As the school is getting a site licence for Quark Xpress I decided to teach myself how to use it. The end result? 15 posters giving a brief rundown of the tasks. skill and qualifications needed for 15 different IT based careers. Details are taken from Learndirect and the images from Stock Xchange (royalty free).
I actually did them a good while ago but have been posting them to Senduit (or is it USendIt?) and putting the link on the TES forums. Hopefully this will stop me having to update the thread every couple of weeks.
Despite the potential for a potential (although unlikely) legal battle over the use of a registered trademark my plan to get a pupil-led Podcast up and running has finally made it to a live website.
The Egglescliffe School Podcast Network was going to be a 3-4 weekly 40/45 minute show featuring a range of 5-15 minute slots. However, due to the long-ish lead times (pesky coursework and modular science exams getting in the way) some of the shows we have prepared are fast running out of date and so I made an executive decision, spent a bit of time setting up a Wordpress/Podpress site and set the Podcast forth upon the world.
I’ve not configured the iTunes side of things just yet but we alreay have another 2 or 3 shows within sight (i.e. before the end of term). Of course that means we’ll be on hiatus for 6 weeks most likely but I’d rather get something out as soon as possible, especially since I’ve been battling setback after setback since Christmas trying to get the damn thing off the ground.
The scripting, recording and editing has been done entirely by the pupils (all in Years 9 & 10) and my only real physical input has been the website.
Check out the site (and the first show) at http://voyager.egglescliffe.org.uk/mwc/espn (easy to remember I know, a simple domain name redirect will follow in due course).
Please leave any comments there in the first instance, as the kids don’t know about this place and I’m sure they’d appreciate the feedback.
I’ve finally gotten around to sorting out the spam comments that have been appearing en-mass for the last few months. All posts now need to be authorised by me before being published so, although the workload for me won’t change, the site should be a lot cleaner at the cost of delayed comments.
There are quite a few things on the go at the moment.
Last year, as an NQT, I had no Year 11s at all. This year I had 3 classes totalling 8 hours a week. As a result I’ve had a very busy year, particularly as one of the Y11 groups was picked up from a departing colleague, but now I have a significant proportion of ‘gained time’. As well as this, next year we’re not formally running the AS Computing course which has meant that the department is slightly overstaffed. All this led to the department members being asked to organise some extra projects.
Then, one of the non-specialists was promoted to head of D&T and we managed to get enough bright kids to sign up to an AS Computing course to be run in free periods, so all of that free time seems to have been eaten up. And yet the projects remain.
So what am I doing? Well, I’m learning Flash with the aims of
- allowing me to teach Unit 10 of the A2 Applied ICT
- allowing me to create Flash based resources
I’m also in charge of updating around 1/3 of the KS3 SoW and replacing the control activities previously run in Flowol with Scratch.
And finally I’m also in charge of implementing a new website for the school, but more about that in an upcoming post.
So the end result? Despite having all this ‘gained time’, and despite having to cram a lot of work over the last 10 months I’m actually more busy than ever.
And do you know what? I’m loving it. Getting to grips with new software, setting up new websites, getting the Podcast up and running finally. I wish it was like this all the year. In fact if it wasn;t for the kids, and their parents, this job would be perfect ;-p
