foolfillment: the blog

Last night I talked about alternative tasks for pupils in Craft and Design. I’ve blogged about this before but I want to just pool the three things I mentioned here so they can get aggregated with all the other TeachMeetBorders stuff.

I have a pupil who has been unable to work because he’s been in a sling. He couldn’t draw or write, but he was able to use his left han to control a computer mouse. While the rest of his class were sketching out designs for a wooden box, he was busy drawing the box on the computer, using Autodesk Inventor. He came up with something that looked a little like this:

Then when the class wre in the workshop making their boxes, again he was unable to do this so I gave him a camera and set him the task of documenting the different stages in the manufacture. He was going to put it all together into a ComicLife strip, and hopefully a short Animoto video. Unfortunately he has been absent again and hasn’t had the opportunity to complete these tasks, so I’ve done some examples of the sort of thing he could get done:

ComicLife strips:

Animoto video:

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?