BlogDale

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 a lot of thought and anguish about how I’d need to transfer all my Windoze expertise and Stuff (lots of Stuff) across to a Mac, and how there would be a huge learning curve, etc., etc., my thirst for adventure exceeded my reluctance and I made the jump. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the PC running right by me - Just In Case, you understand - and I have taken out insurance against hitting technological brick walls such as You Can’t Do That on a Mac. Umm..the insurance is that this Mac runs Parallels so I can run Windows on it (and Linux, w00t) all at the same time. Scary stuff. I’m still gathering confidence to run Bootcamp so that I can run Windows DirectX 3D games on this baby (Parallels won’t do it - yet) but when that’s done I shall retire the old PC to the children’s room.

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TeacherTube is a YouTube clone (which probably means it’s blocked in Shropshire but not for long if I can get my way) with some outstanding content. I found this one today which I haven’t seen before, which questions teachers as to why they are denying technology in their teaching in this digital-rich ages where our learners are all “Digital Natives”.  This Web 2.0 presentation might be useful to those trying to get teh message over in school.
Did you Know is still one of my favourites though - “If MySpace were a country it would be 11th largest in the world, between Japan and Mexico”. Beautiful, and a real wake-up call to those complacent about the flattening of the world . Time to get real guys - it’s happening around us, even especially in our rural idyll.

As the roar of highly-tuned engines and the screech of tyres fades into the background with the waving of the chequered flag, news just in from the Jaguar Cars - Maths in Motion Challenge indicates that my school has qualified for the semi-finals. We like this kind of news.  Especially when we’re the first school in Shropshire to do so.
Since registering and getting the software with our elc money, we’ve had learners queuing up to join the CARS sessions at lunchtimes. Keeping things to a manageable number means we’ve restricted membership to 15 for the present but the waiting list is rowing. Kids are doing extra maths at lunchtimes. Yep, you heard me right. They are helping each other with learning estimation and measuring skills, calculations done without calculators (it’s the quickest way really) and generally getting motivated with their mathematics.

It’s all about fun, enjoyment, engagement, fulfilment in maths. These kids are having a great time honing their maths skills, and they’re excited about it too. The icing on the cake was when the racing teams were told off for chattering loudly when leaving their exciting school qualifying race - this was held in an afterschool session! Yep, they’d stayed after school to see the race run, such is their motivation. Pity they got told off for being excited about maths though.

Here’s a nice one, brought to my attention by Val Brooks.  Scrumdidilyumptio.us allows you to build relationships between websites .  It’s about building folksonomies , relationships and generally adding to the interconnectedness of all things.

Scrumdidilyumptious is a Firefox extension that lets you describe relations between websites. Want the world to know that you think Digg is better than Slashdot? that Google owns Writely? that Desperate Housewives is available on iTunes? Scrumdidilyumptious lets you do it.

That’s what their homepage says and who am I to argue?

Fellow Moodler Jens Gammelgaard (I think that’s enough letter As) brought Compendium to my attention this evening. It’s a knowledge management tool that allows individuals and groups to quickly compile existing, and grow new, knowledge. In the words of the developers:

Compendium is about sharing ideas, creating artifacts, making things together, and breaking down the boundaries between dialogue, artifact, knowledge, and data. It helps provide a faster, better way for groups and project teams to work.

Having tried it for a VERY short time, I can report that it is awesome. Rapid construction of information pathways is a snap, adding nodes with drag and drop from the web and from files in local folders onto the map to construct an information-rich source document.

I’m thinking this looks awfully like an eportfolio…

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.

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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