foolfillment: the blog

I’ve been pointed towards Camtasia 3 today by one of my lecturers, it’s a fantastic piece of kit. Let’s you capture your actions on screen then edit how they are viewed - size, zoom, pause -and then add audio commentary over the top, or other sounds. As far as I can see you can add in other video sources too. The potential of this sort of thing is huge for learning, it’s amazingly easy to do and much clearer than other methods of showing how to use a computer. I could record a clip of how to transfer photos from a camera card to a My Documents folder and then give the clip to my mum - she’d have no excuse again for coming to me asking how to do it. With the possible exception of her not being able to view the clip.

I’m going to put together a few clips of how to use the wiki tool that the uni’s VLE has built in so that my guinea pigs will be able to use it and help me with my final year project, it’ll take next to no time - fantastic! To do the same thing with power point, or putting together a booklet would take far longer and would not be nearly as clear.

I am pretty excited by this, you might be able to tell.

There’s a meet up of scottish edubloggers happening in a couple of weeks time. I’m going to go along to the Goat and, well, meet up with some people who are doing simialr things to what I hope to be doing in classes when I start in a year’s time. There’s a wiki page just for the event. Most of the people who read foolfillment probably don’t care about this, but I’m putting it here anyway so that it’ll remind me to go, and on the off chance that someone reading this will be going too. And that’s all I have to say about it for now. No doubt there will be lots of photos on flickr and I’ll post after the event.

The Herald reports today on a new course offered at Intermediate 1 in a few schools in a small trial. It aims to make pupils aware of the dangers of the internet. I don’t know details of the course content but the report mentions the usual suspects of chat rooms and internet grooming; spyware and viruses.

It’s an important issue and this course is probably a good way of making people more aware. My concern though is that in schools this sort of thing should be taught alongside any subject that uses the internet (ie. all of them) not as a separate course but as an important integrated part.

In the main I suspect teachers will teach internet safety in the same way a CDT teacher stops pupils losing limbs on certain machines - they only let pupils use certain sites. Whereas pupils should be given the knowledge to go off and discover sites then make informed decisions about whether it is safe or not.

It’s also important that this course stays relevant too, it’s no use if it sets itself up to say bebo is bad (it isn’t any way, if anything it’s just a bit rubbish) when in a year this could be wrong or irrelevant, and in five years totally obsolete.

teaching, internet, safety, SQA

My final year project has been going round in my head a lot recently and I had a meeting with my supreviser today and I’m quite excited with what may happen. Rather than re-writing everything I’ve just writtewn though here’s a link to my wikispaces page where I’m developing my thoughts. foolfillment.wikispaces.com Please feel free to add a comment to the discussion page, I’d really appreciate any comments or ideas you may have, or resources you have maybe seen that may be valuable to me.

There’s a flurry of posts over at Ewan McIntosh’s blog today, standing out in particular to me is discussion about filters in schools, when I was in school the filter was a constant pain - the internet was off limits for chemistry research because too many sites used the words bonds and bonding, a sixth year colleague who was trying to work for her AH Modern Studies dissertation couldn’t do any reseach at school becuase her topic was to do with prostitution. No doubt filters have become more sophisticated but I can’t help but feel that we have the duty to prepare students for what they could come across when they use the net at home, would it not be of more benefit to try to build good practice where we can monitor what is being viewed than to restrict everything potentially dangerous until the kids are alone?
These thoughts echo the sentiment behind Struan’s post on to bebo or not to bebo a few weeks back. We have the duty to educate kids on how to get the best out of the web and to avoid the nasty bits, but instead we wrap them up in cotton wool and pretend everything’s hunkydory untill they leave the building, the other side of it is that at the same time we are restricting their access to potentially valuable tools - I know some of my fellow BTechEd students have found difficulties getting access to moodle while we’ve been out on placement, and how many blogs, wikis, email clients, IRC clients can you use in schools?

As an aside, diamond geezer’s post on Wednesday spurred me to update my blogroll, so I’ve added - at last - a few of the edublogs that I’ve been reading, and checked the other links, there’s still a few other there that seem dormant but I don’t want to write them off just yet. Dive in they’re over there —>

The last two days have seen the eLive conference at Edinburgh - the best in ICT in learning and teaching - and I would have liked to have gone, but instead I’ve been kept informed by the near-realtime blogging of Ewan and David. The posts of the speeches give a good insight into a few hot topics at the moment and I’ll pick out a few key points here:

• RSS, more information, but with more control
• collaboration, key thing to learning, key to the real world so why don’t we encourage it in school?
• audience, a pupil will be more motivated to do something if they know that it’s going to be seen (and appreciated by people)
• audience again, pupils use psuedonoms so that their work gets critiqued, not them
• IT turned into ICT, but should it really be IC, the T should not get in the way
• Why do we teach? When will the change to them learning happen? Who is the active participant?

That covers a few things.

Now though, lots of people are in Edinburgh on a meetup in the Jolly Judge or somewhere, wish I could have made it.

Well having used it for only a few hours today and an hour last week I can already say I can do more complicated, impressive drawings with Inventor than ProDesktop. What’s more is it is so intuitive to use that I can’t wait to use it with classes - by all acounts there are copies of the software scattered in schools just lying unused because the teachers don’t know where to start. Lots to do though so that’s all for now.

When I was at school last I got a copy of a presentation on classroom assessment, it was relevant to an assignment I have to hand in in a few weeks, I looked at it today to see what was on it and it’s actually really good, it’s footage and slides of a presentation by Dylan Wiliam - Inside the Black Box. You can download the slides for this presentation freely from KCL anyway but they don’t make much sense on their own.

A couple of points stood out:

• Making the difference between Assessment for Learning and Formative Assessment
• Giving marks is useless, much better to give comments. Don’t give both. If you give a child a mark and a comment the first thing he looks at is the mark, the second thing he looks at is his pal’s mark.
• The comments have to be understood by the learner and be of some use. It’s no good telling the comedian that he isn’t making people laugh because he isn’t funny.

Now, to write that assignment.

.PPPt - a photoset on Flickr from Ewan McIntosh, the notes are appearing day by day on his modern languages blog

In just under a year I have to make some choices. Richard Ledingham had to make them recently and won’t find out the outcome until May or so.

Yes! I’m talking about the lottery that is being placed for your probation year following a teacher training course in Scotland. Now that newly qualified teachers get their first school chosen for them a situation has arisen where some local authorities (LAs) don’t get enough new teachers and other LAs get too many, to try and resolve this there is now what I like to call a bounty payment to entice people to go where nobody else would touch with a barge pole. It’s a nice idea, it means that I get rewarded for going to a place that I’d have chosen otherwise. The places that fail to attract people generally are the most beautiful parts of the country - the highlands, islands, and generally more remote parts - and as such they are the parts that I would choose to go to normally, this way though I get and extra ?6000 for doing so. The downside of it is, it could literally be anywhere in Scotland, it could be one of the places that people don’t touch with a barge pole because they are horrible places - I won’t say where, you can decide for yourself - and that is what makes it a hard decision. On top of that I could end up somewhere that is miles from anywhere Morven wants to be.

Still, I have about a year to decide, and ?6000 is a lot of money.

[tags]GTCS, probation, teaching[/tags]