Thunder

Atomic Learning is offering the PBwiki workshop (http://www.atomiclearning.co.uk/pbwiki) free until the end of September as a resource for educators. Please feel free to post it on your site.

I seem to be slightly addicted to Facebook atm.  Up until last week I had probably only visited my profile a couple of times, over the last couple of days I have probably spent hours on my profile adding applications, and seeing what my friends are up to.  If you are using Facebook let me know and I will add you as a friend.

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?

As some of you may be aware I am in ’sunny’ Torquay at the NAACE conference, yesterday I delivered by session on web2.0 in the classroom (you can find most of the sites referred to here).

It has been great to have so much positive feedback and a little constructive negative feedback. This has left me thinking about how to improve and where I believe we should start to go next. What I believe is that it is good to see the practical uses of web2.0 in the classroom whether they be the best use or not, from the primary school blog to the geography tectonics podcast, my use of del.icio.us to the gallery of student work. Where I believe I need to take this next is to start to look in more detail about the effects on teaching and learning from using these technologies, to me it is obvious but that is not the case for everyone.

I think in Shropshire we could be at a tipping point, we have spent the last 18 months or so piloting and developing our use of these technologies but can we start to exploit them even further, using blogs to support boys writing, podcasts to support speaking and listening, del.icio.us to support research etc

I am keen to hear other peoples opinions and set up some collaborations to develop materials to support the use of these technologies in the classroom. Has anyone already developed teaching units, that don’t necessarily teach the technologies but exploit their use.

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?

After recommending del.icio.us to many people on many occasions I was asked recently what can you do if someone sends an unsuitable link to one of your students.  It stumped me, I didn’t know what to say, there is always the usual line about teaching the students about being responsible users of the internet and getting them to inform an adult about it - what do you think del.icio.us would do, should there be a button to inform them of an unsuitable link??

Any thoughts….

I often wonder what would be the best tool for a job, should I use a blog or a wiki, an email or an SMS.  Earlier this week I came across this blog that contains a nice decision tree to help me make the choice in the future.

Tim Curtis from Shrewsbury High School has just created a wiki over at wetpaint where he would like teachers to upload any alternative versions to the SNS KS3 ICT STU’s (too many acronyms). Taken from the site:

Why this site?

To share the knowledge, expertise and creativity of ICT teachers.

Who can contribute?

Anyone. You don’t have to sign up to wetpaint to contribute but it would be great if you did (it will be easier to see who deserves the credit for great ideas).

How does it work?

At KS3, the units are based on the DfES STUs.

If you tweak a lesson, add a comment to that page
If you have rewritten a lesson, add it as an alternative lesson sub-page
If you have rewritten a unit, add it as an alternative unit sub-page
(I’ve tried to set up a typical structure for unit 8.2 - please feel free to add others!)

Get the credit

Add your alternatives with your school in the title of the page. E.g.
Alternative Unit 7.5 from Shrewsbury High School

Other Key Stages and General Stuff

Feel free to develop the structure as necessary. KS4 and KS5 will be set up by qualification and then board.

If you would like to contribute then visit the site (http://teachict.wetpaint.com/)

My latest podcasting adventure was at Priory school in Shrewsbury.  Trina invited me in to work with a group of 20 Y10 students, prior to my visit she had worked with them to produce their scripts - this was done in Google Docs, and example of a script can be viewed here.  As the students were working in groups the use of google docs to produce their scripts was ideal, all of the group could participate in producing the final script.

The podcasts were produced in Garageband, the final podcasts can be viewed/listened to below:

Alex, Nick & Absar (mp3 or m4a)
cfrd (mp3 or m4a)
Condoms (mp3 or m4a)
Hott Pink! (mp3 or m4a)
Matts Music (mp3)
Mindless Chatter, Pointless Talk (mp3)

The deputy headteacher was really impressed by the work that the students produced and the learning environment within the class, several of the students have asked if the school can buy Apple computers.

Slideshare is like Flickr for Powerpoint presentations, once you have created your account you can upload your powerpoint presentations and then either embed them in your blog or provide a direct link to them.

Unfortunately I can’t get mine to embed I guess it is a Wordpress MU issue, so here is a link to mine.

As powerpoints appear to be the common means of communication in lessons in our schools nowadays this seems an easy way for teachers to be able to publish their lesson notes etc, pupils or other teachers could then comment on the presentation.