Jist Haiverin

Here’s a quick pic of Elsie Young presenting Glow
to a large audience of Aberdeen teachers at the
Inset Day on 16th May at the
Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre

Richard

Thanks to all who texted in questions and comments to the Conference Text Line.

As promised here (Click here) are your (unedited) questions and the teams responses.

Also here is a link to the flyer “First Steps with Glow in Aberdeen” which was available at the conference and answers some of the questions posed

Please come back to this page and leave comments here.

Richard

The team are presenting four of the sessions at the Authority led INSET day on 16th May.
The twin themes are Glow and the Curricfulum for Excellence.

Our workshops are

• Glow - Impact on learning,
• Glow - Communicating and Collaborating,
• SCHOLAR and
• WeB2.

We have set up a TEXT Line for the day - you can post your text comments and questions to the number displayed in the hall and on the Glow Flyer. We will post your questions and our answers here throughout the day and for a while afterwards.

Richard

I’ve been making a few wee changes to the blog.

You’ll notice the Del.icio.us links on the right.
This is done by pasting a little bit of code from our delicious site into a simple text box on the blog.

I’m also beefing up the Glow pages with a few more links to training materials and resources. Adobe Captivate is a great programme for building walkthroughs of the various screens and I’ve been working away at it - results soon. Andrew Brown has a very comprehensive tutorial section on his blog - thanks AB)

Next term the team will be focussing hard on Glow. Our first round of Mentor Training is scheduled for 15 - 16 April. We’ve been working on the training rooms here at Summerhill to make sure they are ready for the off next term.

Richard

Phew - we just finished ops training here in Aberdeen City. Two days of information absorption has left us all a bit drained. Training has answered many of the questions we were pondering and has raised a few more besides. All 6 of our Focus schools were represented along with the Development officers and MIS team. Roll on Mentor training !

Richard

Caspian Learning’s “Thinking Worlds” is now available free of charge. This is not just one simple program, but a suite of programs. There is a Player program which can run a host of free downloadable programs from The Solar System to The Middle Ages and an Authoring program which lets you adapt any of the existing programs to meet your own needs. This is accompanied by a range of manuals and guides.This is an exciting suite of programs which can produce professional looking educational games. But like any good system, the quality of the end result depends on the quality of the planning.

Andy

Until the 31st March RM have a special offer available for Primary schools in Scotland only - buy one get one free Easiteach Content.   Aberdeen Primary Schools have been given Easiteach Science Content and may wish to add some of the other titles.    See the products at  http://www.rm.com/Primary/Products/story.asp?cref=PS79667  The cost is £299 and the software can be loaded on to all teacher laptops/PCs.  

Lilian

The Independent newspaper printed an interesting article about Glow last week.
(Thanks to Tess Watson’s blog). Follow this link to the online version.

We are looking forward to Operatioal training in Aberdeen next week. We have the approval sites and have been getting to grips with the new terms and the new meanings for old ones!

Richard

Microsoft Photo Story 3 lets you arrange your photos, add narration or music and the program automatically turns this into a photo story with automatic panning and zooming and transitions. And it’s a free download! Have a look at this example -

I put this China Photo Story together in a couple of minutes. The pictures are copyright free and come from http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

On the Educational Uses of Digital Technology website, there are a number of examples of how to use Photo Story (and other programs) to deliver high quality presentations. Here is an example which uses old photographs, narration and a speech to create a powerful presentation about the American Civil War.

Here’s an effective example from which shows that you only need a few simple photographs and sound recordings to create an interesting presentation. This is only one of a whole range of photostories produced by children of the Greece Central School District, New York.

You can download Photo Story here.

Some more links -

Photostory tutorials from JakesOnline.org.

Beginner’s Guide to PhotoStory from Mark Coffman.

Andy

On Wednesday last we had the first of our new fortnightly Drop-in sessions.

These sessions allow folk to book in, giving us just one week’s notice of their intention to attend and the subject/equipment/software/skills they want help with. We will endeavour to have the appropriate people available to support the session. At the first session Sheila and I were working with two teachers learning how to use del.icio.us and another two working with Easyteach.

We hope these more flexible sessions will be attractive to staff. If you want to book in just contact the ICT education team at Summerhill and give us a week’s notice.
The current cpd programme can be found on AGfL.

Richard