Monday 31 August 2009

LeadMeet

In July myself and Caroline (Commonly known as C in twitter) went through to Edinburgh. One reason to the visit was to attend the LeadMeet organised by Con Morris. leadMeet is a very interesting variation on the TeachMeet scenario.

The event was very well attended. With a good range of people who are passionate about education and professional development.

I managed to maintain an incredible record. Attended 6, put myself forward to speak at 5 and been selected by the random selector Zero. I have spoken twice at a TeachMeet. Once was virtually from my back bedroom and once was setup in Perth because I had travelled, with Andy Wallis, so far to attend.

Con suggested (awhile ago now) that I record my talk………… So its Con’s fault

More images from the event can be found here

Sunday 30 August 2009

A broken habit

 

Its been a long time since I got out of the habit of blogging. Twitter, the micro blogging service, as dominated my online activities recently.

Its not that things haven’t been going on. In fact its been extremely busy. I hope to do a catch up with some of the things over the next few weeks.

This past week has been the first full week in school. (after an extra day due to water supply problems) and therefore the issue of the UMPC’s to the incoming pupils. These are UMPC’s that are new to them.

On a Friday afternoon we are running How to session’s for all the incoming pupils. In our case that's 43.

The First session was issuing the UMPC’s, giving out login’s, and logging on……. and of course dealing with associated problems.

Last Friday was connecting to the internet and accessing email using Outlook 2007.

I have been using Community Clips to record instructional video’s. Basic ‘How to’s’ for the pupils to refer back too.

So why have I used Community Clips instead of Jing?

The main reason was that I wanted to add the video’s directly into OneNote.

OneNote embeds and plays WMV files directly within the application and Community Clips produces WMV files which I can edit in Movie Maker and place in the OneNote to create a NoteBook.

Jing produces FLV (and MPEG’s if you pay the subscription and I paid the subscription 2 days before discovering Community Clips) files which are much smaller. These can be hyperlinked and will play when clicked in a notebook and they open in the devices default player. I wanted to keep everything within OneNote and keep the work flow as simple as possible.