BlogDale

Last week saw the start of the CARS project at school, designed to raise the achievement and motivation of young mathematicians. Unable to resist, I’m hijacking part of it for my own ICT purposes - it just seems an ideal opportunity for the young leraners to develop their ICT skills in creating graphics to get their pictures on their teams, but most of all it gives them a chance to develop their writing skils on their team blogs (which we’re in the process of setting up). The intention is that we’ll do pre-race podcasts for each team, and we’ll also podcast the commentary from the races.

So what’s this challenge then? Well, using the CARS modelling program, participants set up a racing car according to their own measurements and estimations of the speeds it is capable of on a particular track. (The car parameters are taken from an actual Formula One car to add to the realism!). All sorts of other parameters are factored in such as weather, pitstops, tyre life and (my favourite) ) driver attitude. All this goes onto a spreadsheet model and the race is run - things get exciting as jostling for position goes on, engines overheat and the weather changes. Those drivers who made the right choices reap the rewards, and they climb the leaderboard in the race series.

Teams have already made themselves known at the CARS blog - watch this space (and that one) for exciting developments as they update their teamBlogs with their progress and successes.

A while ago the science department were asking me for some life simulations and I was able to direct them to some population sims and some predator-prey (and this one) sims too. We used this natural selection sim sucessfully in class as an exercise on the IWB and it illustrated topics that are often hard to get across to learners.

I just found this one too - A.I. Planet, which seem to bring them all together. I’ll look forward to playing with this one and will post at length on it later on. My first foray indicates that it’s going to be great for modelling in life and earth sciences, although the graphics are rather rudimentary.

The North West Learning Grid has continued the trend of their successful DiDA resources.  The pilot NCICT resources have been released and although this isn’t a complete set yet I’m sure it will become a useful resource for teachers to supplement classroom activities.

And there was me worrying about Sketchup licences.  With my predisposition towards free and Open Source software the technicians get a bit twitchy when I ask for some obscure software titles to be added to the network.  So at school we’re going through licences with a magnifying glass, not wanting to get caught out by the small print; when we’ve installed something we want to be sure that as an institution, rather than a single user, we are covered for network-wide installations.

I’ve been a bit glum since I’d spotted a page at Google Sketchup that (I thought) suggested a licence was needed.  Not to worry, we’ll find the cash somehow because this is an awesome product.  So today I phoned Google to make sure, just clutching at straws really before I take the plunge and spend money.  To my surprise I’m informed that it’s OK to download and install the free version across the network!  “Splendid”, says I, and asked for it in writing (keeps the techies happy).  So on Monday I look forward to rolling SketchUp out across the network and writing some schemes of work to make use of it’s astounding features.

We’ve installed a helpdesk at school. Previously we didn’t need one, since the network was small enough (and used by so few people) that the faults could be reported directly to the technicians in the corridor and they’d have it fixed by lunchtime. But not any more…the network has grown and it has become increasingly difficult for the techs to take jobs on in this way, and to prioritise and track them adequately. And everybody wants a slice of the ICT action these days. IT’s getting busy.

The beauty of the helpdesk is that already, after only a couple of weeks, it has allowed technical support to relax and prioritise their work instead of firefighting. Jobs are getting done, everybody knows where they are and all systems are just tickety-boo.

The solution we’re using is OneOrZero, an Open Source solution. Nicely customisable, we’re still working on defining categories in different areas while we pilot the system. Things look good so far; getting things working properly is one of the first steps in embedding elearning. People need to feel supported and to know where to go for help.