foolfillment: the blog

I was flicking through some bookmarks today and found this, absolutely brilliant!

The nice folks at software company Autodesk have kindly set up a great area on their website where people involved in education can download their software for free. In this post I outline how school pupils and teachers can download software. All you need is:

* A pc or laptop Click here for system requirements
* A broadband connection
* A School e-mail address (either a pupil or teacher e-mail address will do)

First go to the registration page for Autodesk’s Student community. When the page opens you will need to complete all of the required fields.

Important: At this stage you will need to enter your school e-mail address and also create a username and password. You should also enter an e-mail address in the ‘preferred e-mail’ field that you can access from home. All future correspondence will be forwarded to both addresses, using both means you can download the software at home.

Autodesk will now send you a verification e-mail. All you need to do is open the e-mail and click on the link to verify your account.

Now go to the Autodesk Student Community homepage and use your new login details to access the student community.

Once you have successfully logged in go to the software downloads tab and choose Autodesk Inventor Professional 2009(English) from the dropdown menu. Then hit the download button.

There are a few download options but I would strongly recommend that you choose to DOWNLOAD USING THE AUTODESK STUDENT COMMUNITY DOWNLOADER. You will now be faced with a dialog box, select ’save file’ make sure you save it to a location on your PC where you can easily find it.

Once the download tool has been saved on your PC you are now ready to install it. It should only take a few minutes to install, once installed open it up and log in.
Finally, reselect the program you want to download (Inventor 2008) and the download will begin. The download tool will also display your serial number at this stage. Make sure you record it so that you can insert it at the required stage of installation.

The files to download are quite large but it will happily run if you leave it overnight - just remember to make sure your PC won’t go into hibernation.

Once it has downloaded simply follow the on screen installation instructions, there are a few important things to note though:

During the configuration stage of installation make sure you change the units from inches to mm and choose ISO for the default setup.

If you are having any problems with this process then please feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email. I have to give credit to Robert Clements for this post, he wrote it originally a few weeks ago, but I’ve made a few changes and posted it here because it’s pretty useful.

It’s hard to believe that my time at Ross High is almost over, just a day and a half left before the end of the Summer Term and the end of my probation year. There’s lots of things running through my head about the year and it’s difficult to keep in mind that I won’t be walking the corridors there for much longer.

It has been a really good year and I’ve gained a huge amount of experience and (I think) become a lot better at this whole teaching thing. I’ll be sad to leave on Friday lunchtime but I’m sure I’ll still be in touch regularly and I hope that my classes will keep adding material to the department’s flickr account.

I just want to finish off by saying a huge thanks to all the staff at the school, in particular the all the boys in CDT. The biggest thank you has to go to all of the pupils of course, they are the ones who’ve made all the hard work, late nights, and early starts worthwhile.

Below is just copied text from an advert but these sessions are incredibly important so I wanted to let you know about them. I will be attending the session at Dunbar Grammar.

In June this year, East Lothian Council, in partnership with Lothian and Borders Police, will be hosting a series of Internet safety and responsible use training sessions for parents with pupils in P5 - S6 across the county. This is in response to growing concerns, expressed by individual parents and parent councils, about how to make sure young people use the internet safely and responsibly. The sessions are also designed to show parents how they can protect their youngsters from on-line dangers.

The training sessions will be led by Ollie Bray (Depute Head at Musselburgh Grammar School) and PC David Gunn from Lothian and Borders Police. Both Mr Bray and Mr Gunn are accredited Ambassadors of the Child Exploitation Online Protection Agency (CEOP).

The training session has already been piloted within the Musselburgh Cluster and received positive response from over 200 parents. The content of the evening includes background information on new technologies and information about computers and mobile phones and the law. But the main part of the presentation involves Mr Bray taking the parents into some ‘real’ social networking spaces that young people use. This includes Habba Hotel, Teenspot, MSN Instant Messenger and Bebo. The session also gives advice on how you can protect your home computer and advice on on-line gaming.

Everybody who attends the training will have access to a comprehensive on-line handout.

The sessions will be held at:

* Preston Lodge High- 3 June 2008
* Ross High - 10 June 2008
* Dunbar Grammar - 11 June 2008
* Knox Academy - 18 June 2008
* North Berwick High - 24 June 2008

All training sessions will take place between 7 - 9pm.

Ollie Bray, Depute Head at Musselburgh Grammar School, says:
‘This is a very exciting time for East Lothian to be leading the way in Internet Training for staff, parents, families and pupils. We are going to use the feedback we gain from these sessions to inform good practice nationally through the Scottish Learning Festival.’

These evenings will start promptly at 7pm and have a limited availability. If you have any queries or you would like to book a place on one of these sessions, please email Tess Watson, (Acting Education Support Officer) at twatson@eastlothian.gov.uk or log onto http://edubuzz.org/blogs/internetsafety

I’ve kept myself very busy this weekend. During the day today and yesterday I was on an excellent first aid course led by Mark Tennant, as well as being a computing teacher at Dunbar Grammar he also manages to find time to be part of the Borders Mountain Rescue and be a BASP trainer. It was a really good course and Mark is incredibly knowledgeable so even though I’ve not really had a weekend I don’t begrudge that fact at all.

In the evenings I’ve been busy planning all sorts of things for next year, including a new website that I’m hoping to be able to use in class. I’d toyed with the idea of installing Moodle, but have just stuck with good old Wordpress, I may also go for an installation of WPMU in a sub-level sometime in the future. At the moment there is virtually nothing there and I’m just toying with how I want it structured, then I can get down to the really fun business of putting together a theme* to use with it. I love what Doug Belshaw has done with to integrate twitter into his site. In the future I’m aiming to have delicious and flickr seamlessly brought in, and who knows I’ll maybe even get some nice youtube integration.

* I really mean that - I just love diving into CSS and playing to make things look nice. I’m a geek I know

Following on from last night’s post about google docs, I’ve just discovered I can publish individual charts from a google docs spreadsheet, so below are the live charts for the three measurements I’ve asked for. It’s been interesting to see the charts change in the short time the form has been live.

If you haven’t yet then please take 2 minutes to do this wee favour for me (and my 2nd years) and fill in this form. And if you have filled it in once then why not go ask all of your friends to, or get your classes to do it?

As you can see they are not quite bell curves yet but already they are tending that way. So far there have been 35 sets of data put in and while there have been a few rogue results that I’ve had to tweak a little, in the main what you see is the raw data that has been inputed by you, the user. Thank you!

Hand length:

Hand Breadth:

Length of first finger:

You can help me (and my pupils) by filling in this form!

I’ve been toying with the idea of using Google Docs for a while. It is possible to get a class to populate a spreadsheet with complex data by filling in a really simple and easy form that anyone can access.

One way of using this would be a cheap interactive voting system. Another way that I was hoping to use it for was getting a sample of data so that pupils would understand anthropometrics better. I have a couple of classes who are about to design their own chair and need to understand the importance of getting the sizes of their chairs to fit the sizes of people.

Earlier today I spent a wee while setting up a spreadsheet that took data from a 5 question form and created some tables and bar charts showing the spread of hand sizes across the sample.
The form took about 5 minutes to create, and it set up the bones of the spreadsheet too. After that I set up a few extra sheets that munched up all the data and returned some graphs showing the spread of results. I fed in some fabricated data to check it was all working but soon realised I was going to need results from a lot more people than my 40 pupils for the sheets to really give a decent curve.

So, I turned to twitter and asked for people to fill in the form. As more people answer the questions the spreadsheet fills up and the charts become more refined - in real time, which is cool.

I’m hoping to find time for all of my classes to add their own data to the spreadsheet so that when it comes to the time my 2 design classes will be able to see a near perfect bell curve - and the process of gathering results.
Then I can explain the idea of using the 5th to 95th percentiles. The really nice thing is that the spreadsheet updates in real time as new values are added so I can show them the graph refining in front of their eyes.

For this spreadsheet to really make an impression though it needs as many results as possible, so please take a couple of minutes to fill in this form. Fill it in twice if you like - after all you have two hands! Now, I fully admit that this is not a scientifically rigorous experiment and that there are a lot of variables that mean the values in the spreadsheet could be wrong or inconsistent but I think this will give a reasonable idea of the spread of sizes.

This year at Ross High we’re hoping our Higher Graphics Class will be producing some really cool stuff for their Thematic Presentations (a folio of different types of graphic work based around a single artefact) with a suggested theme of Lego toys. To get them started I’ve modelled a wee man with the intention that they can use him in their own work - with modifications of course.

For the course they will need to do a series of manual and computer generated drawings. One way of doing the computer drawings is to actually model the object in 3D like I’ve done above then get very accurate and detailed drawings generated from that. I’ve used Autodesk Inventor but if you want a shot of doing something similar yourself then Google Sketchup is a free programme that does similar things and comes highly recommended for all abilities.

What you see above is me just going that little bit further so that the class can see what is possible outwith the requirements of the course, animations are a fantastic way of really showing off a piece of work and can be quite good fun to make - unfortunately they aren’t currently assessed/assessable.

This example needs a lot of tidying up, but it is just a little bit of fun and (I think) quite cute.

Incidentally this took me around 2 hours to model and a further 1 at most to set up and tweak the animation. The bit that took the time was rendering the animation, around 450 frames, which took about 60 minutes for 30s of animation.

You might see a theme developing here, I’m basically just asking for people to give me lots of their ideas, under the guise of sharing good practice Today’s theme is how to set up a classroom.

In August I will have the amazing luxury of having my very own classroom, this is something that is almost unheard of for a Tech teacher, and as such it is not something I’ve given much thought to. Since getting the Hawick post I’ve been thinking a little about what I could do to the layout of desks, or what resources I should have out - that sort of thing. Having never had my own room before though I’ve never been through all the practicalities of it and I’m sure I’ll have forgotten or overlooked important things.

So, I’m asking those of you out there who may have something to say to say it. If you were starting from scratch in a new room what 5 things would you do?

I’m looking for your ideas in this post.

A quick summary first: Today saw the final training session for this year’s probationers in East Lothian. Training really isn’t the right word for it as it was more an informal afternoon with the focus being on sharing and exploring our ideas about the Learning and Teaching that is going on in East Lothian. There was another focus - recently all the probationers took part in a sector shadow where secondary teachers watched primary classes for a day then swapped over - so this gave a lead to the discussions.

The final activity we took part in was particularly useful - both for sharing ideas but also to justify what we do to other professionals. This is where I’d really appreciate your comments.

There were two headings under which we had to describe something that we think is great practice and we want to implement or continue to do when we take up our next jobs. We then mingled and shared ideas with each other. It opened up my eyes (even further) as to the variety of things that are going on in Primary schools that are just fantastic.

The first heading was Formative Assessment/Learning Strategies.
I wrote something along the lines of: Peer Assessment - evaluating each others work, pupils are much better at praising/criticising each other’s work than their own.

The second header was Management of Learning.
For this I wrote Starter questions/exercises at start of every lesson.

I’d love to hear you share anything that you consider to be essential to good learning and teaching so please leave a comment. It needn’t be much just a few words describing something that you think works.

( I toyed with the idea of writing this as a meme, so feel free to write up on your own blog and link here, or even to tag someone else.)