About a month ago I wrote about the beginnings of OpenSourceCPD at TeachMeetPerth. Since the the site has moved to a suitable host and we have started making some links with CPDFind. There are now several very knowledgeable people listed on the Profiles page and more have shown interest in joining in the fun. I’ve added an Introduction to blogging course as an example and the beginnings of some general CPD Materials.
I’ve been enjoying setting up the wiki as there is quite a lot of cpd for me involved. PmWiki is proving interesting and flexible giving an opportunity to play with the tech as I figure out how to organise the site.
So the wiki is now awaiting more content. You can contribute by editing the wiki or if you are too busy by sending me material and I’ll add it and attribute. There is a Discussion section on the wiki for any sort of discussion of the project, or add a comment here or send me a mail.
For a blog that claims to be mostly what we are doing with ict in class I’ve not posted much about that recently. Things have be coming a bit thick and fast for reflection. This is just a wee note about some things that have been going on over the last couple of weeks.
One afternoon a week I take a bunch of children from or primary six classes to work on self esteem, emotional literacy and the like through practical activities. The most recent activity is drawing to a close. It this the children created short tunes with GarageBand, then designed covers for a cd. The covers were further edited with picnik. We then burned cds with all 12 tracks and published the mp3s and art on the website: Sandaig Primary Wiki Primary6Project. The children are in the middle of adding a bit of writing to the wiki to round up the project.
We have been using GarageBand around the school too. My musical ability has been taken to its limit just making a minute of loop music so I’ve roped in our peripatetic music teacher Martian Douglas who is working with groups of children on a Friday afternoon. At the moment they are just using the loops provided, but Martin is working on incorporating drumming and guitar played by the children. The music made so far can be heard on the Sandaig Jukebox.
On Wednesday afternoons I teach ‘the other’ primary six class to cover NCC time. This term I am teaching the Sound part of the glasgow Sound and light topic. I am using a modified topic created by Alisa Barr of nearby Mount Vernon Primary when the children work in groups on challenges to cover the learning outcomes. This has been quite challenging for me and i am not sure I spent enough time on preparing for group work, despite the fat I had attended a couple of cpd events by Alisa on just that. I’ve give the topic a slight web 2 spin as I present the challenges on the Sandaig Primary Wiki SoundAndLight. The first challenge we did as a class and published our findings as a mp3. The next section was on The Ear and the groups tried a variety of ways of reporting their findings. In the current challenge Sound Travels different groups have been set different tasks and seem to be widening there reporting methods (not published yet).
These two project have been my first step of using a wiki at school, at the moment the children need support for publishing but hopefully this will improve. Some of the publishing is a bit tricky, eg powerpoint to slideshare and then a recipe to put on wiki. I am using PmWiki which is not wysiwyg but seems to be working out well enough.
The topic was interrupted this week by health week which should have been a excellent chance to get the children blogging, but in reality they were to busy with activities, there is a wee movie in the works and hopefully it will be blogged next week.
In the midst of the Health week we had a visit from Johanna Hall from BBC Scotland, Johanna had commented on the Sandaig Otters’ blog about Radio Sandaig. She came in to give the children a chance to work on recording some content for the BBC (links when I know them). She also gave a masterclass on speaking and recording for the 12 children involved which I hope they will cascade to their classmates. This also gave me a bit of impetus to get the podcast flowing and we put out a special this week with another one nearly finished. My HT kindly gave me some time out of class to work on these before Johanna’s visit. Johanna took them away with her recording to work into an up and coming BBC production.
I am sure I’ve missed one or two things out, but that is probably quite enough for now.
The ScotEduBlogs site is dear to my heart. An opensource effort by teachers in Scotland to aggregate and redistribute the posting by Scottish educational blogger of all shapes, ages and sizes ScotEduBlogs has become an more than every day read for me.
To cut a long story short; ScotEduBlogs has now moved to its very own server which should lead to (and Robert will correct me if I am wrong) more stability, better updating etc, etc. The SQA and LTS logos now sit prettily on the ScotEduBlogs sidebar.
It might take a few days for ScotEduBlogs to settle into its new home, so if you notice anything strange let us know.
If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:
As there are more and more ScotEduBloggers ScotEduBlogs will become more and more useful as a learning tool, enabling you to get ideas that you might not pick up through your favourite feeds.
I want children learning together, I want them to be connected to others (audience, purpose, communication), and I want them to be delighted.
I also enjoy a kludge, but the children don’t need to worry about that bit.
These children were blogging a comic they had worked on together, obviously enjoying themselves, hopefully connecting to an audience.
Here are the rules:
Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about?and give your picture a short title.
Title your blog post ?Meme: Passion Quilt? and link back to this blog entry.
Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.
These are the slides I used at TeachMeetPerth Last week. You can see the images on a flickr set. The VoiceThread above is a work in progress, I’ll probably re record the audio with a quieter computer and a script.
I first got the idea for OpensourceCPD from teachmeet at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2007. Ollie Bray is widely quoted as saying that teachMeet was his best CPD experience. This had me thinking about Teachers as providers of CPD I also talked to Con Morris of LTS’s CPD Scotland team, he mentioned that reading my blog could be a cpd opportunity for someone!
My favourite learning experiences at conferences and inset have always been the ones presented by teachers. I include in this the more informal teachmeets and the social continuation in the pub or restaurant afterwards.
I’ve also been aware of the open source movement as a great deal of the software I use day to day is open source software, this blog, firefox, Vienna and many more. this got me wondering if this might be a useful model for distribution of cpd material by teachers, material that is not locked into a Local Authority, business or agency. Teachers as providers and consumers. The CPD material would be freely available and could be used by individuals or presented by a provide, the teachers supplying the material on the wiki could be providers/consultants. Of course because the material is freely available it can be supplied as CPD by anyone.
Free Redistribution: the softwarecpd materials can be freely given away or sold. (This was intended to expand sharing and use of the software on a legal basis.)
Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable. (Without source code, making changes or modifications can be impossible.) this might be a little more difficult, hopefully it will not mean that folk would be put off uploading a pdf which is hard to edit, but more the spirit that material shared here is for mashing up.
Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed. (To allow legal sharing and to permit new features or repairs.)
Technically, it is royalty free, share alike and may or may not allow commercial redistribution. Content can be either in the public domain or under an open license like one of the Creative Commons licenses.
but at this time I thought that Open Source CPD was a snappy title
So I have started a wiki OpenSourceCPD to support this idea. I hope it is going to be connected to CPDFind in some way. At the moment the site is sitting on a temporary server and I probably will not get a lot of work done until the spring break. Several scottish educational bloggers have added Profiles and there seem to be a far bit of approval at TeachMeetPerth.
The focus to start with will be Social Media or Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.
Nothing is set in stone (it is a wiki) but I’ve begun three main sections:
CPD Materials A basic outline of various social media tools that can be used in teaching.
Cpd Opportunities CPD courses for self study or to be used as a skeleton for leading cpd.
Profiles A list of practitioners that could lead such cpd (this could be on a paid or free, online or face2face basis).
If this idea appeals please get in touch, if you want a password to edit the wiki leave a comment or send me a mail.
If you have some material you want hosted on the wiki but have not the time or inclination to edit it get in touch and I’ll be happy to post it for you.
Yesterday evening I was in Perth courtesy of Krysia who kindly give me a lift to and from Glasgow through a fair amount of fog.
We were there for TeachMeet 08 North. T oget the idea of how good teachMeet is think how far you would go for some cpd on a Tuesday Night. The ScotsEduBlogoSphere had come from far and wide. None further than Ian Stuart of Isly High school who had set off at 8:30 am to get there.
As the event was set up the Sandaig macbook was pressed into service to run the flashmeeting which brought in an audience from further afield, I think I spotted Sinclair and Joe Dale in there. Flashmeeting is an amazing service, it is increadable that with a standard macbook and a wifif connection you can broadcast watch-able quality video and sound. The macbook was attached to Mr W’s snowball mic, I think it could get used to having such a great piece of kit attached to it. This meant that I could not tweet microblog the presentations which on a little refection was probably a blessing for my followers.
The meat of the event were the Seven minute micropresentations chosen as is becoming traditional by electronic fruit machine. The presentations were great, it always shocks me finding out how much I do not know about teaching with technology.
Ian Stuart kicked off telling us what’s been happening in Islay High School. I heard Ian at the SLF where I was amazed at the radical way the school is transforming teaching.
At teachmeet Ian focused more on the umpc technology the children are using, the power of these tiny devices is amazing. Small devices were a bit of theme at the meet, Asus minibooks, PSPs and other wee computers dotted the audience and dinner table.
I was lucky enough to be sitting with Bob Hill who leant me (or did I just borrow) his Eee PC with which I could watch the flashmeeting meaning Tess Watson‘s voice was in sterio until I found how to mute the sound.
These small pcs look like being the vanguard of a realistic one2one program. (and according to Robert Jones a possibility of getting Linux into schools). I would take a very long blog post to cover all of the ideas that came out of the 2 and a half hours of presentations. Hopefully the presenters will take a leaf from Nick Hood and blog their presentations, Nick’s is unusually in the comments to his teachMeet post. It is a great comment, (and one of the few where I’ve felt Snap shots has been useful rather than annoying) well worth following the links. I would be great if the presetator tweeted there posts @TeachMeetPerth which would provide a nice aggregation..
I talked about OpenSourceCPD more of which when I have more time at the weekend. for now I’ve put my comicLife slides, OpenSourceCPD on flickr. My TeachMeetPerth set is up too.
All in all another great teachMeet well up to the high standards set by previous events, all credit to Neil for organising, arranging and MCing.
Tomorrow after work I am of to TeachMeet 08 North curtsy of a lift from Krysia. Organised by Neil Winton and with a great line up of speakers I am really looking forward to the evening. Not often you can say that about cpd
By the looks of the wiki everything is in place, space, projectors and an enthusiastic bunch of web 2.0 teachers.
If you cannot get along to teachmeet David Noble has organised a Flash Meeting so you can get some of the fun in your browser as it happens. The Meeting for TeachMeet08 BETT went very well, it was easy to hear and see the presentations.
I hope to be spreading word about scotedublogs.org.uk again, this time by passing out wee flyers. I am also hoping my name comes up for 7 minutes of fame. The presenters at TeachMeet are chosen by electronic fruit machine and get 7 minutes to talk.
Last time I was up first, ran through my talk in 5 minutes but still managed to secure sponsorship for scotedublogs.org.uk. The results of this will hopefully be apparent soon as scotedublogs.org.uk will have its own host, making it even more powerful!
This time I hope to talk about OpenSourceCPD for the first time. More about that here after the event.
If you are going to TeachMeetPerth either in the flesh or in the Flash Meeting or just want to keep in the loop remember that you can follow teachmeetperth on twitter, teachmeetperth will tweet all the posts tagged teachmeetperth on technorati and hopefully provide a backchannel on the night for tweets @teachMeetPerth.
I am looking forward to meeting everyone in person or online
For the last couple of day and the next day or two I am posting on a blog for collaboration between Students in McClure Middle School and Sandaig: McClure – Sandaig. I am having a great time in Atlanta really enjoyed my visit to McClure yesterday.
Normal service here will be resumed later this week.
On Saturday I am going to go to the award ceremony and on the Friday and Monday I am going to visit Sammy McClure, Sr. Middle School. I am hoping to do some collaborative work between my class and the students there. I started a blog, McClure – Sandaig to support this, hopefully it will be an interesting read. We will try to post updates on the pupil activities and I hope to post during the trip so that my class can follow what I am doing. In case of connectivity problems I’ve made a sort of moblog too.
I had quite a lot of fun setting up the blog (and a related one, more of which if it works) and moblog in the early hours of Saturday. The moblog just pulls down photos from flickr, which is the easiest moblog app I’ve found. Of course flickr is blocked in school so the webpage downloads the photos to the Sandaig site if they are not there and shows them from there. I hope to adapt that idea for out forthcoming Dutch trip with primary 7 this May too.
I am also hoping to be able to update the map and use Flashmeeting to have a wee chat with my class at some point during the trip, time difference and holidays allowing. I thought briefly about using seesmic to talk to my class, but am not even sure if we can access it in school and it might open a can of worms. I think there might be a wee podcast too.
Of course this is not so much a plan as a wish list, but I’ll be trying my best to both enjoy meeting Carol for the first time, visiting a school in the USA and getting as much value for my own class as I can.
