages or screenshots.
Wednesday 13 January 2010 at 08:59 am
A couple of days ago I had to cancel my intended trip to BETT. I've not been since the famous Glasgow Jumbo junket, as the papers called it, when to celebrate the new city wide network glasgow flew (not in jumbos as it happens) its ICT coordinators down to BETT. Needless to say I do not regard BETT as a junket, but an cpd opportunity. The CPD quotient of conferences and trade shows, has to my mind, increase a lot over the last few years, mainly due to TeachMeet and other self organised meetings of partitioners. I think you gain more for a coffee with an enthusiastic teacher than many a seminar.
I had hoped to do a little bit of evangelising for EDUtalk at BETT and join in TeachMeet Takeover to do so. Unfortunately I can't do that.
I mailed Tom Barret to let him know that I would not be speaking and he offered me the opportunity to gust blog on his site. This is a really generous offer give the size of Tom's network and following. In the unlikely event that you have not read Tom's blog I suggest that you head over there as soon as possible. Tom produces a stream of detailed posts of how he introduces new tech and ideas to his primary classroom.
Anyway I blogged EDUtalk at BETT 2010 on Tom's blog on Monday and put out an EDUtalk phlog today EDUtalk365 #13 - EDUtalk @BETT calling for contributions to our 'open mic' podcast over the next couple of days. I look forward to hearing some interesting audio. If your are going to BETT please pick up your phone.
Sunday 03 January 2010 at 02:31 am
I usually (well for the past 3 years) do an end of year post reviewing the year. This year I have been looking back over the last 10 years of using technology in education. I spent the first 9 of those years at Sandaig Primary in Glasgow.
At the start of this decade I had only been using computers in the classroom for 5 years. Most of my ict interests centred round HyperCard. We had as far as remember 3-4 apple macs in school, a couple of LCs a LC 475 and a color classic (the HT's). My interest in HyperCard had lead me to the HyperCard mailing list which was the first example of online sharing of information I became involved in. I was lucky the HC list was a very friendly place for all levels of user.
Making worksheets, due to my appalling handwriting and spelling along with the instant facination with HyperCard were the reasons I bough my first computer in the mid nineties.
2000
By 2000 I had explored using HyperCard to create a few applications for teaching and learning, including maths worksheet maker and a logo type application where the pupils steered a robot round a maze they had designed. Unfortunately I was not aware of all the work in Scottish education already done with HC and mostly ploughed my own furrow. At this time I was mostly interested in producing games and quizzes for pupils rather than encouraging them to produce their own material . We did however make an interactive HyperCard tour of the school in 1998:
The pupils taking photos with our QuickTake camera and adding them to the HyperCard stack along with text.I remember being really excited with the QuickTake and its 640 x 480 pixel photos!
2001
By 2001 HyperCard lead me to try to sell shareware and learn a bit of html: LittleFish Software (courtesy of web.archive.org 2001) I never did make much money but I had a lot of fun and though a lot about pupils using computers.
I also had learnt that the best way to teach children how to use computers was often to teach one or two and let them cascade to the rest of the class.
I had also started teaching primary 6 to use Flash: example of bats we had a page on AOL where children's work was displayed (2m limit) very few of the children had access to the web at home but it seemed like a good idea to share some work. I had not discovered blogging but had made some simple SuperCard projects that the pupils used to produce webpages mixing pictures and photos for example: weetom@Sandaig
2002
In 2002 I was lucky enough to join the Masterclass project. This was run by LTS and tool 600 teachers from across Scotland gave them laptops and a week residential training in ICT. There was further support online and funding via the local authorities.
Masterclass turned out to be one the the best things I've ever done CPD wise, not so much from the content of the courses (though there was nothing wrong with them) but the chance to meet and network with teachers making links that have lasted. In addition to the laptop LTS distributed funds to Local Authorities, Glasgow gave me a Digital video Camera and, more importantly, some training. I was still using the camera with pupils when I left Sandaig. We were also allowed to bid for funds from the local masterClass pot, I got some to cover a video project and bought an iBook which again did a power of work over the years. Later on I also got a IP video conferencing unit which allowed us to video conference with local schools and our Dutch Partner school in Holland.
2002 marked my entry into the blogosphere first with pitas and then pivot: Bad Poet On the pitas blog I mention NetNewsWire lite, so I must have been reading RSS by then. I also made an attempt at making my own blog software a combination of SuperCard on the desktop and flash on the web, screenshot so i must have been quite excited about blogging.
2003
In 2003 (or 4 memory is not to good) I (or rather my pupils ) made their first stop motion animation (with the masterclass video camera): On The Beach, I love the warning i wrote then: On The Beach 320x240 3.2MB you need Broadband or a lot of patience for this one.
We continued using Flash in the classroom and over the years with after school clubs.
I am still convinced that children working together with simple (stop motion) or complex (Flash) tools is a valuable activity, not just for the fun and end result but more importantly for the communal problems solving.
2003 also marked my only foray into the world of paid for flash development, I created a cloze procedure creation and quiz system for Lanoweb which is still on the web at LanguagePlanet.Net.
2004
2004 was the year we started blogging at Sandaig Otters, I'd been using blogging tools myself since 2002 and at the start of 2004 I though it might be an idea to try out blogging without out much of a plan Sandaig Otters » Welcome to our weblog:
A weblog can be all sorts of things, this one is going to start as a diary and link list by staff and pupils of Sandaig Primary. We will find out what to put on it as we go along.
Looking back at the
first few months on the blog I am struck by the small size and lack of images (due to bandwidth concerns) and by the fact by the time I finished at Sandaig we were still
finding out what to put on it as we go along.
2004 was also the year we started podcasting I just covered that in my previous post: TeachMeet Mobile - Classroom Podcasting, I also posted my first photos to flickr which involved one of our first Video conferences in class.
By halfway though the decade I think we had come a long way, from making worksheets and drill and practise application in isolation to being part of a community, and having pupils publish digital media straight to the web, these two themes developed exponentially in the rest of the decade which I'll cover in the next post.
