Thunder

I have spent the last couple of days leading cpd on the use of blogs and podcasting. My audience consisted of West Midlands ICT Consultants and members of the ICT team in Shropshire. All delegates set up an ethinkblog, links to these can be found on my sidebar in the ‘Consultants Blogs’ link category.

The morning of the session was used to introduce the wordpress blog and its functionality to the delegates, I will get around to putting some notes together to explain exactly what we did over the Summer break.

After lunch (see photos) which was at the local Abbey, we returned to a hot ICT room to continue the training.

To start the afternoon off we looked at Flickr and Del.icio.us, both technologies were well received and delegates set up accounts for future use. My flickr page can be accessed here and my del.icio.us page here, with my network here(that contains links to the other consultants del.icio.us accounts).

The rest of the afternoon was set aside to producing enhanced podcasts using Garageband on the ibooks, I am still looking for an equivalent piece of software for producing enhanced podcasts on the pc. I have found Podcaster by Kudlian Software - that appears to work on the pc but there doesn’t appear to be a pc download!

The podcasts can be heard on the various delegates blogs, here is an example. After publishing their podcasts we looked at subscribing to the podcasts with iTunes, and also investigated finding podcasts on iTunes. To complete the circle I demonstrated the use of Bloglines and Newsgator as examples of RSS aggregators.

Everyone agreed that there is great potential for these technologies in the classroom, both for teacher and student use. Hopefully we will try and produce a sample teaching unit or two that are based around these technologies. If anyone is interested in assisting with their production then leave a comment below and I will get in touch. I would also be keen to hear what the delegates thought about their days experience and what they plan to do next.

Last year I was working in a school where pace in the lesson was an issue, so we thoughty getting a timer that could be projected onto the whiteboad and then play an alarm when the time was up. We both hunted around and couldnt find anything free, there was a nice flash timer within SMART notebook but that was no good as they school didn’t have any SMARTboards.

At last months subject leader update in Shropshire John Holmes from Rhyn Park school mentioned ‘Cool Timer‘ which was a free countdown timer that he had used to keep the pace in his lessons.

It has taken me to this morning to download it and try it myself, having done so I would recommend it to everyone who would like to keep track on the various actvities that are going on in their lessons.

Where I live we regularly use electricity during storms so we clamber for the candles, having a young son this isn’t the safest thing to be doing.  Tonight I was interested to find a free download for my ibook to convert the screen into a reading lamp…

Lamp Light is a very simple app based on a simple idea - utilizing the power of your laptop (powerbook, ibook) display to emit bright reading light. Created during an electrical storm and blackout, the app was used to shed some light on a book that could hardly be read in the dim light of a normal laptop display. It’s simple - a screen displays pure white light, and you can choose your settings from battery saving low, medium to high. It’s also useful when traveling on long plane flights - use Lamp Light instead of the overhead light so as not to disturb all the passengers around you trying to sleep - and other low light conditions.

I am about to download it and give it a try, I will let you know how effective it is the next time I have a power cut.

I have just read an article in TES online entitled ‘Look what’s happened to mobiles phones and broadband‘ by George Cole, in the article he says:

A shame then, that most schools still see mobile phones as a threat rather than as an opportunity for extending the use of ICT. I know there are management and security issues, as well as questions about who pays for using many of the features. But it’s sad that a personal computer which many students have in their pockets is being banned rather than used as a useful ICT tool in the classroom.

We need to keep opening headteachers eyes to the power of the mobile phone, it has been great over the last few weeks to be working in two schools in Shropshire (Oldbury Wells and Sir John Talbot’s) where the headteachers have supported my use of mobile phones in the lessons I have been teaching. It would be great if organisations like Becta could note the power of the mobile phone and publicise case studies showing their positive impact on learning, we also need unions like NASUWT to stop stating that we should ban them (see my earlier posting).

While meeting with the Geography Advisor for the LA this morning he pointed me towards this website ‘Geography at the movies‘.  The website contains a variety of movies made by teachers and/or students for geography which you can download for free, may favourite so far is based on the M&S advert (39Mb).

Today I took my podcasting roadshow to Sir John Talbot’s school in Whitchurch Shropshire, this is my local secondary school.

It was the year 6 induction day and the headteacher had asked me to get a group of 20 mixed year group students to record the events of the day. Prior to the day, just like at OWS, I emailed the students with a link to their blog and asked them to comment on the first six posts. Unfortunately not many of the students participated in this activity, this lead to me having to spend time going through the questions with them to assess what they knew already. The applications I had asked them to look at where all new to them - so today was going to be a big, but enjoyable, learning curve for them.

So after getting their brief and planning the questions they wanted to ask the year 6 students off they went with ibooks, mobile phones, mp3 recorders and digital cameras in hand to record their discussions.

The students were given a brief introduction to Garageband, iPhoto and iTunes to enable them to produce their enhanced podcasts. All photos taken throughout the day were uploaded to the schools Flickr account, they even caught me doing some work - I think I should frame it!

The students were really motivated and engaged with using the ibooks and ICT being more than spreadsheets and databases. All the teachers that popped their head in during the day were impressed with the work ethic and the buzz that was going around the room. It was amazing to see how much they produced. You can read their evaluations of the day here, at present there is only a couple but they have all agreed to add theirs comments tomorrow.
Please check out their blog and leave them some comments.

It was great to see the students so engaged in their work, there really is great potential in developing this kind of experience for our students. I will have to put some time aside during this Summer break to produce a unit of work for KS3 ICT lessons based around these collaborative and social technologies.

Today I ran a workshop as part of an RE conference at Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth. I had 4 sixth form students and 2 year 9 students, that had worked with me a couple of weeks ago.

Our role was to blog and podcast (using Garageband, iphoto and itunes) the events in the morning and to record and publish the question time event in the afternoon.

The blog can be found here - it isn’t complete as I am waiting for the information that the ethics group completed so I can upload it. Photos taken during the morning, mainly of the food group for some bizarre reason can be viewed on their flickr page, unfortunatley we ran out of space on the free account so I will need to upload the outstanding photos in August (I hope I remember). The websites that formed the basis of the ethics research can be found on their del.icio.us page tagged by ethics.

The question time mp3 is 58Mb at present so I will try and splice it up over the next few days and then upload it to the blog.

The year 9 students were stars, and commented that they wished their ICT lessons were more like this and not just using Office applications!

Tomorrow I am off to SJT to set up a blog and do some podcasting with a mixed age group of pupils.

I have been subscribing to Bill MacKenty’s blog for a while now, initially for his writings about the use of Games in Education. Today he had a post stating:

Part of my new job at Hunter College High School is to create and run staff technology professional development. Because I like to share stuff, here’s a link with all the materials I’ve created. Lots of movies, PDF guides and the like.

Take a look and take the files you are interested in. It would be nice if we could put all of our ‘HowTo’ guides in a central place for all to benefit from, maybe this is a Summer job for me. If anyone has any guides/movies that they would like to share either send me a link to them or email them over.

Several people have suggested that we shouldn’t be using the term web2.0 to describe the recent influx of web applications.  This being the case I was wondering what we should call them, I am keen to hear peoples thoughts…

Collaborative applications
Social applications
Social & collaborative applications

My Flickr experience increased today, while setting up my new tablet pc I was installing the Flickr uploaded and saw a link to Shozu. Shozu is an application for your mobile phone that allows you to upload directly from the phone to your Flickr account. The software doesn’t work on all phones, but I was happy to see it works on my Sony Ericsson W800i.

After downloading the software onto my phone and fiddling with the settings, following very detailed instructions on the website, I took a photo of Dale and sent it. It worked a treat as you can see from the photo.