foolfillment: the blog

JRowing posted a few ideas for using a camera hooked up to a data projector recently, I thought I’d share them here.

I love the idea of collaborative/co-operative slideshows like these, there are a few about as John Johnston blogged recently. Such an easy way to share ideas.

I’ll be sure to add my idea to JRowing’s slideshow soon – I’m hoping to get a camcorder rigged up in my classroom in the next couple of weeks.

I like to share

I’ve got a wee corner of this site where I make some of the things I use available for others, I’ve finally got around to adding a few things for Standard Grade Craft and Design.

My Standard Grade Craft and Design resources page.

I’ve made up a few woodworking joints in Autodesk Inventor, and they are now available for anyone to use. Currently corner butt joint, corner rebate, hidden dowel, box comb, dovetail. More are there but I’ve yet to build the links to them, in time they will get done.

Creative Commons Licence 2.5 applies as always – copy, edit, reuse how you like, but make no money, and give attribution. If you share it further the licence persists.

I have other things made in Inventor that I will get on to uploading soon. Please let me know in the comments if any of the files do not work. They were made in an educational version of Inventor 2008.

That dastardly pair Neil Winton and Guinea Pig Mum have tagged me. Memes are quite good things usually, and this one is no exception. I’ve been challenged to tell you 7 things that you don’t already know about me. Trouble is I already did the 5 things meme back in 2006, so do I have to come up with 7 new things or will 2 suffice?

Let’s see what I can manage.

1. Last December I went down some new passages of a cave called Rana in Sutherland. At the time there had been more people on the moon than had been in that part of the cave.
2. Blogging, what is it? I’ve had a blog for a lot longer than Don Ledingham, but it was him that first introduced me to the term when I was still a naive 6th year student at Dunbar Grammar, where he was the Headteacher. But that’s not important right now.
3. I have an incredibly sweet tooth and can easily demolish a quarter of sherbet lemons/strawberry bonbons/rhubarb and custard…anything, in one very brief sitting.
4. My favourite film without exception is Airplane, I don’t know how many times I have seen it, I know pretty much every line and regularly fit quotes into everyday conversation and bamboozle people who don’t recognise it.
5. At the end of my first year at secondary school I had to choose between a extra hour of Craft or having an hour of French. I was talked into French by my parents, here I am several years later and I spend most of my time teaching in the practical workshop. The only bits of french that come to me easily are Je tres en and J’Adoube, I apologise if I’ve mis-typed them, or even just got them totally wrong.
6. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit soaps! I am a self-confessed Neighbours addict. It’s a disgusting habit I know, but one that gives me pleasure and half an hour of mind-numbing a day.
7. Cream? No thanks, I take it black. I am dairy intolerant. For years I put up with the symptoms, not knowing what it was, then eventually did a food intolerance test, with a very sceptical mind. Turned out I can’t eat cow’s milk, goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, and load of other things. The most irritating thing about it (other than not being able to enjoy a good cheese board) is when I cook with chillies. As anyone who has read The Crow Road by Iain Banks will know, a good thing to soothe the pain of eating really hot food is cow’s milk (is it the lactose?), this is particularly good if you’ve been chopping chillies and then rub your eye. However if you are dairy intolerant then soya milk just doesn’t cut the mustard. I know, I’ve tried.

As well as having to come up with 7 new things, I also have to come up with 7 people to tag and pass on this meme, much like a virus. My 7 people are:

• Duncan Smeed (who introduced Don to blogging)
• Krysia (though she may not have time, justifiably)
• Margaret Vass
• Jonesieboy
• Fearghal Kelly
• Dave Cain (he’s been very quiet recently)
• And finally, Doug Belshaw, because he wimped out and only came up with 2 new things having also done the 5 thigns meme a while back.

I’m not going to chase these people up, nor will I be disappointed if they don’t respond, not everyone appreciates memes, but they can be a bit of fun. If you want to have a go, consider yourself tagged by me.

As well as the Anomoto app for the iPhone, another piece of good news that came out over Christmas was the move by wikispaces to enable teachers to create accounts for their students.

Anyone with a K12 account can now very easily set up a user name, email address, and password for each and every one of their students. Previously anybody who wanted to use the service had to have an active email address already. This was a major problem for me when I tried to use wikispaces last term with my S1 class only to find they hadn’t been given their user names or passwords yet (this was 4 months after they joined the school!).

This evening I spent about 15 minutes creating accounts for all of the new S1s that I will get from now until June. The process was dead simple, all I needed to provide was a user name. Wikispaces then created the email address based on the wiispaces.com domain and even created a password. I’ve opted to create a user name based upon the pupils’ names prefixed with an abbreviation of the school’s name and the year that they started there – hopefully this should mean I can set up new accounts each year with no problem.

There is also the option to input your own existing passwords. Of course, had I known the format of their existing user names for the school network and a copy of their passwords I could have set up these accounts to match and save confusion. In future this is definitely what I will try to do.

I’m sitting here listening to a podcast of a radio show that was broadcast yesterday in Manitoba, Canada. Not what I would normally do, certainly. However this is a bit different., this three hour show (podcast cut down to 1hr 40 when you take out the news and adverts) was all about teaching. Darren Kuropatwa is a mathematics teacher who was the main interviewee, along with other teachers from North America. They are covering a massive amount of really interesting topics – maths, teaching approaches, online safety, using technology in the classroom and why we have to change the current model of education. Can you imagine teachers being let loose on the airwaves in Scotland or the UK for three hours? And to talk about these (controversial?) topics

I can’t write a better summary than Neil Winton has so I would urge you to go and read his post from yesterday, thanks for bringing this to my attention Neil!

Of course I should also point you towards the podcast.

There was also a lively Chatterous back channel, which I haven’t read through yet, you can find that here.

I will mention this part though, one caller brings up the point: ‘When a teacher changes his teaching by using new methods and new technologies that most other teachers are not using, then how do we make sure that the tax payer getting a good return for their money?’ This point ties in very nicely with a recent series of posts by Don Ledingham.

I’m sure most people reading this will have seen Animoto before, but if you haven’t: it’s a great wee service that bills itself as the end of slideshows. Basically it lets you upload images that you want to put together in a presentation, it then takes them and puts them into a slick video clip with music that you have selected. Until just at the end of the Winter term I had not used it in class before, for a few reasons, most of them to do with me being busy doing other things, but one reason being the limited access to a PC during most of my lessons.

I’m revisiting the idea now because at the end of the term Animoto brought out an app for the iPhone. The app is so incredibly simple and quick to use that there really is not excuse not to dip in occasionally and use it.

When I was at home over Christmas I put together the video below, it took just a few minutes of fooling around with the camera and then a few minutes for Animoto to process the video.

I’ve said it before, so have many many other people: The iPhone and other similar 3G devices are going to have such a huge impact on schools. How do we get to the stage where teachers aren’t scared to let pupils use what they have in their bags, what they use day in day out outside of school?

With only a couple of days left now of the Christmas holidays I’m sitting here wondering where the time went. Someone, somewhere recently likened a teacher’s holidays to the time a diver takes to adjust to the atmosphere at sea level after a dive, a decompression time if you like.

As the last term came to an end I felt a lot brighter and less tired than I did at the same time last year, yet I was still feeling very run down. Teaching is such an all-consuming thing to do – entirely enjoyable and worthwhile of course – that the time during the holidays is so important. I can honestly say that since I left school on the last day I have probably spent no more than a few hours thinking about work I have to do, instead I’ve been spending my time on me! And so it is that I’ve done that usual New Year thing of coming up with a few things I want to do, or get done this year; focussing on the personal rather than professional, the professional resolutions I thought about back in August when the school year started.

1. I want to get back into swimming a bit more this year, back in to the pool in fact. I’m secretly harbouring a hope that I could do some competing and even (pushing it a bit!) break the minute for 100m Free.
2. I’ve got to get out onto the hills a lot more this year, at least 24 times in the year, and hopefully I’ll finally get to a stage where I can realistically think about starting my Mountain Leader training.
3. Much, much more caving needs to be done this year. Hopefully I’ll do a little bit of digging with a couple of the GUPA reprobates as well. I’ll maybe even manage to drag out Ollie sometime?
4. To start (and complete?) an extreme learning project (ok, this one is a little bit related to my professional life).
5. I’m giving the 365 project a shot this year, with an iPhone there really is no excuse not to take and publish a photo each day of the year. I’ve managed two out of two so far.