Year: 2008

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Last week on Thursday I had a big day. I reached my half century, got an iPhone and had a job interview. I was very pleased with the phone, not particularly happy about hitting 50 and unsure about the interview until yesterday. It looks like I am going to be an ICT Development officer in North Lanarkshire.
I took a wee risk with the interview, I actually got the iPhone before my big day so the night before the interview I knocked together a quick imovie for a few stills as a self advertisement and put it on the iPhone, at the is there anything else you want to tell us bit I pulled out the phone and showed the video.


John @ Sandaig from John Johnston on Vimeo.

I don’t know if it helped or I got the job in spite of the movie, I’ll need to enquire.

The upshot is it looks as if my life will be changing quite a bit. It has not really sunk in yet, but I know I’ll miss Sandaig, staff and pupils and the school website, they have all been a big part of my life for the last 16 (or is it 17) years.

A couple of asides, vimeo quality seems better than youtube, and how amazing is twitter, when I heard about the job I tweeted and was overwhelmed by good wish tweets, thanks folks

I should probably also move and rename this blog, any ideas for a new name will be gratefully received.

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the sevens
I’ve got the the end of a quick first week back at school. The first time in a couple of years I’ve had a class to myself, year before last I was doing ICT and last year involved a lot of learning support and team teaching. I am also back in Primary Seven.

A shock to the system as all my mushroom boxes have vanished and I need a quick trip to Pound Land.

I am beginning to get the classroom they way I want, I have a projector and a big bit of white paper on the wall along with a gyro mouse and wireless keyboard. A networked xp laptop and non-networked mac mini are positioned beside the projector so that I can easily switch back and forth between platforms. So far I am missing the ability to draw quickly on the board but enjoying the shadow free screen.

The children have used ICT in the previous year a fair bit, mostly research, word-processing and powerpoint and I worked with them on the wiki for a Sound & Light project.

I always like the first week or two of term and other times when the timetable and curriculum is not so fixed in stone and decided to get the children introduced to online tools, cameras blogging etc.

We got the Photo -a-day How does our Garden go galler off the ground to start with.

Next we started with the Simpsons Movie site making avatars which, I hope, will be used throughout the year as signatures on blogs and wikis. We had to use a horrible amount of kluding to work around the fact that we do not seem to be able to download the files on the school pcs (unblocking popups not withstanding). This become a good exercise in lots of things: print screen, cropping in picture manager and exporting as jpgs, allowing me to harp on about files etc. I had to download the saved images at home to slap together the pic at the top.

The children had more cropping to do to get a nice wee head shot of their avatar too.

We worked on one of my favourite start of session lessons, Bio-Poems, these use a strong template and give the children a lot of fun, this year we blogged these with the Simpson head-shots on the Sandaig Poets blog which give everybody a chance to blog. If you have a minute please leave some one a comment.

Finally, have talked about adjectives and watch a couple of youtube downloads on the subject earlier in the week, we made a quick photo movie about Feelings today giving the children more practise with the cameras and their first use of iMovie, it was also a great way to end the week as non of them though they were working.

Next week we start with a trip to Ayr so fingers crossed for the weather.

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On Ewan’s Invitation I toddled along to Inspiration Session No. 4: The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen. This was the second ‘open’ session and quite a few of the regulars from ScotEduBlogs were there in addition to LTS staff.

Ewan has given a rundown, LTS Inspiration Sessions: Run your own, (archive link) on the purpose and content of these sessions over at connected, number 4 was on improving presentations. Ewan has gathered a pile of useful links on delicious tagged ltsinspirations4, Andrew Brown live blogged the session: Do your presentations suck? very effectively, and Tessa used it as an excuse to return to blogging after the summer.

This is the first post here for a while too, although I’ve been posting to posterous, tweeting and keeping my photostream uptodate.

The others have covered the meat of the session so I’ll just pick over some bones here (in no particular order and with little organisation).

As usual it was a lesson in itself to see Ewan present he is both well prepared and able to respond to the audience flexibly. He also kept things light with plenty of ‘jokes with a purpose‘ Having said that he was not following any of the simpler styles of presentation he discussed (pecha kucha and the 10-20-30 rule for example), most of his presentation, was video from the web, discussion and analysis.

The classroom at LTS was beautiful and great space for this sort of meeting. Unfortunately I could not find ant creative commons photos of the building or space on flickr although Ewan gave a quick but thorough overview of finding images and using them legally which is always good to hear.

Although I was familiar with most of the videos shown it is a very different experience watching with a group, without the distraction of, email, twitter, todo.txt or the fact that you have to make dinner. Face-to-face sessions like this are worth ten time the same amount of browser time, the presence of others sharing the space really helps concentration and other folks ideas spark off your own. Class teachers often miss this sort of experience of discussing things that are of interest and do not have to be acted upon immediately.

As a primary teacher I felt a fair bit of tension between the role of a presenter to adult audiences, Steve Jobs rehearsing his 2 hour stint 6 times, and my own efforts in class, speeding round Scran for pictures of Victorian toys in my 45 minute lunch hour and plastering them onto a powerpoint. Many of the ideas were applicable though, repetition (some of my wee guys need more than three times) keeping it short an too the point. Shared reading of text has more of a place in the primary classroom than more adult settings. One of my new sessions resolutions it to review my use of projector/whiteboard and Ewan and his audience has given me plenty to think about.

On the few occasions I’ve formally presented to adult audiences it has been talking about my own practise and I hope the passion and experience has let me overcome the hurdles of imposed format, poor graphics and instinctual rather than trained design. I’ve also usually been so nervous in preparing a talk I’ve distracted myself by using a different technology each time. Ewan challenged the group to end the session by working on one of there own presentations to be posted to slideshare for review. I skipped that part ending up in a huddle of ScotEdubloggers (Mr W reported a unrepeatable collective noun for teachers, I wonder what a group of edubloggers is?). A couple presentations I’ve given are here (voicethread) and here (enhanced podcast), the second proving my point about horrible dot mac urls at least. Both break a fair few rules of presentation but they worked for me I would like to have spent some time getting some feedback and criticism.

One of the subjects talked about in the huddle of ScotEdubloggers was TeachMeet08 @ The Scottish Learning Festival 2008 this is approaching fast, and some community organisation is needed, if you can lend a hand with organisation equipment, sponsorship of food and drink( or know a person who can) you should head over to the wiki.

Zz79882878

We also talked over glow, wordpress, exams etc. and transferred the conversation to the horseshoe to continue the informal CPD.

Ewan has provided an online kit for running your own inspiration session which unfortunately does not come with a Ewan. Thinking about the session yesterday I think the big takeaways were the importance of personality and preparation which to my mind are probably more important than the tools and design.

I should suggest that you get together with some colleagues, watch the videos and check out Ewan’s links and Andrew’s post I am only reluctant to do so because I realise that one of the key parts of that process would be the leader unless you can find a friendly huddle. Even alone the linked video, sites and tools will provide plenty of food ofr though.

I am still churning a lot of the ideas the session and informal follow up just in time for starting school next wee.

Many thanks to Ewan and LTS for inviting me to an inspiring session.

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I have been working on OpenSourceCPD a bit recently. Mostly working on the On-site Cpd Opportunities. Nearly everything is labelled first draft being work in progress but I guess that is the beauty of a wiki.

Yesterday I knocked out a rough version of the first of some guides to Online Tools. This covers the basic use of Picnik the online image editor. I used Picnik a couple of times with my class last session and was please with how easy it was for children to use. The course (or cpd opportunity) at OpenSourceCPD just goes over the basic use of Picnik and has a few ideas about using it in school. Very much a first draft at the moment, feedback is welcome in the comments or via email.

For the first time on the OpenSourceCPD site I’ve made use of a screencast. I’ve made a few of these before elsewhere and used the smartnote book recorder to make instructional videos for the children at school but this time I used an application new to me ScreenFlow.

ScreenFlow is a mac application that allows you to record your screen, audio from the mac and a mic (you can also record from an isight). It then allows you to edit the video and export to quicktime. The editing is very slick, you can auto highlight the main window, the mouse or zoom and pan the video. You can add other images, video and audio. I had a bit of trouble with my mic and recorded the audio over the original footage without too much bother. I am not completely happy with the result (and may redo it ) but that is more to do with me than screenflow, my previous efforts were much shorter, smaller and without a voice over. I think I was trying to go a little too quickly to make for good instruction.

As ever I’d be interested in feedback about OpensourceCPD and the screencast not only the content but the playback as it is a H.264 movie and nearly 30mb.

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Flowgram is a new web-based tool for giving online tours of sets of webpages or photos. I have hasd a quick play (click the widget to see my creation) and it looks like it could be a very useful tool in the classroom.

Once you have signed up and been accepted for the beta flowgram program you can create your own pretty easily. I just watched one of the flowgrams about flogram and tested it without really reading the manual. It is pretty simple to use although I could not get the create tool to load in Safari.

You add pages to a flowgram by adding a url or uploading a photo. Or you could import a flickr set or RSS feed to create a set of pages. Once you have collected your set of pages you can add audio recorded via your browser (flash based) notes and highlight text. I managed to do all without too much bother although it took me a while to get the highlight work. If you scroll a page during recording and then highlight something it will scroll to show the highlight in sync with the audio when playing back. I found that quite tricky to do and if you watch my flowgram above you will notice a few pauses while I scroll and highlight.

The most amazing thing about flowgram is that the pages viewed in flowgram are live the links etc work for the audience. I am not sure how flowgram deals with changes in the webpage perhaps they store local copies.

I think it might be a bit difficult for primary children to use for creating a tour of websites but they could certainly make a slideshow of photos or pictures without too much trouble. For teachers it could be used to give children instructions on using online tools (or for a set of screenshots) or for blogging sites to other teachers for professional development.

Flowgram could be used as an alternate presentation tool, and feels a little like voicethread, although users cannot audio comment. You can make your flowgrams private but I can’t see a way to turn off comments which would sometimes be handy for school use. another one t otest on the nexwork next term.

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posterous is a new blogging tool that takes simple to extremes. To post to posterous you just send an email to post@posterous.com from any email account, the mail is posted and you get a reply. At that point you can set up a posterous page/blog and then everything sent to posterous from the same email (you can add more) will go onto the posterous page. Mine is John’s posterous.

What is really clever is how posterous deals with content.

Text becomes, well text, and image is posted as you would expect, but so is a image url). A series of images are turned into a mimi gallery. Powerpoint is passed over to Scribd and presented on the posterous page with iPaper as are pdfs. If you print a pdf frpm Safari on a mac and mail it to posterous, the pdf is displated via scribd and the links on the page are live (example). Pasting an image, say a screenshot, into your email app puts it on the blog, as does pasting code from kwout: kwout example. I managed to create 10 posts of all sorts without any problems, on a mac you can even Drag and Drop to Posterous via a simple Automator workflow.
Youtube and other video service are embedded as are mp3s.

posterous is just out the wrappers, but the developers really seem on the ball

For education, I am thinking this is a really quick way to create a blog, a series of resources for learners (rss of course), a student portfolio etc. With 1 GB of space you could use it for podcasting much simpler than many other methods.

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Functionmachine tn
Function Machine, an old HC stack of mine
( a newer flash version)

They say that things in education go round in circles. I came late to teaching and later to ict. I got my first mac, a Performa 630, in 1995. Over the next few years I became a HyperCard fanatic spending many an hour creating stacks for use in the classroom. Many of these were drill and practise application, for practising tables, telling the time, cloze procedures etc.

After a while I became more interested in children creating with computers, podcasting, blogging, animation and digital video, I have played with them all. When I started blogging it seemed that most of my reading was pointing me away from drill applications towards creative projects.

Drill and practise applications became associated in my mind with worksheets, I used them but do not talk about them in the polite company.

I noticed some drill and practise popping its head above the parapet with the various games based learning especially the brain training type of application, but have not managed to get involved with this yet. This session I’ve been happy with Educationcity.com which provides a nice variety of colourful and attractive games for children linked to the 5-14 curriculum with reasonable record keeping. At first I was reluctant to use Education city, but once I learned how to target pupils with particular tasks I’ve used it every day with the children support in maths.

Lately I’ve seen a bit of twittering and blogging about tutpup which seems to be a new twist on an old song:

Tutpup

Tutpup consists of some pretty straightforward drill and practise maths and spelling exercises so far, although they seem to be interested in increasing the range of games.
What makes tutpup different is the fact that you play the games against other members of the community live. While playing they can see the progress of their opponent who is identified by a user name and a flag for their country, in my class this generated a lot of excitement. From a safety point of view tutpup is great, the help for parents and privacy policy are clear. Each child is identified by a colour-animal-number user name only, the site does not collect data from the children, teachers and parents need an email address and to give permission to the children. The setup for a class is slick and simple, teachers set a class code which pupils use to join a class. There is even some simple recording of scores.

I do not know who is behind tutpup, but Ewan has been advising the team on its development, given his knowledge of the educational use of social media It will be interesting to watch the site move on from beta. Tutpup seem to have the usual Web 2 speed of response to feedback, I’d an email within minutes of sending feedback asking for times to be added to the recording of pupil scores to allow me to see who is using tutpup at home.

I do not suppose I’ll use tutpup much before the end of term, sports and activity days are filling up the calendar but I look forward to using it next session and seeing if it can give some legs to good old drill and practise.

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I’ve run a couple of short term collaborative poetry blogs this session. The first was part of the The Sandaig McClure Connection: Solutions – A poetry conversation. I played around a bit with the blog template so that comments became part of the poem. Comments were displayed inline and the link to add a comment became ‘add line’. The comment form was simplified by removing the email and url fields. An entry would look like this (slightly reduced):

screenshot

At the time I was reasonably pleased with this solution although the whole page layout started to look a bit odd as the poems began varying in length.

Last week we were working on the On the street where you live – An International Poetry Project I kept the blog in a fairly straightforward shape, except for the addition of the (stars) and (wishes) to the emoticons (that works in most of the Sandaig blogs) to help the children assess each other work. The idea with this blog was that the children would use 2 stars and a wish to offer feedback to the children on the other side of the atlantic. (In the event the US students didn’t get to commenting on our work, which might have been due to communication failures between myself and the us organisers).

The problem with using a traditional blog layout became apparent as the number of posts grew very quickly, pushing poem off the front page (which I increased to 30 poems/posts). With hindsight it might have been better to only have the last poem on the blog front-page with a list of all the poems on the side or scattered around. Or maybe no poems just boxes with titles which would open entries in a lighbox/thickbox style when clicked?

With the increase in the number of primary school blogs I’ve noticed a big drop in the comments on on main blog, perhaps due to that blog becoming routine and neglected to some extent. I’ve also not found the time to get the children reading and commenting on other blogs something else I hope to remedy next session.

So I hope to be doing more of these sort of arranged commenting blogs in the future, where there is a fairly intense burst of activity on the blog over a short period. I think this calls for a different sort of organisation and layout, I am just not sure what yet.

Pivot which we use for blogging here is a lot easier for an amateur to mess about with layout and organisation than some of the more popular blogs, its simple template tags allow you to create templates for posts, pages etc with a wee bit of html and css knowledge.
I’ve not seen any other school blogs that have altered the shape of a blog to suit purpose in this way and I’d be interested in any ideas for making these sort of blogs more accessible, interesting and attractive, if you have ideas and examples please let me know.

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Islay high School

Yesterday I went to the Islay ICT: ICT Open Day

Islay High School is one of the Schools of Ambition and is well know for its innovative changes to school organisation and use of ict.

I had a great day from the start. The boat trip from Kennacraig in the company of Moira my HT, Krysia and Doug was a relaxing way to start a cpd event, I even spotted a Porpoise rising to breathe.

Once we got to school we had a visit to the music room where the children were demoing music software, with Ewan in attendance, then a chat with Ian about the umpcs which merged into lunch.

central to the use of the umpcs at Islay is oneNote which Ian demoed, it is quite hard to describe it briefly, it accepts hand written (on the umpc’s touchscreen) notes, typed text, records audio and video through mic and webcam and allows you to tag, store , search and share all of this. Teacher’s notes and presentations can easily be shared to pupils. The pupils at Islay all have their own umpc which travels home with them.

After lunch we visited the English department where the new S2s were creating a video for the soon to be S1s.
The children were working in groups, had story boarded and planed their movies on the umpcs or bits of paper and were filming and editing. We had a chance to chat to the pupils. Their skill with the umpcs was obvious and I was impressed with the machines (and the pupils) video editing capabilities. Some of the children had come to the high school with experience of iMovie and this seemed to transfer easily to movieMaker.

Chatting to the children about their umpcs was interesting, they obviously enjoyed using them, but the kit was ‘normal’ to them not something special. The umpcs seemed robust and in my opinion would be a better investment than the various ‘mini pcs’ such as the eeePc that are getting a lot of attention for educators at the moment.

bowmore primary

We popped out to the back of the school to take in the amazing view and then visited the award winning Bowmore Primary School. The primary received BT Scotland’s ICT Learning Award for the school?s under-five unit uses a Promethean Interactive Whiteboard. We were a bit late to see the children in action but saw some great viedo, filmed by the four year olds, of the whiteboards in action. We also had a good look around the school with the HT, picking up a good many ideas to take back to Sandaig, not least there eco greenhouse.

Then it was back to the high School for a tour of the tech and design department before heading for a quick pint and the 6:00pm boat.

As usual with a trip to an exciting school there was far too many interesting things going on to remember them all, these stand out at the moment:

  • A culture of change staff see themselves as learners
  • pupils working together according to their needs and interests, rather than on more age based progression
  • lots of vocational opportunities
  • ICT as a tool rather than a end it its self. Some children prefer paper for some tasks

UmpcassIdeas I hope to use:

  • Pupil recorded assessment on umpcs could be replicated with laptop.webcam/ macbook/isight
  • More free use of whiteboard, this happens in our infant department, but my p6s are not as slick with the tools as the wee ones
  • The eco greenhouse and wellie flower pots!
  • ict and technology needs to be transparent, pupils must be able to use it without thinking, more free use

There was probably many more things that I could mention, but Islay High Open Day was a great event, the chance to spend time observing and talking about all sort of things with the staff there and at Bowmore primary along with a extended and gentle journey giving time for reflection and chatting was a great cpd opportunity. Many thanks to Ian and Islay for inviting us