foolfillment: the blog

Having posted a week or so ago about trying to get my 4th years to be a bit more creative, my efforts have come around to bite me.

With Standard Grades being sat at the end of 3rd year at Ross High it gives us a whole 2 years to cover the higher courses. So far this is showing some good and some bad points. One of the good things to come out of it in the CDT department is the chance to overhaul the structure of some courses. In Product Design for instance we are giving the pupils the chance to be a lot more hands on and to actually make some of the things they design. This is great because the pupils get to see their designs right through from brief to manufacture and evaluation, it also makes sure they have to take the development of ideas through its full cycle and leave no details uncertain.

However that is causing some small headaches. The project they are currently working on is to design a promotional radio. The pupils are to design the radio and then create a pattern around which plastic will be vacuum formed, then they wire up a radio kit and mount it inside their plastic shell.

The class have come up with some really creative forms, the trouble is finding a way to create the pattern that the plastic will be formed around. The original idea had been that the form of the radios would be simple extruded shapes, and we’d be able to make the pattern from some timber or MDF – no such luck, I’ve tried to put together a rough model of one idea, I’ve probably simplified it:

This afternoon I posted this image on pownce asking for any advice on how to make it and Ian quickly came up with some good ideas. Of course that is exactly the sort of conversation that the pupils could have benefited from being involved in or even better, leading – my task is to get them set up on pownce sometime in the next fortnight or so.

The link above to my pownce post won’t work unless you have an account and are marked as my friend, but I have invites left if you want one.

In between enjoying all the fabulous weather we’ve had this summer I’ve had a few ideas spinning through my mind about what I want to try doing next year along with all the emotions that come with starting a job like this one.

One of the things I’ve been trying to work out is how I can best use some online tools next year, much of this will all work itself out when I start and I find out just how much time I have and what services are available in school. What I’m looking at though is using Pownce a lot. If you’ve not had a look yet and want to know what it is that I’m banging on about then I’ve got an extra 6 invitations. Leave a comment if you want one.

What I’m quite excited about is the ability to create groups of people/friends – I want to use this to collect all my classes together then find a way to carry out their course. The ease in which you can send messages to groups means that I am certain that this is a really cool way of getting some peer assessment going, as well as simple sharing of files appropriate to that day/week’s lesson.

Another of the benefits I think it will have is that there is no need to post long messages, something I think will appeal to the pupils, and will make managing time more easy.

What I’m looking at doing is running my presentation class for Craft and Design with a little pownce work throughout. As they progress through the different stages of their folio they will be required to post various work online – thoughts, links, items of work – and also to spend time looking at the things that their classmates have done and replying to them. Peer assessment if you will, but more than that using other people’s opinions/preferences/ideas to refine their designs.

There’s so many possibilities, I’m pretty excited about it, much more so than I was about twitter. My enthusiasm has brought out a side of me I thought I’d managed to suppress for a while – my need to constantly redesign. Those of you who read this on the site itself and not in a browser will see I’ve added pownce to my sidebar, I think I’ll use this to add shorted posts that don’t warrant a whole post on the main blog, so if you want you can subscribe to the feed.

I’ve got a few other ideas I’m trying to work out in my head. Do you have anything to offer?

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.