I’d rather go canoeing !

Spent much of today exploring the Glow Portal. It has just been switched on for the 3rd pilot. I still find it hard to navigate around in there. I have the experience of finding something interesting, navigating away and then spending ages trying to get back. Still no VLE. I have been able to upload files and to link to content hosted outside. No point in posting a link to it – If you have a password you will know what it’s like. If you are still in the dark (along with a significant proportion of the teaching profession) there are lots of blogs discussing it and the LTS website has all the basic information.

Quite a title for this really useful little utility from Ron Mitchell at the LondonOnline project. You can download the programme and use it at no cost. It creates very neat flash based drag and drop routines with embedded sound and jpeg images. I’ve put a quick example here. It took approx 5 mins to create this from existing material. The programme also creates a powerpoint and a word version of the file.

Friday 18th May

Today I attended the CPD event at Aberdeen Conference Centre organised by Aberdeen City Council. This was my first real experience of a Curriculum for Excellence and I was keen to get some context for all the reading I had been doing. Dan McGinty’s keynote outlining his 4 contexts for learning got me thinking about how ICT can support the collaborative aspects of the new curriculum. There will be new opportunities for embedding ICT in whole school projects and in themes which cut across the curriculum such as literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing.

The mid morning workshop by Guy Merchant where he discussed the motivational aspects of new technologies such as blogs, wikis and photosharing was of particular interest. I mention motiviation because, when challenged, he was unable to point to any hard evidence of increased attainment but rather the the enthusiasm for learning which is generated. This seems to fit well with HMIEs intentions to focus on broader aspects of learning.