Thunder

Over the last six weeks I have spent quite a bit of time in Secondlife trying to find my way around, learn the basics and gather as much educational ’stuff’ as possible.

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Since getting an ipod last Christmas I have started to listen to podcasts more often, but I still only subscribe to a small amount. At present I listen to the following podcasts on a regular basis:

• Booruch - David, a Chartered Teacher from Scotland, shares his experience of using social software and the latest Web tools in class. David publishes his feed about twice a month.
• Digital Planet, the weekly BBC World Service programme that reports on technology stories from around the globe.  This podcast is published on a weekly basis.
• T4 Tips - Jordan School District, Transforming Teaching Through Technology.  A variety of educational ICT podcasts, I came across this podcast after watching ‘Pay Attention‘.  This podcast is published on a weekly basis.

If you know of any other decent educational technology podcasts can you leave me a comment.

500MB of free online storage that can be private, shared or public.

This has been coming for a little while, and then when it arrived, it was initially only for users in the US. But now, it has been activated for customers in the UK. And this has some really useful applications in education. SkyDrive gives users 500MB of free online file storage - password protected by their Windows Live ID. And they can be stored in private, shared or public folders - allowing you to decide who has access to each folder.

What could you do with it? Well, things like…

• Backup up important files, using personal folders.
• Access files from any PC with Internet access - making it easy to move files between home and school - for you or your students.
• Work on a project with colleagues or amongst students, using shared folders.
• Publish files, so that students can read them, but control their access so that they cannot add files or delete them - useful for homework assignments?

Some of the features added to this Beta version are:

• An upgraded look and feel – new graphics to go along with your new features!
• “Also on SkyDrive” – easily get back to the SkyDrives you’ve recently visited
• You can see thumbnails of your image files
• Drag and drop your files right onto your SkyDrive, using the handy applet
• Embed your stuff anywhere – with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html

Sign up for your personal SkyDrive here

Notely is a collection of online tools designed to support students organisation. The website is free to use, but unfortunately contains adverts from Google!

At present there are 10 tools you can use:

• Calender - add simple events, doesn’t support recurrences or have the ability to invite other users, but you can download your calendar to iCal.
• Courses - allows you to give a course a title, associate a teacher to it and then the start and end dates - this course doesn’t seem to appear in the calendar.
• Notes - create a note and associate it with a course, notes can contain html code, graphics and emoticons. Once created you can download this note as a pdf, word or text file or you can have it emailed to yourself, notes can be searched but I couldn’t get it to work!
• To-Do - create calendar entries for jobs you need to do, once created the appear in your main calendar.
• Tasks - can’t work out the difference between this and ‘to-do’
• Friends - search for your friends using writely, or add friends from Facebook.
• Notebook - allows you to enter simple notes, these notes are not associated with a course.
• Links - compile lists of your links, I think if I was to use these I would link to tags on my del.icio.us account
• Contacts - unlike ‘friends’ you can type in your contact details
• Upload - upload files to the site, I can’t find the maximum file size or the size of your upload area.

All of the tools contain an RSS feed and can have the data backed up.  The dashboard gives you an overview or your nearest events to-do’s and recent activity:

For further details check out one of the many videos on YouTube.

‘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 ordered a copy of Big Brain Academy for my Wii just before going off to France, on my return it was on the table ready to play. After unpacking the car and doing some basic tidying up etc, I sparked up the Wii. My first test result was C++.

The game is split into 5 areas - Compute, Visualise, Analyse, Identify and Memorise. I could see the compute area being used in maths classrooms, in September I will demonstrate this to my maths colleagues and see what they think. Within the compute section there are three types of questions:

• Mallet Math - knock numbers out of a stack so that the numbers left add up to the total required, on expert level you have both positive and negative numbers.
• Colour Count - calculate whether more blue or red balls have ended up in your net, on expert level more balls appear at the same time at increasing speeds.
• Balloon Burst - burst bubbles in ascending order, when you move up to expert level you have to order positive and negative fractions.

The scores you receive are dependent on both accuracy and speed, I personally think speed gains you more points than accuracy at the higher levels.

Another interesting, and I think useful feature, is the ability to send your results to other Wii consoles. To give this a try I spoke with David Noble from Scotland, he is using a Wii with his students. After about twenty minutes we were able to send each other our Wii console numbers (16 digits) and register one another’s Wii’s, we then sent our record cards. After receiving David’s card I was able to play against his records on the Mind Sprint game. This appeals to me in Shropshire as we have a vast amount of small schools and this functionality would allow students to play against students from other schools easily, I can imagine a nice competition for G&T students in primary schools….

If anyone would like to challenge me, leave your wii number in the comment box below and I will send you mine and we can pair up.

To wet your appetite here is an example of the mind sprint game:

It is fast becoming that time of year again, TeachMeet 07 is scheduled for Wednesday 19th September, 6.00pm - 8.30pm.  Last year I was able to attend the event and picked up some great points for development work.  I am hoping that I will be able to attend again this year and meet up with the great Scottish bloggers, and anyone else who manages to make it up there.

Atomic Learning is offering the PBwiki workshop (http://www.atomiclearning.co.uk/pbwiki) free until the end of September as a resource for educators. Please feel free to post it on your site.