marlyn.moffat

I heard about it at Teachmeet, the unconference after the e live Conference in Edinburgh and have played about with it, creating characters to give the children some amusement and occasionally instruction and tried to place a wee demonstration here but couldn’t embed it at all. It likes blogger though, so I left a demonstration on my old blog . ( Tongue firmly in the cheek) Like almost everything else there are educational possibilities. Thus far I can at least see how attention grabbing it has been for the children, and no harm has befallen them. The sound recording is slightly bitty, but there is potential for the children to do their own writing, characterisation and soundtracks. Best of all the firewall lets it happen!

It was two days of learning. By the end of it you just can’t absorb any more. I went to hear about some good stuff. Talked to some knowledgeable people, particularly at the Teachmeet unconference, found out what some companies can do in terms of cost for schools when the authority is prepared to support. But the saddest thing was, I was all fired up to get the biz where AIfL meets Curriculum for Excellence and ended up having both of them explained to me. I know about both. What I was hoping for was to find the meeting place, and what might help in the classroom. What I didn’t want to do was to fill in 10 questions at the end of a seminar that had already over run, with the people sitting next to me and suggest ways I could use in my classroom. That, it seems is the problem that many thinking class teachers have. They want to know they are doing the right thing, but don’t know what is going to be perceived as the right thing. They, like me, were waiting for someone to tell them. AifL without some of the buzzwords has always been my modus operandi. Curriculum for Excellence and wider thinking in terms of planning I have done for years and caused grief to my head teacher, when it was not popular with the powers that be, but she is now cool with it, ‘cos it’s ok for me to be a thinking professional, now. I just wish that presentation had had more oomph, enthusiasm and encouragement, for those who are less sure than myself. There were a lot of young teachers there . When I lose that oomph, I give up teaching.

But for those who followed it through, all two of you, thank you! I know now that I write this blog and friends read it and I understand that it does not appear to be utilised anywhere else for the purpose for which it was intended. I also know that many who read regularly, don’t comment.
So why do I continue? Well there are now three more teddy blogs in Scotland, now, though sadly they are being written by teachers, not children, but a lot of the underlying activities that took place to create our teddy blog, are taking place too. So more children are getting the enthusiasm and other skills that came out of the project Morag and I did last year, and talked about at SETT, and that seems to be where the knockon effect came from, judging from some of the mail I have received.  The teddy blog continues to get hits and that convinces me of the value of blogging at all.

Further to Chris , Andrew and Groanin Jock

My last post.

Where’s my moby? Get me on Skype? Be in touch somehow . Find me on Google. I’ll find you. You have history! Email? OK! Write me a letter, ‘cos you know my address, and if you don’t, I don’t need to hear from you, or do I? Mmm

I have been trying to post on my own and other blogs, following my terrific meetings etc at eLive and because edublogs is currently unattainable (has been all weekend) the feeds  don’t work, on any others, so I am blocked. I get url error. Can’t post on my own blog either. Wish I could turn this waste of time into something more productive. It was to have been about sharing and communicating. I’m now wondering what was so bad about Blogger or Typepad that we could not have used it.  Are we just using these blogs because they have  ‘edu’ in  the title?  I know there is work going on to resolve the problem, locally,  but meantime, I want to skweem and skweem.

I am hoping you will be able to see and hear this, till I get to grips with the other options now available.   I handed the children the camera, with just the one instruction. Off you go and make a film that will let people know you learned something.  Off the cuff and completely un edited, they did that very thing.

I am now on my original machine, to try all the same things again, and to establish if possible, wherein the problem has been.

I read in Morag’s blog, that she has discovered sparklebox, too. Lower school practitioners can avoid reinventing the wheel there, but set aside plenty of time, because there’s lots of super stuff to browse through.

You might hear this on Argyll FM.

jamie-3.MP3
The children and their teacher Mrs McAllister have been working very hard on this imaginative project, which culminates on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th of March. A wee comment on their blog would be much appreciated, I know. Or better still, go and visit. I have really enjoyed supporting them, and that’s nothing to do with the cheese and wine exhibition preview on Friday.

Yesterday I was in Inverary to be a course participant. This had a high novelty factor, in that it was something I chose to do and was not decided by another agency as something I ought to be doing. So I was in exactly the right frame of mind, apart from the fact that I had to leave home more than an hour earlier than normal, but the drive up was so beautiful that it was the panacea for all that might ail one. The day was organised by Matthew to encourage the use of SCRAN , which is free to all schools and teachers at home, if they have their GTC number handy, when they log in. It’s a huge database of photographic and diagramatic material, for every area of the curriculum and has the ability to store any of your potentially useful material under the wonderfully descriptive heading of ‘Stuff’ to access later. Having registered, teachers can use the ‘create’ button to make simple worksheets and slideshows that they can use easily in class if they download or print them, or they can just store them there. So the morning was great to get to play and create, and I did, for our ‘My Town’ project.

This post has now been labelled as private and though I saved it, I would have expected to see it as a draft, the other portion about the afternoon is missing. It seems that none of the links I made are active, despite having done them properly, and in the same manner as they worked back when. The only thing left to me is to try changing the theme as Andrew suggested. I am using a different machine as Andrew suggested also.

There were 5 links here. I have redone the links now and here goes. They seem OK. The next test will be to go back to the other machine, and ultimately the theme. Sorry for the pedantic nature of these postings. It is being done this way such that those who might help get as much detail as possible.

I can’t set up a new blog because I have one with this email address already. I can’t get beyond the draft status, with one posting, containing a link having tried several times. I can’t post with links that work. I have lost two postings completely. I can’t add sound files, as I used to. I have only changed one of the privacy settings, to moderate the comments, because of spam.  The draft that was saved was only half of the post despite my having completed it and hit save. Dreamweaver keeps getting in the way and my desktop is now littered with downloads of what I am trying to post. So last time.. here goes..Publish