Hands On Support in Shropshire

Wow, WHAT a day! Keith Havercroft asked me to do a spot on podcasting at his music conference and I gladly accepted. In two sessions of an hour and a half each we looked at using Audacity to create podcasts. Well, you can’t really do a world-class production in the time available but judging by the amount of concentration going on, delegates gained a lot from the support and defied the odds to produce some fine intro files for podcasts, publishing them at lopcast.ethink.org.uk. Anyone looking for helpfiles should try here. I’ll do some more over the summer. Examples of blogs and podcasts we looked at were Hope School’s, Mary Webb School’s and Oldbury Wells‘. We touched on issues of pupils having a worldwide audience for their work, pupil motivation and peer review but really the session was about getting hands-on and creating something.
We used Audio Networks for the pre-recorded soundfiles, a superb resource negotiated to be free when used within the RBC. We looked at issues of licensing and copyright and I pointed people towards the Creative Commons site for further clarification than I could give.

I’m hoping that we see some more eThink blogs appearing as the delegates and their pupils start to reap the learning benefits of blogging and podcasting.

For my own Personal Software Challenge, I used Cool Timer for the first time to set time limits for exercises.  What fun!  I hear Mrs Brown is using it in lessons too and she uses different soundfiles for the alarm!  What fun it must be in those lessons.

You can’t keep a good man down.  After another all-too-brief session at Mary Webb,  Head of Music Jim Mould pulls out all the stops and produces podcast after podcast.  Apparently it’s becoming a real motivator for the pupils as they rush home to tell their parents what they did at school today, and “guess what Mum and Dad, here it is on the web”.  I’m sure things will get more and more sophisticated as time goes on and the learners get used to the software and the medium and produce some really cracking podcasts.
Take a trip over to Webbmusic and have a listen to the podcasts. Even better, subscribe to the feed in your podcatcher and receive the new ‘casts as they are made then download them toyour mp3 player to enjoy them on the way into school.  I’ve got “Ode to Mary Webb” on mine already so I can listen in the car.

Another Friday morning at Meole and the Year 7 group were getting ready to start using their blogs as a book review platform. After getting settled in and logged on, they went through the guidelines for writing book reviews and made sure their first paragraph had all the details to identify the book. This was because we were going to use trackbacks from their individual blogs to the main blog. They all had the trackback URI copied and were ready to go…some had started writing excellent book review posts to their blogs…and the fire bell went off. So it was out onto the yard to stand in the sunshine while the school was checked for safety. Everything was OK but the time was gone and no more blogging was done.

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Jim Mould, Head of Music at Mary Webb, yesterday set up the Music Blog ready for interactive work with learners. Once we’d discussed the concepts of blogging and podcasting Jim was really enthusiastic about using it with learners to enhance the curriculum. Of course there are security concerns, like giving out pupils’ email addresses in a public environment (they’re not), who manages the server at ethink (it’s me) and the ins and outs of letting learners have their own blogs. It’s refreshing that teachers are thinking about these security issues, but I’m certain that I’ve covered all bases at eThink. At least, that’s what the pilot projects show. (more…)

Sam took a deep breath and looked nervously over her shoulder. The reassuring line of light under the bedroom door that usually showed that Mum was still reading had been turned off long ago. The midnight darkness was complete, enveloping, clinging like a cloak around her, raising her other senses to a level where everything was twice as large. Someone needed to investigate what was making that noise - and only Sam was awake. There was the sound again - Sam tried to identify it in her imagination but failed. The darkness let her thoughts run riot, exaggerating the possible source; what was it? Could it be a troll that had slipped from another dimesion into the kitchen, and was now foraging for food? A slavering beast that had got in through the catflap and was now waiting, just waiting for somebody to come down stairs so that it could leap out and scare them? “This is no good” thought Sam “I need to deal with it myself”, and hesitantly stepped onto the first stair. Thankfully Dad had fixed the creak that it often made so that the ogre in the kitchen didn’t hear her, and Sam slowly continued down the stairs, holding tight to the banister as if it was a lucky talisman, protecting her from the horde of dwarves, their sharp teeth clattering together as they prepared to devour her flesh.

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Meole Brace English Department had a twilight this evening with the brief of looking at effective interactive technology use in the English classroom. After a hard day’s work, the delegates continued working hard into the evening through varied exercises and discussion on the ways that whiteboard and presentation technology can be used in the English classroom.

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Flash is a great tool for “getting the message across”. So is a word processor, web authoring package, dtp, art program, whatever - but Flash has the features that make it available to all from an extremely low level, up to ActionScripting where extremely elaborate programming can make something truly magical.

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I got quite excited when I got to Rhyn Park this evening for a twilight session with the English Department.  The department are looking to raise achievement through the use of electronic resources and I was looking forward to introducing some of my favourite tips and tricks as well as take a look at the resources they have bought in.  For ages they have been waiting to use their tablet PC with the projector - the plan has been to use it as a collaborative tool that can be passed around the class. 

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Again Barrie Fisher at Idsall comes up trumps for innovative use of ICT.  Today’s HOS session was aimed at delving into digital video; we toyed with the idea of looking at Pinnacle but instead went for Movie Maker 2 which amply fulfils the requirements that Barrie had for it.

Barrie worked through the different aspects of MM2 including the titling and the voice over.  Then we hit on the idea that this would be useful to pupils assessing their own performance - they watch a video of themselves and add a voiceover as they watch.  This could be so powerful in the classroom, as well as meeting targets for GCSE (particularly the AQA specification) where pupils need to provide analysis of their own or others’ performance.  And the nature of a Movie Maker 2 project means that they can add the video of their improved performance at the end after they’ve done it.  I can imagine moderators being highly impressed with a DVD of pupils assessing their own performance.

Today I worked with the PE staff at Thomas Adams school, giving support using cSwing performance analysis software in a gymnastics lesson. We were only expecting to be using the “Live” mode of the software for pupils to replay their techniques instantly and improve on their performance, but moved on to using the motion analysis techniques also. I helped out by the “forward roll and cartwheel” mat where pupils worked in pairs and we saw some real and rapid improvements in performance due to the use of the video replay software.

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