marlyn.moffat

I’d played about with it but didn’t know it was so easy till I went to Joe Moretti’s seminar. He showed me how to disregard the complicated bits and has tutorials and help on his website. So today I tried it out with my class of P3 , and lo, it took them ten minutes them to get it. If you want to try it out, I’d suggest the use of headphones. The results were terrific. The peer group told them what they thought would make it better and they went away and sorted it,then told me when they were ready for performance. I felt ineffectual doing inventing stuff in music previously, because it mostly was to do with percussion. Now we’re groovin’ and movin’. Ewan blogged about this great presentation more fully.

From the Edinburgh eTeam I learned that there is a tiny adaptor available for toys, lights, bubble makers, in fact anything that has a straight on/off switch, and runs from batteries, for children who can only access with their switch pad. Cause and effect technology for children with special needs. Costs £7 from Granada Learning.

It only seems to crop up at this time of year. Reporting! It’s as well that our format does it as you go! Save! But do you make a backup, somewhere else? The hard drive in the staffroom is there for that very purpose. A teacher had almost finished 29 reports and her computer which had been playing up, previously, though she had not notified, and continued to use, despite its erratic behaviour, crashed and gave up the ghost, big time. (A white screen with blue strips.) It would not shut down or, after the removal and replacement of the battery, start up independently. Because of the screen it was impossible to tell if it had started up from a system disk. It did start up holding down T, while linked to another with a firewire cable, so her work folder and her reports were retrieved, but the reports were corrupt, presumably because she was working on them at the time of the crash. I copied them to a couple of other machines and got the same message and was instructed to use ‘recover’, but that was not an option. So I dashed down to Springbank Distillery and borrowed their copy of File Salvage, but that didn’t work. It recovered the damaged file.

Then the ‘Eureka’ moment. What if there were other options on the Filemaker menus in the full version of Filemaker? Open it from within Filemaker, put in on my old Masterclass machine? And lo there were! The magic word ‘Recover’. Result! One thankful teacher who had spent over 25 hours, working, but did not value her work enough to back it up, till it was apparently lost! And all would have been totally lost if the format created in Filemaker had not been saving for her already. I explained to her, it was not me she should be thanking, but the person who introduced me to Filemaker. I should have thought of trying that first!

So reports…Backup… backup ..backup and don’t dare moan if you don’t, and something goes wrong! Set your programmes to save every five minutes and save some grief. This teacher was lucky that the format she was working on did it for her.
Hey, we’ve all been there!

Was over at Dalintober tonight, for a CPD session on Activote Pods. The staff liked the formative assessment tool that is the Excel spreadsheet, which is generated, after a flipchart session, but they don’t have Office on their machines, so it was decided that to get it was a priority, and the head agreed. Left them some of my own charts to use and showed them how to find the shared ones, already there, and gave them promethean planet login instructions to acquire more. We made a few quickly, too, but no need to invent the wheel really. As always the comment is that when there is all that material out there, they would like to be given more time to explore what already exists.

I was out at Drumlemble on Friday, for the preview of their Art Exhibition, which was the culmination of their Rich Task. The red room was very red. The art work was red, too. The masks were inspired by their visit to the Museum of Modern Art. The invited guests were highly impressed, by the huge variety of styles in the other rooms, and that was reflected in the number of ’sold’ stickers. The exhibition ran Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The children were allowed to explore their entrepreneurial sides, selling the artwork, dispensing teas and yummy home baking.

I’ve been helping out there for a few years now and I really enjoy the way in which both staff and pupils take things on board, and take them forward. I had a camera crew of 2 terrific P7’s and was back out yesterday, in my McCrone time to show the P6/7’s how to edit their films and create titles in imovie and iDVD. They were designing the CD labels and covers today.

A well rounded, satisfyingly complete, project, enthusiastically executed, that exemplified all the best potential of the Curriculum for Excellence. I’ve been very pleased to have been involved in bringing the seamlessly integrated ICT, which, as anyone who knows me will recognise as my warcry. Their blog details much of what they have been doing to get to this point.

From their recent windfall, Dalintober Primary got a set of Activote pods, at a great price.

List was nearly £3000, but their set of 32 was only £1200. Their Head Teacher has some negotiating power, eh? Anyway, I was over there today, in my McCrone time, to get their pods registered on one computer, ready for a session on their use in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, their ceiling mounted projector has had a nasty bump, presumably from the electricians fitting new lights and is now projecting mostly onto the ceiling. However they have a mobile setup ( a bit wobbly and becomes decalibrated readily, if that’s a word, even with the brakes on the trolley) in a room which contains a Smartboard also. They are not being used as much as I would have hoped after the last CPD session. But… having learned from our own situation….. Our new Smartboards were fitted last week on the classroom walls and projectors were ceiling mounted, have been in use every day since, and I am regailed at break and lunch with enthusiastic discoveries from the teachers. Our Promethean board is also wall mounted and has been voluntarily, fully timetabled. So the connecting of the cables and setting it up, seems to be the deciding factor in whether or not they are used. Maybe the secondary folk who left the Promethean course saying they did not need to learn how to connect it had a wee teeny point. Though I did suggest to them that it might be a good idea to know where all the bits go, should for example a cleaner pull out a lead, they disagreed and said that they would call for a technician. I wonder what their classes would be doing while they waited. In the primary sector we can just envy that luxury. South of the border, where I ventured recently, it seems that all the bigger primaries have a technician on site and the smaller ones share one. Oh and the school ICT co-ordinators have that as their main focus and quite often it’s a full time job, in a promoted post. So the class teachers can get on with their work of using the technology. Eutopia?

Our technicians do amazing things given the geographics of our area, but I am beginning to recognise that staff need support, in that realm, at an intermediate and sometimes basic level, that is well beneath the technician’s skills. If we could free them up from that level of work, they could have more time to make a difference in their overall function. I wonder if Andrew will lend me his soapbox?