In class with Microsoft Kodu
After a few discussions with our Subject Leader for ICT – Joe Santarcangelo (@santarc) I pursudaed him to look into using the wonderful Microsoft Kodu for our ICT lesson primarily aiming it at KS3 ICT Control modules.
Itching to get my Kodu project rolling, but not being able to use Kodu with our KS3 groups yet (they’re doing modelling with Excel up until mid December) I asked Joe could I hijack some of his Yr11s to get feedback from them on Kodu (and using them as technical guinea pigs to see how it runs on our network – you cant keep a good techie down!)
Mozilla Popcorn – Future of web video?
After reading a tweet about something called Mozilla Popcorn by Learn 4 Life’s Leon Cych and hearing one or two things on the Twittersphere from the recent #Mozfest event I decided to have a look at a) what Popcorn was and b) what it can do…
In a nutshell Popcorn extends on HTML 5 video and allows you to make web video as interactive as a conventional web app. Through the Popcorn framework the integration of external data and content sources such as Flickr, Google Maps, Google Translate, WordPress blogs, Wikipedia entries… the list is endless AND all this can be done on the fly as the video is streaming in your browser.
My first Teachmeet
Friday, November 4th 2011. 5pm. Bolton, Lancashire.
On a wet, cold and generally miserable autumn afternoon @john_howarth at arrived at my school to give me a lift to a local primary school. The trip wasn’t for an LA led INSET session, or LA meeting this was going to be my very 1st Teachmeet.
Microsoft’s 2019 Future Vision Montage: Envisioning the Future
I love any kind of ‘vision of the future’ videos. Total Minority Report kinda guesswork but, for me anyway, inspiring!
DreamSpark
One of the most exciting things I’ve seen to come out of Redmond is DreamSpark.
In a nutshell DreamSpark is a selection of enterprise level, pro standard development tools that students in HE and now high schools can download and use for FREE.
QR Code Project – Week 2
I’m now at the start of week two of a four week project to introduce the use of QR Codes into our Creative Studies department.
The iPod Touches arrived on Monday and it was straight down to getting them on the network.
As we don’t want the students to have to enter user credentials before they connect to our Windows 2008 / Win7 network we’ve created a specific ‘iPod’ user account, with restricted network permissions, to automatically connect to our 3Com wireless network.
This took about 10 minutes to and we then got to play with the Touches. I must admit the iPod Touch blows me away and in my humble opinion is the best handheld device for educational use on the market today.
Moodle… What Makes a Good Course?
What actually makes a Moodle course a good Moodle course?
This is something that I’ve discussed at length with a few colleagues and we always ending up agreeing to differ.
To my mind a good Moodle course incorporates several features:
Moodle… A New Era
Over the past few months I’ve installed, configured, tweaked, broke, fixed, laughed, cried and ultimately been amazed at our new Moodle installation.
To go back slightly, last year I approached SLT with the idea that we should move away from the learning platform Uniservity and bring online learning in-house with a self hosted Moodle install. For a variety of reasons Uniservity just wasn’t working for us and a change was needed.
After 5 months of discussion, persuasion and pestering I got my wish and I bravely decided to commission a Dell server running Windows 2008 as my Moodle box.
I had the box setup within a day and testing began…
Moodle Block: Sharing Cart
One of the best aspects of Moodle is that there is an abundance of add-ons for it. These Blocks, Plugins and Modules are the heart of the Moodle community and its pretty safe to say that if you have a need for a specific function on Moodle, someone, somewhere has had the same need and probably developed an add on to meet that need.
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