Learning, Teaching and ICT

Today I went (back) along to Carronshore because Primary 5L/W were interviewing some visitors from a local Asda store that’s due to open soon nearby. I suggested to Miss Law that it might be a good idea to use the new Animoto for Education website to produce a video of the event. Unfortunately, we discovered that we couldn’t upload the mp3 file of the interview because we worked out that Animoto needs a music file so that the cool effects can happen to the uploaded images.

Eventually we used Photostory 3 to produce a video podcast of the event. A few minutes were spent uploading this to photobucket. The results can now be seen on the Primary 5L/W blog.

It was frustrating not being able to upload the children’s voices to the Animoto ’show’- having randomly chosen music accompanying the pictures wouldn’t have had the same effect.

Later this evening, however, I thought about a lovely moment last session when we ‘recorded’ the children in Primary 7V reading their own storybooks to the Primary 2 children in the school. I’ve included it here. The photographs were uploaded to One True Media and a soundrack was added. There’s obvious pride in the older children’s faces as they read their stories ….. and the younger children appear to be a captive audience

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I’m constantly updating my diary with school visits, twighlight courses, meetings … even a trip to BETT (should I choose to!).

Cool tools like myPlick      Photobucket       Slideshare    and     Animoto    are all on the agenda.

What’s important, though, is that learning is at the heart of all the fun.

 Sharon’s  great project  Voices of the World  is a perfect example of this. At Carronshore last session we had heaps of fun being part of it all, and we hardly noticed that we were learning along the way

Talking of fun while learning

 …. all of the Primary 7’s interviewed their parents last session so that they could write about their early years (as part of an autobiography). They each took home an mp3 recorder so that they could find someone at home who could answer the questions they had devised about their earlier years.

Bethany made use of her experience of using vokis in class to produce this wonderful interview with her mum – enjoy

It was a busy week last week, but I think that things are set to become even more busy in the near future. The first ICT Support Team meeting of the session takes place tomorrow at 9 am. We’ll be joined at 11 am by the ICT Support Engineers. The agenda has been emailed to all concerned. I have some general ideas about the Falkirk VTC site. I’ll bring these up at the meeting tomorrow – more on that later.

Later in the day, I’ll be paying a visit to Cassie at Carronshore Primary … it’ll be nice to catch up with all the staff there, too:) I’ve arranged the visit because Cassie has been asked if her class will interview representatives from a new Asda store due to open up nearby soon. The interview is set for Thursday. Primary 7V interviewed a variety of visitors and the technique of asking good questions was stressed(brainstorming open-ended questions, role-play in small groups, feedback of findings, etc.)

When it comes to the actual interview, there’s decisions to make about what format it should take. It may be a simple podcast using Audacity to convert to an mp3 file, a video can be created using a digital video camera … or it may be that some children take photographs of the event while others conduct the interview using an mp3 recording device. (i’ve just received an email from the people at Animoto to say that I’ve been successful in my Animoto For Education application – this might be the ideal choice!)

I suppose the strangest thing about my new post is not having a class to test out all the new cool web 2.0 tools that keep popping up. Go Animate has been discussed a few times in the scodedublogs feed. Malcolm (one of my new colleagues) and I looked at it on Friday and were both suitably impressed. It was agreed that later on in the session a ’special events’ evening should be arranged to showcase the potential some of these tools have for improving learning and teaching ……  but what we needed was a teacher with a class to try one out. I contacted Cassie when I returned home from work and she is more than happy to try out Go Animate with her class and has agreed to share her experience of using it by coming along to the special events evening to reveal any improvements made to literacy as a result.

I really didn’t mean to leave it so long before writing this 2nd ‘new job’ post – hopefully, I’ll get more organised soon  

 picture by Brian Vass – Tofino sunset

Well … I survived my first day. In fact it was quite pleasant

 My diary is filling up and my new phone with the much needed ’sat-nav’ facillity is very much appreciated – and needed :

(my lack of sense of direction has been the topic of many a Carronshore staffroom ‘chuckle’).

Good luck tomorrow to the new primary 5L/W, and to the new Ist and 2nd year Larbert High pupils!!

More soon  ….. 

I’ve changed my blog theme and my blog title ….. and I’m thinking about my new secondment that I’ll start tomorrow.

I’m not the only one making a fresh start tomorrow. Miss Law included a great post about her thoughts on moving on from a student teacher to a probationer …. thanks for the lovely comments, Miss L

Primary 5L/W are lucky to be getting a new teacher who is very enthusiastic and genuinely excited at the prospect of helping them to enjoy their learning experience.

And, of course, last sessions Primary 7’s are all geared up for their new adventures at Larbert High

I hope that at least some of them continue to post to their blogs ……. and wikis.

Bethany’s last words to me in Primary 7 were that I should keep an eye on her pbwiki, because she intended to update it over the summer. Click on her weemee below to view the revisions she’s made to her stories – the most recent was just 4 days ago. I hope she keeps it up because I love reading her adventurous stories – and her awareness of audience is very apparent

Bethany’s PBwiki revisions can be viewed by clicking on her weeme here :   

I had trouble recently with receiving comments on this blog. I left a message in the help forums and noticed a post about ‘edublogstv’. It’s possible to transfer videos from Youtube, etc. over to edublogstv – great for getting around blocked access at school. There are teething problems, however, because it appears that only one video can be uploaded to a blog’s homepage … previous edublogtv videos then disappear. Hopefully they’ll find a way around this soon

Meanwhile, here’s an example. I’ve seen this somewhere on the blogosphere, but on Youtube (I’ll need to pop the code in, then ‘publish’ right away for it to work. As I can’t ‘preview’ it first … fingers crossed!)

 This post was partly inspired by Ferghal  who has just completed module 1 of the Chartered Teacher course (well done!). In his post, he wrote:
I’m hoping that as my confidence grows, I will be able to post my assignments online before submission and make use of this community.

I really wish that I had done just that with all my modules, too. Blogging about the final dissertation stage and receiving words of encouragement – or maybe just the occassional comment from others online was definately very benificial to me. Even just writing for a potential audience forced me to focus more on the different chapters. Rather than leaving loads of unfinished drafts, I felt the need to ‘tidy’ them up a bit before submitting them to the ‘world’.

David left a comment on Ferghal’s post to congratulate him and to ask what his next plans were. He mentioned ‘double modules’. I only heard of this option recently. Stirling are allowing the choice of completing the Chartered Teacher pathway in 3 years by opting to write double the amount of words on half the amount of modules (or so I’ve been told?)

 With the UWS route, I completed  four core modules at Post graduate certificate level:

Reflective Practice: Critical Self-evaluation and Development
(Module 1, Self-Evaluation)
Effective Teaching for Effective Learning
(Module 2, Learning and Teaching)
Equality and Diversity in Education
(Module 3, Education for All)
Essential Personal Communication
(Module 4, Working Together)

Followed by 4 Option Modules. The modules I chose were:

Teaching and Learning of Core Skills: Numeracy
Developing Cognitive Flexibility
Mentoring and Supporting Students, Probationers and Colleagues
Introducing eLearning, eTeaching and eAssessment

Each of these modules had to contain between 3 to 4000 words (I think it started out as 3000, but as the course progressed the ‘wordage’ crept up to 4000). It took 4 years to complete these eight modules. I then had the choice of undertaking 2 smaller dissertations (10-15000 words) over 2 years, or one larger dissertation (20-25000 words) over 1 year. I chose the larger dissertation over 1 year.

When I began the CT journey, there was no option to complete the course by doing double modules. I’m glad I completed all 8 core and option modules because I learned so much about so many different topics. If the Stirling option had been available, would I have chosen it ….. probably     

(although the cost would have been an issue – presumably the double modules cost double the money, meaning an outlay of around £2000 a year instead of £1000?)

Ferghal also shared his essay via scribd (I tried to leave a comment on his blog explaining how to embed it in to edubuzz, but I linked it to the carronshore blog by mistake. I’m not sure what happened but it seems that some comments appear right away and some require moderation??)

Anyway, if anyone wants a VERY long read, here’s my dissertation