Some updating

Nothing really particulalry new to add here but a few things might become important in the near future:

There is a new computer available for me to move to. This one is not giving me any problems right now and I am a little worried that it will take some time to check everything is where I want it when things get migrated. It seems that – in theory – everything just gets moved and that is that but it may be more complicated than that if things don’t all migrate. Fingers crossed.

The school is going to look at internal communications and websites – I have said I would be willing to be involved in this. If anything comes from it I will need to have a think about priorities for this.

Logger pro is good for generating stuff quickly, but has a lot of buttons and a lot to learn – some tutorials or learning activities might be indicated here. I am a little skeptical that online video tutorials are well used by a broad spectrum of users, but this is not founded on any evidence.

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A different way of using voicethread

Another experiment using voicethread. I took one of the presentations for grade 7 and put the slides into a voicethread, then shared this with the class. After showing the presentation in class, I then got them to log on to it and post comments to it for eachother.

I think the potential use of this is to give students the oportunity to review things shown in class even if they don’t get everything into notes. It also lets them share things in a different way – kind of multi-modal.

I guess I would say it went well if the comments were on topic and there were plenty of them. We shall see.

The challenge was managing accounts and passwords. I have three separate accounts at the moment, which messes things up. Some are free one and have limits.

Here it is:

[voicethread b=759336]

(Doesn’t look possible to embed this here – apparently because wordpress doesn’t allow this)

By the way – just set up a logger pro lab – these can work really well, though the students are not well trained at following the instructions. The hardware is good, but some components needed checking

Photos and whiteboard notes

A couple of quick things.

A simple and quick way of taking exemplar work. After marking a set of lab reports today I took a couple of pictures of some good examples of some sections. I was then able to put them straight up on the board for discussion – very immediate if you have the camera and card reader there. This takes advantage of the projector in every room thing. Archiving these may have some value, though the immediate feedback is good – this aspect is worth some thought.

Whiteboard notes is progressing well, but there is a lot of fiddling to get into the right display mode quickly and to the right part of the text. This would be worth some thought. Have resisted publishing this so far, but it may be more important to support some middle school students, so I think I should revisit this decision.

Here the middle school web page may be useful. Certainly some thought needs to go into how to use this efficiently

Grade 11 students have used the graphical analysis part of logger pro with train data. This seems good, bit takes some time to teach and a manual for this in some form (video logs?) would be great.