ChrisRyall

Adding a little bit of sparkle. The winning image is shown above.

Our computer network is currently being revamped by our network administrator and roving technician, and they are doing a fine job! And while trying not to get in the way, I’m involved in discussing exciting things like important features from a teaching & learning perspective, user agreements & policies, software we need to run, software we’d like to run… and the very major decision of which image we should use on the login screen and the desktop background!

Below are some options we considered, all of which are available to use under Creative Commons licenses. We also looked at some affordable stock images.

You can view a lightbox containing some more commercial images we considered.

Hate the images, love the images? You can leave a comment on this post to let me know!

This was going to be a post about the equipment a modern learner would carry to school, instead of the text books, pens, pencils, compasses, protractor, calculator, slide rule etc…

It was going to include things like mp3 player, camera, video camera, dictaphone, laptop, elctronic translator…

But of course as we all realise, it just needs to be a mobile phone!

Because they provide:

• digital camera
• video camera
• web access
• rss reader
• media player
• bluetooth connectivity
• file storage
• multimedia messaging
• voice recording
• runs java applications
• calculator
• calendar
• email

Lots more to say but it might have to wait for another day!

A great day with a consultant! (How many times does Google find that phrase “consultants are wonderful” compared with “consultants are a waste”?)

Phil Filer was very helpful – and encouraging, which surprised us! Despite having several thousand aspects (an aspect is a field which contains a particular set of data, for example KS3 English Level would be an aspect) and several hundred marksheets, we are making good use of SIMS! – it was certainly good to hear someone with a wealth of experience in supporting schools use of SIMS say that. Often we seem far more aware of where we can still improve rather than acknowledging our success in using SIMS for:

• attendance
• personnel
• finance
• recording positive rewards (yellow checks)
• recording particularly poor behaviour (red checks)
• collecting assessment data
• timetabling
• exam management
• organising cover
• planning events with the diary

Are next few planned improvements are:

• improving internal communication
• making information more easily available to parents and staff
• recording, monitoring and supporting students with SEN (including G&T)
• improving our reporting systems

Comparing those two lists, we could well be over half way there!

Anyway, today; we were encouraged by how much we can already do. It was particularly useful for our data manager who is rapidly getting a good understanding of how we can use SIMS better. Well done Kate!

One outcome was a draft copy of a new half termly progress check. Below are tries numbers 1 & 2. Thanks to Farlingaye for the inspiration!

Progress Check Draft 1

Progress Check Draft 2

Today was probably my last day of teaching DiDA! I can now start thinkning about the OCR Nationals!

No firm decisions yet.

It’s been a bit more hectic today, with a DiDA marking deadline to meet and suddenly some conscientious students to work with

One thing which has made my life a lot easier this last two weeks is, Simple Viewer, a new found free flash photo viewer – a great improvement on our previous solution SlideShowPro. It was fun while it lasted.

What Simple Viewer does:

• Stupidly easy way to make photo galleries for the Internet
• Uses Flash, to make it one step harder for pupils to download photos
• Automagically produces thumbnails for the galleries
• Makes customisable, light weight, standards compliant gallery pages

In short, what I can do, within a few minutes, with hardly any clicks is: take a folder of images within Picasa (a fab, free Google photo editor/manager), export them to a Simple Viewer gallery and upload to the school website.

THis takes a fraction of the time I’d been spending creating xml files by hand or teasing SlideShowPro Director to work for me. All that saved time I can spend on… well maybe I can now finish my reports

If you want to see it at work, visit our school website, register for an account and look for the Open Learning 2007 pages.

Thanks also to Rob Da Bank and Gilles Peterson for finding the tunes to help me through the day.