June, 2010

ICT — 1 Comment
28
Jun 10

In Character

Tonight I am thinking more and more about how to encourage students to write. On the list for next year is WordPress accounts for all students and Depts. Also, I have been thinking more about the use of ‘in character,’ opportunities. Part of the inspiration come from EducationGoveUK a spoof Twitter account responding to educationalist on Twitter in character.

http://twitter.com/educationGoveUK

I quite like the idea of a forum or Twitter conversation where student(s) respond in character. For example, take the characters from Romeo and Juliet and reposition them into a modern day issue, let say alcohol at a party, . Do the students know their characters well enough to play out the modern drama?

Popularity: 4% [?]

e-Tools — No Comments
25
Jun 10

Screencast

For as long as I have been a ICT tecaher, I have been looking experimenting with  screencasting. It started with creating screencasts to support learning and this task left a lasting impression. Screencasts are very simple in practice, but actually require significant planning, preparation and most importantly understanding of what you are ‘doing.’ or casting! If you are using audio aswell, you almost have to be able to automate the skills / knowledge to be able to effectively narrate the screen cast. I have 18 screencasting tools, all for one reason or another have not been adopted in school. Thats is not to say they are not very good, some were excellent, but a school network often presented barriers; students needed to be able sign in, an applet did play nicely with current IE version, the download format render excessively large files, the UI was just too….. well not as good as most of the others. We all have standards you know.

Continue reading →

Popularity: 4% [?]

Digital Leaders / Digital Learning — No Comments
25
Jun 10

SSAT Achievement Show

I would just like to thank the SSAT for inviting Hamble Community Sports College Digital Leaders to present at the Achievement Show. The students delivered a Pecha Kucha presentation of their experience of being a Digital Leader at our school. With Just 10 minutes used to present, we gave ourselves the same amount of time to take questions and the students answered them, well, just superbly. The complements the students received afterwards were well deserved and you could see these young people simply inflate with pride and confidence. Well done Digital Leaders. If you want to know more about Digital Leaders, then visit the resources on Vital.ac.uk

Popularity: 13% [?]

Management / Middle Management — No Comments
24
Jun 10

GTP to NQT (PGCE)

I am very pleased proud pleased to announce that Liam Nicol, our GTP student, successfully completed his formal assessment with Reading University. This was my first experience of being a GTP mentor, having mentored PGCE students in both PE and ICT previously, and I just wanted to share a few reflections on the GTP and make some loose comparisons to the PGCE from a mentors perspective.

The GTP offered plenty of class experiences and in school training supplemented by University lectures. In this sense I would expect this to be fairly consistent with the PGCE. The key difference is that a) you recruit the GTP and b) they work at just the one school (apart from a two week placement). As a result it is imperative you recruit with care.

I believe Liam benefitted from the single school experience. He really did develop strong relationships with the student and we were more confident in offering wider mentor opportunities, parent conferences and extra-curricular experience. Of course, if the relationship were fraught, I can see this benefit quickly becoming a drain. Continue reading →

Popularity: 48% [?]

e-Tools — No Comments
21
Jun 10

PDF to Text

Here is a fairly common question with a simple answer. Google Docs will now extract text from images free. This new feature has only recently gone live but may have arrived just in time to help staff ploughing through and restructuring new specifications. Or perhaps stripping out content, exam questions or restructuring exemplar materials from….. well, from anywhere. I will give you a quick example, a colleague recently wanted to use a registration form, similar to an example he had collected on his school visits. With a little technician help, he didnt have to start from scratch, but perhaps this may have been a better starting place. When uploading files to your account, tick the ption to run an OCR scan, Google does the rest. Extracting characters and placing them within a new text document. Incidentally, I am happy for colleagues to use almost everything I create, but check and at the very least acknowledge the original document or IP.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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