http://dale.ethink.org.uk Explorations in education and technology, and other stuff. Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:24:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en M'colleague Mark Glover continues to work his ICT designing techno magic. I know I shouldn't be overtly impressed by tech stuff these days, but every now and then Mark says"have you got 5 minutes" and I know this is going to be a journey of discovery for me into ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/06/05/glover-magic/ This week I have been playing with my Wii. Following Johnny Chung Lee's posts about his research into using Wiimotes and an IR pen to create an interactive whiteboard (for less than £50), and Doug Belshaw actually doing it, I've mashed up a complete solution that is cheap and ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/06/01/interactive-whiteboard-with-a-wiimote/ May the Fourth be with you. Sorry.  Couldn't resist.  I'll get me coat. http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/05/04/jedi-day/ There are some classes who try to scare teachers by being rowdy, belligerent and generally just Not Nice. (Actually, I can't think of ahy who do that at this school). However, when I get a class as inspirational as 9Y I get really scared. They are intelligent, polite, hard working ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/05/02/9y-are-scary/ The One Laptop Per Child project always seemed to be too atruistic to be true yet I had high hopes for it.  With a forceful and charismatic leader to front the hard work done behind the scenes by the open source developers it looked as if this projet would work ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/04/24/olpc-and-windows-oh-dear/ I've been mooching around Second Life lately, now my machine can cope. Although I've been on the WMNET island for ages I've done the least building and my patch looks rather unimpressive. Bare, too. Thing is, apart from the nagging doubt that I didn't ought to be building things ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/01/21/second-life/ Everyone I show my Asus to is really impressed. Teachers can see that it will fit into their daily flow, students all want one (not just to play Tux games). In a Year 9 sessions today we talked about how useful it would be to have one in ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/01/19/asus-eeepc/ So I got fed up of the stuttering on the Mac and sent it back to the supplier for a replacement.  Seems they've sent me the new 8-core model (mine was 4-core).  Just my luck - being Without a Mac at the very time when I need to do some ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/01/17/be-still-my-fickle-heart/ These Mac toys aren't all that bad, really.  I'm finding a few niggles with the Mac Pro such as the cursor stuttering all over the place when an application is loading up - I'm finding it very very annoying, and am in the process of doing something about it.  Surely ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/01/14/assimilation-is-nearly-complete/ Please don't tell on me. I bought a mac. <whisper> OK Steve, you were right.  I do like it. </whisper> (Steve knows how hard it was for me to say that.  In public, as well). Yes, I know, one of those "plastic toys" (I got round that, mine's aluminium). After ... http://dale.ethink.org.uk/2008/01/05/paradigm-shift-or-just-another-computer/