foolfillment: the blog

I’ve managed to snaffle a wee shot on an Asus EeepPC. Tess Watson visited me at Ross today and has kindly loaned me one for the weekend. So far I’m really impressed, it’s is all dead easy to use, the main drawback so far has been the keyboard size. I’m typing this post on it right now and keep making a lot of typos, that said the machine manages to strike a great balance between usability and portability.

As far as the potential for use in a classroom/workshop, things are looking great. It is so lightweight (yet sturdy feeling) that I wouldn’t have too many concerns about giving them to pupils, and the ease with which they could access information would make it incredibly useful - especially if the school had a wireless network. The integrated webcam is a nice touch but is really only useful for phone calls as it doesn’t move, more useful perhaps would be just a USB wired camera that could be pointed at whatever you wanted. The software that runs with the webcam though is great - it is very fast to capture an image or video. With a maneuverable camera it would be very useful for capturing demonstrations of practical tasks in the workshop or graphics room and then making them available for pupils to run in a loop on their own machine at their bench.

I’ll get back to you later in in the weekend on how I get on, but so far things look pretty good for quick use of the basic stuff. One thing it wouldn’t be great for is graphics work, but that isn’t what this machine is aimed at so not a huge problem, but that didn’t stop me having a look at what linux CAD/CAG programs there are

Heard of twitter? Well pownce is quite a bit similar, but I think it’s a lot more useful. It’s a new venture by Kevin Rose (digg founder) and it lets you send short messages, links, events, and files to anybody (who uses pownce).

What makes it for me is the easy way to specify who you send things to - my gripe with twitter was the difficulty in sending messages to only certain people. Pownce lets you set up groups for you to put your friends in, so you can have your drinking buddies, your family, your colleagues, your 3rd year Craft and Design class, etc. And then you can send messages to only those groups and not worry about sending inappropriate messages to most of your contacts. (What I haven’t been able to find out yet is if you can have friends in multiple groups, would be useful).

Educational uses? Definitely, they seem far more obvious to me than twitter, which I didn’t really manage to get into. The ease of sending a short message to a class or a group of pupils creates loads of opportunities for teaching.

At the moment it’s invitation only, but there’s a way round that… over at mashable there’s a thread where if you comment with an email address you should get someone sending you an invite - this is how I got mine. I have none left to give out because the rule on mashable is once you’re in you go back and give your invites to people still waiting. Sharing at it’s best.

So, go over to mashable and comment, once you’re into pownce find me and add me as a friend - once I have people to talk to maybe I’ll start talking

Of course you don’t need to have an account, you still view all the public messages, and of course subscribe. This is the feed to my public messages.

The week before last I had the fantastic privilege of visiting Islay High School, on the invitation of Ian Stuart. I’ve been pretty busy since and haven’t had the chance to blog about it until now.

The whole time I was impressed with what I saw. The island itself was beautiful but it was what is happening in the school that is really exciting. Anyone who already reads Ian’s blog will know a little about what they are doing and there’s no point me reiterating it here but I’ll try to summarise briefly.
All the teachers have a tablet PC and a wireless projector in every classroom, in the coming session each pupils will be given an Ultra Mobile PC that they will do a majority of their work on. Each day the UMPCs sync all work with the school’s network so no work is lost.
There are clearly loads of opportunities for using all of this technology, but the other changes being made are perhaps more interesting. Rather than a drive towards specialising on one subject area there is more of a push for widening out opportunities for the pupils. One big change to the usual way of working is the removal of age and stage restrictions, by doing this pupils can take new subjects later in school that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, it also means that there are classes all operating at one lever but with different ages of pupils. By doing this there is now more space in the timetable so every Wednesday and Friday afternoon is open for different project activities that the pupils can choose.

I really enjoyed seeing all that was going on and wish I’d had more time there. I think there’s a lot we can all learn so if you haven’t already done so, go and subscribe to Ian’s blog or better still try to arrange a visit to see for yourself. Next session will be really interesting to read about as all the pupils should have their UMPCs, the second batch of which arrived while I was there.

Thanks for letting me come over Ian!

I’m not sure how but this has passed completely under my radar until today. BarCampScotland is happening in Edinburgh tomorrow, with an unsocial meet up at the Edinburgh rugby match tonight. I don’t think I can make it to either parts unfortunately, the timings just don’t match up with some other things I have to do this weekend.

It’s a real shame as there are a lot of people there who I’d like to meet and hear present, including Duncan Smeed who can justifiably claim to be my blogfather but I can look forward to seeing all the photos and slides appearing over the next few days.

[tags]barcampscotland[/tags]

I lent my desktop PC to my parents when theirs went belly up a while ago, shortly after that they managed to get mine to stop working too, so since I’ve been home I’ve been trying to get it back to some sort of useful working order for them again.
As well as all the hair-tearing moments there have been waiting for it to do things (one stick of memory died so it was fairly slow) I also managed to stick my thumb in the the CPU fan last night by not looking what I was doing. It could have been a lot worse though, it didn’t catch my nail or draw too much blood.

I recently heard about a school where they are missing their technician after he had a similar lapse of concentration and lost the end of his pinky. It makes me shudder to think about it. As teachers we are expected to be able to use all the machines in the technician’s store but we don’t really get the experience while at uni and even when out on school placement I’ve found that none of the teachers ever used the planer/thicknesser or the table saw.

Anyway, on that cheery note I’ll wish you all a Merry Christmas and I’ll be back in the New Year.

[tags]school, woodwork machines, CPU fan injury, Merry Christmas[/tags]

Ollie has just finished uploading his presentation from the SAGT conference - 50 Ideas in 50 Minutes. There’s some really good stuff in it that doesn’t just relate to geography teachers so it’s an excellent resource. It’s over on google video and he’s even gone to the trouble of putting it on veotag with chapters. I really like the photo of himself he’s used at the start - it makes it look like he’s got the biggest feet in the world!

I spent most of today putting together a short film I might use in school next week, I’ve been thinking about using something similar for my last ever crit in two weeks. I’ve said before but Camtasia is incredibly easy to use, the only barrier I faced was having to use a webcam to capture the video - it meant the quality isn’t great and setting up a way to hold the webcam on the scene was the nightmare in the photo here.

Anyway, go and watch it and let me know what you think, I’d really appreciate any feedback.

(Unfortunately the quality on this youtube version isn’t as good as the original but it gives a fair representation)

Graphic Communication, You Tube, Camtasia, Rendering

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.

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

I finally ordered a new power supply for my desktop which has been sitting unused for a few months, for only a few pounds I got myself a fancy new 350W (ooh, what power!) silent supply, if it had been cheaper I’d have been aswell just getting the noisy one though because of the noise of my CPU fan.
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