Tag Archives: blogging

Three years ago I noticed a Strange ‘Game’, (the game is no longer at the url links from that post).
I played the game for a few minutes and got nowhere, it looked lovely so I just linkdumped it for my class and forgot about it.
Recently I’ve saw mention of it (on KimP’s Blog and Ewan’s) so I looked again. It still looked cool and I still got not very far.
This afternoon, I was delaying going to music (my least favourite bit of the curriculum) so I fired up Samorost on to the wall and gathered the children round.
They had a ball, giving me advice and solving the puzzles to work through the game. As a class they took about the same time as Ewan and a lot faster than Derek

I realise that there are lot of areas (as well as music) that I don’t get. I recall getting the first version of Myst along with HyperCard 2.3 and not getting that at all, I spent a wee bit of time wandering in an aimless fashion then a good deal more time gently hacking into the game to check out it’s Hypercard roots.

Anyway there is not much time left this session and we are getting a refresh of hardware tomorrow which might slow thing up, but I hope to get my class to follow the AllStars progress using Samorost and perhaps replicate some of their activities> I might get to see what I can get out of this type of gaming. Moving a little way out of my comfort zone.

(Note to self Samorost2, thanks Ewan).

technorati: games literacy blogging samorost

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

I’ve had a half finished draft post about Blogging Bootcamp in the works since the bootcamp finished. I still hope to finish it but thought I used the excuse of the Teaching with WordPress course to post this shortish screencast.
I’ve also got a huge post about the 5Rs presentation I bungled at teachmeetGLA this week which will fit in nicely with #TWP15 too. Perhaps I’ll chop that up and post wee bit as it is getting out of control.

Fools rush in, foolish fools sign up at the last minute.

I’ve just signed up for Teaching with WordPress

This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:

• open education, open pedagogy and design
• WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
• examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
• plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other

Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.

If I get through 10% of the above I’ll be doing well. The course is organised by Christina Hendricks who I’ve met on etmooc and ds106.
I’ve not started a new blog for the course as I hope anything I post will be relevant to this blog (which I hope focuses on learning).

The course is obviously based in higher ed, but I’ve learnt a lot fro reading HE blogs over the past few years and I don’t think there are any of the learning objective that are not applicable to primary and secondary education.

The course has a Blog Hub where hopefully my post categorised as teachingWP will end up. (this aggregation of learners blogs to a course hub is something I am very excited about, having seen it in action a few times. I recently ran a 10 week blogging bootcamp for Scottish schools using the same technique.

A Brief Introduction

For anyone who ended up here from a #twp15 tweet or the blog hub.

I am a primary teacher by trade, currently working as an ict staff development officer in North Lanarkshire (121 primaries) and seconded to the Scottish Government as a product owner for Glow Blogs.

Glow blogs is a blogging system for Scottish schools. it consists of 33 instances of WordPress. More information on glow blogs on the Help Blog. I guess one of my goals for this course is to improve that help site.

I started blogging with my pupils in Sandaig Primary on Sandaig otters in 2004 using pivot (not wordpress), and organised various other blogs.

This blog started off on pivot in 2005 and I move to WordPress last year, although I used WP elsewhere for several sites. Two of the more interesting ones being ScotEdublogs, an aggregation of Scots Educational Blogs and Edutalk. I have a DS106 blog, the 106 drop in.

My main technical excitements about blogging are RSS and syndication/aggregation. I am interested in giving pupils purpose through audience.

Now we will see if this gets to the mothership.