Thunder

Wikis, originally uploaded by stevebeard73.

One of my highlights of SLF08 was Neil Winton’s presentation on wiki’s. I have followed Neil’s exploits in Perth for several years now, probably since the first teachmeet I attended in 2006.

Neil was going to talk us through his experience of using Wiki’s at Perth Academy and how they can be used to support the Curriculum for Excellence.

You can check out his presentation here.

Points that stood out to me:

1) Difference between a ‘typical teacher network’ and the ‘networked teacher’. I wonder what the split is for our teaching profession?
2) How could I not mention his movie…. What do you get if you cross the death star with a can of alphabetti spaghetti? Wikipedia (it is better in the presentation)
3) There are a variety of wiki platforms out there, Neil recommends Wikispaces - sign up for free as an educator and avoid the adverts.
4) Examples of wiki’s used in his school:
4a) Caves of Mull (thecavesofmull.wikispaces.com/) - text based adventure games, each cave is has its own wiki page, make choices on which route to take while navigate you through the wiki.
4b) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (midsummerdreaming.wikispaces.com/) - used by students studying the book with the same title, I would recommend looking at ‘Aunty Flo - problem page’
5) Why use a wiki - ‘engages pupils, enhances learning, real world experience’.

Last year I visited Thomas Adams School in Wem to work with 2 teachers of geography to introduce them to podcasting, while I was there they produced their first podcast.  Since then, as with lots of ICT training, it appeared to have gone quite until I had an email just before the Christmas break to ask if I could do a follow up session.

Yesterday I went in, the first thing I noticed was that Lea now had his own MacBook and Ollie’s had been ordered, over the last couple of weeks they had produced a couple more podcasts and wanted me to go through the procedure to post them to their blog and how to find them in iTunes.

By the end of the afternoon they had published 5 year 11 revision podcasts on:

• Settlements
• Tectonics
• Coastal
• Tourism
• Water

You can listen to these podcasts direct on their blog, feel free to leave them comments, or you can search for ‘adams geography’ in iTunes to subscribe to their podcast feed.

They are planning to produce another couple of podcasts that would complete the year 11 revision podcasts.  Their next stage in development is to make all the podcasts into enhanced podcasts by adding photographs to support the voice, following on from that they will produce some pdf files to support the podcasts all of this should be available soon…..

Yet again, the people at TED continue to inspire and amaze me. I have just finished watching this video:

Andrew Brown posted today…

If you’ve ever wanted to create your very own talking character from a photo or picture, then the guys at PQ DVD may have come to the rescue!

They are even offering the software for free to those that blog about it before Christmas. How’s that for a christmas present?

Following on from this post on the Official Linden blog I decided to check out Veodia, Veodia allows you to broadcast high quality live video to sites, blogs and mobile phones (and to Second Life).

I set up a tv on wmnet island ready for my broadcast and popped back to Veodia to start it up, once the broadcast was rolling I copied the url onto the television and I was away..

There you have it Tarannau Wollongong watching me.

This has tremendous potential for running cpd for staff and students, as far as the Shropshire Teen Island and the diploma I see huge potential for using this technology to get high quality speakers from industry to talk to our students.  I will certainly try to deliver part of my next ICT subject leader course using this technology within Second Life.  I am also thinking that I will broadcast our Create IT awards (April 14th 2008) via Veodia in Second Life.

I found the following video on YouTube, this would make an excellent starter for Power Point training:

‘Now Play It’ is a new and exciting way to learn and play your favourite songs.  This unique video service features real music and real artists all backed by real learning techniques.  It has been developed to help offer a more instant and direct way of learning, for every range of musician. ‘Now Play It’ aims to get people as close to the artist and songs they love as simply as possible. If you want to play a song, there is no better way to learn than from the artist who wrote or performs it…welcome to ‘Now Play It’.

There are 3 types of ‘Now Play It’ tutorials, ‘FULL’, ‘LITE’ & ‘IN HOUSE’

A ‘FULL’ tutorial is split into 3 parts, (Lesson / Recap / Play Through).

The Lesson is an exclusively filmed direct 1 to 1 tutorial with an artist. Each one is shot in a unique location, be it at the artists house, studio or backstage on tour. Lessons last an average of 15 - 25mins and take the user through how to play every aspect of the song, from chords, techniques and/or equipment used.

The Recap, which only features in guitar lessons, gives the user an overview of all the chords used in the song, allowing them to learn them individually

The Play Through is the last part of the full tutorial package and features the original promo video (or approved photos where a video doesn’t exist) for the song with tabbed versions of the chords overlaid on it. This final section allows the user to put into practice all the skills they have just picked up and jam along with the original track and artist to perfect their skills. For drum lessons there are no chords, but instead the play through features a live performance of the drummer alongside the video showing all the techniques used.

A ‘LITE’ tutorial is split into just 2 parts, (Play Through / Recap).

The Play Through in ‘Lite’ tutorials is the same as in the ‘Full’ tutorials.

The Recap in ‘Lite’ tutorials is slightly less advanced than the ‘Full’ tutorials, it gives the user and overview of all the chords used but in a more simplistic way.

‘In House’ tutorials are exactly the same format at the ‘Full’ tutorials outlined above, but instead of featuring the actual artist who wrote or performs the song, it features our own in house tutor.

We have this 3rd option available so that we can make sure that we can offer as many different tutorials in the Now Play It style, even if an artist isn’t around to teach them anymore.

All 3 types of tutorials are delivered as just one video file, quickly and easily, allowing people the unique ability to be able to download and learn on the go, anytime they want.

 Lite Tutorials cost £1.99, Full Tutorials cost £3.99

Following on from his hugely successful Captivate tutorials, Andrew Brown has just published 32 PowerPoint tutorials with a more advanced course, using Breeze Presenter, planned for release on Monday.  All the tutorials are expertly produced using Captivate, as most teachers use Powerpoint (some use it badly) I would recommend viewing these tutorials.

I continue to be amazed by the potential Second Life has for learning, I have just watched the video on this blog post and was completely blown away. Clck below to see a low res version, or follow the link above for a high quality version.

Download link

WikiMindMap produces a mindmap based on a search of Wikipedia.  This provides an interesting and visual way of researching using wikipedia.  As a test I typed in Shropshire and this is the map displayed:

By clicking on a cell with a ‘+’ it expands the branch for further siblings, clicking the green icon will re-centre the map with that branch being the central point, if you click on a branch without any icon it will open up wikipedia in a new window/tab at the relevant section.