BlogDale

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 things that I might have known were possible but haven’t had time to try. Today was different; I had no idea the Welsh Wizard was going to come up with this one.

We’ve used No Limits Rollercoasters for a couple of years. It’s a great sim where you build a rollercoaster in a quasi-technical drawing environment, then you get to ride the fearsum beast that you created - and analyse where your passengers would have died due to excessive G force. We introduce a number of topics around it in Year 9; design and analysis; the use of ICT in society and how accurate simulators can save money; the shortcomings of simulators; writing letters/memos to theme park owners; designing leaflets/other advertising blurb including podcasts and vodcasts; costings spreadsheets using goal seek (et al) to find break-even points. And we have some great fun seeing what the students come up with in their rollercoaster designs.

But the great just got better. Since I introduced Wings 3D, Mark has been using his outstanding design skills to get students using it to make ’stuff’. His students won first, second and third with their artistic interpretation at the Shropshire Create IT! awards. I’m looking forward to the day when Second Life gets going around here, because our students will have a huge head start in designing prims in Wings. But I digress.

Today Mark showed me how he can create models in Wings and then import to No Limits. He’s got the techs to do the necessary adjustments to the permissions and locations of various files so students can insert their own models into their rollercoaster designs.

I watched in awe as he created a ghost in Fireworks, imported it to Wings then rendered it with UV mapping and created a 3D model to import to No Limits. Then he did the same with a dragon and a galleon he’d created previously.

So what’s the learning potential? No longer will students create beautiful models that they can admire only in Wings 3D. They will now be able to put them anywhere that there’s a need for 3D objects - I’m thinking games, scenery, creating their own landscapes (Mark’s a wizard in Bryce and Daz Studio). They’ll be visualising and creating their own artefacts in different packages, using the appropriate tools for the job without necessarily seeing any difference between one software package and another. That’s what I call ICT capability. It’s the future.

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 convenient.

Interactive whiteboards are like marmite. People either love ‘em or hate ‘em. I know people who believe strongly that the IWB is an expensive luxury in a classroom and that the same learning gains can generally be met using just a projector; conversely I’ve spoken with teachers who believe strongly that the interactive aspect of the board is what makes it useful, and they now wouldn’t be without the IWB. Interestingly, these two poles of opinion were found to be split generally between phases, where primary teachers wouldn’t part with their boards but secondaries were indifferent to them. My own observation was that whereas a huge investment was made in putting IWBs in classrooms, less importance was placed on training teachers how to use them. And so they sat on the wall as an expensive ornament for months until somebody went on a course and found what “other people” were doing with them.

To me, the biggest impact of a school’s investment in IWBs lies not in the whizzy resources that they produce for their own particular brand of IWB with its proprietary software. The biggest impact is to get teachers to use ICT to prepare and deliver rich content that is pertinent and relevant to learning objectives, and the rest will follow. As suggested here, the initial use of an IWB is simply to use it as a data projector and not to exploit the features of the interactive board itself. Surely that represents a wasted investment? Couldn’t we have bought two projectors rather than a projector and board? Yes we could. We should. And now there’s a way to dispense with the expensive board altogether, or at least see if your teaching style needs the features that a board has to offer.

Here’s how I did it…

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