Thunder

These are my links for July 5th:

• Games Design -
• Welcome to Education UK Island | Education UK - An island in Second Life to support learning & teaching -
• BlogHUD : Second Life blogging system -

These are my links for June 30th through July 3rd:

• Google Operating System -
• Digital Cre8or - training -
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets Help Center -
• My Wikispace -
• Wikispaces » for teachers100K -
• My PBWiki -
• SNP preparation - WikiWorks -

I have just noticed a couple of new icons on the visual editor, the Yellow ‘V’ seems to allow me to embed video into my post, so lets give it a test:

The report highlights how important innovation is to improve education as a whole and to encourage higher learning. The report shows how the every day innovation that occurs in classrooms - from a novel way of teaching to a new approach to student involvement is rarely spread beyond the individual teacher and/or school.

NESTA identifies the need to give teachers more autonomy - supporting more developmental work led by teachers and schools to help increase innovation.  But before this can happen there needs to be more funding and support, and schools and teachers need to be given incentives to engage in it.  The report also suggests the significant impact the available budget for educational research could have on collaboration if more of it was offered to schools engaged in innovative development and research.

You can read more (or download the report) from the NESTA Website:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/informing/policy_and_research/highlights/hidden_innovation.aspx

I have recently been given approval and funding to set up a private island in Second Life, the purpose of he island will be to support the delivery of the new Diplomas in Shropshire schools.  The island will need to be accessed by students aged 14 - 19 and also their teachers. So now I am after some help and advice, any generic help would be most welcome, either in a comment or email steve[at]it4L.org .  I have a couple of key questions at the moment:

1. Should I set the island up on Teen Grid or Second Life, from reading the second life website, I think it would be best put on the Teen Grid and then getting the teachers access to the island.
2. Do all teachers have to get clearance through Ascertain, or can their LA clearance be used?

I would be keen to hear from anyone using Second Life with high school students in the UK, at present I only know of Digital Katie, who I heard speak about her use of Second Life at TeachMeet 06.

Last week while I was in Staffordshire I was chatting to a couple of the delegates about gaming, as you do on a game design course. Tim from Ounsdale School mentioned that he had been playing on ‘Frets on Fire‘, this is an open source (FREE) version of Guitar Hero for the pc or mac. I have since downloaded it, it is very addictive and great fun, I would recommend it to everyone. I have passed the details on to Keith the Shropshire music advisor and we will see what he makes of it.

As a child a water pistol was an essential toy and even when I went to university the trusty water gun or super soaker was taken with me.  It now appears that a group of people have taken a water pistol fight to the next level, Water Gun Wars is coming to London, sometimes there are advantages for those living in London.  It would be great to hear form anyone who enters the competition and to see some photos on Flickr.

I have spent today in Staffordshire working with eight ICT teachers from across the county. The Staffordshire ICT consultant has accessed some funding for a study support project, the aim of the project is to participate in a Gaming Competition (details here). I was asked to deliver software training on Game Maker, the software to be used for the project. The project will conclude on the 4th December with the students coming to the training centre to present their games to the other students.

I have set up a blog that will be used to share ideas and work in progress throughout the project, the teachers have posted their initial plans for the project already. What was interesting is that the teachers were discussing how they will be using Game Maker in other contexts outside of the project, replacing Flowol with Game Maker was high on the agenda, iMedia was mentioned by several teachers, and using it from year 7 right up into the sixth form.

With thanks to Tim I have now completed the additional model, you can download it from here.

Steph was working in a school today where they were looking at using ICT to support addition. Among a variety of other resources, she was planning to use Excel to produce addition questions similar to this:

I thought I would try and be smart and use the ‘=randbetween()’ function to generate the numbers and use the ‘=if()’ function to check the number entered by the student is correct. Unfortunately when you press enter to get the ‘=if()’ function to check the number is correct it randomises the original numbers again. I was wondering if anyone (Tim?) knew of a way to keep both bits of functionality i.e. random numbers and checking of answers. My working progress can be downloaded from here.