Posted on Jun 28, 2007

Job with no name: Day 19: The Day the Department Shrunk

Thanks to Craig for the title! Mad frantic day today, not quite enough of us to do anything more useful than teach. Is there anything more useful than teaching? Good news was loads of contact with a whole range of students, al of whom enjoyed an incredibly enjoyable ICT enabled learning experience! In particular, we planned & made & reviewed loads of great animations using Fireworks & Flash. Great fun, I’m very luck to work with some very talented and some very enthusiastic pupils. (If I remember I’ll add a small sample here later, my favourite was Matthew’s chicken!)

Posted on Jun 27, 2007

Job with no name: Day 18: Software List

Start - Bergius

Started thinking about the minimum vs desirable list of software which we’d like distributed to all machines when our network is un RM’d from September. All contributions very welcome, please use the comments link at the top of this post.

This list is of course incomplete! – and I’ve been lazy and not included links, but Google should be able to help you :)

Minimum

Multimedia Creation & Editing

  • Audacity
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
  • Adobe Flash
  • Adobe Fireworks
  • Adobe Freehand
  • PhotoStory
  • Windows Movie Maker
  • Pinnacle Studio

Multimedia Players

  • Windows Media Player
  • Flash Player
  • Shockwave Player
  • Adobe Reader
  • Real Player
  • Quicktime
  • Java Runtime
  • .net Framework

Utilities

  • Canon Scangear & Drivers
  • Super Encoder
  • PDF Creator
  • InfraRecorder
  • Wink

Office

  • Microsoft Word
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Microsoft Access
  • Microsoft Publisher
  • Microsoft Project

Subject Specific

  • Key Stage 3 ICT Assessment Software

Staff

  • SIMS.net
  • Aim High
  • CSF Software (10QQ, TPIM, Wordsearch Maker, Pair Them Up, Millionaire, Countdown…)

Maybe - things we might get rid of?

  • Outlook
  • Paint Shop Pro
  • Corel Suite

Possibly Desirable - but we don’t use yet

  • Google Earth
  • Scratch
  • Irfan Viewer
  • Paint.net
  • Rename-it
  • Flickr Uploader
  • Picasa
  • Open Office
  • Firefox
  • Flock
  • Filezilla
  • Pidgin
  • SketchUp
  • VLC Media Player
  • iTunes
  • Riva FLV Encoder
  • Gimp
  • Stellarium
  • WorkRave :)
  • Google Desktop
  • Adobe Premiere – costs money!

Posted on Jun 26, 2007

Job with no name: Day 17: Teaching Time

Paper Numbers

Looked at some numbers for teaching time for each of our courses, started planning out which units may make a good combination for OCR Nationals. My scribbles made sense to me – once I’ve tidied it all a little so it makes sense to more than just me I’ll finish this post.

Posted on Jun 25, 2007

Job with no name: Day 16: Feed Me

RSS Mmmmmm

Feed me! A bit of time over the weekend to catch up on thousands of unread RSS feeds. I’m hooked. The best (most efficient, cost effective, quickest, most up to date, participatory, and addcitive) way for me to learn seems to be an hour of RSS feeds a day!

Unofrtunately for the last month my output has been exceeding my input. So I’ve just enjoyed a couple of hours catching up on what has been happening across the learning world.

For a quick guide to RSS (Really SImple Syndication) see this great video introduction.

Now you hopefully know what RSS is, you can have a quick look at the learning blogs I try to keep up with.

OPML - a list of feeds

If you’d like to plug these into your own  RSS Reader you can download  my OPML to import. OPML is just a nice way to make hierarchical lists, so great for listing my RSS feeds to share with you.

My RSS subscriptions relating to Teaching

All my RSS subscriptions (includes topics of God, Life, Teaching & Technology)

(For very good reasons you’ll need to change the file extension from .txt to .xml before importing into your own RSS Reader.)

Finally, it took me a while to find one that works, but here is a lovely little utility to turn OPML into gorgeous HTML.

Posted on Jun 22, 2007

Job with no name: Day 15: Guiding for Parents

GCUS Guides

Very simple. Maybe the length of my blog posts are inversely proportional to the amount of work I get done each day :)

Moodle is a course management system, not a content management system . As such we are are always investigating better ways to use it as our main school website. Our reasoning being:

  1. Only one site to manage users for
  2. Only one site for users to become familiar with
  3. Only one site for me to worry about/screw up

The latest idea is for 3 guides (Moodle calls them glossary), where we will store useful information. The advantage of suing a glossary, ratehr than making individual resources is that the glossary will index and categiorise them making the organisation simpler.

To this end, I’ve created two guides and trained two members of staff to add content. One guide for our sixth form students and one for parents and students in years 9 to 11. Coming soon, hopefully, is a guide for staff.

These guides should prove to be

  • East to add to
  • Easy to organise
  • Easy to locate content within

Deteriorating rapidly, my senetence structure is. Must be time to go!