Thunder

In Shropshire YouTube is blocked, but there are lots of really useful videos hiding away.  The geography advisor asked if there was anyway he could show a video from YouTube on a course, after a bit of searching and playing around I found vixy.net.  All he now needs to do is while at home locate the video he wants to use, paste the url into vixy, choose the format he would like the video in and then wait a couple of minutes and download the file to his pc.  Lots of output file formats are available, avi, mov, mp4, 3gp and mp3.

The video he was after was Ultra Records: “Proper Education” - a very cool video.

Last night I attended a meeting of the Shropshire branch of UKITA at Radbrook College, it was a very interesting and informative meeting.  I was invited to take part in a discussion about what skills these companies would want from our IT students, here is a list of points they made:

• common sense, not sure how we would teach this??
• have a desire to find things out, to want to know how to do things.
• want to learn for themselves not because we want them to learn.
• act as a ‘professional’.
• have a thirst for knowledge.
• a knowledge of the IT industry
• vendor qualifications are not important

The next step is to set up a sub group that I will work with to develop a mutually beneficial relationship.

Last week the year 5 & 6 students from Barrow CE Primary School had use of my set of ibooks, they produced comics about the planets, please visit their blog and leave comments on their work.  This morning I have popped in to say hello and to congratulate them on their work.

I have just demonstrated how to produce a podcast in Garageband so they can produce an evaluation of last weeks activities. Their first attempt can be downloaded from here.

Just demonstrating how to blog to a really interested group of people:)

Hi all, this coming Friday I am speaking to members of NAMA (National Association of Mathematics Advisors) about the joys of flickr, podcasting, wikis, del.icio.us and blogs.  I would be grateful if anyone could send me some good examples of the use of these technologies in mathematics, I have the excellent maths in motion podcasts and some student blogs that focus on maths but anything would be good.

Cheers

My ibook’s have gone mobile and have landed at Barrow CE Primary school, the pupils are busy playing around with Comic Life.  You can check out pupils progress on the school blog.

Last night I read with sadness that BBC Jam is being suspended as of 20th March. This is a real shame as these innovative, high quality resources are available freely to teachers, students and parents. One of the great things about Jam is that it is aimed at the learner not the teacher, but could easily be incorporated into teacher activities. As a student you could use these resources to support the learning you were doing at school.

Update: Check out Ewan’s post

It’s the final month of Microsoft’s collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the ninemillion.org campaign.

You can support the Click4theCause campaign whereby each time a user conducts an online search through the special http://click4thecause.live.com/ page, Microsoft will donate money to ninemillion.org to help the estimated 9 million refugee children and youth around the world.

Blogs could help spread the word about raising as much money as possible before the final date of March 31st 2007 by posting about the ‘Click4theCause’ scheme. One suggestion is that some blogs are designating ‘Click4theCause’ days where they encourage readers to search for an entire day with Click4theCause to boost donations. However it’s up to you, if you’d like to participate, how you’d try and get people doing it.

To drive donations to the ninemillion campaign you would need to direct people to search at the specially set-up http://click4thecause.live.com/

If you want to find out more about the ninemillion.org campaign please go to http://www.ninemillion.org/

Individuals can also donate money by going to http://nine-million.spaces.live.com/

If you require any further information or would like images then please contact me:

Best Wishes

Darika Ahrens
Shiny Red
darika@shinymedia.com
www.shinyred.tv

While at the Apple RTC event in Newcastle, more postings later, I have just had a brief demo of Clicker 5 and was impressed by its functionality, I was however slightly concerned by the part of the demonstration when he just dragged an image and text off another website and dropped it into Clicker, at this point breaking several copyright laws.  I suggested to him that it might be a good idea to integrate a Flickr advanced search into the application so that users could find creative commons images and use them, unfortunately he wasn’t impressed by the idea and simply said ‘No’.  I wonder why you wouldn’t want to allow this?

Margaret Wright (QCA) has just posed the question if you were creating a GCSE in ICT what would you add to functional skills to form this qualification. To me the answer is engaging and motivating uses of ICTs, I am sure there are very few if any students who want to study databases, spreadsheets and wordprocessing. We should look at a qualification that encompasses the ICTs they use outside the school environment. If students were able to submit their myspace site or their latest video from YouTube, I am sure they would engage more in our classrooms. It would probably be worth looking outside the conventional uses of ICT, look at using mobile phones, mp3 players, games consoles etc.

I think it would be great to sit down and develop a GCSE for our ‘digital natives’, it is probably something we should do in conjunction with our students, what do they think ICT is actually about.  My biggest issue with ICT qualifications to date is that they are very quickly out of date, how do we design a qualification that is future proofed?  Should we have a selection of modules that students can pick from, smaller modules that can be developed and replaced easily. I could see modules on internet safety, computer gaming, blogging, podcasting, internet research etc etc

So what do you think?