Hands On Support in Shropshire

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.

I thought this was just song by Don McLean, but learned last week (thanks to Gill Middlewick) that it’s a painting by Van Gogh.  Imagine my surprise when the style appears in a self-portrait on the Meole Brace Art Blog! 

Gill Middlewick, Head of Art at Sundorne, has created the most awesome online curriculum.  Over 650 megabytes of material to support the subject are available on the school network in a web folder, and pupils can access it at any time in school.  Today’s HOS “mission” was to assist Gill in learning how to get these files online and maintain an online presence in Digitalbrain.

First off we set up a site in Dreamweaver with the existing folder as a webroot.  Then, using WebDAV, Gill “put” the entire site to the Sundorne Art Community on DB - and we hit our first hiccup.  Seems that WebDAV has its faults, and a call to Digitalbrain support confirmed that uploading large numbers of files might be difficult.  We decided to try things in smaller bites, and that improved matters although it’s going to take ages to upload nearly 700Mb like this! Onward and upward then…

Gill has the necessary vision to know that access to these online resources from anywhere on the web can only be of benefit to her pupils.  When it’s all up there, Gill intends to use the site as a resource for pupils to access from outside school.  It should be easy for Gill to maintain the site since she already has considerable skills in Dreamweaver, and will be adding and manipulating resources in this rich learning environment.

A very productive afternoon spent on learning Kar2ouche Composer.  Kar2ouche is a great package produced by Immersive Education and the basic software, Composer, has been put into Shropshire schools. 

Using Kar2ouche allows the creation of storyboards with interactive characters, props and scenes so that learners can explore different scenarios.  From their website:

Kar2ouche is cross-curricular role-playing software for producing pictures, storyboards, animations, movies, comics, handouts, posters and magazines. Launched in October 2001, Kar2ouche is now in more than 7,000 UK schools and has won numerous awards. Kar2ouche now has titles for Key Stages 1-5 and is available for a wide range of subjects including Literature, Creative Writing, History, Languages, Music, Drama, PSHE, Citizenship, Numeracy and Science.

With the additional packages the fun really starts - interpreting Macbeth by placing actors, getting Michael Faraday to give a speech about his findings - the learning opportunities are endless. 

Another successful training session at Sundorne this evening, this time on the use of Communities within digitalbrain.  Staff were enthusiastic about learning the setting of access rights on folders to maintain security both in their personal webspce and in their respective subject communities.  There’s always a healthy buzz of conversation where the staff discuss the new things that they are learning and they support each other in implementing new skills and knowledge, but a noticeable quiet came over the room when we used the course chat rooms for the first time!

Enthusiasm such as this is good to see and I’m sure that Sundorne will soon be using digitalbrain to its full extent.  

In the next session we shall be looking at pupil use of digitalbrain.