On Wednesday afternoon I took some primary 3 children over to the local nursery. Our mission was to show them how to use their recently acquired portable Promethean board. The primary 3 children were amazing in their interaction with the wee tots. They altered their language to a level that the tots understood. They showed them some of the tools on the board, and how to play with Musical monsters. One wee chap, after a moment or two said “I knew I’d be good at that!” Aged 3…and do you know he was…..confident little individual. Curriculum for excellence not necessarily required there eh? 
Other tots drew on the board, handling the stylus in a way they can’t ordinarily handle a pencil. My wee peeps felt great about themselves and the nursery children took their input readily. Nothing held any fears for them. Ducks to water!!
Archive for the 'Technical help' Category
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.
Thanks to Graham Dickie today. Askimet the plugin for Wordpress, just click on Plugins from your dashboard, to be led throught it, stops the spam right enough. 161 spams on this blog were picked up. 4 from the time where I activated it till I checked the blog 15 minutes later. I’d been told about it before, but hadn’t done anything about it.
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!
Try some text first.
when things are small enough to fit in your handbag? My first connection with a computer was in 1970, when I spent two days placing pixel by pixel, a yellow line into the Commonwealth tartan at Gallowshield’s college of technology and two whole rooms of electronics stuff ( think of the old Bond films) whirred into action for about 5 minutes with every click. Then looms whirred into activity and produced fabric quicker than the design had been created. So engineering was faster than electronics in those days. Look out for my input at the Commonwealth Games!
So, on Friday, I received, this little baby. Neat wee mic and speaker. Children will relate to this.
I
I’m not sure I know enough about how to use it for the things I believe it could have a real purpose, but I know a man who can help. And yes! I have found a tutorial online, but I printed it, to have it small enough to have in my handbag too! ( Beside my ebeam)
50 minutes of the whirling beachball of doom, till I could stand it no more, on a brand new machine. Then force quit wouldn’t work either, so resorted to force restart. Thought I must let it run. So here goes again.
Regular readers might notice that the theme of this blog has been altered today. It wisnae me! My blogroll is absent, too. Now peculiarly, changing the theme back and editing the blogroll, and tweaking some bits, was something I intended to do, this very night, having been using another, to rule out the possibility that the original theme had somehow become corrupted last October, which was one suggestion I had been given, when trawling for help. Again readers will know all about that. So at the weekend, having had the same problems again, with the second theme, it seemed sensible to revert, since I am now using another machine, and didn’t appear to be having the serious but intermittent problem, that was evident previously. (This all having been detailed in previous postings.) I have to say, it’s really quite difficult to take ownership, and keep trying to prepare for things going wrong, as Andrew suggested, ( I keep picking his brains when they have already gone wrong.) and then things like this happen. 
Recent Comments