foolfillment: the blog

I’ve had a few short discussions with the hard-working Krysia on my course recently, like most of the people on my course she’s been spending a lot of her time on the final year project in the last wee while. As part of her project she wants to put together a resource for new CDT teachers – she puts it better:

for probationary Technology teachers to: blog, have an open forum, post resources, help each other out, and not feel too isolated during their first year.
…
Concerns I have are, how to ‘break down barriers’ such as: peoples’ willingness to share what they do, to overcome the ‘can I really be bothered with this’, how best to maintain a common focus. Things that I feel will be needed, and I’ll need to develop, are maintaining real life contact with each other, the use of critical friends, having a progressing (monthly) focus, a structured resource database and unfortunately some kind of security as I don’t know how pupil suitable the site may be.

Why am I mentioning this here? Well, she needs a way of setting this up that is going to be manageable, cheap, and easy to use, so any suggestions people have would be welcomed,. But also she wants to see if there is anyone out there:

Though I wonder what’ll be needed to get everyone on board, to create a common aim in our teaching practice? I feel we’re all doing it for different reasons – which is no bad thing – but I’ve not yet had a sense of ‘whole school/ across schools community’ which I feel is vital

I’ve probably ripped enough out of her post already so why don’t you go over to her blog Teaching Scout and read it for yourself, then try to give her an idea of the sort of community that can exist.

I’ve been wanting to practise more with screen capture software recently, I have a copy of Camtasia which I have used a little in the past and last weekend my dad (just back from trekking in Morocco, now golfing in Thailand – spot the new retiree) said he wanted to know how to put photos on the web so he can share them with people. So I set to work putting together two very basic tutorials on using flickr.

You can see them on youtube now:

• Signing up to flickr
• uploading to flickr, using tags and adding contacts

The second one is very grainy for some reason, the source flv file is fine, I had the same problem on google video so if anyone has any bright ideas about why or an alternative way of hosting videos like these then could you let me know. I could host them here but I’d rapidly run out of bandwidth and webspace.

They follow hot on the heels of Andrew Brown’s excellent screencasts on keeping up with blogs and not missing blog conversations among other things. Andrew’s work has prompted me to download a trial copy of Adobe Captivate which I’ve yet to use properly, but I’m put off by the US$600 price-tag.

On Tuesday night Life on Mars is back on telly, and about time too! I really enjoyed the first series, although I was a bit disappointed with the end of the series – it seemed like they suddenly realised they could milk a lot more out of the idea and it looked like it could turn into a series that would run and run long after it’s appeal ran out.

That shouldn’t be the case though as this series is the last and will give away what is actually happening to Sam Tyler.

Interesting though, for me anyway, is the publicity that the BBC are giving to the series. It’s been given a few different trailers over the last few weeks, starting with the Camberwick Green one, but also in the pub the other night there were copies of a spoof handbook ‘The Rules of Modern Policing’ lying around. These books must have cost a fair amount to produce and distribute (more than usually get spent on promoting a tv show anyway), so the BBC must think there is money to be made from this show. This, I suppose is proven by the books now appearing on ebay, and selling for as much as £6.50.

I’m not sure where this post is going so I’ll wrap it up by saying I’m looking forward to it on Tuesday night, and Happy Birthday to my brother.

I wrote yesterday about the Royal High School’s excellent CDT department webpage. It is an showcase of the work being done by their pupils, and an insight into the varied software they use. It is updated every week or so and it looks as though it is all done by hand – that is, creating the pages in Notepad or Dreamweaver or similar; cropping and resizing all the images and uploading them to the right directories, manually archiving the old versions of the pages.

I wonder if they realise how much easier it would be to update their site through some sort of combination of a blog and a photo sharing site like edublogs.org flickr.com, and the community they could create around their work – I already know lots of teachers check it regularly, I’m sure conversations would quickly take place and the benefits for pupils (theirs and outsiders) would be tremendous.

One thing I really used to miss about their site was a feed so I didn’t have to check if it had been updated (you do use feeds by now don’t you?) so I went away and made one using page2rss.com, so if you want to be kept up to date with what they’ve been doing then you can use it too: RSS feed for the RHS CDT Department.

And if anyone is out there from RHS I hope you don’t see this as any sort of criticism – I think the site is great and I just hope that it doesn’t turn into a chore and stop getting updated, I’d miss it!

I saw on the last update of the Royal High School CDT Dept website* that their S1 pupils have been using a package called West Point Bridge Designer to simulate bridges, I’d not heard of this before although I’ve seen others.

Tonight I downloaded it and had a play, interestingly, for whatever reason I quickly turned from trying to faithfully re-create the Forth Bridge, to trying to get the truck that tests the bridges to fall through the floor. It must be a boy thing, this is what the RHS pupils have been doing, in particular Ryan who’s bridge was on the CDT webpage.

It was harder than it sounds, the driver of the truck is quite bright, if he thinks the bridge won’t hold his truck he won’t drive onto it. I had to tease him on with a bridge that was pretty sound until one of the very last members which I wickedly made too weak, the result:

Now I want to make a real bridge, strong enough to hold my own weight. I just have to decide on a material, I was thinking of matches and PVA but does anyone have any other (more absurd the better) ideas?

*more on this in a later post: RHS CDT page

I’ve just spent a wee while after dinner playing with some new headers for the site, they’re randomly selected from a list of 5, so just hit refresh and you should eventually cycle through them all, I think full sizes of all of the images are available on my flickr photostream. Those of you who only read my blog through an aggregator won’t care at all about this. On the subject I’ve been using Google Reader for the last week or so, I have to say it’s much friendlier than bloglines with a lot of nice features, such as marking posts as read just by scrolling past them.

[tags]random headers, flickr, google reader, bloglines, aggregators[/tags]

IDEA has just announced its ‘call for submission’ for Thaw 2007. IDEA is the Industrial Designers of Edmonton Association (so not local) and Thaw is an event which gives “visitors an opportunity to view and purchase innovative and original products and ideas.”

The brief is interesting, in short it is ‘imagine there was no oil.’ I don’t see anything stopping schools in Scotland taking up this challenge, there is no benefit of actually submitting to this event – the only prize as such would be recognition so the costs would far outweigh the benefits – but a local (within school or authority?) equivalent competition could be feasible and would tie in very nicely with areas of the curriculum, citizenship for example. Of course most of the crafting that happens in schools is with wood or metal anyway so ruling out plastic isn’t too much of a hurdle, but try coming up with a new CD case, or redesigning most of the stuff in your kitchen.

via Land+Living

[tags]idea, design, sustainable development, schools, thaw2007[/tags]