Kristianstill

Memory 4 Teachers is a major new ICT initiative taking place within the UK education sector.

The project has been developed, in association with LEAs and Teacher Unions, to support teachers and educators in addressing their ever-increasing workloads by funding the provision of 750,000 USB memory sticks across the UK. Simply register and they will send you your FREE USB memory stick preloaded with a range of educational resources. The project launches at BETT 14-17 January 2009.

http://www.memory4teachers.co.uk/index.asp

The 3rd week, and the 3rd week of growth. Thats great news. This is a credit to Andrew Sangster, my colleague for all the hard work he has put into the project so far. More good news, on Monday we received positive feedback on the DMGC Leader proposal. While there is still work to do on the final pitch, it has been very well received ticking a number of key funding foci. We are addressing inclusion, attendance, leadership, encouraging low aspirational white working class males to get involved in extra-curricular studies albeit with the caveat of gaming at the end of the session and ICT for girls. Of course we get to write our own curriculum for the workshops, now thats fun teaching. No specification to restrict you, no fear of failure for the staff or the students, we can go where the learning takes us and there is no deadline. When the students exhaust the software, we will change or rather they will tell us that they have had enough. Watch this space.

Now a reminder to self – in GIMP we are trying to create the posters for ICT at Hamble College. What if we created the artwork for the next SSAT conference and sent it in??

LiveWeb allows you to insert web pages into a PowerPoint slide and refresh the pages real time during slide show. Bascially you can display web pages without ever leaving the confines of your PowerPoint slide show.

I thought this might be really handy for my Colleague Tom Barrett when he shows the power of Google Docs, plus other sites. Let me know what you think?

Topic or Tool: Smallworlds

What does it cost? FREE. SmallWorlds is a 3D virtual world (similar to Second Life and Lively) but it runs inside your web browser – no software to install. Targeted at anyone aged 13 years and above, Smallworld creators Outsmart believe that,

‘the combination of social interaction, self expression, media consumption and casual gaming features of SmallWorlds means there’s something in there for everyone, and the ease of use and general accessibility of the product means that even novice users can have a satisfying experience.’

Once you have designed your avatar, you are dropped into your virtual home with or without your virtual pet, you teleport into a multilingual international virtual world. Importantly for educators, Smallworlds is Moderated. Moderators and helpers are real easy to spot, they all have a saintly (some might say unearthly?) glow as they travel about in-world. They also wear a snappy looking blue cape with an “M” or “H” on the back just in case you miss the glow.

Whats more Smallworlds a mash-up or is mashable! ‘Mashable’ means you are able to mash together different web applications. A more professional definition can be found in the Horizon Report 2008

‘A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source via a single, unified tool.’

Same difference. For example you can play selected radio stations through your ghetto blaster, you can hang your pictures/artwork stored on photo sharing site flickr on your walls. You can take part in game tournaments such as chess and pool and much more. Smallworlds is a real interactive experience.

How it could be used for teaching?

At this moment in time, I have used Smallworldsto introduce students to social media. Once logged in, there is an enormous amount for them to do, people to meet and etiquette to learn. The importance of personal safety, security and 21st Century safety awareness are easily reinforced through Smallworlds. Features such as room design (Design Technology) and Chat (MFL), can be easily applied in Smallworlds as students complete ‘Missions’ to help them earn credits. These credits can then be used to make purchases, an instant reward, often used to ‘pimp’ their home space.

How it could be used for learning?

More recently, I have been corresponding with the Outsmart team, discussing ways to use the many features available in Smallworld to create learning experiences. In particularly we have been looking at how Outsmart can offer staff and headstart or ‘teacher package’ and ways to use the missions to develop learning opportunities for students. For example, heading to a Maths room full of equations, with supplying the correct answers earning you credits. Or by creating rooms or great characters in history, again with questions to answer but also rooms to display photo and artwork, then entered into international competitions….. More ideas please.

Topic or Tool: Screencasting, a digital recording of computer screen.

What does it cost? Low end FREE, at the Professional end, it can be expensive. For use in your classroom, on your website or CPD, Jing, Wink, ScreenToaster, Screencast-o-matic and the many others, are just fine. Just in case you get hooked, Camtasia, for professional level recording, editing and sharing high end screen video.

The new kid on the block is ‘in browser’ screen casting. Enter ScreenToaster, a free web based screencasting tool that requires no installation, no software and can record your full desktop screen (or just a rectangular section) in few clicks. It will even host the finished screencast for you and is therefore immediately available for sharing via email or for embedding on other sites. You can download it of course, but why would you? Ok you might want to.

A hidden bonus is that Screen Toaster is written as Java web applet, which means it works pretty much on every Operating System. Any difficulties here, as your Network Manager, considering there is nothing to install s/he should be more than happy to help !

The downside – Screen Toaster doesn’t not currently record audio, but its coming, in the mean time you can add subtitles. On the up side, they were more than happy to help when I asked for a few extra accounts for students to use.

Screencast-o-matic is another similar online screencasting app but what you may like more about Screen Toaster is that it renders videos as streaming Flash so it becomes easy to embed screencasts in web pages. For those of you that love your firefox browser, there no reason to leave with Capture fox.

How it could be used for teaching?

An obvious answer, create ‘How to’ screencasts. Screencasts to show students how to login into your VLE? Or create functions in a spreadsheet, or any skill in a ICT lesson. Screencasts for staff on how to complete the NEW online registers or assessments?

How it could be used for learning.

I recently asked the students to evidence they could attach documents to their emails using screentoaster, I know I am not the only teacher using screencasting as OCR Nationals evidence. I know Gideon Williams at Perins School was complimented by his External Moderator for using screencast to  evidence some of the criteria in the OCR Nationals. This process requires thinking and planning and if your use the audio features, scripting skills as well. Getting senior students to create ‘how to’ screencasts for junior students is a very powerful learning tool but also a great resource creator / base for the teachers.