Thunder

THE SEARCH IS ON……..
Pupils across the country are being encouraged to try their hand at journalism thanks to an innovative online tool, Making The News, where they can enter national competition and win some fantastic prizes.

Making The News, created and hosted by the Regional Broadband Consortia, allows pupils to research, write and publish news reports, interviews, articles and flash-blogs online.  With advice and tools to create fully designed “newspapers” and tips on writing styles, Making The News encourages creativity, communication and literacy skills.

For the second year running, the RBCs have launched ‘The Making The News National Competition’. The competition aims to showcase the best budding journalists in schools throughout the UK by giving pupils the chance to write their own news material based around ten categories. The categories range from, Best Local News Story and Best Field Trip to Best Personal Story and Best Overseas Report.

Schools can register now online (http://mtncomp.e2bn.net) and enter their news stories from the 1st December to the 16th December 2006 via the MTN competition website.

Last year I was chatting to Karl Royle from Wolverhampton University about gaming and he mentioned a project he was involved in ‘e-games league‘.  After chatting to a couple of local headteachers they agreed to pilot the scheme this year with students in year 10.

Last week I was able to get in to Thomas Adams school to have a look at an e-games lesson, the students were motivated and engaged in their ICT activities.  At the end of the lesson they played Fantastic Four on the xbox against each other.  More information can be found on the e-games blog on the ‘what is it?‘ page.
After chatting to the teacher after the lesson we decided to get the students to set up their own blogs to record their work as they progress through the course.  If you have a spare couple of minutes could you visit on the the clan blogs and leave a comment on their logo:

• Die Hard Horse Lovers
• Game Over
• Hellz Angels
• J2R
• Mestevious2
• Spurs

When I want to perform a basic calculation I tend to spark up Excel and type it into one of the cells, this might become a thing of the past thanks to a post on Lifehacker.

You can use Firefox 2’s suggest-as-you type Google search box as an instant calculator. Simply type your mathematical formula into the search box and you’ll get your answer even before you hit the equals sign.

Having successfully installed Bootcamp onto my mac, I have now installed GameMaker and MissionMaker and they are working well.  Now I can get rid of my laptop.  There appears to be no issues at present with this installation but I will keep you informed if anything untoward happens.

When I logged into my Writely account today I was surprised to see that it has now been combined with Google Spreadsheets to be called ‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets‘.  So what does this mean for Writely?

• It is now easier to access both your spreadsheets and your documents
• Collaborators can now invite new collaborators
• You can invite people to just view but not edit
• The layout of the actual toolbars etc has changed, it seems a little less clunky now.

So what do you think, is Google Docs and improvement on Writely?

Gareth Pimley has just started a blog for Primary D&T teachers, Gareth is an exceptional practitioner so his blog should be very informative.

Via Lifehacker I came across a post on the Chief Happiness Officers blog that looks at 10 seriously cool workplaces, at the beginning of his post he states:

Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one.

Isn’t this equally true of schools, here are a couple of typical ICT classrooms:

These rooms are hardly creative environments, I hope when the BSF programme comes to Shropshire we will be able to take account of the creative workplaces mentioned in the previous article and would be keen to see any schools who have produced creative, colourful, organic and playful environments for their pupils.

How cool would it be to have a wall like this, one that you can write on:

All the photos from his post can be found on flickr.

Unfortunately two of my favourite pieces of software, Mission Maker and Gamemaker, don’t run on a Mac so I spoke to my friends at Apple and they suggested using Parallels.  Early this week I downloaded it and on my second attempt managed to get it working, what a weird sight that was seeing Windows XP running within Mac OS X.  Using my 15 day trial I installed Gamemaker and it appeared to be working well until I tried to run the game and I hit an error, it appears that Parallels runs everything as native to Intel/Windows EXCEPT the graphic sub-system, which is emulated.

So now that Parallels has failed :(  and I was really looking forward to it working so I didn’t have to use reboot to run Windows, it looks like I am going to give Bootcamp a go.  I will give it a go this week and let you now what happens (fingers crossed).

Tony Karrer has posted ‘Top Ten Reasons to Blog and Top Ten Reasons Not to Blog‘ - they are lighthearted and amusing, does anyone have any other reasons..

To Blog:

Because Ewan said I should (Steve)Not to Blog:

Because Dale said I should, and I don’t like Dale to be right (Steve)

I think it could be quite interesting to get some of our students to come up with reasons to blog or not to blog, maybe if they can explain to the teachers who don’t read/write blogs why they could offer a huge benefit to learning more teachers might use them.

My wife just received this email from a lady she works with:

Dear All

I have a favour to ask you all.

My little boy attends Trench Tots Nursery and they have been asked to collect plastic screw top lids, this is for a local girl aged 7 who has been diagnosed with cancer and she needs treatment in America.  A local Charity has agreed to pay for the trip if she can collect 1 Million lids. Local Schools and Shops are also collecting and I thought that I would ask you all to do the same, I will put a box on my desk for collecting.

Many thanks

If any of my readers would be able to help this little girl out please send your lids to the nursery:

Trench Tots Nursery

c/o The Sutherland School

Gibbons Road Trench Telford

Shropshire TF2 7JR