Hands On Support in Shropshire

Music Conference

dale — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:35:24 +0000

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.

More podcasting at Mary Webb

shropshirehos — Wed, 17 May 2006 00:43:49 +0000

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.

Book reviews at Meole Brace

shropshirehos — Fri, 12 May 2006 17:44:25 +0000

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.

(more…)

Music, Blogs, Podcasting

shropshirehos — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:21:38 +0000

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…)

Into the dark…

shropshirehos — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:36:41 +0000

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.

(more…)

Art at Meole Brace

shropshirehos — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:59:18 +0000

Wow. What a morning. We ditched the stuff we were going to do (we’ll do it this afternoon, promise) and did some blogging. Take a look at Meole Art Blog to see how the Art Department did in their first hour (actually it’s probably grown a LOT since then)!

We talked about the how blogging might be used in Art. After hashing out a few ideas, the first foray will be to ask for comments on pupils’ pictures. Next might be a set of famous artist’s pictures for Art pupils to critique on using Audacity in a voxpop kind of stylee. This has the potential to create a superb podcast - watch this space.

Starry Starry Night

shropshirehos — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:48:57 +0000

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!

Weblogs at Oldbury Wells (and elsewhere)

shropshirehos — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:31:35 +0000

So what on earth is a blog? How can we use blogs to enhance learning opportunities? A number of people have made great and erudite pronouncements on the uses of blogs (Will Richardson, Alan Levine, Anne Davis , Ewan McIntosh to name but a few) but how might we use them in our educational situation?

Perhaps by training learners to express themselves better, or to draw connections to develop better understanding of meaning?

Click “comment” below and make your pronouncement, or even trackback from your own blog. Define blogging (here are some ideas) and suggest what you think might make a blog good for learning.

Here are some examples:

Ellie’s Grade 7 Maths blog

Improving Writing at JHH

A mathematical conversation

Sundorne Art

shropshirehos — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 11:29:09 +0000

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.

English and ICT at Meole

shropshirehos — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 19:06:02 +0000

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.

(more…)