I Should Be Marking

I’m having a fantastically inspiring week! I discovered Museum Box today, a web application in which you create a museum tray with a number of cubes in. On each cube you can add text, images, sound, links and documents on that particular topic – making it simple to collect and collate information on a variety of sub-topics.

It is, of course, easier to explain with a practical demonstration so here are examples based on The Roaring Twenties and a really clever way of constructing an argument both for and against animal testing.

Kids in Year 7 can use PowerPoint already (in terms of skills if not judgement) and this is a much more engaging and interesting way of looking at things.

Two birds with one stone here. I’m leading some INSET with ICT staff on some basic Flash Actionscript and I’d also like a handy document to share with KS4 & KS5 students working on Flash.

I want it to be very short and snappy, with just the bare essentials. Feedback on the examples I’ve chosen would be very much appreciated – and if you would find the document useful then feel free to ‘borrow’ it.

As bizarre as it sounds and as cliched as I know it makes me, I’m really getting into Twitter.

There’s lots of talk on the TV apparently (although I’ve heard about it all second hand) and now I have a small but effective group of followees (people whose posts I get to see) I’m picking up on all sorts of new technolgies, software and websites. I’m blanning on adding some to my sidebar.

I can’t recommend it enough, and Tweetdeck even picks up my system proxy so I can continue to follow the goings on at work (this may turn out to be a very, very bad thing). I’ve already discovered Tikatok and Kerpoof amongst other things (including an amazing stop-motion video – the platform game and fall in the middle was brilliantly done IMO).

If you do decide to join (or are already a Tweeter) then make sure to say hello.

Well, it finally happened – I was pestered into signing up for Twitter.

It took me a couple of days to get into it, but I have already picked up some useful links. The problem is this – I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds (including blogs and del.icio.us accounts), use Facebook, several forums and now Twitter (via Tweetdeck which I heartily recommend, having never used an alternative). Oh, and I run this blog and several in school as well.

It’s starting to sound a lot like work. I have decide what information to post here (longish thoughts and reflections), on Facebook (daily or bi-daily personal goings on mostly) and what to put on twitter (at the minute I’m still unsure as to the balance between hourly minutiae and daily things that are interesting).

My del.icio.us account has fallen by the wayside and I’m not even getting started on the likes of Flickr.

The point? There isn’t one really – I’m reflecting here! I need to make sure I’m doing what I want to do (at the minute that’s anything other than my Y9 reports) and that it’s useful in both a long term sense (making contacts, discussing technologies and being up on the latest trends) and in the short term (actually enjoying myself).

And besides, this wouldn’t fit under the Twitter character limit…

It’s taken me a while to even realise that I’ve discovered it but I appear to have found a winning formula with my last-lesson-on-a-friday Y8 class. Drink lots of coffee.

The result – a ’somewhat manic’ lesson with me literally bouncing around the room and making sure that the troublemakers don’t get the chance to let whatever is bothering them bubble to the surface, demonstrations and discussions that move a lot quicker and keep the pace up and a teacher that doesn’t ‘come down’ until at least 7pm.

Mind you, a new report from Durham university suggests that drinking too much coffee can trigger hallucinations – and so maybe they WERE little monsters and I just hallucinated a fun lesson.

I’ll take that

I suppose it seems seasonal, but that isn’t my motivation – I just have that many jobs to do right now (and you can guess which path through the above flowchart I’ve taken to obtain them) I thought it might be useful to list them.

So, in no particular order:

• School TV station
  - work with media Tech to set up a functioning TV recording studio
  - write a suitable addendum to the ‘digital images’ permissions letter sent to all parents
  - find, recruit and train students in filming, editing and publishing digital footage of events
• KS3 ICT
  - Complete schemes of work, resources and lesson plans for updated units making use of Scratch, Alice, WMM/iMovie & Flash
• A-Level Computing
  - Collate interested parties – so far we’re up to 4 students without me having pushed it at all. Aim for 6-8.
• KS4 ICT
  - Catch up with marking *ahem*
• KS5 ICT
  - Catch up with marking *double ahem*
• After School Computing Club
  - Do more to learn ActionScript properly.
  - Remember to put time and place on the school bulletin this week!
• Blogging
  - Identify, recruit and enable students to blog about the various goings on in the school (to include at least music, drama, PE, library and any extra-curricular groups).
• Moodle Forums
  - Promote student support forums amongst general populus (i.e. not just the three geeks that have discovered them independently and only post about PHP problems)
• Social Life
  - Who am I kidding?