Category Archives: Blog Hub

Session over

Class in a box box

Although I am ready for my holidays rather a lot of interesting things have appeared on the horizon in the last couple of weeks.
On the software front I finally got round to using scratch with the children, samorost is inviting and we tried out slideshare. As usual I underestimated the amount of time I’d have to teach in the last couple of weeks of term and suddenly we have no time left!

A couple of weeks ago our pcs were refreshed and this should really make a big difference to using ict in the school, the old ones were getting really slow. At the start of this week I had another flurry of excitement when our class in a box box arrived, the laptops to go with it have not got here yet but hopefully this is going to be a great resource to use ict flexibly across the curriculum next session.

My job next year is going to be rather different than what I’ve been doing this year.

This year I’ve been teaching with ict across the stages using our new media room, unfortunately for me this didn’t really work out as planned, term one the suite was not ready, term 2 went as planned, but staff leaving and a lot of staff absences kept me in class most of term 3, term 4 saw the switch from the mitel managed service to dell and put our network out of action for 4 or 5 weeks.
From my point of view this has been pretty disappointing.

Next session or staffing number change for the worse and I’ll be changing roll.
It looks like I will be spending a fair amount of time on Emotional Literacy, working with children who have problems in this and other areas of their learning. Pretty challenging, especially as a lot of the things I’ve been doing over the last few years have worked best with our more confident and motivated learners, how much blogging, dv, podcasting I will be involved in is in question I think.
I’d be really interested in anyone who has experience in these areas passing on ideas and tips, especially ones involving ict and Web 2.0

I am also looking for a wee summer project, hopefully involving being paid for something I enjoy (edu, blogs, html etc) again ideas gratefully received.

I will be continuing to blog a bit over the holidays as I have a few things to think about that I’ve not had time for.

Have a great summer

    Playing with Hackasaurus and popcorn

    Popcorn Hackasaurus

    Yesterday I heard a few intriguing boos from Mozilla Festival by Doug Belshaw and Leon Cychwhich sent me on a day trip round the internet. I discovered:

    Hackasaurus makes it easy to mash up and change any web page like magic. You can also create your own webpages to share with your friends, all within your browser. for which there is an educators guide and even a lesson plan.

    and:

    Popcorn.js is an HTML5 media framework written in JavaScript for filmmakers, web developers, and anyone who wants to create time-based interactive media on the web. Popcorn.js is part of Mozilla’s Popcorn project.

    among a host of other interesting things. Rather than blog about it I used these tools to create somethings:

    A spoof 2015 BBC News – X-RAY GoGGLES improves pupils performance in exams

    Playing with hackasaurus and popcorn

    I think that hackasaurus in particular could be very useful in the classroom. Popcorn gives us a way to make complex media projects in particular HyperVidio and HyperAudio which act in the same way as HyperText. I’d love some feedeback on this stuff, if you think it could work in your classroom?

      Edutalk at Teachmeet Strathclyde

      Edutalk fist

      Last night I went along to Teachmeet Strathclyde at Jordanhill college, I had signed up a couple of days before and stuck my name down to talk about edutalk.cc.

      I noticed there were nearly 70 folk signed up and quite a crowd was gathered eating cupcakes when I arrived. This was the first TeachMeet I’d attended when I had not really though much about it or had any involvement with before hand. The participants were mostly students which gave the meet a slightly different energy, slightly more formal and organised than some TeachMeets, the crowd was quietly energetic and motivated.

      A couple of the usual suspects were in attendance but I didn’t know the vast majority of attendees.

      As usual for teachmeets the presentations were all interesting, with lots of things I either nodded to or was completely surprised by. The compare Paul Campbell kept everything running smoothly.

      I was nice to have a round table break in the middle, I went to a Games Based learning table organised by Morven Skinnder, Jen Deyenberg was in the group and has extensive experience in gbl. I suspect learning in Jen’s infant class would be wonderful with or without the high tech additions as I can’t imagine an object or situation she could not animate with learning.

      I’ll not go into details of the different presentations or the round table as I am currently chopping up the audio recording I took and posting to Edutalk I had my two minutes talking about Edutalk, should have done 7 as I expect that most folk went huh; without the chance to listen, or see a demo. I am quite pleased with the slide though.

      Edutalk is fairly pushing out the episodes at the moment, with the purpos/ed crew adding one a day for their #purposedfutured campaign and the audio from TMLothians11 – TeachMeet Lothians & Borders 2011 which I am (with permission) reposting on Edutalk.

      There is still plenty of room for move voices on Edutalk, see the How to EDUtalk to find out how easy it is to join in.

      My photos from Teachmeet Strathclyde on my John’s posterous site and there is a Teachmeet strathclyde Edition – Stuff from the strathclyde Teachmeet posterous waiting to be filled up.

        Open UBC Snapshots: OER Adoption on the Rise

        Thanks to the amazing faculty and students, there’s a lot of open educational activities happening at UBC. In an attempt to quantify and explore some of the trends, I, along with some of my colleagues, have tried to dig into some of the nitty gritty details in a new resource published at open.ubc.ca that I’m calling Open UBC Snapshots.

        This first Snapshot attempts to look at how open resources are replacing traditional textbooks and what we found is that the number of UBC students impacted by open resources has doubled in 2016 compared to 2015. A large driver of this trend is the great faculty in the Math Department, who have replaced textbooks with open resources in all first year and most second year courses.

        In trying to quantify OER adoptions, it quickly became apparent that much of it is happening below the radar and we’ve tried our best to surface and verify OER adoptions. Largely, there is no real radar for how and which educational resources are used and I suspect that we’ll have missed some very important open practices. If you know of any open resource adoptions at UBC that do not seem to be reflected in the Snapshot, please let me know so we can be as accurate as possible. In the next Snapshot, we’ll move away from resources and examine some of the open practices have long been adopted or are emerging.

        You can check our first Snapshot here: Open UBC Snapshots: Textbook Displacements by Open Resources