Hands On Support in Shropshire

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.

There are a number of packages available for assisting the management of behaviour in schools, but the one used most widely in Shropshire is Sleuth from the School Software Company.  Written in Acces it provides a database solution for logging many aspects of poor and good behaviour so a macroanalysis can be made to show up issues which may not have been apparent if they were treated in isolation.

For instance, recording the time of the behaviour during a lesson can yield rich data thta can lead to a change in practice - if there is evidence of misbehaviour at the beginning of a lesson then perhaps there needs to be work on the way pupils come into the room, or work on starters.  Similarly, the place or time where behaviour is poor can be analysed.

I’ve worked with a group of PSHE co-ordinators who are implementing this in their schools, and I look forward to working in schools a lot more through HOS.

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 still have some misgivings about the value-for-money that an IWB adds to education, but each time I have a session like today’s at William Brookes, the enthusiasm of teachers for the IWB starts to erode my negativity.

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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.

This post on the Primeradiant blog tells of a budding writer of game software at Priory. He’s written a number of games already and is selling them to his schoolmates.

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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The following is merely a personal commentary and in no way an endorsement of any product in favour of another.

With the interactive whiteboard getting into more and more classrooms, I’m asked more and more for IWB training. I’m not really a fan of the Interactive Whiteboard itself but some of the software that goes with IWBs is very good for creating engaging resources .  Nevertheless, to create even higher-quality resources for a rich learning experience that reaches more learners it is sometimes necessary to use other tools as well.  Whatever the reason, here I am training people in Smart software.  It’s a good starting point.

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