Thunder

It is now possible to share games produced using Mission Maker with people who have not got the software, all you need to do is download the player from http://www.immersiveeducation.com/missionmaker/player/ - Let the games commence

I have been trying to find an efficient way to export my calendar from Entourage so that people can view where I am (most of the time).  I think I have now found the solution Spanning Sync (http://www.spanningsync.com/).  This application will synchronise iCal (which I automatically sync with Entourage) with Google Calendar, I have then got a link on my blog to my Google calendar.  At the moment it all appears to be working well, has anyone else got any neat solutions for exporting a calendar from Entourage?

Shropshire LA are just starting on the procurement process for their Learning Platform for September 2007 onwards, as part of the process to get opinions and consult with as many people as possible Keith has set up a blog - if you are using a learning platform in your school or educational establishment at present please leave a comment on the blog.

Cheers.

Being a very lucky boy, great dad and super husband I was lucky enough that my family bought me (at great distress) a Nintendo Wii for my birthday last week. What a great bit of kit the Wii is, for playing ‘proper’ games I still prefer my XBox 360 but what fun playing on the Wii is, and Jack my 3 year old can even have a go. The Wii has also awoken Steph’s competitive side and we are having so much fun.

Anyway to the point of my post, tennis is probably our favourite game - and I have lots of photos of Steph playing (give me an email if you want to see one). While playing tennis we have to move all the furniture back to allow us plenty of space. Unfortunately there isn’t much skill to my game I just whack it and hope it stays in, this being the case I decided to do some research to see if anyone can help me out. There are loads of websites out there but this has got to be my favourite - How to win Wii Tennis (at any cost)

If anyone knows of any good sites that provide useful tips for getting my ball to go back straight over the net and not cross court all the time please leave it in the comment section below Thanks

I have been working with Lea and Ollie at Thomas Adams school in Wem today, they are both geography teachers.

The purpose of the afternoon was to start to produce year 11 revision podcasts, here are there first attempts.

Tectonics.m4a and Settlements.m4a (needs iTunes or Quicktime to play)

There was lots of discussion about the following:

• Length of the podcast - how long should a podcast be, what the guys thought would be a 2 minute podcast rapidly became 4 minutes. At first they were thinking about 10 minute episodes, but in the end we believed that would be too long and we should go for short sharp shows.
• Speed of voice - a couple of times Ollie got into full stride and was rattling through his notes, at some points they speech might have been too fast. We wondered what the students would do with the podcast, if they were going to take notes then we really would need to speak at a slow pace so they could keep up.
• Images - how many images should be used? Should the track have no images at points? We didn’t really come to a consensus on this, I personally like there to be lots of images to try and keep up the pace of the show.
• Hyperlinks - it is worth adding hyperlinks from the enhanced podcast to point to written notes to support the audio. We felt that this would be the next step in out journey, for now we would just put up the podcast.
• Student podcasts - after certain topics of work this year they will get students to produce a podcast as an assessment activity - these podcasts could start to form a set of revision notes for other students.

It would be nice to hear other peoples thoughts on the discussion points above. If you have time it would be great if you could leave a note about their podcasts on their Geograhy blog at http://adamsgeog.ethink.org.uk

UPDATE: Lea has now reproduced his Tectonics podcast and has uploaded it to his blog (http://adamsgeog.ethink.org.uk) - I think he has a talent for it, what do you reckon?