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.

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 and they listen to instructions. What a challenge - there is NO challenging behaviour other than the hum of work and the buzz of enquiring minds. Today is a case in point. I love to push these kids as hard as I can. Last week we looked at different ways of presenting information.  I taught them to use Animoto, Comic Life and some of them experimented with the lesser-known aspects of Word.  Since then my inbox is inundated with messages about new Animotos - the creativity is awesome.

So today they’re doing some coursework, on databases.  It’s a really dry boring task but to spice it up I suggest they can  collect their screenshotted evidence and display it how they like.  Some played safe with Word but others started to tell a story in Comic Life - some really excellent renditions of coursework are coming out.  With 10 minutes to go they were asked about other ways of showing the info - they suggested Animoto and my eyes sparkled with the vision of an OCR moderator watching Animoto’ed files of coursework evidence.

I’m not sure if they managed to get any done with only 10 mins to go…still watching the inbox.  I bet I get some next week though.

Mr C is asking about open Source software. I was responding to his post when I thought I might be better off posting here and using trackback.

Open Source junkie that I am, I’ve used all the items on his list for quite some time. Predictably, my fave open source software is Moodle. See eCognition if you want some (commercial plug).

Scribus is a superb OS DTP program.  Unlike the M$ offering, it maintains standards.

We use GIMP alongside paint.net (not OS) on the school network, and despite the cries of “totally unusable, you need a degree in nuclear physics to use it” from people who really should know better, GIMP is excellent. Get this - at our school an Art student teacher used GIMP with a year 7 class to do popart pictures using their own portraits. With no preconceptions of unusable software on the part of teacher nor pupils, the lesson went down a storm. None of these people had a degree in higher Computer Science. Mind you, if your photoshop-savvy friends sniff at it, show them Gimpshop. And remind them what they paid for their (legal) copy of Photoshop.

WINK is another fave of mine. Rather than getting kids to produce lengthy tomes for their Nationals coursework, we’re gettting them to record evidence using WINK. It creates a swf which we’re putting on the VLE so the moderator can see it.
I think Nvu is an excellent replacement for Dreamweaver (particularly if you haven’t bought Dreamweaver yet). Another alternative is html-kit. I’ll be using it with Year 7 later this year.

AVG. Wouldn’t be without it. Honestly. It’s freeware rather than OS though.

Videolan - use it instead of Windo$e media player. Works for me. Freedom means more than “no cost”.

Inkscape - oh boy, I love this vector-graphics editor. Only today Year 9 spent half an hour learning the basics of Inkscape to produce a scalable logo in svg and png formats. One of my favourites is it’s ability to produce vector images from rasters. Cartoonify your friends!

Thunderbird - if I wasn’t using Googlemail these days, I’d still use Thunderbird although there might be a blip on the development horizon as Mozilla are concentrating on other things. (Actually I still do use Thunderbird too).

If you need ftp, take a look at Filezilla . I’m really impressed with it. Does what it says on the tin.  WinSCP is a great SSH tool too, I use it all the time.

If you’re into project management try Open Workbench . Can be a bit complicated but worth a try. Apparently GanttPV is an alternative but I haven’t tried it.

Blender is awesome for 3D modelling but there’s a steep learning curve (I’m at the bottom, looking up). A more creative colleague than I uses Wings3d and swears by it. Another learning curve for me though, I’m afraid.

Synergy allows computers on a network to share keyboard and mouse.  You probably need it, you just don’t know it yet.

I could go on - it’s late though.  Take a look at this list of OS. I concur with most of it.

Soon I shall get to compile a CD of OS for the kids at school so they can use school software on their home computers without needing a licence.

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.

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.

Such joy. An online image editor. There have been problems recently with the school network, which means that the software I want installed for creating vector graphics hasn’t been installed. But there’s this clever Ajax app called AjaxSketch that allows graphics to be made online and then saved to the local machine as a scalable vector graphic - the format can be changed with your friendly graphics editor eg GIMP. Trouble is, it needs Firefox to work, which ain’t on the network (yet). Curses, foiled again.  ‘Course, there’s still Gliffy.
While I’m at it, I have to say that I like the latest version of paint.net. Very usable and not at all like Paint. I really don’t like Paint. Another favourite image processor is ArtRage, now in version 2. I even paid for the pro version, I like it so much and I felt the need to support the developers. And here’s another great toy - remember those photomosaic posters that were all the rage a few years back? I’ve recently been playing with AndreaMosaic, a freeware application for creating these fascinating works of art. One great thing is that you can tell the software to create a web page, which links to the original image when you hover over the mosaic cells that contains it.

Old standards for me, I can’t do without Photofiltre and Irfanview for simple image processing. Another useful tool is Resize-o-matic for resizing images with a right click. I’m slowly getting used to Inkscape for vector graphic editing, and it has a great function for converting a raster image to a vector with various controls that can be set to make it dance to your tune.

One thing I can’t wait to get on the school system is Scribus. Waving goodbye to Publisher will be the best day of my life.

While talking about image processing, I can’t fail to mention GIMP again.  I had Year 7 using it a couple of weeks ago to create logos.  Some folks think it’s really hard to learn, but it’s all a matter of approach (as with anything.  HTML is really hard to learn but we still expect kids to learn a bit).

A group of us have been thinking about ways to make the KS3 curriculum more contemporary. Jude has some superb schemes of work using kitchen designers and Rollercoaster Designers - the pupils at Lacon Childe love them if the blog’s anything to judge opinion by. Similar pupil enthusiasm appears at Thomas Adams where Gill’s pupils collaborate on MissionMaker programs, and at Priory where Trina’s Gamemaker and Missionmaker pupils are blazing a trail with their authoring.

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