Sunday, January 29, 2006

Collaboration and influence

I've been working with our Craft instructor to amend some Access 3 Craft and Design National Assessment items. We have grabbed time here and there, although the pleasing thing is that he now has the knowledge and skills to complete this task himself, and to put his own ideas into practice.

The Science teacher came to see me during one of my now regular ICT 'drop in' sessions. Within the hour, we had reviewed The Naked Scientist podcast; considered possible uses of podcasting re: assessment of his pupils; and enabled him to set up his own blog! He sees the possibilities from blogging in terms of being a reflective practitioner (who is aiming for Chartered Teacher status), and promoting the discussion of eco-awareness in schools (eg EcoSchools).

I am now looking at the power of wikis, particularly after an experience last week. One of the managers was browsing our 'Rewards Scheme' (a 3-year old initiative to 'promote positive behaviour'). He noticed an anomaly in the Excel file (hosted on our network), and made a change. He informed me that he had made the change, and we discussed the appropriateness of this (it was brilliant, and saved me some work!). I will now use my own wiki to collaboratively plan work with external agencies (see podcasting project).

One of the steering group now runs a very healthily attended after-school music club. This is raising interest in advance of resourcing the FLaT room. Two boys who are due to leave soon (and therefore will miss out on using the resource) are keen to record some songs using the laptop and Audacity.

A photo of the finished FLaT room should be posted next week.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Podcasting Reflections #2

Click here to listen to my second weekly podcast. The next one will be on Friday, 3rd February. You can access the series at iTunes by clicking here.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Podcast project - Podcasting Reflection #1

Click on the title to listen to my first podcast series, where I talk about useful Podcasts, tools, and my offshoot project - introducing podcasting into the classroom. You can subscribe by copying the following link into your 'podcatcher' - http://booruch.libsyn.com/rss. The blog is at http://booruch.libsyn.com.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Issues arising from meeting on Monday, 16th January


We are nearly ready to start resourcing the FLaT room. There is going to be a cross-over in resources between the FLaT project and the Podcasting project. Over the next 2 weeks we are going to research and discuss the following. Please help if you can!

* should we buy a class set of iPod (Shuffles?) or MP3 players?
* do we need to invest in GarageBand AND Cubase?
* following the MacWorld announcements, do we an ibook G4 or an imac?
* would a Mac connect with our PC network, and our internet connection?
* is there a place for an iPod Video player in the classroom?

The Independent Living programme has been relaunched, and is being delivered to the S3 group. So far the education/care team joint planning and delivery is working. I think the difference is mainly down to greater management overview and co-ordination. It appears that we may have finally found a model which successfully extends the working week.

Pupils in Class 2 are now choosing for Podcasts to be part of certain areas of PSE and RMPS lessons. There is now a lot of completed pupil work in Art and Craft. This means that within the next month pupils can start to use Media Stage to create 'virtual galleries' of their work. Our Science teacher has received some input on podcasting and is interested (like myself) in the idea of pupils using mp3 technology to record, for example, experiment results (assessment), with the potential to send the file for possible inclusion in a Science podcast (eg The Naked Scientists).

Two more staff have commenced ICT training.