I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before, but a few months ago I started a collaborative Google Docs presentation (in the style of Mark Warner’s Ideas to Inspire) aimed at gathering ideas to share with colleagues at work.

Since then I’ve had much inspiration and many ideas from a range of people (particularly Mark Berry) and have so far printed up two issues of ‘Techy Tips for Not So Techy Teachers‘ (although I would love to go for a non-paperbased version, I would miss the very market I am aiming for) and have had a few positive comments from individuals.

Have done a bit of work today on the next two, I’ve published all four at mwclarkson.co.uk. Feel free to use as you see fit, but please do provide a link back to me (here / my website/ my twitter account) if you do.

Following a very hectic week last week I am positively enthused with a vast array of ideas laid out before me. Writing this blog helps me enormously in terms of reflecting upon and describing my ideas in a way that makes it easier for me to recall them, understand them and refine them. But, I have been posting quite a lot over the past few days though and didn’t want to flood the blog with daily posts. Instead, I decided to have a go and putting my thoughts down in a MindMap – specifically, using MindMeister.

I found it to be an incredibly cathartic and useful exercise and my thoughts on the topics at hand are now much clearer. And what struck me was that I have never really used a mindmap before! I’ve been forced into doing a couple at school, but have never really used them as a way of keeping my own thoughts and ideas in order.

This, of course, led me to the idea of using mindmaps in better ways with my students. We get them into Bubbl.us to create a planning document for some of the larger projects – but it would be nice to spend a little time comparing tools and techniques, followed by students actually using a mindmap for something a little more significant. It ties in with a lot of the independent learning that isn’t really going on in education right now. (Point me to a staffroom where nobody whinge about students being spoon-fed). There are also the collaborative and creative sides to mind-mapping.

In terms of tools – you have

• hand-drawn mindmaps
• online apps such as Mindmeister, Mind42 and Bubbl.us
• desktop apps such as Freemind
• online & offline apps auch as Xmind

So I think I’ll get some of my Y7, Y9 and probably Y12 & 13 students looking at mind maps in the new academic year. I’ll let you know how I get on…

Feel free to have a look at the resultant mindmap for yourself.

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.

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.

I’m preparing some resources for a Scratch Scheme of Work for Year 7. The one I made last year was OK, but a bit uninspiring and I’d like to be able to have non-specialists walking through it without too much hassle.

I’ve been a bit brave and gone for a narrated video tutorial. I’m not 100% certain that this is the best way but I’m sure the students get sick of PDFs, handouts and chalk & talk so here goes.

My questions (and of course there are always some) are:

• Will the inclusion of me in the video stream a) add some more visual cues/realism or b) cause much giggling distraction and general silliness?
• Is a video introduction suitable for a 3 minute video to show on a whiteboard for situations where headphones aren’t available?
• Should I go back to one of my other methods?
• Is my haircut better than it was on the last video I shoved up here?

Addendum: I know I forgot to put a title on the page, so you don’t need to tell me that

One in particular is Zoho which I’ve been playing with today. As well as a basic office suite there are all manner of other uses and existing Yahoo and Google users can sign in instantly with the new OpenID.

Web design is an important part of the KS3 curriculum. Not only does it earn its own unit of work in Year 8 but we’re including it in a larger project in Year 9 and throughout all of the ePortfolio subjects at KS4 and KS5 (DiDA, iMedia, OCR, GCE Applied…). But what to use?

We currently have installed on some or all of the machines:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
• NVu (F/OSS)
• Kompozer (F/OSS)
• Amaya (F/OSS)
• SeaMonkey (F/OSS)
• iWeb
• Serif Web Plus (F/OSS – outdated versions)
• Microsoft Frontpage
  (NB: F/OSS = Free/Open Source Software)

Plus you can, of course, convert Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, etc. to web pages.

One of the things we really want to push is the idea that students can download and use the same applications at home that we use at school. I try to use GIMP for graphics as much as possible, for example.

NVu is free, but has not been updated in a few years. Kompozer is a bug-fixed branch of NVu but is still a year out of date. The free Serif apps are prior versions, Amaya is W3C’s contribution and throws a hissy fit if you try and do anything that oesn’t match their stringent guidelines and SeaMonkey is part of a package which includes IM and (I think) IRC chat stuff.

All of those problems could be overcome if it weren’t for the fact that Dreamweaver is so powerful and has so many features – integration with Fireworks HTML, Flash, Managing Sites, template management, library items, rollover buttons, etc, etc, etc… makes it a killer app.

I guess the point of the post is to justify to myself the fact that we’re using Dreamweaver over F/OSS alternatives. At the moment it seems a no-brainer. The trick is to convince the kids that you don’t NEED Dreamweaver to do web design. Maybe we should make them do everything in Notepad…

Technically not freeware, but I came across a range of products for Mac and PC at Arten Science that are available free for educational purposes. The two that caught my eye are MacVCR (video screen capture) and ScreenAudit (automated webcam or screen capture – ideal for time lapse animation). A quick email to the developer and I have a serial for each package requested at no charge – bargain!

A colleague of mine has been using this since last year, although I hadn’t had more than a 2 minute look to see what all the fuss was about.

Today, with the collapse of my Lego CAD lesson plan (more on that later), I improvised a quick intro to Sketchup after a quick brief from said colleague.

An hour later and I had a group of particularly unmotivated Y9 students designing lawns, hedge mazes, swimming pools – one student even recreated the mansion from GTA:Vice City (complete with helipad, helicopter and a garage with a motorbike inside)!

You could also run competitions to draw real buildings and they can be published to GoogleEarth.

It’s incredibly easy to create models quickly and simply – and of course it’s both free to download and cross-platform!

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before on here (I suspect not), but Yacapaca is great.

It’s an online assessment/quiz tool, totally free, run by Chalkface. You can import pupils quickly by simply copying and pasting lists from CSV, Word or Excel files and group them easily enough. You then set them a test or quiz (either from the huge list already available for many subject areas or a creation of your own), print a list of passwords and away they go.

A group of very clever people have devised a suite of KS3 questions aimed at assessing levels (from L2-L7) and you can get a class full of pupils to run through each test twice (with random questions so they won’t just get all the same questions again) inside an hour and then the really impressive bit begins.

You can track their results in real time and there is a wealth of analysis available. The screen I use most shows the % score for each test and a final level but you can also look at each pupils’ answer or analyse the answers for each question in order to look for common misconceptions or weaknesses.

It’s interesting to see pupils come from primary school with L4 or 5 and then score L2 or 3 and it’s certainly not a standalone solution (what is?) but it’s a useful way to baseline at pupils at the start of a KS. I’ve got a few more classes to run through and then I’m going to compare the data ot the English, Science and Maths baselines done by colleagues and I’m also hoping to compare (anonymous) data with some other schools – so if anyone else is using Yacapaca to baseline their Y7s then please let me know!